The Riot Trail

here we go!

2012-01-21T20:22:00.000-05:00

2012-01-21T17:48:00.000-05:00

a few good reads from last week:

Fareed Zakaria interviews Obama

Andrew Sullivan makes the case for Obama and starts some interesting discussion:

Kevin Drum said Obama's strategy is actually much simpler than Sully makes it out to be

this guy and this guy think Sully's too easy on Obama... he responds

Man, this Republican Primary is turning into a real circus, huh? I love it!

ps. if you are getting this as an email would you let me know? As far as I can tell these posts are no longer being sent out, but I want to make sure.

real quick

2012-01-21T17:32:00.000-05:00

I just want to state for the record that for months now I have been skeptical of a Romney cakewalk to the nomination. There's been a series of non-Romney surges (Bachman>Perry>Cain>Gingrich) that to me made it totally obvious that Republicans don't like the dude and want someone else. The problem is they didn't have any other credible candidates (besides Huntsman, who they really didn't like).

This, combined with the fact that the Republican dropped winner-take-all primaries in favor of the proportional delegate system the Dems use (a change made because R's saw 2008's Obama/Clinton duel as ultimately helpful to the Dems), means that there was no way Romney was just going to waltz through. Don't get me wrong, he might still win, but everyone... including people who I generally admire a lot (Nate Silver and Josh Marshall, to name two)... has just been assuming that Romney's a cinch. I NEVER thought this, and it annoys me that now people are saying in reference to Romney's current problems that only a few days ago it was unthinkable that Romney would have trouble wrapping up the nomination. It wasn't unthinkable because that's what I thought.

Just sayin'!

how we got here and how to get out

2011-12-03T16:00:00.001-05:00

two op-eds that everyone should read:

A Banker Speaks, With Regret by Nicholas Kristoff

and

Raise Taxes on Rich to Reward True Job Creators by Nick Hanauer

Welcome to the Occupation

2011-10-22T12:23:00.003-04:00

Time to take this thing off blocks, blow out the lines, check the plugs and points... ok, I have no idea what most of that means, just quoting Springsteen lyrics, hehe

But, yeah, haven't posted in a long while... why? Cuz shit's been depressing!! Republicans have been doing everything in their power to prevent the economy from recovering while pinning the blame on Obama, and it's totally working. What a sad, sad spectacle it's been to behold.

But the good news is we seem to be entering into a new phase. That's not to say things will necessarily get better, but at least the dynamics are changing. For one thing Obama seems to have finally figured out he's been played and is gonna get his ass handed to him if he doesn't start taking his own side in the argument.

Some chick up in Massachusetts with the temerity to suggest the middle class should have someone representing their interests figured if no one else wanted to do it, then she would.

And, oh yeah, a rag tag bunch of anarcho-hippie-punks formed one hell of a drum circle in downtown Manhattan, unleashing social forces beyond anyone's control in the process. It's been a heartening development, as well as a fascinating one to watch.

Watching OWS unfold I've repeatedly found myself thinking 'but, this doesn't work, you can't do it this way.... HOW IS THIS WORKING!?' These people are talking about throwing out our entire economic system... and the country seems open to the idea!

Backing up for a moment, I'd like to preface by noting that my own ideas about what is and is not possible in politics came out of the 2000 election. At the time I was disillusioned with both parties and felt corporations were able to use the government to bend the rules for their own benefit at everyone else's expense, and that nothing would change without a dramatic challenge to the status quo coming from outside the two party system. (Sound familiar?) So, I voted Nader/LaDuke, in a state that was, uh, close. Well, things changed... for the much, much worse.

To say the 8 years of Bush/Cheney that resulted from the 2000 debacle had a major impact on my political outlook does not capture it. It defined it. I learned that politics is not an opportunity for personal expression. There are serious, even deadly, consequences. You ignore political realities at everyone's peril.

But, it is possible to over-learn lessons. Peter Beinert made a good point about those of us who have been so focused on working within the system and being 'pragmatic:'

Starting with Howard Dean’s campaign in 2004, a younger generation of Web-savvy liberals congregating around websites such as DailyKos and groups like MoveOn, began using their fury against the Iraq War to create a leftist activist movement inside the Democratic Party. What distinguished these “netroots” activists from the anti-globalization activists was their willingness to work inside a major political party. That pragmatism (which stemmed partly from the memory of Ralph Nader’s 2000 independent presidential campaign, which had helped elect George W. Bush), was a source of the movement’s strength. And it was in the Dean campaign that many younger activists learned the organizational skills that helped power Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008.

But in retrospect, the netroots movement’s focus on candidates as a vehicle for change left it unprepared for the aftermath of Obama’s election, when Obama failed to articulate a story about why the financial meltdown had occurred—and why America’s regulatory system and welfare state needed to be rebuilt—that could compete with the Tea Party’s narrative of a government grown so large that it was stifling both economic growth and personal liberty.
Today’s Wall Street protests represent the left’s decoupling from Obama and the Democratic Party, something that the global nature of the movement will only reinforce. That doesn’t mean the movement has a clear critique of unregulated capitalism yet, let alone a concrete agenda for reform, but it means that the left finally is forcing those questions onto the public agenda. By confronting Wall Street, it is creating the populist energy that Obama himself has not.

The 2008 election seemed like the ultimate vindication for those of use who felt that working within the system was the best way to move this country in the right direction. Ironically, though, it seems to have only ended up proving the opposite point for many Americans.

David Graeber, one of the founders of the OWS movement, recently penned a wide ranging post about the movement that considered why it, as opposed to the many that preceded it, actually caught on:

the social scientist in me has to ask: Why? Why now? Why did it actually work?

Again, I think the answer is generational. In politics, too, as in education, we are looking at a generation of young people who played by the rules, and have seen their efforts prove absolutely fruitless. We must remember that in 2008, the youth vote went overwhelmingly to Barrack Obama and the Democrats. We also have to remember that Obama was running, then, as a candidate of “Change”, using a campaign language that drew liberally from that of radical social movements (“yes we can!”, “be the change!”), and that as a former community organizer, he was one of the few candidates in recent memory who could be said to have emerged from a social movement background rather than from smoke-filled rooms. This, combined with the fact that Obama was Black, gave young people a sense that they were experiencing a genuinely transformative moment in American politics.

How, then, do you expect a young American voter to feel, after casting a vote for a fundamental change to our political and economic system, on discovering that in fact, they have elected a man who twenty years ago would have been considered a moderate conservative?

After all, how could there have been a more perfect alignment of the stars than happened in 2008? That year saw a wave election that left Democrats in control of both houses of congress, a Democratic president elected on a platform of “Change” coming to power at a moment of economic crisis so profound that radical measures of some sort were unavoidable, and at a time when popular rage against the nation’s financial elites was so intense that most Americans would have supported almost anything. If it was not possible to enact any real progressive policies or legislation at such a moment, clearly, it would never be. Yet none were enacted. Instead Wall Street gained even greater control over the political process, and, since Republicans proved the only party willing to propose radical positions of any kind, the political center swung even further to the Right. Clearly, if progressive change was not possible through electoral means in 2008, it simply isn’t going to possible at all. And that is exactly what very large numbers of Americans appear to have concluded.

Say what you will about Americans, and one can say many things, this is a country of deeply democratic sensibilities. The idea that we are, or are supposed to be, a democratic society is at the very core of what makes us proud to be Americans. If Occupy Wall Street has spread to every city in America, it’s because our financial overlords have brought us to such a pass that anarchists, pagan priestesses, and tree-sitters are about the only Americans left still holding out for the idea that a genuinely democratic society might be possible.

The frustration and disillusionment is palpable and well justified. For me, the debt ceiling fiasco over the summer was the last straw. Simply put, our government, in it's current form, does not work.

I suppose it should always be mentioned at this point that the reason it's not working is the utter cynicism of Republicans and their willingness to sabotage the country for their own political gain. And, yet, we have a system that allows and rewards such behavior. How can that be?

The OWS insistence on working outside the political system is shaking up the debate in a much needed way. It's revealing dynamics that usually remain camouflaged. New York DJ Jay Smooth made a great point along those lines:

Indeed, it's a great thing.

But it has also revealed longstanding fault lines between liberals and the activist left. Consider, for example, this piece by Chris Hedges, another 'occupier,' who clearly has nothing less than sheer contempt for liberals:

The liberal class functions in a traditional, capitalist democracy as a safety valve. It lets off enough steam to keep the system intact. It makes piecemeal and incremental reform possible. This is what happened during the Great Depression and the New Deal. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s greatest achievement was that he saved capitalism. Liberals in a functioning capitalist democracy are at the same time tasked with discrediting radicals, whether it is King, especially after he denounced the war in Vietnam, or later Noam Chomsky or Ralph Nader.

The stupidity of the corporate state is that it thought it could dispense with the liberal class. It thought it could shut off that safety valve in order to loot and pillage with no impediments. Corporate power forgot that the liberal class, when it functions, gives legitimacy to the power elite. And the reduction of the liberal class to silly courtiers, who have nothing to offer but empty rhetoric, meant that the growing discontent found other mechanisms and outlets. Liberals were reduced to stick figures, part of an elaborate pantomime, as they acted in preordained roles to give legitimacy to meaningless and useless political theater. But that game is over.

Human history has amply demonstrated that once those in positions of power become redundant and impotent, yet retain the trappings and privileges of power, they are brutally discarded. The liberal class, which insists on clinging to its positions of privilege while at the same time refusing to play its traditional role within the democratic state, has become a useless and despised appendage of corporate power. And as the engines of corporate power pollute and poison the ecosystem and propel us into a world where there will be only masters and serfs, the liberal class, which serves no purpose in the new configuration, is being abandoned and discarded by both the corporate state and radical dissidents. The best it can do is attach itself meekly to the new political configuration rising up to replace it.

An ineffectual liberal class means there is no hope of a correction or a reversal through the formal mechanisms of power. It ensures that the frustration and anger among the working and the middle class will find expression now in these protests that lie outside the confines of democratic institutions and the civilities of a liberal democracy. By emasculating the liberal class, which once ensured that restive citizens could institute moderate reforms, the corporate state has created a closed system defined by polarization, gridlock and political charades. It has removed the veneer of virtue and goodness that the liberal class offered to the power elite.

Liberal institutions, including the church, the press, the university, the Democratic Party, the arts and labor unions, set the parameters for limited self-criticism in a functioning democracy as well as small, incremental reforms. The liberal class is permitted to decry the worst excesses of power and champion basic human rights while at the same time endowing systems of power with a morality and virtue it does not possess. Liberals posit themselves as the conscience of the nation. They permit us, through their appeal to public virtues and the public good, to see ourselves and our state as fundamentally good.

But the liberal class, by having refused to question the utopian promises of unfettered capitalism and globalization and by condemning those who did, severed itself from the roots of creative and bold thought, the only forces that could have prevented the liberal class from merging completely with the power elite. The liberal class, which at once was betrayed and betrayed itself, has no role left to play in the battle between us and corporate dominance. All hope lies now with those in the street.

Hedges goes overboard in his criticisms here (sure, some of us may have been too focused on 'what's feasible,' rather than what's right, but at the same time I'd like to see at least some sort of acknowledgement of the political constraints).... but, still, there is a kernel of truth to his criticisms.

It's worth remembering though, that the tension between liberals and the left is nothing new, and indeed things work best when both sides are being heard.

John Judis considers this dynamic:

LIKE THE LABOR MOVEMENT, or the old Populists and Socialists of Eugene Debs, liberalism arose in the early twentieth century as a reaction to the excesses of laissez-faire capitalism. But instead of trying to overthrow capitalism, as radicals did, it sought to create a more egalitarian version of it.

In that way, liberals and the left have always had a complicated, symbiotic relationship. Franklin Roosevelt disdained Huey Long’s Share the Wealth movement and was probably not excited about armed farmers preventing foreclosures or about striking workers. But unlike Herbert Hoover, who turned to Douglas MacArthur to drive the Bonus Marchers out of Washington, Roosevelt responded to these pressures from below not with troops, but with positive legislation—indeed, it was precisely Roosevelt’s liberalism that inclined him to do so.

The movements saw it as their task to force Roosevelt’s hand; he, in turn, understood his mission as the transformation of their sometimes unreasonable demands into the great reforms of the Second New Deal. And that is how it was throughout the 20th century. Social security, the minimum wage, Medicare, environmental protection, the government’s commitment to civil and sexual equality—all these came out of liberalism’s interaction with the left.

Sometimes, liberals have hemmed and hawed about protests, pleading that things were complex and that change was too difficult. The left, on the other hand has sometimes dismissed liberals as tools of corporate capitalism. But this kind of suspicion and derision has not benefitted either side. Without liberalism, the left and its movements slip into extremism that ends up validating their harshest opponents. That happened in the 1920s when the Communists vied with the Socialists for leadership of the left; it happened again during the late 1960s when the New Left veered out of control. The converse is equally true: Without leftwing ferment from below, liberalism becomes powerless in the face of business and the organized right. That happened in the 1920s and the 1980s and in the early part of this century—and it threatens to happen again now.

That was part of a response to a New Republic editorial that warned liberals they will rue the day they associated themselves with the radicals of OWS. If anything TNR believes liberals should condemn the protests and hope to escape what they believe as the inevitable coming backlash.

Reminds me of the old Phil Ochs song:

Well that TNR editorial got a lot of liberals talking and writing about how to respond to this new movement, and TNR itself published many of them. Here are a few notable responses...

Timothy Noah:

Apparently the demonstrators have had some unkind words to say about capitalism. I have my doubts as to whether very many of them are serious about wanting to abolish it. Put me down as opposing any effort to overthrow capitalism in America. But American capitalism is overdue for reform more drastic than anything under current consideration within the polite mainstream.

A year ago I wrote, from my former perch at Slate: "Today, the richest 1 percent account for 24 percent of the nation's income, yet the prospect of class warfare is utterly remote. Indeed, the political question foremost in Washington's mind is how thoroughly the political party more closely associated with the working class (that would be the Democrats) will get clobbered in the next election. Why aren't the bottom 99 percent marching in the streets?" Well, now they are marching in the streets, waving signs that say "We Are The Bottom 99 Percent." Do I wish they were paying more attention to the Federal Register so they could properly support the writing of forceful regulations under the undeniably valuable Dodd-Frank financial reforms? Of course. Do I wish they'd stop occasionally trying to perform the latter-day equivalent of trying to levitate the Pentagon? What do you think? But until they give me a concrete reason to feel otherwise, I'll be glad that protesters are finally taking notice of America's 30-year income-inequality binge. It's long overdue.

David Greenberg:

Now, it is a hallmark of the hardheaded brand of liberalism that The New Republic rightly cherishes that such enthusiasms be met with scrupulous skepticism. Cold water runs freely at the magazine’s offices. Amen. The magazine’s party-pooping editorial about Occupy Wall Street at least has the virtue of questioning the spreading delirium that unfortunately resembles nothing so much as the Obamamania of 2008, to which embarrassingly large numbers of hardheaded liberals happily succumbed.

Yes, there is reason to wince at the ideology emanating from some quarters (though, we should stress, only some) of Occupy Wall Street. Yes, there is something excruciating about watching the “human mike” in action—and even one of the twenty-something activists I drank with the other night attacked that ritual as part of “the fetishization of process” and a promoter of “Stalinist groupthink” because it made people repeat words before knowing what they were going to be saying. Myself, I find it rather less threatening than all that, evoking above all the balcony scene from Monty Python’s “Life of Brian.” (“You’re all individuals!” “Yes, we’re all individuals!” “You’re all different!” “Yes, we’re all different.”)

But this is silly stuff. The main and perhaps obvious point is that the protesters are doing something very right and very important. They have gotten the nation to focus on the costs and injustice of inequality, on the need for financial regulation, on the problem of job creation, and on other urgent concerns that, but for a brief spell in late 2008 and early 2009, Washington has largely avoided addressing. They’ve rekindled a feeling of hope, and created a sense of political possibility. Most important, they’ve begun to put pressure on our political leaders, including President Obama, who as Ron Suskind’s devastating Confidence Men confirms, has been far too timid in challenging the banks and financial firms. All of this liberals should applaud.

Liberals and the left have had a troubled relationship in American history, as often pitted in opposition as yoked in alliance. Liberals deserve credit for those occasions when they’ve repudiated radical cadres that have strayed from humane values—rejecting Communists who sought to co-opt labor unions, renouncing the violence of the late-1960s New Left. But each period of progressive change in the last century—the Progressive Era, the New Deal, the New Frontier and Great Society—gained energy and power from a left-liberal coalition. The radicalism of the anarchists was not reason to spurn the liberals’ push for regulatory government at the turn of the last century; the anti-capitalism of the communists did not lead New Deal liberals to forget that their immediate adversaries were the protectors of privilege; the fringe sympathizers with the North Vietnamese hoisting NLF flags did not stop the mainstream, middle-class Moratorium movement of 1969 from mounting an anti-Vietnam War protest of unprecedented size. Shared enthusiasms and common goals have overcome, if provisionally, persistent tensions and conflicts.

If this history should make liberals see that the reasonable left can and should be a partner in achieving reform, it should also help today’s radicals see some important patterns. I am not bothered that Occupy Wall Street hasn’t presented any concrete list of demands; their concerns are self-evident enough, and besides, the protesters who flock under their banner are too heterogeneous and too diffuse to be expected to speak with one voice (human microphones notwithstanding). What they do need, however, is politics—without which radical reform efforts have almost always run aground.

More troubling to me than the anti-capitalist cant I hear from the movement is the contempt for politics and the two-party system. History again: Radicals have traditionally fared best when they’ve worked within the Democratic party, not against it—keeping up pressure but not tearing down the organization that has been, for better or worse, the most reliable instrument for liberal change over the last century. Perhaps the protesters can be forgiven for not knowing the history of the ’30s or the ’60s, but none is too young to know the consequences of Ralph Nader’s 2000 campaign.

Franklin Foer is also worried this may all be leading to a repeat of 2000:

Protests movements, with their outpourings of camaraderie and idealism, often lead to lyrical writing and wishful thinking. Some Democratic politicians and think tanks apparently now see a scenario for salvation in Zuccotti Park—a possibility that the protests could morph into the Democratic answer to the Tea Party. Perhaps Washington operatives could descend on the movement and drive it in that direction. But that seems like an awfully daunting task, given the scene on the ground and the ideological tendencies of Occupy Wall Street—and it misreads the symbiotic relationship between liberals and the left. Let’s say Occupy Wall Street can overcome its self-limiting strategic philosophy, develop some concrete goals, and blossom into a full-fledged social movement. Over the long-term, then, liberals will want to position their reforms as the most reasonable mechanism for staving off the radicals. That’s how FDR played it—“Liberalism becomes the protection for the far-sighted conservative.” But you can’t triangulate against a social movement if you fully embrace it.

On one level, the protests have already wildly succeeded. They have helped remind the public of how blame for the crisis should be properly apportioned. And when Eric Cantor mouths the words “income disparities,” you know the conversation has shifted. But as the protests drag on, will they continue to be beneficial? To answer that, the protestors need to answer, at least for themselves, the question: Will they work to actively undermine Barack Obama’s reelection?

Under the best scenario, this moment emboldens Obama to rhetorically cudgel Wall Street, lock arms with Elizabeth Warren, and make symbolically potent appointments to his economic team. His turn towards populism reassures his political base and helps him paint Mitt Romney as the tribune of the economic royalists. While the movement continues to harp on Wall Street, and maintains useful pressure on him to overcome his cautious instincts, it does nothing to actively campaign against his reelection. This shift would set the stage for a second term that would further financial reform and take other measures against income inequality.

There is, however, another, plausible possibility: that Occupy Wall Street is poorly timed. After all, there’s no legislative debate to usefully prod at the present juncture, but there’s a chance to scupper the president’s re-election. As John Nichols cheers in The Nation, the “movement might well develop into a virtual primary challenge to Obama.” Even if Obama attempts to co-opt the message of Occupy Wall Street, the movement will likely continue to harp on his inadequacy. (Many of the complaints with Obama unfairly view him as a central villain in the crisis, rather than a disappointingly ineffectual foe of it.) Protests might erupt at the convention in Charlotte that overshadow his case for reelection; all this further diminishes enthusiasm for his candidacy. Or worse, a third-party candidate emerges and we know how that story goes. Indeed, much of the gripe with Obama reflects the canard that a Republican president wouldn’t be worse. I hope the protesters are surrounded by allies who remind them it actually can get much worse.

Matt Yglesias thinks that rather than distancing themselves from the left, liberals need to be engaging them and persuading them to our side:

The basic economic premise of modern American liberalism, as I understand it, is that with appropriate regulation and taxation a market economy can be made broadly beneficial to the overwhelming majority of citizens. This stands in contrast to the pure capitalist view that a rising tide will inevitably lift all boats, and to the radical claim that market economies are inherently immiserating.

The liberal view is, I think, correct. But it’s clear that for the 20 years between 1980 and 2000 what was possible in theory wasn’t necessarily happening in practice, and for the past decade it hasn’t been working at all. The story is familiar, but worth repeating. We’re seeing not just growing inequality, but actually falling wages and incomes at the median. People are outraged—and rightly so—that the economy and economic policymakers are failing them.

Faced with these realities, the TNR staff editorial on the subject feels distinctly like an op-ed penned eleven years ago about anti-globalization protestors, put on ice, and then re-animated with a hasty rewrite that fails to consider the actual political and economic circumstances.

Beyond a critique, any movement for social and political change ultimately needs solutions and it is true that some of the solutions offered by some protestors are unsound. This is all the more reason that liberals with confidence in liberal solutions should show up and try to persuade people to champion a more sustainable set of economic policies.

But the alternative of staying aloof out of some kind of fussy disdain for drum circles helps nobody. On the contrary, it’s worth reflecting on the idea that the instinct toward ideological police actions represented by TNR’s editorial has had a malign influence on American politics for years. Liberalism, in its triumphant years, represented the “vital center” of American politics. The silence of further-left voices over the past decade has merely served to marginalize liberalism, creating an atmosphere in which center-left technocrat Barack Obama can be tarred as a radical socialist.

Yglesias is getting at what I think is the real significance and contribution of Occupy Wall Street (at least so far), which is the re-framing of the terms of debate in this country. Likewise, this is a time to re-conceptualize what each of our roles might be in trying to bring this country's reality into line with our ideas. As we question OWS, it behooves us to pose similar questions to ourselves.

Todd Gitlin:

When idiots drive John Lewis off a platform in Occupy Atlanta, condemn them for that. I do. But pure condemnation is self-defeating. The more conventionally organized had better learn how to engage Occupy Wall Street in friendly discussion. They’ve breathed life into a suffocating polity. So what does Occupy Wall Street “actually believe”? What, in other words, is its essence? A good question to ask all political phenomena: for example, what is the essence of the Democratic Party? This is a good time to find out.

Indeed.

King

2011-01-17T13:00:00.005-05:00

By coincidence I just finished reading (listening to, actually: I'm on an audiobook kick) Taylor Branch's trilogy about the King years. The books shy away from commentary or analysis (to a fault, really) and just focus on the details of 'who did what' as King led the Civil Rights movement. But that allows the reader to draw conclusions on their own, so, as it's MLK day, here are some of my own.

MLK has become one of those larger than life figures which, ironically, makes him harder to appreciate. We know he's admirable, but probably find it difficult to relate to him a personal level. I think this is because his main message was actually pretty abstract, amazingly so for someone who achieved such cultural prominence.

When you think of Malcolm X or Stokely Carmichael, their message was rational and straightforward: 'We are being denied what's rightfully ours, it's time we take what we deserve, and if someone tries to deny us, we will fight them.' That makes sense, right?

But King's philosophy of nonviolence demanded a larger perspective. He was asking his followers to go out and get beat up, over and over again. Without fighting back. Who does that? In hindsight of course this actually makes a lot of sense, if only on a crassly political level. Whites had all the power, so fighting them wasn't going to get you anywhere. You would lose. You had to convince them to change.

But I've come to realize that that's too limited an interpretation of what King was up to. It wasn't just that he had gamed out the system and realized this was the only way to achieve his goals (although that was surely true). Nonviolence was more than just a strategy for King, it was a life philosophy. A philosophy ultimately rooted in spirituality.

Towards the end of King's life it became fashionable to talk about "love" in popular culture. Many of my favorite bands were writing songs that weren't just about romantic love, but love in a larger sense of the word. And of course girls on Laugh-In had the word written in body paint over their scantily clad bodies. But King was really living that ethos, and had been for a long time. The philosophy of nonviolence was rooted in love.

That might be hard to comprehend, until you realize it is ultimately a spiritual world view, based on the teachings of Jesus. This is a big part of why King was able to convince so many African Americans to follow his lead, because, while they were denied so much in formal education, the one kind of education they did have was Bible study. So they could see the spiritual link that he was talking about.

Here are some extended excerpts from a sermon King gave in 1957 that explain his philosophy much better than I can:

In the fifth chapter of the gospel as recorded by Saint Matthew, we read these very arresting words flowing from the lips of our Lord and Master: "Ye have heard that it has been said, ‘Thou shall love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy.’ But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you; that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven."

Certainly these are great words, words lifted to cosmic proportions. And over the centuries, many persons have argued that this is an extremely difficult command. Many would go so far as to say that it just isn’t possible to move out into the actual practice of this glorious command. They would go on to say that this is just additional proof that Jesus was an impractical idealist who never quite came down to earth. So the arguments abound. But far from being an impractical idealist, Jesus has become the practical realist. The words of this text glitter in our eyes with a new urgency. Far from being the pious injunction of a utopian dreamer, this command is an absolute necessity for the survival of our civilization. Yes, it is love that will save our world and our civilization, love even for enemies.

The Greek language has three words for love, interestingly enough. It talks about love as eros. That’s one word for love. Eros is a sort of, aesthetic love. Plato talks about it a great deal in his dialogues, a sort of yearning of the soul for the realm of the gods. And it’s come to us to be a sort of romantic love, though it’s a beautiful love. Everybody has experienced eros in all of its beauty when you find some individual that is attractive to you and that you pour out all of your like and your love on that individual. That is eros, you see, and it’s a powerful, beautiful love that is given to us through all of the beauty of literature; we read about it.

Then the Greek language talks about philia, and that’s another type of love that’s also beautiful. It is a sort of intimate affection between personal friends. And this is the type of love that you have for those persons that you’re friendly with, your intimate friends, or people that you call on the telephone and you go by to have dinner with, and your roommate in college and that type of thing. It’s a sort of reciprocal love. On this level, you like a person because that person likes you. You love on this level, because you are loved. You love on this level, because there’s something about the person you love that is likeable to you. This too is a beautiful love. You can communicate with a person; you have certain things in common; you like to do things together. This is philia.

The Greek language comes out with another word for love. It is the word agape. And agape is more than eros; agape is more than philia; agape is something of the understanding, creative, redemptive goodwill for all men. It is a love that seeks nothing in return. It is an overflowing love; it’s what theologians would call the love of God working in the lives of men. And when you rise to love on this level, you begin to love men, not because they are likeable, but because God loves them. You look at every man, and you love him because you know God loves him. And he might be the worst person you’ve ever seen.

And this is what Jesus means, I think, in this very passage when he says, "Love your enemy." And it’s significant that he does not say, "Like your enemy." Like is a sentimental something, an affectionate something. There are a lot of people that I find it difficult to like. I don’t like what they do to me. I don’t like what they say about me and other people. I don’t like their attitudes. I don’t like some of the things they’re doing. I don’t like them. But Jesus says love them. And love is greater than like. Love is understanding, redemptive goodwill for all men, so that you love everybody, because God loves them. You refuse to do anything that will defeat an individual, because you have agape in your soul. And here you come to the point that you love the individual who does the evil deed, while hating the deed that the person does. This is what Jesus means when he says, "Love your enemy."

There is a power in love that our world has not discovered yet. Jesus discovered it centuries ago. Mahatma Gandhi of India discovered it a few years ago, but most men and most women never discover it. For they believe in hitting for hitting; they believe in an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth; they believe in hating for hating; but Jesus comes to us and says, "This isn’t the way."

And oh this morning, as I think of the fact that our world is in transition now. Our whole world is facing a revolution. Our nation is facing a revolution, our nation. One of the things that concerns me most is that in the midst of the revolution of the world and the midst of the revolution of this nation, that we will discover the meaning of Jesus’ words.

History unfortunately leaves some people oppressed and some people oppressors. And there are three ways that individuals who are oppressed can deal with their oppression. One of them is to rise up against their oppressors with physical violence and corroding hatred. But oh this isn’t the way. For the danger and the weakness of this method is its futility. Violence creates many more social problems than it solves. And I’ve said, in so many instances, that as the Negro, in particular, and colored peoples all over the world struggle for freedom, if they succumb to the temptation of using violence in their struggle, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness, and our chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos. Violence isn’t the way.

Another way is to acquiesce and to give in, to resign yourself to the oppression. Some people do that. They discover the difficulties of the wilderness moving into the promised land, and they would rather go back to the despots of Egypt because it’s difficult to get in the promised land. And so they resign themselves to the fate of oppression; they somehow acquiesce to this thing. But that too isn’t the way because non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good.

But there is another way. And that is to organize mass non-violent resistance based on the principle of love. It seems to me that this is the only way as our eyes look to the future. As we look out across the years and across the generations, let us develop and move right here. We must discover the power of love, the power, the redemptive power of love. And when we discover that we will be able to make of this old world a new world. We will be able to make men better. Love is the only way.

-MLK (Sermon delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama, on 17 November 1957.)

King spent as much time, if not more, arguing and persuading other black people that nonviolence was the way to go as he did with whites over Civil Rights. Many of those fighting for Civil Rights had a hard time accepting King's vision for affecting change. Towards the end of his life especially King's ideas were trending out of fashion, in favor of a more militant approach (Black Panthers, etc.).

But King was right, and it's amazing that he held sway for so long, given what a hard sell it was. By convincing so many people to follow his vision he averted what was at the time actually a very real possibility: a full scale race war. I don't think many people understand how close we came to that catastrophe. We were on the verge.

MLK knew what a disaster that would be. But he also knew that for a century white people had been content to push race problems 'out of sight, out of mind.' Change would have to be forced. Nonviolence was a way of putting the race problem front and center in the minds of the public, without starting a race war.

