The adminstration's last bullet against economic stagnation?

Back in 2008, as the mortgage crisis metastasized,  FDIC chair Sheila Bair, a Bush appointee, was for it.  John McCain,  under tutelage of his economic advisor, former CBO director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, was for it (twice, in two forms). In early 2009, leading Senate Republicans were for it. Today, former Reagan Council of Economic Advisers Chair Martin Feldstein is for it. And we learn it today's FT that Glenn Hubbard, George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers chair, is also for it.

"It" is large-scale mortgage relief for underwater homeowners. Bair, McCain-Holtz-Eakin, and Feldstein called for principal writedowns. Hubbard wants interest rates reduced to today's low levels:

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.

Can Occupy Wall Street make Obama welcome some hatred?

My wife and I went into Times Square for the Occupy Wall Street rally held there Saturday evening.  One of the lead chants was "Wall Street got bailed out; we got sold out." That's a half truth -- and a vague charge, as it leaves the nefarious deeds in the passive voice. Obama thus avoids the direct hit. But not everywhere:

Although that sign is more false than true, I'm glad it's out there. Obama did need to complete the bank bailout and engineer their recapitalization, but he did it with far too few strings attached, and without demanding reciprocal action from the banks in the form of mortgage relief.  I want him pressured from the left -- as FDR was pressured.

Today people love to quote Roosevelt's October 31,1936 campaign speech in which he laid into powerful moneyed interests, who had been excoriating him for instituting a tax on a tax on undistributed corporate profits. Roosevelt responded by campaigning with increasing fervor, according to David M. Kennedy in Freedom from Fear, against "greed" and "autocracy." The Madison Square Garden speech was the climax:

Rick Perry, philosopher king

A Perry spokesman, reacting to questions about the billions in state contracts awarded to clients of Perry's chief factotum, characterizes the governor's decision-making process like this:

Aides to the governor took issue with any suggestion that Mr. Perry did anyone’s bidding other than his own. “The governor bases his policy decisions on what his philosophical beliefs and policies are,” said a spokesman, Mark Miner.

The best liar in the field

It is a fact universally acknowledged that Romney crushed the opposition in the last debate -- in fact in all the debates so far.  That's because he has facts and data at his fingertips, along with a bottomless willingness to twist them in support of current GOP nostrums. The others don't call him on his distortions, because they support the same policies he's advocating -- no new taxes, no bailouts, repeal Obamacare and Dodd-Frank, gut regulations.  And they don't call him out when he creates false contrasts between his own past actions and Obama's, because doing so would imply that there's some virtue in Obama's policies.

The upshot is that Romney is free to propose impossible unions of his past pragmatism -- compromising with Massachusetts Democrats, supporting the TARP bailouts, designing subsidized health insurance exchanges -- with his current extremist positions. Here's how three of those unions played out in the last debate.

Will debased politics hit the databases?

Politico's Kenneth P. Vogel today delves into the coopetition between the GOP fundraising empires of Karl Rove and the Koch brothers.  When the account turned to rival databases, I suffered a free association so sharp it was almost comic, as if the keyword word flashed in front of my eyeballs. Here was the trigger:

Earlier this year, operatives from both camps had conversations with the Republican National Committee about accessing its mega database of voter information, which is both a powerful organizing tool and a valuable asset used as collateral to secure bank loans and lines of credit.

“This is about getting a hold of the most valuable asset that the RNC has,” said former RNC Chairman Michael Steele, who asserted Rove’s allies have for years wanted to “get their hands on this list so bad they can taste it.”

The word was Stuxnet.  And no, I don't expect the Koch and Rove empires to sabotage each others' databases.  What I can easily imagine is Rove or other GOP operatives corrupting or stealing Democrats' data. It's so in keeping with the m.o. of the aging College Republicans who have directed GOP campaigns for a generation.

Better Angels yield new angles

I am very much looking forward to reading Steven Pinker's  The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined, after reading a precis by Pinker and a review by Peter Singer. As a collector of evidence that human life and human beings are getting better, I am receptive to the copious evidence that Pinker has gathered to demonstrate that violence has diminished dramatically over the course of human history -- in the family, in the state, between states, and, perhaps now finally, within states.

Pinker's demonstration that human beings have gradually taught themselves to be more in control of their violent instincts, more amenable to reason, and more empathic seems to me to sync up nicely with Robert Wright's theory that God has evolved with human society--that as society grows more humane, so do concepts of God (this too I'm familiar with through the writer's shorter representations of his recent book, The Evolution of God).

Personally, though, I would prefer not to drag the God of Ages along on our pilgrim's progress.  Notwithstanding frequent relapses such as the two world wars of the twentieth century, it looks to me as though Pinker shows moral advances in human history to be as verifiable as technological advance. For that reason, I am impatient with the concept of scripture, the investiture of any inherited text or law with authority that can't be superseded , after due process, by a text or law embodying the best wisdom of those living now. Less legalistically: if a thinker is groping toward new moral or ethical insight, why shackle that insight to an interpretation of God's law as embodied in ancient texts? Can we not acknowledge by now that gods are silent, except perhaps through our own intuition, and that that intuition is continually improving?

That sixties suburban sweet spot, revisited

My wife grew up on a leafy cul-de-sac in West Seneca, NY, a suburb of Buffalo. Her house, like I think most of the houses on the street, was a comfortable split-level (2500 sq feet, built 1954) with a good-sized yard.

Yesterday, at a family brunch, my wife started asking her fifty-something siblings what the parents of various friends on the block did for a living. Her brother had almost all the answers; her dad filled in a few more this morning. I am changing the names but perserving the ethnicities.

Mr. Grimm was a bricklayer. Mr. Wojick was a foreman at the Ford plant. Mr. Majewski worked in a bronze casting factory, as did one other neighbor. Mr. Cobb worked in product safety at Fisher-Price.  Mr. Frank was a stockbroker. Tombari sold insurance. Panetta was a meat wholesaler.  White was a concrete contractor working mainly on bridges. Carlotti was a dentist (and my father-in-law, an oral surgeon). The Murphys, husband and wife, were teachers, and so were the Stones. Burger was a roofer.

That is a pretty wide range of livelihoods, isn't it? Perhaps it's not so different today. The price of comparable homes in West Seneca today is $179k; metro Buffalo skipped both housing boom and housing bust. There are fewer factory workers, natch.  And I suspect that the dentists and stockbrokers probably live elsewhere. The area has had its share of McMansion building, and you can get a castle in the outer burbs for under $350k. 

Seeing beyond the trough we're in

Kevin Drum today takes on a meme gathering steam: that innovation has stalled, and we're in a period of relative technological stagnation. In particular, addressing the question of whether inventions in the last 50 years have been less transformative than those in the previous 50-odd, he argues:

Most of the best known inventions of the early 20th century were actually offshoots of two really big inventions: electrification and the internal combustion engine. By contrast, the late 20th century had one really big invention: digital computers. Obviously two is more than one, but still, looked at that way, the difference between the two periods becomes a bit more modest. The difference between the offshoots of those big inventions is probably more modest than we think too. Just as we once made better and better use of electrification, we're now making better and better use of digital computing. And to call all these computing-inspired inventions mere "improvements" is like calling TV a mere improvement of radio. These are bigger deals than we often think. We have computers themselves, of course, plus smartphones, the internet, CAT scans, vastly improved supply chain management, fast gene sequencing, GPS, Lasik surgery, e-readers, ATMs and debit cards, video games, and much more.

Drum is responding in large part to Tyler Cowen's The Great Stagnation. I'd like to second his skepticism.  In fact, some months ago I posed five questions for Cowen, e.g.:

When MoDo drops the doo-doo...

When Maureen Dowd gathers every cliche that's been circulating about a public figure and assembles them in one spitball, it's a sign that a national caricature has hardened into granite.   This week, that spells bad news for President Obama, set off as a foil to Chris Christie:

But now his asceticism seems more like a reflection of his cherished membership in the technocratic priesthood — and an unnerving mirror of our starving economy. He’s an egghead who surrounds himself with eggheads, even when they have helped wreck the economy he’s trying to save....

