xpostfactoid

Go tell the Democrats: the golden Newt-goose is dead

2012-01-26T22:38:00.004-05:00

Newt was tamed and shamed tonight -- not only by Romney but by Wolf Blitzer. It was fascinating to see him reach for an old trick -- one that brought him glory just a week ago -- and find his hypocrisy stripped so bare that an attentive eight year old could catch it.

Immediately after attacking Romney's investments, Gingrich was asked by Wolf Blitzer if he was satisfied by Romney's release of his tax returns (for 2010, with 2011 promised). Gingrich's response, according to a partial transcript:

GINGRICH: This is a nonsense question. Look, how about if the four of us agree to talk about issues that matter to the American people? This is a national debate. We have a chance to talk about important things.

That was an attempt to replay the glory of having savaged John King (to raucous applause) for asking him about his second wife's allegations. This time, since he'd just attacked Romney's finances in detail, the effect was like hearing the newcaster in 1984 reverse enemies and allies in mid-sentence. Doublethink! Personal finances crucial! Personal finances inappropriate subject!

Blitzer, moreover, had the advantage of having witnessed Gingrich's takedown of John King, and he didn't stand for it (just found another partial transcript). He sustained a defense through two rounds:

BLITZER: But, Mr. Speaker, you made an issue of this, this week, when you said that, "He lives in a world of Swiss bank and Cayman Island bank accounts." I didn't say that. You did.

GINGRICH: I did. And I'm perfectly happy to say that on an interview on some TV show. But this is a national debate, where you have a chance to get the four of us to talk about a whole range of issues.

BLITZER: But if you make a serious accusation against Governor Romney like that, you need to explain that.

Then Romney delivered the coup de grace -- something to the effect of, if you make accusations behind someone's back, you should be willing to defend them to his face.

That was only the centerpiece; Romney basically won every personal confrontation with Gingrich -- on his own finances (though it seems he lied about the blind trust), on Newt's influence peddling, on Newt's semi-repudiated claim that Romney is "anti-immigration." After a few hard rounds, Romney felt comfortable enough to start agreeing with his rivals' policy pronouncements and focus on lying about Obama.

Also noteworthy was that Santorum managed an even more sustained and specific assertion that Romneycare was structurally akin to the ACA than he put forward last week. I can only hope he's blazing a trail here that will be effectively picked up by the Democrats, because I fear that the brief glorious season of the Republican candidates deeply goring Romney is done. Gingrich is done. He may hang around a while, but his attacks will be more muted after he decisively loses Florida. Santorum, as someone noted on Twitter tonight, may already be angling for the veep slot; he can make a plausible case that his attacks on Romney were principled policy points, and that he's made Romney a stronger candidate by challenging his policy choices rather than his wealth or integrity.

The ready-made attack ads for Democrats may be over; they will have to make their own case against Romney.

P.S. Remember when Romney's campaign cut an ad that quoted Obama in '08 saying "if we talk about the economy, we'll lose"-- conveniently leaving out the fact that Obama was quoting the McCain camp talking about its own prospects -- and Romney's top aides defended the deliberate distortion? Tonight Romney showed that he agrees with them in principle. Gingrich called him out for an attack ad claiming that Gingrich called Spanish "the language of the ghetto." Romney, shamefully, claimed not to have seen the ad -- which, unlike the Super Pac attack ads he claimed not to have seen a couple of weeks ago, was created by his campaign and had his "I approved this message" imprimatur. On top of that dishonesty, Romney added the 'fuck context' defense (finally, a complete transcript):

We did double-check, just now, Governor, that ad that we talked about, where I quoted you as saying that Speaker Gingrich called Spanish “the language of the ghetto” — we just double-checked. It was one of your ads. It’s running here in Florida in — on the radio. And at the end you say, “I’m Mitt Romney and I approved this ad.”
So it is — it is here.
(BOOING)
ROMNEY: Let me ask — let me ask a question.
Let me ask the speaker a question. Did you say what the ad says or not? I don’t know.
GINGRICH: It’s taken totally out of context.
ROMNEY: Oh, OK, he said it.

Democrats, take note: by Romney rules, Romney likes to fire people.

P.P.S. I see Newt (excuse me, NewtPac) is out with another slasher film against Romney. Could his personal rage at Romney's Iowa assault be so intense that he'll continue to tear down the nominee if/when it becomes clear that he has no chance? Why would Biblical imperialist Sheldon Adelson sign on to such a crusade? Does he want to elect Obama? In any case, the perhaps the advent of mute Newt is not imminent after all. A Democrat can hope!

P.P.P.S. Re the subject of Newt's new Devil in Mr. Romney film, the large-scale Medicare fraud that Damon Corp., one of Bain's portfolio companies, engaged in while Romney sat on its board: we can anticipate Romney's defense by his response when challenged about one of his allegedly deceitful ads:

I haven’t seen the ad, so I’m sorry. I don’t get to see all the TV ads. Did he say that?

Coming: "I wasn't involved in day-to-day operations, I'm sorry. I didn't get to see all that went on. Did they do that?" In fact, he's already said that -- after saying that he got wind of the fraud and took steps to clean it up. This is all replay for Romney, so presumably he'll get his story straight -- that is, thread some tortuous syntactic needle that explains how he was both aware that something was fishy and unaware of what it was. Sort of like being in favor of rescuing the financial system without bailouts, or being for state-imposed individual mandates but mortally opposed to federal ones, or calling for managed bankruptcies for GM and Chrysler without any money being put up...

Cook little pot, cook!

2012-01-26T12:01:00.006-05:00

Don't wake me...if you'd told me two months ago that the Republican presidential candidates would be tearing Mitt Romney apart like this, I would have dismissed it as wishful thinking. A Rolling Thunder Review of early primary season:

You have to live in a world of Swiss bank accounts and Cayman Island accounts and making $20 million for no work, to have some fantasy [Romney's immigration policy] this far from reality” (Gingrich, 1/25).

When Mitt Romney invented government-run healthcare, Romney advisers helped Barack Obama write the disastrous Obamacare...Romneycare sent premiums spiraling out of control, hiking premiums, squeezing household budgets...Now, desperate to save his failing campaign, Romney promises to repeal Obamacare. How can we trust him? Think you know Mitt? Think again. (Winning Our Future, ad, now running).

Two of the people up here will be hard to elect because of Obamacare. Romney was Governor of Massachusetts who was the father of Obamacare with Romneycare and he still stands by it. Massachusetts has the highest premiums of anywhere else in the country. Doctors in Massachusetts, over 50% not seeing new patients. It’s an abject disaster and he’d have to run against a President who’d say “Lookit what you did in Mass and I used your model for what I did to the country”. Then we have Gingrich who is for an individual mandate as late as 2008 and says we should have a mandate or post a $100k bond — these two folks don’t present as clear a contrast as I do when I was talking about private savings accounts. Twenty years ago I wanted bottom up health reform while these two guys were playing footsies with the Left....I am not wrong. 92% of people in Massachusetts had health insurance, and Romneycare just expanded that to be full subsidized by the state of Massachusetts. Romneycare did not create a marketplace. It is a very prescriptive program. He is arguing for and defending a plan that is top down. It is prescriptive in government and was the basis of Obamacare. (Santorum, 1/19)

I think there’s a real difference between people who believed in the free market and people who go around, take financial advantage, loot companies, leave behind broken families, broken towns, people on unemployment.” (Gingrich, 1/10)

Perry told a town hall meeting in Fort Mill, S.C., that firms such as Bain Capital were “just vultures” that “loot” other companies. “They’re vultures that are sitting out there on the tree limb, waiting for a company to get sick,” Politico quoted Perry as saying. “And then they swoop in, they eat the carcass, they leave with that and they leave the skeleton (1/10).

Perry cited two companies in Gaffney and Georgetown, S.C., that he said had lost jobs while the venture capital firm took in millions of dollars. He accused Romney and Bain of “picking their bones clean” rather than working to “clean up those companies, save those jobs.” (1/10)

I won't even bother with what Mitt and his minions are saying about Gingrich, who's going nowhere. There are assassins every tenth of a mile on Newt's path - e.g., Elliot Abrams this morning. Newt is nothing but targets. Okay, just one...Abrams:

Such was Gingrich’s faith in President Reagan that in 1985, he called Reagan’s meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev “the most dangerous summit for the West since Adolf Hitler met with Neville Chamberlain in 1938 in Munich.”

That should take a bit of bite out of the default Obama-Chamberlain comparisons.

Will all this vitriol fade like morning dew in the general election? GOP partisan Daniel Henninger doesn't think so:

Now Mitt's in the muck. Now we're in the muck. It's kind of fun for insiders. But for those who will decide the election, the appeal may be hard to see. With the Romney and Gingrich camps going thermonuclear on each other—Newt tarring Mitt with Swiss and Cayman Island bank accounts—the fallout could damage more Republican infrastructure than just these candidates.

Many of the dark charges that Messrs. Gingrich and Romney are launching at each other are real, or real enough. Newt Gingrich has a serious Freddie Mac problem. It is also disconcerting that so many former, respected House colleagues are critical of his leadership and political character. Mitt Romney's inadequate answers to Rick Santorum's point-by-point critique of his health-care plan are (still) a problem. The Romney tax return screams "tax reform," but he only whispers the phrase. The Bain bonfire burned both Messrs. Gingrich and Romney—the former for doing it and the latter for letting it fester in public.

All this might have been survivable in the old era, after the nomination was secured and the "politics" evaporated. But new media magnifies and extends all the dark charges and bad odor. We are all marinating in it. It sticks. Republicans seem to think these primaries are a family fight. But independents, now perhaps 40% of the electorate, are also in the stinky marinade. The ABC-Washington Post poll just recorded Mr. Romney's unfavorable number rising 15 points in two weeks. It now matches Newt's awful unfavorables.

What's most satisfying is that, aside from the over-the-top demagoging of Romney's Bain record, everything his rivals are saying about him is true. Morn to night Romney lies about Obama, while his rivals tell the truth about him.

Bonus Update, a little after noon, 1/26:

@jaketapper Newt on Mitt: "How can somebody run a campaign this dishonest and think he's going to have any credibility running for president?"

Liberal Reagan redux

2012-01-25T21:12:00.002-05:00

E.J. Dionne compares Obama's structural approach to the SOTU to Reagan's while contrasting the two presidents' political philosophies:

Reagan laid out what became the major themes of his campaign, including not only the nation’s recovery from economic turmoil but also his central philosophical purpose: a continuing battle against “the tendency of government to grow.”

Obama’s speech was Reagan’s turned on its head. Like Reagan, Obama previewed his election arguments in a philosophically aggressive way. But Obama’s claim was the opposite of Reagan’s. Obama spoke of government’s essential role in ensuring shared prosperity and in creating an America “built to last” — a slogan drawn, perhaps not accidentally, from truck commercials for General Motors, the company whose rescue Obama engineered.

Dionne seems mildly surprised by the reverse-Reaganism:

It was to be expected that, in the course of his State of the Union address, President Obama would mention the killing of Osama bin Laden, whose death represented the culmination of the battle against terrorism that began on Sept. 11, 2001.

Far less expected was Obama’s use of the bin Laden episode to present a community-minded worldview that contrasts so sharply with the highly individualistic and anti-government message that has been heard over and over from the Republicans seeking to replace him.

The surprise is somewhat warranted by the infuriating year in which Obama directed his indignation at "Congress" and "Washington" as he tried to cut a deal with adversaries openly devoted to destroying him. But that was a detour (that ended last Labor Day). Obama's whole career -- on the national stage, at least -- has been an extended attempt to turn Reaganism on its head.

After a year of revenue-free deficit reduction, it's easy to forget that Obama's two-year presidential campaign was a pitch to move the American center back to the left, to roll back the tide of growing income inequality, to restore trust in an active government committed to shared prosperity. His epic campaign had a master narrative: at various crisis points in American history, Americans renewed and expanded their commitment to "fairness" and "a common stake in each other's success" and equal opportunity. Over the last 20-30 years -- since Reagan's attack on big government, that commitment had frayed, and the time for renewal and restoration was at hand. If I may run the tape from my chronicling the narrative back then:

From How Obama frames our history, variations on a theme (June 12, 2008; links to referenced speeches in original post):

We've been here before/Let's get back:
But I also know that this nation has faced such fundamental change before, and each time we've kept our economy strong and competitive by making the decision to expand opportunity outward; to grow our middle class; to invest in innovation, and most importantly, to invest in the education and well-being of our workers (Raleigh).
Back in the 1950s, Americans were put to work building the Interstate Highway system and that helped expand the middle class in this country. We need to show the same kind of leadership today. That's why I've called for a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank that will invest $60 billion over ten years and generate millions of new jobs (Pittsburgh).
But if we unite this country around a common purpose, if we act on the responsibilities that we have to each other and to our country, then we can launch a new era of opportunity and prosperity. I know we can do this because Americans have done this before. Time and again, we've recognized that common stake that we have in each other's success. That's how people as different as Hamilton and Jefferson came together to launch the world's greatest experiment in democracy. That's why our economy hasn't just been the world's greatest wealth creator – it's bound America together, it's created jobs, and it's made the dream of opportunity a reality for generations of Americans (New York).

From Janesville: Obama gets down to tax brass (focused on an Feb. 13, 2008 speech):

His calls to national unity that many find so stirring and that some find vacuous are wrapped round his call to reverse the tide of income inequality that's been rising for thirty-plus years.

In fact, he casts income redistribution -- "at a time when we have greater income disparity in the country than we've seen since the first year of the Great Depression" -- as an imperative of fulfilling the American Dream. That's his key to winning the center.

There are several steps to this move-the-center-left gambit. First, Obama frames income redistribution at this time as simple fairness and a collective responsibility:
when opportunity is uneven or unequal - it is our responsibility to restore balance, and fairness, and keep that promise alive for the next generation. That is the responsibility we face right now, and that is the responsibility I intend to meet as President of the United States.
"Balance" suggests the center: the nation has careered rightward. "Responsibility" is a Republican buzzword -- but Obama applies it to the community rather than the individual. And "fairness" - who's going to quarrel with that? [snip]

Obama casts the current "imbalance" as a temporary aberration -- a condition we have more than enough strength to fix:
But that doesn't mean we have to accept an America of lost opportunity and diminished dreams. Not when we still have the most productive, highly-educated, best-skilled workers in the world. Not when we still stand on the cutting edge of innovation, and science, and discovery. Not when we have the resources and the will of a decent, generous people who are ready to share in the burdens and benefits of a global economy. I am certain that we can keep America's promise - for this generation and the next.
Finally, Obama makes shoring up the working poor and middle an imperative of the "unity" he always affirms, and which is often ridiculed as feel-good puffery. Here, unity is "shared sacrifice and shared prosperity":

In the end, this economic agenda won't just require new money. It will require a new spirit of cooperation and innovation on behalf of the American people. We will have to learn more, and study more, and work harder. We'll be called upon to take part in shared sacrifice and shared prosperity. And we'll have to remind ourselves that we rise and fall as one nation; that a country in which only a few prosper is antithetical to our ideals and our democracy; and that those of us who have benefited greatly from the blessings of this country have a solemn obligation to open the doors of opportunity, not just for our children, but to all of America's children.

So welcome to the new Obama...just like the old Obama.

UPDATE 1/26: Jackie Calmes makes a similar point about the continuity in Obama's record, going back deeper into his political past:

President Obama’s election-year State of the Union address on Tuesday echoed a theme that has run through his career: Government and citizens are responsible together for the common good, even as they celebrate individualism and free markets.

As an obscure Illinois state senator, as a United States senator and as president, Mr. Obama has even used the same phrases to describe a communitarian credo rooted in American tradition, but vying always in his telling with a Darwinian alternative: you’re-on-your-own economics.

Check it out -- lots of illustrations.

I funked a speech...

2012-01-25T09:02:00.000-05:00

I must confess, having got up at 4:00 a.m. yesterday, I fell asleep during the SOTU! I'd like to blame Obama, because I didn't much like what I did see, but that would be unfair... I did not like the military bookends; I thought they bordered on jingoistic. Drawing a hard line under $1 million in income for a much higher effective tax rate than anyone pays is a gimmick: the tax code needs reform, and it needs to be made more progressive, but not that way. Couldn't you cut your taxes in half by getting your reportable income down to $999k? I did not hear any clear-cut contrast between Republican plans to further cut taxes on the wealthy and shred the safety net and a vision of the tax code that would raise sufficient new revenue while allowing for Obama's "win the future investments" (did I sleep through it?) I remain frustrated, as I have been since 2007, by Obama's repeated pledges not to raise taxes on anyone earning less than $200k (or $250 for a family). And jiggering the tax code to discourage outsourcing -- an elusive mirage that I remember parsing when Kerry proposed it -- is a lame centerpiece for a discussion of retooling the U.S. economy. The proposals for revamped job training and teacher incentives were studiously vague. Suddenly Obama is against teaching to the test? Isn't that what Race to the Top has been all about? And how exactly did he say we're going to control tuition inflation?

This is obviously not the year for tax reform, and a Clintonesque blancmange may suit Obama's purposes. But the SOTU struck me as a pretty lame followup to Osawatomie, where Obama did cleanly contrast competing economic prescriptions. Or so I thought last night. I will try to take a closer look sometime in the next two days.

The difference between Gingrich and Romney distilled

2012-01-23T13:49:00.001-05:00

Andrew Sullivan takes a crowbar to the political scientists' notion of a Republican "party establishment" and bends it into its new shape: a 'leadership" captured by Limbaugh and Fox, bound to adopt rhetoric and policy that runs on demonizing the opposition -- by means that Gingrich pioneered.

Reading Sullivan's precis of Gingrich's speech, it struck me that the difference between Gingrich and Romney is embedded in one phrase:

Listen to Gingrich's victory speech. It was completely, fundamentally, organizationally Manichean, if you'll pardon the expression. He limned a familiar battle between independence and dependence, pay-checks vs food stamps, America vs "Europe", the American people vs elites "forcing people" for 35 years not to be American, the traditional America vs the "secular, European style socialist bureaucratic system". There is no gray here. There is no nuance. And there is the imputation to the other side of malign motives, secret agendas and foreignness that has been Gingrich's hallmark since the very beginning, when he assaulted the traditions of the Congress until that institution eventually had to repel him (emphasis guess whose).

Romney's claims that Obama wants to turn the U.S. into a European-style social welfare state - -with the caveat that Obama is not a socialist -- is infuriating to Democrats, gilded as it is with lies such as that Obama seeks equality of outcomes. But it's thin gruel compared with Gingrich's food stamp president -- which is visceral, vicious, racist, and dizzyingly effective with the talk show culture Sullivan outlines. "Food stamp president" is Gingrichspeak for Romney's dishonest-but-inhibited diss.

Really I'm just restating Sullivan's core point: Gingrich can channel the base bile; Romney can't. But it really seems to me that that one phrase carries the whole ball of pus.

A caveat: I don't think that the poli sci model of a party establishment has been upended -- just complicated. I believe Romney will win out in the end. The empire will strike back.

Of Cohn and Karma

2012-01-22T12:45:00.002-05:00

Jonathan Cohn worries in the wake of Gingrich's South Carolina victory:

But I know one member of the liberal media who is not giddy: Me. There’s a reason Gingrich is rallying the conservative base right now: He’s espousing some very conservative ideas. For starters, Mr. Former Speaker, what is wrong with food stamps? Gingirch is also appealing to some less than enlightened instincts. Let's face it, his victory in South Carolina probably has less to do with attacks on Bain Capital than it does with an attack on Juan Williams.

Maybe the Gingrich schtick stops working outside of South Carolina and the Republican base – and maybe, if he somehow won the nomination, he’d be the gift to Democrats that everybody supposes. That's the safe bet. But in a year that’s already proven so unpredictable, how can anybody be sure?

I know how he feels; I've expressed similar thoughts about Palin (a first: I can't find the link!). Yes, an unstable demagogue should be a lot easier for Obama to beat than a candidate who'd make a plausible president -- e.g., judging by past work product, Romney. But in a two-party system, either party nominating an unstable demagogue is a danger to democracy, both because any incumbent can be beat if economic conditions are bad enough or if catastrophe strikes, and because the takeover of one major party by extremists, reactionaries and hatemongers means we are always on the knife's edge. The counter-argument, often expressed by Sullivan, is that only by electing an extremist and getting its clock cleaned can a party submerged in its own ideology be dragged back to the center. That may have worked in the case of Goldwater. But Goldwater was a sober statesman compared to Gingrich, Perry, Palin.

My own personal compromise with Nemesis is to hope that Gingrich makes a sustained run at the nomination and continues to train his full demagogic arsenal on Romney, highlighting every flip-flop, making everyone in the nation grasp in reasonable detail the structural kinship of Romneycare and Obamacare, and continuing to demonize Romney's tenure at Bain as nothing but serial layoffs and asset stripping. Then let a weakened Romney face Obama.

Of course, it doesn't matter what Democrats wish, unless they intervene actively, such as by voting in open primaries. But it feels like bad karma to me to root for a candidate unfit to be president to win the nomination contest. And that Gingrich is unfit, the whole GOP establishment knows.

In which I extract some hope from the news of the day

2012-01-21T15:25:00.000-05:00

I may be following wandering fires, but I thought I picked up a couple of glimmers of hope regarding electoral trends in today's Times.

First up is a factoid accompanying Charles Blow's column. Blow's focus is on GOP voters' attitudes toward media and race. But what caught my eye in the sidebar was the percentage of the electorate as a whole who find the president trustworthy: 61%. That's far ahead of Obama's job approval rating, which is I think* 46-47% . In an era of all-time-low trust in government, 61% seems stratospheric. If Americans even value trust in elected officials any more, it's got to help him -- especially as Gingrich and Romney (and their hands-off Super Pac minions) do their vicious uninhibited best to highlight one another's documented lack of integrity and throw in a few gratuitous smears to boot.

The high percentage of Americans who trust Obama is comparable to the percentage who believe he negotiates with the Republicans in good faith -- approximately twice as many as those who believe the reverse. His low approval numbers are mainly an inevitable effect of the anemic economic recovery, perhaps augmented by a perception of ineffectuality that got a boost when he acceded to a no-new-revenues deficit reduction package on August 1. The public supports his "balanced" approach to deficit reduction, the measures in his jobs package, and his proposed means of paying for them, but probably blames him for not be able to get them enacted, as Steve Benen reminds us at regular intervals. Being viewed as a trustworthy conciliator, he therefore has plenty of running room to stage confrontations with Republicans in Congress and executive orders advancing progressive policies, as in the payroll tax cut fight, the recess appointment of Richard Cordray, and the order that health insurance plans cover birth control. If he can shore up his image as a tough, successful fighter (see: foreign policy), he will have a character troika: honest, reasonable, tough. And I doubt anyone but bigots (and perhaps a few far-right ideologues) doubts his intelligence.

