As in December 2010, trading tax cuts

The pending debt ceiling deal is shaping up as quite a Rorschach test. On the left, Michael Cohen crows that the GOP caved, while Noam Scheiber is convinced that Obama has finally and definitively destroyed his negotiating cred.  Reception on the left was shaped this morning, as the deal came gradually into focus, by an uncharacteristic freakout from Jonathan Chait. Just returned from vacation, Chait seemed to be reacting more to Obama's offer several weeks ago to start income tax hikes at the $400k level than to overnight developments (though the overnight news did move that higher threshold to the realm of the more limited deal).  Me, I wavered between "poles of hope and fear... Dec 2010 tax deal vs.crappy Jul 2011 deal Boehner did O favor of pulling out of. ' My hope:  "Perhaps cliff deal postmortem will look like 12/2010 - jaw-dropping headline concession offset by lower profile plusses."

My sense at this point is that the pending deal does look something like the 2010 agreement: a steep headline price paid to preserve core Obama priorities, with judgment yet again to be deferred until another round of deficit reduction is negotiated in 2013. On that second point, Obama laid down a key marker in his press statement this afternoon: that all subsequent spending cuts would have to be offset by tax hikes of equal value.  It's unclear how he would enforce that: his ability to do so depends both on how the sequester is handled and how he plans to make good his proclaimed refusal to negotiate under threat of a debt ceiling default. If he can make his own ground rules stick, then this is indeed a good deal.

The deal resembles the December 2010 agreement insofar as in both cases, the two sides found it easier to trade favored tax cuts than to either cut spending or raise revenue (surprise...).  In exchange for holding households earning $250k--$450k nearly harmless (though they are subject to some deduction limitations), the Democrats will have secured (if the deal goes through) 5-year extensions of Obama's tax credits for low- and middle-income Americans (expansions of the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Child Tax Credit, and the credit for college tuition), alternative energy, and business investment, along with a one year unemployment benefit extension. Thus Obama continues to forego hardball to maximize future revenue in favor of easing financial pressure on the needy and nonwealthy, stimulating the economy, and advancing his energy policy.  Long-term, I suspect he thinks that revenue can be squeezed out of the GOP in stages, but that the economy and Americans with stagnant incomes need help now.  Those who insist that our chief challenge is to stimulate the economy rather than reduce the deficit ought to be pleased.

Obama moved 'from hope to hardball' last September

Cheering Obama's turn to partisan combat, Noam Scheiber draws some striking parallels between the political trajectories of the Clinton and Obama presidencies -- starting with a hope for bipartisanship, going through the meat-grinder of passing key legislation with zero Republican support, getting creamed in the midterms. But then he moves to a false -- or rather, distorted -- contrast:

The major difference between the two after the midterms was their posture toward Republicans. Clinton went for the jugular early. By August of 1995, he had launched a major ad campaign attacking the Republican Congress for its designs on Medicare and vowing to defend the program from $270 billion in cuts. Almost daily beginning in late 1995, Clinton and his surrogates repeated their mantra of protecting “Medicare, Medicaid, education, and the environment”—that is, the programs Republicans threatened to decimate. The White House even had a nickname for the refrain: “M2E2.” “It wasn’t elegant—I wouldn’t etch it in marble. But people fucking knew what was at stake,” recalls Paul Begala, a former Clinton strategist. When Bob Dole emerged as the Republican presidential nominee the following spring, he had little hope of separating himself from his party’s government-slashing ethos.

Obama, on the other hand, spent more of his third year striking conciliatory notes as he negotiated with the GOP over the deficit. With the exception of a tough, high-profile speech that April, his White House consciously avoided flaying Republicans over their proposed cuts to Medicaid and Medicare. He didn’t dwell on their anti-government nihilism until a speech in December, and even then he did so in broad strokes.

The Administration gets game on FinReg

Do I sense a wee change in tone in the administration's approach to "bipartisanship" as it pursues a financial reform bill?  From the Times' coverage of yesterday's meeting of Obama with Congressional leadership:

I am absolutely confident that the bill that emerges is going to be a bill that prevents bailouts. That’s the goal,” Mr. Obama said before the start of the meeting, directly answering assertions by the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, that the bill would encourage, rather than prevent, future taxpayer bailouts of financial companies. As Mr. Obama spoke, Mr. McConnell sat impassively nearby in the Cabinet Room.

Later, in a particularly pointed statement, the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said Mr. Obama would not let the bill be thrown off course. 

“The president reiterated his belief that we are open to ideas and eager to work with anyone who is willing to work with us regardless of party,” Mr. Gibbs said. “He also made clear that bipartisanship should not be equated with an openness to lobbyists, loopholes and special interest carve outs and that he would be unwilling to negotiate on some key issues, and that he could not accept bad policy in pursuit of bipartisanship.”