"Tell the truth, now, Nicolle..."

I wish I could find it. Circa 1998, Saturday Night Live ran a mock-interview between Monica Lewinsky and I think Barbara Walters (a.k.a. WaWa), in which the question is posed: "Tell the truth, now, Monica, did you give the President a hummer?" Answer: "No, Barbara." Almost immediately after, Monica whips out and displays her new book, How to Give the President a Hummer.

That's what came to mind as I glanced at a Time interview (by Claire Suddath) with former Bush communications director and McCain campaign adviser Nicolle Wallace focused on her new novel, It's Classified. Main character: Vice Presidential candidate Tara. Premise, according to Wallace:

Better late than never? Obama ramps up the attack

Well, the transition is complete. Hope it ain't too late.

A few weeks ago, Democrats waited desperately for Obama to start calling out Republicans in Congress, instead of just "Congress" or "Washington," for blocking action on jobs and deficit -- or, back, then, on deficit and jobs. And the change did come, in the runup to the jobs bill rollout. On September 3, in the weekly address, it was the same old pablum: Congress failed to pass a clean extension of the transportation bill. On Labor Day, he named them that (till then) must not be named (when criticizing):

But we’re not going to wait for them.  (Applause.)  We’re going to see if we’ve got some straight shooters in Congress.  We’re going to see if congressional Republicans will put country before party.  (Applause.)  We’ll give them a plan, and then we’ll say, do you want to create jobs?  Then put our construction workers back to work rebuilding America.  (Applause.)  Do you want to help our companies succeed?  Open up new markets for them to sell their products.  You want -- you say you’re the party of tax cuts?  Well then, prove you’ll fight just as hard for tax cuts for middle-class families as you do for oil companies and the most affluent Americans.  (Applause.)  Show us what you got.  (Applause.)

Since that moment, week by week, day by day, the attacks have grown more focused, more direct, more confrontational, more sustained.

September 8, when he rolled out his jobs bill, he tweaked a Republican article of faith without naming names:

Republicans for red tape

Who says Republicans are always hostile to strict regulation? 

The New York Times' front-page review of efforts by Republican-controlled state governments to prevent "voter fraud" -- i.e., voting by people who in the good old days would have failed to meet property qualifications -- concludes with a snapshot of a law apparently designed to make all voting rights groups fear that they will share ACORN's fate:

In Florida, a new law imposing restrictions on voter registration drives has led the state’s League of Women Voters, a nonpartisan group that had registered voters for 72 years, to call a moratorium on new registration drives in the state, citing the penalties that groups can face under the law.

Independent groups that register voters — like the league — face fines of $50 to $1,000 per applicant if they fail to turn in the applications to elections officials in a timely manner.

“It’s too cumbersome,” said Deirdre Macnab, the league’s president. “There is too much red tape and regulation.”

Food for thought, and occasional light rations, in Richard Florida's The Great Reset

Credit Richard Florida putting forward a satisfying -- and I think mainly sound -- conceptual framework for understanding our current economic woes in The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work.  Florida argues that major economic slumps correspond with major economic 'resets', in which new ways of generating wealth demand -- and ultimately shape -- new organizations of community, workspace and living space -- and new means of transportation that tie the new "spatial fix."  From this perspective, to extrapolate a point that Florida leaves implicit, the bubbles that precede major economic contractions are more symptom than cause -- a kind of giddy last fling at priming the legacy infrastructure that's reached a kind of natural limit.

According to Florida, the two main examples of "reset" in U.S. history are 1)  the urbanization of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, which developed during and followed the "long depression" of 1873-1896; and 2) suburbanization, for which the way was "literally paved" by the New Deal and postwar infrastructure investments. Florida argues that we are in a third reset now -- an accelerating shift from a manufacturing to a service economy, demanding an "infrastructure fix" centered largely on high-speed rail tying together "megaregions" - clusters of large cities that strengthen their economic links and so pool resources.

Run, Sarah, Run!

If Dick Cheney can try to lure Hillary Clinton into the presidential race, why can't we progressives have a go at Sarah?  Jonathan Bernstein:

Could Palin launch an independent bid for the presidency? Why not? What bridges would she be burning with Republicans that she hasn’t burned already? And if she did go that route, she certainly wouldn’t have problems raising a fair amount of money, and she would be able to mobilize enough volunteers to get her name on the ballot in quite a few states.

Roger Ailes sees "shoot," and swoons

A few posts back, while trying to articulate a warning that Rick Perry had implicitly endorsed an Israeli strike against Iran's nuclear installations, I wondered if this veiled threat might be written off as campaign bluster.  A story about Andrew Jackson, which I had read in Robert Remini's biography, popped into my head at that point.

When Jackson was sitting as a Superior Court judge in Tennessee, "a great, hulking fellow named Russell Bean, who had been indicted for cutting off the ears of his infant child in a 'drunken frolic,' paraded before the court, cursed judge, jury and all assembled, and then marched out the door."  Jackson ordered his arrest, but no one dared do it, as Bean threatened to shoot "'the first skunk who came within ten feet of him'." Jackson called a ten-minute recess and took matters into his own hands:

Fare and ballast

In what sense is Fox "fair and balanced"?  Roger Ailes gives the game away:

Ailes has a blunt rejoinder to those who say he runs a biased outfit: “Every other network has given all their shows to liberals. We are the balance.”

Voters: compromise good, capitulation bad

When the first polls came in after the lopsided debt ceiling deal and subsequent stock market tumble, Jonathan Chait billed the budget deal Obama's Katrina. 

That rang ominously true to me. Shortly afterward, my sister-in-law, a compassionate Democrat and social worker who stumped with my wife and me* for Obama in ''08, told me tenderly that people were wondering whether Obama was strong enough to be president.  Oh oh... Hence, when apparently anomalous polls found that Americans disapproved of Obama's handling of the economy while approving of most of the proposals in his jobs plan, it seemed plain to me that Obama was being punished not for advocating the wrong policies but for failing to put his policies across.

Now here is Michael Tomasky quoting Democratic pollster Guy Molyneux affirming the notion that Obama is suffering from perceived weaknes. Citing  Kaiser Family Foundation polling (though the article provides no actual data on this point),  Molyneux tells Tomasky

Please, Obama: stop talking like a hostage

A worrying signal in The President's Plan for Economic Growth and Deficit reduction, regarding the triggers in the deficit reduction deal, aka the Budget Control Act (BCA):

With approximately $1trillion in deficit reduction achieved over the next decade through the use of discretionary spending caps, it took a substantial step toward bringing down our deficit.Yet, with discretionary spending projected to reach historically low levels, we need to look at other parts of the budget for savings so that we pursue deficit reduction in a balanced way.This is not only critical to future economic growth, but if the Committee fails to achieve at least $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction, then a sequester would be triggered that could have devastating consequences for both defense and non-defense programs (pg. 2, pdf pg. 12).

Here we are with Obama once again warning about "devastating consequences" if a deal is not struck, this time by the Supercommittee. That worked out great the last time, didn't it? When faced with economic disaster if they don't back off a maximalist position, Republicans always back off, right?

"Michele doesn't comment on any of it"

In the last GOP debate, some participants say that the audience boos for a gay soldier asking a question about Don't Ask Don't Tell couldn't be heard clearly on the stage. Others admit otherwise. After the fact, ABC asked all the candidates for comment. Michele Bachmann's response leaps out:

Rep. Michele Bachmann’s spokeswoman Alice Stewart said in an email to ABC News, “There was booing and cheering throughout the debate – Michele didn’t comment on any of it.”

Let's imagine equivalent responses in other situations that test a public figure's moral mettle.

Learning from experience

Jonathan Cohn is cheered that Obama is not only following through so far on his promise to take his jobs plan to the country, but that he's also sticking with calling out Republicans by name for their obstruction, instead of inveighing against "Washington" or "Congress":

Remember those days when he wouldn’t even utter the word “Republican”? Those days are gone. He's even naming names.

