Obama girds for nuclear budget war, cont.

So Obama has repackaged and linked two old proposals -- revenue-neutral corporate tax reform and a package of jobs stimulus measures. The tax reform would be revenue neutral over the long term, cutting rates and reducing loopholes, but would yield a one-shot revenue boost as the loopholes are closed, paying for teh short-term jobs measures.

This mini "grand bargain" is part of Obama's announced series of economic speeches and proposals.  The purpose, as I see it, is twofold. First, to shift the national agenda in the upcoming budget battles from deficit reduction to jobs (short-term stimulus and long-term investments). Second, to present Republicans with a series of manifestly reasonable programs and compromises to reject. That way, when they shut down the government or threaten national default because Obama won't agree to obscenely large spending cuts, he can say, "I offered to compromise six ways to Friday, but my opponents won't agree to anything but more spending cuts and more tax cuts." 

"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.

Perfidious Obama, Assaultive Obama

It goes without saying that if you're trying to unseat an incumbent, you have to portray that opponent as having failed in fundamental ways -- pursued policies that were ineffectual or counterproductive, wasted resources, wounded relationships, shown lack of resolve or energy, etc. etc.

For the past twenty years, Republicans, schooled in large part by Newt Gingrich, never stop there. Opponents in their portrayal are always depraved, malevolent, disloyal, craven, fundamentally hostile to real Americans.  

Greg Sargent, Steve Benen, Jamelle Bouie and others have laid out with precision the ways in which Romney taps into birther and Manchurian candidate fantasies about Obama to portray him as unAmerican, socialist, committed to "European' values, sympathetic to or submissive before aliens of various stripes, hostile to the upstanding businessmen who make America great.  I want to paint with a broader brush for a moment.  It seems to me that Romney's cartoon villain Obama has two main sets of vices.

The kernel of truth in blaming Obama

Greg Sargent and Steve Benen share a tic.  Almost daily, both expose the big lies and small lies on which Romney's economic case is founded.  Almost invariably, after highlighting the falsity in the Romney narrative, they warn: it could work.

One underlying assumption, inculcated by the political scientists, is that voters blame the president for the state of the economy because they don't understand how limited the powers of the presidency are, particularly when the out-party is determined to block all action proposed by the president. Hence Benen today:

Romney Rules

Weekly, Steve Benen tallies up the latest instances of Mitt's Mendacity.  At longer intervals, the Dish flags Romney's Big Lies, the core myths of his case against an imaginary Obama. I find the laser focus on lying a little narrow: the modes of Mitt's deception are manifold. As a private equity chief, Romney was a master of playing a rigged game, or of himself rigging games in his firm's favor; he has carried that skill to the political arena.  He would have the election played by Romney Rules, compiled below.

1. Context doesn't matter. Anything you say I may use against you, e.g., by making it sound like you said the opposite.

2. My record shall be judged by different standards from that of my opponent. For example, job losses in my first year in office don't count; in his, they shall define his entire record.

3. What I said 18, 10, 4, or 3 years ago doesn't matter. Erase it from your mind.  I've been as consistent as human beings (all three of me) can be.

An upright man who lies nonstop

The Times' Jodi Kantor is out with a long article about the centrality of faith in Mitt Romney's life and his commitment to living a life of service and rectitude and devotion to God's will as God gives him to see it.

Having read the The Real Romney, a well-documented biography y Boston Globe reporters Michael Kranish and Scott Helman, I don't doubt the truth of this narrative as far as it goes.  What is unfathomable to me is the level of doublethink that will allows an extremely able, intelligent, in many ways generous man who believes that God is watching over him to go out and lie every day, in general concept and in detail -- about his opponent's record and beliefs, about his own past positions, about the inevitable effects of his own purported policies. Steve Benen documents 10-20 verifiable lies per week in his now 18-part series, Mitt's Mendacity (Vol. 17 here).  Paul Krugman has ably captured the full arc of Romney's false narrative about Obama in his op-ed The Post-Truth Campaign. To review Romney's most fundamental and oft-repeated untruths:

Proud owners of the post-truth campaign

Paul Krugman famously dubbed Romney's drive for the presidency "the post-truth campaign."  You would think the candidate and his organization would take umbrage at such a characterization.  But no, they've embraced it.

