Breaking up the Tea Party: Raising the debt ceiling.

Posted on July 5, 2011 by David S. Meyer

The unfolding debt ceiling standoff is exacerbating divisions within the Tea Party movement that have been visible from the outset.  (Confession: I started writing about this end of the Tea Party on election day, 2010.)

The United States has to raise the debt limit by the beginning of August or risk: defaulting on its debts and collapsing this economy and others (worst case, I think) and scaring creditors and increasing the interest it has to pay (likely best case).  Every mainstream politician knows that this increase has to happen, but most would like someone else to take responsibility for doing it.  The preferred alternative is to vote against raising the debt ceiling, knowing that it is going to pass anyway.

But with a Republican House wagged by a freshman Tea Party tail, it won’t be easy, quick, or pretty.

Speaker Boehner

It’s a great situation for negotiating with President Obama, who has consistently demonstrated the willingness to try to find the center no matter how far to the extreme his opponents stake out their opening position; he generally projects the willingness to give away the store, in this case, severe and long term budget cuts, along with more tax breaks.

This, however, is not enough for those Tea Partiers at the grassroots, who oppose any more borrowing or any more taxation.  A collapse or crash of any sort would, paradoxically, vindicate their certainty on this matter.  The last thing they want is a deal.

But the large business interests who bankrolled the Tea Party at the outset have a stake in keeping the government functioning and maintaining existing  credit arrangements.  They want to extract all they can from President Obama and MAKE A DEAL.

At The Hill, Erik Wasson, provides a scorecard for both sides.  The absolutists who oppose any new debt are represented by the Tea Party Patriots, the national group with the strongest grassroots orientation, and the weakest financial infrastructure.  Americans for Prosperity, FreedomWorks, the established groups underneath the Tea Party, and Tea Party Express, the electoral group run by consultants, envision some kind of deal raising the debt ceiling, cuts in spending, and ultimately a budget cap; in Capitol Hill shorthand, this is “Cut, Cap, and Balance.”

Right now, the absolutists give the Congressional insiders a negotiating advantage.  They can say, we’d like to take this deal, but we’ll get killed by the base.  Can’t you do more, Mr. President, to cut this budget?  But they are unlikely to deliver near enough to satisfy that base once they’ve generated enough votes to raise the debt ceiling.

Some Tea Party purists will gulp and try to get more from their Republican allies next time.  Some will be so disgusted that they’ll go home, angry and frustrated by the people they’ve worked so hard to empower.  And some will get angry and active within the Republican  Party, trying to punish deal-makers of all sorts and enforce a vigorous commitment on the elected officials who  purport to represent them.

The relative share of each of these factions will determine not only the future of the Tea Party, but also the longer term prospects of the Republican Party.

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Motorcycle helmets, protest, and irony

Posted on July 4, 2011 by David S. Meyer

Philip Contos drove a 1983 Harley-Davidson with a group of bikers protesting mandatory helmet laws in New York.  Living the world they wanted to see, the protesters weren’t wearing helmets.  Contos died when he lost control of his bike and was thrown over the handlebars.  New York State troopers say that a helmet would have saved his life.

It’s ironic, and also sad.  Sometimes protesters take to the streets knowing that they risk their safety and well-being, but it’s hard to think that Contos imagined he was risking his life by engaging in a choreographed protest ride.

And it’s really not the point that a helmet would have saved his life.

Opponents of mandatory helmet laws don’t argue that helmets can’t save lives.  Rather, they claim that helmets also carry risks.  More significantly, they say, the rider should decide on the risks and precautions he wants to take.  They say that drivers of cars concerned about their liability insurance–or anyone concerned about health care costs and others’ safety–should drive more carefully.

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The Tea Party and the Bachmann challenge

Posted on June 30, 2011 by David S. Meyer

Representative Michele Bachmann (Minnesota) embraced the Tea Party enthusiastically as it first arrived, seeing it as the expression of the conservative populist sentiments she means to embody.  After the Republican victories of 2010, she started the Tea Party Caucus in Congress, and has been remarkably adept at cultivating media attention and raising money.  She’s an asset to the movement, energetic, telegenic, disciplined and focused.

Rep. Bachmann’s early success in campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination (campaign site) presents the movement with the dream/nightmare scenario that exemplifies–and extends–the purity/pragmatism dilemma inherent in electoral politics.  Bachmann chose the Tea Party, early and without ambivalence, but her candidacy leaves the movement with the nagging question of whether to choose her back.  What she brings to the table–and what she doesn’t bring–will define the movement in the next year, unless activists work very hard to stop it from happening.