As someone who was waiting on a hair trigger (with millions of other Democrats) for Obama to make this shift, which he made on Labor Day in a preview of the jobs proposal he unveiled on Sept. 8, I'm as thrilled as Cohn. On one level it's surprising, insofar as Obama was so all-in for so long on finding common ground, compromising, rising above partisan politics -- in fact, that approach a lifelong m.o. and was central to candidate Obama's brand.  But in another way it's not surprising. Obama is probably still gunning for compromise and will probably praise Republicans effusively if they put through some subset of the proposals in his jobs bill -- though he will probably also remain in confrontational mode through the election. It's a change of tactics, and one in line with another core element of his brand and probably his self-concept: pragmatism.  Here's what he told Ron Suskind about his approach to governing:

Perry flubs a shot at Romney

In tonight's GOP presidential debate, Romney did a great job nailing Perry to the cross of his ridiculous pronouncements against Social Security -- it's unconstitutional, it's a ponzi scheme etc.-- and his recent attempts to unsay them. Unfortunately, when Perry had a chance to turn the tables, and highlight the disconnect between Romney's defense of Romneycare and denunciations of Obamacare, he flubbed it.

I forget the question, but Romney managed to say  in one extended breath that Romneycare was great because "nothing's changed" for the 92% of Massachusetts people who already had coverage, while the uninsured were given a choice among "market-based private insurance" plans. Of course, the same is true of Obamacare. He then cast Obamacare as an abomination because it "puts someone between you and your doctor." In a clearing stands a boxer...lie lie lie, as Romney did every time he said anything about Obama.  While the ACA empowers an independent board to cut Medicare costs on a national level, it puts absolutely no one between doctor and patient in any plan.  In any case, Perry's opportunity was to point out that everything Romney said in praise of the Massachusetts plan was true of the ACA -- and then rip both.

You can't fact-check a dog whistle

Factcheck.org is unduly literal-minded when it protests that Perry, contra his critics, never "advocated"  for Texas seceding from the United States:

Some may question the prudence of Perry entertaining the suggestion of secession, or talking too loosely about such a radical idea, but any fair-minded reading of Perry's fuller quote, and its context, makes clear that Perry was not advocating for Texas to secede. And Perry has repeatedly said since then that he did not, and does not, advocate secession.

Of course Perry didn't 'advocate' secession. He just took advantage of the emotional valence the idea held for his audience.  He left it floating as a pleasant fantasy or reserve contingency if current trends persist:

Perry letting slip the dogs of war?

Rick Perry's default modes of discourse are the smear, the lie and the threat.  All three make repeat appearances in his speech outlining his Middle East policy. To sample briefly: the smear: Obama has pursued a policy of "appeasement" of the Palestinian authority and has given "equal standing" to Palestinian "orchestrators of terrorism." Lie: that unspecified U.S. actions during the Green uprising could have unseated Iran's current rulers.  But let's spotlight in particular a noteworthy threat, cushioned though it is by some conventional policy recommendations and diplomatspeak.  It's here:

Israel’s security is critical to America’s security. We must not forget it was Israel that took out the nuclear capabilities of Iraq in 1981 and Syria in 2007. In both instances, their actions made the free world safer.

Today, the greatest threat to the security of Israel and, by extension, a threat to America, is the Iranian government developing a nuclear arsenal. One thing is clear: we must stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Economic sanctions must be tightened and increased and all options must remain on the table to stop a brutally repressive regime from acquiring a nuclear capability.

Quote of the day

"Obama, to my mind, has successfully demonstrated he has been willing to compromise, and the GOP has successfully demonstrated they cannot." - Andrew Sullivan

That really boils it down, doesn't it?

The arguments haven't changed, but the opponent is named

Greg Sargent cheers Obama's newfound fighting spirit:

This has to be the clearest sign yet that Obama has taken a very sharp populist turn as he seeks to frame the contrast between the parties heading into 2012. During his remarks this morning, Obama directly responded to Republicans accusing him of “class warfare,” but rather than simply deny the charge, he made the critical point that the act of protecting tax cuts for the rich is itself class warfare, in effect positioning himself as the defender of the middle class against GOP class warriors on behalf of the wealthy.

Sargent has put his finger on the key difference between Obama today and Obama this summer: direct confrontation.  It's worth noting that Obama's arguments have not changed -- nor really have his proposed policies. All through the summer, he argued repeatedly tht deficit reduction had to be "balanced," that it was unfair to ask people to accept reduction in Medicare and Social Security without asking "millionaires and billionaires" to "pay their fair share" via higher taxes. He won that argument in the court of public opinion but lost the negotiation that produced the debt ceiling deal.   Moreover, in his deficit reduction plan in April, Obama called for Medicare cost savings broadly similar to those proposed today. According to Ezra Klein, he called for roughly the same amount of increased tax revenue over today's rates -- $1.5 trillion over twelve years -- as he did today -- though the language in the plan outline was studiously vague and I never could see how it amounted to more than $1 trillion over twelve years, i.e., the amount gained by letting the Bush cuts for the top 2% expire. 

About that veto promise...

It seems that the Times preview of Obama's deficit reduction plan was inaccurate in an important particular:

In laying out his proposal, aides said, Mr. Obama will expressly promise to veto any legislation that seeks to cut the deficit through spending cuts alone and does not include revenue increases in the form of tax increases on the wealthy.

The battle lines are drawn

From the New York Times' preview of Obama's deficit reduction plan:

In laying out his proposal, aides said, Mr. Obama will expressly promise to veto any legislation that seeks to cut the deficit through spending cuts alone and does not include revenue increases in the form of tax increases on the wealthy. 

 Glory hallelujah. That has been the missing piece all along.

But does that mean Obama is willing to pull the trigger (or see it pulled) if the supercommittee deadlocks?  He'd better be.

Borrow and spend...

Is how metaphors become memes. Take one that's glided with swanlike grace into the stream of our economic discourse this summer:

With both parties competing for the mantle of austerity, they’re acting a bit like two crazed medeival (sic) doctors leeching a patient who’s already suffering from catastrophic blood loss.

That's Adam Serwer on July 28 of this year, regarding the pending debt ceiling deal. Three days later, when the deal was announced, behold Paul Krugman:

So those demanding spending cuts now are like medieval doctors who treated the sick by bleeding them, and thereby made them even sicker.

A fair look at Obama, cont.

Yesterday, I wrote a post speculating about why polls show that Americans broadly approve of Obama's economic policies yet give him poor marks for his handling of the economy. Short answer: he's being punished for not executing, or not fighting hard enough. Today, the New York Times devotes its lead editorial to the same apparent anomaly, and comes to a similar conclusion:

He has wasted far too much time trying to puzzle out how he can shave policies down far enough to get the Republicans to cooperate. The answer has long been clear: He can’t. Since he was elected, the Republicans have openly said they would not work with him, and a year ago, Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, said explicitly that the Republicans’ goal was simply to deny Mr. Obama a second term. The new Times poll showed that Americans do not believe bipartisanship is achievable. Six in 10 Democrats want the president to challenge Republicans more. He should not worry about voters thinking he is being mean. What he should worry about is that he is not showing them that he is fighting all out for their interests.

Qualifying the Wisdom of Crowds

For Sunday fun, a jump into the wisdom/unwisdom of crowds discussion. Re the oft-cited fact that when a roomful of people are each asked to guess the number of jellybeans in a jar, the average answer is usually spot-on, Ed Yong notes:

Approve of his policies/disapprove of his performance: not a paradox

Greg Sargent wrestles with an apparent paradox in poll data: voters strongly approve of Obama's economic policies but disapprove of his handling of the economy to date. Methinks his explanation misses something rather basic:

What we’re seeing here, again, is more evidence that Republicans benefit from blocking policies Americans support. As long as the economy remains abysmal, the public is likely to strongly disapprove of Obama’s overall performance, even if Republicans are the ones blocking job-creation ideas the public itself thinks will reduce unemployment.