Not only is there swift, strong pushback on Mitch McConnell's outrageous claim that giving regulators resolution authority to liquidate failing banks would encourage bailouts.  Note also the signal that the administration (contra Andrew Leonard) will not be content with claiming victory on the headline issues (here, the resolution authority; previously, the consumer protection agency) while letting banking interests have their way on more arcane matters, like regulation of securitizations or derivatives. On the latter, there's this from Geithner:

How not to attack the Administration

Andrew Leonard cites analyses of pending financial reform legislation by Paul Krugman and Noam Scheiber to suggest that the Administration will be happy to pass a weak bill and declare victory -- and that more generally, "the public's perception of how the administration is addressing the nation's problems may be more important to the White House than whether or not those problems will actually be solved." 

To my eye, Leonard's article is a cautionary example of how easy it is to misrepresent others' writings in support of one's own thesis. I made the case in a comment, here. The Summers interview to which Leonard refers is here (and is also the subject of my prior two posts, here and here).

Silver bullet in the War on (electoral) Terror?

In this corner we have Nate Silver, data-crunching young technocrat with a dizzying array of charts and an astounding track record, coolly assuring us that John McCain's chances of winning the election stand at 3.8%, that state poll data remains strong for Obama, and that any national poll tightening is as yet insignificant. And in this corner, nailbiting TNR vet Noam Scheiber:

I'm not popping anything just yet, except maybe some sleeping pills to get me through the night... In the last few days, pretty much every tracking poll I trust (WaPo, Gallup, Rasmussen) and several I either don't trust (that would be you, Zogby) or don't have much of an opinion about (Kos, Investor's Business Daily) has shifted toward McCain, in some cases sharply. ...

As of this writing, Obama's lead in the national tracking polls looks to be around five points (I get 5.5 when I average all six of the trackers I mentioned, along with the Hotline and Battleground trackers, which haven't changed much in the last few days). If that drops two-to-three points, as it easily could in a week, I don't think it's crazy to think McCain will have a shot at winning Pennsylvania, Virginia, and/or Colorado. Unlikely, yes, but not crazy.

And then again today, ironically citing the more sanguine John Judis:

Judis makes a great point in his otherwise overly-optimistic post on the polls:

I mention the Bradley effect because I think, too, that McCain and Sarah Palin's attack against Obama for advocating "spreading the wealth" and for "socialism" and for pronouncing the civil rights revolution a "tragedy" because it didn't deal with the distribution of wealth is aimed ultimately at white working class undecided voters who would construe "spreading the wealth" as giving their money to blacks. It's the latest version of Reagan's "welfare queen" argument from 1980. It if it works, it won't be because most white Americans actually oppose a progressive income tax, but because they fear that Obama will inordinately favor blacks over them.

Agreed.

Worse, though I have no evidence for this (nothing new there), I worry that these insinuations are reinforced in the minds of working-class whites by the millions of African-Americans lining up early to vote for Obama. How sad for the country if McCain ends up jujitsuing something (i.e., record turnout) that should be a source of pride.

Silver is brilliant and has all the confidence of a young black box hedge fund manager. Scheiber, however, has been around the block a few times. Silver writes sanguinely about McCain's need to shave a half-point off Obama's cumulative poll lead per day and the historical unlikelihood of doing so. Scheiber speaks to that gut feeling that polls can shift a lot more suddenly than that.

I'm off to barackobama.com to contribute one last c-note.

UPDATE: Make that $120. Those clever devils have moved the defaults to base 6. I consent to be upsold!

P.S. Behind the cool Silver, there's the even cooler (and equally data-based) Obama...

No Ordinary Time: Eleanor's tourist lesson for Obama

Noam Scheiber, dismissing the inevitable Potemkin Village quality of Obama's foreign tour, cites Obama's own world-weary account of VIP fact-finding and good will tours:

Obama, as is his wont, actually lodged a version of this complaint during the primaries, when the topic was the knowledge Hillary had supposedly gleaned from her own globe-trotting: "You get picked up at the airport by a state convoy and a security detail. They drive you over to the ambassador's house and you get lunch. Then you go take a tour of some factory or some school. Children do a native dance." Replace "ambassador" with "chancellor" or "prime minister" and you have a reasonable summary of this week's itinerary. A term as National Security Advisor it is not.

Sounds worldly, but it's a half-truth. Compare Eleanor Roosevelt's approach to this process (albeit in less-hyped and less-watched settings) as recounted in Doris Kearns Goodwin's magnificent No Ordinary Time:

...it was Franklin who had encouraged her to become his "eyes and ears," to gather the grass-roots knowledge he needed to understand the people he governed. Unable to travel easily on his own because of his paralysis, he had started by teaching Eleanor how to inspect state institutions in 1929, during his first term as governor.