While Rep. Bachmann is articulate and charming, and much better on the stump and in crowds than Sarah Palin, her profile does not demonstrate anything in the way of legislative accomplishments or mastery of inside politics.  Indeed, she has focused her efforts in Congress on the outside, refusing to cut deals of any kind, voting no on budget matters repeatedly, allowing her colleagues the responsibility of making something happen.  At the same time, she’s got a nose for the camera and the quick quote, articulating strong stands passionately and effectively.

Despite her extraordinary success at fundraising, her Republican colleagues have kept her out of any institutional position of power.  (In this regard, she is similar to the recently departed Democratic congressman, Anthony Weiner [New York].)  And, while she has generated early support at the grassroots, no national Republicans have been rushing to sign onto her campaign.  When those who should know your work best are reluctant to support you, it’s a sign that there may be trouble in the profile somewhere.  [Note, for example, that none of John Edwards’s Senate colleagues endorsed his presidential run.  Whether or not they knew of troubles in his personal life, it’s worth observing that they saw nothing in his Senate term that merited support.]

Elections turn movement causes into candidates, and Rep. Bachmann’s candidacy may have as many deficits and mistakes as other candidates for office.  More will certainly come out about her light legislative experience, and her family’s contracts with government agencies for farms and foster children.  Another potential problem is her repeated flubs about historical detail, which are amusing, but probably not fatal.  (There were books about Ronald Reagan’s misstatements.)  This all can lead to a distraction from Tea Party issues.

And those issues are likely even more important than the personal background of the candidate.  On the issues, Rep. Bachmann is a Tea Party fiscal stalwart, railing against all sorts of government spending and the deficit, and proposing the elimination of much of the government.  Rep. Bachmann is a committed populist Christian conservative, comfortable in talking about God and quoting scripture.  Her public career, even before elected office, offers ample evidence of her evangelical drive.  She cut her political teeth as a sidewalk counselor against abortion in the 1970s, and left the board of a charter school she helped start when parents complained about the promotion of Christianity in the curriculum.  Today, evangelical candidates demonstrate their props by fighting hard against abortion and same sex marriage.  Bachmann’s record is strong and solid; she fights hard against both.  And she adds a bonus: Bachmann claims to be an agnostic on evolution, and supports teaching intelligent design (read: creationism) in the public schools.

There are, to be sure, many Tea Partiers at the grassroots who share these positions.  But the big money organizations animating the movement do not.  And even at the grassroots, there is a large libertarian strain in the movement.  Folding the movement into the Bachmann campaign risks losing those libertarian supporters, while branding the Tea Party as a fundamentalist Christian movement.

Like most social movements, the Tea Party has been a coalition comprised of different interests and opinions that agree on a few key principles.  Filling out the movement with a candidate threatens that broad tent–and the movement’s future.

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The Tea Party’s electoral dilemma

Posted on June 29, 2011 by David S. Meyer

Our Constitution presents a recurring dilemma for social movements: routine elections.  Right after the Republicans won massive gains in the 2010 elections–and the Tea Party claimed a great deal of credit for those victories–conservative activists shifted their attention to the 2012 elections.

For the Tea Party, this means working to influence the selection of (mostly) Republican candidates for office, turning away from demonstrations and house meetings to the normal stuff of electoral politics: raising money, organizing candidate forums, contributing money, and turning out voters.

At Roll Call, Janie Lorber reports on the shift in strategies within FreedomWorks, one of the key organizations underneath the Tea Party movement:

FreedomWorks, a nearly 20-year-old grass-roots advocacy organization led by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas), will take on a deeper and more sophisticated role in the 2012 elections than ever before. The organization has its eyes on 15 Senate seats, including Utah, and will target both Democrats and Republicans. The group aims to raise $10 million through a new super political action committee called FreedomWorks for America…

“We’re not a protest movement anymore,” said Matt Kibbe, the group’s president. “It is a protest movement morphed into a get-out-the-vote movement. We are here to think nationally but act locally.”

On one level, this makes sense.  Elected officials make policy.  Putting politicians who agree with you in office is the most direct way to get what you want from government.  On the other hand, this means ceding both the drama and moral clarity of movement activism for the trade-offs inherent in electoral politics.

