Short history of the decline and fall of American democracy

I switched on Twitter for 15 minutes at 7:00 a.m. this morning and felt I was watching democracy die before my eyes as a fascist and possibly traitorous president threatened to prosecute Obama.

That led me to a flash review of our decline and fall as the narrative has taken shape in my mind in recent years:

• The Kochs plotted long and hard, building their network of extremist think tanks, fake news sources, astroturf advocacy groups and corporate lobbying groups.


• Reagan ripped the lid off inequality and disinherited the middle class with a cocktail of tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation, weakened antitrust enforcement and union-bashing.


• Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes prepped 30-40% of the population for fascism with twenty years of progressively more extreme gaslighting.

Two assessments of the Bush presidency

By any normal human reckoning, you would have to call President Obama's selective precis of the George W. Bush presidency, delivered at the dedication of the Bush Library, generous and gracious, First he paid tribute to the man:

So we know President Bush the man.  And what President Clinton said is absolutely true -- to know the man is to like the man, because he’s comfortable in his own skin.  He knows who he is.  He doesn’t put on any pretenses.  He takes his job seriously, but he doesn’t take himself too seriously.  He is a good man.

Then, to an edited version of his record: 

But we also know something about George Bush the leader.  As we walk through this library, obviously we’re reminded of the incredible strength and resolve that came through that bullhorn as he stood amid the rubble and the ruins of Ground Zero, promising to deliver justice to those who had sought to destroy our way of life...

Political science consensus judgment of the day

The U.S. District Court of political commentary, xpostfactoid division, affirms in part and vacates in part Peter Beinart's remediation order* for the GOP [n.b. note update at bottom for second appeal ruling] :

...to seriously challenge for the presidency, a Republican will have to pointedly distance himself from Jeb’s older brother... It won’t be enough for a candidate merely to keep his or her distance from W. John McCain and Mitt Romney tried that, and they failed because the Obama campaign hung Bush around their neck every chance it got. To seriously compete, the next Republican candidate for president will have to preempt that Democratic line of attack by repudiating key aspects of Bush’s legacy. Jeb Bush would find that excruciatingly hard even if he wanted to. And as his interviews Sunday make clear, he doesn’t event want to try.

Upheld:  it would be a good idea for the next GOP presidential candidate, and probably all GOP candidates for the foreseeable future, to distance themselves from W.  David Frum saw the writing on the wall back in February 2008:

The tax-cutters' eternal advantage

David Atkins does not like Obama's proposed Medicare and Social Security benefit cuts and complains about moral um, unequivalence in D.C.:

The idea that spending cuts are morally and politically superior to revenue increases is so ingrained the Village political press that to even put the shoe on the other foot creates an unthinkable scenario. This is one of Ronald Reagan's most baleful legacies: a Washington establishment that can't stop believing it's the 1980s or early 1990s.

A prophet not without honor save in his own party

How many political prognostications hold up well nearly five years later?  Give Republican Cassandra David Frum credit for seeing the landscape clearly in February 2008:

John Mitchell, Richard Nixon’s attorney-general, predicted in 1970: “This country is going so far right you won’t recognise it.” His prophecy was vindicated. Now its time is up: 2008 is shaping up to be the first decisive Democratic victory since 1964 – a 1980 in reverse...

In 2002, equal numbers of Americans identified as Republicans and Democrats. In the six years since, Republican identification has collapsed back to the level recorded before Ronald Reagan. The decline has been steepest among young voters. If they eat right, exercise and wear seatbelts, today’s 20-somethings will be voting against George W. Bush deep into the 2060s. Most ominously, US polls show an ideological sea change: a desire for a more activist government, a loss of interest in the tax question and a shift to the left on most social issues (although not, interestingly, abortion).

Why does Obama let Romney get away with his "doubled the deficit" charge?

