Dem chorus rising: Don't let them take your freedom

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For most of the post-January 6 era, the U.S. has seemed to be sleepwalking toward autocracy. 

Republicans swiftly fell in all but unanimously behind Trump's Big Lie that he won the 2020 election; red states passed a raft of voter suppression laws; Trump acolytes positioned themselves to seize control of election administration and machinery; pardoned Team Trump criminals and the RNC encouraged thousands to sign up as poll workers; and diehard election deniers won Republican primaries for secretary of state, attorney general and governor in key states.

Meanwhile, inflation dominated headlines, Biden's approval rating sank to record lows for a first- and second-year president, courts upheld Republican gerrymanders and struck down Democratic ones, off-year elections swung heavily toward Republicans, and Republicans led in generic Congressional polling.

Then came the riveting January 6 Commission hearings in June and July, with Republican officials laying bare Trump's criminality and pathology -- and smack in the middle of that timeline, the intense shock of the Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs, overturning Roe v. Wade. Democrats woke up -- some Democrats, anyway. Gavin Newsom laid down a keynote in a July 4 ad aimed at Floridians ("inviting "them to move to California): freedom is under attack in your state...don't let them take your freedom.

Trump's corrupt schemes didn't help him -- but they didn't hurt him either

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Some time in the night, I found myself thinking about this claim of Greg Sargent's, which I found clarifying when it was published on October 7:

When you step back and survey the last two years of U.S. politics, one of the biggest story lines that comes into view is this: One after another, a whole string of deeply corrupt schemes that President Trump has hatched to smooth his reelection hopes have crashed and burned.

The "corrupt schemes" run from attempting to extort a bogus investigation of Biden from the Ukrainian president to trying to retail the same Biden smears in U.S. media to a retaliatory investigation of those who conducted the investigation of Russian influence to siccing federal troops on protestors to sabotaging the Post Office, smearing vote-by-mail and promising legal challenges against full vote counts.

While it's true that all of these schemes have failed (so far), it's also true that none of them hurt Trump's standing much. His support is pretty much where it was in November 2016. 

Attention, Paul Krugman: Not everyone votes

Am I crazy or is Paul Krugman making a really elemental mistake here?

As Greg Sargent points out, the choice of Tom Price for HHS probably means the death of Obamacare. Never mind the supposed replacement; it will be a bust. So here’s the question: how many people just shot themselves in the face?

My first pass answer is, between 3.5 and 4 million. But someone who’s better at trawling through Census data can no doubt do better.

Here’s my calculation: we start with the Census-measured decline in uninsurance among non-Hispanic whites, which was 6 million between 2013 and 2015. Essentially all of those gains will be lost if Price gets his way.

How many of those white insurance-losers voted for Trump? Whites in general gave him 57 percent of their votes. Whites without a college degree — much more likely to have been uninsured pre-Obama — gave him 66 percent. Apportioning the insurance-losers using these numbers gives us 3.42 million if we use the overall vote share, or 3.96 million if we use the non-college vote share.

The assumption appears to be that everyone votes. Turnout this year is currently reported at 58.6%. It's probably lower for most of those who gained insurance via the ACA, as their incomes are below median: according to the Current Population Survey, almost three quarters of those who gained insurance in both 2014 and 2015 have incomes below twice the Federal Poverty Level, and nearly all have incomes under 300% FPL. Lower income people have lower turnout rates.  It would appear that Krugman's total needs to be sliced almost in half.

Trump the Incompetent

The Times reports the welcome news that Hillary Clinton's brain trust is taking the Trump threat very seriously and studying approaches to convince the disaffected that his promises are empty. Here's the emerging Democratic thinking, according to Amy Chozick and Patrick Healy:

The plan has three major thrusts: Portray Mr. Trump as a heartless businessman who has worked against the interests of the working-class voters he now appeals to; broadcast the degrading comments he has made against women in order to sway suburban women, who have been reluctant to support Mrs. Clinton; and highlight his brash, explosive temper to show he is unsuited to be commander in chief.