Second factoid to mull over (ex post...): a dramatic drop in Wall Street pay. In a Times article about Morgan Stanley's radical cap on cash bonuses, a former "top trader" has this to say about beleaguered colleagues (my emphasis):

Even for those making seven figures or more, the cuts “are a blow,” Mr. Driscoll said. “The effect is psychological. To a large extent, Wall Street keeps score by what you’re paid. If you’re making $750,000 or $1 million, you’re doing O.K. by any reasonable standard. A lot of people make that kind of money. But it affects people’s psyches. It’s a hard thing for the other 99 percent to grasp, but for better or worse, that’s how they measure their value and self-worth: what their paycheck is. I’m not trying to defend that, but that’s how it is. Now they’re being paid less and less. They’re being pilloried in the press and by the 99 percent. Even Republican candidates are attacking you. People in the industry are being treated like pariahs.”

This stirs some hope that the opportunistic and demagogic attacks by Gingrich and Perry on Romney's Bain career have blurred the battle lines. It's Gingrich who, while denigrating OWS protesters with one side of his mouth, adopted their language vis-a-vis successful private equity with the other. With awareness of the 99/1 gap heightened, the Republican nominee will have to at least gesture toward concern with income inequality, or, cum Romney at present, double down on out-of-touch denial and unqualified defense of a system that has sent the vast bulk of increases in wealth over the past thirty years to those at the very top. Either Gingrich-style popular pandering or Romneyesque advocacy for the one percent could stoke further dissatisfaction with widening inequality.

On the other side of the ledger, Obama is getting some deserved credit for dramatically improved U.S. export numbers, which are actually on track at the moment to meet Obama's goal of doubling exports by 2015. Could an improving economy and an extended GOP food fight lead some Wall Street tycoons and other business interests to conclude that they're better off with Obama's not-so-tough love than with GOP shills whose proposed tax giveaways and draconian cuts in social spending may ultimately push popular wrath to a tipping point?

Thus, if I may exhort the surviving GOP candidates in the voice of the dread commander Dark Helmet in Mel Brooks's Spaceballs: keep firing, assholes!

Attention, David Brooks: "Romney grits" are not the issue

2012-01-20T09:22:00.002-05:00

Nice diversion, David.

David Brooks would have us believe with regard to Romney that "the wealth issue is a sideshow," because Romney is not a "spoiled, cossetted character," but rather a fanatic hard worker shaped by his family's persecution and pioneering grit. True enough, and point taken.

But the trust fund stereotype is a straw man. Romney's wealth is an issue -- and a potent one at this point in American history -- not because his privileged (and demanding) upbringing spoiled him, but because, as a member of the 1% (or the point-one percent), he proposes to further cut taxes on the wealthy and shred the social safety net. As Ezra Klein recently pointed out, Romney's budget proposals are far to the right of candidate George W. Bush's. As Jonathan Cohn adds, his cap on Federal spending at 18% of GDP puts him to the right of Paul Ryan, whose budget ends Medicare as we know it and radically reduces Social Security.

Romney's wealth is also at issue because the way he earned it encapsulates both the strength and the weakness of American capitalism in the Reagan and post-Reagan era. Bain may well have revitalized many companies that could not have survived without restructuring via the kind of strategic management the company pioneered and fostered. Bain also loaded down its purchases with debt and effectively looted some of them: the leveraged structure effectively siphoned wealth from employees to investors. Bain, in short, contributed both to growth and growing inequality.

The problem is not that Romney participated (and helped innovate) such a system but that he decries any discussion of how to moderate it -- how to restructure American capitalism so that wealth is more equitably and productively shared -- as "the bitter politics of envy."

The irony is that Romney is probably not lying (for once) -- at least with respect to personal inclination -- when he says that he's concerned more for the middle class than for the wealthy and that "I'm not running for office trying to find a way to lower the tax burden paid for by the very high, very highest income individuals. What I'm solving for is growth." Radical as it is, his economic plan is less extreme in its budget cutting and new tax breaks than those of his rivals. As governor of Massachusetts, he did everything he could to squeeze new revenue out of corporations without violating Republican orthodoxy by creating anything that could be called new taxes. And of course, he expanded the social safety net -- redistributed wealth toward the 8% of the state population that lacked health insurance.

The problem, as Brooks mutedly implies, is that Romney will say or do anything to get elected -- and that includes not only mischaracterizing and demonizing Obama policies very like those of the old Romney, but binding himself with promises to further cut taxes for the wealthy, gut Medicare and Social Security, effectively end Medicaid, radically reduce other social programs for the poor, increase defense spending in the wake of its doubling over ten years, start a shooting war with Iran and a trade war with China. He can't "solve for growth" with the Republican primary electorate setting the terms of the equation -- or rather, not for growth that wouldn't radically accelerate already galloping income inequality.

Data-driven Romney has to know that these policies are insane. But as Jonathan Bernstein keeps reminding us, presidents keep their promises -- or at least try their utmost. And therein lies the real mystery of Romney. He's allowed his ambition to govern to undercut his ability to govern in a way that won't make the United States as unrecognizable as falsely claims Obama is making it.

Obama the minimalist nation builder

2012-01-19T23:31:00.000-05:00

Ever since he questioned Ryan Crocker and David Petraeus on U.S. goals in Iraq on April 8, 2008, I have noted Obama's minimalist criteria for success, first in Iraq and then in Afghanistan. Here's what he said to Crocker at that time:

I'm not suggesting that we yank all our troops out all the way. I'm trying to get to an endpoint. That's what all of us have been trying to get to.

And, see, the problem I have is if the definition of success is so high, no traces of Al Qaida and no possibility of reconstitution, a highly-effective Iraqi government, a Democratic multiethnic, multi- sectarian functioning democracy, no Iranian influence, at least not of the kind that we don't like, then that portends the possibility of us staying for 20 or 30 years.

If, on the other hand, our criteria is a messy, sloppy status quo but there's not, you know, huge outbreaks of violence, there's still corruption, but the country is struggling along, but it's not a threat to its neighbors and it's not an Al Qaida base, that seems to me an achievable goal within a measurable timeframe.

Compare what he told Fareed Zakaria about the endgame in Afghanistan in an interview published today (my emphasis):

I never believed that America could essentially deliver peace and prosperity to all of Afghanistan in a three-, four-, five-year time frame. And I think anybody who believed that didn’t know the history and the challenges facing Afghanistan. I mean, this is the third poorest country in the world, with one of the lowest literacy rates and no significant history of a strong civil service or an economy that was deeply integrated with the world economy. It’s going to take decades for Afghanistan to fully achieve its potential...

From the perspective of our security interests, I think we can accomplish our goal, which is to make sure that Afghanistan is not a safe haven from which to launch attacks against the United States or its allies. But the international community — not just us; the Russians and the Chinese and the Indians and the Pakistanis and the Iranians and others — I think all have an interest in making sure that Afghanistan is not engulfed in constant strife, and I think that’s an achievable goal.

U.S. security is U.S. responsibility: stabilizing one of the world's poorest and most strife-torn countries is a joint responsibility. The goal is minimal -- "that Afghanistan is not engulfed in constant strife." The commitment over the "decades" required before Afghanistan is truly stable and prosperous is far more limited, but therfore sustainable. This is the Rory Stewart plan, on timed release.

Read the whole interview. Obama is in complete control articulating U.S. goals and means of achieving them -- with respect to Iran, China, our alliances in Asia, and the nature of U.S. leadership. Would that this election could be decided on foreign policy. It would be a landslide

Newt blames everyone but himself for his troubles (HUGE CHEERS)

2012-01-19T22:30:00.002-05:00

Well, we really do judge these debates like American Idol. Newt's little show of high moral dudgeon when asked at the opening gun about his ex-wife's allegations of cruel, self-serving betrayal is getting rave reviews as performance art. And it was an astounding display of the Audacity of Hubris. In the space of a minute or two, Gingrich managed to blame or condemn questioner John King, the news media, his ex-wife and Barack Obama for his being forced to address the consequences of his serial adultery. Let's consider the substance:

I will respond. I think that the destructive, vicious, negative nature of much of the news media makes it harder to govern this country and get decent people to run for office. I am appalled you would begin a presidential debate with a topic like that. (HUGE CHEERS). Every person in here knows personal pain. Every person in here has had someone go through personal things. To take an ex wife and make it two days before the primary is as close to despicable as anything I can imagine. My two daughters wrote the head of ABC and made the point that it was wrong, they should pull it, and I am astounded that CNN would take trash like that and open a presidential debate. Don’t try to blame someone else, YOU chose to start this debate with this. The story is false, personal friends attest it is false, ABC is not interested because the media just wants to protect Barack Obama and attack Republicans. I am tired of the elite media doing this. (HUGE CHEERS)

We begin with projection. The question is whether Newt is a decent person: the evidence is overwhelming that he's not. Confronted with that evidence, it's the media's job to raise the question.And "destructive, vicious, negative nature" is a pitch-perfect description of Newt and the way he's conducted political warfare for thirty years, and the way he's taught his party to conduct it.

Every person here knows personal pain. Right -- the question is how much of it they've inflicted on others. I am astounded that CNN would take trash like that and open a presidential debate. Trash = the allegations of his second wife, strikingly similar to the allegations of his first wife. Unchallenged: that he left both for women he had been carrying on affairs with (one of whom was his second wife). Trash to the trash! ABC is not interested because the media just wants to protect Barack Obama and attack Republicans. Gather round me, fellow Republicans! And they did -- no one had stomach to press the attack.

Bulletin, Newt: Barack Obama protected himself -- by not exposing himself to his wife and the world as the most self-serving deceptive, treacherous and cruel cad on the national stage.

All those pieties about forgiveness with which Newt's rivals dodged confronting him on this front are just so much Christianist crap. Newt's ex-wife can forgive him if she will -- and his daughters, as they claim to. The rest of us have nothing to forgive because he did us no harm (excepting his Republican colleagues, whose crusade against Clinton he undermined). But at our peril would we forbear to judge his character and fail to recognize him for the treacherous fraud he is.

Bill Clinton's post-mortem on 2010

2012-01-18T20:29:00.002-05:00

In an in-depth interview in Esquire, Bill Clinton delivers a detailed recap of recent U.S. political history that's for the most part economically determinist: Democrats were bound to win in '08, Republicans in '10. But I have one bone to pick. Clinton alleges a couple of messaging errors & omissions on Obama's part, starting with this:

There was no way people could feel fixed in 2010. So I wish now, and I'm not — I didn't see it, either — but I wish now that we had all known enough about this on September 16, 2008, when we still had a debate or two to go, and that the president could have said, "You know, I've just looked at this. This kind of thing is happening to us now, first we gotta keep everything from cratering, and that means we'll have to help some people who contributed to the problem. I hate that, but I can't let your financial system go down. I can't let it be so you can't use your credit card.

True, there was a debate or two to go. And on October 7, 2008 Obama was asked by an audience member how the $700 billion bank bailout would help ordinary people who are "having a hard time." His response:

Well, Oliver, first, let me tell you what's in the rescue package for you. Right now, the credit markets are frozen up and what that means, as a practical matter, is that small businesses and some large businesses just can't get loans.

If they can't get a loan, that means that they can't make payroll. If they can't make payroll, then they may end up having to shut their doors and lay people off.

And if you imagine just one company trying to deal with that, now imagine a million companies all across the country.

So it could end up having an adverse effect on everybody, and that's why we had to take action. But we shouldn't have been there in the first place.

Maybe he didn't say it often enough over the long course of bailouts? Well, there was this on April 14, 2009:

Of course, there are some who argue that the government should stand back and simply let these banks fail – especially since in many cases it was their bad decisions that helped create the crisis in the first place. But whether we like it or not, history has repeatedly shown that when nations do not take early and aggressive action to get credit flowing again, they have crises that last years and years instead of months and months – years of low growth, low job creation, and low investment that cost those nations far more than a course of bold, upfront action. And although there are a lot of Americans who understandably think that government money would be better spent going directly to families and businesses instead of banks – "where's our bailout?," they ask – the truth is that a dollar of capital in a bank can actually result in eight or ten dollars of loans to families and businesses, a multiplier effect that can ultimately lead to a faster pace of economic growth.

The second half of Clinton's riff on Obama's should-have messaging is more on target. Picking up where we left off:

I can't let — and then, at five hundred years every one of these things takes between five and ten years to get over. My goal is to beat that. I'm gonna try to get it done for you in less than five years. That's my goal, that oughta be America's goal, we oughta beat the odds, we oughta do something nobody has ever done before, but it won't be fixed in two years. It can't be.

The "five hundred years" is a reference to Kenneth Rogoff's historical argument that financial collapses always cause deep recessions. And while it's hard to imagine a president suggesting that five hard years lay ahead, Clinton is certainly not the first to lament that the Obama administration consistently underestimated the downturn, and encouraged the American people to underestimate it, and fell to a degree into the Hoover prosperity-is-just-around-the-corner trap. On that count I think Obama would have to plead guilty.

The Perry Way of defamation

2012-01-17T20:39:00.000-05:00

Ever since he first strutted stiff-spined onto the presidential candidates' stage, Rick Perry has struck me as a danger to democracy -- the purest thug in that confederacy of charlatans, demagogues and ideologues that constitute the GOP field. Time after time, I've felt compelled to point out the pattern of his verbal aggression: escalate a garden-variety policy difference or critique with the most inflammatory of slurs, and justify the slur by insisting that since there is some criticism to be leveled at the target, any insult will do. Social Security is a "criminal enterprise" because its funding may need to be tweaked; Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke is "almost treasonous" because his policies may help Obama; Obama is opposed to the country's founding ideals because Perry is pleased to label his mainstream Democratic policies "socialist."

The latest target of Perry's signature mode of verbal assault is Turkey. In last night's debate in South Carolina, asked whether Turkey, having allegedly "embraced" Hamas and "threatened military force against Israel and Cypress, still belongs in NATO, Perry called Turkey "a country that is being ruled by, what many would perceive to be Islamic terrorists." Note, for starters, the recourse to vaguely defined authority: "what many would perceive." That's a typical Perry dodge: his trademark slur for Social Security is okay because "calling Social Security a Ponzi scheme has been used for years. I don’t think people should be surprised that terminology would be used."

Today, after Turkey's foreign minister condemned the slur, both Perry and his spox Victoria Coates defended it in Perry's usual terms. That is: because some criticism of Turkey might be legitimate, the most inflammatory insult is legitimate. Coates had recourse to that 'other people say' dodge:

The key to the whole business is to look at the question and the way it was asked," she said. "It's an important distinction that what [Perry is] saying is that the Turkish leadership is engaging in behavior that many people would associate with Islamic terrorists [my emphasis].

Coates went on to qualify that claim with a good deal more nuance than Perry himself would ever employ, effectively admitting that the insult of choice was inaccurate while asserting it would not be retracted:

So would Perry, if elected president, put Turkey on the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism, along with Hamas supporters Iran and Syria [with which Perry did group Turkey]? Not exactly.

"No, we would not list Turkey as a state sponsor of terrorism. We don't have any evidence of them engaging in international terrorist acts," Coates explained. "I think we know they are extremely supportive of Hamas, but these things go in stages."

Perry simply fell back on his "one insult is as good another" defense:

"This is a country that's got some explaining to do to the United States," Perry told CNN's Wolf Blitzer, The idea that [Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's regime has somehow or other has somehow or other earned our respect is not correct."

Right. And a Fed Chairman who's go some explaining to do by Perry's lights is 'almost treasonous.'

Last night, Perry put this thug-logic into a peculiar kind of reverse when defending the U.S. marines caught on film urinating on dead Afghans:

PERRY: They -- they made a -- a mistake that the military needs to deal with. And they need to be punished. But the fact of the matter -- the fact of the matter is this, when the Secretary of Defense calls that a despicable act, when he calls that utterly despicable. Let me tell you what's utterly despicable, cutting Danny Pearl's head off and showing the video of it.
(APPLAUSE)

PERRY: Hanging our contractors from bridges. That's utterly despicable. For our president for the Secretary of State, for the Department of Defense secretary to make those kinds of statements about those young Marines -- yes, they need to be punished, but when you see this president with that type of disdain for our country, taking a trillion dollars out of our defense budget, 100,000 of our military off of our front lines, and a reduction of forces, I lived through a reduction of force once and I saw the result of it in the sands of Iran in 1979. Never again.

Because beheading Daniel Pearl is despicable, urinating on corpses is not. It's just a mistake -- though Obama administration condemnation of the deed is despicable, occasion for the smear that it has disdain for the military).

In fact, desecration of enemy corpses is a crime under U.S. and international law. Someone (via the WaPost's Felicia Somnez?) must have told Perry as much in the interim between his first defense of the marines and last night's debate, because his acknowledgement that the marines have to be punished was new. But when it comes to war atrocities, as Rudy Giuliani might say, "it depends on who does it."

The toxic brew of massive upper income tax cuts and domestic spending cuts, military spending increases and all-but-promised war with Iran advocated by all the Republican presidential candidates (save in part Ron Paul) bespeaks deep long-term trouble for the United States if Obama is defeated. Among the viable candidates, though, I have felt from the start that Perry constituted the gravest danger. Gingrich is an inflammatory demagogue, willing to deploy any lie or incite any fear for political gain, but I don't sense that his aggression goes as deep. Santorum is the most rigid of ideologues, dangerously willing to go to war, but there are some shreds of compassion and respect for law in him. Romney will say anything to get elected -- and fearfully, make any promise -- but he is competent and analytical; were he not beholden to his base, he might govern well. Perry is the purest thug among them. You are with him or against him -- and if you're not on his side, no insult, and presumably no punishment, is too good for you.

Perry's rejection by GOP voters, notwithstanding his seemingly tailor-made experience, cultural positioning and war chest, is one bright spot in a terrifying election season.

Related posts:
Our next 'great communicator'
Voters sniff out Perry's dominant trait
Perry keeps skidding on smears

Thank GOP voters for small favors

2012-01-16T23:23:00.004-05:00

If there has been one silver line in the long disgusting spectacle of the GOP nomination contest, it's the failure of Rick Perry to get any traction. As Jonathan Bernstein reminded us early and often, Perry -- a three-term governor of the largest Republican state, with an at least superficially impressive job creation record and an enormous war chest-- was the candidate best positioned to win, or at least give Mitt Romney a serious run. He's failed to break into the top four purely by virtue of proving himself too stupid and (perhaps) cruel and abusive even for Republican primary voters. Tonight he was in top form -- calling Turkey's leaders terrorists and lumping this NATO member with Iran and Syria, defending the U.S. marines who urinated on Afghan corpses on the grounds that their crime was not as bad as the beheading of Daniel Pearl, and declaring a state of war between the U.S. and South Carolina and between the U.S. and "religion."

While Republicans are going to nominate a shameless liar, they have forborne to elevate an incompetent, a religious fanatic or a fascist.

Tonight, for the first time, I got fully into the swing of debate-tweeting. Some live impressions @xpostfactoid1.

Better Angels in Super Hornets

2012-01-16T14:28:00.000-05:00

The continued U.S. military engagement on behalf of Hamid Karzai's government in Afghanistan is viewed by increasing numbers of Americans as a legacy struggle -- seen to varying degrees from different perspectives as wasteful, futile, brutal. Maybe so. At the same, whatever the prospects for success however defined, the manner of its fighting illustrates a major thesis of Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined: that great powers' recourse to violence grows ever more calibrated and proportional.

Given the waste of the Iraq war, the mishandling of the one in Afghanistan, the hundred-plus thousand lives lost in the one and the tens of thousands in the other, the claim may seem callous and polyannish. Compared to past conflicts of like scope, however, it true nonetheless, and increasingly so. Today's front-page New York Times report by C.J. Chivers on changing U.S. aerial tactics in Afghanistan provides a striking illustration. One navy flight commander's experience illustrates the current m.o.:

In 953 close-air support sorties by the 44 F/A-18 Super Hornets aboard the aircraft carrier John C. Stennis, from where Commander McDowell flies now, aircraft struck only 17 times. They flew low- or mid-elevation passes 115 times.

The shifts in missions and tactics partly reflect adaptations by the Taliban. But guided by complex rules of engagement and by doctrine emphasizing proportionality and restraint, they also reflect what Commander McDowell calls “a different mentality.”

These days, striving for certitude in target selection and minimizing civilian casualties have become standard practice. Projecting power nonlethally is routine. Dropping bombs is not.

“So much has changed from when I was here the first time,” he said, looking down at Afghanistan on a six-hour flight early last week. “Now I prefer not dropping — if I can accomplish the mission other ways.”

This is in dramatic contrast to the way the same commander acted and thought ten years ago:

At the outset of the war in 2001, American aircraft often attacked in ways that maximized violence, including carpet bombing, dropping cluster munitions and conducting weeks of strikes with precision-guided munitions.

Flying in an F-14 squadron from the aircraft carrier Enterprise, then-Lieutenant McDowell dropped 6,000 pounds of munitions in the war’s first week, destroying Taliban aircraft and vehicles at Herat airfield and striking training camps and barracks in Kandahar Province.

He had already flown the past two years in Kosovo and Iraq, where in 32 combat sorties he dropped 35,000 pounds of guided munitions, including on Serbian barracks that were struck when the largest number of soldiers were believed to be inside.

“Our culture is a fangs-out, kill-kill-kill culture,” he said. “That’s how we train. And back then, the mind-set was: maximum number of enemy killed, maximum number of bombs on deck, to achieve a maximum psychological effect.”

Recently, the COIN tactics laid out in Petraeus' counterinsurgency manual and McChrystal's 2009 surge proposal for Afghanistan have been derided as a fraud (I'm afraid I can't recall the source). They are not. The premise of the Afghan mission may well be fatally flawed, in that there has never been a viable ally to support, and from a U.S. security standpoint the goal and endgame at this point seem increasingly nebulous. But the effort to minimize casualties and so not undermine the quest for hearts and minds is real -- and part of a larger trend in the way the west at least wages war.

Pinker views the now-accelerating trend toward more restraint in use of force as a delayed dividend of the Enlightenment:

It's no coincidence that the word proportionality has a moral as well as a mathematical sense. Only preachers and pop singers profess that violence will someday vanish off the face of the earth. A measured degree of violence, even if only held in reserve, will always be necessary in the form of police forces and armies to deter predation or to incapacitate those who cannot be deterred. Yet there is a vast difference between the minimal violence necessary to prevent greater violence and the bolts of fury that an uncalibrated mind is likely to deliver in acts of rough justice. A coarse sense of tit-for-tat payback, especially with the thumb of self-serving biases on the scale, produces many kinds of excess violence, including cruel and unusual punishments, savage beatings of naughty children, destructive retaliatory strikes in war, lethal reprisals for trivial insults, and brutal repression of rebellions by crappy governments in the developing world. By the same token, many moral advances have consisted not of eschewing force across the board but of applying it in carefully measured doses. Some examples include the reform of criminal punishment following Beccaria's utilitarian arguments [in the 18th century], the measured punishments of children by enlightened parents, civil disobedience and passive resistance that stop just short of violence, the calibrated responses to provocations by modern democracies (military exercises, warning shots, surgical strikes on military installations), and the partial amnesties in postconflict conciliation. These reductions in violence required a sense of proportionality, a habit of mind that does not come naturally and must be cultivated by reason (location 14364).