Obama did a lot of things right in the Hofstra debate. But one core Romney lie he let go unchallenged repeatedly. I go to my tweet tape:

@xpostfactoid1 

nailed him on everything but his own deficits

6:51 PM - 16 Oct 12 ·  Details

3x "he doubled the deficit" - time to pop that lie
6:56 PM - 16 Oct 12 · Details

he has cut the deficit - time to say so

6:57 PM - 16 Oct 12 · Details

unaswered: you doubled the deficit Lie
6:37 PM - 16 Oct 12 · Details

In fact, the deficit in FY 2009, compiled mainly on Bush's watch, was $1.4 trillion; this year it's just shy of $1.1 trillion. The only way Romney can get to Obama "doubling" it is to hold him responsible for 2009 -- as he's held him responsible for job losses that occurred prior to the stimulus taking effect (while holding himself harmless for job losses in the first year of his Massachusetts tenure -- see Romney Rule #2).

In defense of the boomers, who don't exist

Going away for the weekend, freaked out by recent polls, holding my breath until Tuesday night...and so reposting one that got a little lost in the sauce, below.
 -------
In an article pinging across the internets just now, 34 year-old reporter Jim Tankersley calls his 63 year-old lawyer father to the bar to defend the boomer generation against a broad indictment:

This is the charge I’ve leveled against him on a summer day in our Pacific Northwest vision of paradise. I have asked my favorite attorney to represent a very troublesome client, the entire baby-boom generation, in what should be a slam-dunk trial—for me. On behalf of future generations, I am accusing him and all the other parasites his age of breaking the sacred bargain that every American generation will pass a better country on to its children than the one it inherited.

Dad makes some very good points in defense, but he accepts the general terms of the trial: that it makes sense to indict a so-called "generation" for the course of human events, national and global.  I reject that premise. Generalizations about generations always send me around the bend.  Being admittedly predisposed to dismiss the case on conceptual grounds, I believe that the particular charges don't stand up to scrutiny.

Tankersley's case against the boomers: summarily dismissed

In an article pinging across the internets just now, 34 year-old reporter Jim Tankersley calls his 63 year-old lawyer father to the bar to defend the boomer generation against a broad indictment:

This is the charge I’ve leveled against him on a summer day in our Pacific Northwest vision of paradise. I have asked my favorite attorney to represent a very troublesome client, the entire baby-boom generation, in what should be a slam-dunk trial—for me. On behalf of future generations, I am accusing him and all the other parasites his age of breaking the sacred bargain that every American generation will pass a better country on to its children than the one it inherited.

Dad makes some very good points in defense, but he accepts the general terms of the trial: that it makes sense to indict a so-called "generation" for the course of human events, national and global.  I reject that premise. Generalizations about generations always send me around the bend.  Being admittedly predisposed to dismiss the case on conceptual grounds, I believe that the particular charges don't stand up to scrutiny.

In GOP heaven, St. Ronnie is lonely

Most GOP presidents in this century have helped advance American prosperity and security in enduring ways. Teddy Roosevelt busted the trusts. Eisenhower kept the peace while keeping the military-industrial complex under control and building our modern transportation infrastructure.  Nixon opened China to the US, helping to sap Soviet strength and provide an engine for global growth that's still chugging. Reagan helped feather down the Soviet Union peacefully, as did Bush Sr., while turning back Saddam's aggression and helping to lay the foundation for the balanced budgets of the 1990s.

Lots of twitterers, including James Fallows and Ezra Klein, have noted that while Bill Clinton mentioned George W. Bush three times in his speech last night, mostly positively, none of the GOP speakers in Tampa mentioned him by name. That's not surprising. Bush was a disastrous president on all fronts -- busting the budget, getting tens of thousands of US soldiers and Iraqi and Afghan civilians killed and maimed in two botched wars, permanently compromising U.S. civil liberties, massively eroding the nation's soft power. Not even Republicans can defend that record of faillure.

GOP Demonization Index soars again

Speaking at a New York fundraiser heavy with basketball stars on Wednesday, Obama ventured a snapshot of how far the GOP has moved to the right during his presidency:

This is probably the most consequential election of my lifetime, and in a lot of ways, it’s more consequential than the one in 2008.... back in 2008, we were running against a Republican candidate who believed in some basic things that I believe in -- believed that money shouldn’t dominate politics; believed in immigration reform, that we should give every young person who’s here a chance to become an American and contribute to this country; somebody who believed in climate change and believed in science.

In which I am blinded by my own propensities

I have taken heart more than once from Rick Perry's ignominious plunge in the polls and exit from the presidential race, concluding that even GOP voters don't like a thug -- or a policy illiterate.