One potential problem, as Greg Sargent argues this morning, is that the "heartless businessman" attack used on Romney may not work in this case, because the nature of Trump's appeal is different. His followers respond to his assertions of "strength" -- and past heartlessness may only reinforce that. It might be more effective, as Kevin Drum has suggested, to point out Trump's serial business failures -- emphasizing not just that he hurt people, but that his promises were empty, his judgment comically bad, his execution terrible.

The Washington Post's account yesterday of the rise and swift fall of Trump Mortgage (founded in 2006!) provides a distilled essence of Trump's art of the debacle. Here's the Rise and Fall pattern, recounted by Tom Hamburger and Michael Kranish:

1. Ignore market signals

“I think it’s a great time to start a mortgage company,”  Trump told a CNBC interviewer in April 2006, adding that “the real estate market is going to be very strong for a long time to come.”

Clinton vs. Sanders: It's not really head vs. heart

In an Iowa post-mortem, Greg Sargent spoke to several top Democratic campaign operatives about how Bernie Sanders managed to fight Clinton to a virtual tie. Here's one diagnosis:

Her message has tended to focus on solutions and not really reflect back to people the feelings that they have,” Mark Mellman, a veteran Democratic pollster, tells me. “Bernie is reflecting back to people their feelings. She has to do a better job reflecting back to people what they feel and think. Forging an emotional connection is critically important. She’s not always done that very effectively.”

I think that's true to a point, but it leaves something out. Sanders doesn't appeal purely to emotion. He establishes a better head-to-heart pipeline than Clinton does. His read on our current situation and how we got there may be oversimplified, but it's coherent and easy to grasp. It's political cognitive therapy: you feel good because you feel you understand what's wrong and what to do about it.

A thought about Trump

His rage is real but disassociated:

@ThePlumLineGS He will say anything that works and taps followers' anger. But vicious response to those who insult/cross him bespeak rage.

— xpostfactoid (@xpostfactoid1) January 15, 2016

@xpostfactoid1 interesting, thanks

— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) January 15, 2016

Two caveats. First, over the years Trump has doubtless learned that all-out aggression against anyone who gets in his way or challenges his self-love "works" -- so it's hard to separate calculation from the emotion behind the strike-back reflex. Second, Trump's vicarious rage against the (wrongly) alleged Central Park rapists and prospective Indian casino builders may have had an emotional component -- the rage reflex easily attaches itself to prejudice. But as for his political targets, it's obvious that he'll take up any attack that gets a rouse out of his follows

"Obamacare, Obamacare! stay a little. Ha!*

As Greg Sargent never tires of reminding us, Republicans have been promising an ACA replacement plan for 50 months now and haven't been able to deliver. Ergo, Sargent asserts, claims by Republican legislators that they are developing a plan to replace the ACA and keep premium subsidies flowing should the Supreme Court rule for the plaintiffs in King are a ruse, designed to convince swing justices that chaos won't erupt if the court invalidates subsidies credited through the federal exchange.

That is probably at least partially true, as Republicans have long proven themselves unable to unite behind a plan that would replace a large portion of ACA benefits while creating different winners and losers. But there are plans and plans (and motives and motives), and elected officials don't yank away existing benefits lightly. While Republicans may well be paralyzed by a Supreme Court decision that gives them what they say they want, there are elements in the plans they're floating that could find their way, sooner or later, into a post-King settlement.  Republicans' lack of unity could lead them to punt, perhaps declaring victory with relatively modest gains while restoring most of the status quo.