Pinker's constant odes to current western 'habits of mind' can get a bit rich, especially in light of the bellicose tone of American politics today, and in particular the GOP candidates' pledges and near-pledges for a new launch of violence in Iran (for an 'uncalibrated mind', sample the rough justice promises of presidential candidate Rick Perry). He does not take into account the contemporary forces driving politicians to undertake military adventures in the first place; more broadly, as I hope to explore in a later post, he does not consider the implications of retrograde or "decadent" tendencies tendencies in U.S. and European society that he himself identifies. One thing he does do convincingly, though, is document the trends toward reduced violence in the world at large and in the west's waging of war over the last twenty years.

Related posts:

The bettering angels of our nature
Better angels in the news
Religion helped develop our better angels
How our better angels' wings might be clipped
Better angels leave their kitchens in Cairo
Can humanity lead itself out to pasture?
Better dead than red, revisited

Shooting skeet was excellent practice. It taught them to shoot skeet."*

2012-01-16T09:54:00.002-05:00

In today's Times, Michael Winerip spotlights an important limitation to a widely publicized longitudinal study that found that elementary school teachers who significantly raise students' test scores have a positive impact on their long-term prospects.Winerip notes that the testing in question took place before the era of "high-stakes testing," in which teachers are under relentless pressure to teach to the test and curricula are bent to that end. Winerip's caveat:

Whether those results are applicable to our post-2004 high-stakes world, we cannot tell. It may well be that teachers under pressure to raise their students’ scores through extensive test preparation will get inflated results that do not carry over positively to adulthood.

There's a kind of Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle at work: if you teach to the test, the test results have a different import. Winerip concludes with a personal anecdote that I can bookend with my later experience as a parent:

I suspect that Mr. Noyes, my 11th grade Advance Placement American history teacher from 40 years ago, had a low value-added rating. As I recall, no one in our class got a top score of 5; I got a 3. There was no prepared curriculum aligned with the test: Mr. Noyes built the lessons. On any given topic, he would assign us several books that viewed history through different lenses — economics, politics, personality.

I have long ago forgotten the content of those lessons, but Mr. Noyes instilled in us something far more important: the understanding that history does not come from one book. While that idea has served me for a lifetime, I do not believe it is quantifiable.

AP courses now are completely keyed to the tests -- at least in humanities, in the district I now live in, or at least in my perception of my sons' experience. When my younger son, now 21, was in AP history five or six years ago, I chanced to read on-screen a little screed he'd written that read like a kind of precis of A People's History of the United States: a sad tale of economic exploitation, racial oppression and faux democracy, in a lightning tour through events and evolutions I knew that he knew little about. I protested to him that it was pretty unbalanced, unsupported, something to that effect. He retorted that he could guarantee me that he'd get an A: what he was supposed to do was "take a strong point of view." And that pretty much summed up the course. There were few or no books assigned; the reading was mainly xeroxed snippets. The students did no research to speak of: in frequent short writings, they responded to the snippets. They were trained to write, not think; to sound knowledgeable, not to learn in depth.

Perhaps these illustrations are a bit too symmetric. Winerip's tale is incomplete, in that he doesn't tell us what kind of school district he was in. One might suspect, given his career path, that it was reasonably affluent; in that case, why did a whole class get through an AP course with no one scoring a 5 on the test? As for my son, he was a high school cynic, albeit a verbally facile one; others in his humanities classes may have dug deeper. But still, I suspect that the two experience illustrate the basic trend line: toward teaching to the test, and educational ADD.

* Title is a memory-paraphrase from Catch-22.

On leveraged debt bondage

2012-01-14T15:01:00.003-05:00

The best articles about Romney, Bain and private equity as it's developed over the last thirty years make it clear that it's very difficult to draw a fair scorecard. Private equity firms can deploy strategic smarts and managerial skill to turn around troubled companies or turbo-charge successful ones; they can also load down their purchased companies with debt, denude them with fees and dividend payouts, and sell them off before chickens come home to roost. Whether PE-owned companies thrive or fail, we never know how they would have done under prior or different ownership. The story of private equity since about 1980 is very much of a piece with the story of American capitalism: impressive growth, but with gains going disproportionately to the very top in a game that seems ever more rigged.

When PE firms (including Bain) do drive a portfolio company into bankruptcy, it's often the result of saddling it with debt. That highlights a basic fact about private equity that I could never quite wrap my head around: when an investment firm or fund uses mainly borrowed money to buy a company, why should the purchased company own that debt?

Steven Rattner, in a defense of Bain, relays the investor's rationale for high leverage:

First, it’s fair game to question the amounts of debt that are sometimes used in leveraged buyouts. While higher debt usually means higher returns — because debt is cheaper than equity, thanks in part to its tax deductibility — it also means higher risk of bankruptcy

Yes, higher debt means higher returns for the fund owners -- but not increased profitability for the purchased company. When current owners of a company borrow money, the loan may boost profitability, because the money is used to fund operations. But when outsiders use debt to fund their own purchase, the debt, it seems to me, is dead weight for the company. At best, if the new owners do add value, the company (which often includes retained existing management) might be thought of as "buying" them with debt. The price is high. According to one study of European LBOs from 2000-2007, the mean debt to assets ratio for companies purchased by LBOs in that period was 70%, versus 29% for comparable public companies. The debt ratio is even higher for U.S. LBO companies. Debt financing is perceived to have a "disciplinary role" for the purchased company -- which means extreme short-term pressure to cut costs, e.g., lay people off. That could be understood as pressure either to be ruthlessly efficient or to privilege short-term thinking -- or both.

I realize that the purchased company becomes a subsidiary of the PE firm that buys it, and that the owner is free to use the company's cash flow to pay off the debt taken on at purchase. That's the way it is, now. But the laws enabling this are not laws of nature; could not laws be passed to shield a company from liability for debt incurred in its purchase? Insurance conglomerates, by way of analogy, cannot use the assets of an insurance subsidiary to pay or guarantee the debts of another subsidiary or of the parent company (as we learned in the AIG bailout, when NY Governor Paterson and Insurance Superintendent Dinallo briefly showed themselves willing to put those rules aside). It is considered in the public interest to provide special protections to insurance policyholders. Could we not do the same for workers? Could the law not stipulate that if a company has a minimum number of workers (5? 50?), its assets cannot be used to pay the debts incurred at its purchase? Could the balance sheets of a PE firm's portfolio companies not be in some way sequestered from that of the the acquisition subsidiary the PE firm uses to control them?

Given U.S. business norms and political culture, mine is a utopian solution.Would a law that shielded the target company from debt incurred in its purchase end leveraged buyouts? Perhaps a PE firm could service debt out of the profits it earns from selling portfolio companies. Maybe not. A less radical response would be to equalize the tax treatment between debt and equity, as Jimmy Carter tried unsuccessfully to do in 1977. Some kind of cap on the amount of leverage used would be another option.

In any case, the brutal demagoguery of the GOP nomination fight is raising in the most unreflective way imaginable a question that might otherwise seem more at home on Daily Kos than in the midst of a radical right presidential slugfest: are leveraged buyouts something that ought to be encouraged (as current tax law currently does), countenanced, made more difficult, or effectively banned? Gingrich and Perry's opportunistic characterization of Bain, one of the nation's premiere PE firms, as purely predatory implies that a death sentence might be appropriate. Maybe I should contact the Gingrich campaign with my 'sequester.'

Erasing the King of Bain Stain

2012-01-13T20:45:00.002-05:00

Romney should be able to beat the King of Bain rap. The film is so obviously over the top in its vilification, it has 'smear' written all over it from the moment the narrator intones menacingly, near the outset, that Bain Capital was initially funded by Latin American money. Its presentation of every factory closure it treats has been shown to be distorted: either the troubles started well before Bain came on the scene, or after Romney left, or in several stages under several changes of ownership. Even Newt is now demanding that his Pac either fix every error or take the film down -- as if the old demonizing fraudster didn't know perfectly well last week, when he was urging debate viewers to watch it and judge for themselves, that there was not an undistorted fact in the whole.

And yet. Distorted does not mean entirely devoid of truth. The closures were real; Bain did push some companies into or towards bankruptcy by overloading them with debt; and when Romney is shown asking "whose pockets" corporate profits flow into, the film provides a clear answer: disproportionately into his and those of his ilk.

Moreover, for all its distortions, the film contains more truth than everything Romney has said about Obama combined: that he has gone on an 'apology tour' and appeased America's enemies; that he made the recession worse; that he aims to create equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity; that he "betrayed his oath of office" by passing a healthcare reform law that mirrored Romney's own and that fulfilled his central campaign promise; and that the said office-betraying ACA takes away everyone's right to chose their doctor or insurance plan. Nor do the lies end with his attacks on Obama: virtually every position he takes is a convoluted amalgam of a prior position and the current demands of the Tea Party. Lies appear in almost every factual assertion Romney makes -- see the ten recent lies documented today by Steve Benen. There is a certain poetic justice in the spectacle of a man who spends his days lying from sunup to sundown being confronted by rivals in his own party with a portrait of a man whose core claims about himself -- that he is a job creator, that he cares about ordinary Americans, that he knows how to fix the economy -- are all lies.

Because Romney inspires distrust across the political spectrum, some of the images and juxtapositions in the film will resonate: a bereft woman intoning, "he's not meaning one bit of what he's saying"; Romney challenging hecklers yelling about corporate profits by asking "into whose pockets" they go; Romney's multimillion dollar estates set off against the lament of a woman who lost her home after being laid off by Bain. And while Romney should be able to counter the cartoonish narrative -- a little expressed regret and compassion for 'inevitable' job destruction would be a useful introit -- so far he's only dug deeper, insisting that publicly expressed concerns with growing inequality are an exploitation of envy, and that the problems of growing wealth disparity should only be addressed in "quiet rooms".

Romney may come back with a strong counter-narrative about Bain. He has the money, and a credible assemblage of facts on his side. But while the film and ad images are still raw, he's been reinforcing them by expressing his apparently core belief that all accumulations of wealth are fully justified, and that modifying the rules by which the managing directors of Bain or Goldman extract ever-growing shares are not a fit subject for public discourse. While those expressed beliefs are not lies, they do not accord with most Americans' current perceptions. Impressions that a person believes what is untrue and asserts what is untrue tend to be mutually reinforcing.

Santorum promises universal daycare!

2012-01-12T11:10:00.002-05:00

Igor Volsky relays the historic announcement live:

Santorum: "This is an election about whether you're going to leave your children free. Period.

Citizens Divided via SuperPac

2012-01-12T09:56:00.004-05:00

As anti-Romney billionaires fund SuperPacs in support of Gingrich, Huntsman and Santorum, it's obvious that the Citizens United decision has remade the political playing field. What has traditionally been big money in campaign finance -- say, $15 million in a quarter raised by a candidate for a major-party presidential nomination -- is chump change to the likes of Sheldon Adelson, Foster Friess and Jon Huntsman, Sr. (their contributions thus far may reach only a large fraction of that level, but give them time). Any candidate who shows a pulse can be insta-funded; any attack that suits a billionaire's agenda can be micro-targeted or broadcast. A nomination that would be wrapped up under the old rules may not still be competitive - -but the level of advertising attack that Romney and Gingrich have sustained or will sustain is unprecedented in a primary race.

In some cases, American voters have shown some antibodies against campaign advertising (see: Huckabee, Iowa; Santorum, Iowa). We're going to have to develop stronger ones. Perhaps the barrage of internecine attacks will be self-cancelling.

Or maybe, just maybe, if enough Republicans are gored and gutted this cycle by SuperPacAttacks, we'll see a new round of campaign finance reform. Especially if they destroy their nominee.

P.S. How about a billionaires' truce? Warren Buffett, on behalf of Obama, promises to match all SuperPac funding on the GOP side -- and they all agree to keep their money instead.

Tell us more, David Brooks: why do Americans mistrust government?

2012-01-10T08:32:00.002-05:00

David Brooks makes a fair point today: Americans' lack of trust in government undermines liberalism. But then he can't forbear to give his bias enough play to blame Democrats almost equally for this sad state of affairs. His diagnosis skips or elides key drivers of this lack of trust.

First, it's cultural. Americans have been railing against the federal government since before it existed. The ratification debate was rife with fear that a tyranny was being established, a fear shared by many members of the Constitutional Convention. Six-year Senate terms, lifetime judgeships, a vice president with feet in two branches of government, direct taxing power -- all were excoriated as instruments of tyranny. A few decades later, states' rights became the battle cry and vehicle for those who so resented any impingement -- or potential impingement -- on their "right" to hold slaves that they established their own weak confederacy custom-designed to leave them to their pleasures of personal dominion.

It's true that FDR's bold and successful initiatives -- federal unemployment insurance, social security, effective oversight of the banking industry, protections for labor -- coupled with a successful world war effort and a postwar boom in which the U.S. dominated global markets generated relatively high confidence in government for a few decades. But then came Ronald Reagan, assuring Americans that government was the problem. And his party has never looked back -- not only disparaging government every time they open their mouths, but doing their best to sell legislation and regulatory oversight to their corporate overlords (or in the case of the Supreme Court, give it away) every time they get control of one or more branches of government.

Brooks cannot resist false equivalence. Republicans have blocked an unprecedented number of Obama's appointments to federal agencies and the judiciary. They have engaged in an unprecedented program of nullification, refusing to allow a vote on any nomination to agencies they disapprove of, e.g., the newly formed Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the National Labor Relations Board --openly aiming to prevent those agencies from functioning. They tried to close off the Constitutional safety valve of recess appointments by using a procedural gimmick to avoid ever technically recessing. Obama, meanwhile, has inexplicably forborne the mass recess appointments to which his predecessors Bush and Clinton resorted. But when he finally calls the faux recess bluff and makes four essential appointments, in Brooks' eyes he is indulging in "vicious squabbles" that "may help Obama in the short term by making him look better than Republicans in Congress. But they will only further discredit Washington over the long run."

No, David. The aim is to discredit Republicans, who have tried to make the federal government stop working. And there's the real rub. Brooks blames the Democrats for adopting Republican methods: " How many times have you heard Democrats from Carter to Obama running against Washington, accusing it of being insular, shortsighted, corrupt and petty?" And that is one charge against Obama that has some heft. Throughout the late spring and summer as he was being snookered and betrayed by House Republicans who torpedoed a "grand bargain" for deficit reduction that Brooks himself characterized as "the deal of the century" for Republicans, Obama did direct his rhetorical fire against a generic "Congress." That was a deeply foolish attempt to avoid antagonizing antagonists openly bent on destroying him.

That soft-pedaling was worse than a crime, it was a mistake. Since Labor Day, Obama has rectified it by directing his firepower against Republicans in Congress who block his every initiative and attempt to foster the recovery, including policies they have long supported. He also, quite eloquently, defends the concept of a government that works to foster equal opportunity.

The only way to defeat endemic mistrust of govenment is to discredit the 30 year-old sustained campaign to discredit it (listen to the contempt and venom oozing from Rick Perry as he promises to close agencies whose names he can't remember and put Congress on part-time wages).The problem is a bit chicken-and-egg. But partisan combat -- and a recovering economy that will cast a kinder light on Democratic initiatives -- is the only way out.

True Newt, false Newt

2012-01-09T10:52:00.001-05:00

Hate-mongering demagogue though he may be, Newt Gingrich spoke one truth and illustrated another in a response to one question from moderator David Gregory in yesterday's GOP debate in New Hampshire:

GREGORY: Speaker Gingrich, if you become President Gingrich and the leader of the Democrats, Harry Reed says he’s going to promise to make you a one term president, how would you propose to work with someone like that in order to achieve results in Washington?

GINGRICH: I think every president who works with the leader of every opposition knows they’re working with someone who wants to make them a one term president. I mean you know that -- that’s the American process. I worked with Ronald Reagan in the early 1990’s. Tip O’Neil was speaker. He wanted to make Reagan a one term president. We had to get one-third of the Democrats to vote for the Reagan tax cuts and we did.

As speaker I was negotiating with Bill Clinton. He knew I wanted him to be a one term president. And we got a lot of things done, including welfare reform. Because you have to reach -- I agree with what Governor Huntsman said earlier, you have to at some point say, the country comes first. How are we going to get things done? We’ll fight later. Lets sit down in a room, lets talk it through. I’ll tell you what I need and I’ll tell you what I can’t do.

You tell me what you need and you tell me what you can’t do and it sometimes takes 20 or 30 days. But if people of goodwill, even if their partisans, come together, talk it out, you know, we’ve got welfare reform, the first tax cut in 16 years, 4.2 percent unemployment and four straight years of a balanced budget, with a Republican speaker and a Democratic president. So it can be done with real leadership.

The perfectly obvious spoken truth is that the opposition wants your head. The illustrated truth is that a professional politician will take credit for the results of fruitful negotiation forever after, regardless of whether the enacted agenda was mainly the opposition's initiative and/or doing.

Gingrich's acknowledgement of the terms of political combat recalls what Bob Dole told Bill Clinton straight-out in their earliest negotiations in 1993, according to Tayler Branch's The Clinton Tapes:

Clinton said Dole spoke of the opposition's job not as making deals but rather making the president fail, so he could be replaced as quickly as possible. In fact, he said Dole himself started running for president within ten days of Clinton's inauguration. "every time he goes to Kansas," remarked the president, "he stops off in New Hampshire on the way."

In posing his question, Gregory was of course trying to mirror-image Mitch McConnell's notorious comment that the GOP's first priority in the 112th Congress was to make Obama a one-term president. What made McConnell's staement so jarring was not his assertion that defeating Obama was a priority but rather laying it out as a first priority -- particularly because it cast such a clear light on the GOP's obstructionism throughout Obama's term -- their demonization of policies they had previously advanced, their filibustering of every bill advanced in the Senate, their unprecedented number of holds and filibusters on hundreds of nominations.

Speaking of Newt, a comment from one of his surrogates in today's Times pretty much reduces Gingrichism to its purest essence. The subject is the plans of the Newt-allied SuperPac Winning Our Future, newly bulked up with a $5 million contribution, to unleash a barrage of ads "attacking Mitt Romney as a predatory capitalist who destroyed jobs and communities," along with a film that paints Romney's Bain Capital as a predatory, asset-stripping, job-killiing robber band. The surrogate is Rick Tyler, senior adviser to Newt's SuperPac, who's " spent a lot of time defending free enterprise from a biblical perspective.” Here's a nice sample of his heuristics:

Mr. Gingrich, who has vowed to run a positive campaign, has said he will tell supporters not to donate to any group that runs negative advertisements on his behalf. Mr. Tyler said the Romney campaign might find the commercials negative. “But I think voters will find them instructive and positive and help them make a decision,” he said.

By that token, I suppose a film and ads exposing Gingrich's chief political activities as character assassination, deception and hate-mongering, and his chief business activity as naked influence peddling, would would also constitute "instructive" and therefore positive campaigning.

And here's Gingrich in yesterday's debate touting that SuperPac movie, in which he legally can have had no hand:

When the 27-and-a-half-minute movie comes out, I hope it’s accurate.

I -- I -- I can say publicly I hope that the super PAC runs an accurate movie about Bain. It will be based on establishment newspapers, like the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Barron’s, Bloomberg News. And I hope that it’s totally accurate and then people can watch the 27-and-a-half minutes of his career at Bain and decide for themselves.

Decide for yourselves, folks -- after watching a propaganda film. That's positive campaigning, Gingrich style.

UPDATE: Gingrich, after 30 years spent slandering all adversaries, suddenly discovers that it's not always possible to remain relentlessly positive:

Gingrich referred to the positive campaign message he’d claimed to this point and said it was impossible to keep that up when talking about Bain.

“It turns out that there are some things that if you describe them, they’re negative,” he said. “If you accurately describe some things, they are negative,” Gingrich said.

Perry keeps skidding on smears

2012-01-08T18:59:00.001-05:00

Give Rick Perry credit for consistency. His primary mode of political communication remains the smear. To be more precise, his default mode of attack is the inflammatory insult used to articulate a garden-variety policy disagreement.

Note the structural similarities between two Perry attacks, one made in today's New Hampshire debate
and one made four months ago. Today:

HILLER: Governor Perry, your party’s last nominee, John McCain wrote in the Washington Post in an op-ed about a year ago, his words, “I disagree with many of the president’s policies but I believe he is a patriot, sincerely intent on using his time in office to advance our country’s cause. I reject accusations that his policies and beliefs make him unworthy to lead America, or opposed to its founding ideals.” Agree?

PERRY: I make a very proud statement and, in fact that we have a president that’s a socialist. I don’t think our founding fathers wanted America to be a socialist country. So I disagree with that premise that somehow or another that President Obama reflects our founding fathers. He doesn’t. He talks about having a more powerful, more centralized, more consuming and costly federal government.

And on September 15, in a Time Magazine interview:

But you know there’s concern that you use controversial rhetoric, like calling Social Security a “Ponzi scheme.”

There may be someone who is an established Republican who circulates in the cocktail circuit that would find some of my rhetoric to be inflammatory or what have you, but I’m really talking to the American citizen out there. I think American citizens are just tired of this political correctness and politicians who are tiptoeing around important issues. They want a decisive leader. I’m comfortable that the rhetoric I have used was both descriptive and spot on. Calling Social Security a Ponzi scheme has been used for years. I don’t think people should be surprised that terminology would be used.

No one gets confused about the point I was making, that we have a system that is now broken. We need to make sure that those on Social Security today — and those approaching it — know without a doubt it will be in place. It will not go away. We’ll have a transitional period for those in mid-career as they’re planning for their retirement. And our young people should be given some options. I don’t know what all of those options need to be yet, but they know instinctively that the program that is there today is not going to be there for them unless there are changes made.

I don’t get particularly concerned that I need to back off from my factual statement that Social Security, as it is structured today, is broken. If you want to call it a Ponzi scheme, if you want to say it’s a criminal enterprise, if you just want to say it’s broken –they all get to the same point. We need, as a country, to have an adult conversation. Don’t try to scare the senior citizens and those who are on Social Security that it’s somehow going to go away with the mean, old heartless Republican.

In one case Perry is invited to refrain from endorsing, and in the other to modify, a defamatory attack. In both cases he asserts that the defamation is appropriate, citing reasons disproportionate to the slur's import. Because Perry labels Obama's policies 'socialist,' he need not repudiate the notion that Obama is "opposed to to [this country's] founding ideals" (never mind that there was no such concept as "socialism" in the founding fathers' time). Because Social Security may be inadequately funded, it's perfectly appropriate to call it a Ponzi scheme or "criminal enterprise."

This sloppy smear-only style may have been too much even for Republican primary voters. The common assumption is that the debates sank Perry because 1) he evinced too much 'compassion' toward illegal immigrants and 2) he often sounded like an idiot, babbling incoherently or trailing off. But he also was thoroughly pwned by Romney in the Sept. 12 CNN debate for his scare tactics regarding Social Security. Note the focus on language (and would that any other GOP candidate could call Romney out this effectively for his own distortions):

BLITZER: Governor Romney, you said that Governor Perry's position on Social Security is, quote, unacceptable and could even obliterate the Republican Party. Are you saying he could not, as Republican nominee, beat Barack Obama?