I can think of four occasions since October when Romney or his surrogates admitted more or less outright that Romney's words or deeds are either willfully misleading or purely for show.   Most recent first:

Obama: It ain't worth a fig if it ain't got my sig

Steve Benen and/or Greg Sargent (I must confess, these two are so in sync their posts meld in my memory) have been fond of fretting that voters tend to hold the President chiefly responsible for the economy -- so when Congress stalls, the President gets the blame; when Republicans block Obama's agenda, he's seen as ineffectual. This lament was more intense before Obama got into the swing of regularly calling Congressional Republicans out for inaction, and before the economic news improved early this year, but it continues at intervals.

Today, Obama exploited the flip side of that equation.  If he gets the blame when Congress fails to act, he gets the credit when he successfully pressures Congress to act.  Never mind if that is collective Democratic pressure on Republicans to stop blocking a popular measure: let's roll with the impression that the big guy is in charge:

Erasing the King of Bain Stain

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.

A not-entirely-false equivalence of blame between the parties

Primed by James Fallows,  Greg Sargent, and Steve Benen, I'm on high alert for false equivalence -- reporter's language blaming government dysfunction equally on both parties, when it's Republicans who have taken the filibuster and other means of blocking legislative action to unprecedented extremes while opposing and demonizing a host of policies that they've historically supported.  So the radar started blinking when I came across this in a Financial Times editorial:

For the last three years, the country has been paralysed by a political gridlock that has put its future on the line. Both Republicans and Democrats are to blame – 

 But then, I was stopped by the actual "equivalence":

the Grand Old Party for its callous obstruction of all Democratic initiatives and President Barack Obama for his naïve neglect of the need for muscular leadership.

A muff on the Mitt watch

It's fair to assume that whatever the post-2006 Mitt Romney says about a given issue will contradict something he's said or done on the same issue in an earlier incarnation.  Nonetheless, Steve Benen misfires somewhat in this round of Mitt Hypocrisy Watch:

"The president has been disingenuous trying to lay this at the feet of the health insurance companies," he said. "Nobody believes that health care is expensive in America because of insurance companies. Health care is expensive because we use a lot of health care treatment."

Yes, Mitt Romney wants to a) defend universally-reviled health insurance companies as they jack up everyone's premiums while reaping huge profits; and b) thinks health care would be a whole lot cheaper if we'd all stop getting treatment for our ailments.

I'm tempted to ask him, by way of a follow-up, why health care costs in the United States are vastly more expensive than any other country on the planet -- per capita -- even as people in other countries seek treatments for their ailments, but Romney would probably just pretend reality doesn't exist and change the subject.

Actually, health care is more expensive in the U.S. than in any other wealthy country partly because of administrative and marketing costs imposed by for-profit insurance companies, and partly because doctors prescribe and patients demand a lot of unnecessary treatment, but mainly because all payers in the United States pay doctors and hospitals far more per treatment than payers in other countries.

Our system is hugely wasteful -- myriad insurance companies each with their own coverage rules and payment schedules jack up providers' administrative costs and therefore the price of treatment. But at the same time, insurance companies lack the pricing power that governments in other countries arrogate to themselves (including countries like France, Germany, and Japan which use private but nonprofit insurers) and so in large part they just pass through the inflated prices that doctors and hospitals are able to charge.

The worst damage imposed by our insurance delivery system is in our failure to impose uniform coverage rules -- what is covered, what is not, how much insurers are allowed to charge. That can't be fixed without an individual mandate to widen the risk pool. And our system won't truly approach the effectiveness of that of other industrialized countries until the government assumes price control over treatment.

"Shorter Scott Brown"

Reading the suicide screed of the IRS kamikaze bomber, my first thought was that it was a distillation of the  noxious brew of inchoate rage that's fueling the tea party movement. Then I thought, don't go there -- let's not insta- politicize the paranoid homicidal insanity of someone who complains of "the storm raging in my head." True, Stack understood his own grievance as a political one, but he was so clearly insane that I would hesitate to impute his craziness to the tenor of ideas that his resemble, even if those ideas are finding extreme expression in what now passes for our mainstream. But then, Scott Brown swiftly drew a political moral, expressing implicit approval of the focal points of Stack's insane rage:

Appearing on Fox News soon after Stack flew an airplane into a building, Brown told the national television audience that he "feels for the families" affected by the attack. In the next breath, however, the senator added:

"I don't know if it's related but I can just sense not only in my election, but since being here in Washington, people are frustrated. They want transparency. They want their elected officials to be accountable and open and talk about the things affecting their daily lives. So I am not sure if there is a connection, I certainly hope not, but we need to do things better."