Sargent assumes that voters are judging Obama solely on the basis of whether they agree with his current preferred policies, and that many of them are being duped: they like the policies individually, but buy a Republican branding of the whole package.  That's probably true in some cases. But I suspect that a lot of people are judging Obama not for advocating the wrong policies but for failing to put his policies across.

Boehner supports Merkeley's call to score Supercommittee proposals for jobs impact

...only implicitly, of course.

Senator Jeff Merkley, as Greg Sargent has repeatedly broadcast with such enthusiasm, has a modest proposal for the Supercommittee charged with striking a deficit reduction deal:

He is calling on both parties to agree to submit every proposal offered by the supercommittee to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, to be evaluated for the impact it will have — on jobs.

He doesn’t want the CBO to evaluate the proposals just for their budgetary impact. Rather, he wants the CBO to reach a conclusion on the impact the proposals will have on unemployment, whether positive, negative, or neutral.

“We need to have every proposal that the super-committee brings out to have it scored by its jobs impact,” Merkley told me in an interview this morning. He plans to urge Democratic and GOP leaders to agree to this standard, and hopes to build a campaign to make it happen...

Our next Great Communicator

Having made something of a study of our current President's rhetoric, I owe some attention to that of the man perhaps likeliest to be our next President, Rick Perry. Time's Richard Stengel and Mark Halperin just posted an interview with Perry. Below, some thoughts on responses revel much about Perry's approach to policy, politics, and the rules and purposes of political discourse.

Now that you’ve been in the race for while, do you feel pressure to temper some of your rhetoric, like calling the Obama administration socialist?

No, I still believe they are socialist. Their policies prove that almost daily. Look, when all the answers emanate from Washington D.C., one size fits all, whether it’s education policy or whether it’s healthcare policy, that is, on its face, socialism.

Let's grant Perry his definition of socialism -- he does have one -- and look at his signature method of characterizing opponents' policies. The Obama administration's education policy is embodied in Race to the Top, which invites states to compete for extra federal funding by submitting their own plans to raise performance according to standards that they propose.  As for healthcare policy: the Affordable Care Act does create a template for states to achieve near-universal coverage by two means: expanded Medicaid, 80-90% financed by the Federal government, and healthcare exchanges composed of private plans that meet minimum coverage standards, made available to citizens via premium subsidies provided by the federal government. But it also grants waivers to the states to design their own plans, as long as they meet basic coverage standards, and Obama has proposed moving up the date for granting such waivers.  In neither case do "all the answers emanate from Washington."  A candidate minimally concerned with veracity would not "temper" the socialism charge with socialism thus defined -- he would eschew it. But that of course implies a by-now-Utopian reality standard for any GOP candidate. Let's move on to Perry's more specific m.o.

The party of treason (charges)

In the GOP debate tonight, Perry doubled down on his slimy insinuation that Ben Bernanke's attempts to stimulate the economy with monetary policy are treasonous. This time he used the classic demagogic method of asserting that we have no way of knowing that an outrageous smear isn't true. Of Bernanke's motive for intimating that further monetary easing may be coming, he said "we don't know if it was political or not" -- i.e., whether Bernanke is motivated by trying to help Obama get re-elected.  Never mind that the being accused of treason for following a given policy course by the leading presidential candidate of one party would constitute a perfectly good motive for trying to maintain the other in office. Or that Bernanke is a Republican, and a Bush appointee, and a student of the Great Depression whose entire corpus of published writings support a more radical course of easing than he's pursued.  From smearing motive to charging treason -- that's the GOP way.

What goes round comes round. Invited to respond, Romney agreed that Bernanke's policy is wrongheaded and didn't call out Perry for smearing Bernanke's motives and patriotism. And then, shockingly, the T-word was turned on Perry by the guy who's supposed to be the sane man in the asylum.  On immigration, Perry in response to Santorum said it was not feasible to build a fence along the entire U.S.-Mexico border. He then delivered his own nostrums for "securing" the border - 4500 boots on the ground, air surveillance, etc. Then, Huntsman turned around and declared sententiously that for Perry to say that we can't secure the border was "near treasonous." (Never mind that Perry didn't say you can't secure the whole border; he said you can't fence  the whole thing. And he lacked the verbal quickness to make that point himself.)

Treasonous!  GOP culture makes Stalinists of them all.  Disagreement with their favored policies -- tactics even -- is treason. 

Risk-free Republican rebranding

Hey, Republicans, I've got a winning strategy for you. Why not give Obama rope to hang himself?

This evening, the President will send up his jobs bill, with $440 billion in tax cuts and infrastructure spending. Next Monday, he'll send the White House proposal for the debt supercommittee, which will presumably add at least $440 billion to the $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction the committee is charged with putting together. In his speech on Sept. 8, that's how Obama proposed to pay for his jobs plan.

Republicans, why not carve out your favorite $440 billion in spending cuts from Obama's deficit reduction proposal, tack them to his jobs bill and pass the whole shebang -- leaving the remainder of the supercommittee's charge unchanged?

In one fell swoop you can lock in another near-half trillion in spending cuts with no tax increases, wipe out your reputation for intransigence, and get a chance to prove that a) the party is always in favor of tax cuts, b) the party recognizes the country's acute infrastructure needs, and c) Keynesian stimulus doesn't work.  If you really believe the last, what harm can the package do?  At the same time, you'll give yourself added space to stonewall in the supercommittee negotiations -- yielding on a little bit of stimulus spending can offset your implacability on tax hikes.

A fitting coda for 9/11/11

Leon Wieseltier implicitly acknowledges the many things that have gone wrong in the U.S. since 9/11 but affirms that we maintain our core virtue and ability to self-correct.  Looking back at my brief lament, I appreciate his superior balance:

It has been a wounding decade. Our country is frayed, uncertain, inflamed. There is hardship and dread in the land. In significant ways we are a people in need of renovation. But what rouses the mourner from his sorrow is his sense of possibility, his confidence in the intactness of the spirit, his recognition that there is work to be done. What we loved and what we valued has survived the disaster, but it needs to be secured and bettered, and in that secure and better condition transmitted to our children. Our dream of greatness must be accompanied by an understanding of what is required for the maintenance of greatness. The obscenities of September 11, 2001 exposed the difference between builders and destroyers. We are builders. Let us agree, on this anniversary, that it is an honor to be an American and it is an honor to be free.

A President confesses error and defends democracy

Let's say that you were a supporter of Barack Obama in 2008, now disillusioned. You credit the main thrust of the liberal brief against him and discount administration defenses. You believe that  the 2009 stimulus was too small and too tax-heavy (and that a decisive leader could have put through a much more effective package), that the healthcare reform process took way too long (and that decisive leadership could have radically foreshortened it), that the President was eighteen months late in refocusing on jobs and let Republicans set the agenda, and that he got disastrously rolled in the debt ceiling deal.  Should you then write him off as a failure, a disaster for Democrats and the country, a man unequal to the challenges of his historical moment?

No. All presidents err terribly. They err in emphasis, in tactics, and in overall direction.  Theodore Roosevelt said he would be happy if he made the right decision 55% of the time.  You have to weigh the successes against the failures (and the politically possible against the ideal) and determine which way the scales tip -- perhaps slightly.  And given Obama's tendency to favor long-term priorities over short, you might have to wait a year or decade or two before making an assessment.

In a recent post, I noted that FDR not only tipped the U.S. into a brutal recession by cutting spending in 1937, as Krugman and others have been reminding us for years, but reversed course only halfheartedly and rather ineffectually -- both because of his own ambivalence about deficit spending and because he had squandered political capital on his court-packing scheme and a war on conservative Democrats. Moving the story along: by early 1939, the economy was perking up because the war machine was starting to crank.  Roosevelt gave a memorable State of the Union address. I it, he implicitly confessed to two major errors over the previous several years -- though he cast those errors as collective ones, which they also were.

A backdoor way to shore up the Affordable Care Act?