ROMNEY: No, what I'm saying is that what he just said, I think most people agree with, although the term ponzi scheme I think is over the top and unnecessary and frightful to many people. But the real issue is in writing his book, Governor Perry pointed out that in his view that Social Security is unconstitutional, that this is not something the federal government ought to be involved in, that instead it should be given back to the states.

And I think that view, and the view that somehow Social Security has been forced on us over the past 70 years that by any measure, again quoting book, by any measure Social Security has been a failure, this is after 70 years of tens of millions of people relying on Social Security, that's a very different matter.

So the financing of Social Security, we've all talked about at great length. In the last campaign four years around, John McCain said it was bankrupt. I put in my book a series of proposals on how to get it on sound financial footing so that our kids can count on it not just our current seniors.

But the real question is does Governor Perry continue to believe that Social Security should not be a federal program, that it's unconstitutional and it should be returned to the states or is he going to retreat from that view?

BLITZER: Let's let Governor Perry respond. You have 30 seconds.

PERRY: If what you're trying to say is that back in the '30s and the '40s that the federal government made all the right decision, I disagree with you. And it's time for us to get back to the constitution and a program that's been there 70 or 80 years, obviously we're not going to take that program away. But for people to stand up and support what they did in the '30s or what they're doing in the 2010s is not appropriate for America.

ROMNEY: But the question is, do you still believe that Social Security should be ended as a federal program as you did six months ago when your book came out and returned to the states or do you want to retreat from taht?

PERRY: I think we ought to have a conversation.

ROMNEY: We're having that right now, governor. We're running for president.

PERRY: And I'll finish this conversation. But the issue is, are there ways to move the states into Social Security for state employees or for retirees? We did in the state of Texas back in the 1980s. I think those types of thoughtful conversations with America, rather than trying to scare seniors like you're doing and other people, it's time to have a legitimate conversation in this country about how to fix that program where it's not bankrupt and our children actually know that there's going to be a retirement program there for them.

ROMNEY: Governor, the term ponzi scheme is what scared seniors, number one. And number two, suggesting that Social Security should no longer be a federal program and returned to the states and unconstitutional is likewise frightening.

Look, there are a lot of bright people who agree with you. And that's your view. I happen to have a different one. I think that Social Security is an essential program that we should change the way we're funding it. You called it a criminal...

PERRY: You said if people did it in the private sector it would be called criminal. That's in your book.

ROMNEY: Yeah, what I said was...

(APPLAUSE)

ROMNEY: Governor Perry you've got to quote me correctly. You said it's criminal. What I said was congress taking money out of the Social Security trust fund is like criminal and that is and it's wrong.

While Romney was able to parry Perry, Perry had no answer except ineffective counterattack to Romney's charge that the Ponzi scheme label for Social Security was inaccurate and inflammatory.

The American political system may be entering its dotage. But the electorate has not yet shown itself ready to elevate a transparent bully. At least, not one who's also manifestly stupid.

Update 1/9: I'm pleased to note that Perry is turning his smear tactics on Romney:

“There’s nothing wrong with being successful and making money, that’s the American dream,” Mr. Perry said. “But there is something inherently wrong when getting rich off failures and sticking it to someone else is how you do your business. I happen to think that that is indefensible.”

May he do some damage before he goes belly-up.

Santorum double-blind

2012-01-08T11:36:00.002-05:00

The core of Rick Santorum's domestic policy and governing philosophy is to boost the two-parent family. That's his anti-poverty program. Here he is in today's debate in New Hampshire:

And I believe that there’s one thing that is undermining this country, and it is the breakdown of the American family. It’s undermining our economy. You see the rates of poverty among single- parent families, which are -- moms are doing heroic things, but it’s harder. It’s five times higher in a single-parent family.

We -- we know there’s certain things that work in America. The Brookings Institute came out with a study just a few -- couple of years ago that said, if you graduate from high school, and if you work, and if you’re a man, if you marry, if you’re a woman, if you marry before you have children, you have a 2 percent chance of being in poverty in America. And to be above the median income, if you do those three things, 77 percent chance of being above the median income.

Why isn’t the president of the United States or why aren’t leaders in this country talking about that and trying to formulate, not necessarily federal government policy, but local policy and state policy and community policy, to help people do those things that we know work and we know are good for society? This president doesn’t.

What's the single greatest stimulus to marriage and the two-parent family in the U.S. today? Gay marriage. I have no stats to back this up, but here's my personal impression. Like the spectacle of southern racists beating and baiting peaceful civil rights protestors in the early 1960s, today's news clips and Youtubes of gay couples sobbing with job as they tie the knot are changing the national consciousness -- not only by increasing empathy for gay people but by making marriage cool again. And parenting, too. We have among us a substantial population for whom the opportunity to marry and raise children is a passion and also something of a miracle, given the relative swiftness of social change on this front. That's got to have a demonstration effect on all of us. As Andrew Sullivan has been arguing for decades, gay marriage is a fundamentally conservative aim.

One more little Santorum irony from today's debate:

SANTORUM: They’re a -- they’re a theocracy. They’re a theocracy that has deeply embedded beliefs that -- that the afterlife is better than this life. President Ahmadinejad has repeatedly said the principle virtue of the Islamic Republic of Iran is martyrdom.

So when your principle virtue is to die for your -- for Allah, then it’s not a deterrent to have a nuclear threat, if they would use a nuclear weapon. It is, in fact, an encouragement for them to use their nuclear weapon. And that’s why there’s a difference between the Soviet Union and China and others and Iran.

So...Santorum thinks theocracy is inherently dangerous -- so dangerous that he's stated his willingness to start a war now on the basis of what we already know about the progress of Iran's nuclear program. Why then does he want to found U.S. law on a Catholic interpretation of Biblical law? Oh, and as for that claim that would-be religious martyrs in power render a state fundamentally dangerous: who was it who recently said he would die to stop gay marriage?

Socratic Santorum sidetracks students

2012-01-06T17:28:00.000-05:00

Rick Santorum laid a bit of a trap yesterday for some indignant college kids who confronted him about gay marriage at a student convention in Concord, NH yesterday. David Corn recounts:

Two students asked Santorum how he could justify this opposition with his opening remarks that focused on the guarantee, enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, that no American shall be deprived of the "pursuit of happiness."

"So anyone can marry several people?" Santorum asked. "What about three men?"

Santorum...asked the students to justify gay marriage. When one said, "How about the idea that all men are created equal and [have] the right to happiness and liberty," Santorum asked, Are you saying that everyone should have the right to marry anyone?

The student said yes. And Santorum quickly retorted. "So anyone can marry several people?"

No, the student said.
But what if someone can only be happy if he or she was married to five people? Santorum asked her.

Others in the crowd starting jeering him. "That's not the point," one shouted.

But Santorum, who kept cutting off the students, stuck to this argument. When the students talked about equal rights, he repeatedly interrupted, "What about three men?"

"That's irrelevant," one of the students said.

"No, it's not," he said.

"That's not what I'm talking about," she said.

With a smile, Santorum said, "If we're going to have a conversation based on rational, reasonable thought…if people say it's okay for two, then you have to say why it's not right for three."

Santorum was diverting the students (with some success, it seems; I can't find a full transcript). He was suggesting that their argument was that the state has no right to regulate or define marriage. The question is on what basis the state excludes some relationships from marital status. For Santorum, it comes down to God's law:

He noted that for his interlocutors, "marriage really means whatever you want it to be." Many in the crowd applauded—to show approval of that notion.

But then Santorum got to the nut of his argument: "God made man and woman…and men and women come together to produce children." And, he went on, when children do not have both a father and a mother, "we are harming children, we are harming society."

His bottom-line was clear: Gays and lesbians are not good parents for the youth of the greatest country that ever existed. So no marriage for them.

Perhaps some of his interlocutors really do believe that "marriage means whatever you want it to be." But that need not have been the basis of any focused response to Santorum (that's not what I"m talking about"). The point is not that the state can't deny some relationships marital status: it's that the state must justify its exclusions on the basis of something other than theological assertion. Because the United States is not a theocracy, much as Santorum would like it to be, the state can only ban a given behavior on the grounds that it harms the larger community -- your rights end where mine begin (or, per the original questioner, your pursuit of happiness). Santorum might believe that gay marriage harms the community, and that gay parents "harm children," but he has no evidence, and he will convince virtually no one under 30. His allies in this cause failed epically to make the case for harm in the challenge to Proposition 8 heard in the California Supreme Court .

Whether bigamy leads to some kinds of exploitation or somehow harms the community is a separate question from whether gay marriage does (some of the students might say yes, others no, others might not be sure). Where the students differ from Santorum, regardless of the extent to which their (presumably various) views of marriage differ or coincide with his, is in their view of homosexuality. They likely have imbibed the consensus in the scientific community that it is not an illness; they are convinced by reason or cultural osmosis and probably their own experience that it harms no one; and they do not accept the Bible's authority, as Santorum does, to dictate otherwise or shape U.S. law accordingly.

Obama has long maintained as an article of his political credo that while it's fine for a politician's values to be informed by faith, and to let the role of faith in her judgments be known, she can only argue for policies that further those values on the basis of universal reason:

What our deliberative, pluralistic democracy does demand is that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals must be subject to argument and amenable to reason. If I am opposed to abortion for religious reasons and seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or invoke God's will and expect that argument to carry the day. If I want others to listen to me, then I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all (Audacity of Hope, p. 219).

Santorum too, by his own lights, wants to engage in "a conversation based on rational, reasonable thought," as he told the students. But for him, the underlying argument is always based on Biblical authority as interpreted by the Catholic hierarchy -- as he thinks U.S. law should be. That should get him about as far as proposals to ban contraception. He's a story of one month, max.

Paint Romney as flip-flopper or right-winger? Both/and!

2012-01-04T20:03:00.001-05:00

Methinks New York Times reporter Helene Cooper has posed a false choice for the Obama campaign. But then, John Sides and Kevin Drum both accept the terms, so maybe I'm missing something.

As a plan of attack against Romney, Cooper asks:

Do they go the flip-flopper route? Or do they go the out-of-touch, protector-of-Wall-Street route?

Cooper acknowledges that the two paths may not be mutually exclusive. But then, recounting the campaign's pursuit of the flip-flopper meme, she undercuts that caveat:

But there’s a kink in that approach: independent voters might view Mr. Romney’s shifting positions as nothing other than pragmatism. And by highlighting evolving positions by Mr. Romney, political analysts say, the Obama campaign runs the risk of unintentionally promoting the image of Mr. Romney, the former governor of that bastion of liberalism, Massachusetts, as a moderate.

In the general election, that would be the equivalent of the Obama campaign shooting itself in the foot. The very thing that has made Mr. Romney less palatable to the conservatives who populate the Republican primaries and caucuses — his past moderate positions—is the thing that makes him, at the end of the day, more palatable to the independent voters who will show up in the general election.

Isn't this backwards? Independents might like the Romney of "past moderate positions" -- but he's flip-flopped away from them! Nonetheless, John Sides provides the expert imprimatur:

Mr. Sides said American voters reacted negatively to candidates they perceived as ideologically extreme. Mr. Romney, he suggests, is still, in the eyes of many people, more moderate than the rest of the Republican field, despite his campaign shifts to the right.

“It might be more effective to concentrate on the conservatism,” Mr. Sides argued. “If your goal is to make Romney seem like a conservative ideologue, then bringing up his pragmatic past as the governor of Massachusetts is a bit dissonant.”

Kevin Drum, in assent, adds some voting bloc anthropology:

My guess: the flip-flopper charge probably won't get much traction. It's mostly a problem for conservatives, who don't fully trust that Romney is one of them, but by the time summer rolls around they're going to be his most fire-breathing supporters. They'll have long since decided to forgive and forget, and independents won't care that much in the first place as long as Romney seems halfway reasonable in his current incarnation. It's possible that Obama can do both — Romney is a flip-flopper and a right-wing nutcase! — but if he has to choose, my guess is that he should forget about the flip-flopping and simply do everything he can to force Romney into the wingnut conservative camp. That'll be his big weakness when Labor Day rolls around.

It seems to me, though, that the flip-flopper charge and the extremist charge are complementary. Romney, in pursuit of a nomination prize awarded by the Republican base, has flip-flopped into extremism: no new taxes, no universal healthcare, no abortion, no attempts to limit greenhouse gas emissions, no aid to homeowners, no job-creating measures that involve federal spending, no accommodation for Gingrich-styled "deserving" undocumented aliens. Each of these positions represents a reversal of a past position (except perhaps aid to hurting homeowners).

The point is that Romney has repudiated his pragmatism to accommodate Republican rejectionism -- repudiating his past repudiation of Reaganism and embracing a far more rigid ideological purity than Reagan ever did. The line of attack seems pretty seamless to me.

Perhaps this is what I'm missing: are Cooper, Sides and Drum imagining a scenario in which nominee Romney runs hard back to the center and gets slammed for that? Some new revenue? - maybe...Let some core elements of Obamacare stand? - maybe... But wouldn't that be one set of flip-flops too many?

Gingrich goes Bob Dole one better

2012-01-03T10:41:00.000-05:00

Lore has it (who knows, maybe the polling data doesn't back it) that Bob Dole disqualified himself for the presidential nomination in 1988 with a testy challenge to George H. W. Bush: stop lying about my record. That was in response to a Bush ad accusing Dole of "straddling" on taxes.

Newt Gingrich, who knows he's going nowhere and counts himself destroyed by Romney's hands-off SuperPac ads, has defined intraparty decency down down down. On CBS this morning, he told Mitt Romney to stop lying about...everything. Recap below starts with a question by Norah O'Donnell:

"You scolded Mitt Romney, his friends who are running this Super PAC that has funded that, and you said of Mitt Romney, 'Someone who will lie to you to get to be president will lie to you when they are president. I have to ask you, are you calling Mitt Romney a liar?"

"Yes," Gingrich replied.

"You're calling Mitt Romney a liar?"

"Well, you seem shocked by it!" said Gingrich. "This is a man whose staff created the PAC, his millionaire friends fund the PAC, he pretends he has nothing to do with the PAC - it's baloney. He's not telling the American people the truth.

"It's just like this pretense that he's a conservative. Here's a Massachusetts moderate who has tax-paid abortions in 'Romneycare,' puts Planned Parenthood in 'Romneycare,' raises hundreds of millions of dollars of taxes on businesses, appoints liberal judges to appease Democrats, and wants the rest of us to believe somehow he's magically a conservative.

"I just think he ought to be honest with the American people and try to win as the real Mitt Romney, not try to invent a poll-driven, consultant-guided version that goes around with talking points, and I think he ought to be candid.

Wow, oh wow, oh wow. Can we please have several months of this? The Obama campaign won't have to add a word; they can just run the tape.

The irony, which is too weak a word, is that we've got the greatest liar in politics truthfully calling the presumptive nominee a liar, after a week he spent whining about the politics of personal destruction, which he practically invented. Gingrich is of course violating Ronald Reagan's 11th Commandment, thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican. Just one more norm the old gutter snipe has blown through.

Obama through the looking glass(es)

2012-01-02T11:32:00.000-05:00

Obama is a radical socialist who vastly increased government spending, saddled our grandchildren with debt and expanded government control of every aspect of Americans' lives.

Obama is a naive weakling who let Republicans frame the agenda in 2011, was seduced by a siren song of compromise, and capitulated to the Tea Party hostage-takers, agreeing to massive spending cuts without winning any revenue increases.

I'd like to accuse Republicans of the doublethink required to embrace both narratives, but they never really bought into the second -- at best, they projected "weak Obama" onto the foreign policy stage (a bit of a stretch in light of Obama's apparent 'got the sucker' lethality, whatever you think of the wisdom of his various covert and low-key military operations). The capitulator-in-chief narrative belongs to disappointed progressives.

Still, given the Rube Goldberg two-stroke spending cut apparatus that Obama signed onto on August 1 this year, I have a hard time wrapping my head around the Wall Street Journal editorialists' lump-of-coal lament today:

As for the White House, Mr. Obama joined the assault on Mr. Ryan, but he also claimed to favor some fiscal discipline and he invited GOP leaders to work out a compromise behind closed doors. This let him posture as a spending cutter without having to make a decision on any specific budget cuts or reforms. He gulled Speaker John Boehner in particular with promises of sincerity, only to demand $1 trillion in tax increases that House Republicans could never pass without violating their own campaign promises.

This was the big GOP mistake. Mr. Boehner and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell both fell for Mr. Obama's backroom political trap. Mr. Boehner privately insisted that Mr. Obama really wanted a deal, while Mr. McConnell, who never liked the House budget, was looking for political cover on Medicare. But whatever their motives, their strategy failed by letting Mr. Obama set the terms of debate. They failed to make Senate Democrats and the White House declare themselves in public where voters would notice.

That is nuts. No one, but no one, thought that Obama and his allies would enter into deficit reduction negotiations without seeking some new revenues as part of the package. Throughout the summer, as Obama embraced the debt-ceiling-deadline negotiations as "a unique opportunity to do something big," no one thought that Boehner was being hoodwinked merely by virtue of fielding proposals for some revenue increases. In fact progressives and conservatives alike, outside the extremist Tea Party bubble, were in agreement that Obama was willing to give away the store. accepting a paltry $800 billion in new revenue over ten years as the price for extending the vast bulk of the Bush tax cuts, cutting Medicare benefits, raising the retirement age, and agreeing to at least a 3-to-1 spending cuts-to-tax increases ratio. On the Democratic side, Jonathan Chait called the busted grand bargain a terrible deal; conservative David Brooks marveled that Republicans were turning down the deal of the century. But in the bubble narrative, that deal was an elaborate trap set by a wily Obama -- despite the fact that Boehner came away with over $2 trillion in legislated cuts over ten years with no revenue increases (as yet: the Bush tax cut expiration looms). And far from setting the terms of debate, Obama spent three quarters of a year of sputtering-to-expiring recovery riveted on deficit reduction.

Apparently the WSJ editorialists, like many observers on both sides, regard the cuts legislated from 2013 forward as notional, or rather, up for grabs depending the outcome of 2012 and future elections. More interesting in a way is their take on the budgets agreed for 2011 and 2012:

The news is that after accounting for last-minute unemployment insurance extensions, "emergency" spending and higher Medicare physician payments, total federal outlays are estimated to be $3.65 trillion in fiscal 2012, up slightly from $3.6 trillion in 2011. The last year has seen no major reforms in any of the big entitlement programs—Medicare, Medicaid or Social Security. Spending on food stamps alone is scheduled to reach $80 billion in 2012, more than double the amount as recently as 2007.

Republicans had promised to roll back discretionary spending to 2008 levels, to save $100 billion. But the August debt deal lowered the savings to $7 billion—or a 2012 target for appropriations of $1.043 trillion. Even that target was missed because appropriators tacked on roughly $10 billion in disaster relief—hurricanes this summer—and so the new total is $1.054 trillion. That's $4 billion more than the 2011 baseline of $1.050 trillion, although savings from troop withdrawals in Iraq may reduce that.

While acknowledging that "a flat overall budget is a vast improvement over the years 2007 to 2011," the authors still profess to see a glass half empty (or rather, a budget still overflowing with wasteful spending). But those who acknowledge that cutting spending at a time of anemic growth and high unemployment will have a counter-stimulative effect see the relatively modest cuts enacted for 2011 and 2012 as a significant drag on the economy. According to Merrill Goozner of the Fiscal Times:

Government spending on discretionary programs has been cut substantially. According to an analysis by Bipartisan Policy Center budget experts, the 2012 budget, in inflation-adjusted dollars, will have eliminated all residues from the 2009 stimulus package and reduce spending to slightly below 2008 levels – the year before the recession and the target put in the pledge..

The GOP's biggest “win” came in early August after the debt-ceiling standoff. The Budget Control Act included a ten-year reduction in spending of nearly $1 trillion starting in the current fiscal year with the prospect that there will be another $1.3 trillion in cuts starting in 2013. It’s already having an immediate impact on next year’s employment picture, which led Bernanke in September to tell a Minneapolis audience that “a substantial fiscal consolidation in the shorter term could add to the headwinds facing economic growth and hiring.”

The 2.1 million federal workforce, three-quarters of whom work outside the Washington, D.C. area, is now in its third year of a wage freeze with a hiring freeze in place at many agencies. That will lead to sharp drops in employment in the coming year due to the escalating number of federal employees opting for retirement. If employment levels return to 2008 levels, that could be a loss of 173,000 jobs, which would wipe out a month or two of private sector job gains at present rates.

David Dayan, who cites Goozner, references a Center for American Progress study that details "how Congresssional budget decisions are putting Americans out of work," specifically government employees in law enforcement, environmental cleanup and construction." While Dayan acknowledges in an update that report author Scott Lilly may have taken GOP boasts about the extent of cuts too literally and that the estimate of 370,000 jobs killed by the 2011 cuts may represent an "outer bound," he maintains that the report details many cuts in progress that are all too real. He also pushes back against the widespread dismissal of cuts mandated for out-years:

Talking about the specific 2011 outlays neglects that the FY2011 deal set the baseline on discretionary spending for the next ten years. Those lowered baselines became the starting point for the discretionary cuts in the debt limit deal. That deal initiated a spending cap on discretionary spending to last the next ten years, for a total of $900 billion in cuts. That will roll back fiscal policy in a very real way; though not as high-profile as, say, cuts to Social Security or Medicare, it constrains discretionary spending at an extremely low level, a lower percentage of GDP than the Eisenhower era. That’s a major policy loss for liberals who favor a more activist government. Now, many will say that the spending cap can simply be ignored by future Congresses. So far, we know that the FY2012 budget adhered to the spending cap. And the President certainly supports it. If he’s re-elected, you can expect this spending cap to dominate through Fiscal Year 2017. If he isn’t, the spending cap is probably the best-case scenario.

From a progressive point of view, the Budget Control Act establishes a blueprint for keeping discretionary spending at inadequate levels -- at a lower percentage of GDP than in the Eisenhower era as we're often reminded, e.g., by Dayan. That's mainly because Bush succeeded in starving the beast, and the Democrats can't get feed levels back to anything close to Clinton-era levels -- coupled with bloat in the defense budget and in healthcare spending.

Dayan, a tough administration critic, pushing back against an Ezra Klein year-end bouquet for Obama, concludes, "If you thought the nation was doomed at the beginning of 2011, maybe you think that the Administration made out all right. If you think that they still held the Senate and the White House and should have been able to hold the line, your opinion is either mixed or disappointed." For the Journal Jacobins, on the other hand, "The real failure of GOP leaders is that Senate Democrats and the White House foiled Republican attempts to cut spending further." And so the war of attrition continues for the foreseeable future.

My not-most-read posts of 2011

2011-12-30T08:00:00.006-05:00

As Kevin Drum notes today, all the cool kids (himself now included) are putting up their most-viewed blog posts of the year. Well, you know how we uncool kids cope: with variations on a theme. My most-read posts have all been boosted by links from my more-trafficked friends in the blogosphere. What I'd like to do here is pull out of storage a few posts that I could have wished had grazed a few more eyeballs.