Most interesting in this regard are Republican proposals to freeze or patch the the current system while they devise a fix. Here's how one very sympathetically worded account describes such a measure:

But Greg Sargent, "handling and manipulation of process and theatrics" matter

Greg Sargent has quite rightly called out a bevy of reporters who have slammed Obama for the process by which he arrived at his Syria policy (and other policies) "without taking a stand on the substance of the policy debates underlying them. It's true that criticizing presidential process can be a dodge, shielding the writer from grappling with the policy merits of, say, a missile strike on Syria. But Sargent overstates the case, I think, by suggesting that process can be cleanly separated from policy.  Holding up Dylan Byers as Exhibit A, Sargent criticizes a

genre of criticism of Obama..largely focused on the President’s handling and manipulation of process and theatrics, and the consequences that allegedly has had for the president and the country. Into this category fall the arguments, mentioned by Byers above, that Obama’s changes of course during the Syria crisis have been “confusing and contradictory,” that this has made him “appear weak on the international stage,” and that he has failed to muscle a progressive agenda through Congress.

Democrats should shut down the government

Not really. But they should let Republicans shut down the government rather than agreeing to a two-month continuing resolution that will bring on debt ceiling apocalypse.

When word was that Boehner would postpone a budget showdown until the debt ceiling is reached in November and try to force a defunding of Obamacare then, I suspected that he and his party would shift gears and seek to extract more attainable budget concessions. That has now happened, as Chait summarizes:

The Republican leadership is perfectly aware that a debt default could have explosive implications and that the Obama administration is not willing to negotiate over it. It’s already formulating a line of retreat to back out of this threat. As Politico reports, they want to tie together negotiations over the debt ceiling with negotiations over budget sequestration. Then they can extract concessions from Obama on the budget and sell them to their base as a ransom for lifting the debt ceiling, rather than admit they just gave in on the debt ceiling.

"Gave in" is a relative term. Extracting further budget cuts beyond sequestration would be a major GOP victory by my lights, if not by the GOP base's. And they may get it. As Chait warns here and has warned before, a debt default (stemming from failure to raise the debt ceiling) is a " vastly more dangerous threat" than a government shutdown. Yet Chait, like Greg Sargent and Brian Beutler, seems to have more faith than I do about what Obama will not yield to if faced with a debt default:

Listen to Boehner, Dems. When he announces a negotiating strategy, he executes

Republicans' latest reported strategy in the looming budget wars is to pass continuing resolutions that will fund the government at sequestration levels through November, when the next debt ceiling deadline looms -- then once again hold the country's faith and credit hostage to extremist demands like defunding Obamacare. Democrats should not take this strategy lightly. Methinks the account below, via The Week, gets the dynamics of this year's prior battles exactly backwards:

The Republican leadership has been increasingly under pressure to appease the right wing of the party. Publicly insisting that ObamaCare funding will be fought further down the road would soothe the demand for that fight in the first place, while kicking the can down the road, perhaps indefinitely.

As the Washington Post's Greg Sargent points out, this is exactly what happened with the last debt ceiling fight. In January, Boehner said the upcoming sequester debate, not debt ceiling fight, gave the GOP its best position to push for major budget cuts. Yet the sequester came and went without the GOP winning those deep concessions.

Come again? The sequester is "major budget cuts." As of now, those cuts are locked in for ten years, a seemingly immovable deadweight on Obama's long-term domestic agenda. Republicans may be ambivalent about their effects, actual and political, and ultimately unable to sustain their will to enact the cuts.  But they did not cave -- they decided to embrace the cuts, and they followed through, and the overall ten-year deficit reduction scorecard remains stuck at a 4-to-1 spending-cuts-to-tax-increases ratio.  In March it was Obama and the Democrats who caved, balking at forcing a government shutdown to shut off sequestration.

Is Obama preparing for nuclear budgetary war?

It's a foundation built upon five pillars that will grow our economy and make this new century another American century: new rules for Wall Street that will reward drive and innovation; new investments in education that will make our workforce more skilled and competitive; new investments in renewable energy and technology that will create new jobs and industries; new investments in health care that will cut costs for families and businesses; and new savings in our federal budget that will bring down the debt for future generations. That is the new foundation we must build. That must be our future – and my Administration's policies are designed to achieve that future.