I'm generally averse to "great man" theories of history. I think most history is the product of social and economic forces, and that we use "great men" because they make for a better story. Certainly the Civil Rights movement was a force far beyond MLK's powers. But in this case I do believe he shaped the movement in an absolutely crucial way. He helped channel the anger and frustrations of black people into actions that actually made the world a better place, at a time when things could have so quickly spiraled out of control.

And, ultimately, he did not defeat his enemies. He redeemed them.

shellacked

2010-11-06T10:42:00.005-04:00

Steve Benen:

In truth, I wouldn't say I'm disappointed, but that's only because I largely expected the results we received.
Instead, I'm frustrated. I'm frustrated about some exceptional lawmakers losing their jobs for no good reason. I'm frustrated about the role of secret money in the elections. I'm frustrated that there's so much idiocy in the discourse -- people think Obama raised taxes, bailed out Wall Street, and socialized health care, all of which is completely at odds with reality -- and that too many people believe it. I'm frustrated about voters saying they want all kinds of things -- less gridlock, fewer candidates beholden to special interests -- and then deliberately choosing the opposite.

I'm frustrated that, after two years of digging out of a ditch Republicans put us in, the country is ready to take the next productive step forward, and now that's impossible. I'm frustrated that the economy desperately needs additional investments to create jobs, but that's impossible, too. I'm frustrated that Republican leaders seem to be making no real effort to hide the fact that they prioritize destroying the president over literally everything else.

But most of all, I'm frustrated that there are no meaningful consequences for successes and failures. Republicans began last year as an embarrassed and discredited minority, and proceeded to play as destructive a role as humanly possible as Democrats tried to clean up their mess. GOP officials refused to take policymaking seriously; they refused to work in good faith; they refused to offer coherent solutions; they even refused to accept responsibility for their own catastrophic mistakes.

They've proven themselves wholly unprepared to govern, but have been rewarded with power anyway. It's ... frustrating.

This Krugman column definitely deserves to be read in full.

Newly elected Republicans are already killing jobs.

Gail Collins' brand of wry humor eases the pain a bit.

as does Stewart's:

Nicholas Kristof sees a silver lining to the defeat:

My hunch is that Mr. Obama is also capable of learning lessons and growing as a president. And the Republican-majority House will offer a fine target for improved messaging — especially if its first priority will be to worsen the budget deficit by cutting taxes for the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans.

John Judis (TNR) doesn't:

What this election suggests to me is that the United States may have finally lost its ability to adapt politically to the systemic crises that it has periodically faced. America emerged from the Civil War, the depression of the 1890s, World War I, and the Great Depression and World War II stronger than ever—with a more buoyant economy and greater international standing. A large part of the reason was the political system’s ability to provide the leadership the country needed. But what this election suggests to me is that this may no longer be the case.

Joe Klein:

What will Obama do? What can he do? It all depends on the Republicans, of course. He will propose a new, painless energy and infrastructure package. He will accede to moderations in his health care plan, reducing the regulatory burden on small businesses and perhaps incorporating some form of malpractice reform. But he won't allow the basics of the plan to be gutted. He will agree to tax reductions — perhaps a brief delay in restoring the Clinton rates for the wealthy, perhaps a more dramatic payroll tax holiday (as proposed by Ohio's new Republican Senator, Rob Portman) to jump-start the economy. He will take his deficit-reduction commission's recommendation for reforming Social Security, a provision favored more by Republicans than Democrats, and try to pass some form of it, which would be regarded as a historic achievement.

But Obama's real agenda will be to outwit and outmaneuver the Republicans, as Clinton did after his shellacking in 1994, so that he can live to fight another term. He will have to make concessions — graciously, as if he believed in them (as Clinton did with welfare reform). But he'll also have to sense when to stand firm, when to push back (as Clinton did after he allowed the Republicans to shut down the government). He will have to hope for good news from overseas; he will have to pray nothing awful happens.

Obama will probably never shed a tear in our presence. Nor will he indulge in what he regards as cheesy emotional displays of anger or enthusiasm. Without those tools, he'll have to be a much better working politician than he has been. But he remains widely respected by the American people, if not quite loved. And the next click of the political metronome could be heading his way.

Greg Sargent argues that "'Pulling a Clinton' is as much about populism as it is about centrism."

John Meacham:

In the days following the midterms, the president played his post-election role in this familiar Washington drama, duly calling the defeat a "shellacking" (his version of George W. Bush's 2006 "thumpin' ") and inviting everybody over for dinner.
But I would not hold out for a fundamentally New Obama. For better or for worse, Obama is today - and will be tomorrow - what he has always been: a bright man engaged in an endeavor that rewards luck and happenstance more often than it does intellect and good intentions. He's had his share of bad luck, and his notable inability to convince the country that he is leading a comprehensive economic turnaround is one of the most significant leadership failures in the modern history of the presidency. Still, the White House's tactical mistakes do not excuse the rest of us for ignoring our own history, a history that helps us gain perspective on the president's problems.

There is now a gap between the politically active and the politically dependent - that is, between obsessives who have a stake in the nature of political debate and those ordinary people who have a stake in the outcome of political debate. From cable television to the Internet, we are now living with a political class which has a financial and cultural interest in conflict rather than in governing. The result: Every incremental development is invested with apocalyptic significance.
Amid that constant churn, Obama has always managed to appear detached and clinical. That seemed a virtue during the campaign, in the madness and fear of the economic collapse. Now it seems a vice to those who expected a human figure to perform superhuman feats.
Obama is not surprised that the kingdom of heaven has failed to arrive in his first two years. A more historically minded country would not be, either.

Matthew Yglesias:

Back when Republicans were unpopular because of the poor economy in late 2008, Barack Obama’s calm demeanor amidst economic crisis was said to be key to his popularity. Then when Democrats became unpopular because of the poor economy in late 2009, Barack Obama’s calm demeanor amidst economic crisis was said to be the key to his unpopularity. But if the economy improves, then conventional wisdom about every single aspect of Obama’s personality and policy agenda will pivot around that fact. With the economy in the dumps, the health care bill is liberal overreach. If the economy improves, the health care bill will be said to demonstrate the genius of pushing a moderate proposal with no public option. Just you wait.

Dan Froomkin, Robert Kuttner, and Helene Cooper (NYT)
all discuss things that Obama can do without Congress. There's plenty he can accomplish. The problem is that since Congress controls the budget the economy is the one area where he can't bypass them. And the economy is what will determine if he is reelected.

Here's an issue to keep on your radar: the debt ceiling

TPM notes that:

In an interview with Fox News this evening, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Congress would not vote to increase the nation's debt ceiling -- legislation that must pass to avoid a global economic panic -- without "strings." Those strings could be attached to anything, including health care legislation.

Joe Weisenthal (Business Insider):

So the threat is, basically, agree to defund healthcare, or we're going to put the US into default.
That's an ironic stance, since the whole point of fiscal discipline is to avoid a Greek-like crisis and this would be manufacturing one.

Derek Thompson talks to former Reagan adviser Bruce Bartlett about the issue:

The idea of a debt ceiling is weird. Why can't the Treasury borrow and spend as it needs to fulfill its obligations to investors and the law?

It's an incredibly stupid system. I think no other country has a debt ceiling. These countries understand correctly that the deficit, ie the incremental increase in debt, is a consequence of decisions about taxing and spending.

There's no need to have a debt ceiling and there's no evidence that the debt limit has limited spending. It serves no purpose except to give people free votes to look as if they're being fiscally responsible ["Hey look, I voted against raising the debt limit!"] while they act fiscally irresponsible ["Also, I'm voting to cut taxes by $4 trillion."].

What happens if we reach the debt ceiling?

We can't borrow any more money to pay for our obligations. You move to a pure cash flow budget. We can only pay with bills that come in -- payroll taxes, income withholding, that kind of thing. But that's not enough money.

Let's say the Treasury makes $100 of cash today but it has to pay $1000 of bills. You have to create a line. We don't want to piss off investors, so they come first. If bond holders come first, maybe Social Security recipients come second, but eventually you run out of money. Somebody has to go to the back of the line. Somebody expecting payment won't get paid when he's expecting a payment. It's a terrible thing. That's why the debt ceiling has always been raised.

Right. The debt ceiling always been raised. So why worry now?

I've talked to Wall Street types. They say, 'Well they've always raised the debt limit and they always will.' But they don't know how crazy the Tea Party people could be. I don't think John Boehner is crazy. He'll do what he has to do. He needs a couple dozen Republicans to walk the plank to vote with Democrats on this. But I honestly don't know that he has enough.

It is admittedly a wacky scenario. A new party elected to run government better immediately refusing Treasury the money it needs to run government, at all.

It is wacky! People dismiss the consequences of technical default, which is what we'll have if we touch the debt ceiling. But US bonds have been the gold standard, with zero risk of default. You introduce even the tiniest little bit of doubt into the minds of ultraconservative investors, and that's potentially disastrous. It hurts our ability to raise money without a risk premium.

as long as Republicans put the interests of their party before the country's it's a win/win situation for them.

Jonathan Chait (TNR):

Republicans don't have an incentive to alleviate economic stress, as doing so would only improve President Obama's chances of winning re-election. There is a constituency in the GOP for cutting deals with Obama, perhaps on reducing the deficit, but that constituency is tiny, notably silent, and highly unlikely to prevail.

More on this dynamic of "total opposition" here.

Chait on what Dems could have done differently. He has some ideas, but concludes:

When you're talking about the effects of tactics and policies, you're talking about the effects on the margins. There were no good choices, only degrees of bad.

Mark Schmitt:

The country is not radically different from the one that elected George W. Bush at least once, and where only a small portion of voters identify themselves as liberal. But it's not true that Obama didn't recognize or engage with that conservatism. To the consternation of many liberals, he very much did, which is why he spent the bulk of last year looking for bipartisan alliance on health care, around principles that had already been adapted to reflect the proposals of actual conservatives, or why he visited the House Republican Caucus last January and tried to take their ideas seriously, a high point of his presidency. But conservative Republicans dodged the outreach. They cut themselves off from their own proposals or, like Sen. Lindsay Graham, pretended to cooperate (on climate change or immigration reform) while looking for excuses to defect. Conservatism survived, if it did, by making itself elusive, avoiding any attempt to pull it into the governing process.

Evan Bayh came out with an op-ed right after the election arguing that it was a result of liberal "over-reach," specifically in regards to health care reform. This prompted a number of good rebuttals: Ezra Klein, Greg Sargent, Igor Voksky, Matthew Yglesias and Jonathan Cohn are worth reading. I don't think HCR really did hurt Dems (polls on that are split, it's the economy people are pissed about) but that's really besides the point: The real way to measure political success is what did you do to improve people's lives and make this a better country. Not your ability to hold on to power. As Cohn notes, Bayh is very good at winning elections, but has no great legislative accomplishments to show for it... is that really what we want from our politicians?

William Saletan (Slate):

We've become so obsessed with who wins or loses in politics that we've forgotten what the winning and losing are about. Partisans fixate on punishing their enemies in the next campaign. Reporters, in the name of objectivity, refuse to judge anything but the Election Day score card. Politicians rationalize their self-preservation by imagining themselves as dynasty builders. They think this is the big picture.
They're wrong. The big picture isn't about winning or keeping power. It's about using it.

Most bills aren't more important than elections. This one was. Take it from Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader. Yesterday, in his election victory speech at the Heritage Foundation, he declared, "Health care was the worst piece of legislation that's passed during my time in the Senate." McConnell has been in the Senate for 26 years. He understands the bill's significance: It's a huge structural change in the relationship between the public, the economy, and the government.
Politicians have tried and failed for decades to enact universal health care. This time, they succeeded. In 2008, Democrats won the presidency and both houses of Congress, and by the thinnest of margins, they rammed a bill through. They weren't going to get another opportunity for a very long time. It cost them their majority, and it was worth it.
And that's not counting financial regulation, economic stimulus, college lending reform, and all the other bills that became law under Pelosi. So spare me the tears and gloating about her so-called failure. If John Boehner is speaker of the House for the next 20 years, he'll be lucky to match her achievements.

It's funny, in a twisted way, to read all the post-election complaints that Democrats lost because they thought only of themselves. Even the chief operating officer of the party's leading think tank, the Center for American Progress, says Obama failed to convince Americans"that he knows their jobs are as important as his." That's too bad, because Obama, Pelosi, and their congressional allies proved just the opposite. They risked their jobs—and in many cases lost them—to pass the health care bill. The elections were a painful defeat, and you can argue that the bill was misguided. But Democrats didn't lose the most important battle of 2010. They won it.

I'm really glad Nancy decided to stick around.

Steve Kornacki (Salon):

On issue after issue, Pelosi's House produced for the president. The stimulus was larger before the Senate watered it down. Cap-and-trade made it through the House, before dying in the Senate. A stronger healthcare reform package -- one with a public insurance option -- was pushed through the House, only to be stripped down by the Senate. Ditto for Wall Street reform. And let's not forget the lower-profile legislation, on fair pay, student loan reform, cash-for-clunkers, and credit card reform, that made it through both chambers. The 111th Congress will be remembered for the way it ended, with a seismic Democratic defeat, but that doesn't change the fact that it was one of the most productive -- ever.

Eugene Robinson:

When she appears before the cameras, Pelosi often seems stiff and almost brittle. In person, she's warm and engaging - also funny, earthy and just plain good company. She tells a great story. She turns a mean phrase. Colleagues on Capitol Hill almost universally describe her as a good boss and simply a good person.
It was frustrating to hear Republicans demonize her in their thunderous public statements, then confess privately that they really liked her. Ain't politics grand?
And demonize her they did. In their midterm campaign, Republicans attacked Pelosi more often, and more brutally, than they attacked Obama. They made her the living embodiment of Evil Washington, or of limousine socialism, or of whatever alleged plagues that Democrats were supposedly visiting upon the body politic.
The GOP was able to make Pelosi an issue only because she was so effective as speaker. Obama came to office with a long, ambitious agenda. Pelosi had a big majority to work with in the House, but it was ideologically diverse - Blue Dogs, progressives, everything in between. Somehow, she managed to deliver.
Some of the votes she won looked impossible. On health-care reform, there appeared to be no way the House could ever be persuaded to pass the more conservative bill that had passed the Senate. At one point, she told me she could find only "maybe a dozen votes" for the measure. But she and Reid managed to find a workable set of modifications - and a clever parliamentary maneuver to pull the whole thing off.

E.J. Dionne:

"Because I'm effective," she answers matter-of-factly. "It's why they had to do it. They had to put a stop to me because we were effective in passing health-care reform, which the health insurance industry wanted to stop; Wall Street reform, which Wall Street wanted to stop; [reforms of] students loans for taking the money out of the banks and giving it back to the taxpayer and to families."
And in what might be read as a reminder of why she should remain as leader, she adds: "I'm one of the most effective fundraisers that the Congress has had . . . because I believe in something."

Yglesias:

You don’t get to be Speaker without being a shrewd political thinker, but a big part of her shrewdness was not overdoing the political thinking. She always kept her values front and center and made the political thinking subordinate to her substantive mission in politics. The politics, in other words, was a means to an end and the ends she served were important. We need more people like that in DC, not fewer.

The German magazine Speigel has a frightening article on the decline United States as a world power. Excerpts:

The Desperate States of America are loud and distressed. The country has always been a little paranoid, but now it's also despondent, hopeless and pessimistic. Americans have always believed in the country's capacity for regeneration, that a new awakening is possible at any time. Now, 63 percent of Americans don't believe that they will be able to maintain their current standard of living.
And if America is indeed on the downward slope, it will have consequences for the global economy and the political world order.
The fall of America doesn't have to be a complete collapse -- it is, after all, a country that has managed to reinvent itself many times before. But today it's no longer certain -- or even likely -- that everything will turn out fine in the end. The United States of 2010 is dysfunctional, but in new ways. The entire interplay of taxes and investments is out of joint because a 16,000-page tax code allows for far too many loopholes and because solidarity is no longer part of the way Americans think. The political system, plagued by lobbyism and stark hatred, is incapable of reaching consistent or even quick decisions.
The country is reacting strangely irrationally to the loss of its importance -- it is a reaction characterized primarily by rage. Significant portions of America simply want to return to a supposedly idyllic past. They devote almost no effort to reflection, and they condemn cleverness and intellect as elitist and un-American, as if people who hunt bears could seriously be expected to lead a world power. Demagogues stir up hatred and rage on television stations like Fox News. These parts of America, majorities in many states, ignorant of globalization and the international labor market, can do nothing but shout. They hate everything that is new and foreign to them.
But will the US wake up? Or is it already much too late?

The United States of 2010 is a country that has become paralyzed and inhibited by allowing itself to be distracted by things that are, in reality, not a threat: homosexuality, Mexicans, Democratic Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi, health care reform and Obama. Large segments of the country are not even talking about the issues that are serious and complex, like debt, unemployment and serious educational deficits. Is it because this is all too threatening?
Gridlock as the American Status Quo
It has become a country of plain solutions. People with college degrees are suspect and intelligence has become a blemish. Manfred Henningsen, a German political scientist who teaches in Honolulu, Hawaii, calls it "political and economic paralysis." One reason for the crisis, says Henningsen, is that the American dream, both individual and national, has in fact always been a fiction. "This society was never stable. It was always socially underdeveloped, and anyone who talks about the good old days today is forgetting the injustices of racist America."
Agitators like Glenn Beck are "nationalist, racist and proto-fascist," says Henningsen. "They take advantage of the economic situation, almost the way the right-wing intelligentsia did back in the Weimar Republic."
Gridlock has become the modern America status quo, and the condition Henningsen calls "institutional idiocy" is especially obvious in the country's most important legislative body, the Senate, which has come to resemble a royal court where nothing has happened in centuries.
Each state elects two senators, including Wyoming, with its 540,000 inhabitants, and California, with a population of 37 million. If enough senators from states with small populations band together, they have the capacity to block everything, which is precisely what they do. And no one questions the rules, both written and unwritten. The Senate is no longer a club in which the members speak to one another. The filibuster, a way of blocking legislation through continuous debate, was the exception in the past, but today it's the rule. The Republicans have already used the filibuster to torpedo more than 100 of Obama's proposals.

TOMORROW: AMERICA'S FUTURE, THE WORLD'S FUTURE
A creative country doesn't stop being creative because of a crisis. A society that has produced universities like Harvard, Yale, Stanford or MIT, companies like Apple and Microsoft on the West Coast, and institutions like the Metropolitan Opera, Carnegie Hall and the Museum of Modern Art in New York doesn't suddenly become stultified. There are always new projects, even in the United States of 2010. There are startups, new companies and, of course, great thinkers.
But once a decline has gotten underway, it isn't easy to change direction. Many young companies in Silicon Valley don't last very long because they are unable to secure financing or find customers. The country seems lethargic in a very un-American way -- or perhaps it's just the new American way. The demonization of political opponents, the end of debates, the condemnation of intellect -- these are all ominous signs.

James Maguire recounts his experience of the the Stewart/Colbert "Sanity" rally. He's generally positive about the event, but also had this to say:

Near the end, Stewart drops comedy (mostly) and addressees us sincerely. The crowd grows fully silent as we sense his intensity. “We live in hard times, not end times,” he says, to robust applause. Still, we can disagree and not be enemies. The real bogeyman, he suggests, is the media. “The 24-hour politico-pundit perpetual panic conflictinator did not cause our problems, but its existence makes solving them that much harder.” This broken media machine over-amplifies and distorts issues. The funhouse mirror of media coverage encourages division, hampers our efforts to work together. We must rise above its polarizing effect to work together for the common good.
His speech feels heartfelt, but to my ears it has a stark omission. Oddly, he does not exhort us to vote, now on the eve of the midterms. Why not? Is a call for reasoned discourse somehow mutually exclusive with a call for actual involvement?
Certainly the recent Beck/Rally rally here on the Mall didn’t discourage fierce partisanship. The conservatives are teeth-and-fang one-sided, showing no interest in meeting in the middle. The youthful idealists standing in this field today were foot soldiers that helped elect Obama in 2008. With the midterms just 72 hours away, must they be told that moderation is the greatest virtue? Conservatives are working phone banks night and day. And not a single peep this afternoon about the critical importance of voting?
Comparing this event with the conservative rally here in August points up something else unfortunate, something that relates directly to Stewart’s call for mutual respect.
The contrast between the two events is, yes, ideology, but more fundamentally — and more bitterly — one of class. Video footage of the earlier event compared with my view of today reveals that, while this event trends young, college educated, and affluent, the earlier event appeared less affluent, older, less educated; this event is racially diverse; that event was overwhelmingly white. This is hip; that was square. Today is more about knowledge workers, August looked more inclined toward service and factory workers, folks far more displaced by the long recession.
Those people are upset — with good reason. All of America has suffered with the downturn but they’re suffering more. They’re enduring one long dark economic slide, with no end in sight. Deteriorating social conditions (like a persistent 9.5 percent unemployment rate) always fuel the rise of inchoate protest groups like the Tea Party. Yet while the group’s platform is half-baked, the economic pain that fuels it is very real and deserves to be taken seriously. Those folks are in no mood for irony. How can you be ironic when almost the last damn factory in Dayton just shut down and your brother-in-law – who worked there for 8 damn years – was laid off? Those folks don’t want to “restore sanity,” they want to restore their jobs. Their communities are falling apart and they’re pissed off and, frankly, scared shitless. Irony? To hell with that.

Bill Maher had some words along the same lines:

Finally, since we're all talking about 'Shellacking,' I realized the lyrics to this song perfectly capture the message voters sent Washington last week:

Message received, loud and clear!

the song i hate

2010-11-03T19:21:00.005-04:00

Well, that sucked. There were a couple bright spots, but the big picture was grim indeed. I was especially sad to see that Tom Periello of Virginia lost. He was that rare politician who's not just 'basically a good guy,' but a truly decent, honorable person to his core. Which I'm sure is a big reason why he lost, but he didn't go out without a fight. He was one of two politicians I gave $$ to, both of whom lost, but I certainly don't regret supporting him. I hope Obama will consider inviting him into his Administration in some capacity.

If you want to read just one post-election analysis, I would suggest this one:

Timothy Egan: How Obama Saved Capitalism and Lost the Midterms

more than anything, the fact that the president took on the structural flaws of a broken free enterprise system instead of focusing on things that the average voter could understand explains why his party was routed on Tuesday. Obama got on the wrong side of voter anxiety in a decade of diminished fortunes.

“We have done things that people don’t even know about,” Obama told Jon Stewart. Certainly. The three signature accomplishments of his first two years — a health care law that will make life easier for millions of people, financial reform that attempts to level the playing field with Wall Street, and the $814 billion stimulus package — have all been recast as big government blunders, rejected by the emerging majority.

But each of them, in its way, should strengthen the system. The health law will hold costs down, while giving millions the chance at getting care, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Financial reform seeks to prevent the kind of meltdown that caused the global economic collapse. And the stimulus, though it drastically raised the deficit, saved about 3 million jobs, again according to the CBO. It also gave a majority of taxpayers a one-time cut — even if 90 percent of Americans don’t know that, either.

Of course, nobody gets credit for preventing a plane crash. “It could have been much worse!” is not a rallying cry. And, more telling, despite a meager uptick in job growth this year, the unemployment rate rose from 7.6 percent in the month Obama took office to 9.6 today.

Billions of profits, windfalls in the stock market, a stable banking system — but no jobs.

Of course, the big money interests who benefited from Obama’s initiatives have shown no appreciation. Obama, as a senator, voted against the initial bailout of AIG, the reckless insurance giant. As president, he extended them treasury loans at a time when economists said he must — or risk further meltdown. Their response was to give themselves $165 million in executive bonuses, and funnel money to Republicans this year.

Money flows one way, to power, now held by the party that promises tax cuts and deregulation — which should please big business even more.

President Franklin Roosevelt also saved capitalism, in part by a bank “holiday” in 1933, at a time when the free enterprise system had failed. Unlike Obama, he was rewarded with midterm gains for his own party because a majority liked where he was taking the country. The bank holiday was incidental to a larger public works campaign.

Obama can recast himself as the consumer’s best friend, and welcome the animus of Wall Street. He should hector the companies sitting on piles of cash but not hiring new workers. For those who do hire, and create new jobs, he can offer tax incentives. He should finger the financial giants for refusing to clean up their own mess in the foreclosure crisis. He should point to the long overdue protections for credit card holders that came with reform.

And he should veto, veto, veto any bill that attempts to roll back some of the basic protections for people against the institutions that have so much control over their lives – insurance companies, Wall Street and big oil.

They will whine a fierce storm, the manipulators of great wealth. A war on business, they will claim. Not even close. Obama saved them, and the biggest cost was to him.

Greg Sargent tries to read between the lines of Obama's press conference today and ventures that Obama "views the next two years through the prism of two core strategic questions:"

First, with Republicans moving to roll back key chunks of his agenda, how does he draw a line against those efforts without allowing Repubicans to paint him as arrogant and deaf to the message of last night's results?

And second: How aggressively can he highlight the Republicans' refusal to compromise, and thus claim the moral high ground, without undercutting the impression -- one he clearly wants to feed -- that he's reaching out and trying to establish common ground with them?

It will be interesting to see how Obama, who is one of the most resilient and skilled public communicators and debaters of the last generation, adapts to this sudden new set of challenges.

Ezra Klein and David Leonhardt both tried to imagine how Obama and Republicans could find common ground to move forward on solving our country's fiscal woes. It's very cute.

Mohamed A. El-Erian argues that we desperately need such cooperation in order to get the economy moving again. Unfortunately, however... Na Ga Ha Pen!

Going forward all Republicans have to do is prevent the economy from recovering for two more years and they'll be in good shape to take back the White House in 2012. As Lenin used to say, "the worse, the better."

Get ready for it!

Finally, off-topic, I'd just like to state for the record...

I believe Anita Hill

changing back

2010-10-30T11:57:00.006-04:00

It goes without saying, but everyone be sure to vote. It's gonna be a bad year, but there's still a pretty big range in terms of how bad.

Now for some of this and that...

This op-ed by Steven Perlstein is still probably the best commentary on our present circumstances that I've come across. Here's the conclusion:

The simple truth is that Obama and the Democratic Congress were dealt a lousy economic hand, and they've played it about as well as anyone could. Along with their predecessors and the holdovers at the Federal Reserve, they prevented a collapse of the global financial system and a 1930s-like depression. But given the magnitude of the financial crisis and the global imbalances that gave rise to it, a prolonged period of slow growth and high unemployment was almost inevitable.
The political reality, however, is that voters are unwilling to accept that economic reality. They want to believe that government has the power to control the economy and fix it quickly when it breaks down. They are encouraged in that belief by politicians and special interest groups, by the media and by too many economists.
That said, trying to convince voters that things could have been worse was not a viable political strategy for Democrats in 2010. Against a backdrop of stagnant incomes and declining home prices and 10 percent unemployment, toting up the number of jobs saved, mortgages modified or bridges repaired was never going to be a winning argument. What voters needed was a broader vision of where the country needed to go and how we could get there, a credible story of how shared sacrifice today could lead to shared prosperity tomorrow.
The inability of President Obama and Democratic leaders to articulate such a vision and tell that story now threatens their governing majority. Republicans may soon be the beneficiaries of that failure. Their victory, however, will be similarly short-lived if they mistake their good fortune for a mandate for lower taxes, less regulation and further erosion of the economic safety net.
In politics as in many competitive arenas, sometimes you win simply because the other guy loses.

The only thing I would quibble with here, though, is the notion that the government does not have the power to fix the economy. True,politically our government is not capable of doing what would be necessary, but that's not to say it couldn't if everyone somehow got on the same page. We've seen it in our own history: after Pearl Harbor our government began deficit spending on an unprecedented scale. It was a rare moment when "deficit hawks" were silenced by the existential threat posed by the Axis powers. After the war, the economy now out of the Depression and running on all cylinders we managed to pay off the debt relatively quickly. (To be clear, I'm not for deficit spending in good times, just as a way of getting our economy in gear... in the long term we do need to get our fiscal house in order, but that's not going to happen as long as our economy is stuck in the mud)

We could act with the same seriousness now that we did after Pearl Harbor, but rather than building war ships we could spend the money on our own infrastructure and solving the energy/environmental crisis... except, of course, that we can't. But that's a political problem. Not an inherent limitation to the power of government.

Now I don't know if it could be possible to convince the public of the necessity of such drastic measures... but I can say with a degree of certainty that it's unlikely to happen without even making the argument. That's where I do believe the Obama Admin deserves some criticism.

Along those lines, Paul Krugman considers how we got here:

This is what happens when you need to leap over an economic chasm — but either can’t or won’t jump far enough, so that you only get part of the way across.
If Democrats do as badly as expected in next week’s elections, pundits will rush to interpret the results as a referendum on ideology. President Obama moved too far to the left, most will say, even though his actual program — a health care plan very similar to past Republican proposals, a fiscal stimulus that consisted mainly of tax cuts, help for the unemployed and aid to hard-pressed states — was more conservative than his election platform.
A few commentators will point out, with much more justice, that Mr. Obama never made a full-throated case for progressive policies, that he consistently stepped on his own message, that he was so worried about making bankers nervous that he ended up ceding populist anger to the right.
But the truth is that if the economic situation were better — if unemployment had fallen substantially over the past year — we wouldn’t be having this discussion. We would, instead, be talking about modest Democratic losses, no more than is usual in midterm elections.
The real story of this election, then, is that of an economic policy that failed to deliver. Why? Because it was greatly inadequate to the task.

Krugman makes the crucial point that the stimulus was barely enough to counter-act cuts at the State and local levels, meaning, in effect, there was no stimulus.

David Leonhardt thinks he knows the moment the Obama Administration took their eye off the ball:

On the evening of Dec. 3 last year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics sent an advance copy of the next morning’s jobs report to the White House. It’s standard procedure for top White House and Federal Reserve officials to get an early look at the numbers, but there was nothing standard about this particular report.

It showed that job losses had all but stopped in November, after nearly two years of big declines. White House aides exulted. Christina Romer, a top economist, brought a copy of the numbers to the Oval Office, and President Obama embraced her. A photograph of the moment, with a Christmas tree off to the side, was hung in the office of the Council of Economic Advisers. The good news — and the optimism — would continue for the next few months.

Today, that brief period of optimism looks like one of the worst things that could have happened to the White House, other Democrats and, above all, the economy. The nascent recovery removed the urgency that the Obama administration and Democratic senators felt in early 2009. They still favored more action, like aid to states and tax cuts, but it was no longer their top priority.

They assumed a recovery was under way.