First, recent readers may have noted how stimulated I've been by Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined. I've kept up a kind of response journal, in which I've oscillated between enthusiastic assent and various doubts and caveats. Why a running annotated read, instead of a finished review? Well, I'm impatient, and it's a long book. But also: whatever you think about humanity's prospects, and whatever the weaknesses in Pinker's historiography, this is a book that changes the way you view history and the moment we're living in as you read. I keep viewing other things I read, and age-old musings, in light of it. I hope there's some value in recording this process. So here are the posts, earliest first:

The bettering angels of our nature
Better angels in the news
Religion helped develop our better angels
How our better angels' wings might be clipped
Better angels leave their kitchens in Cairo
Can humanity lead itself out to pasture?
Better dead than red, revisited
Better Angels in Super Hornets

Here are a few more posts, mostly nonpolitical, that I'd like to give a second chance:

The best liar in the field
A president confesses error and defends democracy
Rat race or fluid human dance?
Prophets of the new millennium
Five questions for Obama
Jeffrey Goldberg, excommunicator
Slo-mo grow on the plateau: Tyler Cowen's general theory of American malaise
About those free-range little Krugmans and Manzis
Ruth Marcus's false "false false choice" charge
MIA in the latest Jane Eyre

Thanks for reading! Stay tuned in 2012.

EU epitaph?

2011-12-29T17:33:00.001-05:00

The headline of what the Wall Street Journal bills as an insider narrative of the escalating European debt crisis is "Dithering at The top Turned EU Crisis into Global Threat." I'm not sure dithering is quite right. The story suggests that European leaders couldn't agree not because they were indecisive per se but because their national interests were at odds and each was answerable to his or her own people. At one moment, French President Nicholas Sarkozy expressed the problem succinctly:

Finnish premier Jyrki Katainen also complained. His parliament wanted collateral in exchange for more Finnish lending to Greece. "No collateral, no agreement from me," he said.

Mr. Sarkozy was peeved. "All our parliaments can cause problems," he said.

The discord was spread broadly:

Then it was Slovakia's turn. Prime Minister Iveta Radičová was fighting to keep her coalition together over aid for Greece—a richer country than her own. Adding more powers to the bailout fund "would be suicide," she said.

Among the bigger players, Germany's Chancellor Merkel and Finance Minister Schäuble would/could not put German taxpayers on the hook for a full Greek bailout without asking holders of Greek debt to take a haircut. French ECB President Trichet could not countenance a haircut that might put render French banks, which hold a lot of Greek debt, into insolvency. As one leader quoted in the FT confessed just before the December summit, leaders couldn't figure out how to do the necessary and get re-elected. It's been a failure not of individual will but of insufficiently married fortunes.

Better dead than red, revisited

2011-12-29T08:11:00.000-05:00

Please excuse my flipping this post forward; it got buried...

Early this year, in a 'come to it cold' look at John F. Kennedy's inaugural address on the occasion of its 50th anniversary, I was struck by its beleaguered tone -- its somber sense that freedom and even human life itself were on a double knife's edge of communist domination or nuclear war.

In Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature, I just happened on a smidgeon of context:

In 1961 Americans were asked whether the country should "fight an all-out nuclear war rather than live under communist rule." Eighty-seven percent of men said yes, while "only 75 percent of the women felt that way -- proof that women are pacifist only in comparison to men of the same time and society (location 11629).

Never mind just now Pinker's point about gender. Reflect for a moment just how ready Americans were, or thought they were, to " bear any burden...in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty" (though nuclear war was not the burden that JFK had in mind).

Earlier in Better Angels, in a discussion of the odds of catastrophic conflict and the long-term trend toward greater peacefulness so grievously interrupted by the two world wars, Pinker highlights in passing the fact that for many years, many people expected a third cataclysm. When Kennedy challenged a generation "tempered by war" to focus its energy on more peaceful pursuits, World War II was only sixteen years in the past -- a shorter interval than that between World Wars I & II. Given the rhythm of then-living memory, the Cuban Missile Crisis 21 months later may have felt right on schedule. Perhaps, too, that episode of brinksmanship concentrated people's minds, and its peaceful resolution somewhat changed expectations.

I have mentioned before that Pinker's Better Angels, whatever the weak points or blind spots in its argument, is altering my perception of almost everything I read. How true that is of Kennedy's speech. My reread this morning gave me chills. First, because of that "beleaguered tone": the risk of global war felt so much more present then than now, for all our terrorism-triggered terror. Then, because Kennedy dared to envision a world without war. The speech strikes a delicate balance between an effort to project peace through strength -- willingness to fight when necessary -- and a direct overture, to the Soviets and to the world at large, to channel human energy elsewhere:

Let both sides explore what problems unite us instead of belaboring those problems which divide us.

Let both sides, for the first time, formulate serious and precise proposals for the inspection and control of arms--and bring the absolute power to destroy other nations under the absolute control of all nations.

Let both sides seek to invoke the wonders of science instead of its terrors. Together let us explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease, tap the ocean depths, and encourage the arts and commerce.

Only at the close is this appeal to our better angels directed at "my fellow citizens":

Now the trumpet summons us again--not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not as a call to battle, though embattled we are--but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, "rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation"--a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself.

Imagine the neocon ridicule if Obama envisioned an end to war, rather than merely to nuclear weapons. But Pinker's opus documents that we've gone a long way in 50 years toward meeting Kennedy's goal. He deserves enduring honor for framing it in a way that resonated.

Greg Miller, WTF?

2011-12-28T13:10:00.000-05:00

In a disturbing and apparently well-sourced article by the Washington Post's Greg Miller on the Obama administration's escalation of drone warfare, one unattributed assertion looks like an ideological plant:

The escalation of the lethal drone campaign under Obama was driven to an extent by early counterterrorism decisions. Shuttering the CIA’s detention program and halting transfers to Guantanamo Bay left few options beyond drone strikes or detention by often unreliable allies.

How does this compute? Are we supposed to believe that if the CIA had secret torture chambers at its disposal, it would opt to capture some targets rather than kill them? Or is the implication that human intelligence was hamstrung by ending torture, so counterterrorism operatives have nothing better to do than kill their targets? But isn't the very idea of a drone strike predicated on reliable intelligence?

Question for Republicans

2011-12-27T17:10:00.002-05:00

Okay, so now we know that not only did Romney consider his Massachusetts health insurance plan a national model, Gingrich* enthusiastically embraced it as a plan "tremendous potential to effect major change in the American health system," asserting that 100% of Americans should have health insurance and implying that the individual mandate was a linchpin to reaching that goal (I don't consider his spokesman's plaint that Newt didn't write the "Newt Notes" in question worth bothering about). As Ezra Klein reminds us, Obamacare is essentially a Republican scheme for delivering near-universal coverage: "insofar as the Republican Party had a plan for health-care reform, the individual mandate was it."

A question, then, for Republicans: When Romney's healthcare plan was news -- from, say, April 2006, when Romney signed his plan into law, until February 2007, when John Edwards came out with a national plan embracing the individual mandate -- was there any prominent Republican or conservative who went on record saying that Romneycare was an interesting and promising experiment, but that a similarly structured national plan would be inappropriate or unworkable? Did any mainstream Republican or conservative suggest that an individual mandate imposed by the federal government would violate the U.S. Constitution?

*I don't consider the plaint by Newt's spokesman that Newt didn't write the "Newt Notes" in question any more exculpatory than Ron Paul's claim that he didn't know what was in the Ron Paul newsletters. If you're name's on it, and you disavow it, you're a self-confessed fraud.

UPDATE: I have found a libertarian critic of the individual mandate, writing in USA Today Magazine on July 1, 2006: Cato's Michael Tanner, a critic of "big government conservatism." Tanner argued that the individual mandate was unenforceable; that subsidized mandated insurance for individuals would be unpriceable; that minimum coverage standards would become a goody bag for providers of various health services; and that the individual mandate would lead to more government control of the healthcare system. As prelude to his attack, Tanner noted that "proposals for an individual mandate have drawn a surprising degree of support from conservatives."
More broadly: I have spent some time reading coverage of health reform efforts and proposals from April 2006 through January 2007, prior to John Edwards putting universal coverage on the national agenda in February 2007. To be fair, while Republicans in general did not express hostility to the individual mandate, there was a good deal of sentiment across the political spectrum to the effect that different states have different conditions and need to find their own way to healthcare reform; one criticism from that left was that in states that mandate less comprehensive coverage than Massachusetts and so have less robust health insurance providers, a mandate could saddle poor people with expensive subpar coverage. Also, funding conditions were favorable in Massachusetts, because a) a high percentage of state residents were covered by employer-provided health insurance, b) the state was able to use a Medicaid waiver worth hundreds of millions of dollars, which it would have lost if it did not reform its healthcare system, and c) the state was also able to tap a $600 million annual fund collected from healthcare providers to pay for care for the uninsured. Of course, the Affordable Care Act addresses the problem of inferior state coverage standards by imposing universal minimum standards, and it also provide funding for the exchanges and for Medicaid expansion. But that centralization does provide a target for federalist conservatives.

When Romney published an op-ed touting his program in the Wall Street Journal in fall 2006, he did not suggest federalizing it, but rather that it could serve as a model for other states: "How much of our health-care plan applies to other states? A lot. Instead of thinking that the best way to cover the uninsured is by expanding Medicaid, they can instead reform insurance." Further, an article in State Health Watch, Aug. 2006, quotes Romney as follows:

Even Mr. Romney told members of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that the plan was custom-made for his state's situation and unique circumstances, although other states could borrow some ideas. Because of high private insurance rates and an expansive Medicaid program, Massachusetts estimates only 7% of residents are uninsured, compared to a national average of 15%. Also, Massachusetts can subsidize premiums with funds other states don't have. It already spends $680 million in state and federal money to support hospitals serving the poor and that money will be redirected to buy insurance for lower-income residents.

"It's obvious in some respects that, if we could do it there, we could do it in other states," Mr. Romney said. "I believe that's true. I'm not sure it would be done in exactly the same way. Some of the principles we found to work in Massachusetts may well be applied in other states, others perhaps not."

On the other hand, health care expert Robert J. Blendon of the Kennedy School accurately forecast the effect of Romneycare in June 2006:

Mr. Romney will likely tout the law during his expected bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, an achievement that will force Democrats to embrace the Massachusetts plan or something broader, Mr. Blendon said. But most Republican primary voters aren't concerned with health care issues, so Mr. Romney may have limited traction with the topic while campaigning in South Carolina, New Hampshire and Arizona, Mr. Blendon said.

Democratic primary voters do use health care as a touchstone, and anyone who offers less than the Massachusetts plan in their stump speech has little hope of gaining the nomination, Mr. Blendon said.

"No Democrat can be serious if they have a plan less than Romney's," he said. "He has raised the bar for the Democratic primary" (Worcester Telegram & Gazette, 6/16/06).

Oh, for a worthy enemy to crush

2011-12-26T19:35:00.001-05:00

I try to reassure myself that Romney is at least a competent and rational, data-driven guy, I really do. I remain convinced that he is the only Republican candidate who wouldn't necessarily destroy this country if elected. I was even mildly reassured -- grasping at straws though I was -- by the technocratic stance vis-a-vis taxation he struck in a Wall Street Journal interview published this week: "I'm not running for office trying to find a way to lower the tax burden paid for by the very high, very highest income individuals. What I'm solving for is growth." I could even, in this relatively (if faux) wonkish context, stomach the thrust of his economic attack on Obama as advocating "a European social Democratic model." False though the alleged choice between such a model and a "merit-based opportunity society -- an American-style society--where people earn their rewards" may be, it is at least true that Obama is closer to a European social Democrat than Romney. And that's about as much truth as you're going to get out of a GOP candidate this election season.

But in compensation for his relative economic moderation, Romney felt compelled to double down on a cartoon narrative about Obama and America in respect to the world at large:

As for Iran's nuclear program, Mr. Romney sounds a note of moral certitude reminiscent of, well, George W. Bush and the axis of evil. "I see Iran's leadership as evil. When the president stands up and says that we have shared interests with all the people in the world, I disagree. There are people who are evil. There are people who have as their intent the subjugation and repression of other people; they are evil. America is good.

I mean if we go back to Truman," he adds, he "was able to draw a line between Communism and freedom, and having drawn that line, America was able to define a foreign policy that has guided us well until this president. I applaud Ronald Reagan's brilliance in identifying the Soviet Union as an evil empire. I see Iran as intent on building, once again, an evil empire based upon the resources of the Middle East."

This is false on so many fronts, it's a reminder of why voters across the political spectrum can't stomach Romney. Of course it's a complete mischaracterization of Obama's approach to adversaries, which is encapsulated in his oft-repeated declaration: "if you unclench your fist we will extend our hand." Then too, that formula pretty much sums up Reagan's actual dealings with the Soviet Union: once Gorbachev had taken concrete steps to open up Soviet society and loosen the grip on Eastern Europe, Reagan engaged in sweeping arms control negotiation. Obama, conversely, has deemed Iran a bad-faith actor and has upped both the economic and covert military pressure.

Most notably, though, the passage bespeaks a pathetic Cold War nostalgia. The attempt to build up Iran into a USSR-level adversary-- and one with which, unlike the Soviet Union, it is fruitless to negotiate -- is such a transparent effort to fill out the cast in a made-for-campaign play that even the most bellicose neocon would have to be pretty credulous to fall for it. Those who think the U.S.needs to attack Iran are unlikely to believe that Romney believes the same.

To differentiate himself from Obama, Romney essentially goes on to promise another war:

So what would he do about it? "I do not have a top secret security clearance at this stage to be able to define precisely what kinds of actions we could take." But he adds that "the range includes something of a blockade nature, to something of a surgical strike nature, to something of a decapitate the regime nature, to eliminate the military threat of Iran altogether."

That leaves even WSJ editorial board ideologues Joseph Rago and Paul Gigot noting drily, albeit from a purely instrumental point of view, "Which brings us back to the campaign and why he hasn't broken 25%." In his fervor to re-conjure the Cold War, Romney has forgotten that it wasn't a hot war.

In response to the editors' skepticism, Romney casts his warmongering as a deeply principled but unpopular stance -- never mind that only Huntsman and Paul are less bellicose. I suspect rather that everyone in the country knows that Romney is full of shit . What remains to be seen is how much we collectively care.

Can humanity lead itself out to pasture?

2011-12-24T09:00:00.001-05:00

A few more thoughts on how the steady evolution of human norms toward peacefulness, self-control and respect for life tracked by Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature could go wrong.

One weakness in Pinker's analysis of our social evolution, as far as I can tell so far, is that while he sometimes identifies an adverse trend, or an adverse offshoot of a positive trend, he doesn't consider the potential dangers that such trends might pose. Stephen J. Gould, as I recall, recounted the story of a moose-like creature for which natural selection favored the growth of ever-larger antlers, which attracted females of the species. Competition led to the antlers growing to absurd height and weight, which ultimately, or so the hypothesis went, led to the species' extinction. While Pinker is careful to stipulate that the positive behavioral developments he tracks are not products of biological evolution, could not social evolution go off-track in similar ways?

Take, for example, the trend toward cherishing and protecting children. After surveying the horrific physical and mental punishments to which adults used to routinely subject children, Pinker approvingly tracks the growth of an ethic of fostering children's healthy development, guarding their safety, and, in a word, cherishing them. He notes with approval some astonishingly rapid changes in attitude in recent years -- first against beating and even spanking them, then against countenancing bullying. Then, suddenly, Pinker turns to a way in which how this development has gone awry: "the historical increase in the valuation of children has entered its decadent phase." The next several pages channel Lenore Skenazy, freelance author and advocate for what she calls free-range kids, who's recently made a career of chronicling American parents' insane overprotectiveness. As Pinker summarizes:

Children are not allowed to be outside int he middle of the day (skin cancer), to play in the grass (deer ticks), to buy lemonade from a stand (bacteria on lemon peel), or to lick cake batter off spoons (salmonella from uncooked eggs). Lawyer-vetted playgrounds have had their turf padded with rubber, their slides and monkey bars lowered to waist height, and their seesaws removed altogether...(Loc. 9870).

Pinker moves on to consider the national obsession with kidnapping, its statistical absurdity, and its dreadful inhibiting effects on children's freedom of movement. His conclusion:

The movement over the past two centuries to increase the valuation of children's lives is one of the great moral advances in history. But the movement over the past two decades to increase the valuation to infinity can only lead to absurdities (Loc 9829).

And there Pinker leaves it. But might these "absurdities" be dangerous? Can children who never get to play outside or unsupervised, never make friends spontaneously, never take physical risks, never cope with others' aggression on their own, etc. etc., prove less adaptive than children who grow up in cultures that "cherish" them less? This leads back to a question I raised in a prior post: could a society that evolves too far ahead of others toward peaceableness, empathy, and self-control at the same time evolve toward laziness, lack of resilience and drive, lack of a capacity for self-defense or dealing with conflict? Might it not either be conquered outright, or dominated more subtly, or simply out-performed in the economic sphere?

In a similar vein, Pinker more approvingly than not notes the extreme aversion to war that has developed in European countries in recent decades, to the point where their troops are often not combat-ready:

As big as the change in American attitudes toward war has been, the change in Europe is beyond recognition...In February 2003 mass demonstrations in European cities protested the impending American-led invasion of Iraq, drawing a million people each in London, Barcelona, and Rome...Even the war in Afghanistan, which aroused less opposition in Europe, is being fought mainly by American soldiers. Not only do they make up more than half of the forty-four nation NATO military operation, but the continental forces have acquired a certain reputation when it comes to martial virtues. A Canadian armed forces captain wrote to me from Kabul in 2003:
During this morning's Kalashnikov concerto, I was waiting for the tower guards in our camp to open fire. I think they were asleep. That's par for the course...the Germans have already abandoned the towers several times. the first time was when we got hit by rockets. The remaining instances had something to do with it being cold in the towers.. (Loc 5922).

Pinker documents in detail the extent to which American society is more violent than that of Western Europe, with higher rates of homicide and all forms of violent crime, a comparatively enormous prison population, a long and zealously guarded tradition of private gun ownership, etc. It would seem that the more violent nature of American society is connected in some way to the U.S.'s role as the world's dominant military power, with a military presence in more than 100 countries and a unique role as world's policeman. What if America were as peaceable as Europe? Would prospects for humanity's continued turn away from war be strengthened or weakened? Are these questions addressed at a later point in Pinker's book? Stay tuned.

A hit! A palpable hit!

2011-12-22T16:11:00.004-05:00

Say what you will about economic fundamentals governing elections, and the ephemera of spin. Ever since Obama acceded to an all-spending-cuts "deficit reduction bill" on Aug. 1, he has needed above all else to win a fight with the GOP. He just got what he needed:

House Republicans on Thursday crumpled under the weight of White House and public pressure and have agreed to pass a two-month extension of the 2 percent payroll-tax cut, Republican and Democratic sources told National Journal.

Obama staged this fight and has stuck to his guns for two months. He has orchestrated and escalated the pressure in a very public manner. He's brought home a bit of bacon for almost everyone. The perception of weakness and ineffectuality should be in large part erased. His improved persona is working in concert with modestly improved economic data to lift his poll numbers.

Credit the man with learning from experience.

UPDATE 12/23: Just to reinforce the basic narrative line, note the verbs (and verbal nouns) in the lede to the WaPo coverage of the GOP cave:

Facing withering criticism from across the political spectrum and abandoned by Senate allies, House Republicans bowed to political reality Thursday and agreed to a two-month extension of a payroll tax cut for 160 million Americans.

The agreement represented a remarkable capitulation on the part of House Republicans, who had two days earlier rejected such a deal with Democrats as the kind of half-measure that their new majority was elected to thwart.

Remember the banner headline on Paul Krugman's reaction to the deficit reduction deal struck on Aug. 1? CAPITULATION. That was prelude to Drew Westen's disaster narrative and a fall in stature for Obama among his supporters. It's that narrative that he's reversed in stages since Labor Day, beginning with his deficit reduction plan and jobs package, extending through his countenancing of the sequestered cuts triggered by the supercommittee failure, and climaxing with his full-court press for extended unemployment benefits and payroll tax cut. Of course, Democrats compromised perhaps two months to get the measly two-month extension, and a fresh fight looms over the year-long extension. But thanks to House GOP overreach, Obama has his win. Cave, capitulate, collapse..that's the story being told about the GOP.

UPDATE 2: The Times' Jackie Calmes tells much the same tale:

President Obama did not win much substantively with his victory Thursday over House Republicans in their showdown over extending payroll tax cuts and unemployment aid for two months. But he got a lot politically: a big start toward retiring the perception — fair or not, and even among Democrats — that in a pinch with the other party he will inevitably surrender.

That perception had dogged Mr. Obama for much of the year since gains by Republicans in the 2010 midterm elections gave them control of the House and a share of power in Washington. But it became threatening, both to Mr. Obama’s leverage with Congress and to his prospects for re-election, after the epic summer fight over raising the nation’s debt limit.

And quotes an old hand who gets at the crux:

Vin Weber, a Republican Party strategist and former congressman, acknowledged that Mr. Obama had won at least “a nice tactical victory to end the year” as well as higher approval ratings in recent polls. Mr. Weber said he learned long ago from a pollster to President Ronald Reagan that “one of the central ingredients of a president’s approval rating is the public’s sense of his ability to dominate Congress.”

“The substantive issues,” he said, “are secondary.”

A president generally can't dominate Congress. That's why he's got to pick his battles carefully. As Obama did in this case.

Chronicle of a crisis diffused?

2011-12-22T13:52:00.000-05:00

My perception as a semi-informed layman of the latest chapter in the Eurozone crisis has been singular, and maybe worth recording.

For months, the supremely knowledgeable columnists on my favorite opinion page, the FT, along with many other observers, have played Greek chorus to an EU tragedy unfolding in several acts. Most recently, in the runup to the early December EU summit, Wolfgang Munchau, Martin Wolf, Philip Stephens and others have warned that the Eurozone is on the brink of avoidable doom. The most recent lament has been that the European Central Bank could at any given time end at least the immediate existential crisis by buying bonds Italian and Spanish government debt -- on the secondary market, since the EU charter apparently bans the ECB from buying the bonds directly. But the ECB's new president, Mario Draghi, like his predecessor, has demurred. The summit yielded only a pact for stricter enforcement of budget austerity standards, which does nothing to ease the pressure of rising interest rates.

Then, yesterday, I pick up some uncertainly-sourced snippet to the effect that banks are buying Italian and Spanish debt, those countries' interest rates are falling, and some are saying that the crisis may be over. Yeahrright....

This morning, however, the Times' Floyd Norris brings those glimmers into focus:

Talk tough, and open the vaults.”

That should be the slogan of Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank.

