As 2017 winds to a close, press, pundits and politicians alike are saying 2018 could be the year of the “blue wave.” Led by a historically unpopular first-year president and still smarting from embarrassing losses in Virginia and Alabama, many Republicans are talking out loud about “bloodbath” in next November’s midterm elections. While Democrats are fielding challengers to incumbent Republicans in almost every congressional district, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is privately warning his colleagues the GOP could lose control of both the House and Senate. Retiring Pennsylvania Rep. Charlie Dent simply urged his fellow Republicans to “be prepared for the worst.”
They have good reason to be afraid. Very afraid. Together, McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) presided over a series of legislative fiascos. Both their greatest failure (the effort to repeal Obamacare) and their greatest success (the year-end corporate tax cut package) were wildly unpopular. In the aftermath of their efforts to take health insurance away from between 13 and 32 million Americans, the Affordable Care Act now enjoys majority support. The massive, $1.5 trillion tax cut windfall for wealthy (also known as “Trump’s Golden Showers”) does little for working Americans even as it delivers 82 percent of its benefits in 2027 to the richest 1 percent of taxpayers. It’s no wonder why in recent polling Democrats lead the generic congressional ballot by 10 to 18 points. On top of it all, the rapid-fire fabrications and the staggering incompetence of the president, the unprecedented corruption of his administration and the five Russia scandals* still under investigation by special prosecutor Robert Mueller have many wondering if the true loyalties of the Oval Office occupant lie with his bank accounts—and the Kremlin.
Republicans have one more reason to feel mildly nauseous heading into the 2018 midterms. After all, just 8 short years ago, the shoe was on the other foot. By November 2010, the GOP’s “Red Tide” washed away the Democrats’ majority in the House, as Republicans picked up a staggering 63 seats. McConnell’s minions added six Republican senators in the 2010 midterms and would take over the chamber four years later. And Mitch McConnell, John Boehner and the Republican Party did it all without one great advantage Democrats hold today.
The truth.
That’s right. In a colossal media failure perhaps exceeded only by the Iraq war and the election of Donald Trump itself, the GOP swept to power in 2010 despite misleading the nation on almost every major campaign issue of consequence. After all, Obamacare, signed into law on March 23, 2010, did not increase the national debt, represent a “government takeover of health care” which contained “death panels” or “stick it to seniors” with a “raid a Medicare.” And far from being “Taxed Enough Already,” Americans in 2009 and 2010 received the largest two-year tax cut in American history.
To fully understand the 2010 triumph of the most successful disinformation campaign in U.S. up to that time, it helps to start with not-so-immaculate conception of that great right-wing hissy fit, the tea party.
“Taxed Enough Already?” In 2009 and 2010, federal tax revenues as a share of GDP hit 60-year lows.
Consider the origin story of the tea party itself. In his documentary The Legacy of Barack Obama, CNN host Fareed Zakaria discussed the uproar over bank bailouts and CEO bonuses which began during the final months of the Bush administration. As CNBC’s Rick Santelli appeared on the screen, Zakaria proclaimed, “Then American anger over all of it seemed to find a voice.” In the ensuing clip from Feb. 8, 2009, Santelli raged:
“The government is promoting bad behavior…This is America. How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills. Raise their hand. [Booing.] President Obama, are you listening? We’re thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party in July. All you capitalists who want to show up on Lake Michigan, I’m going to start organizing.”
“It was,” Zakaria declared, “the moment the tea party movement was born.”
Zakaria was doubly wrong. The right-wing fury directed at the president, as any number of video clips from McCain-Palin rallies the previous fall show, was simmering well before Barack Obama was even elected. More important still, Rick Santelli’s “epic rant about bailouts” wasn’t directed at big banks on Wall Street, but instead supposedly undeserving homeowners on Main Street he called “losers.” Santelli’s rage was over a rumored possibility of federal “cram-down” of mortgage rates that would help American families at the expense of the banks. It never happened, of course. But at a time when 100,000 homeowners were being foreclosed upon each week and 800,000 workers losing their jobs each month, Santelli rechanneled populist anger nevertheless. (It should be noted that Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s choice to head the Treasury Department, was personally involved in thousands of those foreclosures.) Soon, bankrolled by right-wing sugar daddies including Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks and the Koch brothers, the tea party was on the streets—and in Democrats’ faces.
Near the top of the list of tea party complaints was the issue of taxes. On April 15, 2009, thousands of the furious faithful rallied at Tax Day Tea Parties lovingly promoted by Fox News. In addition to carrying signs like “Sieg Heil Herr Obama” and “No Taxation without Representation,” many displayed buttons, hats, and posters announcing “T.E.A.” or “Taxed Enough Already.” As future House Speaker John Boehner summed up their complaint:
"Across our nation, thousands of Americans are participating in taxpayer tea parties today for one simple reason: overtaxed families and small businesses have had enough.”
