The subtlety of monolithic Islam bigotry

By Frank Moraes

On Wednesday, I published "Je Suis Charlie." And I stand by most of what I wrote. But there was one thing that I wrote that was based upon hearsay rather than actual research: "In the case of Charlie Hebdo, any outrage is totally unjustified because the magazine took on everyone." It was also based upon the cover illustration to the left that mocked both a Muslim and a Hasidic Jew. But I think there might be a problem with this contention.

Yesterday, Glenn Greenwald wrote "In Solidarity With a Free Press: Some More Blasphemous Cartoons." It is a reaction to a push by many all over the political spectrum who claim that we should celebrate the offending cartoons that supposedly caused the recent massacre of innocents in Paris. It is an interesting and thoughtful analysis of the issue. (Contrast it with Jonathan Chait's incredibly uninteresting response, "Charlie Hebdo Point-Missers Miss Point.") I'm not quite sure where I stand on it. But this part struck me:

With all due respect to the great cartoonist Ann Telnaes, it is simply not the case that Charlie Hebdo "were equal opportunity offenders." Like Bill Maher, Sam Harris and other anti-Islam obsessives, mocking Judaism, Jews and/or Israel is something they will rarely (if ever) do. If forced, they can point to rare and isolated cases where they uttered some criticism of Judaism or Jews, but the vast bulk of their attacks are reserved for Islam and Muslims, not Judaism and Jews.

I don't speak French, so I'm not in a position to say. But it made me realize that the cover illustration above may actually indicate the fundamental problem with my own thinking. The problem, as I now see it, is that the Muslim is generic and the Jew is not. The implication is simply, "all Muslims and particular Jews." But I don't think that this is intentional. It is more along the lines of, "All Japanese look alike!" What such claims actually mean is that the speaker has little experience with Japanese people. (I've had this problem myself -- cured by years of Japanese cinema watching.)

It is pathetic, of course, that I now feel I must mention that I'm free speech absolutist. It is not just that it is obviously wrong to kill people for the "offense" of saying things you disagree with. The idea that people should not have the right to encourage draft resistance during a war ("shouting fire in a crowed theater") is simply ridiculous. Just the same, it is curious, isn't it, that we do not have such clearly political -- First Amendment -- rights, but we do have the right to snipe at minority groups in any way that we choose -- including "the right of neo-Nazis to march through a community filled with Holocaust survivors..."

According to Juan Cole, two-thirds of Muslim heritage French people don't even consider themselves religious -- much less "radical." The problem here is that even among the very small world population of Jews (less than 20 million), we distinguish. But the 1.6 billion Muslims are monolithic for us. And that's why that Charlie Hebdo cover struck me as fairly even-handed (I would have preferred a Christian in there -- but intolerance is not limited to any religion or non-religion).

Bigotry is, at base, about classification -- treating individuals as members of a group. It is a very big issue that I fight with in myself constantly regarding racism. I fear that many people who, like me, worry about racism, don't worry about such grouping problems when it comes to religion. After all, people supposedly choose their religions. There are a couple of problems with that. First, people don't choose their religions. Almost every religious person is a member of the faith they grew up in. Second, as we know only too well, there is very little that can be generalized about a hippy Unitarian and a right-wing evangelical Protestant. The same is true of all people. I'm sure there are even cruel Jains.

I would hate for the tragedy in Paris to leave us with nothing but what we should have always known: people shouldn't be killed because others find them offensive. Worse still is the idea that this is all about Islam, because if these actions really spoke of the religion, those 1.6 billion Muslims would have forced us to live under a worldwide caliphate by now. I suppose that it is asking too much for everyone to take this as an opportunity to examine themselves. But it really is on all of us non-Muslims, because it isn't like the terrorists are going to start wearing "gang colors." And it is wrong to ask Muslims to abandon their heritage so we can better spot those we ought to fear. (Not that it would work, of course.)

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)

Charles Krauthammer doesn't know science

By Frank Moraes 

Going back briefly to the Jonathan Chait article I mentioned earlier, there is one thing that Charles Krauthammer said that really bugged me. It's been quoted various places but no one seems to have noticed the contradiction, so I figured that I should point it out.