This post got buried beneath new ones a bit too quickly; excuse the re-post:

Before Obama's "grand bargain" with Boehner imploded, many progressives were appalled to learn that Obama had put (gradually) raising the Medicare retirement age to 67 on the table. Swampland suggests that Democrats on the supercommittee charged with proposing a deficit reduction package are doing the same:

Democratic staffers on the Ways and Means Committee on Wednesday submitted a list of potential savings, including some $500 billion from Medicare through tweaks like raising the eligibility age to 67 from 65. The bipartisan task forces of months past have identified a menu of potential savings the supercommittee can mix and match from to reach its goal.

The actual Ways and Means memo, however, reads more like a brief against this option -- and a slap at Obama for proposing it.  It also perhaps hints at the germ of a messy bargain, or rather a kind of subtrigger to preserve these alleged savings, which may be presumed dear to GOP hearts (my emphasis below):

Raising the Medicare eligibility age [by two months per year through 2027, to 67]would be a radical departure from current policy and is only possible if the ACA is retained. If ACA were subsequently repealed or otherwise substantially changed, this policy would result in a significant increase in the number of near-elderly uninsured persons. Even

Can Obama raise the cost of GOP stonewalling?

Whatever alchemy goes into Moody's economist Mark Zandi's calculations, his simple declarative forecasts do have a way of framing political stakes. Here's the top line as served up in Mike Allen's Playbook:

MARK ZANDI for Moody's Analytics, "An Analysis of the Obama Jobs Plan": "President Obama's jobs proposal would help stabilize confidence and keep the U.S. from sliding back into recession. The plan would add 2 percentage points to GDP growth next year, add 1.9 million jobs, and cut the unemployment rate by a percentage point. The plan would cost about $450 billion, about $250 billion in tax cuts and $200 billion in spending increases. Many of the president's proposals are unlikely to pass Congress, but the most important have a chance of winning bipartisan support. ...

So far so good, Obama...

Well, I think Obama accomplished step one of what he needs to do tonight. He took it to the Republicans.  Without accusing them of deliberately blocking action to help the economy, he made it clear that that's what they're doing, since they're blocking consensus measures that they've supported and proposed in the past -- most notably for payroll tax cuts:

I know some of you have sworn oaths to never raise any taxes on anyone for as long as you live.  Now is not the time to carve out an exception and raise middle-class taxes, which is why you should pass this bill right away.      

He made the Republicans stand and cheer for infrastructure investment and payroll tax cuts and tax breaks for hiring the unemployed.  Because he could credibly characterize all the measures as historically bipartisan ones, he was able to cast his injunction to "pass this bill" as a matter of responsibility and patriotism. The refrains were simple: "pass this bill and..."  and "you should pass this jobs plan right away."

He was straightforward, too, about applying political pressure, appealing to listeners to pressure their reps:

A backdoor way to shore up the Affordable Care Act?

Before Obama's "grand bargain" with Boehner imploded, many progressives were appalled to learn that Obama had put (gradually) raising the Medicare retirement age to 67 on the table. Swampland suggests that Democrats on the supercommittee charged with proposing a deficit reduction package are doing the same:

Democratic staffers on the Ways and Means Committee on Wednesday submitted a list of potential savings, including some $500 billion from Medicare through tweaks like raising the eligibility age to 67 from 65. The bipartisan task forces of months past have identified a menu of potential savings the supercommittee can mix and match from to reach its goal.

The actual Ways and Means memo, however, reads more like a brief against this option -- and a slap at Obama for proposing it.  It also perhaps hints at the germ of a messy bargain, or rather a kind of subtrigger to preserve these alleged savings, which may be presumed dear to GOP hearts (my emphasis below):

Raising the Medicare eligibility age [by two months per year through 2027, to 67]would be a radical departure from current policy and is only possible if the ACA is retained. If ACA were subsequently repealed or otherwise substantially changed, this policy would result in a significant increase in the number of near-elderly uninsured persons. Even

A fair look at Obama

With a good deal of pain, I have read, and ruminated over, and sometimes pushed back against, a large number of assessments of Obama in this season of failure following the debt ceiling debacle.  Today I think Joe Klein actually got the mix about right, providing some clarity:

In fact,the great conundrum of Obama’s presidency is that he has accomplished a hell of a lot–preventing a depression with his stimulus package, passing a plausible universal health care plan, fighting the good fight on financial regulatory reform, saving the auto companies–but it has worked to his political disadvantage. Dowd is correct about one of the reasons for this: the President simply isn’t a top-draw politician. If he were, we’d be talking about the Obama tax cuts–there have been two big ones–instead of the “failed” Obama stimulus package; the Obama Senior Citizen prescription drug benefit (he closed the donut hole), universal health coverage that you can never lose instead of death panels; the Detroit auto boom as a path to a revival of manufacturing. Most important, we’d be talking about jobs instead of deficits. We would never have played the Republican deficit follies these past nine months. He would be defining the political arena. Instead, the Republicans are. 

As Klein suggests elsewhere in the post, the policy vs. politics division is too neat.  Obama's timidity, his passivity in the face of Republican stonewalling and sabotage, his unwillingness to stage fights, goes to substance too. As Klein implicitly asks, why didn't he appoint Elizabeth Warren to head the Financial Consumer Protection Board, and embrace the fight when the GOP inevitably filibustered? For that matter, why isn't he orchestrating pressure now over their refusal to allow a vote on his more anodyne if able nominee, Richard Cordray? Why didn't he make noise when Richard Shelby blocked a confirmation vote for his FHFA nominee, Joseph A. Smith, who might have directed Fannie and Freddie to launch a mortgage writedown program? Or when Shelby successfully blocked Nobel laureate Peter Diamond from serving on the Federal Reserve?

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.

Obama changes the subject

...that is, the grammatical subject of his sentences when he's calling out certain parties for obstructing his jobs agenda.

Jonathan Cohn has already made this point in brief. But I'm going to gild the lily, overemphasize it, put the obvious in boldface below, because this rhetorical turn goes to the heart of how Obama has driven his supporters mad in recent months via continued pursuit of compromise and bipartisan cooperation with those who keep drive-by shooting him.

On Labor Day, Obama moved away from his months-long practice of criticizing "Congress" for blocking formerly bipartisan, consensus measures to boost trade and growth and instead called out "congressional Republicans." Got that?  The subject (or object) of the sentence is not "Congress" (sidelined as an adjective) but "Republicans." Way to call a spade a spade, Mr. President. It's been a long time coming.

Compare the pablum in Obama's Sept. 3 weekly address:

FDR was Hoover, too

We've all heard by now that FDR cut spending in 1937, sending the economy into a sharp recession that reversed much of the rapid economic growth his New Deal policies had helped spur in his first term. 

What's less well known, I think (at least to me), is that when he reversed course after this disastrous bout of balanced budget fever, he did so only fitfully, with ambivalent half measures, and the economy sputtered on with weak growth and unemployment near 20% until 1941, when wartime spending kicked in. Moreover, his assault on big business, via populist denunciations and new corporate taxes -- driven mainly by a need in 1935-36 to cover his left flank and stave off a feared populist third-party challenge -- left a widespread perception that he'd driven away the confidence fairy. David M. Kennedy summarizes in Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945:

Yet so far as the economy was concerned in 19838, Roosevelt's actions looked for the moment to be something considerably less than revolutionary. The president may have planted the seeds of the "Keynesian Revolution" in American fiscal policy, but it would be some time before they would fully flower. In the meantime, Roosevelt seemed to have wrought the worst of all worlds: insufficient government spending to effect recovery, but sufficient government sword-rattling to keep private capital cowed. "The President won't spend any money," an exasperated Jerome Frank exclaimed. "Nobody on the outside will believe the trouble we have with him. Yet they call him a big spender. It makes me laugh." As for private businessmen, they still hesitated to make new investments. Why, the president mused on night at dinner, did they lack confidence in the economy? Eleanor replied tellingly, "They are afraid of you."  Deprived of adequate public or private means of revival, the economy sputtered on, not reaching the output levels of 1937 until the fateful year of 1941, when the threat of war, not enlightened New Deal policies, compelled government expenditures at levels previously unimaginable.