That's Obama laying out his broader economic vision -- in April 2009. Three of the five pillars match the five cornerstones he laid down in yesterday/s speech on long term economic growth -- or rather two and a half, as his "jobs" cornerstone yesterday centered in large part on renewable energy.

As many pointed out, there were no new proposals in Obama's speech yesterday, and not much detail -- it was a framework, with details to be supplied in an upcoming series of speeches. And that's okay. As the political storms of autumn approach, dullness is good. Repetition is good. Reminder of what Obama is about -- how he thinks, how he carries himself, what he wants -- is useful, even if it doesn't excite anyone now. It's an impression scheduled for timed release.

Will we hear Obama in retrospect?

Greg Sargent very sensibly notes that Obama, in his speech at Georgetown today announcing executive actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, "recast the call for climate action as the centrist, common-sense solution." Further developing that idea, he cites Chait:

As Jonathan Chait noted recently, the untold story of the Obama era is his vision of achieving liberal goals as a means for also achieving long-term economic growth:

Fashioning a long-term growth strategy is, and has always been, Obama’s deepest passion. He’s been caught up in an economic crisis and a culture war over the role of government that he wants badly to escape.

I must add that if Obama's vision of enacting liberal policies as a means for achieving long-term growth has been left untold by certain parties, those parties don't include Obama. He has never stopped telling that story: it is the very heart and soul of his pitch to America and always has been. That goes for casting those policies as "common-sense centrism," too. Throughout the 2008 campaign, tracking his speeches, I referred repeatedly to Obama's bid to move the center left. The argument has (and had) these components:

Are "liberals" learning to love the sequester?

A while back, as the sequester took hold and Obama unfurled his budget, Greg Sargent framed up what he presented as a tough choice for Democrats (on the dubious chance that they would have any choice at all): Stand pat with the sequester in place, Medicare and Social Security left essentially untouched, and no new revenues beyond the $600 billion over ten years enacted in January -- or sign on to a grand bargain that would include entitlement cuts proposed in Obama's 2014 budget, e.g.,  chained-CPI and higher Medicare premiums for wealthier seniors, along with more targeted and gradual discretionary spending cuts than those mandated by the sequester, and some new revenue.

As of today, Sargent seems to have made his choice, or assumed a collective one for "liberals":

The Monica Lewinsky scandal may have helped save Social Security in the late 1990s. Now the scandal fever currently gripping Washington — IRS, Benghazi, Associated Press phone records — may save Social Security and Medicare two decades later.

Liberals who are dreading the scandal-mania that is taking hold should note that it contains a potential upside: It could make a Grand Bargain that includes cuts to Medicare and Social Security benefits even less likely than it already is.

Save Social Security? From Obama's chained-CPI proposal, which by slowing cost-of-living increases would reduce payments from the current baseline by about 0.3% per year, with offsets for the very elderly? Save Medicare? From Obama's $400 billion/10 year grab bag of nips and tucks, little different from those proposed in his 2013 budget, the most notable difference being larger (but still quite incremental) premium hikes for wealthy seniors than those proposed in 2013?

I get nervous when I read sentences like this, cont.

from Greg Sargent:

And so, in the days ahead, you’ll hear top Democrats continue to amplify the case that the so-called “Boehner Rule” — in which Republicans insist on dollar-for-dollar spending cuts in exchange for the debt limit hike — is a dead letter. You’ll hear them continue to call on Republicans to stop allowing Tea Party intransigence to exert total control over budget strategy. You’ll hear them demand an end to chaos governing. But we’re probably stuck with chaos governing for the foreseeable future. Anyone see any way out of this?