We now know, of course, that the recovery has stalled. From November of last year — the month whose job report brought cheer to the White House — to May, the economy added almost one million jobs, thanks partly to census hiring. Since May, almost 400,000 jobs have disappeared.

More than anything else, that change explains the midterm losses that Democrats are bracing for next week.

Tim Dickinson argues in Rolling Stone that Obama deserves more credit than he's getting:

During his campaign, skeptics warned that Barack Obama was nothing but a "beautiful loser," a progressive purist whose uncompromising idealism would derail his program for change. But as president, Obama has proved to be just the opposite — an ugly winner. Over and over, he has shown himself willing to strike unpalatable political bargains to secure progress, even at the cost of alienating his core supporters. Single-payer health care? For Obama, it was a nonstarter. The public option? A praiseworthy bargaining chip in the push for reform.
This bloodless, if effective, approach to governance has created a perilous disconnect: By any rational measure, Obama is the most accomplished and progressive president in decades, yet the only Americans fired up by the changes he has delivered are Republicans and Tea Partiers hellbent on reversing them. Heading into the November elections, Obama's approval ratings are mired in the mid-40s, and polls reflect a stark enthusiasm gap: Half of all Republicans are "very" excited about voting this fall, compared to just a quarter of Democrats. "Republicans have succeeded in making even the president's victories look distasteful, messy — and seem like bad policy steps or defeats," says Norman Ornstein, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. "Many on the left have expressed nothing but anger, frustration and disappointment."
But if the passions of Obama's base have been deflated by the compromises he made to secure historic gains like the Recovery Act, health care reform and Wall Street regulation, that gloom cannot obscure the essential point: This president has delivered more sweeping, progressive change in 20 months than the previous two Democratic administrations did in 12 years. "When you look at what will last in history," historian Doris Kearns Goodwin tells Rolling Stone, "Obama has more notches on the presidential belt."
In fact, when the history of this administration is written, Obama's opening act is likely to be judged as more impressive than any president's — Democrat or Republican — since the mid-1960s. "If you're looking at the first-two-year legislative record," says Ornstein, "you really don't have any rivals since Lyndon Johnson — and that includes Ronald Reagan."
Less than halfway through his first term, Obama has compiled a remarkable track record. As president, he has rewritten America's social contract to make health care accessible for all citizens. He has brought 100,000 troops home from war and forged a once-unthinkable consensus around the endgame for the Bush administration's $3 trillion blunder in Iraq. He has secured sweeping financial reforms that elevate the rights of consumers over Wall Street bankers and give regulators powerful new tools to prevent another collapse. And most important of all, he has achieved all of this while moving boldly to ward off another Great Depression and put the country back on a halting path to recovery.
Along the way, Obama delivered record tax cuts to the middle class and slashed nearly $200 billion in corporate welfare — reinvesting that money to make college more accessible and Medicare more solvent. He single-handedly prevented the collapse of the Big Three automakers — saving more than 1 million jobs — and brought Big Tobacco, at last, under the yoke of federal regulation. Even in the face of congressional intransigence on climate change, he has fought to constrain carbon pollution by executive fiat and to invest $200 billion in clean energy — an initiative bigger than John F. Kennedy's moonshot and one that's on track to double America's capacity to generate renewable energy by the end of Obama's first term.
On the social front, he has improved pay parity for women and hate-crime protections for gays and lesbians. He has brought a measure of sanity to the drug war, reducing the sentencing disparity for crack cocaine while granting states wide latitude to experiment with marijuana laws. And he has installed two young, female justices on the Supreme Court, creating what Brinkley calls "an Obama imprint on the court for generations."
What's even more impressive about Obama's accomplishments, historians say, is the fractious political coalition he had to marshal to victory. "He didn't have the majority that LBJ had," says Goodwin. Indeed, Johnson could count on 68 Democratic senators to pass Medicare, Medicaid and the Voting Rights Act. For his part, Franklin Roosevelt had the backing of 69 Senate Democrats when he passed Social Security in 1935. At its zenith, Obama's governing coalition in the Senate comprised 57 Democrats, a socialist, a Republican turncoat — and Joe Lieberman.
In his quest for progress, Obama has also had to maneuver against an unrelenting head wind from the "Party of No" and its billionaire backers. "Obama is harassed as well as opposed," says Princeton historian Sean Wilentz. "The crazy Republican right is now unfettered. You've got a Senate with no adult leadership. And Obama's up against Rupert Murdoch, Dick Armey, the Koch brothers and the rest of the professional right." Compared to the opposition faced by the most transformative Democratic presidents, adds Wilentz, "it's a wholly different scale."
Despite such obstacles, Obama has succeeded in forging a progressive legacy that, anchored by health care reform, puts him "into the same conversation with FDR and LBJ," says Brinkley, "though those two accomplished more." Goodwin, herself a former Johnson aide, likens the thrust of Obama's social agenda to LBJ's historic package of measures known as the Great Society. "What is comparable," she says, "is the idea of using government to expand social and economic justice. That's what the health care bill is about. That's what Obama tried to do with the financial reforms. That's what he's doing with education. The Great Society was about using the collective energies of the nation to make life better for more people — and that's what Obama has tried to do."

Unfortunately though, most people don't see things that way (Bloomberg):

The Obama administration cut taxes for middle-class Americans, expects to make a profit on the hundreds of billions of dollars spent to rescue Wall Street banks and has overseen an economy that has grown for the past five quarters.
Most voters don’t believe it.
A Bloomberg National Poll conducted Oct. 24-26 finds that by a two-to-one margin, likely voters in the Nov. 2 midterm elections think taxes have gone up, the economy has shrunk, and the billions lent to banks as part of the Troubled Asset Relief Program won’t be recovered.
“The public view of the economy is at odds with the facts, and the blame has to go to the Democrats,” said J. Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Co., a Des Moines, Iowa-based firm that conducted the nationwide survey. “It does not matter much if you make change, if you do not communicate change.”

Paul Krugman on the kind of politics we can look forward to:

In the late-1990s, Republicans and Democrats were able to work together on some issues. President Obama seems to believe that the same thing can happen again today. In a recent interview with National Journal, he sounded a conciliatory note, saying that Democrats need to have an “appropriate sense of humility,” and that he would “spend more time building consensus.” Good luck with that.
After all, that era of partial cooperation in the 1990s came only after Republicans had tried all-out confrontation, actually shutting down the federal government in an effort to force President Bill Clinton to give in to their demands for big cuts in Medicare.
Now, the government shutdown ended up hurting Republicans politically, and some observers seem to assume that memories of that experience will deter the G.O.P. from being too confrontational this time around. But the lesson current Republicans seem to have drawn from 1995 isn’t that they were too confrontational, it’s that they weren’t confrontational enough.
Another recent interview by National Journal, this one with Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, has received a lot of attention thanks to a headline-grabbing quote: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
If you read the full interview, what Mr. McConnell was saying was that, in 1995, Republicans erred by focusing too much on their policy agenda and not enough on destroying the president: “We suffered from some degree of hubris and acted as if the president was irrelevant and we would roll over him. By the summer of 1995, he was already on the way to being re-elected, and we were hanging on for our lives.” So this time around, he implied, they’ll stay focused on bringing down Mr. Obama.
True, Mr. McConnell did say that he might be willing to work with Mr. Obama in certain circumstances — namely, if he’s willing to do a “Clintonian back flip,” taking positions that would find more support among Republicans than in his own party. Of course, this would actually hurt Mr. Obama’s chances of re-election — but that’s the point.

get ready for it!

This Vanity Fair profile of John Boehner gave me some perspective on the guy. He comes less as a zealot and more as a political creature responding to the demands of his increasingly crazy constituents. This doesn't make him any less dangerous, but still interesting nonetheless. Here's a key excerpt:

He is not ashamed to acknowledge that he raises a glass, or two or three, when day is done. “He smokes and he drinks, and God bless him,” says John Feehery, who was press secretary to the last Republican Speaker, Dennis Hastert, and who has been on the receiving end of some of Boehner’s sartorial tips and injunctions to lose weight. “The thing that’s most important about Boehner is he’s very even-keeled. He’s not mercurial. Unless he’s giving a speech on the floor, he’s not going to get overly excited. From a leadership perspective, he’s been there before. I don’t think he’s necessarily out to prove anything.”
Yet the reality of the modern Republican Party is that Boehner has to prove himself every day to his truculent colleagues, which is part of the reason he has offered such consistently unyielding opposition to Obama. It’s impossible to imagine a Speaker Sam Rayburn adopting a “Hell, no!” strategy with Dwight D. Eisenhower, or a Tip O’Neill adopting it with Ronald Reagan, whatever their real policy differences or partisan electoral objectives might have been. Were he to be left to his own devices, it would be easy enough to imagine that Boehner might like to close the sale for a change, instead of just closing the door. But he can’t—it would cost him his job. It was Boehner himself who shouted “Hell, no!” on the House floor just before the final vote on the health-care bill. Although he likes to say that Obama has refused to listen to G.O.P. ideas or bargain in good faith, the truth is the other way around. Boehner was among the architects of the strategy by Republicans in both houses to resist the president at every turn, regardless of whether they thought his proposals made sense or might be good for the country. Led by Boehner in the House, the Republicans voted down measures they had previously agreed with, even been the first to propose. The Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, of Kentucky, has openly acknowledged that this approach was a deliberate effort to build the party’s political fortunes at the expense of the president’s.
Boehner has vowed that, if the House were to come under his management as Speaker, he would run the place differently. Even if he tried, it is not clear how much difference it would make. “Boehner does understand the legislative process, he values the legislative process,” says Don Wolfensberger, a former top Republican staffer on the House rules committee and now director of the Congress Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, in Washington. But legislating has become “more and more difficult, because things have become so much more partisan.” If the modern Senate has been twisted into knots by the ever present threat of filibusters to prolong debate, the House has seen the reverse: a precipitous decline of substantive debate among members on the floor, through the use of restrictive procedural rules that bar, or severely limit, amendments to pre-cooked bills that emerge from the powerful Rules Committee. The use of so-called “closed” rules began to increase about 30 years ago, after Reagan’s election, when House Republicans staged rearguard warfare against the Democratic majority by seeking to attach rafts of amendments, and Democrats clamored for relief. As part of the original Contract with America, Republicans pledged more open debate, but the best they were able to do was to have open rules on 58 percent of legislation reaching the floor, according to Wolfensberger’s calculations. Since then, that percentage has declined steadily. In the first two years of renewed Democratic control, in 2007–9, only 14 percent of bills reached the floor in a form that allowed unlimited amendments. In the current Congress, not even one such bill has reached the floor.
Boehner routinely deplores this state of affairs, but he would have a tough time changing it. It is also hard to see just where and how he might be able to work with Obama, though they agree on several broad fronts of foreign policy, including the war in Afghanistan. Boehner has been deliberately opaque about what his own priorities would be as Speaker, in part lest he rank too low on his own agenda some item that is high on the agenda of the Young Guns. (He is anti-abortion, for example, but he has never shown much interest in the culture wars.) But Boehner holds out some hope, and cites the messy passage of Obama’s health-care bill as proof, that big and complex things cannot be done effectively on pure partisan votes. “This is one of the reasons why I believe that beginning to break down the scar tissue that’s been built up by both political parties is critically important for the future of the institution that I’m seeking to lead,” he said recently to a group of journalists in Washington. “And both parties have built up a lot of scar tissue that prevents members from working together again. But I’m going to tell you what: we’re not going to be able to solve the big problems in our country until members begin to work with each other again and trust each other once again. Ain’t gonna happen overnight.”
That’s an understatement, and Boehner is, in the end, a most unlikely candidate to lead any kind of revolution. He is a traditionalist, and an institutionalist, and, Lord knows, he is anything but a fresh face. He is the captive of forces more powerful than himself, and he has evidenced a form of Stockholm syndrome, which his captors may or may not find convincing. The pitiful reality of contemporary Washington is that institutional perspective is in such short supply that anyone with even a smidgen of it might pass for having qualities of statesmanship. If John Boehner is a statesman, he’s one who starts from an unenviable position: neither the leader his party may really want nor the kind his country most needs.

Here are a few other random things I found interesting:

Jonathan Chait reviews the most popular conservative book of the year, The Battle by Arthur Brooks, calling it a notable signpost on the road to idiocy.

Sean Wilentz traces the Tea Party's roots back to Cold War fringe groups like the John Birch Society. He notes that many of the books being promoted by Glenn Beck and gaining currency among Republicans lately are by people who were shunned in their day by the likes of William F. Buckley.

Tom Junod on the "sore winners"

The Stewart/Colbert rally is starting soon. Have a great weekend people!

(insert tea related pun here)

2010-10-05T00:20:00.005-04:00

The "Tea Party" has always struck me as more of a media creation than a real political force. I do see the occasional bumper sticker, so there is something real there, but at this point we should all be well aware of how the media fixates on the sensational, and how that gives a distorted view of reality.

Nevertheless I happened to read two really interesting articles on the phenomenon recently, so I'm going to provide my "condensed" versions here. The first takes a relatively scholarly approach, the second is on the irreverent side... this will be worth your time I promise.

First off, this is from the New York Review of Books:

Many Americans, a vocal and varied segment of the public at large, have now convinced themselves that educated elites—politicians, bureaucrats, reporters, but also doctors, scientists, even schoolteachers—are controlling our lives. And they want them to stop. They say they are tired of being told what counts as news or what they should think about global warming; tired of being told what their children should be taught, how much of their paychecks they get to keep, whether to insure themselves, which medicines they can have, where they can build their homes, which guns they can buy, when they have to wear seatbelts and helmets, whether they can talk on the phone while driving, which foods they can eat, how much soda they can drink…the list is long. But it is not a list of political grievances in the conventional sense.

A new strain of populism is metastasizing before our eyes, nourished by the same libertarian impulses that have unsettled American society for half a century now. Anarchistic like the Sixties, selfish like the Eighties, contradicting neither, it is estranged, aimless, and as juvenile as our new century. It appeals to petulant individuals convinced that they can do everything themselves if they are only left alone, and that others are conspiring to keep them from doing just that. This is the one threat that will bring Americans into the streets.
Welcome to the politics of the libertarian mob.

Quite apart from the movement’s effect on the balance of party power, which should be short-lived, it has given us a new political type: the antipolitical Jacobin. The new Jacobins have two classic American traits that have grown much more pronounced in recent decades: blanket distrust of institutions and an astonishing—and unwarranted—confidence in the self. They are apocalyptic pessimists about public life and childlike optimists swaddled in self-esteem when it comes to their own powers.

Since the Seventies, distrust of politics has been the underlying theme of our politics, and every presidential candidate since Jimmy Carter has been obliged to run against Washington, knowing full well that the large forces making the government less effective and less representative were beyond his control. Voters pretend to rebel and politicians pretend to listen: this is our political theater. What’s happening behind the scenes is something quite different. As the libertarian spirit drifted into American life, first from the left, then from the right, many began disinvesting in our political institutions and learning to work around them, as individuals.

Americans are and have always been credulous skeptics. They question the authority of priests, then talk to the dead¹⁵; they second-guess their cardiologists, then seek out quacks in the jungle. Like people in every society, they do this in moments of crisis when things seem hopeless. They also, unlike people in other societies, do it on the general principle that expertise and authority are inherently suspect.
This, I think, is the deepest reason why public reaction to the crash of 2008 and the election of Barack Obama took a populist turn and the Tea Party movement caught on. The crash not only devastated people’s finances and shook their confidence in their and their children’s future. It also broke through the moats we have been building around ourselves and our families, reminding us that certain problems require a collective response through political institutions. What’s more, it was a catastrophe whose causes no one yet fully understands, not even specialists who know exactly what derivatives, discount rates, and multiplier effects are. The measures the federal government took to control the damage were complex and controversial, but there was general agreement that at some point it would have to intervene to prevent a worldwide financial collapse, and that without some sort of stimulus a real depression loomed. That, though, is not at all what people who distrust elites, who want to “make up their own minds,” and who have fantasies of self-sufficiency want to be told. Apparently they find it more satisfying to hear that these emergency measures were concocted to tighten government’s grip on their lives even more. It all connects.

The conservative media did not create the Tea Party movement and do not direct it; nobody does. But the movement’s rapid growth and popularity are unthinkable without the demagogues’ new ability to tell isolated individuals worried about their futures what they want to hear and put them in direct contact with one another, bypassing the parties and other mediating institutions our democracy depends on. When the new Jacobins turn on their televisions they do not tune in to the PBS News Hour or C-Span to hear economists and congressmen debate the effectiveness of financial regulations or health care reform. They look for shows that laud their common sense, then recite to them the libertarian credo that Fox emblazons on its home page nearly every day: YOU DECIDE.

the Jacobin spirit could shape our politics for some time, given how well it dovetails with the spirits of Woodstock and Wall Street, and given the continuing influence of Fox News and talk radio. (Rush Limbaugh alone has millions of daily listeners.) It is already transforming American conservatism. A wise man once summed up the history of colonialism in a phrase: the colonized eventually colonize the colonizer. This is exactly what is happening on the right today: the more it tries to exploit the energy of the Tea Party rebellion, the cruder the conservative movement becomes in its thinking and rhetoric. Ronald Reagan was a master of populist rhetoric, but he governed using the policy ideas of intellectuals he knew and admired (Milton Friedman, Irving Kristol, George Gilder, and Charles Murray among them).
Today’s conservatives prefer the company of anti-intellectuals who know how to exploit nonintellectuals, as Sarah Palin does so masterfully.¹⁶ The dumbing-down they have long lamented in our schools they are now bringing to our politics, and they will drag everyone and everything along with them. As David Frum, one of the remaining lucid conservatives, has written to his wayward comrades, “When you argue stupid, you campaign stupid. When you campaign stupid, you win stupid. And when you win stupid, you govern stupid.” (Unsurprisingly, Frum was recently eased out of his position at the American Enterprise Institute after expressing criticism of Republican tactics in the health care debate.)

For half a century now Americans have been rebelling in the name of individual freedom. Some wanted a more tolerant society with greater private autonomy, and now we have it, which is a good thing—though it also brought us more out-of-wedlock births, a soft pornographic popular culture, and a drug trade that serves casual users while destroying poor American neighborhoods and destabilizing foreign nations. Others wanted to be free from taxes and regulations so they could get rich fast, and they have—and it’s left the more vulnerable among us in financial ruin, holding precarious jobs, and scrambling to find health care for their children. We wanted our two revolutions. Well, we have had them.
Now an angry group of Americans wants to be freer still—free from government agencies that protect their health, wealth, and well-being; free from problems and policies too difficult to understand; free from parties and coalitions; free from experts who think they know better than they do; free from politicians who don’t talk or look like they do (and Barack Obama certainly doesn’t). They want to say what they have to say without fear of contradiction, and then hear someone on television tell them they’re right. They don’t want the rule of the people, though that’s what they say. They want to be people without rules—and, who knows, they may succeed. This is America, where wishes come true. And where no one remembers the adage “Beware what you wish for.”

Indeed.

And now here is the inimitable Matt Taibbi, from the new Rolling Stone:

Vast forests have already been sacrificed to the public debate about the Tea Party: what it is, what it means, where it's going. But after lengthy study of the phenomenon, I've concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They're full of shit. All of them. At the voter level, the Tea Party is a movement that purports to be furious about government spending — only the reality is that the vast majority of its members are former Bush supporters who yawned through two terms of record deficits and spent the past two electoral cycles frothing not about spending but about John Kerry's medals and Barack Obama's Sixties associations. The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending — with the exception of the money spent on them.

In the Tea Party narrative, victory at the polls means a new American revolution, one that will "take our country back" from everyone they disapprove of. But what they don't realize is, there's a catch: This is America, and we have an entrenched oligarchical system in place that insulates us all from any meaningful political change. The Tea Party today is being pitched in the media as this great threat to the GOP; in reality, the Tea Party is the GOP. What few elements of the movement aren't yet under the control of the Republican Party soon will be, and even if a few genuine Tea Party candidates sneak through, it's only a matter of time before the uprising as a whole gets castrated, just like every grass-roots movement does in this country. Its leaders will be bought off and sucked into the two-party bureaucracy, where its platform will be whittled down until the only things left are those that the GOP's campaign contributors want anyway: top-bracket tax breaks, free trade and financial deregulation.

The rest of it — the sweeping cuts to federal spending, the clampdown on bailouts, the rollback of Roe v. Wade — will die on the vine as one Tea Party leader after another gets seduced by the Republican Party and retrained for the revolutionary cause of voting down taxes for Goldman Sachs executives.

So how does a group of billionaire businessmen and corporations get a bunch of broke Middle American white people to lobby for lower taxes for the rich and deregulation of Wall Street? That turns out to be easy. Beneath the surface, the Tea Party is little more than a weird and disorderly mob, a federation of distinct and often competing strains of conservatism that have been unable to coalesce around a leader of their own choosing. Its rallies include not only hardcore libertarians left over from the original Ron Paul "Tea Parties," but gun-rights advocates, fundamentalist Christians, pseudomilitia types like the Oath Keepers (a group of law- enforcement and military professionals who have vowed to disobey "unconstitutional" orders) and mainstream Republicans who have simply lost faith in their party. It's a mistake to cast the Tea Party as anything like a unified, cohesive movement — which makes them easy prey for the very people they should be aiming their pitchforks at. A loose definition of the Tea Party might be millions of pissed-off white people sent chasing after Mexicans on Medicaid by the handful of banks and investment firms who advertise on Fox and CNBC.

It would be inaccurate to say the Tea Partiers are racists. What they are, in truth, are narcissists. They're completely blind to how offensive the very nature of their rhetoric is to the rest of the country. I'm an ordinary middle-aged guy who pays taxes and lives in the suburbs with his wife and dog — and I'm a radical communist? I don't love my country? I'm a redcoat? Fuck you! These are the kinds of thoughts that go through your head as you listen to Tea Partiers expound at awesome length upon their cultural victimhood, surrounded as they are by America-haters like you and me or, in the case of foreign-born president Barack Obama, people who are literally not Americans in the way they are.

It's not like the Tea Partiers hate black people. It's just that they're shockingly willing to believe the appalling horseshit fantasy about how white people in the age of Obama are some kind of oppressed minority. That may not be racism, but it is incredibly, earth-shatteringly stupid. I hear this theme over and over — as I do on a recent trip to northern Kentucky, where I decide to stick on a Rand Paul button and sit in on a Tea Party event at a local amusement park. Before long, a group of about a half-dozen Tea Partiers begin speculating about how Obamacare will force emergency-room doctors to consult "death panels" that will evaluate your worth as a human being before deciding to treat you.

"They're going to look at your age, your vocation in life, your health, your income. . . ." says a guy active in the Northern Kentucky Tea Party.

"Your race?" I ask.

"Probably," he says.

"White males need not apply," says another Tea Partier.

"Like everything else, the best thing you can do is be an illegal alien," says a third. "Then they won't ask you any questions."

An amazing number of Tea Partiers actually believe this stuff, and in the past year or so a host of little-known politicians have scored electoral upsets riding this kind of yahoo paranoia.

At a Paul fundraiser in northern Kentucky, I strike up a conversation with one Lloyd Rogers, a retired judge in his 70s who is introducing the candidate at the event. The old man is dressed in a baseball cap and shirtsleeves. Personalitywise, he's what you might call a pistol; one of the first things he says to me is that people are always telling him to keep his mouth shut, but he just can't. I ask him what he thinks about Paul's position on the Civil Rights Act.

"Well, hell, if it's your restaurant, you're putting up the money, you should be able to do what you want," says Rogers. "I tell you, every time he says something like that, in Kentucky he goes up 20 points in the polls. With Kentucky voters, it's not a problem."

In Lexington, I pose the same question to Mica Sims, a local Tea Party organizer. "You as a private-property owner have the right to refuse service for whatever reason you feel will better your business," she says, comparing the Civil Rights Act to onerous anti-smoking laws. "If you're for small government, you're for small government."

You look into the eyes of these people when you talk to them and they genuinely don't see what the problem is. It's no use explaining that while nobody likes the idea of having to get the government to tell restaurant owners how to act, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the tool Americans were forced to use to end a monstrous system of apartheid that for 100 years was the shame of the entire Western world. But all that history is not real to Tea Partiers; what's real to them is the implication in your question that they're racists, and to them that is the outrage, and it's an outrage that binds them together. They want desperately to believe in the one-size-fits-all, no-government theology of Rand Paul because it's so easy to understand. At times, their desire to withdraw from the brutally complex global economic system that is an irrevocable fact of our modern life and get back to a simpler world that no longer exists is so intense, it breaks your heart.

At a restaurant in Lexington, I sit down with a Tea Party activist named Frank Harris, with the aim of asking him what he thinks of Wall Street reform. Harris is a bit of an unusual Tea Partier; he's a pro-hemp, anti-war activist who supported Dennis Kucinich. Though he admits he doesn't know very much about the causes of the crash, he insists that financial reform isn't necessary because people like him can always choose not to use banks, take out mortgages, have pensions or even consume everyday products like gas and oil, whose prices are set by the market.

"Really?" I ask. "You can choose not to use gas and oil?" My awesomely fattening cheese-and-turkey dish called a "Hot Brown" is beginning to congeal.

"You can if you want to," Harris says. "And you don't have to take out loans. You can save money and pay for things in cash."

"So instead of regulating banks," I ask, "your solution is saving money in cash?"

He shrugs. "I'm trying to avoid banks at every turn."

My head is starting to hurt. Arguments with Tea Partiers always end up like football games in the year 1900 — everything on the ground, one yard at a time.

My problem, Frank explains, is that I think I can prevent crime by making things illegal. "You want a policeman standing over here so someone doesn't come in here and mug you?" he says. "Because you're going to have to pay for that policeman!"

"But," I say, confused, "we do pay for police."

"You're trying to make every situation 100 percent safe!" he shouts.

This, then, is the future of the Republican Party: Angry white voters hovering over their cash-stuffed mattresses with their kerosene lanterns, peering through the blinds at the oncoming hordes of suburban soccer moms they've mistaken for death-panel bureaucrats bent on exterminating anyone who isn't an illegal alien or a Kenyan anti-colonialist.

The world is changing all around the Tea Party. The country is becoming more black and more Hispanic by the day. The economy is becoming more and more complex, access to capital for ordinary individuals more and more remote, the ability to live simply and own a business without worrying about Chinese labor or the depreciating dollar vanished more or less for good. They want to pick up their ball and go home, but they can't; thus, the difficulties and the rancor with those of us who are resigned to life on this planet.

The bad news is that the Tea Party's political outrage is being appropriated, with thanks, by the Goldmans and the BPs of the world. The good news, if you want to look at it that way, is that those interests mostly have us by the balls anyway, no matter who wins on Election Day. That's the reality; the rest of this is just noise. It's just that it's a lot of noise, and there's no telling when it's ever going to end.

drip, drip...

2010-10-03T11:50:00.005-04:00

Ryan Lizza has an interesting article coming out in the new New Yorker about the negotiations behind the failed Senate bill to address carbon emissions. The House of course did pass such a bill, but it was one of many things the House passed that went to die in the Senate (which insists on acting as if it takes 60 votes to pass anything).

One thing that becomes clear is the White House really dropped the ball on this issue. For all the douchebaggery of Lieberman and Graham they worked in earnest with Kerry to get something done. You may remember Graham lamely saying that Reid's decision to put immigration reform before the energy bill meant he could no longer support the latter... (and of course neither ended up getting voted on) At the time many, including myself, just concluded he was being what the blogger Atrios would call a WATB. But he actually had a legitimate complaint, which for obvious reasons he couldn't state publicly: in order to sell this to his constituents he needed to plausibly deny that the carbon cap would in effect be a new tax. But rather than work with him on this the White House told Fox News that Graham wanted to raise peoples taxes but that they wouldn't let him. And when Graham asked Harry Reid for his support, he refused. So, if Lizza's account is accurate it would seem Graham had every right to be pissed off that after going out on a limb to get something done Democrats made no effort to be helpful, and in one instance intentionally undermined him.

Furthermore the White House made HUGE strategic errors in increasing off shore drilling and nuclear power without consulting KGL (Kerry/Graham/Lieberman). These were the incentives they had built into the bill in order to garner Republican support. Now that the White House had just given those away Graham had nothing to take to Republicans to say he had "won" for them.

Here's my condensed version of the article:

In Barack Obama’s primary-campaign victory speech, in St. Paul, Minnesota, he said that his election would be a historical turning point on two pressing issues: health care and climate change. “We will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick,” he said. “When the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” During the campaign, he often argued that climate change was an essential part of a national energy strategy. “Energy we have to deal with today,” Obama said in a debate with McCain. “Health care is priority No. 2.”

After the election, Obama decided to work on both issues simultaneously. Representative Henry Waxman moved climate change through the House, while Max Baucus, of Montana, moved health care in the Senate. “The plan was to throw two things against the wall, and see which one looks more promising,” a senior Administration official said. Obama, in a February, 2009, address to Congress, said, “To truly transform our economy, protect our security, and save our planet from the ravages of climate change, we need to ultimately make clean, renewable energy the profitable kind of energy. So I ask this Congress to send me legislation that places a market-based cap on carbon pollution.”

In March of 2009, a senior White House official outlined a strategy for a “grand bargain,” in which Democrats would capitulate to Republicans on some long-cherished environmental beliefs in exchange for a cap on carbon emissions. “You need to have something like T. Boone Pickens and Al Gore holding hands,” the White House official told me. In exchange for setting a cap on emissions, Democrats would agree to an increase in the production of natural gas (the only thing that Pickens, the Texas oil-and-gas billionaire, cared about), nuclear power, and offshore oil. If Republicans didn’t respond to the proposed deals, the White House could push them to the table by making a threat through the Environmental Protection Agency, which had recently been granted power to regulate carbon, just as it regulates many other air pollutants.

Fast forward to KGL deciding to try to negotiate something between the three of them that could get 60 votes...

Graham warned Lieberman and Kerry that they needed to get as far as they could in negotiating the bill “before Fox News got wind of the fact that this was a serious process,” one of the people involved in the negotiations said. “He would say, ‘The second they focus on us, it’s gonna be all cap-and-tax all the time, and it’s gonna become just a disaster for me on the airwaves. We have to move this along as quickly as possible.’ ”

In early December of 2009, Lieberman’s office approached Jay Heimbach, the White House official in charge of monitoring the Senate climate debate. For Obama, health care had become the legislation that stuck to the wall. As a consequence of the long debate over that issue, climate change became, according to a senior White House official, Obama’s “stepchild.” Carol Browner had just three aides working directly for her. “Hey, change the entire economy, and here are three staffers to do it!” a former Lieberman adviser noted bitterly. “It’s a bit of a joke.” Heimbach attended meetings with the K.G.L. staffers but almost never expressed a policy preference or revealed White House thinking. “It’s a drum circle,” one Senate aide lamented. “They come by, ‘How are you feeling? Where do you think the votes are? What do you think we should do?’ It’s never ‘Here’s the plan, here’s what we’re doing.’”