Promise and peril for the Affordable Care Act

In December 2009, Atul Gawande expressed hope that a "hodgepodge" of cost control measures stuffed into the Senate healthcare reform bill, most of which later made it into the Affordable Care Act, might have a transformative effective over time:

Where we crave sweeping transformation, however, all the current bill offers is those pilot programs, a battery of small-scale experiments. The strategy seems hopelessly inadequate to solve a problem of this magnitude. And yet—here’s the interesting thing—history suggests otherwise.

Gawande goes on to review the history of Federal government intervention in the agriculture sector in the early 20th century gradually but radically transofrmed farming methods andled to massive increases in productivity.  For healthcare too, he argues, there is no master switch. Trial and error, orchestrated by carrot and stick, is the model:

Rat race or fluid human dance?

Way back when, while teaching freshman composition, I used to sometimes assign an essay by Tom Wolfe in which he stood on the mezzanine balcony at Grand Central Station with a social scientist who compared the commuters below to rats. "Listen to them squeak," the guru said -- and sure enough, Wolfe reported, there was a regular squeak of pivoting soles.   This was, we were given to believe, the rat race made literal.

Productivity revolutions can hurt

Program update: thanks to Hurricane Irene, I am held over in Ireland -- a very nice place to be stuck, I must admit.  Continuing squibs based on current reading....

In December 2009, Atul Gawande drew an extended analogy between the agricultural revolution of the early 20th century, sparked by an array of creative government programs that promulgated improved farming techniques, and the welter of cost control measures packed in the Affordable Care Act, which collectively may have the potential to radically lower healthcare costs while improving quality. Here's Gawande's overview of what happened in agriculture, circa 1900-1920:

The United States did not seek a grand solution. Private farms remained, along with the considerable advantages of individual initiative. Still, government was enlisted to help millions of farmers change the way they worked. The approach succeeded almost shockingly well. The resulting abundance of goods in our grocery stores and the leaps in our standard of living became the greatest argument for America around the world. And, as the agricultural historian Roy V. Scott recounted, four decades ago, in his remarkable study “The Reluctant Farmer,” it all started with a pilot program....

What seemed like a hodgepodge eventually cohered into a whole. The government never took over agriculture, but the government didn’t leave it alone, either. It shaped a feedback loop of experiment and learning and encouragement for farmers across the country. The results were beyond what anyone could have imagined. Productivity went way up, outpacing that of other Western countries. Prices fell by half. By 1930, food absorbed just twenty-four per cent of family spending and twenty per cent of the workforce. Today, food accounts for just eight per cent of household income and two per cent of the labor force. It is produced on no more land than was devoted to it a century ago, and with far greater variety and abundance than ever before in history.

What I'm learning from David M. Kennedy's Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945  is that however good this 'revolution' proved to be for consumers, it was absolutely wrenching for farmers. According to Kennedy, American farmers (who still made up 30% of the U.S. population in 1930) had been suffering a Depression of their own since the end of World War I, when prices collapsed. The problem was essentially massive oversupply, triggered by those wonderful productivity gains. The early New Deal remedy was the set of subsidies -- paying farmers not to grow certain crops -- that plague us to this day. Then as now, too, those subsidies disproportionately benefited large holders -- particularly southern landlords, who responded to incentives not to grow by depriving their sharecroppers of their less-than-bare-subsistence livelihood.

Another disillusioned pundit

N.B. I am trekking the Kerry Way in Ireland this week and just slipping in a squib or two from current reading here and there...
-----
After the president signed a controversial bill that most economists believed would worsen a sharp economic slowdown, a former admirer wrote that he

had surrendered everything for nothing. He gave up the leadership of his party. He let his personal authority be flouted. He accepted a wretched and mischievous product of stupidity and greed...

Why? The pundit probed for the President's tragic flaw:

He has the peculiarly modern, in fact, the contemporary American, faith in the power of the human mind and will, acting through organization, to accomplish results...[but] the unreasonableness of mankind if not accounted for in [his] philosophy...in the realm of reason he is an unusually bold man; in teh realm of unreason he is, for a statesman, an exceptionally thin-sknined and easily beweildered man...He can face with equanamity almost any of the difficulties of statesmanship except the open conflict of wills.

When the social contract was new

One perhaps obvious point about the United States' formative period is brought home vividly in Pauline Maier's Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788.  It's this: the framers, and many of those debating ratification, were quite consciously trying form a new social contract -- that is, implement some version of the social contract theory developed over the prior century-and-a-half. In fact, worries about the chaos that might ensue if the inert federal government was not replaced with a functioning one made some fear the return of a state of nature, which must have added to the sense of being in at the birth.  The sense of consciously forming something new, yet doing it deliberately and in accordance with the norms of representative government already developed, is really quite astonishing. It was an almost scientific experiment and a lived creation myth rolled into one.  Here is James Wilson making the opening bid for ratification in the Pennsylvania ratification convention (as paraphrase/quoted by Maier):

"Government...taken as a science may yet be considered in its infancy," Wilson said, and it had in the past been the product of "force, fraud, or accident." America, he said, offered the first instance "since the Creation of the world...of a people assembled to weigh deliberately and calmly, and to decide leisurely and peaceably, upon the form of government by which they will bind themselves and their posterity."

That's true, isn't it? Remarkable...

Polarized politics, 1787

In the United States, the bitter charge that a majority that wants to bring an ambitious project to a vote is trying to ram it down our throats has a long pedigree.  In Pennsylvania, the first state to ratify the Constitution, such was the lament of the minority who were either opposed to ratification, undecided, or in favor of making ratification conditional on the opportunity to amend.

Moreover, the minority was right, according to the narrative stitched together by Pauline Maier in  Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788.  Pennsylvania proponents of the Constitution wanted to be the first to ratify. They convened the ratifying convention in November, just two months after the framers completed their work, and before copies of the Constitution had had time to fully penetrate the enormous rural expanse of the state. In fact they scheduled the ratifying convention before Congress had decided the manner in which it would present it to the states.  That led a conditional supporter of the proposed new scheme of government, Robert Whitehill, to complain, "I don't know any reason there can be for driving [the Constitution] down our throats, without an hour's preparation"...unless it was "a plan not fit for discussion" (p. 61). 

Program note

I'm going to be mainly out of blogging range this coming week.  A couple of posts are scheduled to go up, on Sat. and Monday and next-gen family guest bloggers may appear. Have a good!

"You are too shallow, Hastings...to sound the bottom of the after-times"*

There is a certain strain of conservative British fantasist that pits the folly of the common people, Coriolanus-like, against the beleaguered wisdom of leaders. George MacDonald, in The Princess and Curdie,  portrays a benevolent king gradually worn down by the recalcitrant foolishness and greed of his people.  In Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, battle-hardened chieftains keep the faith and hold the line against the encroachments of Mordor as their people weaken.  C.S. Lewis has more of a feel for the ways in which the powerful and ruthless deceive and enslave common folk, but he too betrays a weakness, in the Dawn Treader vignette of the Dufflepods ruled by a fallen star, for the vision of the wise ruler bemusedly enduring the follies of his simple subjects  (though Lewis is more consistently smitten by the fantasy of a contented and submissive populace willingly ruled by wise and benevolent monarchs).

Perhaps it is in this spirit that Sir Max Hastings laments that voters in the western democracies will punish at the polls leaders who tell them the hard truth about "the scale of upheaval and the sacrifice necessary to meet it."  Suggesting that "we get the political leaders we deserve" -- which may in some ultimate sense be true -- Hastings seems blithely unaware of the first axiom of political science: economic conditions (absent all-encompassing catastrophe) shape the dominant public perceptions of leaders everywhere. There's not much point in excoriating "pampered European and American voters" for blaming "bad news" on leaders currently in power. All electorates everywhere do that, to the extent that they're free to choose at all. 

Some comparisons are obvious...

of course, of course. But still, this echo gave me a bit of a chill.  One passage in my rebuttal of Drew Westen's attack on Obama bounced around the web quite a bit, e.g., in the LA Times online:

Sprung, blogging at Xpostfactoid, compared Obama's challengers on the left to Martin Luther King Jr.'s critics during the civil rights era. "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," Sprung wrote. "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."