As I've noted before, anticipations by Sargent, Beutler and other progressive close watchers of the budget battles that Democrats won't cave on a particular upcoming sticking point are pretty good indicators that Democrats will, in fact, cave on that particular point. In this case, Sargent does leave the outcome open, merely relaying what we'll hear from Democrats. And it's hard for me, too, to imagine Democrats making any new spending concessions without further tax increases. But still...

A severed wasp: Democrats and the sequester

When Democrats voted last Friday to jigger the rules of sequestration to allow the FAA to ease flight delays, the conviction took hold on the left that Democrats have lost on sequestration, as Ezra Klein declared.  If that's true, it means that the budget battle that began when Republicans retook the House is over, and Republicans have won.  The ten-year vice grip on discretionary spending is closing.  Since spring 2011, Obama has agreed to some $3 trillion in spending cuts over ten years, while securing just $600 billion in new revenue. 

You could say no one has won -- Klein again -- as Republicans have failed to cut entitlements and acceded (so far) to huge defense cuts.  But they've achieved their more nihilist (and perhaps dominant) ends -- foreclosing on the kinds of long-term investments Obama has urged throughout his presidency, and crimping the economic recovery for which Obama would get the principal credit.

For progressive writers, realization has dawned in agonizing stages. I'm reminded a bit of George Orwell's account of  "a rather cruel trick I once played on a wasp. He was sucking jam on my plate, and I cut him in half. He paid no attention, merely went on with his meal, while a tiny stream of jam trickled out of his severed œsophagus. Only when he tried to fly away did he grasp the dreadful thing that had happened to him.”

Progressives have consistently underestimated the capacity of Obama and the Democrats to fold -- at the fiscal cliff, at the passage of continuing resolutions implementing the first tranche of the sequester through FY 2013, and at the FAA kerfuffle. Let's flash back a bit and watch awareness unfold, first that Republicans were going to focus their efforts on sequestration, then that they were going to let it happen, and then that they could induce Democrats to help cram the budget into the sequestration strait jacket.

"They deserve a vote"

The lede to this Hill article dredged up a thought that had flitted half-noticed through the ol' necktop a day or two ago:

The White House has tilted the gun control debate in its favor by centering its public relations effort around one pivotal message: the legislation deserves a vote.

The thought: maybe the best response to the Senate's galloping filibusteritis is not new rulemaking, but public shaming.

The three-quarters GOP win on offer

It seems to me that in sketching out possible budget battle endgames, Greg Sargent is missing the middle ground. Or call it three-quarters ground, since Obama continues to move the goalposts in the GOP's direction.

Obama's new budget includes about $800 billion in new revenue over ten years and $800 billion in spending cuts, not counting savings from chained-CPI, to replace the sequestration cuts. The chained-CPI method of inflation calculation, which reduces Social Security spending and also boosts revenue (by slowing the upward adjustment of income tax brackets for inflation), is included as a concession to Republicans demanding the Obama propose "entitlement cuts" (Obama cut $716 billion over ten years in Medicare spending in the ACA and last year proposed another $400 billion in federal Medicare spending reductions, but never mind). Chained-CPI, with Obama's offsets for low-income seniors, saves a projected $130 billion over ten years. Sargent, trying to scope out administration intentions in light of Obama's new budget, writes:

Senior administration officials who briefed a number of us late yesterday repeatedly insisted that the White House will not move any further in the GOP’s direction if Republicans try to pocket the entitlement cuts while refusing to make any concessions. The officials say that without new revenues, no deal is possible.

And then, assessing the import of Obama's chained-CPI "concession" (which he had already put on the table, publicly, in December):

It’s welcome that the White House is vowing not to budge off its current offer, but only the White House can ensure that this promise holds over time.

The White House has not vowed not to budge off its current offer. It has vowed not to deal if Republicans put no revenue on the table. As his been true since the 2011 negotiations, Republicans can clean Obama's clock by offering some revenue.

Another cliff, another cave?