Now, there was a big problem with this claim at the heart of the Tea Party movement: it simply wasn’t true.
For starters, on Feb. 9, 2009, President Barack Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), also known as the stimulus. With no GOP votes in the House and just two in the Senate, the stimulus provided $787 billion to jumpstart a U.S. economy on the brink of collapse. More than 40 percent of that package came in the form of tax cuts. President Obama didn’t just keep his campaign promise to deliver tax relief for 95 percent of working Americans. He had also provided, as Steve Benen noted at the time, the largest two-year tax cut in American history.
The tea party thought taxes had gone up after the largest two-year tax cut in history,
But as the New York Times reported on the eve of the 2010 midterm elections, “What if a president cut Americans' income taxes by $116 billion and nobody noticed?” As then North Carolina state representative Thom Tillis remarked, “This was the tax cut that fell in the woods—nobody heard it.”
In a troubling sign for Democrats as they head into the midterm elections, their signature tax cut of the past two years, which decreased income taxes by up to $400 a year for individuals and $800 for married couples, has gone largely unnoticed.
In a New York Times/CBS News Poll last month, fewer than one in 10 respondents knew that the Obama administration had lowered taxes for most Americans. Half of those polled said they thought that their taxes had stayed the same, a third thought that their taxes had gone up, and about a tenth said they did not know.
Believe it or not, those September 2010 results represented an improvement over a CBS News poll conducted that February. One-quarter of respondents said the Obama administration increased taxes, while 53 percent said they were unchanged. Only 12 percent rightly answered that federal income taxes had come down under President Obama.
But among the confused tea party crowd, that belief was akin to asserting the sun orbits the earth:
Of people who support the grassroots, "Tea Party" movement, only 2 percent think taxes have been decreased, 46 percent say taxes are the same, and a whopping 44 percent say they believe taxes have gone up.
It's no wonder that former Reagan Treasury official Bruce Bartlett aptly concluded, "For an anti-tax group, they don't know much about taxes."
As it turns out, their ignorance was even more profound than that. Thanks to the combination of the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, the deep recession which began in late 2007, and those Obama tax cuts of 2009, the AP reported, "as a share of the nation's economy, Uncle Sam's take this year will be the lowest since 1950, when the Korean War was just getting under way." In January 2011, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) explained that "revenues would be just under 15 percent of GDP; levels that low have not been seen since 1950." That finding echoed an earlier analysis from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Last April, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities concluded, "Middle-income Americans are now paying federal taxes at or near historically low levels, according to the latest available data." Or as former Reagan Treasury official Bruce Bartlett again explained it in the New York Times:
In short, by the broadest measure of the tax rate, the current level is unusually low and has been for some time. Revenues were 14.9 percent of G.D.P. in both 2009 and 2010. Yet if one listens to Republicans, one would think that taxes have never been higher, that an excessive tax burden is the most important constraint holding back economic growth and that a big tax cut is exactly what the economy needs to get growing again.
Here's how Michael Ettinger of the Center for American Progress put it in 2010: “The idea that taxes are high right now is pretty much nuts.”
Nuts, indeed. But not as nuts as some of the slanders the tea party, the GOP, and their conservative echo chamber deployed in their all-out effort to stop what became Obamacare. It was, after all, the Affordable Care Act that mobilized those hardest of right-wing hardliners to overwhelm Democratic town hall meetings in the summer of 2009 and propelled the GOP to its massive victory in the 2010 midterms. And virtually all of their anti-Obamacare talking points were lies.
The GOP’s Obamacare talking points weren’t true, but they were effective.
Consider, for example, “death panels.” A Democratic proposal to enable Medicare to pay for patients’ optional end-of-life counseling by their physicians was turned into something found nowhere at any time in the legislation for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Thanks to the chicanery of Betsy McCaughey, the same Betsy McCaughey who in 1993 invented “you can’t keep your doctor” under HillaryCare, a common-sense benefit was transformed into a 21st century Soylent Green. Sarah Palin, who later claimed she was speaking metaphorically, famously framed the GOP slander this way:
The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's "death panel" so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their "level of productivity in society," whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.
That would be evil, if it were true. But when Iowa GOP Senator Chuck Grassley warned his constituents that Obamacare would “pull the plug on grandma” and would have prevented dying Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy from receiving treatment, he was lying. But Sec. 1233 of the bill, labeled "Advance Care Planning Consultation," did no such thing. That’s why Politifact didn’t merely call McCaughey’s fabrication a “Pants on Fire” lie. The fact-checking site named “death panel” the Politifact Lie of the Year for 2009. (It should be noted that conservatives, aided by Democrat Howard Dean, returned with a new deception that could be called “Death Panels II.” The false charge this time was that the Medicare Independent Payment Advisory Board—or IPAB—was a “rationing body” which would inevitably lead to seniors unnecessarily dying.)