In recent weeks, the new president publicly insisted the central bank would never do any of the things that Germany opposed. The bank would not drastically step up its purchases of Spanish and Italian government bonds. It would not directly finance European governments. It would not backstop European rescue funds or print money that the International Monetary Fund could use to bail out governments.

It would do only what central banks normally do. It would lend to banks.

It turns out that may be enough to stem the European crisis for at least a few years, and go a long way to recapitalizing banks in the process.

Well, rub your eyes -- is it morning it Europe? It seems that giving almost free money to the banks may effectively bail out their home governments:

There is no assurance that the banks will use all, or even most, of the money they borrowed, to buy government securities. It would be nice if some of it were lent to the private sector to spur growth and investment. But the logic of putting it in two- or three-year government notes is obvious.

Spanish two-year securities now yield about 3.6 percent, while Italian ones offer 5.1 percent. A bank that uses central bank money to buy them will clear the difference between those rates and 1 percent. The spread will be a little larger when the central bank lowers rates in a month or two. The securities will mature well before the loans come due.

What can go wrong for a bank that follows that course? The obvious one is that the governments default. But for a Spanish bank owning Spanish bonds, or an Italian one with bonds from its government, that is really not a risk worth worrying about. They would be dead whether or not they had bought more bonds.

Then, compounding the epistemological miracle, Paul Cassandra Krugman not only ratifies Norris's narrative, but effectively admits, that he, Krugman, was wrong -- or, if you prefer (or Krugman prefers!), that he was snookered by Draghi:

Regular readers may recall that I and others were adamant that it was essential for the ECB to step in and buy the debt of troubled governments, to head off what looked very much like self-fulfilling panic. The ECB refused to do that, and many of us took that refusal at face value — but the argument is that in reality it did the functional equivalent, lending very large sums to banks with sovereign debt as collateral, so that it was in effect doing the purchases we wanted, but laundering those purchases through banks...

The bottom line seems to be that Mario Draghi is a consummate eurocrat. I’ve always kind of enjoyed talking to eurocrats, who always seem to be implying something they aren’t saying; in this case he may have managed to say one thing while doing something else, and the thing he actually did was just what people like me have been urging.

If the pressure on the bond yields of stressed Eurozone countries really is durably eased, that could be an even greater Christmas present to Obama than the House's hissy fit over the payroll tax cut extension. Perhaps the Euro will still prove a failure, as Martin Feldstein argues at length in the current Foreign Affairs (behind a paywall, and I'm putting off finishing it until this evening). All I ask for the present is that the EU stave off collapse until Nov. 7, 2012.

Obama's uncertain trigger finger, cont.

2011-12-21T10:43:00.001-05:00

It is perhaps a measure of Obama's poor negotiating track record that as I read both Republican and Democratic assertions that Democrats have all the leverage in the fight over the payroll tax cut and unemployment benefits extension, I worry that Obama will find a way to cave.

Nate Silver, who asserts that Obama's recent poll bounce is likely due more to economic upticks than to his more confrontational stance over the last two and a half months, provides the rationale for another 'hostage negotiation':

This debate over interpreting Mr. Obama’s approval ratings has some implications for the current argument in Congress over the payroll tax cut. If you believe that his improved ratings reflect his outmaneuvering Congress, then perhaps it is to his benefit if the argument extends on past the new year. But if you believe instead that the ratings have more to do with improved economic confidence, this could be a dangerous game. Even if the tax cuts are eventually extended, as seems likely, a temporary decline in Americans’ take-home pay in January would nevertheless represent a disruptive influence at the very moment that Americans are starting to believe in the economy again.

Compare the underlying logic here with Obama's justification a year ago for extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest:

Now, I know there are some who would have preferred a protracted political fight, even if it had meant higher taxes for all Americans, even if it had meant an end to unemployment insurance for those who are desperately looking for work.

And I understand the desire for a fight. I’m sympathetic to that. I’m as opposed to the high-end tax cuts today as I’ve been for years. In the long run, we simply can’t afford them. And when they expire in two years, I will fight to end them, just as I suspect the Republican Party may fight to end the middle-class tax cuts that I’ve championed and that they’ve opposed....

CHUCK TODD: If I may follow, aren’t you telegraphing, though, a negotiating strategy of how the Republicans can beat you in negotiations all the way through the next year because they can just stick to their guns, stay united, be unwilling to budge -- to use your words -- and force you to capitulate?

THE PRESIDENT: I don’t think so. And the reason is because this is a very unique circumstance. This is a situation in which tens of millions of people would be directly damaged and immediately damaged, and at a time when the economy is just about to recover.

Those "unique situations" do keep arising, don't they? The Times editorial board argues from real economic impact to make the case for what most Democrats would perceive as a cave:

Assigning blame, or avoiding it, has come to replace actual governing in the Congress. If the tax cut dies, Democrats will accuse Republicans of killing it, and they will be absolutely right to do so. It might even help them regain the House next year among an electorate disgusted with partisan gridlock. But the cost to individual families and the nation is too high a price to pay.

The House may well back down; several Senate Republicans are urging them to. But if Mr. Boehner refuses to bend, as painful as it will be, Mr. Obama will have to ask the Senate in the next few days to return to Washington and negotiate with the House. It may not do any good, but there are too many paychecks at stake to give up.

Obama himself is probably something of an economic determinist, convinced that the actual economic impact of any policy that gets adopted or fails to get adopted is likely to affect his reelection chances more than the optics of any policy showdown. And that's true, too. The wild card, though, is that effectively deployed political pressure and successful political combat can determine the outcome -- and that sometimes you have to be willing to risk a bad outcome to get a good result -- e.g., allow a few weeks' expiration of tax cut and benefit extension. If Obama gets sucked into a pre-New Year's negotiation for a year-long payroll tax cut and unemployment benefit extension Boehner and his Tea Party puppeteers are sure to pull the football away again.

Of course, the White House is going all out to pin the looming expiration of the tax cut on the GOP and to pressure the House to cave -- cf. Obama's unscheduled appearance at a press briefing yesterday, where he declared that "the bipartisan compromise that was reached on Saturday is the only viable way to prevent a tax hike on January 1st", and its floating of a Twitter hashtag, #40dollars, inviting people to write out, 99%-style, what losing that amount per week (on average) should the payroll cut expire would mean to them. So the current signs are against a turn back to negotiation in the absence of passage of the Senate bill. Recently, too, Obama let the supercommittee fail and the sequestered spending cuts for 2013 and beyond become law with perfect sang froid. But I'm still not entirely convinced that if Boehner dangles something shiny, Obama won't bite.

See also: Obama's uncertain trigger finger

Obama to cash in his "compromiser" chips?

2011-12-20T21:14:00.000-05:00

Back in August, in response to Drew Westen's denunciation of Obama as a spineless rollover to the Republicans, I wrote:

in a fearsomely stressed and politically polarized country, Obama's relentless refusal to demonize an extremist opposition may yet win the day by means of contrast. Perhaps it will prove in the long run to be the political equivalent of the nonviolence of Martin Luther King...

Let's not forget that many African Americans at times regarded King as an appeasing sellout, much as many progressives now see Obama as one. The Panthers and the Nation of Islam were more satisfying to many. King called out his adversaries, but he never shrank from engaging with them. Neither has Obama -- though the results have not always been what his base could have wished.

Now, after two and a half months of relentlessly calling out the GOP for refusing to stimulate the economy or raise taxes on the wealthiest, the moment may have arrived when he cashes in his "nonviolent" chips. His poll numbers are spiking -- by a widening margin, Americans trust him more than the GOP to protect the interests of the middle class. Having blessed a Senate compromise over the payroll tax cut and unemployment benefit extension -- the fiscal heart of his September stimulus package -- he is refusing to negotiate further as Boehner once more reneges and lets the House extremists scotch the placeholder deal. Now, having convinced Americans over the course of a year of bloody partisan conflict that he is the one willing -- too willing -- to compromise, he is poised to in his civil way to KO the House holdouts over their rejection of a deal that Boehner blessed and the Senate approved 89-10. He made his first strike today:

The issue right now is this: The clock is ticking; time is running out. And if the House Republicans refuse to vote for the Senate bill, or even allow it to come up for a vote, taxes will go up in 11 days. I saw today that one of the House Republicans referred to what they’re doing as, “high-stakes poker.” He’s right about the stakes, but this is not poker, this is not a game -- this shouldn’t be politics as usual. Right now, the recovery is fragile, but it is moving in the right direction. Our failure to do this could have effects not just on families but on the economy as a whole. It’s not a game for the average family, who doesn’t have an extra 1,000 bucks to lose. It’s not a game for somebody who’s out there looking for work right now, and might lose his house if unemployment insurance doesn’t come through. It’s not a game for the millions of Americans who will take a hit when the entire economy grows more slowly because these proposals aren’t extended (my emphasis).

In this he should hit the trifecta -- for protecting middle class interests, for sweet reasonableness, and for a principled stand against an overreaching adversary. Playing the only adult room works when you've already compromised, when you refuse to compromise further, when you're seeking measures with broad-based popular support, and when tens of millions face immediate pain if you're thwarted.

After the debt ceiling debacle, Obama's support cratered -- not because people did not support his deficit deal negotiating stance, but because he was perceived to have caved -- he looked weak and ineffectual. I wrote then that he needed to stage a fight with Republicans and win it. He should be on the brink of that now -- and at almost exactly the stage of his presidency that Clinton had reached in Jan. 1996 when he won the government shutdown showdown with the Gingrich Congress.

Better Angels leave their kitchens in Cairo

2011-12-20T17:12:00.000-05:00

Serendipity: I was just reading this morning Steven Pinker's discussion in The Better Angels of Our Nature of the astonishing drop in the rate of rape in the U.S.over the past generation -- an 80% decline from 1973 to 2008. That decline is far longer in duration and far steeper than the drop in murder rates and other violent crime rates from the mid-nineties to the present. Pinker credits the feminist movement for recasting rape as a crime against an individual woman's agency and bodily integrity, spotlighting Susan Brownmiller's 1975 bestseller Against Our Will, which "showed how the nonexistence of a female vantage point in society's major institutions had created an atmosphere that made light of rape" (loc. 8820). He documents the swiftness with which the treatment of rape in both law and popular culture were transformed, and casts the change as one more chapter in the delayed triumph of enlightenment ideals:

The history of rape, then, is one in which the interests of women had been zeroed out in the implicit negotiations that shaped customs, moral codes, and laws. And our current sensibilities, in which we recognize rape as a heinous crime against the woman, represent a reweighting of those interests, mandated by a humanist mindset that grounds morality in the suffering and flourishing of sentient individuals rather than in power, tradition, or religious practice. The mindset, moreover, has been sharpened into the principle of autonomy: that people have an absolute right to their bodies, which may not be treated as a common resource to be negotiated among other interest parties. Our current moral understanding does not seek to balance the interests of a woman not to be raped, the interests of the men who may wish to rape her, and the interests of the husband and fathers who want to monopolize her sexuality. In an upending of the traditional valuation, the woman's ownership of her body counts for everything, and the interests of all other claimants count for nothing...The principle of autonomy, recall, was also a linchpin in the abolition of slavery, despotism, debt bondage, and cruel punishments during the Enlightenment (location 8793).

This particular assertion of autonomy is playing out on the streets of Egypt today:

CAIRO [New York Times] — Thousands of women massed in Tahrir Square here on Tuesday afternoon and marched to a journalists’ syndicate and back in a demonstration that grew by the minute into an extraordinary expression of anger at the treatment of women by the military police as they protested against continued military rule.

Many held posters of the most sensational image of violence over the last weekend: a group of soldiers pulling the abaya off a prone woman to reveal her blue bra as one raises a boot to kick her. The picture, circulated around the world, has become a rallying point for activists opposed to military rule, though cameras also captured soldiers pulling the clothes off other women.

“Drag me, strip me, my brothers’ blood will cover me!” they chanted. “Where is the field marshal?” they demanded, referring to Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, the head of the military council holding onto power here. “The girls of Egypt are here.”...

The scale was stunning, and utterly unexpected in this strictly patriarchal society.

Stunning indeed, and rapidly having an effect, perhaps in part as international voices take up the echo:

In what has been some of the strongest criticism of Egypt's military rulers by US officials, Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state spoke out against the treatment of Egyptian women in recent months.

"Women are being beaten and humiliated in the same streets where they risked their lives for the revolution only a few short months ago," America's top diplomat said in a speech at Washington's Georgetown University on Monday....

Clinton said women had been mostly shut out of decision-making by Egypt's ruling military and by big political parties.

"Women protesters have been rounded up and subjected to horrific abuse. Journalists have been sexually assaulted. And now, women are being attacked, stripped, and beaten in the streets," she added.

"This systematic degradation of Egyptian women dishonours the revolution, disgraces the state and its uniform and is not worthy of a great people" (Al Jazeera).

Whereas yesterday, General Adil Emara of Egypt's Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) angrily denied the significance of the stripping and beating caught on camera, calling it an isolated incident, today, the Times notes,

The women’s chants were evidently heard at military headquarters as well. On Tuesday evening, the ruling military council offered an abrupt apology.

“The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces expresses its utmost sorrow for the great women of Egypt, for the violations that took place during the recent events,” the council said in a statement. “It stresses its great appreciation for the women of Egypt and for their right to protest and to actively, positively participate in political life on the path of democratic transition.”

Today, too, according to the BBC, "The council also said it would open an investigation into accusations that soldiers carried out virginity tests on women protesters in March."

It would seem that women's fervent assertion of their right to bodily autonomy may serve as a force multiplier in the protesters' demands for democracy. Note that the SCAF statement connects the two. With the world watching, only Enlightenment values, as Pinker identifies them, are acknowledged as legitimate, whatever code the military -- and perhaps the victorious Islamist parties -- follows in actual practice.

The spectacle of women leading this latest iteration of the demand for democracy -- and being shielded by men who for this moment yield the leadership to them -- is remarkable:

By four in the afternoon, thousands had gathered in Tahrir Square. Instead of the usual core of activists, it was a broad spectrum including housewives demonstrating for the first time, young mothers carrying babies, a majority in traditional Muslim headscarves and a few in face-covering veils. And as they marched towards the headquarters of the journalists union, two long lines of hundreds of men joined hands on either side of the column of women to protect them from any possible harassment.

The crowd seemed to grew at each step as the women in the march called up to the apartment buildings lining the streets to urge others to join — “come down, come down,” they shouted in an echo of the protests that led to the ouster of Hosni Mubarak 10 months ago.

“If you don’t leave your house today to confront the militias of Tantawi, you will leave your house tomorrow so they can rape your daughter,” one sign declared.

“I am here because of our girls who were stripped in the street,” said Sohir Mahmoud, 50, a housewife who said she was demonstrating for the first time. “Men are not going to cover your flesh so we will,” she told a younger woman. “We have to come down and call for our rights nobody is going to call for our rights for us” (NYT - link above).

Perhaps 'the revolution will be feminized.' Here's hoping.

I contain multitudes, and not in a good way

2011-12-18T20:11:00.000-05:00

As I mentioned once before on this blog, Kurt Vonnegut got me early (at about age 14) with his vision of time in Slaughterhouse Five, and it's stayed with me: all moments always have existed and always will exist; to be finite in time is no more remarkable than to be finite in space. This raises the question: when you die, in whose "when" are you dead? Even for a monotheist, there's no clear answer. For millennia, theologians have asserted that all moments are equally present to God. You're only 'dead' in the perception of those who live 'after' you -- and they will soon be dead, and so it goes. But our personal timelines are not the universe's.

Vonnegut's novel offers two ways of experiencing time's nonlinearity. Billy Pilgrim is unstuck at time; he is shunted at random to different moments of his life. Like the rest of us, he experiences these moments singly, albeit not sequentially. The Tralfamadoreans are more advanced: they choose which moments to live in, concentrating on the more pleasant ones, like a habitual re-reader who opens a favorite book to whatever passage she's in the mood for. But they too experience one moment at a time.

Recently an alternate possibility occurred to me -- perhaps a more comprehensive way of grasping that the arrow of time is an illusion. We experience time as a sequence of moments -- and that experience is real, even if the sequence itself is a figment of our limited perception. What if there are so to speak an infinite number of each of us, eternally experiencing every moment (singly, subdivided infinitely..) of our lives? If I were to die five seconds from now, nothing would stop: each moment in which I experience myself on a particular point on my own timeline continues to exist, and each is always and eternally experienced. There is no universally shared 'when' that makes one moment more present than another -- time is completely relative within our own experience, with a moment experienced as past only from a "later" moment in which it is remembered. Each moment is no less present than the house around the corner that I can't see, and there is no change in the way it is (was) experienced.

This possibility has haunted me ever since the thought struck; it rings true to me, and it's not particularly reassuring. It seems that my hopes and working assumptions are tied to the idea of continuous progress, of always moving up, or at least on. For all my agnosticism, I am wed to the prospect of a posthumous moment at least of release, insight, debriefing with 'the one presumed to know', whoever, s/he might be. The notion of my existence as bound by time -- finite, even if its end does not imply a "future" nonexistence -- is only marginally more reassuring than the notion of a finite life that "progresses" to nonexistence.

How our better angels' wings might be clipped

2011-12-13T17:55:00.001-05:00

To support his hypothesis in The Better Angels of Our Nature that the human race is, in effect, outgrowing war, Steven Pinker amasses considerable cultural evidence that individuals in the developed world, spurred in part by the development of commerce, have grown progressively 1) more interactive -- able to see another's point of view, address her concerns, meet his expectations; 2) more 'mannerly,' i.e. more self-controlled, less gross to others, slower to signal readiness to take violent action or to in fact take that action; 3) more empathetic, able to imagine another's pain, and hence more reluctant to inflict it; and consequently, 4) more moral, in any meaningful sense of the word.

Assuming that this kind of development has in fact taken place, unevenly but unmistakably, it's possible to imagine opposite directions from which this social progress might reverse itself.

One is reflected in the ancient fear that highly civilized elite classes, nations or cultures will render themselves ripe for conquest, or at least dominance by less constrained, more aggressive, tougher rivals, whether from outside or within their own society. Fears of this kind of eclipse might be written off as throwbacks to early 20th century worries, expressed by Teddy Roosevelt among others, that a growing distaste for war would render European or American men effeminate, or to racist fears of a "yellow peril." But leaving race aside, it is not hard to imagine that the competitive drive and rapid development of contemporary China will indeed spearhead some kind of eclipse of western values by "Asian values." It's not implausible that declining relative economic power in the U.S. and Europe would combine with war weariness and the advanced values that Pinker lauds to erode and eventually erase the United States' current enormous military advantage -- before "military advantage" itself becomes obsolete. Nor does it by any means follow that a dominant China or other emerging society or nation would be more advanced in Pinker's sense than western nations are today.

From the other end, there is cause to worry that the international global elite might pull away from the rest of us -- increasing their competitive advantage on multiple fronts rather than ceding it. Perhaps Pinker will deal with the global trend toward widening income inequality later in the book. But that gap is becoming a chasm, and it's hard to believe that personal weatlh beyond the imaginings of Croesus will generate superior empathy or values in the majority of its possessors. Rather, the evidence in the U.S. seems to be that current elites, like almost all elites everywhere, are subject, per Fukuyama, to a perhaps genetic imperative to maximize their advantages and make them heritable -- and that this drive, after having been held in abeyance for a generation or two, is now reasserting itself with a vengeance.

One obviously dangerous frontier in this regard is genetic manipulation. Them that have could in the not-too-distant future make themselves basically a different species from the rest of us, perhaps even immortal. What in current economic rends suggests that they would share that wealth, even if whatever innovations come don't go horribly wrong in their own right?

Buenos Aires, buenos break

2011-12-12T07:50:00.002-05:00

My wife and I are off in Buenos Aires this week, visiting our son, who's wrapping up a semester abroad here -- seems like it's the latest hot spot for that college ritual. His Spanish is now very impressive! In any case, blogging will be light this week.

Alas poor me, I missed that grave public policy forum, the ABC GOP debate, $10,000 bet and all. Of course, a large part of me would pay $10,000 to miss it, or rather not to have to contemplate the possible fallout from our political discourse having sunk low. In fact, I can play the short version any time: less taxes on the wealthy! More taxes on the poor! Less regulation! Drill, baby, drill! Bomb Iran! Let Israel bomb Iran! Give Israel the whole West Bank! Give Israel the whole State Department! Increase military spending! Defund the State Department! Abolish the Department of Education! Abolish the Department of Energy! Abolish the entire federal government except the Department of Homeland Security! Privatize Medicare! Drown Medicaid in the bathtub! Deport Obama to Kenya!

There, I just saved you 120 minutes of bellicose farce and fraud.

"Allow me to sell you a couple!"

2011-12-09T12:16:00.001-05:00

Free association time, re Gingrich's reflexive/relentless promotion of his books and movies in the midst of his presidential campaign. Who could read this

When asked last week about Russia during a town hall-style meeting in South Carolina, he noted that he made a film about the Ronald Reagan-Margaret Thatcher-Pope John Paul II nexus that he posits helped bring down the Soviet Union. Any mention of "American exceptionalism" earns a mention of his movie on the subject of America's special role. And his film and book about Reagan seldom goes unmentioned as he hails the former president as a role model....

For Gingrich, the campaign sometimes takes on the feeling of an extended book tour.

"At 8:30 tomorrow morning, we're going to be at the Westin at the Detroit Metropolitan Airport, and we're going to be talking about jobs and the economy," Gingrich told a radio interviewer last month. "And then after the town hall meeting, Callista is going to be signing her new book, the New York Times bestseller, `Sweet Land Of Liberty.' ... And I'll be signing my new novel, `The Crater,' about the Civil War, and a book on American exceptionalism called `A Nation Like No Other.'"

Without reverting to this, from Alice in Wonderland?

"You are old," said the youth, "as I mentioned before,
And have grown most uncommonly fat;
Yet you turned a back-somersault in at the door--
Pray, what is the reason of that?"

"In my youth," said the sage, as he shook his gray locks,
"I kept all my limbs very supple
By the use of this ointment -- one shilling the box --
Allow me to sell you a couple?"

No denying it, the old con artist has kept supple this many a year. And like the illustrious Father William, he knows how to handle rude questioners:

"You are old," said the youth, "one would hardly suppose
That your eye was as steady as ever;
Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose--
What made you so awfully clever?"

"I have answered three questions, and that is enough,"
Said his father; "don't give yourself airs!
Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
Be off, or I'll kick you down-stairs!"

Yup, that GOP base is slippery. How long can Gingrich keep it aloft?

P.S., there's no copyright on book titles, but Gingrich ripped off his Civil War novel title and subject, The Battle of the Crater, from Richard Slotkin's The Crater (1996).

P.P.S. Memo to Jonathan Bernstein: did you study with Slotkin? He's a professor of American Studies at Wesleyan.

Romney's lullaby

2011-12-08T13:42:00.002-05:00

Mitt Romney is doubtless capable of forming a coherent argument in response to any question that requires knowledge, analysis and judgment. His problem just now is that his current positions are predetermined by his need to pander to the GOP base -- which in itself would leave him with the relatively simple sophist's task of making the weaker argument seem stronger -- and then further contorted by his need to justify past actions and positions, which were less distorted by a less extremist constituency.