This may be wishful thinking.  Rich Yeselson, recounting Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson's analysis of the Tea Party, notes their finding that immigration is the No. 1 hot-button issue for Tea Partyers, and reminds us:

A brief post-9/11 lament

I have been shying away from most of the 9/11 retrospectives, because when I think of what that day wrought in this country, all I feel is grief. Grief, that is, over what we in the United States have done to ourselves in response to the real and perceived threat.

The usually acute FT columnist Philip Stephens argued last week that in the grand scheme of things, 9/11 mattered not much of all. The main story of the last decade is "the rising states of Asia and Latin America"; 9/11 just accelerated the relative "rise of the rest."  That may well be true.  But to add as a corollary that "Bin Laden did not really change very much at all" is reverse myopia of the worst kind.

"Known known": Rumsfeld fixated on Iraq from 9/12/01?

In a well-documented take-down of Donald Rumsfeld's memoir Known Unknowns, Bob Woodward uses records from his own interviews and George W. Bush's Decision Points to dispute Rumsfeld's claim that Bush asked him to look at  then-current military plans for invading Iraq shortly after 9/11 -- on 9/26/01, to be exact. Woodward, offended that Rumsfeld "tries to push so much off on Bush", is at pains to demonstrate that Rumsfeld himself was floating the idea of invading Iraq on 9/11 and 9/12 -- and that "the record shows that it was Rumsfeld stoking the Iraq fires" before Bush did indeed ask for plans in late November. 

Woodward's evidence is from his own Plan of Attack and from the 9/11 Commission Report.  Former counterterrorism director Richard A. Clarke's Against All Enemies provides corroboration that Rumsfeld was fixated on Iraq from the beginning. Clarke implies that driving Rumsfeld's focus was Wolfowitz:

On the morning of the 12th DOD's focus was already beginning to shift from al Qaeda. CIA was explicit now that al Qaeda was guilty of the attacks, but Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld's deputy, was not yet persuaded. It was too sophisticated and complicated an operation, he said, for a terrorist group to have pulled off by itself, without a state sponsor--Iraq must have been helping them...

By the afternoon on Wednesday, Secretary Rumsfeld was talking about broadening the objectives of our response and "getting Iraq."  Secretary Powell pushed back, urging a focus on al Qaeda...

Embracing the process: Jonathan Bernstein's joyous cynicism

I am one of I'm sure many amateur political observers who's had his perspective widened in recent years by the entry of academic political scientists into the blogosphere.  Jonathan Bernstein is particularly bracing, as he refracts our elected officials' day-to-day  hand-to-hand combat through a lens that's a kind of PoliSci  equivalent of Everything Bad is Good for You. 

In A Plain Blog About Politics, Bernstein embraces the political process in all its ugly, necessary glory: the posturing, the pandering, the packaging, the parliamentary maneuvering, the horse-trading, the struggle for survival and the ambition that drives it.  His approach can alternately seem extremely cynical, in that it assumes that politicians are motivated almost entirely by the drive to amass and keep power, and the the opposite of cynical, since it embraces the process and its outcomes so cheerfully.

There's a problem, though, with this admittedly liberating enthusiasm for sausage-making. Sometimes Bernstein seems to suggest not that the ends justify the means, but that the means determine the ends, and rightly so.

There is something oddly reassuring in Bernstein's clinical admiration for the GOP's obstructionism of the past two years.  The underlying assumptions are that the game is eternal, there are no permanent winners, a rough policy balance emerges from the never-ending death match, and that  policy results, once manifest (a big open question embedded there), affect the players' political fortunes far more than the short-term spin battles. 

Not so reassuring, but often illuminating, is Bernstein's read on political calculations that may advance a party's (or individual's interest) whether or not it's at cross-purposes with the actor's own beliefs or with policy results viewed from any but the most extreme perspective. Here for example is his contrarian take on the Republican leadership's "defeat" over the New Start treaty:

However, Republicans did accomplish something by fighting on New START.  They chewed up quite a few hours of Senate floor time, a very valuable commodity in the lame duck session, and really throughout the 111th Congress.  Now, there's really no way of knowing what exactly they gained by doing that.  However, had they agreed to a quick vote on the treaty, there would have been more time for the Democrats to confirm judges and executive branch appointments; more time for appropriations bills, and perhaps to give a more sustained effort on the omnibus appropriations bill; and more time for any of the other unfinished business on the Democratic agenda.