The “death panels” fraud wasn’t the only one Republicans and their tea party storm troopers deployed in their blitzkrieg on the Affordable Care Act. As Republican spin master Frank Luntz counseled, right wingers inside Congress and out denounced Obamacare as a “government takeover of health care.” In 2009 and 2010, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell trotted out “victims” of delayed treatment from Canada and the UK to show what life under Obamacare would look like.
There was only one problem: Obamacare did not represent a government takeover of health care. After all, while the Medicaid program would be expanded, Americans would continue to get their surgeries, tests, doctor appointments, and prescription drugs from private insurers, hospitals, clinics, physicians, drug stores, and pharmaceutical companies. The four-part American healthcare system (VA for veterans, Medicare for the elderly, Medicaid for the poor and elderly, private insurance for workers and individuals) would continue much as it had before. That’s why “a government takeover of health care” was declared the Politifact Lie of the Year for 2010.
The tea party dissembling about the ACA hardly ended there. When President Obama told a joint session of Congress in September 2009 that undocumented immigrants would not be eligible for coverage under Obamacare, South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson shouted, “You lie.” It was, of course, the tea party darling who was lying. During his failed 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney wrongly claimed “Obamacare adds trillions to our deficits and to our national debt.” Of course, Republicans have tried different formulations of this tried and untrue talking point before and since. Every single time, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has explained that they are wrong. The ACA’s combination of new tax revenue and savings from private Medicare insurers and providers always is larger than the program’s expenses. When then House Majority Leader Eric Cantor claimed “the healthcare bill costs over $1 trillion” and accused CBO of “budget gimmickry,” Ezra Klein responded simply,
“What's important about Cantor's argument is not that he's wrong. It's why he's saying something he knows to be wrong…Repealing health-care reform would cost hundreds of billions of dollars and Eric Cantor knows it."
The CBO forecast never changed: Repealing Obamacare would increase the national debt and costs millions their insurance.
Medicare in particular became another area where the GOP’s maybe-not-best and not-the-brightest promulgated a myriad of myths. For starters, as former GOP Congressman Bob Inglis learned the hard way in the summer of 2009, a majority of his party’s supporters did not seem to know that
Medicare is a government-run program:
In July, Rep. Bob Inglis (R-SC) described an angry constituent who confronted him at a South Carolina town hall meeting, "keep your government hands off my Medicare." Despite his best efforts to explain that Medicare is a government program, the voter, Inglis lamented, "wasn't having any of it."
But as data from Public Policy Polling revealed that August, that same cognitive failure was widespread. While 39 percent of all Americans responded that the government should "stay out of Medicare," 59 percent of self-identified conservatives and 62 percent of McCain voters held that oxymoronic view.
Another scurrilous sound bite continues to this day. As noted above, the ACA was funded in part by $760 billion in savings over its first 10 years from private Medicare Advantage insurers and providers. (The figure for the next decade is around $1 trillion.) But in Mitch McConnell’s hands, the reductions to providers, not beneficiaries, became “sticking it to seniors.” By September 2009, the RNC was running ads proclaiming, “No cuts to Medicare to pay for another program. Zero.” In 2010 and again in 2014, Republicans successfully ran against Democrats as supposed "Medicare killers," as this ad attested:
"By voting for ObamaCare, Democrats like Mark Pryor, Kay Hagan, Mary Landrieu and Mark Begich cut $717 billion from Medicare -- including $154 billion from Medicare Advantage -- which will hurt seniors."
Paul Ryan and the GOP were still lying to voters about a mythical “raid on Medicare” in 2012 ...
Again, as Politifact among others explained, the charge wasn’t true. But what was and is true is this: Every Republican budget blueprint authored by Paul Ryan has kept those same dollars in Medicare savings. Not for a different healthcare program, that is, but for tax cuts for the rich.
… and in 2016.
One of the greatest facades erected by the tea party was its movement was somehow “mainstream” with crossover appeal to independents and Democrats beyond the GOP base. This was belied not just by polling data which showed tea partiers were overwhelmingly old, white and Republican. As it turns out, the April 2010 tea party “Contract from America” was little different than the 2008 GOP Platform or the 2010 Republican “Pledge to America.” And for all the talk of a Balanced Budget Amendment, slashing federal spending and reducing the national debt, the New York Times explained of its polling in April 2010: “But in follow-up interviews, Tea Party supporters said they did not want to cut Medicare or Social Security—the biggest domestic programs, suggesting instead a focus on “waste.” The only area where even one-third of Americans agree federal spending should be cut is foreign aid. As Klein pointed out at the time, “Bummer, then, that it accounts for less than a single percent of the budget.”