Lieberman’s office proposed to Heimbach that the first element of the bill to negotiate was the language about oil drilling. Lieberman and Graham believed it would send a clear message to Republicans and moderate Democrats that there were parts of the bill they would support. Heimbach favored doing anything to attract Republicans, and, though he wouldn’t take any specific actions, he generally supported the strategy.

Graham asked Senator Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska, to write the drilling language. Murkowski was up for reëlection and would soon be facing a primary against a Sarah Palin-backed Tea Party candidate. Her price for considering a climate-change bill with John Kerry’s name attached to it was high: she handed over a set of ideas for drastically expanding drilling, which included a provision to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil companies. Democrats had spent decades protecting ANWR, and even Graham didn’t support drilling there. But he passed the Murkowski language on to his colleagues to see how they would react.

The K.G.L. coalition had two theories about how to win over Republicans and moderate Democrats. One was to negotiate directly with them and offer them something specific for their support. After a year of that method, the coalition had one Republican, and its next most likely target wanted to drill in ANWR. Other Republicans were slipping away.

The article recounts their ultimately futile attempts to get other Republicans on board. Eventually they moved to another strategy...

The second theory about how to win the Republicans’ support was to go straight to their industry backers. If the oil companies and the nuclear industry and the utilities could be persuaded to support the legislation, then they would lobby Republicans. Rosengarten called the strategy “If you build it, they will come.” This was the strategy Obama used to pass health care. He sent his toughest political operatives—like Rahm Emanuel and Jim Messina—to cut deals with the pharmaceutical industry and hospitals, which at key points refrained from attacking the bill. (The pharmaceutical industry actually ran ads thanking Harry Reid for passing the bill.) In early 2010, K.G.L. shifted its focus from the Senate to industry.

And here is where the supposed "tax increase" idea comes into play. The "cap and trade" idea is (sshhhhh... this is just between us) actually just another way of requiring energy companies to pay extra money (aka 'taxes') for emitting carbon into the atmosphere. The real reason for having carbon emission permits that can be bought and sold is to avoid the term "tax," because everybody hates that word.

Perhaps ironically it was the oil industry that asked for a more straight forward tax system (known as a 'linked fee') instead of cap and trade. They said it would reduce uncertainty (although I can't help but wonder if their real motivation was the knowledge that such language would be a harder sell politically, making the legislation less likely to pass).

Here's what happened:

The hardest choices involved the oil industry, which, by powering our transportation, is responsible for almost a third of all carbon emissions in the U.S. Under Waxman-Markey, oil companies would have to buy government permission slips, known as allowances, to cover all the greenhouse gases emitted by cars, trucks, and other vehicles. The oil companies argued that having to buy permits on the carbon market, where the price fluctuated daily, would wreck America’s fragile domestic refining industry. Instead, three major oil refiners—Shell, B.P., and ConocoPhillips—proposed that they pay a fee based on the total number of gallons of gasoline they sold linked to the average price of carbon over the previous three months. The oil companies called the idea “a linked fee.”
On March 23rd, the three senators met to discuss the linked fee, which they had been arguing about for weeks. The environmental community and the White House, which rarely weighed in on its policy preferences, thought the linked fee was disastrous because it would inevitably be labelled a “gas tax.” At one meeting, Joe Aldy, a staffer on Obama’s National Economic Council, advised Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman’s staffers to kill it. According to a person involved in the negotiations, Kerry told his colleagues that the Democrats might lose their congressional majority over the issue. But Lieberman, who had first proposed the linked fee, and Graham supported it.

Kerry, despite his hesitations, wanted the oil companies, which had already spent millions attacking Waxman-Markey, to support his bill. So the senators proposed a deal: the oil companies would get the policy they desired if they agreed to a ceasefire. According to someone present, Kerry told his colleagues at the March meeting, “Shell, B.P., and Conoco are going to need to silence the rest of the industry.” The deal was specific. The ceasefire would last from the day of the bill’s introduction until the E.P.A. released its economic analysis of the legislation, approximately six weeks later. Afterward, the industry could say whatever it wanted. “This was the grand bargain that we struck with the refiners,” one of the people involved said. “We would work with them to engineer this separate mechanism in exchange for the American Petroleum Institute being quiet. They would not run ads, they would not lobby members of Congress, and they would not refer to our bill as a carbon tax.” At another meeting, the three senators and the heads of the three oil companies discussed a phrase they could all use to market the policy: a “fee on polluters.”

On March 31st, Obama announced that large portions of U.S. waters in the Gulf of Mexico, the Arctic Ocean, and off the East Coast—from the mid-Atlantic to central Florida—would be newly available for oil and gas drilling. Two days later, he said, “It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills. They are technologically very advanced. Even during Katrina, the spills didn’t come from the oil rigs, they came from the refineries onshore.” From the outside, it looked as if the Obama Administration were coördinating closely with Democrats in the Senate. Republicans and the oil industry wanted more domestic drilling, and Obama had just given it to them. He seemed to be delivering on the grand bargain that his aides had talked about at the start of the Administration.

But there had been no communication with the senators actually writing the bill, and they felt betrayed. When Graham’s energy staffer learned of the announcement, the night before, he was “apoplectic,” according to a colleague. The group had dispensed with the idea of drilling in ANWR, but it was prepared to open up vast portions of the Gulf and the East Coast. Obama had now given away what the senators were planning to trade.

This was the third time that the White House had blundered. In February, the President’s budget proposal included $54.5 billion in new nuclear loan guarantees. Graham was also trying to use the promise of more loan guarantees to lure Republicans to the bill, but now the White House had simply handed the money over. Later that month, a group of eight moderate Democrats sent the E.P.A. a letter asking the agency to slow down its plans to regulate carbon, and the agency promised to delay any implementation until 2011. Again, that was a promise Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman wanted to negotiate with their colleagues. Obama had served the dessert before the children even promised to eat their spinach. Graham was the only Republican negotiating on the climate bill, and now he had virtually nothing left to take to his Republican colleagues.

But the Administration had grown wary of cutting the kind of deals that the senators needed to pass cap-and-trade. The long and brutal health-care fight had caused a rift in the White House over legislative strategy. One camp, led by Phil Schiliro, Obama’s top congressional liaison, was composed of former congressional aides who argued that Obama needed to insert himself in the legislative process if he was going to pass the ambitious agenda that he had campaigned on. The other group, led by David Axelrod, believed that being closely associated with the messiness of congressional horse-trading was destroying Obama’s reputation.

“We ran as an outsider and then decided to be an insider to get things done,” a senior White House official said. According to the official, Schiliro and the insiders argued, “You’ve got to own Congress,” while Axelrod and the outsiders argued, “Fuck whatever Congress wants, we’re not for them.” The official added, “We probably did lose part of our brand. Obama turned into exactly what we promised ourselves he wasn’t going to be, which is the leader of parliament. We became the majority leader of both houses, and we ceded the Presidency.” Schiliro’s side won the debate over how the White House should approach health care, but in 2010, when the Senate took up cap-and-trade, Axelrod’s side was ascendant. Emanuel, for example, called Reid’s office in March and suggested that the Senate abandon cap-and-trade in favor of a modest bill that would simply require utilities to generate more electricity from clean sources.

In early April, according to two K.G.L. aides, someone at the Congressional Budget Office told Kerry that its economists, when analyzing the bill, would describe the linked fee as a tax. After learning that, the three senators met with lobbyists for the big oil firms, and Kerry offered a new proposal: the refiners would have to buy permits, but the government would sell them at a stable price outside the regular trading system. This arrangement would make no economic difference to consumers: the oil companies would pass the costs on to drivers whether they paid a linked fee or bought special permits. But Kerry thought that the phraseology could determine whether the bill survived or died. The refiners surprised everyone by readily agreeing to the new terms. The linked fee was dead, and so, it seemed, was the threat of Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman’s bill being brought down by opponents attacking it as a gas tax.

Two days later, on April 15th, Emanuel and Browner hosted a group of prominent environmentalists at the White House for an 11 A.M. meeting. For weeks, the linked fee had been a hot topic among Washington climate-change geeks. Now the two groups that hated the policy the most were in the same room. According to people at the meeting, the White House aides and some of the environmentalists, including Carl Pope, the chairman of the Sierra Club, expressed their contempt for the linked fee: even if it was a fine idea on the merits, it was political poison. The White House aides and the environmentalists either didn’t know that the fee had been dropped from the bill or didn’t think the change was significant. The meeting lasted about thirty minutes.

Just after noon, Rimkunas, Graham’s climate-policy adviser, sent Rosengarten an e-mail. The subject was “Go to Fox website and look at gas tax article asap.” She clicked on Foxnews.com: “WH Opposes Higher Gas Taxes Floated by S.C. GOP Sen. Graham in Emerging Senate Energy Bill.” The White House double-crossed us, she thought. The report, by Major Garrett, then the Fox News White House correspondent, cited “senior administration sources” and said that the “Obama White House opposes a move in the Senate, led by South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham, to raise federal gasoline taxes within still-developing legislation to reduce green house gas emissions.” Including two updates to his original story, Garrett used the word “tax” thirty-four times.

“This is horrific,” Rosengarten e-mailed Rimkunas.

“It needs to be fixed,” he responded. “Never seen lg this pissed.”

“We’re calling Schiliro and getting the WH to publicly correct.”

Graham was “screaming profanities,” one of the K.G.L. staffers said. In addition to climate change, he was working with Democrats on immigration and on resolving the status of the prison at Guantánamo Bay. He was one of only nine Republicans to vote for Obama’s first Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor. Now Obama aides were accusing him of backing a gas tax, which wasn’t his idea and wasn’t even in the draft bill. Worst of all, the leakers went to Fox News, a move which they knew would cause Graham the most damage. He called one of his policy advisers that day and asked, “Did you see what they just did to me?” The adviser said, “It made him question, ‘Do they really want to get this done or are they just posturing here? Because why would they do something like this if they wanted to get it done?’ It was more than an attempt to kill the idea. It was also an attempt to tag him with the idea, and, if you want him to be an ally on the issue, why would you do that?” Graham’s legislative director, Jennifer Olson, argued that he should withdraw from K.G.L. that day.

Kerry called Browner and yelled, “It wasn’t his idea!” He added, “It’s not a gas tax. You’ve got to defend our guy. We’ve been negotiating in good faith, and how can you go and turn on him like this?” After talking to Graham, Lieberman walked into the office of his legislative director, Todd Stein. “If we don’t fix this,” the Senator said, “this could be the death of the bill.”

On April 17th, two days after the Fox story, an activist named William Gheen, speaking at a Tea Party event in Greenville, South Carolina, told the crowd, “I’m a tolerant person. I don’t care about your private life, Lindsey, but as our U.S. senator I need to figure out why you’re trying to sell out your own countrymen, and I need to make sure you being gay isn’t it.” The question, with its false assertion that Graham is gay, turned into a viral video on the Web. Then Newt Gingrich’s group, American Solutions, whose largest donors include coal and electric-utility interests, began targeting Graham with a flurry of online articles about the “Kerry-Graham-Lieberman gas tax bill.” That week, the group launched a campaign in South Carolina urging conservatives to call Graham’s office “and ask him not to introduce new gas taxes.”

Kerry and Lieberman spent hours alone with Graham, trying to placate him. They forced the White House to issue a statement, which said that “the Senators don’t support a gas tax.” Graham had talked to Emanuel and was satisfied that the chief of staff wasn’t the source of the leak. Eventually, the people involved believed that they had mollified him. By the time Graham showed up at the conference table in Emanuel’s White House office on April 20th, he had calmed down. But, if he was going to suffer a ferocious backlash back home, he needed the White House to be as committed as he was. He was not encouraged when Axelrod, speaking about Democrats in Congress, noted, “The horse has been ridden hard this year and just wants to go back to the barn.”

That evening, hours after the meeting ended, a bubble of methane gas blasted out of a well of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, in the Gulf of Mexico, setting the rig on fire and killing eleven men. At the time, it seemed like a tragic accident, far away and of little consequence.

Kerry and Lieberman were desperate to accommodate Graham’s every request. The dynamics within the group changed. Aides marvelled at how Kerry and Lieberman would walk down the hallway with their arms around each other, while Lieberman and Graham’s relationship was tested by Graham’s escalating demands.

two days later (Earth Day)...

the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig had sunk to the bottom of the Gulf. The spill began to spread; soon it would show signs of becoming one of the worst environmental disasters in history. Then, suddenly, there was a new problem: Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, said that he wanted to pass immigration reform before the climate-change bill. It was a cynical ploy. Everyone in the Senate knew that there was no immigration bill. Reid was in a tough reëlection, and immigration activists, influential in his home state of Nevada, were pressuring him.

Senior aides at the White House were shocked by Reid’s statement. “We were doing well until Reid gave a speech and said it was immigration first. News to us!” a senior Administration official said. “It was kind of like, ‘Whoa, what do we do now? Where did that come from?’ ” Reid’s office seemed to be embarking on a rogue operation. In a three-day period, Reid’s office and unnamed Senate Democrats leaked to Roll Call, The Hill, the Associated Press, Politico, and the Wall Street Journal that the phantom immigration bill would be considered before the climate bill. Graham once again said that he felt betrayed. “This comes out of left field,” he told reporters. “I’m working as earnestly as I can to craft climate and energy independence, clean air and jobs, and now we’re being told that we’re going to immigration. This destroys the ability to do something on energy and climate.”

Graham didn’t tell the press that immigration was mostly just an excuse for his anger. That day, he had urged Reid to release a statement supporting the modified linked fee that Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman had used in negotiating with the refiners. Reid’s office greeted the request with suspicion. Reid and Graham didn’t trust each other. Reid’s aides thought the Republican leadership was trying to trick Reid into supporting something that sounded like a gas tax. The fact that Kerry and Lieberman were also supporters of the proposal did little to allay Reid’s fears. His aides drafted a pro-forma statement for Graham that promised simply that Reid would review the legislation. Graham dismissed the statement as meaningless. During one phone call, Graham shouted some vulgarities at Reid and the line went dead. The Majority Leader had hung up the phone.

At 10 P.M. the next day, Rimkunas sent Rosengarten an e-mail. They had worked together for seven months on the bill. Rosengarten had postponed her honeymoon—twice—to finish the project. They had travelled to Copenhagen together for the international climate conference and often teamed up to oppose Kerry’s office during internal debates. “Sorry buddy” is all the e-mail said. It was devastating. “Matt’s e-mail was a life low point,” she said. “It was actually soul-crushing.”

The next morning, a Saturday, Graham abandoned the talks. Lieberman was observing Shabbat and thus couldn’t work, use electrical devices, or talk on the phone. When his aides explained what was happening, he invoked a Talmudic exception allowing an Orthodox Jew to violate the Shabbat commandments “for the good of the community.” Kerry was in Massachusetts and immediately flew to Washington. The two men spent the morning trying to persuade Graham to stay. At about noon, Graham had a final conversation with Reid, who had nothing more to offer. Graham was out. He wrote a statement, and Olson, his legislative director, e-mailed a copy to Lieberman’s office. The public statement cited immigration as the issue, but attached was a note from Olson explaining that Graham was never going to receive the cover he needed from Reid on how they dealt with the oil refiners.

Rosengarten got the message on her BlackBerry while she was on the phone with Pickens’s policy people, who had no idea about the unfolding drama and wanted to make sure that their natural-gas goodies had survived the final draft of the bill. K.G.L., perhaps the last best chance to deal with global warming in the Obama era, was officially dead. As she read Graham’s definitive goodbye letter, tears streamed down her face.

By the end of April, about sixty thousand barrels of oil a day were flowing into the Gulf of Mexico. To many environmentalists, the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe was a potential turning point, a disaster that might resurrect the climate legislation. But in Washington the oil spill had the opposite effect. Kerry and Lieberman were left sponsoring a bill with a sweeping expansion of offshore drilling at a moment when the newspapers were filled with photographs of birds soaking in oil. Even worse, the lone Republican, who had written the oil-drilling section to appeal to his Republican colleagues, was gone. The White House’s “grand bargain” of oil drilling in exchange for a cap on carbon had backfired spectacularly.

As the Senate debate expired this summer, a longtime environmental lobbyist told me that he believed the “real tragedy” surrounding the issue was that Obama understood it profoundly. “I believe Barack Obama understands that fifty years from now no one’s going to know about health care,” the lobbyist said. “Economic historians will know that we had a recession at this time. Everybody is going to be thinking about whether Barack Obama was the James Buchanan of climate change.”

The environment is my top issue, but I supported Obama's decision to pursue Health Care first because I thought that once the public saw how well that worked out Obama would have that much more momentum to tackle other issues. As it turns out some of the benefits just kicked in last week, and others won't be felt for years. It will be another four or five years before the public can really assess HCR. Meanwhile the poor economy seems to be sapping the White House's ability to address big problems. Hindsight 20/20, but in retrospect I think Energy should have come first.

2010-09-23T02:36:00.002-04:00

If you look at National polls that pit a generic Republican against a generic Democrat you'll actually find them neck and neck. The reason analysts expect Republicans to win big this November is the enthusiasm gap. There's a difference between answering a phone call and taking time out of your day to make it to a polling station. The questioner above embodies the dispirited-ness on our side. I recommend reading Digby for more on this.

Jon Stewart called her Obama's Kryptonite:

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I totally sympathize with her. That said, it can't be stressed enough that if Republicans take over either or both houses of Congress things are only going to get much worse. They're already making promises to shut down the government, and to begin Whitewater style "investigations" into the President. They won't be able to repeal Health Care or Wall Street reform, but they will de-fund their implementation to make them ineffective. The current gridlock will seem pleasant by comparison.

The current legislative session doesn't have long to go and Democrats need to be doing everything in their power to close the enthusiasm gap. Unfortunately, they don't seem to be doing much of anything.

I agree with others who are arguing the best thing Democrats can do now to draw a favorable contrast would be to make Bush's tax cuts on income under $250,000 permanent. As this TPM report explains, there are three basic courses of action regarding the Bush cuts, which are set to expire at the end of the year:

1) Do nothing. (possibly revisiting the issue during the lame duck session after the election, or after the new Congress is seated, or not at all.)

2.) Vote on extending the cuts only for income under $250,000. (possibly revisiting rates on higher income after the election, or not)

3.) Vote on extending all tax cuts. They key question here is, will there be one vote for all the tax cuts, as Republicans are demanding, or will there be two votes, one each for income under/over 250K.

#2 is the ideal choice. Then we can have an election on whether or not to increase our deficit in order to pad the bank accounts of the wealthy. But #3 would be fine as well, so long as there are two separate votes. I doubt cuts for the wealthy would pass anyway, but if they did Obama could still veto them. The worst option of all would be to vote on the tax cuts as a whole without distinguishing between the wealthy and the "bottom 98%," which is what Republicans want to do. They want to disguise their efforts on behalf of the rich as being in service of average Americans, just as they did 10 years ago when they passed the cuts in the first place.

While there a few Democrats who want to help them in their efforts (the usual suspects: Lieberman, Nelson, etc), I think its safe to say neither Reid nor Pelosi would be so dumb to go that route. The problem is that they're getting pressure from "moderate" Democrats (emphasis on the quotes) to go with option #1. As Josh Marshall explains, the rationale is that to extend tax cuts on 98% but let them expire on the richest 2% would still allow Republicans to paint them as tax hikers. Instead they would rather do nothing and hope Republicans leave them alone. But if anything this leaves them open to the charge of allowing tax hikes on everyone. You really have to question the intelligence of some of these people, and I'm not just trying to be insulting. Seriously. We're clearly dealing with some dim bulbs here.

Dems need get on the ball and Hold The Damn Votes. My hope is its not too late to get some mojo back and prevent the worst from happening.

Summers Out: Good Riddance

2010-09-21T22:06:00.003-04:00

Let me go on the record that the news that Larry Summers is leaving the Administration is of the 'good' variety. Very good. One truism that has emerged from my readings about the people in the White House is that Summers is just an unbelievable asshole. And I say that not just because I disagree with his tendency to coddle big business and Wall Street. Others, like Geithner and Orzag, have a similar mindset (which, I should add, comes from a genuine conviction that this is in the best interest of the country as a whole, Summers included). But those other guys aren't raging dicks who try to keep dissenting views from even reaching the President's ear. Ironically, Summers job description was to lay out the range of views on the economy for the President. (He was originally to have Geithner's job, but they decided to give him this role instead as a way of avoiding a confirmation fight) He used this position marginalize people who he disagreed with, notably Christina Romer and Austan Goolsbee. Apparently it's almost universally accepted that Summers is one of the most brilliant economists around today, which is why Obama wanted him close, but he really couldn't have been more poorly suited to his role. Good riddance!

P.S. On the other hand, I actually find rumors that another famed asshole, Rahm Emmanuel, will soon be leaving to run for Mayor of Chicago to be disconcerting. I think his take-no-prisoners approach actually is well suited for his position. Again, ideologically his instincts always seem to be to strike a deal with the opposition whenever possible to "get points on the board," rather than "go big." He repeatedly tried to convince Obama health care reform wasn't worth attempting... but when Obama made it clear that he was going for it and needed everyone on board Rahm put his objections aside and sweat and bled to make it happen. Many on the left blame him for all the disappointments of the last couple years, because he undercuts all Obama's promises of transformational change. But that's because he's been around and has come to believe that trying for everything leaves you with nothing, and that's it's better to push forward a few yards at a time and just keep moving. He has no patience for dreamers or even idealists. Amid today's partisan trench warfare, I think he may be just the guy for his job. He'd be hard to replace.

44 years of INSANITY

2010-09-13T20:07:00.006-04:00

Ruth Marcus sez:

I'm all for a more progressive tax code. But consider: The Tax Policy Center examined what it would take to avoid raising taxes on families earning less than $250,000 a year while reducing the deficit to 3 percent of the economy by decade's end. The top two rates would have to rise to 72.4 and 76.8 percent, more than double the current level. You don't have to be anti-tax zealot Grover Norquist to think this would be insane.

To which I respond:

Just sayin'...

On a related note, I hope the Dems get off their asses and pass those tax cuts for the 97% of us that make less that $250K a year, and then we can have an election on whether to increase the deficit to pad the wealthy's savings accounts. The conventional wisdom (expressed here) that holding tax cuts for the great majority hostage in order to secure them for the rich is the "moderate" course baffles me.

the First's Fourth

2010-07-18T16:33:00.004-04:00

just a couple cute pics of the first couple on the 4th of July:

awww

it's not all bad news

2010-07-15T17:06:00.003-04:00

So Financial Regulation passed and they stopped the oil leak... not a bad day!

I've got more of this and that for you....

NYT profiles Paul Volcker, a key architect of "Reaganomics" who in recent years has become a staunch advocate for financial reform. He gives the Financial bill a "B." He doesn't think it goes far enough, but acknowledges it's probably the best thing that could get through the Senate.

Matt Yglesias:

We’ve tended to focus much more on what’s not in the bill than on what is in the bill. What is in the bill is a consumer protection setup that would be considered a major progressive win as a standalone item. What is in the bill is a “resolution authority” that will let future regulators avoid the bailout-or-crisis dynamic that plagued us in 2008. What is in the bill are regulatory tools that even Simon Johnson likes. The bill clarifies lines of regulatory authority and responsibility and should cut down on abusive “competitive regulation.” I don’t think the bill means we’ll never see an asset price bubble or a banking crisis again, but I also don’t think it’s possible to achieve that goal. It should, however, make crises less likely and make cleaning them up easier.
My hope is that we won’t just leave things alone here. There are a lot of loose threads left hanging here regarding, on the one hand, America’s housing policy and on the other hand hand the role of Wall Street in American society. What’s more, this regulatory setup, like all regulatory setups, only works if the regulators want it to work and that only happens if politicians want the regulators to want it to work. So nothing is over.

More reactions to the FinReg bill

Greg Sargent:

The financial regulatory reform bill that will pass into law is, paradoxically enough, tougher than most expected. But it does not fundamentally transform Wall Street or our economy into something unrecognizable.
Once Obama signs financial reform into law next week, he will have not only passed a stimulus package that helped pull the economy back from the brink; he will have also begun reshaping two major chunks of our economy: Health care and Wall Street. As many have noted already, he's probably done more than any president since FDR to transform our country.
And the sky will continue to remain in place.
The White House is deeply frustrated that this larger narrative arc has not sunk in with the public. Fair or not, the awful state of the economy -- and the Federal government's failure to act on unemployment -- have effectively blotted out this larger story.
The economy, and the wrangling in Congress over jobs-related measures, have left the public deeply skeptical about the Federal government's ability to solve our most pressing problems. That skepticism, it's fair to assume, colors the public's views of just about everything about Obama -- including his accomplishments.
As a result, for all their achievements, Obama and Dems may well lose the larger argument in the short term.
Public skepticism about government's efficacy in the face of our economic doldrums has made the public receptive to the Republican case that Dems are overreaching and overspending, with nothing to show for it. The oil spill, by continuing to gush, buttresses this case, undermining faith in the competence of Obama and the Federal government. Dems may sustain large losses in the midterms, and perhaps their travails will continue beyond then.
But more broadly, it's fair to imagine that that the more accomplishments Dems rack up -- energy reform is next, though its prospects are in doubt -- the easier it will be for them to tell the larger story they're trying to tell. The picture of Dems succeeding at what they've set out to do will make it easier for Dems to argue: We're getting things done, and none of the worst case scenarios foreseen by critics are coming to pass.
Success could build upon success, reinforcing a picture of Dem effectiveness that drowns out the Beltway white noise and begins to persuade the public that Dems are on the right side of the larger argument. That's a very tall order, and it may take awhile -- far beyond 2010 or even 2012. But that's how the larger story could end up playing out.

Politico:

The imminent passage of financial reform, just a couple months after the passage of comprehensive health care, should decisively end the narrative that President Obama represents a Jimmy Carter-style case of naïve hope crushed by the inability to master Washington.

Yet the mystery remains: Having moved swiftly toward achieving the very policy objectives he promised voters as a candidate, Obama is still widely perceived as flirting with a failed presidency.

Eric Alterman, in a column that drew wide notice, wrote in The Nation that most liberals think the president is a “big disappointment.” House Democrats are in near-insurrection after White House press secretary Robert Gibbs stated the obvious — that the party has a chance of losing the House under Obama’s watch. And independent voters have turned decisively against the man they helped elect 21 months ago — a trend unlikely to be reversed before November.

This is an odd reversal of expectations. When he came into office, the assumption even among some Democrats was that he was a dazzling politician and communicator who might prove too unseasoned at governance to win substantive achievements.

The reality is the opposite. You can argue over whether Obama’s achievements are good or bad on the merits. But especially after Thursday’s vote you can’t argue that Obama is not getting things done. To the contrary, he has, as promised, covered the uninsured, tightened regulations, started to wind down the war in Iraq and shifted focus and resources to Afghanistan, injected more competition into the education system and edged closer to a big energy bill.

The problem is that he and his West Wing turn out to be not especially good at politics, or communications — in other words, largely ineffective at the very things on which their campaign reputation was built.

Obama is swimming up Niagara until joblessness improves. But, even while Obama doesn’t directly control the economy, he has not been a disciplined or effective communicator about the state of the economy and his prescriptions for it. People will tolerate a weak economy if they feel there is an upward trajectory. But Obama has not managed to instill that confidence.

“The economy is off the charts on what people care about — nothing is a close second,” one of the advisers said.

The unemployment rate is expected to remain near 9.5 percent through the election, which is a big reason that some White House officials are even more pessimistic than Gibbs about the chances of keeping control of the House.

It doesn’t matter that Republicans such as Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) say Obama’s policies helped avert a worse economic calamity than most Americans will ever realize — or that the federal government is turning a profit on some of the investments it made in bailing out companies in 2009.

No politician can escape the gravitational pull of bad employment numbers and economic figures in real-time.

Obama is spending his time these days earnestly paddling up Niagara:

President Barack Obama travels to Western Michigan on Thursday to promote his stimulus plan in a community awash in stimulus dollars but where many residents, like a majority of U.S. voters, are skeptical his economic program is working.
The trip, part of a campaign dubbed "Recovery Summer" by the White House, is intended to reassure Americans the U.S. economy is returning to a sound footing in advance of the fall elections.
Doubt among voters in more conservative parts of Michigan reflects a wider concern over the president's plans.
Holland, Mich., where Mr. Obama visits Thursday, has seen a big infusion of cash from the president's economic stimulus plan: hundreds of millions of dollars for new automotive battery plants, tens of millions for schools, as well as millions more for housing, small businesses, university research and transportation.
Yet many in the region of 260,000 people, struggling with 12% unemployment, are skeptical the federal spending has made an impact.
"I wish he'd save his money and not come to Western Michigan," said Becky DeWind, co-owner of a company that received nearly $95,000 in stimulus money to neutralize radioactive contamination in groundwater—her only U.S. business in a year. "They were just swiping a Chinese charge card for it anyway, and my kid's got to pick up the tab."
Holland's congressman, Republican Pete Hoekstra, is running for governor against the president's stimulus program, saying the city wants Washington off its back and not in its job market.
The superintendent of Holland schools, Brian Davis, said skepticism among parents was deep, even though stimulus money has saved 14 teaching positions—5% of the total—and bankrolled a $700,000 laptop program. "The unpopular piece is, we've created all this debt, and somebody's got to pay for it," Mr. Davis said.

The White House is trying to change those opinions by building the case for Mr. Obama's economic policies.
Eighteen months after passage of the $862 billion Recovery Act, money is now flowing: $116 billion from April to June, compared to $108 billion in the first three months of the year and $80 billion in the last quarter of 2009.
Government outlays for infrastructure projects, clean energy and communications technology jumped by about 50% between the first and second quarters of this year.
On Wednesday, the White House released new data saying a surge in Recovery Act funding had raised economic growth in the second quarter of 2010 by as much as 3.2% and boosted employment by as many as 3.6 million jobs, compared to estimated levels in the absence of the stimulus.
On Thursday, Mr. Obama will attend a groundbreaking ceremony at Compact Power Inc., the last of nine new advanced battery factories under construction nationwide with $2.4 billion in stimulus money, and the second in the city of Holland, population 34,076.