Obama, of course, quotes King all the time, and is not shy about identifying with him or Lincoln (and damn the obvious "Mr Obama, you're no..." rejoinders).  As in Iowa yesterday:

"I think that we forget when [Martin Luther King Jr.] was alive there was nobody who was more vilified, nobody who was more controversial, nobody who was more despairing at times. There was a decade that followed the great successes of Birmingham and Selma in which he was just struggling, fighting the good fight, and scorned, and many folks angry.  But what he understood, what kept him going, was that the arc of moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.  But it doesn’t bend on its own.  It bends because all of us are putting our hand on the arc and we are bending it in that direction.  And it takes time.  And it's hard work.  And there are frustrations."

O hear Emanuel: the deficit war may already be won

If this trend reported by Maggie Mahar holds up -- and if theSupreme Court doesn't sandbag it -- it could be worth more for America's long-term fiscal health than all the deficit reduction plans put together:

While our elected representatives wrangle over slicing entitlements, virtually no one seems to be paying attention to an eye-popping fact: Medicare reimbursements are no longer accelerating at a break neck-pace. The new numbers should be factored into any discussion about healthcare spending:  From 2000 through 2009, Medicare’s outlays climbed by an average of 9.7 percent a year. By contrast, since the beginning of 2010, Medicare spending has been rising by less than 4 percent a year. On this,  both Standard Poor’s Index Committee and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) agree. (S&P tracks healthcare spending with the help of Milliman Inc., an independent actuarial and consulting firm.)...

Obama's uncertain trigger finger, cont.

I have suggested before that Obama's endgame in the deficit reduction fight is basically the busted Boehner deal, which in turn looks awfully like the plan the President sketched out in April: an alleged $4 trillion in deficit reduction over 10-12 years, with $800b -- $1 trillion coming from new revenue, $2+ trillion in alleged spending cuts, and close to $1 trillion from alleged reduced interest payments.  Two bullet points in the White House's outline of the debt deal struck in early August would seem to bear this out:

•  ...the President will demand that the Committee pursue a balanced deficit reduction package, where any entitlement reforms are coupled with revenue-raising tax reform that asks for the most fortunate Americans to sacrifice. 

• The Enforcement Mechanism Complements the Forcing Event Already In Law – the Expiration of the Bush Tax Cuts – To Create Pressure for a Balanced Deal: The Bush tax cuts expire as of 1/1/2013, the same date that the spending sequester would go into effect. These two events together will force balanced deficit reduction. Absent a balanced deal, it would enable the President to use his veto pen to ensure nearly $1 trillion in additional deficit reduction by not extending the high-income tax cuts.

History of the United States: Counterfactuals in the Prequel

I am about 1/4 through a remarkable book, historian Pauline Maier's Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788 (2010).  What's remarkable about it is that, so far at least, Maier has delivered precisely on the narrative premise she posed in the introduction:

A writer can build suspense in telling a story, [Barbara Tuchman] said, even if the reader knows how the story turned out, so long as the writer never mentions the outcome until it happens at the proper place in the story. This book is, among other things, an effort to test that theory.
     For the experiment to succeed, however, requires readers who are willing to play a game. They need to forget for the moment much of what they know about the American past, and return in imagination to another time when there was no Constitution, when the federal Convention had not even met, and watch events occur, step by step, unaware of how they would turn out (p. xvi).

This is precisely what's so fascinating about the book. Maier's narrative sympathies, if not her settled judgment, are with those who objected to the Constitution in the form in which it was presented for ratification.  State by state, she relates the objections and anxieties of those who rejected or had serious reservations about the Constitution or about the ratifying process (people complained, with some justice, that the Constitution was being "rammed down our throats"!). These included the little matter of the absence of a bill of rights, the nonrepresentative nature of the Senate, the new Congress's powers of taxation, the lifetime tenure of judges, and the lack of provision for trial by jury in civil cases.

An implacable conciliator

Drew Westen's full-fronted assault on President Obama's performance, rhetoric and character riveted liberal America.  To my mind, Westen core charges have been definitively refudiated. Westen idealized and mischaracterized FDR, vastly overestimated the power of presidential rhetoric, short-changed Obama's legislative accomplishments, ignored what he actually said in his speeches and impugned his motives without any meaningful discussion or evidence.

Westen did, however, touch a  raw nerve in progressives frustrated by Obama's refusal to acknowledge that Republicans have not dealt with him in good faith, and by his endlessly proffered willingness to engage with them under the assumption that they are willing to compromise to find solutions to the country's problems. Michael Tomasky offers a more substantive critique than Westen's of this conciliatory approach to leadership.  While acknowledging a variety of possible contributory causes, Tomasky focuses on Obama's political philosophy -- which is easily verifiable in his writing, speeches and engagement with Congress:

An Obamite response to Romney's "Corporations are people"

I've never presumed to script my own fantasy speeches for politicians I support -- especially Barack Obama, who, we tend to forget at this low point, has written a few good ones.  But what the hell...I found myself imagining Obama being asked to respond to Mitt Romney's response to a liberal questioner at an Iowa event yesterday --

"Corporations are people, my friend..Of course they are...Everything corporations earn goes to people. Where do you think it goes? Whose pockets? People's pockets. Human beings, my friend."

-- and started vocalizing a doubtless overly nuanced and prolix response  -- sort of like Obama's in press conferences.  So here it is: 

GOP debate: Santorum misquotes Lincoln

In the GOP debate tonight, Santorum took a shot a Romney after Romney, defending the healthcare reform bill he passed in Massachusetts, asserted that the individual mandate is in accord with the Massachusetts Constitution but not with the U.S. Constitution. Santorum said, roughly, what's wrong is wrong, regardless of written law. Then: "Lincoln said, states have no right to do wrong."

Coincidentally, I just wrote about Lincoln's First Inaugural today, noting that Lincoln not only affirmed the Southern states' right to maintain slavery undisturbed, but said that he would not object to a Constitutional amendment codifying that right.  So I looked up Santorum's cite, which is from the Lincoln-Douglas debates.  Lincoln did suggest that in an ultimate sense, the states have no right do to wrong, insofar as no one has a right to do wrong (the actual quote was with reference to Douglas: "he cannot logically say that anybody has a right to do wrong." Full context below.)  But in the very same passage, he first affirmed the Southern states' legal right under the Constitution to maintain slavery, and asserted that Republicans would not interfere with that right.

An implacable conciliator

Drew Westen's full-fronted assault on President Obama's performance, rhetoric and character riveted liberal America.  To my mind, Westen core charges have been definitively refudiated. Westen idealized and mischaracterized FDR, vastly overestimated the power of presidential rhetoric, short-changed Obama's legislative accomplishments, ignored what he actually said in his speeches and impugned his motives without any meaningful discussion or evidence.

Westen did, however, touch a  raw nerve in progressives frustrated by Obama's refusal to acknowledge that Republicans have not dealt with him in good faith, and by his endlessly proffered willingness to engage with them under the assumption that they are willing to compromise to find solutions to the country's problems. Michael Tomasky offers a more substantive critique than Westen's of this conciliatory approach to leadership.  While acknowledging a variety of possible contributory causes, Tomasky focuses on Obama's political philosophy -- which is easily verifiable in his writing, speeches and engagement with Congress:

GOP will damn the polls and maintain tax intransigence

Andrew Sullivan, who wanted Obama to come out strong for Bowles-Simpson and make a crusade of deficit reduction in his State of the Union address, now suggests that Obama do the same with tax reform, a linchpin of any viable deficit reduction plan. (That is, a revamping of the tax code that shrinks loopholes, lowers rates, and nets substantial new revenue.) In support, Sullivan cites a compendium of polls from Bruce Bartlett:

They all show heavy majorities (most in the mid-60s) in favor of raising taxes on the wealthy as part of a deficit reduction plan. Yet this is the one issue on which Republicans seem determined to take a stand. If the Democrats cannot marshall 2 - 1 support for their policies into actual legislation, they really need to pack it in as a viable party (although one could argue they packed it in years ago).