So, Lorber reports on FreedomWorks activists attacking the Republican Party’s Senatorial Committee, warning it not to support Utah Senator Orrin Hatch’s re-election campaign.  Senator Hatch has a long career in office, and in any other environment he would be seen as a strict conservative.  But Hatch is also a professional legislator, who has cut deals with Democrats to govern; for FreedomWorks, Hatch’s recent sins include supporting the financial bailout under President George W. Bush, and previously voting to raise the debt ceiling to keep government operating.

In any other world outside of Utah’s Republican primary, Tea Partiers would find more important targets than an experienced and very conservative Republican senator.  And in Utah, it may all be fine, for it’s unlikely that any Democrat could beat any US Senate candidate with an “R” after his name.

But Republican regulars are well aware that Tea Party activists were critical in getting Republican Senate nominations for strong advocates (and weak candidates) who cost the party several seats.  Read: Joe Miller (Alaska), Sharron Angle (Nevada), Ken Buck (Colorado), and Christine O’Donnell (Delaware).  (The purity versus pragmatism dilemma discussed here.)

The 20-30 percent of the populace who claim support for the Tea Party, mobilized and active, are a critical resource for conservatives.  Using movement strategies, including protest, they can command political attention and advance ideas.

But they can’t win general elections without appealing to the center of the political spectrum.  They can, however, be extremely influential in Republican primaries, including the long slog toward the Republican presidential nomination.  They may knock off some likely winners to nominate stronger Tea Party advocates.  They are quite likely to pull regular Republicans further to the right in seeking primary support.

All of this may be very good news for Democrats–and bad news for the Tea Party’s continued influence.

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Coming out and burrowing in: Gay marriage in New York

Posted on June 28, 2011 by David S. Meyer

When New York’s legislature approved same sex marriage last week, we saw the acceleration of a well-established trend: growing acceptance for recognizing the participation of gay and lesbian people in every aspect of American life.   It’s not that everything is equal or okay, but it’s clear that we can read this arc of history bending toward justice a little more quickly.

New York made a space for same sex marriage through the legislature, not a judicial edict or a referendum.  In essence, this was regular politics pushed by a powerful social movement.  What we think is important in producing social change reflects how far back we’re willing to trace the story.

In the shortest run, newly elected Governor Andrew Cuomo ran on marriage equality, and followed through in office, twisting legislators’ arms and pushing the issue through his bully pulpit.  This is a story of political muscle.  Roll the tape back a little bit, and you can see the influence of big money from Wall Street supporting the policy change.  At Huffington Post, Sam Stein reports on Governor Cuomo and the power of money:

“Cuomo was able to convince people — both Democrats and Republicans — that they were more likely to get reelected if they supported marriage equality than if they didn’t,” said Richard Socarides, of gay rights organization Equality Matters and the chief aide on LGBT issues in the Clinton White House. “The right-wing threatened these guys and the Catholic Church threatened them.”

“Wall Street interests who supported marriage equality were an important counter to that,” he said. “So yes, money played a role.”

Money was also critical in building the type of grassroots campaign that played a big role in the legislation’s passage. More than $2 million was spent on the campaign organized by progressive groups and labor organizations, the “most aggressive field campaign in state legislative history for a gay right issues across this country,” according to the Human Rights Campaign’s Fred Sainz. Republican donors gave $800,000 of that.

But money doesn’t spontaneously show up on its own.  People donate when they believe there is some important issue at stake, and when they think their efforts are likely to make a difference.  (See our report on the Koch brothers.)

A critical part of the GLBT movement’s strategy was encouraging gay men and lesbians to come out, acknowledging their sexual orientations and personal aspirations to family, friends, and even the general public.  Developing over decades, this approach was critical in helping the rest of the world get over whatever prejudices and preconceptions they had about homosexuality.  It’s far easier to discriminate against abstractions rather than real individuals.

When Supreme Court Associate Justice Lewis Powell voted to uphold a Georgia law criminalizing sodomy to stand [Bowers v. Hardwick 1986], he believed he had never met a gay person.  In fact, one of his clerks at the time was in the closet; looking back, Powell later said he thought he got the case wrong.

Just 25 years later, it’s harder and harder to find Americans who think they have never met a gay person.  When your neighbor comes out, it’s a tiny bit safer and easier for a co-worker to make a similar decision.  And seeing Ellen DeGeneres or Carson Kressley or Chris Colfer’s Kurt on television erodes the old stigma a little bit more.