"This is one instance where you can see job creating coming from it, but again...at what cost?" said Republican Jay Riemersma, a former pro-football player who is running for Mr. Hoekstra's House seat. "People don't want government stimulus and government spending...In their mind we're mortgaging their future and their grandchildren's future."
Faced with such opinions, the White House and Democrats say they must keep pressing their points—one town and one project at a time.
"Sometimes you go into a conversation knowing someone's going to come out with a certain perspective, no matter what you put before them," Gov. Granholm said, expressing frustration. "You're not going to be able to resolve that in one session."

Corporate America has money, but isn't hiring:

Corporate America is hoarding a massive pile of cash. It just doesn't want to spend it hiring anyone.

Nonfinancial companies are sitting on $1.8 trillion in cash, roughly one-quarter more than at the beginning of the recession. And as several major firms report impressive earnings this week, the money continues to flow into firms' coffers.

Yet all the good news from big business hasn't translated into much promise for jobless Americans, leading many to wonder: If corporations are sitting on so much money, why aren't they hiring more workers?

The answer to that question has become a political flash point between the White House and big business groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which held a jobs summit Wednesday and accused the Obama administration of dumping onerous regulations on businesses. That has created an environment of "uncertainty," which is causing firms to hold back on hiring as the unemployment rate has hovered near 10 percent, the Chamber said.

The White House countered that companies are wary of hiring not because of new regulations but because they're still waiting for consumer demand to return.

The Obama admin says the stimulus "saved or created about three million jobs and is on track to save an additional 500,000 by the end of the year," but Greg Mankiw is skeptical. Basically there's no way to really know how many jobs were created/saved, so they had to rely on mathematical models based on past stimulus efforts. Their results conform to other estimates, which means their model is similar to other economists, but still these models are just best-guess attempts.

Raghuram Rajan argues income inequality is partly to blame for the current economic crisis. He says that as lower/middle class wages stalled it became popular to give them more credit so they would continue to spend money, but all that debt caught up with us.

Harry Reid plans another unemployment extension vote for Tuesday, by when Sen. Byrd's successor should be appointed.

Ezra Klein argues that, judging them by their past actions and not their rhetoric, Conservatives don't care about the deficit, but Democrats do.

David Wessel tries to think of ways to stimulate the economy that might have a chance of getting through Congress:

The fundamental problem is clear. After a borrowing binge, the U.S., particularly consumers and financial firms, are trying to reduce their debts. The question is how fast to let that happen. The cold-turkey approach, a rapid deleveraging, means a very weak economy. Government policy has been aimed at slowing the pace of deleveraging by increasing government borrowing to offset shrinking private borrowing. Now that is no longer politically feasible.

"At a time when many people are trying to cut back in their personal lives, it is difficult to persuade the public that driving up the deficit is a good idea—even though it actually is a good idea, especially if combined with a clearer plan for long-term consolidation," Goldman Sachs economist Jan Hatzius wrote recently.

If more deficit-widening stimulus is a non-starter, then what? Look for more politically palatable alternatives to gain favor if the economy deteriorates. The weaker the economy, for instance, the more likely Congress will be to renew the Bush tax cuts for a year despite the deficit talk, to avoid the braking effect of letting taxes rise in 2011.

There's talk in Washington about a federal highway and surface transportation bill, the one form of spending about which some deficit-phobes are enthusiastic. Or perhaps a public-private infrastructure fund of some sort that would leverage taxpayer money and draw some cash out of corporate coffers, and might help beleaguered state governments at the same time. Or, with BP replacing Goldman Sachs as the corporate villain of the month, perhaps there will be a move to raise taxes on oil companies (which might become a stealth gasoline tax) and use that money to cut other taxes to encourage hiring or business investment—a "deficit-neutral" way to spur growth.

Or perhaps there will be quiet talks with bank regulators about not moving too rapidly to implement new rules for banks being negotiated at Basel. Or perhaps there will be talk—never advertised, of course—of the administration backing away from tightening some regulations that, though popular with Democratic voters, may be more economically costly than proponents admit.

Dani Rodrik on "the market confidence bugaboo:"

If you want to keep borrowing money, you need to convince your lender that you can repay. That much is clear. But in times of crisis, market confidence takes on a life of its own. It becomes an ethereal concept devoid of much real economic content. It turns into what philosophers call a “social construction” – something that is real only because we believe it to be.

Today, markets seem to think that large fiscal deficits are the greatest threat to government solvency. Tomorrow they may think the real problem is low growth, and rue the tight fiscal policies that helped produce it.

Today, they worry about spineless governments unable to take the tough actions needed to deal with the crisis. Perhaps tomorrow they will lose sleep over the mass demonstrations and social conflicts that tough economic policies have spawned.

Few can predict which way market sentiment will move, least of all market participants themselves. Even with hindsight, it is sometimes not clear why markets go one way and not the other. Similar policies will produce different market reactions depending on the prevailing story, or fad of the moment. That is why steering the economy by the dictates of market confidence is a fool’s errand.

The silver lining in all this is that, unlike economists and politicians, markets have no ideology. As long as they make money they do not care if they have to eat their words. They simply want whatever “works”—whatever will produce a stable, healthy economic environment conducive to debt repayment. When circumstances become dire enough, they will even condone debt restructuring—if the alternative is chaos and the prospect of a greater loss.

This opens up some room for governments to maneuver. It permits self-confident political leaders to take charge of their own future. It allows them to shape the narrative that underpins market confidence, rather than play catch-up.

But to make good use of this maneuvering room, policymakers need to articulate a coherent, consistent, and credible account of what they are doing, based on both good economics and good politics. They have to say: “we are doing this not because the markets demand it, but because it is good for us and here is why.”

Their storyline needs to convince their electorates as well as the markets. If they succeed, they can pursue their own priorities and maintain market confidence at the same time.

Politico reports on the negotiations behind the climate bill. More here.

David Roberts warns about a bad trade-off:

A deal to exempt utilities from new Clean Air Act rules in exchange for their support for a utility-only cap-and-trade system would be a terrible deal. Terrible. I've resisted the repeated tendency of greens to say this or that compromise renders the climate bill "worse than nothing," but this deal really would do that: it would make the bill worse than nothing. It would be a step backward, on both climate and health grounds. Any environmental group that supports such a deal should be scorned by progressives and cut off by progressive funders. (I'm extremely gratified to hear Samuelsohn report that green groups are, so far, holding firm on this.)

Why would it be so bad? Because the new Clean Air Act regulations are going to have bigger, faster, and more substantial effects on the power sector than any watered-down utility-only cap-and-trade system. Those regulations will eliminate more pollution, shut down more dirty coal plants, and avoid more greenhouse gases than a utility-only cap-and-trade system.

The power sector is terrified. After putting off needed investments in new, cleaner generation for years and years -- aided and abetted by simpatico regulators in D.C. -- all the sudden they're going to have to start making those investments. And quickly! They might have to scramble, and innovate, and maybe even change their business models! Some of them might even have to ... gasp ... raise rates (which have been artificially suppressed for years)!

Utilities are extremely accustomed to their moldy old business models and practically allergic to innovation, so they're reacting to the coming regulations with the same strategy they've always used: whining to politicians. They're telling politicians that the regulations will force coal plant shutdowns faster than replacement generation can be found. There will be reliability issues. Brownouts! Puppies will freeze! Grandma will bake!

It's bull -- the same bull they've been peddling for years. If they get away with it, it will mark the true devolution of the climate bill into farce.

Well, dear readers, this blog sure has been a good way to avoid doing work that I actually need to do, but I'm heading back to Florida, where there are even better ways to waste time, so you might not hear from me for a bit. Thanks for reading!

it's all in your mind

2010-07-14T23:14:00.002-04:00

checkmate?

2010-07-14T21:10:00.001-04:00

Paul Krugman:

For the last few months, I and others have watched, with amazement and horror, the emergence of a consensus in policy circles in favor of immediate fiscal austerity. That is, somehow it has become conventional wisdom that now is the time to slash spending, despite the fact that the world’s major economies remain deeply depressed.
This conventional wisdom isn’t based on either evidence or careful analysis. Instead, it rests on what we might charitably call sheer speculation, and less charitably call figments of the policy elite’s imagination

Yes, America has long-run budget problems, but what we do on stimulus over the next couple of years has almost no bearing on our ability to deal with these long-run problems. As Douglas Elmendorf, the director of the Congressional Budget Office, recently put it, “There is no intrinsic contradiction between providing additional fiscal stimulus today, while the unemployment rate is high and many factories and offices are underused, and imposing fiscal restraint several years from now, when output and employment will probably be close to their potential.”

The argument isn't merely academic. People vote on this. Chris Bowers:

Real disposable income is the dominant ideology among swing voters. This should not come as a shock, or even a mild surprise. The mushy middle is not full of political junkies, but it is full of people who worry about their pocketbooks. As such, whether things get better or worse for their pocketbooks, those voters will blame the governing party, and vote accordingly.

Blocking unemployment benefits will result in less money in the hands of voters who are unemployed. Blocking the Medicare "doc fix" will result in less money in the hands of doctors who vote. Blocking an extension of COBRA and a public option will result in voters who have to purchase individual insurance having less money in their hands. Cutting aid to states to prevent layoffs will result in state workers who vote having less money in their hands. Blocking a cap on ATM fees means less money in the hands of voters. Blocking $100 billion in the first stimulus resulted in voters of all sorts having less money in their hands.

The dominant ideology of swing voters is disposable income. As such, enact public policies that increase real disposable income, or else face defeat at the ballot box. It really is that simple.

And, indeed, Brian Beutler's report for TPM suggests this is really about Republicans playing politics with the economy:

It was a Democrat -- James Carville -- who coined the phrase "it's the economy, stupid." And to this day, leading Democrats understand that Carville was correct. They get it all the way down to their trembling bones. They'd love to take dramatic steps to improve the economy, but Republicans are using every tool at their disposal to prevent that. It's led Democrats to blame Republicans explicitly for causing Americans economic pain for short-term political gain, but it also means we're not going to see much in the way of economy-improving legislation in the months ahead.

"They think the worse the economy is come November, the better they're going to do election wise," said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid at a press conference this morning.

Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) echoed that analysis last month on a conference call with reporters.

"If [the GOP] can stop the recovery from occurring, if they can create as much pain as possible, people will be angry and will not vote at all or will vote against those in the majority," she implored.

With Republicans pushing for tax cuts for the rich and blocking unemployment benefits, you can see where they're coming from. And yet, with unemployment hovering near 10 percent, and a midterm election threatening to sweep them out of power on Capitol Hill, Democrats are trapped and running out of time.

They can't pass anything other than modest stimulative measures without running into obstruction, mostly from Republicans -- but they face similar obstacles within their own party. Compounding matters is the fact that the Senate schedule is packed to the brim with other must-pass initiatives and that the White House is divided over whether the President should press Congress to spend more money (stimulus) or to retreat into deficit reduction mode (anti-stimulus).

With leadership like that nobody (particularly at the White House) is picking up a megaphone and demanding Congress (particularly Republicans) do something significant to reduce unemployment. And they're not gonna.

"Look at what we had to go through for the last eight weeks," said Reid's spokesman Jim Manley. "The fact is that we have a Republican party that's betting on this President to fail. We'll continue to look at additional efforts to provide help for the economy but the fact is in this heavily polarized Senate, it's very difficult to get stuff done."

Checkmate. Suddenly, a picture has emerged of Democrats stumbling toward November with nothing to show the unemployed, only to feel the full wrath of a disenchanted electorate.

Digby:

Americans worship winners and they don't really care about unfair process. This is the nation that reveres the quote "winning isn't everything, it's the only thing." I think the best example is the stolen election in 2000, in which most people seemed to believe that the partisan manipulation of the system in Florida and the biased Supreme Court decision were actually a fairly decent way to figure out who should be president in what was essentially a sudden death playoff --- the one who did whatever was necessary to make it happen was the one who was most qualified, simply by dint of his ability to come out on top at the end of the "game." (We see that same ethos on Wall Street and among those who think it's perfectly fine to torture and hold innocent people in jail indefinitely.) In America, the operating principle is that the ends justify the means.

Paul Krugman rebuts arguments against extending unemployment benifits:

Do unemployment benefits reduce the incentive to seek work? Yes: workers receiving unemployment benefits aren’t quite as desperate as workers without benefits, and are likely to be slightly more choosy about accepting new jobs. The operative word here is “slightly”: recent economic research suggests that the effect of unemployment benefits on worker behavior is much weaker than was previously believed. Still, it’s a real effect when the economy is doing well.

But it’s an effect that is completely irrelevant to our current situation. When the economy is booming, and lack of sufficient willing workers is limiting growth, generous unemployment benefits may keep employment lower than it would have been otherwise. But as you may have noticed, right now the economy isn’t booming — again, there are five unemployed workers for every job opening. Cutting off benefits to the unemployed will make them even more desperate for work — but they can’t take jobs that aren’t there.

Wait: there’s more. One main reason there aren’t enough jobs right now is weak consumer demand. Helping the unemployed, by putting money in the pockets of people who badly need it, helps support consumer spending. That’s why the Congressional Budget Office rates aid to the unemployed as a highly cost-effective form of economic stimulus. And unlike, say, large infrastructure projects, aid to the unemployed creates jobs quickly — while allowing that aid to lapse, which is what is happening right now, is a recipe for even weaker job growth, not in the distant future but over the next few months.

But won’t extending unemployment benefits worsen the budget deficit? Yes, slightly — but as I and others have been arguing at length, penny-pinching in the midst of a severely depressed economy is no way to deal with our long-run budget problems. And penny-pinching at the expense of the unemployed is cruel as well as misguided.

So, is there any chance that these arguments will get through? Not, I fear, to Republicans: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something,” said Upton Sinclair, “when his salary” — or, in this case, his hope of retaking Congress — “depends upon his not understanding it.” But there are also centrist Democrats who have bought into the arguments against helping the unemployed. It’s up to them to step back, realize that they have been misled — and do the right thing by passing extended benefits.

People like Ben Nelson (HuffPo):

For the past several weeks, Nelson has joined the Republican party in filibustering a measure to restore unemployment benefits for the long-term jobless, which lapsed at the beginning of June. The upshot: a legislative debacle that has made the entire Democratic party look ineffectual while 2.1 million people who've been out of work for longer than six months have missed checks. Economists no less mainstream than Mark Zandi, former advisor to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), have said that the failure to reauthorize the benefits could jeopardize the economic recovery.

Deficit reduction is more important, Nelson and Republicans say. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the original bill to reauthorize long-term unemployment benefits, a broad domestic aid package that also included business tax breaks and state Medicaid money, would have added $134 billion to the deficit over 10 years. When Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) first brought it to the floor in June, it failed with a whopping dozen Democrats voting nay. Over the next several weeks, Reid and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) reduced the bill's deficit impact by adding revenue raisers and doing things like cutting $25 per week from every unemployment check. They got closer and closer in a series of votes, but Nelson joined moderate Republicans in saying the bill was moving in the "right direction" while still voting no. Democrats (except for Nelson) rejected Republican proposals to reauthorize the benefits and offset the cost by cutting spending elsewhere -- something that is generally not done when enacting federally-funded extended benefits during recessions.

Eventually, Reid brought forward a bill just to reauthorize the extended benefits through November at a cost of $33 billion in "emergency spending." Maine Republicans Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins voted for the bill; Nelson didn't, and, with the late Sen. Robert Byrd's seat unfilled, the bill failed by one vote.

Greg Sargent on why House Dems are particularly pissed off right now:

What's really driving the anger is that House Dem leaders feel like they've done a whole bunch of heavy lifting to pass jobs-related measures -- while the Senate and the White House have effectively dithered. And, crucially, it's House Democrats who are likely to pay the price at the polls this fall over this failure.

The House passed an extension to unemployment benefits weeks ago, and have passed a host of other jobs-creation measures, too. But the Senate is stymied on jobs and unemployment. It's true that Republicans are blocking the unemployment extension. It's true that it's easier to pass legislation in the House, where the Dem majority is larger and the procedural obstacles are fewer.
But fairly or not, House leaders feel that the White House and Senate leaders could be doing more to force the issue -- and that Obama could be showing more urgency about jobs and unemployment and driving the Senate harder to take action.
Ultimately, the real irony is it's House Dems who will likely suffer the biggest losses this fall over the ongoing failure to act on this front.

I seriously hope the Dems have a plan for filibuster reform at the start of the next session. If they allow Republicans to continue blocking everything they won't get anywhere. If they survive the midterms priority one needs to be making the Senate a "majority rules" institution.

odds and ends

2010-07-14T14:10:00.003-04:00

Looks like Financial Regulation is set to pass tomorrow, which is good news. My impression is that it won't prevent future crises, but it will make them somewhat less likely, and, more importantly, make us much better at dealing with them when they happen. Here's Ezra Klein's take.

On the other hand, here's Matt Davies' impression:

Reid wants to press forward on environmental legislation next, which is also good news, although it will require some wizardry to pass something substantive given Republican obstruction, which is unlikely (to put it mildly) to abate in an election year. He has smartly decided to include offshore drilling reform in the larger bill, though, so Republicans will have to decide if they really want to vote against that. Marc Ambinder has more.

Speaking of offshore drilling, here's a good op-ed on Congress's role in allowing the spill to happen.

Ezra Klein comments on recent deficit talk:

The unexpected outbreak of fiscal honesty on the Republican side of the aisle is changing the terms of the deficit conversation, and quick. First, Sen. Jon Kyl told Fox News Sunday that "you should never have to offset cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans." Then, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell doubled down: "There's no evidence whatsoever that the Bush tax cuts actually diminished revenue," he told Brian Beutler of TPMDC. "They increased revenue because of the vibrancy of these tax cuts in the economy. So I think what Senator Kyl was expressing was the view of virtually every Republican on that subject."
In recent weeks, Republicans have gained a lot of traction -- and hung a lot of tough votes -- on their concerns for deficits. Now they're stuck between two untenable positions: That tax cuts needn't be offset as a matter of principle, or that they needn't be offset as a matter of policy. The first suggests they don't really care about deficits. The second suggests they don't understand deficits. Meanwhile, they're filibustering an extension in unemployment insurance based on concerns about deficits. Democrats are ecstatic: Tax cuts for the wealthy versus insurance for the unemployed is, for them, the first hint of solid ground in some time.
This isn't a slam dunk for Democrats. Tax cuts remain popular, and not paying for them has been, in the past, a popular position. But where Democrats were on the defensive on deficits last week, Republicans are going to spend the next week trying to sync positions that will radically increase the deficit with a political message that emphasizes the need for deficit reduction. It'll be quite a trick.

Matthew Yglesias points out that Conservatives do not actually care about the deficit. At all.

Here's a helpful graph:

The most egregious example of Republican ridiculousness on this issue is their blocking extension of unemployment benefits, even though there are clearly no jobs out there, in the overall budget it's not a lot of money, and it's probably the most effective form of stimulus in terms of bang for your buck (the money will be spent immediately). It's heartless, but more importantly it's just stupid not to extend unemployment. You're just going to further depress the economy by reducing consumer spending, which will result in more unemployment. Here's another helpful graph:

There are no jobs.

Matt Davies again:

This glimpse into the State Department's Operations Center is very interesting. It's an intense work environment, to say the least.

Finally, I wanted to highlight a couple threads in this profile of Nancy Pelosi by the CS Monitor that I found interesting.

The first is that her success is tied to her experiences in, and talent for, fundraising. That's how she got her start in politics and her talent for networking and for collecting and doling out favors in many ways defines her leadership style:

In a town that typically sorts people as insiders or outsiders, Pelosi is an unusual mixture of both. Most speakers historically excelled at the insider game: building up favors and relationships with colleagues, while plotting ways to move up the party ranks. Once established as speaker, they had a base to expand national contacts and outreach. By contrast, Pelosi – a lifelong Democratic fundraiser – began her freshman year in the House with her own network of national donors. Over time, she tapped these contacts to move votes on the floor.

The key to Pelosi's success is her drive and mastery of detail – the working knowledge she has of who her members are, what their districts need, and who on the outside can be mobilized to affect their votes. In short, she knows the critical "back door" to members.

It's a skill set that no previous speaker had to the same extent, because none spent the time that she has working contacts on the outside. Since entering leadership in 2002, Pelosi has raised $162 million for Democratic candidates. It's an unthinkable sum for previous speakers and shows the increasing importance of vast war chests to win and hold majorities in bitterly partisan times. With a few calls or a well-timed fundraiser, she can sweeten a tough vote or pressure a member considering an unhelpful one.

Call it the art of political cover. In an era of pure partisan gridlock, no one is doing it better.

PELOSI LEARNED THE FINE ART of sustaining political support from her earliest years in a leading political family in Baltimore. Her father, Thomas D'Alesandro Jr., was serving in the US House of Representatives when she was born. He was the mayor of Baltimore from when she entered first grade until she went away to Trinity College in Washington, D.C. Her brother, Thomas D'Alesandro III, was mayor of Baltimore from 1967 to 1971.

"The arts of politics are bred in her bones: the ability to get people to like you, to build coalitions, to reach agreements," says Jack Pitney, a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, Calif. "It's what she grew up with, with her father and her brother. And those are the things that don't come easily to a lot of people."

In the D'Alesandro household, Democratic Party politics and family were inseparable. Pelosi and her five older brothers took turns manning the table near the front door, where constituents came for help or something to eat. "It was an unusual situation, as I look back on it, but it was the life we led," she says. "People would come and they would ask how they could get a bed in the city hospital, a place to live in housing projects, food, a job, and our family was always there to help."

Her mother, Annunciata or Nancy, kept records of all the favors asked and granted on slips of paper to use as a contact list for others needing help.

The favor trading she learned as a child was something she continued as an adult:

From the start, Pelosi built her own political career on finding resources to support others. With all five children in school, Pelosi began volunteering for Mr. McCarthy and raising funds for local candidates out of her San Francisco home near the Presidio. She told the kids: "Proper preparation prevents poor performance," a motto that covered her approach to fundraising and political organizing.
In 1976, Pelosi wrote a memo to California Gov. Jerry Brown (D), a former classmate of her husband's, urging him to get into the Maryland presidential primary. She volunteered her help and family connections. He accepted. In a surprise move, Mr. Brown won Maryland and in return backed Pelosi to chair the Northern California Democratic Party and, later, the state party.
What impressed the Democratic political establishment was her energy, organizational and fundraising skills, and network of personal connections. She set up the first permanent party headquarters and moved a paper-and-pencil operation into the computer era. In 1984, she helped bring the Democratic National Convention to San Francisco. Perhaps most important, she developed a reputation for delivering what she promised.
"When I first met Nancy Pelosi, she was just a worker bee in the Democratic Party, doing fundraising, but she always supported the farmworkers and you could trust her," says Dolores Huerta, a cofounder with César Chávez of the United Farm Workers of America.
In an era of hard-talking party bosses, it was easy to dismiss the charming Pacific Heights mother of five as a lightweight. "Everyone underestimates her from Day 1," says Roz Wyman, a close friend who chaired the 1984 Convention. "Nancy is quite remarkable, and it's only now, since the health-care vote came up, that people realize what she does."
For Pelosi, fundraising wasn't just a process, loathed by most politicians, of getting cash to candidates. It was also a path to vital political information: what donors care about, what motivates them, and how to convert those motivations into a check for Democrats. Over time her California contacts helped fund campaigns across the nation.
But when Pelosi attempted a run for chairman of the Democratic National Committee in 1984-85, she was dismissed by some in the East Coast old guard as "an airhead" – a rich San Francisco liberal who could give parties, but what else? After setting up an office in Washington to campaign for the job, Pelosi dropped out a day before the vote, convinced that she couldn't win. But the experience marked her. "I always said that if I hadn't run for chair of the DNC I might not have realized how rough the intramural game can be on the Democratic side," she says.
Undaunted, she helped Democrats take back the Senate in 1986, as chair of the Finance Committee of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. The effort earned her not just favors but an encyclopedic grasp of key outside players in politics and what their needs were, which would become an essential resource as speaker. "People talk about her enormous fundraising prowess, but it's because she understood the value of relationships," says Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood and a former Pelosi deputy chief of staff. "She has built loyal relationships across this country, and people would walk across hot coals for her."
At the age of 47, Pelosi had raised five children, moved in the top echelons of party politics, and turned receptions in her San Francisco home into an ATM for Democrats. What she had not done was be elected to public office. That was about to change.

She moved her talents for influencing politics from the outside to the inside, winning her seat in Congress in 1987. She moved up the ranks quickly:

In a body of 435 members, most House freshmen take years to be heard. But with her network of favors both to the California delegation and Democrats nationwide, Pelosi was not the average apprentice. She used her network to begin to conquer the House Democratic caucus, one relationship at a time.

She landed a seat on the powerful House Appropriations Committee. In Washington, she began to host a weekly dinner group for liberal Democrats. At home in San Francisco, she expanded fundraisers to help both Democratic incumbents and challengers. The loss of control of the House in the 1994 elections stunned Democrats, none of whom had experienced life in the minority, and gave Pelosi a shot at leadership.

"I only decided to run when we lost the House. We lost it and then we lost again, and then we lost it again," she says. "Around 2000 I said: 'You know what? I know how to win. I can do this.' "

It helped that Pelosi had two growing power bases on which to build her ascent to power. One was the California delegation, the largest in the House; the other, women. When Pelosi first came to the House, 23 women served in the chamber. When she defeated Mr. Hoyer for whip in October 2001, there were 62. Today, there are 76.

Rep. Rush Holt (D) of New Jersey recalls giving Pelosi an early commitment to vote for her in the whip race against Hoyer. Soon after, he got calls from key constituents making sure he was going to keep his pledge. "She knew just who to have call me from back home – people I would listen to," he says.

This was an aspect of her I had never considered before, but it does seem to be central to her life's work.

The other thing was stuck out for me was that her relationship with Catholic organizations played a crucial role in passing health care reform. She identifies strongly as a Catholic:

Her mother wanted her to become a nun. "[T]hat was not going to happen," she wrote in her 2008 autobiography, "Know Your Power: A Message to America's Daughters." Pelosi typically still attends mass at least once a week and maintains strong ties with Catholic communities. She describes church teachings as central to her life and the inspiration for "our responsibility to each other," but she also sees a role for public policy to make such promises practical.

"How many times can we answer the door or the phone and send somebody here or there?" she says. "There has to be a different way. We have to have different public policy to meet the needs of people."

Pelosi came of age in a prefeminist era. Her politics did not grow out of anger or struggle but culture and conviction. As a student at Trinity College (now Trinity Washington University), she was inspired by President Kennedy's call for service. "Because we were in Washington, daughters of Catholic politicians came here in large numbers," says Pat McGuire, president of Trinity. "The Kennedy era was a time of great political fervor and change, a point not lost on students at the nation's leading Catholic college for women."

And her Catholic ties proved valuable:

Even before she took over as Speaker, Pelosi had maintained close relations with Catholic women's religious organizations. They shared not only the same faith but often also the same politics. Catholic activists would meet at least weekly with members of her office. They worked together on issues such as support for the uninsured, child nutrition, immigration, and expanding health coverage for poor children. Those ties were about to become pivotal.

After a year of intense White House negotiations and legislative wrangling, health-care reform was foundering. House and Senate versions of the bill were far apart, and an upset by Republican Scott Brown in the Jan. 19 Massachusetts special election dropped Democrats below the 60 votes they needed to block a GOP filibuster in the Senate.

At the White House, the mood had turned to scaling back expectations. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel urged an incremental approach to break up the health-care bill and pass only those elements that could clear the Senate. But Pelosi, alone among top congressional leaders, balked. She would not accept health-care lite, she told the White House. "It's like the teensy-weensy spider," she said.

The plan subsequently worked out with the White House and Democratic leaders was this: Pass the Senate version of health-care reform in the House, along with a package of "fixes" that the Senate would commit to passing, under procedures requiring only a majority vote. With most of her caucus opposed to the Senate bill in its current form, Pelosi insisted on getting a commitment from the Senate on passing the fixes in writing. But first, Pelosi had to win a tough vote in her chamber.

She settled in for weeks of earlier mornings and later nights spent meeting with elements of her caucus: New Democrats, Blue Dogs, progressives, the Congressional Black Caucus, the Hispanic Caucus, vulnerable freshman and sophomores, as well as regional interests. She didn't expect GOP votes and invested no time looking for them. Step by step, she fielded the leading concerns members had with the Senate bill and what "fixes" could resolve them.

A week before the vote, it had all come down to a fierce, intraparty dispute over language limiting federal funding of abortion. Rep. Bart Stupak, an anti-abortion Democrat from Michigan, publicly backed by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, said he and at least 40 of his supporters would vote down a Senate bill that did not contain the stronger House language blocking public abortion funding.

In response, 40 abortion-rights Democrats, led by Rep. Diana DeGette of Colorado, signed a letter pledging to vote down any legislation that further restricted a woman's right to choose. For the speaker, it appeared to be a cul-de-sac.

Enter the nuns. In a decisive move, Sister Carol Keehan, president and CEO of the Catholic Health Association, and Sister Simone Campbell, representing NETWORK, a social-justice lobby for Catholic churchwomen, said publicly that the Senate language did not, in fact, expand federal funding for abortion and announced their support of the Senate bill – a rare public break with the bishops. "Our contacts there [in Pelosi's office] helped us know the rhythm and concerns of the speaker's office," Sister Campbell says. "We knew where the votes were or weren't. It's not rocket science. Key Catholic votes were needed – and [these members] needed assurance that this new abortion mechanism would work."

Mr. Stupak was stunned. "We had never heard of these nuns before," he says.

At the climactic hour, Pelosi offered Stupak and other holdouts a sweetener: The White House would issue an executive order clarifying that public funds would not be used to fund abortion. This agreement, as well as the public backing of the Catholic churchwomen, gave anti-abortion Democrats cover for backing the Senate bill – and gave Pelosi her last critical votes for passing the Senate health-care bill. "Three or four in the Stupak coalition went over to the other side explicitly saying they [were] moved by the nuns...," says Deal Hudson, president of the Catholic Advocate, an anti-abortion advocacy group. "So it was a very powerful move at that moment in time."

On the other side, abortion-rights groups swallowed an executive order they found repellent because they trusted her assurances that this course was the only way to get a bill. "Without Pelosi, this bill would not have passed," says Congresswoman DeGette.