Sorry, Tea Baggers: Cutting foreign aid won’t balance the budget.
The tea party was wrong about just about everything it stood for, but not the politics of its fury. In 2010, the GOP won an overwhelming triumph, regaining the House and taking over state houses nationwide. In 2014, Republicans retook the Senate and in 2016, the White House. Manufacturing outrage works. As former Arizona Republican Sen. Jon Kyl put it when he overstated how many abortions Planned Parenthood performs by a factor of 30, his figure was “not intended to be a factual statement.” For Republicans and their tea party vanguard, that was a feature, not a bug.
The federal deficit shrank by more than half during Barack Obama’s presidency.
Of course, it is a bug for American democracy. President Obama, after all, cut unemployment from a high of almost 10 percent to under 5 percent. Since he first took the oath of office, federal spending has been flat, while annual budget deficits have been reduced by more than half. The percentage of Americans without health insurance has brought down to the lowest level on record. Nevertheless, majorities of Americans (or at least, Republicans) believe the reverse is true. A year ago, 73 percent wrongly believed budget deficits had gone up under Obama. In January, 34 percent of Americans and 43 percent of Republicans thought the number of uninsured had increased or stayed the same after the passage of Obamacare. As Public Policy Polling found last May:
There continues to be a lot of misinformation about what has happened during Obama's time in office. 43% of voters think the unemployment rate has increased while Obama has been President, to only 49% who correctly recognize that it has decreased. And 32% of voters think the stock market has gone down during the Obama administration, to only 52% who correctly recognize that it has gone up. In both cases Democrats and independents are correct in their understanding of how things have changed since Obama became President, but Republicans claim by a 64/27 spread that unemployment has increased and by a 57/27 spread that the stock market has gone down.
The list of right-wing smokescreens and deceptions—that “tax cuts pay for themselves” or the U.S. military has been “gutted”—goes on and on. The Birther Myth—that Barack Obama was a Muslim born outside the United States—didn’t just make Donald Trump a tea party favorite. During the 2016 GOP primaries, as researcher Philip Klinkner of Hamilton College found, “The easiest way to guess if someone supports Trump? Ask if Obama is a Muslim."
To put it in a nutshell, before there was “fake news,” there was the tea party.
But how could the American media then and since fail so utterly to report the objective truth? Because, as NBC Meet the Press host Chuck Todd accidentally explained in 2014, he and reporters like him are no longer in the truth-seeking business. When former Pennsylvania Democratic Governor Ed Rendell lamented that Americans were misinformed about Obamacare, Todd protested:
"But more importantly, it's stuff that Republicans successfully messaged against it and they wouldn't have heard...they don't repeat other stuff because they haven't even heard the Democratic message. What I always love is people say 'it's your fault in the media.' No, it's the President of the United States' fault for not selling it."
All of which is one important reason why Democrats in 2018 shouldn’t count on a “blue wave,” let alone a tsunami, to take the Republican flotsam and jetsam out to sea. Republican policies may be less popular than the Ebola virus and widely seen as damaging, but a green wave of RNC cash and Koch brothers dark money can wash away the truth. Just as important, Democrats can’t take the intensity of their fired-up base for granted. In 2010, the Republicans’ reliable older, whiter voters delivered for them at the polls. The young voters who helped propel Barack Obama to the White House two years earlier did not. Paul Ryan won’t lose his gavel until Democrats make the investments needed to ensure that African Americans, suburban women and those under 30 who carried Alabama for Doug Jones and Virginia for Ralph Northam turn out in November. After all, Democrats have learned time and again the hard way that voter intensity often trumps propensity.
Even when it’s a propensity for the truth.
* Yes, #TrumpRussia is not one but five scandals. That Russia interfered in the 2016 election is beyond dispute and represents the unified consensus of the U.S. intelligence community. Whether Team Trump colluded with Moscow is still being probed, but the lies, misstatements and indictments revealed thus far suggest the answer is yes. Third, the Trump clan’s business ties to Russian financiers raise questions about whether crimes occurred in the past and whether conflicts of interest remain ongoing. More serious still is the prospect of obstruction of justice by the president of the United States to cover up any of these. Fifth and last is the issue of treason. Did Donald Trump change U.S. foreign policy (on cyberwar, Ukraine, Syria, etc.) to suit Vladimir Putin in exchange for payment in cash or in kind?