Her first inspection was of an insane asylum. "All right," Franklin told her. "Go in and look around and let me know what's going on there. Tell me how the inmates are being treated." When Eleanor returned, she brought with her a printed copy of the day's menu. "Did you look to see whether they were actually getting this food?" Franklin asked. "Did you lift a pot cover on the stove to see whether the contents corresponded with this menu?"...

In time, Eleanor became so thorough in her inspections, observing the attitudes of patients towards the staff, judging facial expressions as well as the words, looking in closets and behind doors, that Franklin set great value on her reports. "She saw so many things the President could never see," Labor Secretary Frances Perkins said. "Much of what she learned and what she understood about the life of the people of this country rubbed off onto FDR. It could not have helped to do so [sic] because she had a poignant understanding" (pp 27-28).

Obama's candor is generally refreshing. He often comes off as knowing, wise to process without being corrosively cynical. By many accounts he's skilled at probing deeply into people's thinking and needs. And his dismissal of Hillary's globe-trotting had an obvious political purpose. So...eat the donut, Senator. There are things to be learned on this trip.

The least expedient church to join....

One of the common right-wing smears attached to the Wright scandal is the assertion or insinuation that Obama joined Trinity United Church out of political expedience. A year ago, that possibility was debunked by Wright himself -- though its very preposterousness suggests other problems for Obama. Here, from a March 2007 interview (hat tip Andrew Sullivan), is Wright's take on that question:

I am not your typical garden-variety African-American clergy person, and because I'm not -- he was talking about organizing the churches in those early days. I said, man, you don't know who you're talking to. They don't like me. I'm not well liked in the city of Chicago, so you tell them you're a member of Trinity, you're going to turn off preachers before they ever get to know you, 'cause they're going to associate you with me, and just that association could be a negative in terms of how you are perceived in their eyes before you open your mouth -- "Oh, you go to Jeremiah's church." That kind of negative imaging I said might be harmful to him in terms of what he was trying to do in building coalitions and getting other churches to do things, again, for the benefit of the people. That would never happen just because they're going to associate your name with mine. That could be detrimental, I told him back then. It holds just as true, even more so, now. In fact, I just shared with, I was trying to remember who it is, somebody in public life was asking me about Barack, and I said listen, Barack might be forced by the media and/or by supporters to be very absent from this church and to put distance between our church and himself. As a politician, he might be forced into that. I have not talked to him about that at all. It's just that my read just of the blogs and what the right-Christian-wing leaders have said about him being a part of our church over past three months says this is -- you think it's ugly now, it's going to get worse, it's going to get much worse. For survival's sake, as a politician he just might have to not -- not that I love you less, I love me more. I'll never get elected as long as they keep harping on this. And that's -- again, I haven't talked to him about that at all.

To me, this passage does raise some questions about judgment, even as it puts to rest the question of expediency (other than the kind of 'expediency' that lets desire to believe and belong have its sway) . It also implicitly belies Wright's current claim that the attack on him is an attack on the black church as a whole. According to David Mendel's Obama biography, recently cited by Noam Scheiber, Obama was attracted to Wright and Trinity by the same qualities that reprelled many others: Wright's non-literal approach to Biblical interpretation, his opposition to school prayer and advocacy for gay rights, his "intellectualism and black militancy." Well, maybe - but what about that so called 'militancy'? -- were many in the black church community in Chicago repelled by the same crackpot and quasi-Nation-of-Islam ideology that has stunned the country as a whole twenty years later? Were many people -- with far less intellectual firepower than Obama (that's almost all of us) aware that Trinity's social activism was embedded in Wright's paranoid theoretical framework? Could Obama really not have been aware of the full crazy sweep of Wright's world view? Did he willfully blind himself because of the strength he drew from the man and the church community?

These questions do not shake my own support for Obama. I find him fully credible when he says that Wright's offensive beliefs "contradic[t] everything that I'm about and who I am." I can forgive him for turning a blind eye to someone whom he found compelling and attractive in powerful ways. But I do believe he did a number on himself by failing to see destructive elements of Wright's world view.

The ambiguous voice in the latter part of Wright's riff above could cause further problems for Obama:

For survival's sake, as a politician he just might have to not -- not that I love you less, I love me more. I'll never get elected as long as they keep harping on this. And that's -- again, I haven't talked to him about that at all.

This is spoken in the "first person speculative" -- Wright here imaginatively mimics Obama's internal voice. He seems to recognize this ventriloquism as a dangerous move, because he protests both before and after, "I haven't talked to him about that at all." But he seems to have settled Obama's thought process in his own mind. Alas, with what bitterness this preemptive interpretation spilled out fourteen months later!