So I wouldn't be quick to conclude that it was a mistake for Republicans to fight this one out, even if they took a (very minor) PR hit in losing.  Indeed, in understanding what the GOP was up to, I think one has to consider the possibility that treaty opposition was in part a deliberate -- and, I would say, perfectly legitimate -- part of trying to run out the clock.

Beating the Bushes for START

Another flashback from The Clinton Tapes: when Clinton found himself 20 votes short for NAFTA passage in the House,

he shifted back to presidential chemistry at the kickoff event for NAFTA. Carter and Bush had stayed with him overnight...Gerald Ford joined them for dinner on the night of the Middle East ceremony, and then again for a private breakfast before the NAFTA presentation. Clinton's staff found no prior record of so many presidents eating meals together at the White House (pp 50-51)

Four presidents for NAFTA...could Obama -- or Gates -- not call on George H.W. Bush to counter the ignorant demagoguery of Mitt Romney and other Republican "leaders" posturing against ratification of the  START arms reduction treaty with Russia?  And, for that matter, on the Prodigal Son, not to say Bill Clinton himself? 

Incidentally, The Clinton Tapes has got to be the worst-indexed book I've ever encountered.

Michael Oren v. Michael Oren on Israel-US relations

Suffering from a bit of dis-Oren-tation regarding the view of the U.S. from Israel.  From Friday's Jerusalem Post:

In a 90-minute conversation he conducted this week with the editorial board of The Jerusalem Post, one of the key messages Oren the diplomat tried to get across was that relations with the US are not as bad as most people like to think.



True, there was a huge dustup during Vice President Joe Biden’s visit here in March; the US acquiesced in signing off on a UN NPT document that singled out Israel in May; and Washington in June wasn’t as robust in its support of Israel at the UN during the Gaza flotilla episode as some would have liked. But, Oren insisted, the sky over the US-Israeli relationship is not falling.


In fact, he said, running against the grain of conventional wisdom, the Obama administration was “as good if not better” on Israel than “many previous administrations,” and Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, often portrayed in the Israeli media as the “bad guy” on Israel issues in the White House, was actually “a great asset.”



“There are disagreements, I’m not going to be Pollyannaish,” the personable and animated Oren said. “But there are two qualifiers you have to attach. One, we have had disagreements with other administrations in the past, and the litmus test with the relationship is not whether there are disagreements, but how you approach the disagreements.”

Now, today's hot tip in Haaretz (via Laura Rozen):

Can electorates walk and chew gum?

Martin Wolf presents a fact-dense, closely argued version of Paul Krugman's argument: that swings toward fiscal austerity in the EU and U.S. risk stopping the global recovery in its tracks and bringing on "cyclical fiscal deficits" - that is, depressed demand which slows growth and keeps tax revenues low.  He then asks:

The best policy is to put together measures that sustain strong growth in demand in the short run, while constraining the huge deficits in the long run. This is walking and chewing gum at the same time. Why should that be so hard?

Jonathan Chait has an answer for that. Citing a Wall Street Journal op-ed lambasting Obama for "hypocrisy" for advocacting precisely Martin Wolf's prescription, which Obama has done since taking office, Chait writes:

Moore and the Republicans think it's "hypocrisy" to be for high deficits during a liquidity crisis but against them during a recovery. Really. The whole Republican message is based on not understanding this distinction.

And why don't they understand?  Because drumming up fear of deficits and loathing of short-term stimulus is working:

Look, ma no lies: Palin smears with hypotheticals

Is there a method to Palin's loopy syntax? She inspired a fresh round of indignation and glee by suggesting on Fox on Monday that Obama has been soft on BP because he's received oil industry campaign contributions, and for seeming to suggest that he attracted more oil money than a Republican President would.