Brown added that an incident like the one in Austin is "extreme," but added, "No one likes paying taxes obviously."

A commenter on Steve Benen's site caught Brown's logic perfectly:

Shorter Scott Brown: People are so frustrated and despairing that they are starting to do dangerous and crazy things, like crashing planes and voting for people like me.

Viewed another way, Scott's reaction is analogous to that of people who clucked that the 9/11 attack was deplorable but understandable, given U.S. actions in the Middle East.

How Obama will -- and won't -- lead on health care reform

Steve Benen has the very section of Obama's meeting with Senate Democrats (cut up and elided) that I was struggling to transcribe from the tape:

"All that's changed in the last few weeks is our party has gone from having the largest Senate majority in a generation to the second-largest Senate majority in a generation," Obama said. "If anybody is searching for a lesson from Massachusetts, I promise you the answer is not to do nothing."

He added, "I know these are tough times to hold public office. The need is great; the anger and anguish are intense." While "the natural political instinct is to tread lightly, keep your head down and play it safe," he said, Democrats should remember the promises they made in their election campaigns.

"So many of us campaigned on the idea that we're going to change this health-care system" Obama said. ..So many of us looked people in the eye who had been denied because of a pre-existing condition, or just didn't have health insurance at all ... and we said we were going to change it..*. "Well, here we are with a chance to change it....I hope we don't lose sight of why we're here. We've got to finish the job on health care."  We've got to finish the job on regulatory reform. We've got to finish the job, even though it's hard."

A health care strategy in Obama's pregnant pause?

Two days ago, I started a post in which I was planning to contrast this intrepid declaration by Nancy Pelosi with what I viewed as mixed messages from Obama:

"You go through the gate. If the gate's closed, you go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we'll pole-vault in. If that doesn't work, we'll parachute in. But we're going to get health care reform passed for the American people."

Paraphrasing Steve Benen, I wrote, "Compare Pelosi's strength and determination with the ambiguity emanating from Barack "identify those core elements of this package" Obama" (Benen's comparison was with Mary Landrieu).  The epithet came from Obama's Jan. 20 interview with George Stephanopoulos, in which the President had seemed to me to be pulling in two directions -- first suggesting that a health care bill might have to be stripped down to win some Republican support, and then explaining why the core elements of the bill could not be pulled apart.

But a funny thing happened on the way to "publish post."  I reread the interview, searching for the wording for my epithet, and began to think I had misread it the first time.  That's partly Obama's fault; his language was unclear.  But his thinking at that point was, I think, completely consistent with his presentation of the health care reform task in the State of the Union address a week later. In both cases, he studiously avoiding speaking as a tactical party leader. He gestured toward one more reach-out to Republicans.  He left the door open to picking up a Senate Republican vote or two and therefore going back to negotiating a merged Senate-House bill, rather than trying to navigate the much messier process of the House passing the Senate bill and negotiating fixes to be achieved through reconciliation.

But also in both, he asserted that the HCR bill had been misrepresented, that its key parts were interdependent,  and that a full-scale bill must be passed. In the interview, when he said, " I would advise that we try to move quickly to coalesce around those elements of the package that people agree on," he was not talking about a scaled-down package. "People" may have nominally included Republicans (or not nominally, if he thinks that his own advocacy may pull in a Republican or two). But essentially, Obama meant that Democrats need to recognize that the core elements in both bills cannot be pulled apart, and that they therefore need to find a way to negotiate or live with whatever parts of the bill they find objectionable and get the core elements -- i.e., in all likelihood, the Senate bill -- passed.

Quote of the Day

It is simply astonishing that the GOP is now posing as a party of fiscal responsibility. It's like Bristol Palin campaigning against teen pregnancy.

 Andrew Sullivan

Meanwhile, the drumbeat of core progressive voices urging the House to pass the Senate HCR bill cotinues.    Andy Stern is threatening. Steve Benen is warning. The New York Times is importuning. And Paul Begala is begging.