Also something I had never considered. I certainly didn't know Pelosi was behind those nuns speaking out.

It's also worth noting that, as you can see that last paragraph I quoted, Pelosi has become to the House what Ted Kennedy was to the Senate: someone progressives can trust to get the best deal possible. If she says "we've got to bite the bullet" on some issue, her liberal allies believe her. That's crucial to actually getting things done, because if there's a feeling that "we could do better" then it makes sense to demand more, but if the votes just aren't there, that can result in getting nothing at all. So it's important for the success of the coalition to have someone like that.

One recurrent theme in the article I did not find particularly interesting is that Pelosi is very partisan and very polarizing. She considers outreach to Republicans to be a waste of time, and I think she's right. It's fair to put it in the article, but anyone who thinks the current hyper-partisanship is Pelosi's fault clearly hasn't been paying attention.

watch this

2010-07-01T02:53:00.002-04:00

credit to Gilbs for the sending me the link. Thanks!

I don't necessarily agree with all the speaker's conclusions, but it's definitely a conversation worth having. Great stuff.

Obama and the spill, redux

2010-06-29T14:35:00.002-04:00

I know I posted tons of stuff on this a couple weeks ago, but a friend of mine asked me about the idea going around that the spill is Obama's fault, so I thought I'd go ahead and post my response:

Permits for offshore drilling are given by an agency called the Minerals Management Service (MMS), an agency formed during the Reagan Admin that always had a reputation for being a rubber stamp for the oil industry. But they got really bad during the Bush administration, who staffed it with oil industry people. They were so tight with the industry they were literally having sex and snorting coke together. Needless to say there was no oversight in regards to risk taking, safety precautions, etc.

When Obama became President he appointed Ken Salazar Interior Secretary, which oversees the MMS. Salazar told the MMS "there's a new sheriff in town" and that things were going to change. But then, he didn't really follow up on that. (He also has a history with the oil industry, so some people question how serious he was) They did appoint a bonafide environmentalist to take charge of the MMS, but for whatever reason she was ineffectual (maybe she was afraid to just start firing people en masse, which is probably what should've happened.) She has since resigned.

Part of the problem is that the MMS not only is in charge of approving operations, but also then collecting the "rent," which means it's in their interest to approve things, because then they get more money for their department. Obama has since split up the operation into two separate units. That's good, although they should have spotted that problem a year ago.

I suppose Obama should take some portion of the blame, but it's for failing to clean up a problem that was created by Republicans. This disaster is consequence of the unholy alliance of corporate greed and the Republican ideology of deregulation. You don't get to criticize Obama unless you've spent most of your time talking about that. Otherwise, you've been watching too much Fox News.

reading rec

2010-06-24T12:12:00.002-04:00

This piece on the Obama Admin's reaction to the now infamous Rolling Stone article is definitely worth the read.

more enviro-politics

2010-06-18T13:36:00.005-04:00

I recommend reading this post from David Roberts it's a entirety, but I'll just include an excerpt here. In it he addresses the argument that Obama should have explicitly dealt with the threat of climate change in his address the other night. Rather than lay out the real reason we need to transform our energy economy, Obama is, some say, using a "trojan horse" strategy of selling other popular ideas such as freeing ourselves from foreign oil and creating jobs. These are certainly valuable in themselves, but aren't the primary issue by a long shot. A number of liberal commentators say it's time Obama lay the issue out in stark terms. Roberts doesn't necessarily disagree, but says there is at least an argument to be made that Obama's got the right idea, explaining the rationale this way:

Obama doesn't have to convince the American people to do what needs to be done. "What needs to be done," if you step back and take in the full vista, is overwhelming in its size and urgency. It's radicalizing. It takes a certain kind of intellect and fortitude to face it squarely; very few people have. (For a glimpse of the big picture, watch Saul Griffith's mind-blowing presentation.)
No president can talk the American people into that far of a leap all at once. All Obama can hope to do is convince the American people, in particular 60 senators, to accept a series of moderate reforms that accelerate the energy transition. He just needs to change the trajectory. If green jobs happy talk can do that, and climate talk makes it more difficult, then happy talk it is.

Remember, the argument here is not about setting climate aside completely and forever. It's about setting it aside for the moment. The argument for the Trojan Horse message is based on a few premises:

Climate skepticism (or mere indifference) is less about reasoned assessment than a) cultural associations of the issue with liberalism and, more deeply, b) the cognitive phenomenon whereby human beings are loathe to accept problems for which they see no solution. People generally acknowledge that climate change is real and we're at the end of the fossil fuel era, but that propositional assent will have no depth or motivational force as long as people fear (or simply don't know) what comes next.
The argument on behalf of transforming society in the face of climate change can't be won with scientific papers, op-ed columns, or even words from Barack Obama. It will be won slowly, as that transformation touches more lives on a personal level. Only experience will make the case for more speed and ambition. (See Sara Robinson's fantastic essay on this.)
Two things will happen in coming years. First, more communities will reap the benefits of clean energy and efficiency. Those industries will interact with more people, as employers, vendors, or just local businesses. People will begin to see that shifting to a clean economy is less costly and more desirable than predicted. And second, climate change itself will start to bite in extreme and inescapable ways. Sooner or later, people will start to panic. Both trends mean that the climate argument will get easier over time.

Or to put that all more succinctly: the case on climate will make itself eventually, but we don't have time to wait. The overwhelming priority in the short term is to get started, via whatever means of persuasion are most effective.

So if we make some modest progress in between now and when climate change really starts to kick in will we then be able to ramp up the massive changes needed in time to reverse it? From what I've read my impression is 'no,' but I obviously have no independent expertise in this area, and even experts concede the science is too complex to make predictions with any great certainty. If that's our best case scenario then I suppose we just have to do our best and hope for the best.

Rachel Maddow thinks the politics of the spill has revealed a Republican "glass jaw:"

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

I believe Ezra Klein will be on tonight arguing Obama should be addressing climate more forcefully.

Meanwhile, Theda Skocpol reminds disgruntled liberals to keep their eye on the ball:

If liberals do not support Obama and the Democrats for the next two election cycles, a rabid Right will be back in control, and America will devolve further into ineffective gridlock and rising inequality. Even the gains that have been made so far, a pretty good health reform, student loan reforms, improved financial regulations, and so forth, will quickly be weakened and reversed if the Republicans regain Congress and the presidency. Liberals right now should not be joining in Obama bashing on the oil spill. They should be focused on Republican blame and hypocrisy -- and should pressure the Senate to vote for good energy legislation.

There is nothing in this oil crisis in an already oil-soaked region that should prompt liberals to turn against Obama. This crisis was caused by the decades-old oil regime and the evisceration of government by "conservatives" and conservaDems. Bashing a moderate liberal President who is trying to turn things around, but needs time and patient support, is just plain self-defeating for liberals. People seem to imagine that Obama could somehow "order" a new environmental/energy policy or wave a wand and clean up the already-dirty Gulf. They are dreaming -- and their childish thrashing based on these dreams is undermining a valuable opening in U.S. politics.

feeding the troll

2010-06-18T11:44:00.005-04:00

I'd just like to offer a quick response to Charles Krauthammer, who is pictured above winning the award for world's biggest asshole (I assume):

Obama is dreamer in chief: He wants to take us to this green future "even if we're unsure exactly what that looks like. Even if we don't yet precisely know how we're going to get there." Here's the offer: Tax carbon, spend trillions and put government in control of the energy economy -- and he will take you he knows not where, by way of a road he knows not which.

That's why Tuesday's speech was received with such consternation. It was so untethered from reality. The gulf is gushing, and the president is talking mystery roads to unknown destinations. That passes for vision, and vision is Obama's thing. It sure beats cleaning up beaches.

First of all, Krauthammer is trying to suggest that by looking at the bigger picture Obama is not doing everything possible to stop the leak and clean up the mess. He knows that's not true, but he's a political hack who sees a good opportunity to score cheap points. So perhaps we should just ignore him. But I just have to respond to his larger point because it's so wrongheaded...

The reason Obama says we don't know exactly what our energy future will look like is because neither he nor the Federal Gov't will be the one creating it. The solutions will come from the private sector, once it's in their interest to do so. By taxing carbon and putting some of the money into subsidies for a variety of clean energies, and offsetting the rest with tax cuts elsewhere (Al Gore proposed a revenue neutral replacement of the payroll tax with a carbon tax) we can make it in everyone's interest to find better energy sources because it will be cheaper to do so. It's the opposite of putting "government in control of the energy economy."

Ironically in order to gain support of Republicans the Energy bill currently being worked on in the Senate is moving away from these market based solutions toward top down government regulation, as David Leonhardt explains:

Unfortunately, the great economic strength of market systems like cap and trade also happens to be their political weakness. They set prices and allow people to react. In the process, market systems acknowledge that reducing pollution may actually cost a little bit of money.

Politicians don’t like to admit this, because voters don’t like it. Accepting higher costs is especially hard when the economy is weak. So Congressional Democrats have been repackaging their energy bills to make them look less and less market-oriented. SenatorJohn McCain, who supported a permit system for carbon as the Republican presidential nominee, no longer does. Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, has reversed his position as well.

What does Mr. Graham now favor? A series of command-and-control regulations. He has introduced a bill with Senator Richard Lugar, an Indiana Republican, that would mandate specific standards for cars, trucks, homes and offices. It would also give the energy secretary the power to award loans to companies he thought could do a good job of setting up programs to retrofit buildings. State officials would do the same for factories. The bill, in short, puts more faith in government than the market.

This approach can certainly reduce the carbon emissions causing climate change. Fuel economy rules have cut per-mile gasoline use by 40 percent since 1975. As a result, vehicles have made more progress on energy efficiency than office buildings, houses and apartments. That’s one reason a cap-and-trade system for power plants — which provide energy to offices and homes — has such potential to reduce carbon emissions.

The Lugar-Graham bill focuses on offices and homes, too, and would make a difference. But it wouldn’t make as much of a difference, and it also has other drawbacks.

In a market system, businesses and consumers have a clear incentive to reduce their carbon use, and they can choose the cheapest way to do so. Some would decide to retrofit current buildings and homes to make them more energy-efficient. Some would buy new, more efficient machinery or appliances. Some would switch to alternative energy and, in the process, create a much bigger market for it.

“Instead of leaving it up to the government to identify the solution and tell people what to do, you are leaving that decision to the people who know best,” says Nathaniel Keohane of the Environmental Defense Fund. “A bureaucrat would never have enough information to do as good a job.”

Under a command-and-control system, businesses and consumers have to focus not just on carbon use but also on the details of the government’s rules: the intricacies of vehicle and building standards, the types of appliances that qualify for subsidies, the fine print of the Energy Department’s loan applications. Each bit of compliance brings costs.

It’s just that those costs are hidden in a thicket of bureaucracy. The fuel economy rules, for example, have raised the price of minivans, pickup trucks and S.U.V.’s by limiting how many can be sold. But the price increase has not been obvious, as it would be with a gas tax. We can pretend prices are no higher than they otherwise would have been.

In some ways, it is not fair to pick on Mr. Lugar, Mr. Graham and the other senators, both Democratic and Republican, who support the command-and-control approach. It is far better than nothing. The ideal energy policy, in fact, would include some ironclad rules and regulations, because people do not always respond rationally to prices. Consultants at McKinsey & Company argue that many families and businesses could already save money by taking simple energy-saving steps, yet they don’t do so. Building standards could overcome their inertia.

But relying only on rules, regulations, standards, loan programs and research financing seems inadequate to the task we’re facing. The last 12 months have been the warmest 12-month period on record, NASA says. Nine of the 10 warmest calendar years occurred in the last decade.

The market is the most powerful tool available for dealing with the costs and risks of a hotter planet. Given how loudly politicians like to proclaim their belief in the market, it sure would be nice if they could figure out a way to make it part of the solution.

But Krauthammer helpfully tells us that all these efforts towards a green energy future are "untethered from reality." When our great grandchildren wonder why the hell we didn't do anything to avoid environmental catastrophe they can go back and read Krauthammer's columns.

buck up

2010-06-17T21:57:00.003-04:00

this evening I'll offer some (tempered) optimism:

Gail Collins:

We are frustrated, too, and it’s possible that Obama may never be able to give the speech that will make us feel better. He may never really lace into the oil companies or issue the kind of call to arms on energy that the environmentalists are yearning for.

That’s because it won’t get him anywhere. Unlike Bush, he has no national consensus to build upon. He’d barely finished his muted remarks on Tuesday before the House minority leader, John Boehner, accused him of exploiting the crisis “to impose a job-killing national energy tax on struggling families and small business.” Michael Steele, the Republican Party chairman, claimed that the president was “manipulating this tragic national crisis for selfish political gain.” And the ever-popular Representative Michele Bachmann denounced the BP restitution fund as “redistribution of wealth” and “one more gateway for government control.”

As a political leader, Barack Obama seems to know what he’s doing. His unsatisfying call for a new energy policy sounded very much like the rhetoric on health care reform that used to drive Democrats nuts: open to all ideas, can’t afford inaction, if we can put a man on the moon. ... But at the end of that health care slog, he wound up with the groundbreaking law that had eluded his predecessors for decades. The process of wringing it out of Congress was so slow and oblique that even when it was over it was hard to appreciate what he’d won. But win he did.

Ironic. The man we elected because we hoped his feel-good campaign speeches might translate into achievement is actually a guy who is going to achieve, even if his presidential speeches leave us feeling blah.

Andrew Sullivan:

In the bank bailouts (much more successful than we first thought), the stimulus (still working), the health insurance reform (a real start on a deep and vexing problem across the developed world), and even the swarm of issues around Gitmo (torture has ended, while necessary, lawful military detentions and renditions continue), you see the same pattern of emotionally unsatisfying but structurally deep changes in the orientation of the ship of state. This is very gradual change we can believe in.

Obama's incrementalism, his refusal to pose as a presidential magician, and his resistance to taking the bait of the fetid right (he's president - not a cable news host) seems to me to show not weakness, but a lethal and patient strength. And a resilient ambition.

Michael Tomasky:

It’s one thing to be disappointed in policy outcomes, or even angry about them. But more and more it seems that we are in an age of liberal despair–as reflex and first instinct, as motif and explanation, even, it sometimes seems to me, as fashion. Criticism of legislation and proposals is always proper and necessary, as is the application of whatever pressure people can apply to try to produce more progressive outcomes. But I’ve read and heard many critiques that then race right past that into outright desolation.

The five-alarm political culture in which we live now forces upon us a certain kind of response to current events: Every little flare-up is elevated to roiling controversy, and every minor setback a potential death blow to the progressive cause, every departure from the sacred codex of Keynes not a mere delay or strategic feint or hindrance but an act of treachery. This much we know; who didn’t, during the last presidential campaign, think that some breathlessly reported development that turned out to be unimportant–the late revelation about Obama’s aunt in Boston who was an undocumented immigrant springs to mind–would be the back-breaking event that would sober up a besotted electorate and lift John McCain to the presidency? After 30 years of mostly defeats, liberals are quick to catastrophize.

But our political culture affects the way we think about the past as well. Too often, when progressives think of American history, we think only of the snapshots: those glorious moments when a historic bill is signed into law, or when the great progressive leader thunderingly confronts the forces of reaction. It’s good to remember those; they are our lodestars. But they are moments. Actual history is slower, more tedious, and certainly less uplifting. It’s not for Obama’s sake, but for liberalism’s over the long haul, that we need to consider this reality and proceed in full awareness of it. It’s only by seeing this fuller picture that we can know how history actually unfolds in real time and place our present experience within that context. We don’t do nearly enough of that. Cable news and op-ed pages and websites are a kind of modern-day camera obscura, giving us an image to be sure, accurate in a way, but upside-down.

The changes we want to see won’t happen in 18 months, or in two years, or four, or probably even eight. Indeed, the entire Obama era, if it lasts eight years, is best thought of not as a culmination, or a self-contained time frame that should be judged a failure if X, Y, and Z don’t happen. It’s the start of a process that may take 16 years, or 24; that may be along the way interrupted or undone; that will be fought tooth and nail, as we’ve plainly seen these recent months, by others whose idea of America is incomprehensible to us but who are citizens too, with the same rights we have.

The image of Barack Hussein Obama speaking to America from his stage in Grant Park that night in November 2008 as president-elect was, for liberals, one of the most staggering images we’ve ever seen. One felt–many millions of us felt–almost invincible in a way; finally justified in our beleaguered beliefs, after so many years of despondency and rage; aware in fresh and unprecedented ways of our collective power, like mortals transformed into superheroes in the movies, realizing for the first time that they could fly or crush stone. It seems likely that American liberals will never again for the foreseeable future feel quite like we did that night. All things seemed possible.

And yet, it almost goes without saying, all things weren’t possible, because all things never are. American liberalism has, for the last year and a half, been living through a painful period of coming to terms with this reality. It’s a traumatic process:

If we insist on thinking of Obama–and in our personality-driven political culture, it’s so hard not to do this–as liberalism’s redeemer, he will always disappoint, as redeemers usually do. But if we think of him as one piece on a vexing historical chess board in a match that will take years to play out, we can exhale, and see the true shape of the tasks ahead of us. I don’t mean to say here that people should just be quiet. Quite the opposite: Progressive pressure is a better guarantor of progressive governance than hoping that governors will follow their most compassionate instincts. And liberals shouldn’t declare themselves entirely satisfied with an outcome unless they actually are (something that probably won’t happen too often). But I do very much mean to say that liberals should avoid the seductive temptation of wallowing in disappointment, and letting that turn into fury and then resignation–branding decisions one disagrees with as "betrayals" and "sell-outs," retiring inward, pushing away from civic life.

this is about something more important and lasting than any single president. We are in a pitched ideological battle that seems virtually certain to continue for many years. In that battle, despair will produce only defeat.

E.J. Dionne:

Democrats should feel a lot better than they do. They enacted a health-care bill that had been their dream for more than 60 years. They pulled the country out of a terrifying economic spiral. They are on the verge of passing the biggest reform of Wall Street since the New Deal. The public has identified enemies that are typically seen as Republican allies: oil companies and big bankers. And given the Republicans' past policies, the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is at least as much their problem as Obama's.

On top of this, the GOP seems to be doing all it can to make itself unelectable, veering far to the right and embracing a Tea Party movement that, at its extremes, preaches the need for revolution. That sounds more like the old New Left than a reinvigorated conservatism. Oh, yes, and can you think of one thing Republicans stand for right now other than cutting spending? Never mind that they are conspicuously vague about what they'd cut.

Yet it is Democrats who are petrified, uncertain and hesitant -- and this was true before the oil spill made matters worse. Obama's bold rhetoric about "the need to end America's century-long addiction to fossil fuels" was not matched by specifics because he knows that nearly a dozen Senate Democrats are skittish about acting. Why does it so often seem that Republicans are full of passionate intensity while Democrats lack all conviction?

There is something preposterous about how the administration and congressional Democrats have lost every major public argument that they should be winning.

They lost it on a stimulus bill that clearly lifted the economy, as Alan Blinder, a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, argued persuasively in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal. They are losing it on the health-care bill, a big improvement on the current system enacted through a process that made it look like a tar ball on an Alabama beach. They are losing it on the deficit even though it was Republicans who cut taxes twice while the Bush administration was starting two wars.

Obama is often criticized for being too professorial. The irony is that Republicans who have little to say about how to solve the nation's major problems are dominating the country's underlying philosophical narrative.

From Plaquemines Parish to Wall Street, we are seeing what happens when government takes too hands-off an approach to private economic actors. Yet the GOP is managing to sell the idea that the big issue in this election should be . . . government spending.

Professor Obama and his allies ought to be ashamed of this. The cure for malaise is to have a self-confident sense of purpose, and to act boldly in its pursuit.

bigger picture

2010-06-17T01:50:00.005-04:00

So Obama used an Oval Office speech to address what they're doing about the oil spill, but also to 'pivot' to broader issues of energy independence. He didn't mention climate change, he didn't mention taxing carbon. Perhaps it's just as well because we don't have the votes anyway. Maybe the address was just about stemming the political fallout of this ongoing disaster, and if so I hope it had some effect toward that. (I'm certainly heartened by the news since that they were able to convince BP to put $20B in an escrow fund for victims/damages)

Above is Rachel Maddow giving a fake oval office address as a way of showing what she wished Obama had said. It's good, although I really don't know if taking such a bold stance would have been the smart political move for Obama. (He needs to use whatever capital he has left on getting stuff done, not making bold proclamations)

But I just wanted to use this little platform (it's what blog are for, right?) to point out how insane this all is from a big picture point of view. The planet is hurtling towards disaster and we as a people are not engaged in the least. If we had the same sense of urgency about addressing climate change as we do now about the oil spill we might actually get somewhere. But if anything the oil spill illustrates that people don't care about risks until they are literally screwing up their own lives. But by the time the icecaps melt there will be no way of cleaning up that mess. The pooch will officially be screwed.

I personally think of this issue as even more pressing than our economy, more pressing than health care or really ANY other issue. I supported tackling the economy and health care first because I thought it was necessary to successfully deal with those issues to gain the momentum that would be necessary to make the big changes to get us on an environmentally stable track. But instead an oil spill, which one would think would spur the public to demand more environmental sensitivity from their representatives, seems to be sapping all political will to do anything. It looks like we won't even be thinking about a course of action until after the midterms, after which, even if they go well, we'll have fewer seats... so I really can't imagine what we'll be getting done then, given the Republicans' complete intransigence on this and all other issues.

I saw one study (sorry, too lazy to find links right now) in which scientists predicted that if the Kerry/Lieberman/Graham energy bill were passed and we reached some sort of global accord on carbon emissions this year there would be a 75% chance we would make the necessary changes before reaching a point of no return (not that that these steps would do it alone, but if we could make them it would show us capable of facing hard realities, thereby suggesting we could follow up as necessary) but that if we do nothing we ('we' being humanity) would have a 1% chance of avoiding calamity. Obviously with an issue as complicated as this these numbers are somewhat pulled out of the air, and perhaps intended for political effect, but the basic point strikes me as valid. If not now, when?

Sometimes I think that the human species is just evil. That we are the locusts, the Cylons, or whatever analogy you want to use. But then I think that if any other species had as much power as we did they would surely behave the same. So I try to remind myself of that whenever I see an oiled pelican. Better you than me.

But when I read Charles Krauthammer ridicule Obama for even suggesting we should/could wean ourselves from fossil fuels I know no pelican is that kind of evil.

When I read Thomas Friedman say that Republicans need to see the harm deregulation can cause (no shit) but that Democrats need to see that the government can't solve this problem through regulation, and that what we need is for citizens to start riding their bikes more often and plant gardens, I can help but wonder if he's just being willfully naive about this. I suppose a newspaper columnist who wrote about how the human species is evil wouldn't help sell many papers, but surely Thomas Friedman realizes that this problem isn't going to be solved by individuals making personal lifestyle decisions. For one thing, corporations, whose environmental impact is many orders or magnitude greater than any individual literally are NOT ALLOWED to make decisions based on a sense of environmental responsibility/stewardship, unless that can somehow be parlayed into increased profit. They have but one obligation and that is to their bottom line and their shareholders. That isn't even a bad thing, so long as our eyes are open to this reality and we are prepared to make sure that corporations' interests are aligned with society's at large. But until we put a price on carbon to account for all its "externalities" we will never make serious progress towards re-orienting itself away from fossil fuels.

I just got back from Illinois where I visited the Lincoln museum in Springfield. Obviously in many ways the challenges of his day were much greater than our own. But one way in which our challenges are greater is that if we screw this up we literally screw it up for everyone that comes after us. I am still a huge admirer of our current President, but I have to say my hope that he will be able to steer this country into making the kinds of hard decisions it needs to is dwindling. We may simply be too far along the path toward self-destruction. We may have to shift the conversation to what kind of role we want our country to play on the world stage as our planet descends into environmental chaos.

Can someone please convince me I'm being too pessimistic? I would appreciate it.

this time with feeling

2010-06-08T21:43:00.002-04:00

more on "Obama's Katrina"

2010-06-07T19:28:00.002-04:00

Larry Downing/Reuters

First, some words of wisdom from Douglas Adams:

"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair."

So true.

Now back to the topic at hand...

Politico outlines criticisms of Obama's response:

People who have worked closely with Obama say he doesn't think like a bureaucrat, is far more interested in changing the way Washington works than in understanding its machinations and isn't excited by the kind of gears-of-government reforms that interested a previous generation of Democrats, particularly Al Gore.
The Gulf crisis has shed light on the strengths and weaknesses of Obama's unique management style, which relies on a combination of his own intellect, a small circle of trusted advisers and a larger group of outside experts. But it's also driven home a more generic lesson all presidents learn sooner or later: Administrations are defined, fairly or not, by their capacity to control stagnant backwater agencies, in Obama's case the Minerals Management Service, which failed to detect problems with the Deepwater Horizon well.

Even Obama's harshest critics acknowledge that the Deepwater Horizon spill, gushing a mile below the surface, is beyond the technical capacity of the federal government to fix. But Obama himself has identified a series of early missteps and oversights made by his administration that contributed to the crisis: Federal agencies accepted BP's outrageously low initial estimates of the spill rate, although the White House says the flow rate has nothing to do with the government's response; the administration didn't move quickly enough to reform MMS, as Interior Secretary Ken Salazar proposed; and the Coast Guard was slow in deploying booms and other oil-blocking materials requested by Gulf area governments.
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and other local officials have been far more critical, saying Obama's team failed to aggressively push on-scene federal agencies. The administration, they say, dragged its feet in green-lighting a plan to block some oil with sand barriers and took too long to deploy containment booms, in some cases waiting until the first wave of crude lapped into coastal wetlands.
"It's really difficult for presidents to find the right altitude to fly at," said former Clinton adviser Paul Begala, an Obama supporter. "You don't want to be Jimmy Carter, scheduling the White House tennis court -- and you don't want to be Ronald Reagan, not even knowing the name of your HUD secretary. I think all in all, President Obama has found the right altitude."
Still, Begala cautioned: "On this BP issue, he's flown far too high. ... I think we need more of a hands-on, take-charge kind of attitude. … I worry that he has too much faith in experts. I hear this a lot, 'we'll put the best people in the room.' They will mislead you."
White House officials are clearly tired of the Monday morning quarterbacking -- especially by Begala's former partner, Louisiana native and political analyst James Carville -- and say they have been planning for worst-case scenarios from Day One, regardless of BP's estimates of the spill's severity.

Obama -- a lightning quick study -- prefers to dip in and out on issues, micro-focusing on things he cares deeply about or on crises. Offshore drilling fit neither of those categories until the Deepwater Horizon rig sunk on April 20.
Just 18 days earlier -- on April 2 -- Obama insisted drilling is safe and a massive spill unlikely, despite the industry's mixed safety record and what he now decries as an overly "cozy" relationship between MMS and Big Oil. The president made the announcement in hopes of wooing conservative backing for his energy bill -- but he proceeded without challenging norms and questioning any basic assumptions.
Every modern president has had to wrestle the bureaucracy and juggle the micro with the macro. But despite his oft-repeated attacks on the "culture of Washington," Obama doesn't seem to possess the bone-deep distrust of federal bureaucrats that many of his predecessors with executive experience possessed.
In 1980, for example, during Bill Clinton's first term as Arkansas governor, Cuban detainees being housed at federal facility at Fort Chaffee rioted -- and Clinton was furious with Carter for reacting too slowly to the crisis, which cost Clinton reelection. Clinton seldom trusted what Cabinet officials told him -- and was suspicious even of his own appointees, often with good reason.
Gibbs, though, dismisses the notion that Obama was too trusting of the agencies handling the oil spill, saying Salazar had planned to reform oversight of offshore drilling but was preempted by the disaster.

E.J. Dionne:

White House aides admit that they mishandled the public side of the event even as they insist that from the moment the oil rig exploded, President Obama was deploying resources on a large scale and preparing for the worst. They say they got the statecraft right but the stagecraft wrong.

"Nobody can look at the response and say we were slow in doing what we were doing," senior adviser David Axelrod said in an interview. He pointed to a "whole range of steps" Obama "took right from the beginning." But he added: "We didn't communicate it well." Axelrod offers a long list of facts and figures to back up his portrait of an administration on top of things. What's not in doubt is that the Obama team's failure to explain what it was doing, to have someone speaking authoritatively about its plans, and to engage the president more visibly early on, all helped feed a media narrative no leader wants to face -- a public argument over whether his predicament more closely resembles Hurricane Katrina or the Iran hostage crisis.

Yet the simple truth is that the most important political issue facing the nation is not the oil spill, however horrific its effects will be, but the economy. And Friday's job numbers, while positive in theory, were nonetheless disappointing.

The trouble is that all of the president's talk about red ink undercuts support for the short-term spending measures that even his most deficit-conscious advisers know the economy needs. It's devilishly difficult to explain why deficits are good now and bad later. When a Democratic Congress has to pare back a job creation bill to get enough votes to pass it -- and can't find $23 billion to save the jobs of up to 300,000 teachers facing layoffs -- advocates of further stimulus have to know they are losing the political argument.

Thus Obama's test: He needs to establish that he is doing all he can to repair the damage in the gulf even as he maintains his focus on the economy and convinces reluctant conservative Democrats that the job of ending the downturn is not done. However unfair the first impressions of Obama's response to the oil spill may be, he can't afford to let them stand. He also can't afford to let oily waters engulf his priorities.

It's worth remembering that while the daily countdown on the Iran hostage crisis helped create a famous television show, it was an unruly economy that ultimately upended Jimmy Carter's presidency.