Greg Sargent exhorts the Democrats not to fall for the GOP's sequester bluff:

Democrats are going to have to do a better job of spelling out precisely what the consequences of the sequester would be, so the public understands precisely what Republicans are willing to allow happen in to force the spending cuts they want.

The White House is starting to do that today, circulating a fact sheet that lays out in specific terms exactly what the sequester would do. A few examples: 2,100 fewer food inspections could occur. Seventy thousand kids kicked off Head Start. Ten thousand teacher jobs put at risk. Hundreds of thousands of seriously mentally ill adults could go untreated. Over $500 million in cuts to small business loan guarantees. Cuts to unemployment benefits — further harming the economy — and child nutrition. Etc.

I must confess, this fans an anger that's been brewing in me -- and I take that anger as evidence of a weakness in the Dem position. Obama and the Dems co-negotiated the sequester. Say if you like that they never intended for it to go into effect -- but they put themselves in a position to let it happen. Put another way, Obama and Biden, through the deal they cut at year's end in a last-minute override of Harry Reid, have let the leverage they had on Dec. 31 be reversed. More broadly, Obama has put us in this position through his serial unwillingness to force a confrontation -- in December 2010, in August 2011, and in Dec/Jan 2011-12. 

Meet the new Obama -- same (mostly) as the Old Obama

Yesterday, I sought to demonstrate that Obama was simply reverting to form in his second inaugural address by equating liberal priorities with the nation's founding principles and historical development. He did so day in and day out in 2008; the notion that liberal policy prescriptions would enable the country to continue forming "a more perfect union" was the basis of his campaign. I professed myself astonished that anyone would be surprised by his using this framework -- grounding his policies in the Declaration of Independence -- in his Second Inaugural.

Lest anyone conclude that Obama the defender of liberal priorities went into remission for four years, let's extend the 'rhetoric retrospective' back from the most recent past. Take, for example, Obama's speech at the Democratic National Convention last September -- a widely panned speech that to my ear was more forceful, more caustic, and more conceptually resonant than yesterday's inaugural.  At the DNC, Obama grounded his defense of government action to expand opportunity and strengthen the safety net and stimulate enterprise in -- you guessed it -- the Declaration of Independence:

As Americans, we believe we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights – rights that no man or government can take away. We insist on personal responsibility and we celebrate individual initiative. We’re not entitled to success. We have to earn it. We honor the strivers, the dreamers, the risk-takers who have always been the driving force behind our free enterprise system – the greatest engine of growth and prosperity the world has ever known.

But we also believe in something called citizenship – a word at the very heart of our founding, at the very essence of our democracy; the idea that this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another, and to future generations....

Our liberal history: Obama's oldest trope

In my response to Obama's second inaugural speech, I took it as a given that it's a well-worn Obama trope to equate liberal priorities with the nation's founding principles and historical development -- so much so that Obama rather abbreviated the argument this time around.

I am therefore a bit gob-smacked to note that many of those whom I like to read best seem to be assuming that the equation of active government and collective action with the credo expressed in the Declaration of Independence and with the course of American history is some kind new departure for Obama. See  Greg Sargent, Ezra Klein and James Fallows, That Obama today expanded his circle of concern to include immigrants and gays and (implicitly) safety from gun violence in new ways, I recognize. Ditto that he's dropped the pretense (or rather, belief) that acknowledging some "good ideas" from the other side will get him where he wants to go (as I noted after his convention speech).  But the core concept of government that he articulated today, and the historical support he mustered for it, were utterly familiar..

Back in June 2008, I examined Obama's deployment of our shared past in a post called "We've been here before": How Obama frames our history. Not to bore you with peripherals in that post, I've culled a few examples of such deployments from it and other 2008 Obama speeches.

Janesville, WI, Feb. 13, 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....

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...

It’s a promise that’s been passed down through the ages; one that each generation of Americans is called to keep – that we can raise our children in a land of boundless opportunity, broad prosperity, and unyielding possibility.

New York, New York, March 27, 2008:

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.