Wooing GOP primary voters, he must wax as paradoxical as the most ardent lover. Reading the transcript of his recent discussion with the editorial board of the Washington Examiner, I was reminded of a folk song that poses a string of riddles:

I gave my love a cherry that had no stone,
I gave my love a chicken that had no bone,
I gave my love a story that had no end,
I gave my love a baby with no cryin'.

How can there be a cherry that has no stone?
How can there be a systemic financial rescue that has no bailouts of individual institutions?

If the contagion of sovereign debt default reaches our shores by virtue of banks here, holding, let’s say, Italian debt, I would not bail out those banks. I would let them go through the restructuring process that has long existed in this country, and hopefully let them recover. The only time I see us having to act to – I can’t use the word bailout, that’s an awful word – to support, preserve, that’s the word I’m looking for; I don’t look to preserve individual institutions. But if I thought that all the institutions were going to go under, that there would be a cascade of all the financial system in this country collapsing, then that would be a candidate for action to prevent our currency and our financial system from disappearing.

I don’t think we will face that again as a nation, but I think we did face that at the end of President Bush’s term. I think there was a very real risk that the entire financial system in this country would collapse, implode. And that that action was necessary. Was it identical to what I would have hoped for? No. But was it essential to keep the entire financial system from imploding? I think so.

So..what happens when several major institutions face simultaneous collapse, including, perhaps, when the collapse of one might trigger the collapse of all?

How can there be a chicken that has no bone?
How can Medicare wean the healthcare delivery system off of a fee-for-service payment model if it's converted to a private voucher program?

I also believe that in setting that amount [of the annual voucher to purchase Medicare coverage], you would look to see what competition is providing. You will have private health care plans that offer the care of individuals for a certain cost. That will tell you something about the level of subsidy that's necessary. And that competition that exists in the private sector will also inform your thoughts about the subsidy that would be applied to people receiving Medicare. My inclination is that the subsidy opportunity is the same whether you are purchasing a private plan or traditional Medicare. When I say traditional Medicare, Medicare provided by government.

I think it's unlikely that Medicare will remain an open-ended fee-for-service-type product that it is today but I think its more likely to take on a capitated rate or more extensive managed care provisions than you're seeing currently employed.

So my view is your [sic] going to limit the growth -- as a principle you're going to limit the growth in the subsidy that goes to this retirement healthcare system based upon the competition that exists in the market and a determination by Congress of the budget amount that can be applied to subsidy.

Medicare administrators' power to move healthcare providers away from fee-for-service is based on their market clout as the largest payer for healthcare. Private insurers generally pay more and so -- in Medicare Advantage plans -- cost the government more.

How can there be a story that has no end?
How do you reform immigration policy without granting some undocumented aliens legal status or undertaking mass deportations?

What I support is focusing on securing the border and when we secure the border and have convinced the American people that we do not have a flow of illegal aliens coming into the country, then we can address what we're going to do with the 11 or 15 million that are here. I don't think that there is a call for rounding people up and taking them out of the country. I don't think that that’s the process that’s necessary to maintain our system. I don't want to, however, during this process, say anything that encourages another wave of illegal immigration. And so by as Speaker Gingrich did, that he thinks at some point during this process anything that encourages another wave of illegal immigration. And so by saying, as Speaker Gingrich did, that he thinks at some point people should be entitled to stay here permanently, if you will, a form of amnesty, then I think that he encourages another wave of people coming in and saying, “Hey if you get there and if you hang on long enough, you get to stay.”

FREDDOSO: Have you not said enough to encourage that just now, simply by saying, "Well, once we've secured the border, we can do something?" Is that…

ROMNEY: I don't think so. I think, in fact, that virtually every Republican I know that's spoken about illegal immigration says the same thing. I listened to Lindsey Graham the other day and he said, "secure the border, stop the flow of illegal aliens into the country, and then we can address the issue of what to do with the people who are here illegally today." I do have my own thoughts on that. I actually have a plan in mind, I haven't unveiled it. There are other people I'd like to sit down with and review it with me.

Since the Great Recession hit, a combination of reduced economic opportunity and increased border enforcement has reduced the inflow of undocumented aliens by three quarters. Would Romney get it to zero before he unveiled a plan for resolving the status of 10-11 million undocumenteds currently in the U.S.? If so, that would indeed be a story that has no end.

How can there be a baby with no cryin"
How can you neutralize Newt without inflicting 'colicky baby parent syndrome' on us all for six months?

I am very concerned that this president is putting America on a path toward appeasement internationally and entitlement domestically. That we go from being a merit-opportunity society to an entitlement society. And it’s going to require a dramatic change in Washington by someone who knows how to lead. And transforming, turning around and leading major enterprises is what I have done throughout my life. And I have only been able to do that by bringing people together and engendering consensus.

And that’s a characteristic of my past. Speaker Gingrich has a very different past, in terms of his leadership style and in terms of his life experience. I spent my life leading enterprises, as head of two different businesses, head of an Olympics, and the governor of a state. The Speaker has a different background.…

That is actually, discounting the lie about international appeasement, a pretty good answer. And in fact, notwithstanding the absurd constraints he's placed on himself, Romney said some interesting things in this interview -- about alternate Medicare payment models, about the terrible risks of bombing Iran, about weaning the U.S. off employer-provided health insurance.

But can he woo successfully with his paradoxical presents?

Two speeches at Osawatomie

2011-12-07T07:17:00.000-05:00

Very interesting that for his landmark speech yesterday spotlighting middle class stagnation and growing income inequality as "the defining issue of our time," Obama chose to channel Teddy Roosevelt. He delivered the hour-long speech in Osawatomie, Kansas*, where in 1910 T.R. laid down a long manifesto calling for a "new nationalism" that would empower the federal government to effectively regulate powerful business interests and so deliver a "square deal" that would "deliver a more substantial equality of opportunity." Obama cited Roosevelt at length, drawing an extended parallel between T.R.'s fight to break up monopolies and establish fair labor laws and a progressive tax code and his own quest to re-establish effective regulation and more taxes on the wealthy. E. J. Dionne does a nice job today exploring the relevance of T.R.'s agenda to our own time.

Primed by Dionne, I took a look at T.R.'s speech yesterday evening. One thing leapt out at me: Roosevelt, unlike Obama, was a fighter, bred in the bone. His speech in many ways casts the fight against the entrenched privilege of special interests as a moral equivalent of war, as William James famously called for in struggles to better the human condition. T.R. was James' pupil. But he was less willing than James to abjure war itself as the crucible of character. While James, according to one scholar, "championed the rigor and strenuousness of his rough-riding former pupil Theodore Roosevelt," ... "he also slammed Roosevelt for his ''gushes over war as the ideal condition of human society, for the manly strenuousness which it involves.'' In the Osawatomie speech, Roosevelt addressed himself throughout to listening Civil War veterans, drawing parallels between their battle and the one he was joining to strengthen democracy and curb special interests.

More comprehensively than he has at any point since he took office (though not more so than in the '08 campaign), Obama yesterday directly confronted Republicans for their belief that "the market will take care of everything," for putting forward further deregulation as a panacea, for advocating trickle-down economics (he used the phrase), for blocking restoration of Clinton-era tax rates for the wealthy, for trying to strangle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in its crib. But for better and/or worse, Obama will never conceive his political task as the sublimated war that Teddy Roosevelt saw himself in:

The essence of any struggle for healthy liberty has always been, and must always be, to take from some one man or class of men the right to enjoy power, or wealth, or position, or immunity, which has not been earned by service to his or their fellows. That is what you fought for in the Civil War, and that is what we strive for now.

Think about that for a moment. Redistribution is a fight, by definition. Them that have are not going to yield their grip on the levers of power without having it pried off.

On the one hand, Roosevelt's speech lays out the ground rules for peaceful competition, for forging a society that leaves the land and people in a better condition for the next generation. He has embraced the "moral equivalent' meme, and a vision of society in which every man contributes to the general welfare. But the competition in the good society he envisions -- and the sublimated combat -- is inexorable. What's more, he admires war itself for the qualities it brings out in men -- including the pressure he believes it generates for pure meritocracy:

At many stages in the advance of humanity, this conflict between the men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess is the central condition of progress. In our day it appears as the struggle of freemen to gain and hold the right of self-government as against the special interests, who twist the methods of free government into machinery for defeating the popular will. At every stage, and under all circumstances, the essence of the struggle is to equalize opportunity, destroy privilege, and give to the life and citizenship of every individual the highest possible value both to himself and to the commonwealth. That is nothing new. All I ask in civil life is what you fought for in the Civil War. I ask that civil life be carried on according to the spirit in which the army was carried on. You never get perfect justice, but the effort in handling the army was to bring to the front the men who could do the job. Nobody grudged promotion to Grant, or Sherman, or Thomas, or Sheridan, because they earned it. The only complaint was when a man got promotion which he did not earn.

The political struggle is not just analogous to the military one that ended 45 years prior; it is of a piece with it, set against the same forces of self-entrenching privilege:

Now, this means that our government, National and State, must be freed from the sinister influence or control of special interests. Exactly as the special interests of cotton and slavery threatened our political integrity before the Civil War, so now the great special business interests too often control and corrupt the men and methods of government for their own profit. We must drive the special interests out of politics. That is one of our tasks to-day.

If this implied enmity is mitigated, it is not by conciliating the imagined adversary, but by offering him scrupulous justice. At various points, T.R. pits the need to keep mob rule in check against the need to curb privilege:

Every special interest is entitled to justice-full, fair, and complete-and, now, mind you, if there were any attempt by mob-violence to plunder and work harm to the special interest, whatever it may be, that I most dislike, and the wealthy man, whomsoever he may be, for whom I have the greatest contempt, I would fight for him, and you would if you were worth your salt. He should have justice. For every special interest is entitled to justice, but not one is entitled to a vote in Congress, to a voice on the bench, or to representation in any public office. The Constitution guarantees protection to property, and we must make that promise good. But it does not give the right of suffrage to any corporation.

Finally, Roosevelt accords to the federal government, as high arbiter in an endless competition and struggle, the moral authority to demand much of its most fortunate citizens:

The absence of effective State, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power. The prime need to is to change the conditions which enable these men to accumulate power which it is not for the general welfare that they should hold or exercise. We grudge no man a fortune which represents his own power and sagacity, when exercised with entire regard to the welfare of his fellows. Again, comrades over there, take the lesson from your own experience. Not only did you not grudge, but you gloried in the promotion of the great generals who gained their promotion by leading their army to victory. So it is with us. We grudge no man a fortune in civil life if it is honorably obtained and well used. It is not even enough that it should have been gained without doing damage to the community. We should permit it to be gained only so long as the gaining represents benefit to the community. This, I know, implies a policy of a far more active governmental interference with social and economic conditions in this country than we have yet had, but I think we have got to face the fact that such an increase in governmental control is now necessary.

Nothing is more true than that excess of every kind is followed by reaction; a fact which should be pondered by reformer and reactionary alike. We are face to face with new conceptions of the relations of property to human welfare, chiefly because certain advocates of the rights of property as against the rights of men have been pushing their claims too far. The man who wrongly holds that every human right is secondary to his profit must now give way to the advocate of human welfare, who rightly maintains that every man holds his property subject to the general right of the community to regulate its use to whatever degree the public welfare may require it.

Conversely, the effort to better the lot of the less fortunate is also undertaken in name of enabling and demanding that citizens do their duty to the community:

No man can be a good citizen unless he has a wage more than sufficient to cover the bare cost of living, and hours of labor short enough so after his day’s work is done he will have time and energy to bear his share in the management of the community, to help in carrying the general load. We keep countless men from being good citizens by the conditions of life by which we surround them. We need comprehensive workman’s compensation acts, both State and national laws to regulate child labor and work for women, and, especially, we need in our common schools not merely education in book-learning, but also practical training for daily life and work. We need to enforce better sanitary conditions for our workers and to extend the use of safety appliances for workers in industry and commerce, both within and between the States. Also, friends, in the interest of the working man himself, we need to set our faces like flint against mob-violence just as against corporate greed; against violence and injustice and lawlessness by wage-workers just as much as against lawless cunning and greed and selfish arrogance of employers. If I could ask but one thing of my fellow countrymen, my request would be that, whenever they go in for reform, they remember the two sides, and that they always exact justice from one side as much as from the other. I have small use for the public servant who can always see and denounce the corruption of the capitalist, but who cannot persuade himself, especially before election, to say a word about lawless mob-violence. And I have equally small use for the man, be he a judge on the bench or editor of a great paper, or wealthy and influential private citizen, who can see clearly enough and denounce the lawlessness of mob-violence, but whose eyes are closed so that he is blind when the question is one of corruption of business on a gigantic scale.

The stakes in the struggle are high. Obama claimed today to be speaking at a "make or break moment for the middle class." For T.R. that moment -- the struggle against entrenched privilege -- is perpetual:

Those who oppose reform will do well to remember that ruin in its worst form is inevitable if our national life brings us nothing better than swollen fortunes for the few and the triumph in both politics and business of a sordid and selfish materialism.

Obama today lambasted Republicans for advocating policies that serve entrenched privilege. He did not really declare war, or moral equivalent of war, on anyone in particular, however. He called for a modest tax claw-back, and for an empowered Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and for the kinds of long-term investments he always calls for. He did not announce intent "to take from some one man or class of men the right to enjoy power, or wealth, or position, or immunity, which has not been earned by service to his or their fellows." Dodd-Frank did not do that, nor the ACA, and there are no such quests on the horizon.

* The occasion was the dedication of John Brown National Park; Brown had battled pro-slavery forces in Osawatomie, in skirmishes that prefigured the Civil War. T.R. barely mentioned Brown in his speech -- though as noted, he addressed attending Civil War vets throughout.

Say I ain't dumb, Drum! I bought Obama's rhetoric...and still do

2011-12-06T14:57:00.001-05:00

Kevin Drum, en route to a fair-minded accounting of Obama's accomplishments and failings, blames liberal disappointment on Obama's campaign rhetoric:

Obama's core problem with his supporters from 2008, the ones who listened to his soaring rhetoric and believed he really was going to transform Washington — and have since been bitterly disappointed. This has always been something I could understand only intellectually, since I never for a second paid any attention to his stump speeches. Of course they soared! Of course they promised a new era! That's what politicians always promise. Why on earth would anyone take this seriously, when every single other piece of evidence showed him to be a cautious, pragmatic, mainsteam, center-left Democratic candidate?

This is the Gideon Rachman school of thought about Obama's hopemongering: that it was composed of"some of the most clichéd and least challenging slogans in the American political lexicon: unity not division; the future not the past; change not stagnation."

I beg to differ. Of course there is a lot of cliche in Obama's political speech -- political speech cannot subsist without it. But there was always a good deal more -- evidence of a truly rare mind at work upon the political process and the historical moment. Among the star-struck count a New Yorker editorialist, probably David Remnick, who in October 2008 compared Obama to Lincoln:

Obama has returned eloquence to its essential place in American politics. The choice between experience and eloquence is a false one––something that Lincoln, out of office after a single term in Congress, proved in his own campaign of political and national renewal. Obama’s “mere” speeches on everything from the economy and foreign affairs to race have been at the center of his campaign and its success; if he wins, his eloquence will be central to his ability to govern.

To those who think that Obama's call to hope and promise of change was just window dressing for a center-left laundry list of policy proposals, let me suggest the following:

o Obama's invocation of 'the fierce urgency of now,' a phrase that Rachman ridiculed, was in service of a concrete argument that the country was at an inflection point, that years of Republican dominance and Bush misrule had primed the electorate for another major swing of the pendulum. Here's how he cast the opportunity in a debate immediately following his victory in the Iowa caucuses:

Look, I think it's easier to be cynical and just say, "You know what, it can't be done because Washington's designed to resist change." But in fact there have been periods of time in our history where a president inspired the American people to do better, and I think we're in one of those moments right now. I think the American people are hungry for something different and can be mobilized around big changes -- not incremental changes, not small changes.

I actually give Bill Clinton enormous credit for having balanced those budgets during those years. It did take political courage for him to do that. But we never built the majority and coalesced the American people around being able to get the other stuff done.

And, you know, so the truth is actually words do inspire. Words do help people get involved. Words do help members of Congress get into power so that they can be part of a coalition to deliver health care reform, to deliver a bold energy policy. Don't discount that power, because when the American people are determined that something is going to happen, then it happens. And if they are disaffected and cynical and fearful and told that it can't be done, then it doesn't. I'm running for president because I want to tell them, yes, we can. And that's why I think they're responding in such large numbers.

Note that he is quite specific here about "the big stuff" that he was seeking to build a Congressional majority to accomplish -- and that he went one for two (perhaps with a sacrifice fly -- the new CAFE standards).

o Obama always cast his bid to be a "transformational" president as a bid to restore balance, a drive on his part and on the part of the American people to move the center left after decades of a tidal pull rightward. The meme was that America had historically committed itself to an ethic of shared prosperity; that that ethic had been left behind in the last ten-to-thirty years, and that the policies he was proposing would bring it back: Here's how he put it in Janeville, Wisconsin in February 2008:

when opportunity is uneven or unequal - it is our responsibility to restore balance, and fairness, and keep that promise alive for the next generation. That is the responsibility we face right now, and that is the responsibility I intend to meet as President of the United States....

We are not standing on the brink of recession due to forces beyond our control. The fallout from the housing crisis that's cost jobs and wiped out savings was not an inevitable part of the business cycle. It was a failure of leadership and imagination in Washington - the culmination of decades of decisions that were made or put off without regard to the realities of a global economy and the growing inequality it's produced...

And we'll have to remind ourselves that we rise and fall as one nation; that a country in which only a few prosper is antithetical to our ideals and our democracy; and that those of us who have benefited greatly from the blessings of this country have a solemn obligation to open the doors of opportunity, not just for our children, but to all of America's children.

Restored balance, shared prosperity, reversal of income inequality was the scaffolding in that speech for a long list of measures to shore up the income and security of the working poor and lower middle class.

o If Obama promised big, it was generally as an incrementalist, a long game player. He stressed that he aimed to begin to solve major problems, to turn the battleship a few degrees on major policy re-orientations, to build a foundation for sustainable long-term prosperity. Look at the agenda he set himself in an interview with Time during the transition (my emphasis):

I think there are a couple of benchmarks we've set for ourselves during the course of this campaign. On [domestic] policy, have we helped this economy recover from what is the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression? Have we instituted financial regulations and rules of the road that assure this kind of crisis doesn't occur again? Have we created jobs that pay well and allow families to support themselves? Have we made significant progress on reducing the cost of health care and expanding coverage? Have we begun what will probably be a decade-long project to shift America to a new energy economy? Have we begun what may be an even longer project of revitalizing our public-school systems so we can compete in the 21st century? That's on the domestic front.

On those last three bolded questions, I think it's fair to say yes: his administration has made promisnig beginnings.

He took a similar incrementalist tack in his hundredth-day press conference:

This metaphor has been used before, but this -- the ship of state is an ocean liner; it's not a speed boat. And so the way we are constantly thinking about this issue of how to bring about the changes that the American people need is to -- is to say, if we can move this big battleship a few degrees in a different direction, we may not see all the consequences of that change a week from now or three months from now, but 10 years from now, or 20 years from now, our kids will be able to look back and say that was when we started getting serious about clean energy, that's when health care started to become more efficient and affordable, that's when we became serious about raising our standards in education.

o Throughout the endless campaign, Obama reiterated an historic argument -- admittedly quite idealized -- to the effect that America had reason to hope for a rebalancing that would restore shared and sustainable prosperity because it had met similar challenges in the past -- from the Civil War to the New Deal to the Civil Rights movement. While his historical snapshots were admittedly quite idealized, the basic premise -- that at crucial historical moments, leaders mustered (or surfed) the democratic will to effect momentous change -- is quite true.

Once core campaign promise on which Obama really has disappointed so far is in his promise to change the way Washington works, which on the campaign trail meant two things: somehow disarming lobbyists, and winning over the GOP with sweet reason and a good-faith effort to win their buy-in. With regard to lobbyist influence, we've gone backwards, thanks to the new floodgates of corporate money opened by the Supreme Court. On the latter front, Obama would have been better off remaining civil but drawing his own bottom lines for the Republicans (and the right wing of his own party in many cases) to take or leave -- both before and after the Tea Party takeover of the House.

But even on this front, the jury is still out. Long term, if Obama survives the re-election campaign, he may eventually be seen to have moderated zero-sum gladiatorial partisan political combat. First, there's the example of his personal probity and that of his administration -- no scandals, other than the bite-in-the-ass Solyndra. Second, he's convinced two thirds of the electorate that he's more moderate, reality-based and focused on solutions than the GOP. This perception has no doubt been vitiated in part by the parallel perception that he can be rolled by the implacable opposition. But if he wins the endgame -- re-election, and a reasonable compromise on taxes and spending before (or after) the Bush tax cuts expire -- he may win this war after losing a few battles.

What Republicans would like to believe about Obama's current strategy

2011-12-06T10:38:00.003-05:00

Michael Gerson, while granting Obama grudging respect for the relative resiliency of his poll numbers in the face of of terrible economy, mis-casts his current political strategy:

Obama’s recent conversion to the old-time Democratic religion of class conflict — preached at Occupy Wall Street tent meetings — has rallied American liberalism. This approach has its limits. A message that shores up support from the left may complicate Obama’s appeal to independents. The construction of a 43 percent floor may also involve the construction of a ceiling not far above it. But Obama’s appeal to the political middle was no longer working. A base strategy was his only credible strategy, and it seems to have prevented a polling collapse.

Obama's current strategy -- highlighting his policy contrasts with Republicans, hammering them for resisting new taxes on the wealthy, pushing popular stimulus measures (by other names), and "balanced" deficit reduction -- is aimed as much at "independents" -- or rather, at majorities much broader than the Democratic base -- as it is on shoring up that base. As Greg Sargent says, Gerson is "just wrong about the Dems’ new populism being a “base” strategy."

Obama now is exploiting broad-based support for the basic thrust of his policies: infrastructure investment, continued tax relief for the middle class, tax increases for the wealthiest, and "balanced" deficit reduction that combines such taxes with back-loaded long-term cuts in projected spending. All of these measures are popular. Americans want action on jobs; and by now the message that in recent decades the top 1% has creamed off most of the benefits of economic growth has penetrated deep. Majorities of Republicans, let alone independents, support additional taxes for the rich, the payroll tax cut extension, and some infrastructure investment.

Moreover, the notion that Obama could broaden his support by being less confrontational or continuing in his prior mode of soft-pedaling his differences with the GOP while seeking compromise is an obvious fallacy. In the wake of the last-minute, revenue-free budget deal struck on August 1 Obama's poll numbers took an across-the-board dive, not because voters disapproved of his advocacy for new taxes in any deficit reduction deal, but because he failed to get what he had argued persuasively was essential. He was punished for perceived weakness and ineffectuality, not for advocating "socialist" policies.