Jonathan Alter:

Obama's reaction to all the easy Katrina-Carter comparisons has been characteristically philosophical. I'm told by a senior White House official that he figures it's "our time in the barrel," and the accusations that he's an incompetent cold fish are "something to be aware of but not panic about." The easiest way to become Jimmy Carter, Obama rightly figures, is to drop everything else and focus solely on the crisis at hand, as Carter did in 1979–80 when Americans were held hostage in Iran for 444 days. So Obama postponed his trip to Asia and not much else. Among other issues he would have to ignore if he let the spill hijack his administration is, ironically, sanctions against Iran. Financial regulation, immigration, and Elena Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court would also get swallowed by the gulf region. Focus groups run by Democrats show the public doesn't want Obama to stop multitasking.
Even so, some optical adjustment is essential. The White House political team is furious with James Carville for calling out the president in public as insufficiently forceful. But Carville was right to do so—it helped dent the imperviousness. Obama is planning an address to the nation, his first prime-time speech in a place (still undetermined) other than Congress. According to reports, he'll draw a bright line between the spill, which BP owns, and the restoration and recovery, which he owns. And he'll use the speech and several scheduled visits to the gulf to point out the need for comprehensive energy reform. The White House's new legislative strategy is to apparently attach a landmark change in energy policy—namely, a price on carbon—to the bill bringing aid to the region. Just as the 1969 oil spill that soiled the coast near Santa Barbara, Calif., helped lead to Earth Day and the establishment of the Clean Air Act, perhaps this spill will generate the nation's first true clean-energy program.
But for that to happen, Obama must be seen as an emotive and creative leader. He has to not just "feel our pain," but mobilize an army of the unemployed to clean up the tar balls that, after hurricane season hits, could spread across a swath of the South. No one expects Barack Obama to be Aquaman, diving a mile beneath the surface of the ocean to cap an oil well with his bare hands. But we do demand that he show us he's leading, not just tell us that he has.

Obama's Katrina?

2010-06-06T22:43:00.002-04:00

The most important aspect of the oil spill in the Gulf is... all that oil being spilled into the Gulf, and the enormous environmental and economic impact it will have. So I don't want to diminish that by looking at it from a purely political angle, but of course it is also a political issue now, so it's worth addressing.

The notion of this being "Obama's Katrina" seems to have taken hold, at least in the punditocracy. I'm guessing Obama wasn't thrilled by Laura Bush's "defense" of their response to the spill:

"I think they're doing everything they can do. Absolutely. Just like we did with Katrina. You know, it's not one person's responsibility. The president can't do every single thing there is to do."

Thanks, Laura.

Beyond the surface similarities (an ongoing disaster being broadcast live on television, with the gov't unable to fix the problem) this USA Today from about 10 days ago that makes the case the Federal Gov't hasn't responded well the crisis. Click the link if you want to read the whole thing, but I'll just quickly summarize the basic points:

Chain of command... who's in charge? BP? Gov't? Some argue response should be Federalized. Some say the Coast Guard should be put in charge. (more recently R.Reich argued BP should be put in 'receivership,' in which the Fed Gov't would essentially temporarily take charge of the company)
Slow getting enough boom out there (LA has asked for 5 million feet worth)
Allowed oil to reach delicate marshland
Slow to approve sand berm plan (has since been approved)

This quote seems to sum up the overall sentiment:

Arthur Bradberry, owner of Artie's Sports Bar, says his business has dropped more than half since the spill began.
"They're all running around here and no one seems to know what's going on," he says of the federal and BP officials. "They should've done more from the start. They waited too late. Now, of course, they all want to blame each other."

The WaPo reports on what the WH has actually been doing:

The new normal at the Obama White House has required that a whole new schedule be laid on top of the old one. There is a daily oil-spill conference call for Cabinet officers, one for their deputies, yet another with the governors of affected states, and sometimes as many as three briefings a day that include the president himself.

"It's not as herky-jerky as it may come across," said Carol Browner, Obama's energy and climate adviser. "It's much more systematic."

But bureaucracies being what they are, it is also far from seamless. Though every day is jammed with interagency conference calls and a river of e-mails in between, some officials complain that at times they still feel like they are talking past each other.

In his radio address Saturday, Obama enumerated the scope of his endeavor to contain the damage, including 17,500 National Guard troops; 20,000 personnel protecting the waters and coasts; 1,900 vessels; 4.3 million feet of boom.

Obama has also called in some of the many scientists on the federal payroll, led by Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist. Chu at one point pushed the unusual idea of using gamma rays to peer into the blowout preventer to determine if its valves were closed, a technique he experimented with in graduate school while studying radioactive decay.

The suggestion at first elicited snickering and "Incredible Hulk" jokes. Then they tried it, and it worked. "They weren't hot on his ideas," a senior White House official said of BP's initial reaction to Chu's suggestions. "Now they are."

The president has pressured other oil companies to step up. At a May 3 dinner at the White House with business executives, says one official who was there, Obama bluntly told Exxon Mobil Chairman Rex Tillerson that he expected the entire petroleum industry to dedicate its engineering talent to fixing the spill and preventing others. It is a question of duty, Obama told him -- and also of the industry's own financial interest.

But Obama and his team are still feeling their way, and it is not at all clear what this vast marshaling of resources will accomplish. Despite all its efforts, the government is still depending on BP to plug the leak. That is not likely to happen until August at the earliest.

The administration is focusing many of its resources on the cleanup operation, which will continue for years, and on mitigating the effects on the environment, which could be felt for decades. The Coast Guard has taken over the enormous effort to restore oil-blackened beaches.

"There's the acute, and there's the chronic," Browner said. "We have moved very much into 'How do you manage this, a difficult situation, over an extended period of time?' "

Obama has at times expressed frustration that the government continues to rely on BP for basic information about the spill. He has insisted that Washington develop its own, more accurate estimates of how much oil is flowing out of the hole.

BP spokeswoman Anne Kolton said the company has tried to "give our best estimate" and to be "open and honest and transparent." Yet whatever trust there was between the administration and BP has seemingly all but disappeared.

The White House has worked to keep the focus of public anger on the company -- and with it, give reassurance that there will be consequences and restitution. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has launched criminal and civil investigations, and the government has presented BP with a first bill for $69 million in cleanup costs. On his visit to the region Friday, Obama warned the firm against "nickel-and-diming" people and businesses harmed by the spill.

Kolton said the company's relationship with the federal government remains one of "coordination and cooperation." Yet she acknowledged: "The frustration is growing on their part. It's growing on our part. It's growing on the part of the people in the gulf."

White House officials complain, with some justification, that they are caught between contradictory narratives about their handling of the crisis: that the president is not engaged enough in the details of the response, or that he is getting bogged down in them; that he should spend more time in the gulf making common cause with its residents, or that his repeated trips down there are merely publicity stunts.

And there remains the question of whether, for all its efforts, the administration can really gain control, or even the illusion of it. BP did indeed shear the riser and put the cap on it as planned. But days later, everyone at the White House was still waiting to see if it had succeeded. And how would they know? When they got the word from BP.

Michael Tomasky on the politics of the spill:

The independent, middle-of-the-road voters who chose Obama over John McCain weren't crying: "Give us liberalism." They were pleading: "Give us competence."

The verdict so far? As Obama's poll numbers suggest, not terrible, but not so hot. The administration's biggest accomplishment, the passage of the health bill, was seen by all but liberals as the Democrats choosing ideology over competence, and thus wasn't and isn't very popular. On the plus side, the economy is picking up, the employment figures are improving, and there are signs that consumers are aware. There has been progress, however unspectacular, in Afghanistan and Iraq. And while the administration has not yet produced any diplomatic breakthroughs of note, neither has it precipitated any major crisis. The record has been good enough – barely – so that continued economic improvement and a diplomatic accomplishment or two will show voters that the guy is doing what they elected him to do.

But this oil spill, especially if it lingers until August, could change everything. This is not the moral equivalent of the Katrina catastrophe – in which, let us recall, some 1,500 Americans died. Most Americans seem to grasp this. However, people are desperate for action as more and more of the Gulf coastline comes under threat. And since surely no more than 2% of them even know who Tony Hayward – BP's chief executive – is, they quite understandably turn to the guy they do know: the president. Do … something.

Much discussed in recent days here in Washington is Obama's inability to "connect" with the frustrations and concerns of Joe Sixpack. It's a valid criticism. Obama appears to see himself as a mediator and conciliator, who vacuums up all (non-crazy) viewpoints and tries to express a consensus. This is a valuable skill, and at his best moments, he's put it to use either publicly or behind the scenes to nudge public opinion or get legislation passed. It's a style of leadership that has its place.

The spill requires a different style of leadership. It requires a leader who can give voice to what regular people are feeling in their bones. Obama has little instinct for that. His instinct is. "let's keep our heads here". There are times, though, when outrage is needed.

But even more than executive outrage, what we really need here is a solution of some kind. If BP's new attempt to cap the leak doesn't work, and if oil starts washing up on beaches and properties in a dramatic way – that is, if this disaster takes on a more urgent, more human dimension – then it really could become Obama's Katrina. Especially, let's face it, if the ooze and the calamity spread to the electorally pivotal state of Florida, which is just on the precipice of happening.

People are also looking for BP to be punished. Late this week, demonstrations began emerging outside BP petrol station-convenience stores across the country. But Washington has to do more. Congress is considering a bill raising BP's liability cap from the current $75m (£51m) to $10bn, but it's debating and dithering as usual. Earlier this week the US attorney general, Eric Holder, surveyed the damage, met with state law-enforcement types in the region and launched a criminal investigation aimed at BP. This marks a much tougher posture from the government, which, for public relations purposes, is much needed. And yet, at the same time, the government still needs to work closely with BP on fixing the problem. Ratcheting up the rhetoric and launching a federal investigation in that context are delicate matters, though not impossible ones.

Anyone who doesn't hate him has to feel a little badly for Obama. First, he got smacked with the financial crisis, leaving him to spend his first two years in office (if not more) cleaning up somebody else's mess. Then this, a uniquely perverse situation so lacking in precedent that there doesn't even exist a federal agency designed to deal with it.

But hey – he ran for the job, and he asked for it. He can still be the kind of transformative president he wants to be. But first things first. Show competence. Gain voters' trust. There's an old American saying in urban politics that there's not a Democratic or Republican way to pick up the garbage. Nor to clean up an oil spill. Just get it done.

But there is a Democratic and Republican way to regulate industries (to do it, or not to do it, respectively). Tim Fernholz argues this was ultimately a regulatory failure (and that Obama's team dropped the ball):

The real failure here was in prevention. It was clear when Obama took office in 2009 that the Mineral Management Service, which regulates offshore oil drilling, was in desperate need of reform. At the time, I wrote a column about how the new administration could succeed at governing; one chief example was reforming the MMS, which had recently been exposed for a "culture of ethical failure." An influential transition briefing book prepared by the Center for American Progress discussed the need for reform of offshore drilling regulation. And though the president appointed Liz Birnbaum, a former congressional staffer, to head the agency, it's clear that she lacked the mandate, resources, and ability to change it. Birnbaum resigned last Thursday.

We know that BP told the government in 2008 that it could handle a spill 10 times larger than the current spill, a claim that was most certainly wrong and was alarmingly lacking in details about responding to a deep-water spill. We know that the MMS cut regulatory corners to meet a 30-day response deadline on a BP request that it could have delayed. Perhaps most damning, we know that in the weeks before the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded, the MMS approved a number of changes to the well, including a redesign that might have made the well more vulnerable. One of the requests was approved five minutes after it was submitted.

To liberals who hoped that, whatever the success of Obama's legislative agenda, his appointees would at least provide good governance, Deepwater Horizon is a devastating blow. Obama has already promised redoubled attention to offshore drilling: a moratorium on drilling while inspections continue, new rules separating the officials who permit drilling and those who supervise it, and legislation to ensure that BP covers the full cost of the cleanup. But despite regulatory successes in other areas -- notably, at the Department of Labor -- the liberal project of crafting an effective state has another hurdle to jump.

Looking at the issue from this angle, this particular bit of information (from Frank Rich's most recent column) is particularly damning:

The Times reported last week that at the administration meetings leading to this new drilling policy the subject of the vast dysfunction at the Minerals Management Service, the agency charged with regulating the drilling, never even came up.

It would seem absolutely plausible to me to say "hey, we were working on the economy, Afghanistan and heath care... doing an internal review of the MMS just didn't come up." But they did devise a new drilling policy. This was on their agenda. But the MMS didn't come up?
That was a major f--k up.

But then again the disfunctionality of the MMS, while it should have been Obama's radar, was not his doing. It was his predecessor's. Andrew Potter brings us back to the "Katrina" notion:

What made Katrina such a perfect symbol of Bush’s legacy was not that he was slow off the mark in taking charge. Rather, it was his cheerful indulgence of cronyism and you’re-doing-a-heckuva-job incompetence, which revealed the entire ideological thrust of his administration, namely that the federal government could never serve as a positive force in American life.
That essential point was made last week by Fox News commentator and former Mike Huckabee adviser Jim Pinkerton, who wrote on his blog that Obama has “ﬁnally confronted the reality that the federal government doesn’t work very well. Uncle Sam doesn’t have core competencies, he has core incompetencies.” This is, of course, just the latest version of the long-standing Republican gambit of denouncing the inadequacy of the very government they’ve been in charge of for most of the past 40 years. The strategy is always the same: once in power, start stuffing the most important agencies with partisan hacks who are either complete boneheads or actively hostile to the institution they serve. This ensures either regulatory failure or regulatory capture, which is subsequently used as proof that government is useless.

This is pretty much what happened with the Minerals Management Service, the agency of the U.S. Department of the Interior responsible for regulation of offshore oil drilling. As is now well known, the agency became thoroughly corrupted during the Bush years, to the point where dozens of MMS staff were caught doing drugs and sleeping with their counterparts from the energy industry—and that’s when they weren’t accepting free gifts and holidays from the companies they were supposed to be overseeing. Meanwhile, MMS scientists who raised concerns over the safety and environmental impact of proposed drilling projects were repeatedly muzzled by their bosses, even as energy companies were routinely permitted to more or less write their own inspection reports.
Occasionally, the Republican inclination to tweak the nose of their most loathed institutions results in pure comedy, as when Bush sent John Bolton to Turtle Bay to piss on all the rugs at the United Nations. But more often the result is nothing short of tragic.

While it has largely fallen out of the public’s interest, the methane explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia that killed 29 is in many ways even more scandalous than what is happening in the Gulf. The company responsible, Massey, had been repeatedly cited over the past few years for methane-related safety violations. Yet even though it was widely known to be running multiple unsafe operations, had one of the worst safety records in the country, had paid over US$4 million in criminal and civil fines for safety violations after a fire at another mine that killed two people in 2006, and had millions more in outstanding unpaid citations, the company was allowed to keep operating, and keep killing its workers.

Like the BP spill, the mine explosion happened under what was nominally Obama’s watch. But in both cases, the disasters were the inevitable failures of a regulatory apparatus that had been deliberately and systematically sabotaged under Bush’s two terms. That is why the BP spill is not even close to being “Obama’s Katrina.” If anything, it is George W. Bush’s Second Katrina—or, if you count the mine explosion, his Third Katrina. Or, if you count the regulatory capture of the SEC by Wall Street and the way permitting investment banks to self-regulate contributed to the mortgage crisis, his Fourth Katrina.

The question that should really be worrying Americans is just how many ticking time bombs the Republicans have left strewn throughout the federal regulatory infrastructure. Where will the next disaster strike? Which agency will be held responsible? The only certainty is that the longer the Democrats are in power, the easier it will be for Republicans to blame the President, or, ideally, blame the very idea of government.

This isn’t mere partisanship, it is nihilism. And it is pure poison in a democracy.

Matt Bai: doesn't see the issue in terms of 'competency' or regulation... instead he describes what he calls "political chaos theory:"

As much as we talk about ideology and competence, our judgment of presidents doesn’t hinge on either of these things in isolation. What matters is the perception — or perhaps the illusion — that one is shaping events, rather than being shaped by them. The modern presidency, like the old “Get Smart” series, is about chaos versus control.

Political chaos theory, if you want to call it that, has always been integral to the American presidency. It’s what Abraham Lincoln understood when, days after taking office, he sought to take charge of events at Fort Sumter, rather than heed the advice of those who thought he should simply let them play out. Franklin Roosevelt demonstrated the same essential insight in confronting the Great Depression — that people needed to know you would impose order, even if not every attempt at doing so worked. (Roosevelt and his intrepid New Dealers would probably be thinking about ways to drain the Gulf of Mexico right about now.)

Mr. Obama seems to find it particularly hard to adjust to this role, perhaps because he has always defined himself as an outsider to Washington and its governing apparatus — someone who would reform government, but not necessarily master its inner workings. This, after all, was the subtext of his entire debate with Hillary Rodham Clinton during the Democratic primaries in 2008; she was the insider who could competently work all the pulleys and levers of government, and he was the outsider looking to cast aside what he later called the “childish things” that dominated debate in Washington.

The problem here for Mr. Obama is that, almost 18 months after assuming office, he still seems to regard himself as something of an intellectual critic of government, when, in fact, what Americans expect from him now is markedly different. The transition is long behind us, which means the president embodies the government he once assailed and is held accountable, fairly or not, for its failures.

John Heilemann on some of the ways Obama could use this an opportunity to make big changes:

The primary demands on it [the White House] since the start of the spill have been two: that the administration do something, anything, to get the freaking hole plugged, and that Obama display some semblance of outrage, empathy, or both. But these twin demands have proved to be equally resistant to remedy. Both, it turns out, involve forces of nature—a volcanic undersea geyser, on the one hand, and Obama’s decidedly unvolcanic personality, on the other—apparently impervious to the world’s most advanced technology (in the case of the former) and the cacophonous braying of the punditocracy (in the case of the latter).
In his interview with Larry King last week, Obama tried to put to rest the emotion-free POTUS meme. “I am furious at this entire situation,” he said. “I would love to spend a lot of my time venting and yelling at people. But that’s not the job I was hired to do. My job is to solve this problem.”
A fair point, no doubt, and I suspect that most voters wouldn’t mind Obama’s lack of histrionics if they saw from his administration a response to the crisis commensurate with its scale. But they do not. Confronted with this criticism, defenders of the president have asked repeatedly, What precisely should Obama be doing that he isn’t doing? And the point underlying that question, too, is fair—but only insofar as it relates to jamming or capping the gash in the ocean floor, where BP’s prowess (such as it is) dwarfs the government’s. In the weeks ahead, however, there are at least three broad areas where the Obamans could and should fashion responses as great as the cataclysm at hand.
Legislative. In his speech last week at Carnegie Mellon University, Obama vowed to put his shoulder into passing the comprehensive energy/climate bill awaiting action in the Senate, noting that “the votes may not be there right now, but I intend to find them … we will get it done.” Obama’s words echoed what White House aides have been telling clean-energy advocates privately for weeks. Yet even as they made those assurances, Obama’s political and legislative strategists have been deliberating over how much capital to invest in what could well be a losing cause—for as Obama correctly noted, enacting the legislation will be an uphill push, and one made all the more daunting by the fact that the loosening of offshore-drilling restrictions that was a key to the bill’s passage is effectively off the table.
But now Obama has decided, I am told, to go all-in on bringing the measure home. The question is what the White House believes that going all-in entails. The temptation will be to try and pass it by cutting deals and scratching for votes one by one. But this is not (or not only) a moment for playing the inside game. This is a moment that screams for Obama to turn the bill into a crusade, to hammer home the connection between the BP spill and the need to end our addiction to oil, to shout from the rooftops his vision of a cleaner, greener energy future.
Corporate. The criminal and civil investigations—and, one hopes, prosecutions and ginormous fines—of BP and others are well and good. But they seem too small, pedestrian, and, you know, legalistic (especially since none of the company’s executives is likely to serve hard time) to provide rough-enough justice given the circumstances. The former Labor secretary Robert Reich got a ton of ink when he suggested that Obama place BP’s U.S. subsidiary into temporary receivership. Whatever the idea’s other merits, it would go a long way toward establishing that Obama is, in James Carville’s phrase, the oil titan’s “daddy.”
Even better would be penalties that force BP simultaneously to pay for its sins and contribute to a future where its profitability would be severely undermined. As readers of Daniel Gross’s column in Slate suggested, why not compel BP either to put a nontrivial percentage of its profits or an amount matching dollar for dollar the damages it has caused in the gulf into developing and making publicly available alternative-energy technologies?
Conservationist. The mitigation of the spill’s effects and the cleanup of the gulf—from the ocean itself to the wetlands and beaches of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida, at a minimum—seem destined to be a Herculean task, requiring the work of many thousands of laborers. At a time when the unemployment rate is still hovering near double digits, and when the local economies hit most directly are likely to be decimated, Obama could transform the effort into a massive jobs program, funded not by the government but by BP. At the same time, he could create a new volunteer national-service organization dedicated to the cause. A Democratic operative of my acquaintance has already coined a name for this putative operation: the Gulf Recovery Corps.
Each of these suggestions has much to commend it on purely substantive grounds. America needs energy reform; BP needs to have its teeth kicked in; the gulf needs saving. But these proposals would also help Obama attend to the political imperatives the crisis has thrust upon him. They would pull him out of his defensive crouch and put him firmly on offense. Executed well, they’d quash the questions being raised by his opponents about his competence. And they would help restore the perception of Obama as a man of big talents and big ambitions ideally suited to a time in history full of big, even epochal challenges.

More from Frank Rich, who thinks Obama is too trusting of other 'elites' as being essentially good people, but nevertheless shares Heilemann's hope that Obama could use this moment outline an overarching narrative to convince Americans for the need for reform on many fronts:

Americans are still seething at the bonus-grabbing titans of the bubble and at the public and private institutions that failed to police them. But rather than embrace a unifying vision that could ignite his presidency, Obama shies away from connecting the dots as forcefully and relentlessly as the facts and Americans’ anger demand.

BP’s recklessness is just the latest variation on a story we know by heart. The company’s heedless disregard of risk and lack of safeguards at Deepwater Horizon are all too reminiscent of the failures at Lehman Brothers, Citigroup and A.I.G., where the richly rewarded top executives often didn’t even understand the toxic financial products that would pollute and nearly topple the nation’s economy. BP’s reliance on bought-off politicians and lax, industry-captured regulators at the M.M.S. mirrors Wall Street’s cozy relationship with its indulgent overseers at the S.E.C., Federal Reserve and New York Fed — not to mention Massey Energy’s dependence on somnolent supervision from the Mine Safety and Health Administration.

Given Toyota’s recent game of Russian roulette with Americans’ safety and Anthem Blue Cross’s unconscionable insurance-rate increases in California, Obama shouldn’t have any problem riveting the country’s attention to this sorry saga. He has the field to himself, thanks to a political opposition whose hottest new star, Rand Paul, and most beloved gulf-state governor, Haley Barbour of Mississippi, both leapt to BP’s defense right after the rig exploded. The Wall Street Journal editorial page perfectly set forth the conservative establishment’s party line on May 26: “There is zero evidence so far that this blowout resulted from lax regulation or shoddy practices.” Or as BP’s Hayward asked indignantly, “What the hell did we do to deserve this?”

If Obama is to have a truly transformative presidency, there could be no better catalyst than oil. Standard Oil jump-started Progressive Era trust-busting. Sinclair Oil’s kickback-induced leases of Wyoming’s Teapot Dome oilfields in the 1920s led to the first conviction and imprisonment of a presidential cabinet member (Harding’s interior secretary) for a crime committed while in the cabinet. The Arab oil embargo of the early 1970s and the Exxon Valdez spill of 1989 sped the conservation movement and search for alternative fuels. The Enron scandal prompted accounting reforms and (short-lived) scrutiny of corporate Ponzi schemes.

This all adds up to a Teddy Roosevelt pivot-point for Obama, who shares many of that president’s moral and intellectual convictions. But Obama can’t embrace his inner T.R. as long as he’s too in thrall to the supposed wisdom of the nation’s meritocracy, too willing to settle for incremental pragmatism as a goal, and too inhibited by the fine points of Washington policy debates to embrace bold words and bold action. If he is to wield the big stick of reform against BP and the other powerful interests that have ripped us off, he will have to tell the big story with no holds barred.

That doesn’t require a temper tantrum. Nor does it require him to plug the damn hole, which he can’t do anyway. What he does have the power to fix is his presidency. Should he do so, and soon, he’ll still have a real chance to mend a broken country as well.

So is it "Obama's Katrina?" To some extent we're talking about public perception here, rather than any objective reality. In that sense it may be his Katrina, although typically these things gain traction because they play into pre-established narratives (Dems being elite snobs, Republicans being corrupt, Dems having affairs, Republicans having gay affairs, etc.) I've seen Republicans say "can you imagine if this was happening under Bush?" And indeed the outrage would probably be greater, but that's also because Bush helped gut the MMS and was cozy with the oil industry, so would actually makes more sense to blame him. With Obama the narrative doesn't make as much sense (he believes in the role of government to help people, believes in regulation, isn't cozy with the oil industry). But if the spill leaves a lasting impression of incompetence, or that Obama is 'out of his depth' (pun intended) it could have a lasting impact on the rest of his presidency. On the other hand perhaps he will be able to use it as an "educational moment" for the nation and get us on the path to making some long overdue changes. One can HOPE(tm).

What do you guys think?

an email conversation

2010-06-03T20:51:00.002-04:00

between me and someone else...

Me:

I thought these were both well worth reading:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/magazine/06fob-wwln-t.html?hp

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/31/AR2010053103113_pf.html

Someone else:

Both articles are good. The NYT article was very well thought-out and the Post article was very emotive.
We are all so angry and distraught over this situation. It is like waiting for a devastating hurricane that may last decades. Our way of life is totally threatened.
We walked on the beaches this weekend, sugar sands and pristine water. The sea birds and turtles are nesting in the Ft. Pickens area. All seems so serene and yet 7 miles off shore with the winds blowing our way is the massive monster getting ready to attack us and Washington is sending down lawyers. We need booms, man-power, permission to build sand bars to block the monster. But nothing is getting done. People down here are distraught . We had Ivan, Dennis, the fall-out from Katrina , the Great Recession, and now this. We are truly cursed.

Me:

Robert Reich provides a word/legal process for what I've been thinking from the beginning: Receivership. This is what Obama/the Federal Gov't taking charge would actually look like.

Here are two posts outlining the strategy and what we could be doing:

one

two

they need to get on it

also, this is worth watching. deja vu indeed.

It's fair to hold Obama accountable for not doing enough... but let's not forget who the real villain is here.

Someone else:

LIked the engineer's ideas. Hated Reich's ideas. BP would love to just walk away from this and turn it over to the govt. BO can increase taxes on their USA production and they will just sell to China and India. This is truly BO's Katrina.
We are truly sick at heart about all of this.
M

Someone else (again):

Since I am reading your points of view, I hope you will read some of mine.

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052748704269204575270950789108846-lMyQjAxMTAwMDAwMzEwNDMyWj.html

Me:

Oh boy, where to begin... I'll just start from the beginning and work my way down.

Noonan calls healthcare reform "unnecessary." I'm not even going to argue this point because after a full year of debate on this issue anyone who still thinks that is clearly beyond reach. But I will say that Obama tackled the issue not out of some abstract, intellectual interest in the theory of gov't but because real people were suffering and dying and going bankrupt because of our broken medical system (not to mention it was stifling our economy). Meanwhile Republicans saw the battle in purely political terms, believing that to defeat Obama on the issue would be his Waterloo, with absolutely no concern for the welfare of the American people. That was what the "war" against Romneycare, excuse me, Obamacare, was really about. So who is it that's disconnected from the needs of ordinary Americans again?

Next: "Indifference" to immigration? Was it not the Republican party who killed immigration reform just a couple years ago? It had the votes (and the support of the Bush WH), but it didn't have "the majority of the majority" of Republican Senators, so they killed it. And let's be brutally frank, the reason the Republican base reacted so violently against reform is because they don't like brown people. At all. And so Republican leadership went along with their crazies and kicked the can down the road. But now our broken borders are Obama's fault?

"Dodging and dithering" in response to the spill? As you saw in that Maddow video on the Ixtoc spill, we've seen this movie before and we know how it ends: eventually, months from now, they'll finish the relief well and be able to plug the hole. In the mean time an incredible amount of oil will spill into the gulf and cause untold damage. We've known for decades that that was the risk. It took them 10 months to plug a hole 150 feet underwater in 1979, and now we're drilling a mile under water, without any advances in dealing with the eventual spill (yes, eventual, accidents always happen sooner or later). And, yet, where has the Republican party been on the issue over all these years? Deregulation! Drill baby drill! Dick Cheney went to great effort to get government off the backs of the oil companies. And yet... this is supposed to be Obama's Katrina.

Let's continue: The American people are worried about high gov't spending? First of all, it's that high gov't spending that kept this country from plummeting into a great depression. Obama inherited an economy in free fall because of a financial crisis which was a direct consequence of... you guessed it!... Republican deregulation! And now, just as Republicans blame Obama for a spill that resulted from theirpolicies of deregulation, they now try to blame the economy that they broke on Obama's efforts to fix it. They know that if Obama cuts back on spending it will further depress the economy... which they can then turn around and blame on him. Chutzpah.

I notice Noonan is very interested in how Obama "seems," as if he's a character in a movie that needs better writers. She was unimpressed by Obama's command of the facts because it lacks emotional force, it lacks drama. It is very true that Obama is far more interested in actually solving problems than putting on a show designed to project the impression that he's solving problems. From a public relations point of view this indeed causes him some problems. But what this actually tells us is that Obama is a grown up. And yet here Noonan is criticizing him for that? Why is it that Republicans put so much stock in stagecraft? Flying onto an aircraft carrier off the coast of California in a flight suit and speaking in front of a "Mission Accomplished" banner did not win the war in Iraq. Whatever theatrics Noonan demands of Obama in this case would be equally ineffective.

But the overarching baloney to all this is that Obama is dealing with problems "of his own making," when in fact every single one of these things was handed to him by the Republicans who made such a royal mess of everything during Bush's Presidency that we'll be cleaning up after them for decades. The power of government does not lie in its ability to fix catastrophes of others' making. It's in preventing them in the first place. But here we come to those nasty words again: "Regulation," "Oversight." But now Noonan thinks the oil spill discredits the idea that government should have a role in our lives... and it doesn't take a psychic to see where this is headed: since the gov't is so inept we might as well get it out of big business's hair and keep deregulating! Sounds familiar: Bush gutted FEMA, and when it failed to respond to Katrina Republicans said it showed that government doesn't work and so shouldn't be trusted. Lewis Carroll would appreciate the logic.

And where are we going from here? You would think a catastrophe like this would spur us to finally develop and sign into law a sane energy policy that moves us away from fossil fuels. And yet because of this oil spill we are LESS likely to pass any kind of energy policy. Why? Because Republicans have already made it clear they will fight any plan that does not include massive expansion of offshore drilling tooth and nail? That is insane. (Unless you're a politician primarily concerned about staying on Big Oil's payroll, in which case it actually makes a lot of sense)

I truly wish the GOP would stop playing politics with every issue and actually engage in trying to solve our country's problems. Obama would be more than happy to meet them half way if they were actually willing to make serious compromises of their own. (Lord knows he's infuriated his base with his constant overtures to Republicans) But it seems like its all just a political game for the GOP. All about scoring points. About trying to keep Obama from having any success out of fear he would get the credit. So instead they do everything in their power to hamstring his efforts to fixtheir messes and root for him to fail (and the rest of the country with him) so that they can take back power. This, from a group that wraps itself in the flag and regularly accuses Dems of lacking patriotism. The cynicism is breathtaking.