Individuals who came out 40 years ago took great risks with their families, friends, careers, and personal safety.  As increasingly numbers of people came out, the risks diminished, at least a little, so it was a bit easier for others to come out.  And this is, obviously, cumulative.

At the New York Times, Frank Bruni emphasizes the importance of personal ties, demystifying gays and lesbians and pushing their friends and families to recognize–and fight–discrimination.  offers another explanation: increased recognition of gay lives on a person by person basis.  When we know the people who are excluded from marriage as individuals, rather than abstractions, it’s easier to recognize the nature and consequences of marriage inequality.

And the personal politics cross ideological and party lines.  Shortly after leaving office, two years ago Vice President Dick Cheney announced his support for same sex marriage (reported by Sam Stein at Huffington Post:

I think that freedom means freedom for everyone…As many of you know, one of my daughters is gay and it is something we have lived with for a long time in our family. I think people ought to be free to enter into any kind of union they wish. Any kind of arrangement they wish.

Would Cheney or Cuomo or former Solicitor General Ted Olson or Mayor Michael Bloomberg or Barbara Bush (George W’s daughter) have engaged this issue altogether if they didn’t think it mattered to someone they cared about?

The political became personal.

The change took place suddenly, but it was decades in coming.

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A movement is a market

Posted on June 24, 2011 by David S. Meyer

Every year when I do my taxes I go through my credit card receipts looking for deductions for work and charitable contributions.  In the past few years, I’ve found a disturbing number of payments for “Justice.”  The payments are disturbing because Justice is a store that sells in clothing for preteen girls.  (Note to IRS: I know these charges are NOT deductible, and have never claimed them.)  Money spent on Justice doesn’t actually promote any vision of justice.  It does, however, promote fashion.

The Justice fashion is all about using the peace symbol on colorful clothing, often accompanied by words like “peace” and “joy.”  It’s hard to quarrel with the style or the sentiment, but I can’t imagine that many of the girls trundling off to grade school each day realize they are wearing a symbol commissioned by the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament to promote its efforts against nuclear weapons.  A symbol deeply tied to a political viewpoint became a style to sell products, supporting a company, but not a cause.

Social movements promote ideas.  They talk, sing, chant, buy ads, and hand out flyers.  They post opinions on websites, and encourage others to consider their opinions.  Activists write books and articles and try to get people to read them.  Activists wear buttons and tee shirts with slogans, and sometimes even carry placards.  Organizers sell the buttons and tee shirts (it’s also one way to make money for the cause), but they also give them away to promote the ideas.  They hope the style promotes the movement and the ideas.

Ultimately, however, the apparel business requires different skills and focus than political organizing, and they have to be more concerned with the popularity of the style than whatever meaning is designers intend to promote.

Entrepreneurs pick up the symbols of a movement when they think it will be profitable.  Every great symbol or slogan can become someone’s business.

And there are businesses that make money by serving movements, making tee-shirts and buttons and bumper stickers.  (Here’s one from the left:  http://www.donnellycolt.com/catalog/core.shtml.)  But they don’t make money unless they serve a market–and themselves.

The Tea Party has appropriated symbols of the American revolution, the Constitution, and patriotism in general, grafting them onto activists’ current concerns.  This makes for a colorful and dramatic movement.  It also creates (and demonstrates) a market for a set of symbols safely in the public domain, providing an immediate boost for business.  And entrepreneurs have responded, producing shirts and buttons and mugs and more, and offering them for sale at a hefty mark-up.

Given the diversity and the range of issues running around inside the Tea Party, plus the unabashed enthusiasm for free enterprise, we’d expect that market to develop more quickly and fully than those of movements around, say, climate change.  On the left, there’s some shame and rationalization about making a living off this.  There should be no reason for similar reluctance on the right.

Does selling the movement mean selling it out?

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Dieter Rucht and Social Movement Outcomes

Posted on June 21, 2011 by David S. Meyer

I’m off to Berlin today.

 

I’m honored to participate in a conference on the outcomes of social movements, celebrating the work of Dieter Rucht.  Dieter is officially retiring, which will mean devoting a larger portion of his time to making films.  He’s a great person and a great scholar; I look forward to the flicks.

