http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1209/30278_Page2.html

There’s a strange political cocktail brewing in Washington, one that mixes top conservative strategist Grover Norquist and tea party organizers at FreedomWorks with democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), progressive activists and public interest advocates.

The unlikely coalition’s bid to block Ben Bernanke’s nomination to a second term as chairman of the Federal Reserve until Congress votes on legislation to audit the secretive central bank is tapping into a growing anti-establishment mood — and legislators up for reelection next year are taking notice.

The Fed fighters’ charge that the White House favored Wall Street over the public interest during the financial crisis appeals to a lot of people these days. Average voters resent the government’s response to the market meltdown — the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, the auto industry bailout and the trillions doled out by the Federal Reserve — because it hasn’t seemed to help them out, as the national debt has soared and the unemployment rate has moved north of 10 percent. It’s a populist anger that goes far beyond traditional definitions to include, as one analyst noted, people living in gated communities in Florida.

“They look at Wall Street, and they say, ‘Who’s been held accountable? Anybody going to jail? No? These guys are actually getting huge bonuses,’” said Sanders, whose campaign to block Bernanke has been embraced by progressive and conservative groups alike.

“Bernanke represents the status quo. People want a change in the way Wall Street functions; they want a change in the way the Fed functions,” Sanders said.

Sanders’s announcement Wednesday night that he had placed a procedural hold on Bernanke’s renomination triggered Campaign for America’s Future, a progressive group, to blast out a joint letter that members of the left-right coalition had sent to senators urging them to delay a vote on Bernanke’s confirmation until they’d passed legislation expanding the government’s power to audit the central bank.

“Without this audit, Congress lacks the information it needs to evaluate Mr. Bernanke’s performance,” said the letter, signed by more than two dozen activists and policy leaders including Norquist, FreedomWorks President Matt Kibbe and Campaign for Liberty President John Tate on the right, as well as Firedoglake Founder Jane Hamsher, liberal economist Dean Baker and Gary Kalman, Washington director of U.S. PIRG, on the left.

The Campaign for America’s Future played a key matchmaking role for the left in this coalition, inspired by the partnership between libertarian godfather Ron Paul (R-Texas) and liberal firebrand Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) on the Texas Republican’s audit-the-Fed measure, which has gathered more than 300 co-sponsors and scored a key committee-level victory in the House.

“This bipartisan, kind of odd-bedfellows coalition reflects the disorder of the times politically, the extraordinary, out-of-the-ordinary actions that were taken and the need to call this very establishment institution to account,” said Robert Borosage, the group’s co-director.

On Thursday, two die-hard Senate conservatives — Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) and Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) — said they would join Sanders’s effort to block Bernanke’s nomination.

“It’s very scary,” said DeMint, a darling of the tea party movement, when asked how he feels finding himself on the same side of the Fed issue as Sanders. But it didn’t give him pause about signing on to Sanders’s audit-the-Fed bill, which has 30 co-sponsors and mirrors the measure sponsored in the House.

“I’ve never seen so much agreement on hardly anything,” DeMint said. “When a man’s right, they’re right.”



The question for the outside groups and the lawmakers alike is whether they can build their peculiar partnership — and the popular support it’s riding on — into something bigger than just auditing the Federal Reserve.

To be sure, the coalition stands on a pretty narrow strip of common ground. Some in the group —including the economist Baker and the Progressive Change Campaign, which has an anti-Bernanke petition at its website, StopBailoutBen.com — want the Fed chief replaced. Others, such as Norquist and the Campaign for America’s Future, are strictly focused on the audit issue. And Campaign for Liberty — which helped organize the group from the right — shares Paul’s ultimate objective of scrapping the Fed itself.

Still, organizers are trying.

“It’s always a breakthrough when you have a coalition like this because ... Washington is so divided. Usually you spend all of your time with the people who agree with you. So just having the door cracked open a little bit presents a great opportunity,” said Max Pappas, vice president of public policy at FreedomWorks.

These divergent groups aren’t exactly strangers. Activists on the left and the right do, in fact, unite from time to time on a handful of issues they agree on, including government transparency, term limits and civil liberties. As Norquist — who’s not known for his ability to play well with the left — put it: “If you want to beat the establishment, you really need a bipartisan or a transpartisan approach.”

Pappas recently had dinner with MoveOn.org co-founder Joan Blades after the two appeared on a panel on “transpartisan dialogue” in San Francisco. “I mean, FreedomWorks and MoveOn having dinner together,” he said with mock incredulity. Now the two are looking for other issues the groups could work on together, including corporate welfare, transparency and privacy.

The traction the left-right alliance has already gained on the Fed front could extend to economic issues more broadly as the Wall Street backlash shows few signs of receding.

“The thing that unites both left and right with regard to the Fed is populist anger,” said Hamsher, the progressive blogger. “It doesn’t seem to matter who is in the White House — Bush and Obama share responsibility for the bank bailouts.”

In that sense, Bernanke, who was appointed by then-President George W. Bush in 2006 and was renominated by Obama in August, is an ideal representative of the continuities bridging the two administrations’ economic policies — and an ideal target for a right-left coalition of outsiders.

The contrast between the bipartisan welcome and smooth confirmation Bernanke experienced the first time — the Senate Banking Committee approved his nomination by voice vote, and the full Senate backed him 99-1 — and his current troubles highlights just how much the crisis altered the political landscape.

“We’re getting a preview of the 2010 election,” said Hamsher. “With the high unemployment rate, people across the political spectrum are looking at all the money that went to bail out the banks and wondering why no one wants to say where it went.”

It’s an analysis echoed by Rutgers political scientist Ross Baker, who described “an absolutely corrosive anti-incumbent feeling among the public” in November’s elections.

“It was, ‘Throw the rascals out,’ in a kind of almost indiscriminate way, ... that anybody who had the power deserved to be punished.”