This would be true if we lived in a sane political environment, especially since Republicans will not be able to prevent the Bush tax cuts from expiring if Obama and the Democrats are willing to let them all expire.  Reversion to Clinton-era rates would raise an estimated $3.6 trillion over current rates in ten years -- as opposed to the $1-2 trillion Democrats would be able to extract through tax reform, would Republicans agree to any increase at all.

We do not, however, inhabit in a sane political political environment.  Consider:

That sick "Obama's sliding" feeling

Bitterly disappointed as I was in Obama for letting himself be hijacked in the debt ceiling deal, I have been willing to reserve judgment through the next round -- the supercommittee negotiations -- and possibly through the endgame of the Bush tax cut expirations.  But this from Obama today triggered that "there he goes again" reflex:

Last week, we reached an agreement that will make historic cuts to defense and domestic spending.  But there’s not much further we can cut in either of those categories.  What we need to do now is combine those spending cuts with two additional steps:  tax reform that will ask those who can afford it to pay their fair share and modest adjustments to health care programs like Medicare (my emphasis).

Couple that with this warning from Panetta:

A lover of fairy tales casts Obama as villain-in-chief

This one is going to hurt.

In what seems like a bid to definitively cement the perceptions of progressives disappointed in Obama, psychologist Drew Westen, a student of the alleged power of stories to shape political perception, has put together his own master narrative about Obama -- a merciless tale of presidential FAIL. It's a quadruple-length op-ed (over 3000 words) on the front page of The New York Times' Sunday Review section -- a rhetorical nuke dropped on ground zero in the liberal heartland.

Westen is a good storyteller. There is real force to many of his charges. But modeling what he says Obama should have done, he  tells a simplified morality tale -- highly selective, with a clear villain, and in some points demonstrably false. He makes copious use of political cliches about messaging that fail to take into account the degree to which economic conditions shape audience reception of a politician's message. Founded on the alleged timidity of the 2009 stimulus, his story fails to engage the question of whether Obama could have got a larger stimulus through Congress. And in the end, it devolves into an ad hominem attack with recourse to cheap psychologizing (notwithstanding Westen's protestations of scientific detachment) and unfounded impugning of motive.

Prophets of the new millennium

A stray link took me back in time and made me think of various chilling prophecies uttered when the millennium was young. Read them and weep.

1. February 2, 2000 

So how can those reasonable men advising George Bush think that he can offer $1.3 trillion in tax cuts? Assuming that they are neither planning to raid Social Security nor counting on favorable revenue surprises to save them (unfavorable surprises are, of course, out of the question), they must have in mind a sharp scaling back of government programs.

Taxes or trigger!

Nancy Pelosi was not entirely clear when she said that Democrats negotiating (if such a thing is possible) with the GOP on the bipartisan supercommittee charged with putting forward a deficit reduction plan should be "as forceful as possible and as unified as possible," but that they should not rule out reforms to entitlement programs. She raised a lot of Democratic eyebrows by declaring "you won't see me drawing lines in the sand."  But if I understand her right, she's right. 

There is confusion about the kind of line in the sand Democrats on the supercommittee must draw. They will have to resist Republican intransigence, not mirror it. That is, they have to hold the line on taxes, not entitlements.

Getting serious with items in series

In my letters to a certain high profile blogger, I've more than once inveighed against "items in series" -- that is, sentences that pack together a host of comma-separated items alleged to illustrate a thesis, often a purported precis of a public figure's alleged accomplishments or sins. It's so easy to smooth over a world of ambiguity, or incongruity, slipping in some highly questionable assertions, like the xeroxed dollars that a pair of drug addicts slips into a wad of cash in The Wire.

From Andrew Sullivan, here's a fresh example: a list of Obama's accomplishments:

On policy: ending the US torture regime; prevention of a second Great Depression; enacting universal healthcare; taking the first serious steps toward reining in healthcare costs; two new female Supreme Court Justices; ending the gay ban in the military; ending the Iraq war; justifying his Afghan Surge by killing bin Laden and now disentangling with face saved; firming up alliances with India, Indonesia and Japan as counter-weights to China; bailing out the banks and auto companies without massive losses (and surging GM profits); advancing (slowly) balanced debt reduction without drastic cuts during the recession; and financial re-regulation.

The debt ceiling stickup as precedent...or not

As the debt ceiling stickup lurched toward its traumatic climax and please-no-one resolution, the laments have been many that a dreadful precedent has been set for government by extortion. Jonathan Chait has been eloquent about this:

The problem is that, even if we get through this crisis with little damage, the debt ceiling is still sitting there, a weapon that will one day explode. Indeed, if there's one good reason to downgrade U.S. debt, it's that House Republicans have discovered a kind of doomsday device that, if not used this time, will probably be used eventually. Any use of the debt ceiling to extort policy concessions will encourage subsequent uses.

And right on cue, once the deal was done, Mitch McConnell heralded the new nuclear norm:

What we have done, Larry, also is set a new template. In the future, any president, this one or another one, when they request us to raise the debt ceiling, it will not be clean anymore. This is just the first step. This, we anticipate, will take us into 2013. Whoever the new president is, is probably going to be asking us to raise the debt ceiling again. Then we will go through the process again and see what we can continue to achieve in connection with these debt ceiling requests of presidents to get our financial house in order.

Many see in this precedent evidence of U.S. decline. Here's Ezra Klein, commenting on McConnell's boast above (same link):

Larry Summers hearts the busted Obama-Boehner deal

Progressives were having conniptions when details of Obama's never-consummated deal with Boehner emerged.  Three trillion in spending cuts, just $800 billion in new revenue -- no more than expiration of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 2% of Americans would yield, and less than half the amount proposed by the right-leaning Bowles-Simpson plan. On the benefit side, social security benefits chained to the "chained CPI" (a less generous inflation calculation than the current CPI) -- and more jarringly, the Medicare eligibility age raised to 67.

A plan, it would seem, that Timothy Geithner could get behind (and probably was behind).  But I was surprised to read from Larry Summers today that he too apparently considers approximately the same level of revenue and presumably the same revenue-to-spending-cuts ratio sufficient:

Bee balm in the rust belt, cont.

Reposting, with photos from this year's Garden Walk, here.

It's time again to celebrate a city besotted with gardening -- Buffalo, which hosts its annual Garden Walk this weekend.  370+ city households will throw open their front and back yards to thousands of visitors, who tour self-guided through neighborhoods tony and raggedy -- some of them revived in large part by gardening that's spread like a good virus block-by-block.  Lots of intense small urban spaces and often low-budget creativity.  My earlier paean here; albums here; update on the spreading fame and impact on the city in the Buffalo News here; info on the self-guided tours, maps, etc. etc. here.

Grasping at straws

as I hit the road this morning...maybe the cuts are backloaded to allow some space for recovery. Maybe defense cuts in the trigger will constrain Republicans more than commenters think. Maybe programs that benefit the poor are adequately protected. Maybe there's less to the first round cuts than meets the eye Maybe Obama will find his spine and push forcefully for tax hikes in the upcoming gang of 12 negotiations--if only because the downside of enraging progressives may now finally outstrip the consequences of bucking GOP intransigence. The mendacity of hope?

About that buyers' remorse

Last week, Clinton consigliere David Rothkopf wrote a mash note to Hillary:

In this moment of national confusion and public despair with officials in Washington, variations on the following cry have often been heard, "Somewhere in the world there must be an American political leader with a vision of tomorrow, a focus on what is really important and an ability to translate rhetoric into success."

I'm pleased to report that there is. If it has escaped your attention it's because that politician has been on the other side of the world the past couple of weeks advancing American interests and the policies of the president with meaningful results and exceptional skill.  

That politician is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton...

When I first encountered this via a well-placed plug in Mike Allen's Playbook, I wondered instantly whether this wasn't the first note in an orchestrated campaign to draft Hillary for the Democratic nomination in 2012.  I brushed the thought off as far-fetched on many fronts. Now in the wake of Obama's debt ceiling debacle, I'm not so sure.