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Money, mergers, and mobilization

Posted on June 21, 2011 by David S. Meyer

Jarrett Barrios resigned as president of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance against Defamation this past weekend.  GLAAD had received $50,000 from AT&T, and then filed a letter supporting the phone giant’s merger with T-Mobile.  The appearance of impropriety (read: corruption) is so great here that the resignation came quickly, but there is a much larger problem underneath the incident.

Advocacy takes money.  Organized groups pay for office space, computers, stationery, staff, and even advertising and product placement.  Any organization that doesn’t devote a substantial amount of time and effort to maintaining an active inflow of financial support will not be around for very long, and a successful president or executive director will be good at raising funds.

Groups have developed a wide range of strategies for raising money: cultivating rich donors, contracting services, selling products, running ads, maintaining membership, writing for grants, running a door-to-door canvass–and on and on and on.

The most fortunate groups, often faith-based, develop endowments that provide a stable base of support.  But living donors are fickle.  The savvy director has an eye on the political goals of her group–but also a finger in the shifting winds of donors’ priorities.

The challenge is finding ways to secure funding without selling anything–at least anything important.

AT&T insists that its donations to advocacy and arts groups, including GLAAD, the NAACP, and the NEA, were not contingent upon any of those groups taking a position on its proposed merger.  And all of the groups emphatically announced that they did not make political decisions based on financial contributions.  And all of the groups weighed in publicly in support of the merger.  (See Eliza Krigman’s Politico report.)

Making the case that the proposed merger represents a substantial step forward for civil rights or public education requires, minimally, some heavy lifting and conceptual stretching.  But it’s not immediately obvious that the merger would hurt those causes.  Is there something intrinsically wrong with working to curry favor with funders on issues that don’t seem to matter that much–so you can work more effectively on issues that do?

According to the Board of GLAAD, and according to gay and lesbian activists across the nation, there is.  Any group–or individual–that seems to sell its endorsement devalues the positions that it takes for free–that is, on principle.

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Politics as product placement

Posted on June 17, 2011 by David S. Meyer

We now learn, thanks to a great piece by Kenneth P. Vogel and Lucy McCalmont (Politico), that political groups are not only buying ads, but product placement as well–at least on the right end of the political spectrum.

The largest and wealthiest conservative groups have been spending millions to buy air time on conservative radio shows.   Americans for Prosperity sponsors Mark Levin, who touts their effectiveness, while Glenn Beck receives a fee for promoting FreedomWorks.  Meanwhile, the Heritage Foundation “invests” in Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, who praise, defend, and fund raise for the groups on the air.  Vogel and McCalmont report:

The Heritage Foundation pays about $2 million to sponsor Limbaugh’s show and about $1.3 million to do the same with Hannity’s – and considers it money well spent.

“We approach it the way anyone approaches advertising: where is our audience that wants to buy what you sell?” Genevieve Wood, Heritage’s vice president for operations and marketing. “And their audiences obviously fit that model for us. They promote conservative ideas and that’s what we do.”

This doesn’t mean, of course, that Beck and Limbaugh and all don’t actually believe the things they say about conservative causes in general, and their sponsors in particular, but it’s worth remembering that they get paid to say those things.

Entertainers on commercial radio, regardless of their politics, are in the business of selling.  The more popular they are, the more they can sell ads for, and drawing lines between the content of the show and the advertisements is dicey business.  We all know when a local disc jockey talks about his good friends at a restaurant, insurance agency, or gym, that there’s a commercial component to this friendship.

Advocacy groups have been buying advertisements for some time now; it’s one way to get their message and their organization out to a broader audience, and this phenomenon has reached across the political spectrum.  With an ad, the group doesn’t have to depend upon an event or a reporter to get the message exactly right.  Money, if you have it, can provide an easy answer to those challenges.  PETA has been buying provocative ads in college newspapers (and elsewhere) for years, and generated real news coverage by doing so.

While PETA trades on provocation, the Alliance for Climate Protection has virtually obscured its politics promising consensus in a series of high profile ads in slick magazine and on television, including this one (left) featuring Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich sitting together.  They are, ostensibly, talking about the need to protect the earth from climate change, suggesting that there can be political alliances on the environment that cross the partisan divide.  (This seems fanciful now).

So, what’s the difference between an advertisement and product placement?

A simple start is that commercials and ads are designated as such.  The radio or television program or magazine editor has no influence on content, and doesn’t explicitly endorse the product.  We can ignore ads; if we pay attention, we can do so critically, knowing they are commercial speech.