We've got crises going on all over the place. In addition to the oil spill there's the economy/jobs, there's Afghanistan, Iraq (remember that place?), Israel/Palestine, Iran, N.Korea, immigration, global warming, energy, education... the list goes on. This is no time for cheap political posturing. In Obama we have a leader who is competent, never gets rattled, never holds grudges, and who understands these issues better than any other politician bar none. Yes, he is human, he makes mistakes, and I do think he has not been aggressive enough with BP. But our problems don't stem from Obama. They stem from corporations run amok, aided and abetted by Republicans.

Regarding the "receivership" idea, it's the opposite of what you seem to think it is. The idea is to take over BP to spend their money and use their resources to fix their mess (that's effecting all the rest of us and destroying the environment). Right now BP is still making huge profits, even taking into account the $$ they're spending on cleanup. Resources that could be used to help the cleanup effort are being used to elsewhere. It's time ALL their resources are devoted to fixing this problem. Right now BP and other oil companies are the only people who have the equipment and personnel who can perform many of the things that we could be doing to ameliorate the problem (such as the ideas proposed by that engineer in the second link I sent you). A receivership takes the wheel from them and makes them do what's right. Trust me, they won't love it. If it bankrupts their entire company I won't be shedding any tears. But Obama isn't Superman, he can't fix a problem without the tools needed, the tools that BP and these other companies have, which is why he should just take what's needed and make them do it. But unfortunately neither Obama, and CERTAINLY no Republicans want to play hardball with those guys. Obama because he thinks we can all get along, and Republicans because they're in the pocket of Big Oil (yes, some Dems too... but Republicans as a group)

Sorry for the rant, but when you send me something like that know that I will read it and you will get a response, haha. I feel strongly about this stuff... but I also don't take it personally. When it comes to politics we both think each other are crazy, and that's ok!

article

2010-05-24T18:11:00.002-04:00

These days I just don't have time to blog (obviously) which is a shame because there's A LOT to blog about. It's been a goal of mine to do an in depth post on the oil spill, but that will have to wait for another day.

But when I first started this thing, back when it was just an email list, the main purpose was just to send the occasional link to a must-read article. Well, this article on Obama and Wall St certainly fits that bill. Check it out (and let me know what you think in the comments!)

loose ends and aftershocks

2010-03-27T21:09:00.003-04:00

This Ezra Klein post is worth reading in full. Perhaps the central irony of the health care debate is that Democrats adopted Republican ideas on health care, but were nevertheless lambasted (in some cases the same people who devised the ideas in the first place). More on that here.

But it is a liberal bill in another regard: it should make a real dent in income inequality. David Leonhardt addresses one of the most important, yet underappreciated, aspects of the Affordable Care Act (as we're now calling it):

For all the political and economic uncertainties about health reform, at least one thing seems clear: The bill that President Obama signed on Tuesday is the federal government’s biggest attack on economic inequality since inequality began rising more than three decades ago.

Over most of that period, government policy and market forces have been moving in the same direction, both increasing inequality. The pretax incomes of the wealthy have soared since the late 1970s, while their tax rates have fallen more than rates for the middle class and poor.

Nearly every major aspect of the health bill pushes in the other direction. This fact helps explain why Mr. Obama was willing to spend so much political capital on the issue, even though it did not appear to be his top priority as a presidential candidate. Beyond the health reform’s effect on the medical system, it is the centerpiece of his deliberate effort to end what historians have called the age of Reagan.

Speaking to an ebullient audience of Democratic legislators and White House aides at the bill-signing ceremony on Tuesday, Mr. Obama claimed that health reform would “mark a new season in America.” He added, “We have now just enshrined, as soon as I sign this bill, the core principle that everybody should have some basic security when it comes to their health care.”

The bill is the most sweeping piece of federal legislation since Medicare was passed in 1965. It aims to smooth out one of the roughest edges in American society — the inability of many people to afford medical care after they lose a job or get sick. And it would do so in large measure by taxing the rich.

A big chunk of the money to pay for the bill comes from lifting payroll taxes on households making more than $250,000. On average, the annual tax bill for households making more than $1 million a year will rise by $46,000 in 2013, according to the Tax Policy Center, a Washington research group. Another major piece of financing would cut Medicare subsidies for private insurers, ultimately affecting their executives and shareholders.

The benefits, meanwhile, flow mostly to households making less than four times the poverty level — $88,200 for a family of four people. Those without insurance in this group will become eligible to receive subsidies or to join Medicaid. (Many of the poor are already covered by Medicaid.) Insurance costs are also likely to drop for higher-income workers at small companies.

Finally, the bill will also reduce a different kind of inequality. In the broadest sense, insurance is meant to spread the costs of an individual’s misfortune — illness, death, fire, flood — across society. Since the late 1970s, though, the share of Americans with health insurance has shrunk. As a result, the gap between the economic well-being of the sick and the healthy has been growing, at virtually every level of the income distribution.

The health reform bill will reverse that trend. By 2019, 95 percent of people are projected to be covered, up from 85 percent today (and about 90 percent in the late 1970s). Even affluent families ineligible for subsidies will benefit if they lose their insurance, by being able to buy a plan that can no longer charge more for pre-existing conditions. In effect, healthy families will be picking up most of the bill — and their insurance will be somewhat more expensive than it otherwise would have been.

Much about health reform remains unknown. Maybe it will deliver Congress to the Republicans this fall, or maybe it will help the Democrats keep power. Maybe the bill’s attempts to hold down the recent growth of medical costs will prove a big success, or maybe the results will be modest and inadequate. But the ways in which the bill attacks the inequality of the Reagan era — whether you love them or hate them — will probably be around for a long time.

The reason the liberal age (1932-1968) lasted so long and accomplished so much was in large part due to FDR's success at addressing income inequality and getting us all more or less on the same page. It's also good for the economy because when average people have extra cash they tend to spend it. If Obama and the Democrats could narrow the gap between the rich and everyone else they would be doing a great service for the country. (This, by the way, is not Communism. We're talking about finding pragmatic ways of using government to temper the inevitable excesses of the free market... not having the government take over the economy.)

But as Ronald Brownstein points out, there's a disconnect in terms of public perception, especially among whites:

On the long climb to health care reform that ended with this week's momentous signing ceremony, President Obama aimed many of his arguments at a different audience from the one targeted by predecessors who faltered on the same steep hill.

Compared with earlier presidents, Obama focused his case less on helping the uninsured and more on providing those with coverage greater leverage against their insurers. That shift was especially evident in his final drive toward passage.

And yet, polling just before the bill's approval showed that most white Americans believed that the legislation would primarily benefit the uninsured and the poor, not people like them. In a mid-March Gallup survey, 57 percent of white respondents said that the bill would make things better for the uninsured, and 52 percent said that it would improve conditions for low-income families. But only one-third of whites said that it would benefit the country overall -- and just one-fifth said that it would help their own family.

In both that Gallup Poll and the latest monthly survey by the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, nonwhite respondents were much more likely than whites to say that the bill would help the country and their own families. Those responses reflect not only experience (African-Americans and Hispanics are more likely than whites to lack insurance) but also minorities' greater receptivity to government activism. By meeting a tangible need in these communities, health reform is likely to solidify the Democratic hold on the one-quarter (and growing) minority share of the electorate, especially if Republicans define themselves around demanding repeal.

But whites still cast about three-quarters of votes. And if most remain convinced that health reform primarily benefits the poor and uninsured, Democrats could find themselves caught in an unusual populist crossfire during this fall's elections.

The ACA (aka HCR) will in fact help middle class people (of all ethnicities)... in some ways immediately, but in other ways not for several years. So its still important for Democrats to sell this. I think the job will be easier now that it's passed, but they really can't rest on their laurels.

Meanwhile it seems that Republicans plan to continue their strategy of playing to the Tea Party crowd, doing everything in their power to obstruct Democratic governance, rather than engage with Democrats in an effort to secure compromises and move legislation to the right. Such engagement would certainly succeed in making future legislative more conservative, but it would also be a boon the Obama Admin., who would have succeeded in making Washington work. So we can't have that!

These dynamics were on clear display in the case of David Frum's recent criticisms of Republican strategy (linked to in my previous post), which quickly got him expelled from the American Enterprise Institute (one of the preeminent Conservative think tanks).

David Waldman:

Frum has an excellent conservative pedigree. He was a speechwriter for George W. Bush, among other things, and he remains extremely conservative today. However, over the last year or so he has been making a name for himself as a reasonable conservative, one willing to call out the Republican Party when he thinks it's making a mistake. And that, apparently, is the problem. The last straw for AEI was apparently this post on Frum's blog, where he said, "Conservatives and Republicans today suffered their most crushing legislative defeat since the 1960s," and went on to lay the blame at the all-or-nothing strategy employed by the GOP leadership.
Frum's crime was not an ideological one but a partisan one. Apparently, not only is it forbidden to question GOP strategy when it's still being executed, it's even forbidden to question it after it has already failed.

Ezra Klein:

As Frum saw clearly, if you were interested in a conservative health-care system, there was room for compromise in this bill. If Republicans had cut a deal on revenue, we could've capped the tax break for employer-sponsored insurance and there would've been no increase in Medicare payroll taxes. Health savings accounts and tort reform could've been much larger parts of the bill. A system of reinsurance for catastrophic costs, as Sen. Chuck Grassley once proposed, was certainly on the table. If Republicans had offered 40 real votes for Wyden-Bennett, I would've been on their side in this debate.

But whatever interest there was in making the outcome of this legislative process more conservative, it was swamped by the interest in making the outcome more Republican. I'm not saying that there's no reason conservatives could've found to oppose this bill. But there's no way to look at Medicare Part D and RomneyCare and conservative think tanks in the 1990s and 2000s and believe that all conservatives should've opposed this bill. There's definitely no way to square their past preferences and the rhetoric they abetted this time around. And in the final analysis, the bill is worse -- both from their perspective and mine -- for that opposition. You can pass bills on a party-line vote, but you can do more with bipartisan cover.

Which is not to say there was nothing to recommend the right's electoral strategy here. But pure obstructionism failed. You might think they'd go through a period of soul-searching now where they considered whether people like Frum might've had a point about the benefits of well-timed, principled compromise. Instead, they're excommunicating him.

Frum's wife even felt compelled to jump in:

We have both been part of the conservative movement for, as mentioned, the better part of half of our lives. And I can categorically state I’ve never seen such a hostile environment towards free thought and debate–the hallmarks of Reaganism, the politics with which we grew up–prevail in our movement as it does today. The thuggish demagoguery of the Limbaughs and Becks is a trait we once derided in the old socialist Left. Well boys, take a look in the mirror. It is us now.

Edmund Andrews:

It's hard to believe that this revelation came like a bolt out of the blue. The Republican arguments on health care, the economic stimulus and financial regulation have become so convoluted and degraded that they only make sense from the perspective of raw political strategy and Tea Party pandering.
What holds the Republican Party together isn't anything remotely like a coherent philosophy or set of values. The only things holding it together are group-think based on a cold calculation of how best to block the Democrats and rile the base. It's an intellectual circling of the wagons. Small wonder that it becomes oppressive.

I am tempted to think that the revulsion expressed Crittenden is part of a bigger ferment among Republicans. I'd like to think that there is a group of young Turks or moderates who agree with Frum that the GOP health-care rejectionism will turn out to be the party's Waterloo. I'd like to think that there is a new generation GOP that is ready to take a chance on constructive engagement.

But my good friend Bruce Bartlett is skeptical. Republican leaders think their strategy since the 2008 election has been a great success. If they win back House and Senate seats this fall -- as they almost certainly will -- they'll argue that their strategy has been vindicated. And the truth is, the Young Turks are among the most fervent of the hard-liners -- the Jeb Hensarlings, Paul Ryans. The moderates are disappearing faster than ever, and the ones who stay are disdained.

Matthew Yglesias adds:

I think that to understand what’s wrong with the conservative movement today, you need to think about Barry Goldwater’s 1964 Presidential campaign. In ‘64, the GOP establishment felt that Goldwater was too radical. They said that nominating a hard-rightist like Goldwater would be counterproductive. But conservative activists worked hard, and they did it. Goldwater got the nod. And, just as the establishment predicted, Goldwater got crushed. And just as the established predicted, it proved to be counterproductive. The 1964 landslide led directly to Medicare, Medicaid, Title I education spending, and the “war on poverty.” In the 45 years since that fateful campaign, the conservative movement managed to gain total control over the Republican Party and to sporadically govern the country. But it’s only very partially rolled back one aspect of the Johnson administration’s domestic policy.

Which is just to say that the conservative movement from 1964-2009 was a giant failure. By nominating Goldwater, it invited a massive progressive win that all the subsequent conservative wins were unable to undue. But the orthodox conservative tradition of ‘64 is that it was a great success that laid the groundwork for the triumphs to come.

Which is to say that it’s not just a movement incapable of thinking seriously about the interests of the country, it can’t think rigorously about its own goals. 2009-2010 has already seen the greatest flowering of progressive policy since 1965-66. No matter how well Republicans do in the 2010 midterms, the right will never fully roll back what the 111th Congress has done. And yet, as Andrews suggests, if they win seats in 2010, conservatives will consider their behavior during 2009-10 to have been very successful.

So maybe Republican insanity is a good thing! But in the big scheme of things it really isn't. The reality is that power tends to shift back and forth between the two parties, so having one party dominated by lunatics doesn't bode well.

Paul Krugman:

I admit it: I had fun watching right-wingers go wild as health reform finally became law. But a few days later, it doesn’t seem quite as entertaining — and not just because of the wave of vandalism and threats aimed at Democratic lawmakers. For if you care about America’s future, you can’t be happy as extremists take full control of one of our two great political parties.

To be sure, it was enjoyable watching Representative Devin Nunes, a Republican of California, warn that by passing health reform, Democrats “will finally lay the cornerstone of their socialist utopia on the backs of the American people.” Gosh, that sounds uncomfortable. And it’s been a hoot watching Mitt Romney squirm as he tries to distance himself from a plan that, as he knows full well, is nearly identical to the reform he himself pushed through as governor of Massachusetts. His best shot was declaring that enacting reform was an “unconscionable abuse of power,” a “historic usurpation of the legislative process” — presumably because the legislative process isn’t supposed to include things like “votes” in which the majority prevails.

What has been really striking has been the eliminationist rhetoric of the G.O.P., coming not from some radical fringe but from the party’s leaders. John Boehner, the House minority leader, declared that the passage of health reform was “Armageddon.” The Republican National Committee put out a fund-raising appeal that included a picture of Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, surrounded by flames, while the committee’s chairman declared that it was time to put Ms. Pelosi on “the firing line.” And Sarah Palin put out a map literally putting Democratic lawmakers in the cross hairs of a rifle sight.

In the short run, Republican extremism may be good for Democrats, to the extent that it prompts a voter backlash. But in the long run, it’s a very bad thing for America. We need to have two reasonable, rational parties in this country. And right now we don’t.

Well, yesterday was Pelosi's 70th birthday, so at risk of overdoing it, here's a little more love for our Speaker...

Renée Loth

AT THE end of January, when all of Washington was wailing that Scott Brown’s election to the US Senate meant a stake in the heart of health care reform, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi held a press conference and outlined her plan for the bill. “You go through the gate,’’ she said. “If the gate’s closed you go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we’ll pole-vault in. If that doesn’t work, we’ll parachute in. But we are going to get health care reform passed for the American people.’’

You have to admire the grit and persistence of Pelosi, whose persuasive powers were at their height in the days leading up to the vote. Buffeted by doubts even from within the White House, she held her seat, and managed to cajole both the pro-life conservative Bart Stupak and the single-payer liberal Dennis Kucinich into supporting the bill. That’s some savvy legislating.

“She’s no-nonsense,’’ said Boston congressman Michael Capuano, who is close to the speaker. “She’s a liberal at heart but she knows when to give and when to take.’’

Harold Meyerson:

In forcefully arguing for major reform, and in successfully lining up the votes for it, Pelosi was reflecting the two distinct strands of her political heritage. Along with her fellow Californians Howard L. Berman, George Miller and Henry A. Waxman, she is one of the four members of the House Democratic caucus who were proteges of the late Phil Burton -- the militantly liberal, legislatively brilliant San Francisco congressman who dominated the House during the 1970s.

Pelosi is also the daughter of Thomas D'Alesandro Jr., a New Deal-era congressman who became mayor of Baltimore. D'Alesandro was an old-style ethnic machine pol with liberal values, and Pelosi's own rise through the ranks of the House Democratic caucus was greatly aided by support from similarly old-style, tough, deal-making Democrats such as David R. Obey and the late John P. Murtha, who found in her a deal-making ability to equal their own.

San Francisco and Baltimore, West Coast liberal and New Deal boss -- you can see all these in Pelosi's passion, her charm, her toughness, her smarts. You can see them in the battle she waged: Waxman and Miller were the key authors of the House bill, and she put tough-as-nails Obey in the chair Sunday night to guard against Republican obstruction as the House finally voted on the contentious legislation.

On Friday -- though she surely doesn't look it -- Nancy Pelosi turns 70. Not a bad couple of weeks' work, Madame Speaker. Happy birthday.

Even now she's urging her colleagues to go on offense... go Nancy!

victory... feels nice

2010-03-23T23:37:00.005-04:00

Well it's absurd for me not to post on what's easily Obama's biggest achievement, so here goes. The health care debate was brutal, and certainly from a liberal perspective a lot of concessions were made. But there's a reason this problem has festered for so long: it's a ridiculously difficult needle to thread. I do believe this legislation is going to help a lot of people, is going to keep our fiscal situation from spiraling out of control, and will irrevocably establish health care as a right, not a privilege. We'll be revisiting this subject as a Nation on a regular basis, and can look forward to many more fights on the subject... but not like this one. The basic framework has now been established, and regardless of Republican bluster it will not be repealed. And of course it's a crucial victory in a political sense as well. A loss would have been crippling, and conversely the victory gives new lift to the various other major priorities on Obama's docket. I feel really happy, but mostly just so relieved that they pulled this off. Just think, we can't gripe so much about how ineffectual Democrats are... they actually DID something!

Eugene Robinson:

Even when the "fixes" that have to be approved by the Senate are made, the health-care bill will still be something of a mess. But it's a glorious mess, because it enshrines the principle that all Americans have the right to health care -- an extraordinary achievement that will make this a better nation.

It may take years to get the details right. The newly minted reforms are going to need to be reformed or at least fine-tuned, and those will not be easy battles. But the social movements that allowed Obama to become president and Pelosi to become speaker proved that the arc of history bends toward fairness and inclusion.

Needed change must not be thwarted, even if some people find it hard to accept. Obama got it right in his remarks following the vote: "We did not fear our future. We shaped it."

Jonathan Chait:

Historians will see this health care bill as a masterfully crafted piece of legislation. Obama and the Democrats managed to bring together most of the stakeholders and every single Senator in their party. The new law untangles the dysfunctionalities of the individual insurance market while fulfilling the political imperative of leaving the employer-provided system in place. Through determined advocacy, and against special interest opposition, they put into place numerous reforms to force efficiency into a wasteful system. They found hundreds of billions of dollars in payment offsets, a monumental task in itself. And they will bring economic and physical security to tens of millions of Americans who would otherwise risk seeing their lives torn apart. Health care experts for decades have bemoaned the impossibility of such reforms--the system is wasteful, but the very waste creates a powerful constituency for the status quo. Finally, the Democrats have begun to untangle the Gordian knot. It's a staggering political task and substantive achievement.

E.J. Dionne:

There will be years of wrangling over the system's costs and how it works in practice. Every successful health system in the world confronts such arguments. This new law will not end all our health care problems (no law could), but it does a great deal for access, and it makes solving other problems a little easier. Above all, it puts us on a new path.
For Obama, this struggle was transformative. He began his administration full of hope that his campaign pledge to achieve concord across party lines was a realistic possibility. But, when faced with implacable Republican opposition, he jettisoned the happy talk and came out fighting.
If bipartisanship is more fashionable than partisanship, partisanship with a purpose is infinitely preferable to paralysis. Obama has made clear that he will reach out when he can, and do battle when he must.
By temperament, the president is more a consensus builder than a warrior. But he is also a practical man who wants to accomplish big things.
On Sunday, he did just that on health care, and he earned a place in history.

Andrew Sprung:

The flip side of Obama's perhaps naive belief that he can win Republicans over is his ability to show them up. Americans are confused about the plan, but they are not confused about the man. By large margins they trust Obama more than they do the Republicans to produce rational solutions to the country's problems. In the past month, he exploited his mastery of policy detail, his pragmatism, his focus on effectively alleviating the suffering he spotlighted, and his willingness to stake his political future on getting this bill passed to the utmost. The full eloquence and passion of the campaign came back to his lips in forum after forum and speech after speech. To Democratic legislators, his message was that this bill epitomized why they had sought public office and why they were Democrats; it was the raison d'etre for their careers; in effect, passing it was worth their careers (and would make or break his own). In the bipartisan summit, he framed a core contrast: the Democrats would rein in the health insurers' worst practices; the Republicans would further enable them by weakening existing regulations. In rallies, he emphasized human suffering caused by leaving people uninsured and underinsured and enumerated the bill's benefits for ordinary people. As noted before, too, he presented the effort as a litmus test as to whether the Federal government was capable of taking meaningful action to solve national problems. He moved the needle of public opinion enough to move enough House Democrats to "yes."

The process may have been frustrating, and long, and ugly, as Obama told the crowd at George Mason on Friday. But it was also glorious. Obama has been telling crowds since 2007 that change wasn't going to be easy, but that it was possible with focus and persistence and courage. He just proved it.

Mark Schmitt:

It is a staggering achievement that Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, and others have carried this reform to the end despite these circumstances. Unfortunately, the toxic -- and easily manipulated -- political environment remains, and a lot of anxious moments still lie ahead. It's certainly dangerous to launch such a major program with one political party entirely committed to stirring up a backlash; "Repeal and Replace," we're told, will be the Republican motto in the fall. It's possible that the law's popularity might not rest on its true success – it may be blamed for insurance rate increases or credited for unrelated improvements.
But that's too narrow a view of the bill's long-term effect on our political culture and the possibilities for further progressive movement. Social Security, for example, is not just politically successful in the sense that it's popular. It's successful because it dramatically reduced the fear associated with old age or disability. It gave Americans a confidence that they would be protected, a confidence that led to a greater generosity when it came to later efforts, such as Medicaid and Medicare. Health reform will succeed politically not by being popular but by working. That is, by giving Americans a much greater sense that they are not on the brink of losing everything, that they can change jobs or start their own business or admit to a medical condition without risking disaster.

David Frum, former Bush speechwriter, came down hard on Republicans.

I saw another Republican dismiss Frum by saying as a former WH staffer he's never been accountable to anyone, which I interpreted as meaning he's never been accountable to Republican voters, who are batshit crazy.

Here are some of the lovely messages Bart Stupak's been receiving:

Jim Clyburn talked about Republican leaders responsibility to tamp down the rhetoric:

Bob Herbert has had it with Republicans:

For decades the G.O.P. has been the party of fear, ignorance and divisiveness. All you have to do is look around to see what it has done to the country. The greatest economic inequality since the Gilded Age was followed by a near-total collapse of the overall economy. As a country, we have a monumental mess on our hands and still the Republicans have nothing to offer in the way of a remedy except more tax cuts for the rich.
This is the party of trickle down and weapons of mass destruction, the party of birthers and death-panel lunatics. This is the party that genuflects at the altar of right-wing talk radio, with its insane, nauseating, nonstop commitment to hatred and bigotry.
Glenn Beck of Fox News has called President Obama a “racist” and asserted that he “has exposed himself as a guy, over and over and over again, who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture.”
Mike Huckabee, a former Republican presidential candidate, has said of Mr. Obama’s economic policies: “Lenin and Stalin would love this stuff.”
The G.O.P. poisons the political atmosphere and then has the gall to complain about an absence of bipartisanship.

David Shuster calls out Sen. Coburn and others for the kind of hyperbolic language that incites violence:

Dems have flipped the script on Republicans:

The health-care bill that hung around Democrats’ necks for the last several months – right up to the final vote Sunday when some vulnerable congressmen were convinced to support it – has suddenly become a weapon.

If politics were war, Republicans would have just been lured from their walled city to chase a force they thought was retreating, only to find Democrats suddenly turning and attacking them head-on.

Even before the bill passed, President Obama had begun pounding the message that the new legislation would immediately benefit many Americans, and cast Republicans who opposed the bill as on the side of greedy insurers.

Hours after the bill passed, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs set the talking points: “[I]f people want to campaign on taking tax cuts away from small businesses, taking assistance away from seniors getting prescription drugs, and want to take away a mother knowing that their child can’t be discriminated against by an insurance company … we’ll have a robust campaign on that,” he said at the Monday briefing.

Tom Jensen says "repeal" has its risks for Republicans (besides it, you know, being impossible):

One of the biggest problems for Democrats on this issue and one that has contributed to the bill's unpopularity is that health care is not high on the list of things most Americans are concerned with right now. They've overwhelmingly focused on jobs and the economy, and they've seen the Democratic fixation on health care as a distraction from more important and pressing issues. We've seen over and over that much of the actual content of the health care bill is perfectly popular. It's the overall process that has really turned voters off and for that Democrats have received the blame.

If the Republicans now keep health care in the spotlight by trying to repeal it, they will be the ones independents voters see as having skewed priorities and they may start to pay the price. Yes, repeal will play well with the base. But focusing on that has a high potential to turn off independent swing voters who have been leaning toward the GOP but are sick of the health care debate and want Washington to be more focused on something else.

Some behind the scenes accounts:

WaPo: How Obama revived HCR

LAT: HCR was Obama's proving ground

Ambinder on the vote

Here's 3000 words worth of Tom Toles:

Here's a nifty little tool that will tell you how the health care bill will affect you.

Some pics...

It was looking rough there for a while:

But he pulled it out:

(lots more photos here)

... but I still vote Nancy for HCR MVP

Sara Mosle (Slate):

She is both ruthlessly effective and quietly feminine. After the House passed health care reform last November in a narrow, difficult vote, Politico reported that Pelosi walked out of the chamber and commented serenely: “That was easy.” Indeed, she's so calm and collected, she makes Obama look like a drama queen. When he was freaking out after Scott Brown's election, she coolly told him to get a spine and helped salvage his top domestic agenda. She never appears to lose it or even raise her voice. (Love her or hate her, no one can credibly accuse her of being hysterical or a harpy.) Indeed, she often seems to talk in a breathy whisper. At the same time, she may be the most able politician and strong-arming vote-getter since LBJ. But far from resenting her power as a woman, her mostly male colleagues in the Democratic House appear to idolize her (in much the way conservative men in Britain used to adore Margaret Thatcher).

Here she is walking to the Capitol with John Lewis and other Congressmen, holding the gavel that passed Medicare, while protesters shout at them.

What a badass.

I'll end with Obama's rousing statement on what HCR means for America. Definitely watch, it's what the guy is all about:

bound to be true

2010-03-20T23:57:00.004-04:00

Well folks, over a year's worth of debate all comes down to tomorrow. The stakes couldn't be higher.

Here's what's been happening today.

If this passes Pelosi gets the MVP award

In the jittery days following Scott Brown’s Senate victory, Nancy Pelosi was eager to resurrect comprehensive health reform. But first, she had to get past longtime ally Rahm Emanuel, who was counseling President Barack Obama to consider a smaller, piecemeal approach.

During a mid-February conference call with top House Democrats, Pelosi made it clear she would accept nothing short of a big-bang health care push – dismissing the White House chief of staff as an “incrementalist.”

Pelosi even coined a term to describe Emanuel’s scaled-down approach: “Kiddie Care,” according to a person privy to the call.

Pelosi’s remark was more than just a diss. It sent a clear signal to House leadership that Pelosi wouldn’t compromise – and it coincided with Obama’s own decision to renew his push for an all-encompassing bill after weeks of confusion and discussion.

The rebirth of the reform effort is the result of a little luck, insurance company avarice, a subsiding of post-Brown panic among party incumbents and the calculation by many Hill Democrats that going small or giving up was just as politically perilous as going big.

But the main reason the bill has made it to the floor has as much to do with the complex, occasionally tense, ever-evolving partnership between the first African-American president and the first female speaker.

“I think [Pelosi] is the one who has kept the steel in the President’s back – and I think she represents that to Harry Reid too,” Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.), Pelosi’s closest friend in Congress, told POLITICO.

“White Houses end up with – how do I say this? — they take an incrementalism pill,” added Eshoo. “But Nancy Pelosi is not an incrementalist.”

Neither is Obama, says Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), it’s just that he moves more deliberately. “I don’t think [the White House] were there from Day One, but they were from Day Two,” he said. “I think they knew this would be the way.”

Ronald Brownstein:

The grueling health care struggle, now nearing a decisive vote in the House, has filled in a picture of Obama that remained stubbornly unfinished through his first year. Most immediately, it has shattered the image of him as a passionless president, too cool to fully commit to any cause.

Win or lose, Obama has pursued health care reform as tenaciously as any president has pursued any domestic initiative in decades. Health care has now been his presidency's central domestic focus for a full year. That's about as long as it took to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, originally introduced by John F. Kennedy and driven home by Lyndon Johnson. Rarely since World War II has a president devoted so much time, at so much political cost, to shouldering a single priority through Congress. It's reasonable to debate whether Obama should have invested so heavily in health care. But it's difficult to quibble with Emanuel's assessment that once the president placed that bet, "He has shown fortitude, stamina, and strength."

Marc Ambinder:

Whatever you believe about health care reform, it's hard to escape the conclusion that for one party, opposing reform was expedient, and for another, supporting it required the summoning of an uncommon degree of bravery and a resistance to every base political instinct.

And a bit off topic, but you gotta love Fox News:

Stewart's Glenn Beck impression borders on performance art:

I'll close with the Lincoln quote that Obama cited at the Congressional Caucus meeting today (the only thing he wrote down for his speech, which was off the cuff):

"I am not bound to win, but I'm bound to be true. I'm not bound to succeed, but I'm bound to live up to what light I have."

-Abraham Lincoln