Short of good economic luck or policy moves that actually make such luck, the best thing Obama can do for himself politically is to win a pitched battle with Republicans (which might even help make such luck). Even the payroll tax cut may serve to a degree, simply because he's said it must be done, and after apparent resistance Republicans will probably let it happen, if only because they can't let their alleged aversion to all taxes be exposed as aversion to taxes for the wealthy only. A government shutdown, triggered by some poison pill social provisions inserted by the House Tea Party into the 2012 budget bills, might do the trick more dramatically. Ultimately, Obama may even get some kind of long-term tax/budget agreement, if Republicans are convinced that he'd both let all the Bush tax cuts expire and let the sequestered defense cuts mandated by the supercommittee failure take place rather than give away the store on new revenue and non-defense spending.

Religion helped develop our 'better angels'*

2011-12-05T08:48:00.002-05:00

To prove his point that past eras were violent almost beyond our current imagining, Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined rather revels in chronicling the brutalities of the late middle ages and early renaissance, particularly those carried out in the name of God by religious authorities -- in crusade, Inquisition, and, once the protestant movements got going, centuries of religious war. At times, he slips into the 'new atheist' mode of attack, and his contempt gets a bit thick -- and as one dimensional, I'm beginning to think, as idealizations of 'the age of faith' by earlier generations of historians, or by fundamentalists today.

At the same time, Pinker makes much of the study of the "civilizing process" carried out by a certain Norbert Elias, who focused on, of all things, etiquette books, and mapped out the steadily rising standards of self-control -- e.g., of bodily fluids, and of impulses and gestures toward violence in polite company -- that those guidebooks prescribe. The development of the basics of what we now compartmentalize and trivialize as manners tracks the centuries of dramatic reduction in homicide rates in Europe, from about the 12th century through the 20th.

One part of the civilizing story that Pinker has so far ignored is the rise of a less punitive, more nurturing and accessible concept of God-- a God who could be encountered on an individual basis in a safe private space. This softening and some cases literal maternalizing of God took place, ironically, throughout centuries of Inquisition, dogmatic enforcement, and political strife within the Catholic church; ultimately, the personalization of worship helped trigger the Reformation and hence the centuries of religious warfare which Pinker asserts to be proportionately as lethal at some points as the wars of the twentieth century.

As is implicit in Pinker's core premise, the softening/civilizing and great bloodletting were happening simultaneously. But what he seems reluctant so far to acknowledge (I'm in Chapter 4 of 10, but we're already focused on the Enlightenment) is that the rise of introspection, empathy, outreach to the vulnerable and less fortunate, and other prerequisites of the civilizing process occurred in large part through changes in religious doctrine and practice.

Caroline Bynum, in a remarkable collection of essays titled Jesus as Mother, traces changes in the concept of God that accompanied the development of various forms of monastic worship for men and women in the later middle ages. She tells a story that seems relevant to Pinker's:

The God of early medieval writing and art is a judge and king, to whom propitiation is offered by the hordes of monks presenting correct and beautiful prayers before countless altars; Christ is a prince, reigning from the throne of the cross after defeating humankind's captor, and Mary is his queen. The fundamental dramas of religion are cosmic -- wars between Christ and the devil, saints or angels and demons...In contrast, eleventh- and twelfth-century writers begin to stress Christ's humanity, both in affective and sentimentalized responses to the gospel story...and in a new compulsion to build into the christian life a literal imitation of the details of Jesus' ministry. The fundamental religious drama is now located with the self, and it is less a battle than a journey--a journey toward God. Hagiography, whose subjects more and more frequently are women and laity, focuses increasingly on inner virtues and experiences (often accompanied by external phenomena such as trances, levitation, and stigmata) rather than grand actions on the stage of history. Alongside the increase in efforts to stimulate affective responses, twelfth-century religious writing (most of which was produced by men) shows an outburst of mystical theology after hundreds of years of silence about it and a great increase in devotion to female figures, in use of feminine metaphors, and in admiration for characteristics (e.g., tears, weakness, and mercy or 'ethical irrationality') that people of the period stereotyped as feminine (pp. 16-17).

Intimate personal communion with a loving, patient, education-minded and decidedly nonjudgmental God found startling expression in the writings of Julian of Norwich, an anchoress who spent her adult life in the latter part of the fourteenth century enclosed in an alcove of the Church of St. Julian of Norwich in the English city of that name. Therein she devoted her time to contemplating and in a sense constantly re-enacting an ecstatic series of 'shewings' that occurred, she tells us, when she was sick to the point of death in her thirtieth year. In this experience, as she describes it, she traveled into the body of Christ through the wound in his side and there was shown various startling truths about the nature of humanity's unity with God. Julian has become something of a rock star with feminist theologians because her central image for this unity is God as mother, enclosing humanity within his body. She means this more than literally: for Julian, an earthly mother's relationship with her child is an imperfect figura for divine motherhood, not the other way around:

For in that same time that God knit him to our body in the maiden's womb, he took our sensual soul, in which taking, he us all having beclosed in him, he oned [joined] it to our substance. IN which oneing he was perfect man, for Christ, having knit in him all man that shall be saved, is perfect man.
Thus our lady is our mother, in whom we be all beclosed and of her born in Christ, for she that is mother of our savior is mother of all that been saved in our savior; and our savior is our very [true] mother, in whom we be endlessly born and never shall come out of him.

The universe, then, is one giant womb. That is, a very safe space. It might be noted that the lucky beings enclosed therein are "all that shall be saved," which would seem to leave out all that shall not be. But Julian's compassion extended so far that she was quite certain that God had shown her that all will be saved: in her famous formulation, "all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well." According to church doctrine of the time, that is (apparent) heresy. Hence Julian spent the rest of her life contemplating the conundrum: how could church doctrine be true, and her revelation also be true? If she got the answer wrong, and put it in writing, she could conceivably have ended up broken on one of those wheels that Pinker describes with such relish.

Julian deals with the harsh concepts of the devil, hell, and ultimately even sin by quarantining them. They are real insofar as they are part of the way human beings see the world, but they are not part of God's perspective. Their reality is "saved" only because God, through the incarnation, incorporates the human way of seeing into his own. They are real because we see them, but God does not, and ultimately we will see as God sees.

One might retort, so what? Julian's way of understanding sin and damnation was not adopted; she was not widely read in her time. True enough. But she existed in a milieu that made such formulations possible. Her conception of the relationship between God and human,and of human epistemology, if not the full sweep of her compassion, incorporated ideas that were widely shared.

Those ideas helped develop the concept of the individual as we have inherited it. So I argued in an article, excerpted at some length here. The upshot:

Julian adopts a widespread strategy of spiritual inquiry and self-definition when she declares, "I understood non higher stature in this life than childhood in feebleness and failing of might and of wit in to the time that our gracious mother hath brought us up to our father's bliss." This stance of child-before-the-mother is used by major religious and secular writers [of the late middle ages] alike to establish a safe field, overseen by a numinous guarantor, for inquiry into the nature of human desire, will, and perception.

While the emotional keynote of the child-before-the-mother stance is reassurance, the intellectual thrust is toward education, the spiritual growth of the individual. In Julian's understanding of the human condition, falling is, first, a necessary means to knowledge, and second, a lesson that takes place in a kind of baby-proofed spiritual nursery:

for it needeth us to fall, and it needeth us to see it; for if we fell not, we should not know how feeble and how wretched we be of our self, nor also we should not so fulsomely know the marvelous love of our maker..and by the assay of this falling we shall have an high and a marvelous knowing of love in God without end...The mother may suffer the child to fall some time and be diseased in diverse manner, for its own profit, but she may never suffer that any manner of peril come to her child for love.

The sequence of 'showings' that make up Julian's revelation constitutes a safe space into which Julian may retreat at will: she is enjoined to "take it, and learn it, and keep thee therein, and comfort thee therewith, and trust thereto, and thou shalt not be overcome." The need to establish such a safe space and the imperative to dramatize an educative process founded, as Julian's is, upon error and correction give shape to major literary forms of the Late Middle Ages: the poem of consolation or confession, the dream vision, the debate. In these framed dialogues, a numinous interlocuter [e.g., dead relative, mythological figure, dead author] often serves as a kind of special education teacher addressing questions or illustrations toward the particular learning disability of the disordered soul. As Julian puts it, "our good Lord answered to all the questions and doubts that I might make."

In centuries when the upper classes were learning not to blow their noses in tablecloths or spear their meat or shit in doorways, they were also learning new ways to interact as pupil and teacher, new ways to care for their own souls and those of others -- though as Pinker emphasizes, the latter could include torturing them to death for the alleged sake of their eternal salvation. Be that as it may, the civilizing process took place through religion as much as in spite in of it.
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* Forgive the re-post: this originally went up on Sat. Dec. 3, and I didn't want to bury it.

The reader over your shoulder

2011-12-04T17:50:00.001-05:00

Whither the U.S.? Whither the human race? I've read some pretty good books recently that grapple with the big questions, and I've enjoyed engaging with them here, whether in the form of reviews, free association, nitpicks, whatever. Below, various responses to some good reads.

Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature
Religion helped develop our better angels
Better Angels in the news
The bettering angels of our nature

Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee's Race Against the Machine
We may be half-drowning, but we're not stagnating
see also: A Kling-free future prosperity?

Tyler Cowen's The Great Stagnation
Slo-mo grow on the plateau: Tyler Cowen's theory of American Malaise

Richard Florida's The Great Reset
Food for thought, and occasional light rations
see also: Our future is not in manufacturing

Francis Fukuyama's The Origins of Political Order
The state's oldest rival
Chronicle of an early social contract

Gideon Rachman's Zero-Sum Future
Gideon Rachman cries wolf, and bids us listen

Stephen J. Rose's Rebound
...foresees America unbound

Niall Ferguson's The War of the World
Fog of war

Robert Reich's Supercapitalism
review

A blow against faux reportorial balance

2011-12-02T08:59:00.000-05:00

Left-side political commentators such as Greg Sargent and Steve Benen, along with the more even-handed James Fallows, keep a constant watch for faux balance in political reporting -- that is, quoting partisans on both sides of a given issue without giving any hint if the claims of one side (or both) are manifestly false or unsupported by evidence.

Today, the New York Times' senior economics columnist Floyd Norris strikes a blow against faux balance, and does so in good reportorial fashion, by calling in outside authority. In fact in this case, the 'authority' is the news hook for the article.

The subject is the stuck housing market: the policy in question is stronger mortgage relief for underwater homeowners. The occasion is more or less explicit calls from Fed governors for such intervention. The ground is well prepared for this infusion of reportorial judgment...

To many Republicans, the answer is simply to let the markets sort it out. That prescription seems to be based more on ideology than on any actual analysis of how the housing market is functioning...

...which is covered by the sentence close and subsequent backup:

and it seems to infuriate Fed officials.

“Regardless of how we got here, we, as a nation, currently have a housing market that is so severely out of balance that it is hampering our economic recovery,” said Elizabeth A. Duke, a Fed governor, in a speech in September.

Mr. Dudley, the New York Fed president, also denounced the way the market was functioning. “In contrast to the efficient mechanisms in place in the commercial property market to work out troubled debt,” he said in his speech at West Point, “the infrastructure of the residential mortgage market is wholly inadequate to deal with a systemic shock to the housing market. Left alone, this flawed structure will destroy much more value in housing than is necessary.”

As a columnist not on the op-ed page, Norris operates in a kind of middle zone between opinion and reporting. On the op-ed page, Paul Krugman denounces anti-Keynesian policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic twice a week. In the business section, Norris and David Leonhardt are more circumspect -- they have more space to build a case, they cite more data and more outside authorities, and they are less strident in putting forward their own prescriptions. They do advance policy recommendations. But still, an outright dismissal of a core position held on one side of the aisle strikes me as rare.

Romney hasn't changed -- the audience has

2011-12-01T19:31:00.001-05:00

What's all this fuss about Mitt Romney's allegedly "disastrous" interview with Bret Baier? I just watched it, and I saw the same Romney I've seen in a half dozen debates--evasive with regard to past and current positions, drawing distinctions without differences, happily misrepresenting opponents' positions and deeds -- in a word, full of shit -- but also in full command of his contorted policy positions and campaign messages, never really at a loss for words. If a little stammering could sink a candidate, Obama would still be a state senator. As for the "snippiness," I thought he just took a page out of Herman Cain's playbook: when challenged, begin by asserting forcefully that your challenger is wrong.

Let's look at* the exchange over immigration policy:

BAIER: In recent days, you've charged that Speaker Gingrich was proposing amnesty essentially with what he said in that last debate.You were attacking him on immigration, but you took what seemed like a very similar position back in 2006-2007, telling Bloomberg that some illegal immigrants need to be allowed to stay, come out of the shadows, and, quote, "we need to begin a process of registering those people, some being returned, some beginning the process of applying for citizenship and establishing legal status. We're not going to go through a process of tracking them all down and moving them out."

ROMNEY: Right.

BAIER: Is that different than where you are now?

ROMNEY: You know, my view is that those people that are here illegally today should have the opportunity to register and to have their status identified and those individuals should get in line with everyone else that's in line legally. They should not be placed ahead of the line. They should, instead, go at the back of the line, and they should not be allowed to stay in this country and be given permanent residency or citizenship merely because they've come here illegally.

BAIER: But isn't that what Gingrich is saying? Isn't he saying short of citizenship

ROMNEY: I can't tell you what Speaker Gingrich is saying.

BAIER: But yet you call him --

ROMNEY: Bret, no. If he's going to do what I believe he said he was going to do for those people who would be allowed to stay permanently and become citizens, that would be providing for them a form of amnesty. But my view is, and I can tell you what -- I'll let him describe his view. My view is pretty straightforward.For those people who've come here illegally, they should have the opportunity to get in line with everybody else who wants to come in to this country, but, they go to the back of the line and they should be given no special pathway to citizenship or permanent residency merely because they've come here illegally.

BAIER: The question is what you do with the 11 million plus people who are already here and how you handle them. And back in 2006-2007, you made a point in saying, we're not going to round them all up and send them out.

ROMNEY: That's right.

BAIER: So, what do you do with them?

ROMNEY: You know, there's great interest on the part of some to talk about what we do with the 11 million. My interest is saying, let's make sure that we secure the border, and we don't do anything that talks about bringing in a new wave of those or attracting a new wave of people into the country illegally.The right course for us is to secure the border and say nothing about amnesty or tuition breaks to illegal aliens or anything else that draws people into the country illegally. The right course, secure the border, and then, we can determine what's the right way to deal with the 11 million and to make it as clear as I possibly can.

Here, Romney misrepresents Gingrich's policy (claiming that it's to let undocumented aliens become citizens), affects not to know the Gingrich policy for which he's attacked Gingrich (give some undocumented aliens a chance to apply for permanent residency), leaves unexplained a key element of his own policy (what happens to the undocumented after you've induced them to register?), changes the subject when pushed on this question (let's secure the border first), and promises an unequivocal answer to that question after something that will never happen happens. He expends a good deal of verbiage outlining a policy that no one, least of all Baier, can make any sense of, distinguishing it incomprehensibly from Gingrich's. Also lost in the sauce: any difference between the Romney of 2006 and the Romney of today.

So what's new? This is precisely how Romney has operated in the debates. The only difference is that Baier pushed back longer than any debate opponent has done, or had the opportunity to do. Romney hit all his talking points -- go to the back of the line, no amnesty, secure the border first. His syntax wasn't mangled, he didn't betray ignorance of any key facts, and he wasn't at a loss for words, discounting a momentary stammer over the point he would not spell out. If this kind of evasion seems damning, it's because the audience has reached a turning point, not because Romney's m.o. has changed.

The healthcare exchange was also familiar territory:

BAIER: About your book, you talk about Massachusetts healthcare. We've heard you many times, in the debates and interviews, talk about how it is different in your mind than the president's healthcare law, Obamacare. The question is, do you still support the idea of a mandate? Do you believe that that was the right thing for Massachusetts? do you think a mandate, mandating people to buy insurance is the right tool?

ROMNEY: Bret, I don't know how many hundred times I've said this, too. This is an unusual interview. (LAUGHTER)

ROMNEY: All right. Let's do it again. Absolutely. What we did in Massachusetts was right for Massachusetts. I've said that time and time again, that people of the state continue to support it by about 3-1, but it's also designed for Massachusetts, not for the nation, and at the time our bill was passed, and that was brought forward as an issue, there were people who said, is this something you'd like to have the entire nation do?I said no. This is not a federal plan, it's a state plan. And under the constitution, states should be able to craft their own plans, and our plan--

BAIER: So, governor, you did say on camera and other places that, at times, you thought it would be a model for the nation.

ROMNEY: You're wrong, Bret.

BAIER: No, no. There's tape --

BAIER: You think that you are well positioned to go up against President Barack Obama on the issue of healthcare?

ROMNEY: Of course. The best equipped, the best equipped. I understand healthcare. I spent a good portion of my career working in healthcare. I came up with a plan, unlike his, that doesn't cost a trillion dollars. Unlike his, we didn't raise taxes. Unlike his, I didn't cut Medicare by half a trillion dollars.

Regarding the factual disagreement, Romney said that he'd like to think that the Mass plan could be a model for the nation, but if pressed he would claim that he never said it should be Federal law. If pressed further, I imagine he'd say that he had hoped that most if not all states would eventually choose the Mass model. As for his pithy set of contrasts between his plan and Obamacare, it's a plateful of red herrings: his plan didn't cost $1 trillion because the population of Massachusetts is 2+% that of the whole country; he didn't raise taxes because Massachusetts had a $2 billion Medicaid windfall; Medicare is irrelevant, and if President, he'd cut it more than Obama would; and the constitutionality of the mandate is irrelevant to its utility or justice. Baier, like all of Romney's nomination rivals, failed to point out that Obamacare clones Romneycare's core structure, that all the features of the Mass plan that Romney touts -- private exchanges, premium support, the individual mandate -- are part of Obamacare. So again, this was echt Romney: erasing the difference between past position and present, rattling off bogus talking points about the ACA, obscuring its close kinship to Romneycare.

It's true that Romney was aggressive with Baier -- he told him he was wrong, that he'd been gulled by Democratic ads, that he'd misunderstood Romney's past pronouncements; and he complained about the tenor of the interview in mid-stream. But all that could be spun as standing up forcefully to tough questioning. And the interview was in fact unusual. Yes, it's par for the course in a good faith big league interview for a candidate to be challenged in the terms that rivals are challenging him in -- but usually the challenging segments are balanced by giving the candidate openings to blather on in his own terms for a while about his 'positive vision.' This one was all challenge

I think that reaction to this interview reflects the crystallization of long latent and long building disgust with Romney's longstanding modes of obfuscation.

*Partial transcript courtesy of RedState

Crowd-sourced cliff notes--->crowd-sourced editing?

2011-12-01T08:45:00.000-05:00

I was just going through my notes and highlights in a book on Kindle -- a frustratingly awkward process, but I won't bore you with an account of this year-old machine's limitations. What struck me was the latent possibilities in an option I never considered: "view popular highlights." Kindles show you what other readers have highlighted, a feature I've always considered an annoyance, like reading a marked-up library book. But now, on the plus side...

Suppose, as an experiment, you took a scholarly book and read only the popular highlights -- the passages other readers had found most significant. I suspect that for many books, my graduate thesis adviser's 80% rule for reading in a foreign language would apply. It's this: if you read a page in a language of which you have run-of-the-mill academic command without any external aids or special effort, you might understand 80%. To get to 90%, you might spend twice as much time, and to 95%, twice as much again.

For many books, reading the popular highlights might give you 80%. Why would you want to? If the book's any good, you wouldn't. In any case, 80% of what? On what scale do you weigh what you missed?

For one reading group, though, I think the experiment would have value -- and probably, visceral interest: authors. How fascinating to see what most readers consider most significant. And you might get material for a great 'short version.' I spend a good deal of my professional life cutting articles down to specified word counts -- say, 1300 words to 1000 or 800, sometimes 4000 to 1200. Generally, if the reduction is less than say 33%, the article is improved.

Suppose you used popular highlights for your 800 page book to create a 25-page or 50-page version. If the original is any good, the short version wouldn't be a substitute. But it might be very useful to people doing copious literature reviews, or to those with casual interest. It might be most useful of all to you -- a compressed sense of what readers take away.

Of course, the idea of an extended precis is as old as the magazine book excerpt -- or rather, adaptation. But one based on dozens or hundreds or thousands of readers' as-they-go decisions might look and feel rather different.

Our historian-in-chief-takes the short view

2011-11-30T17:26:00.000-05:00

Presumptive commander-in-chief Newt was all for the Iraq invasion. No surprise there. Presumably, as a member of the Defense Policy Board, he was advising the administration as a historian, just as he did so selflessly for Freddie Mac. In an op-ed published in USA Today on October 16, 2002, Newt delved deep into his knowledge-hoard and came up with the perfect analogy for the prospective preemptive strike:

The only issue is whether the risks are greater now or whether the risks will be greater later. We learned with Adolf Hitler that moving early would have been less expensive and less dangerous and would have saved millions of lives.

The rest of the piece is unexceptionable party-hack boilerplate. The case for war is made in four simple points, QED:

* First, is the proposed action truly necessary? The necessity of replacing Saddam Hussein is the unanimous view of not only the senior leadership of the United States and Great Britain. They concluded that allowing him to acquire weapons of mass destruction -- weapons he is willing to use -- would make the world dramatically more dangerous. That opinion is also held by former ambassador Richard Butler, who was the head of the United Nations inspections commission in Iraq.

* Second, is the proposed action achievable? No one seriously doubts that the United States and its coalition partners, including Britain, Australia, Kuwait, Israel, Turkey, Italy, Romania, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, Italy, Spain, Poland and the Netherlands, are all prepared to succeed. Even Saudi Arabia and other nations have agreed to help if there is a U.N. resolution.

* Third, is it worth it? The bombing in Bali, Indonesia, should have reminded us that we are permanently at risk until those who support terrorism are defeated. The question is not, "Should we replace Saddam?" The question is, "Should we wait until Saddam gives biological, chemical and nuclear weapons to terrorists?"

* Fourth, if there is to be action, we should act early, and we should have unrestricted options. The Bush administration has gotten congressional authorization, mobilized diplomatic and military forces, worked the U.N. aggressively and prepared and communicated with our allies. Moreover, the Bush administration will not restrict the options for success and ultimately will do what is necessary to win as rapidly as possible with minimum casualties.

Every bullet above is either a deception, a tautology or a non sequitur: a) Richard Butler opposed the invasion; b) countries that joined the U.S.'s pitifully thin coalition would presumably believe the mission 'achievable'; c) by Newt's logic any terrorist attack would prove that Saddam was on course to give nukes to terrorists; and d) if it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly -- so just do it.

But there's the rub: would it be done when 'tis done? Conspicuously absent is any inkling that anything might go wrong after Saddam is overthrown, or that planning might need to extend beyond doing "what is necessary to win as rapidly as possible." MacBeth worried whether his regime change would trammel up the consequences. Historian Newt didn't bother to wonder.