This creates at least two problems for advertisers today: viewers are sophisticated and cynical–at least they think they are; and technology keeps making it easier to avoid even noticing the ads.  A viewer with quick reflexes and a DVR can watch an hour of television in 44 minutes, skipping all the ads without even getting up for a snack.

So advertisers have been skillfully sneaking into the programs.  When lifeguard David Hasselhoff opens his fridge to offer a new lifeguard a cold drink, be sure that you’ll see a case of whatever root beer anted up the most money.  When Wayne goes for pizza, Mike Myers is financing his movie.

Morgan Spurlock, in Pom Wonderful Present: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, has had more fun with this than I’m capable of.  Suffice it to say that product placement is so ubiquitous that grade schoolers watching tv enjoy playing “Who paid for that?”

Is there something different about politics?  It’s not like Limbaugh et al. are selling their shows (much less their souls) to causes they despise.  Organizations on the left, according to Vogel and McCammon, haven’t been playing this game–and they would be unlikely to go after the conservative radio audiences anyway.  But groups on the right, even as they agree on matters of public policy, compete with each other for attention and donations, and general primacy in the larger conservative movement.

Americans for Prosperity (funded by the Koch Brothers) and FreedomWorks (led by Dick Armey) grew out of Citizens for a Sound Economy, splitting because of differences on leadership and political priorities.   Are Glenn Beck’s political commitments so strong that he wouldn’t allow the two to bid against each other for time on his show?  Is his integrity so developed that he would discuss controversies within the organization? Do his audiences know that he’s paid to tout organizations that he says impress him?

Are some rhetorical questions too obvious to ask?

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How the courts disappoint

Posted on June 16, 2011 by David S. Meyer

American politics has provided some updates on our concerns about the courts and social movements (see: “You can’t count on the courts”).  Be sure that activists will be disappointed–and that they are extremely unlikely to give up.

In Wisconsin, the State Supreme Court overturned the ruling of a lower court judge who struck down the anti-union provisions of the dramatic state budget.  She had ruled that the budget process, which included the flight across state lines of all the Democrats in the State Senate, violated Wisconsin’s open meetings law.  The State Supreme Court divided 4-3 on the question, and the majority included David T. Prosser, Jr., who has only recently survived an unusually contested re-election campaign.  Often uncontested, Prosser’s re-election was the first chance for disgruntled Democrats–and others–to voice their opposition to Governor Scott Walker and the budget bill at the polls.

It won’t be the last. 

Democrats and organized labor have launched recall campaigns for eight Republican state senators–all those eligible for recall.  If they win three, the Democrats will gain control of the body.  Clearly, the recall campaigns will consume both activist attention and a great deal of money from organized labor in Wisconsin–and across the nation.  Expect conservative and Republican money to flow into the state at the same time.  It will be like a mini-economic stimulus plan focused on media and political consultants.

Meanwhile in San Francisco, Federal Judge James Ware upheld Judge Vaughn Walker’s decision to strike down a ballot measure prohibiting same sex marriage in California.  Now retired, Judge Walker has acknowledged a long-term intimate relationship with another man, and supporters of the marriage ban argued that Walker’s sexual orientation compromised his objectivity in the case.

Disappointed by the decision they were, nonetheless, undaunted, and plan to continue appeals which could ultimately end in the Supreme Court of the United States.  Of course, this isn’t all of it; they’ll also be engaged in ongoing battles with advocates of same sex marriage across the states.

I don’t claim to be expert on reading the courts–on the same sex marriage issue, all the experts seem to fixate on Justice Kennedy as decisive.  By the time a case reaches the Supreme Court we’ll be reading dispatches on the movies he watches, his exercise regime, and what he has for breakfast each day.

On same sex marriage, the tides of history are somewhat easier to read, and they favor the advocates of marriage equality.  Although same sex marriage is available in only a few states, public opinion has changed quickly, and continues to move toward acceptance of extending the institution.  Most notably, the polls suggest a deep generational divide, with young people overwhelmingly in support of same sex marriage.

I have a harder time reading the tides on labor in Wisconsin–and across the country.  The mobilization against the budget was dramatic and invigorating for Labor and the left.  But organized labor has just lost similar battles in Indiana and Ohio.  Wisconsin has become a test case for assessing whether new Republican majorities have overstretched their mandate–and if their opponents can take advantage of it.

Much rides on the outcome.  And the answer won’t come from the courts.

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