In fact, while Palin's Fox riff was a smear (impugning Obama's motives with no factual basis) it did not include an actual lie -- she didn't say that Obama got more money from the oil industry than any given Republican. In elusive, allusive convoluted fashion, she piled hypothetical on hypothetical.  After asking why the media doesn't ask "if there's any connection with the contributions made to President Obama and his administration and the support by the oil companies to the administration" (literally, a connection between the oil industry's support for Obama and the oil industry's support for Obama, but you know what she meant), she goes from speculation about what is (or could be) to counterfactuals about what might have been or could yet be:

now, if this was President Bush or if this were a Republican in office who hadn't received as much support even as President Obama has from B.P. and other oil companies, you know the mainstream media would be all over his case in terms of asking questions why the administration didn't get in there, didn't get in there and make sure that the regulatory agencies were doing what they were doing with the oversight to make sure that things like this don't happen.

Palin seems to be dreaming up a hypothetical Republican who hasn't been massively supported by the oil industry. We are literally in fantasyland, where it's natural to body forth the possibility that Obama has been influenced by oil money and then conjure a Republican president who's received "even less" than Obama but whom the media will assume (as it would have with Bush, who received proportionately more of the industry's dollars, but never mind...) is more influenced than Obama is (was).  And just as the slip about "support by the oil companies to the administration" suggests the opposite of what she purportedly means, so the "even" in "even as much," taken literally, would seem to suggest that Obama hasn't received much from the oil industry.  Palin gets lost in her own funhouse.

On McConnell, Bush, good policy, good politics and the electoral contract according to Jonathan Bernstein

When I read Jonathan Chait's reaction to Josh Green's conversations with Kentucky Republicans (Green immediately below, followed by Chait)....

In my talks with voters on the campaign trail today and yesterday, the idea that the Republican Party is as complicit as the Democratic Party in what ails the country is something I heard again and again. I made a point of seeking out registered Republican voters, and the frustration with Mitch McConnell, Kentucky's senior senator and the Senate Minority Leader, seemed indistinguishable from--or perhaps better to say, "was a large part of"--the general frustration with Washington. "Republicans in Washington, D.C. are just playing 'follow the leader,' Janice Cox told me at a rally in Paducah earlier today, to which she'd brought her daughter, grandchildren, and a jumbo-sized American flag. "We need a true constitutional conservative."

McConnell must want to tear his hair out. What more could he possibly do to oppose Obama's agenda? He put intense pressure on his party to pull out of negotiations over health care reform. He maintained a united wall of opposition on virtually everything. He used every parliamentary trick at his disposal, slowing down Congress by filibustering even totally uncontroversial measures and low-level appointments. What more could he do? Do these people want him to use actual violence?

I thought of this, by Jonathan Bernstein:

Good representation, following Richard Fenno, is about having a strong representational relationship.  And (and here I'm on my own, I think) it is not for me, or Andrew, or Burke, or Pitkin to say what sorts of representation are best.  That's a matter for each individual elected official and his or her constituents to work out for themselves.  Moreover, I argue that the ability to do this, to make promises, interpret them, govern with those promises and future explanations in mind, to explain what one has done, and then campaign again, is the real skill of politicians.  Of course that takes judgment, and it certainly takes practical wisdom.  A particular kind of judgment, however -- political judgment that helps a pol know how public policy decisions are related to what they've promised. ...

as long as a politician fulfills her promises, and explains what she's doing in a way that strengthens her constituents' trust in her, then she's a good representative.  That's as much as we can say, at least as far as evaluation is concerned.

State-Croft in the Obama Administration, cont.: the Deputies' Committee

A detailed portrait of the Obama administration's foreign policy apparatus by the FT's Edward Luce and Daniel Dombey presents a mixed bag, a work in progress.  One key facet  has an interesting pedigree: personnel from the Clinton administration slotted into a structure adapted from the administration of George Bush, Sr.  That is the "deputies' meetings":

Mr Obama’s character is also stamped on the inter-agency process, set up and managed by Tom Donilon, deputy national security adviser. The nitty-gritty of foreign policy-making is done at these frequent “deputies’ meetings”, which can sometimes consume four to six hours a day
.
Described by one insider as “the most powerful man in the White House whose name isn’t widely known”, Mr Donilon, who was an official in the Clinton administration, is the man who keeps Mr Obama’s trains running on time. And there are a lot of trains. Last year, Mr Donilon held 270 deputies meetings – a workload described as “clinically insane” by a former senior diplomat under Bill Clinton.