The thing is that Krauthammer wants it both ways. Pure science that has no political implications is just fine, but applied science that indicates something that conservatives don't want to do must be held to an impossibly high standard. He wrote:

99 percent of physicists convinced that space and time were fixed until Einstein working in a patent office wrote a paper in which he showed that they are not. I'm not impressed by numbers. I'm not impressed by consensus.

He is arguing that since Einstein changed physics, we can't know that global warming is true. The problem with this is that there was this thing called the ultraviolet catastrophe. The entire physics community was worried about it. There was also the Michelson–Morley experiment. The entire physics community was worried about it. In the decades leading up to Einstein, physics was in crisis. It wasn't the case that that physicists were sitting around thinking that they had it all figured out. It was quite the opposite.

On the other hand, now there is a consensus on relativity and quantum mechanics. But why should Kruthammer accept that consensus? After all, he just disregarded the consensus that he made up about late-19th-century physics. Why is the new consensus any more believable than the old consensus? Scientists can't be trusted!

His argument is very simple if we assume that his historical examples are correct (which they aren't). There was a wrong scientific consensus about relativity before Einstein. Then the scientific community learned the truth and developed a new consensus, which is the truth. Thus, the consensus on global warming is wrong because the consensus in the past was wrong (even though it wasn't).

What Kruthammer's argument comes down to is that he doesn't want to accept global warming as a fact because it will hurt the oil companies and others who he works for. Thus, he will say anything at all to avoid admitting the truth. And in 20 years, if he's still alive, no one will treat him as the evil lobbyist who helped to stop the world from addressing its most pressing problem.

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)

Republicans just don't want reform

By Frank Moraes

Jonathan Chait wrote an excellent article yesterday, "Springtime for Obamacare." In it, he goes through a number of arguments that conservatives have made about Obamacare and discusses how recent events have refuted them. I recommend reading the whole article, especially because I'm only going to talk about one small aspect of it.

He used a quote by Tennessee Republican State Senator Stacey Campfield to make a general point. Campfield recently argued that Obamacare is like the Holocaust, because it was the government deciding who lives and who dies. It's actually a hoot if you brush aside the fact that it was said by a man with a lot of political power. I mean, you need extremely twisted logic to come to that conclusion. You have to assume, for example, that providing more healthcare will actually kill people because it will make the care so much worse. But I suspect that Campfield also thinks that huge numbers of the "right" kind of people don't have health insurance because they've been priced out of the market by the government's paying for the "wrong" kind of people.

Chait's point is that wackos like Campfield are actually in an easier position because they make no factual claims to be refuted. After all, they aren't saying that Obamacare will lead to death. They are simply claiming that the very idea of Obamacare is deciding who lives and dies. No proof needed. But here's the thing: those who present actual claims and those who do not are against Obamacare for the same reason. They just don't want the old system changed.

This fact is clear enough in one of the standard arguments against Obamacare: "Health insurance doesn't make you healthy." This was a big deal last year when a small study out of Oregon didn't find health improvements in a couple of categories for people who had health insurance. Of course, since then, a much larger study out of Massachusetts has found that increased health insurance coverage actually saves lives. So that argument ought to be gone, but of course it will continue on because facts don't seem to matter in these cases.

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Paul Ryan loves the poor so much he wants to put them out of their misery

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Paul Ryan claims he cares about the poor. He claims he wants to deal with poverty in a serious and meaningful way. But of course he's a combination of Ayn Rand devotee and Christianist ideologue, an anti-government extremist who departs from Rand in adding a cover of religious moralizing, and so what he really wants to give the poor, as he pursues his far-right "free"-market agenda benefitting the rich before all others, is more Jesus and less everything they actually need.

And so it's hardly surprising that in fact he's really not all that interested in tackling poverty beyond rhetoric designed to put a compassionate spin on what is essentially an agenda of brutality, and that's reflected in his "budget":

Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin on Tuesday will lay out a tough, election-year budget that he says will come into balance by 2024, in large part through steep cuts to Medicaid and food stamps and the full repeal of President Obama’s health care law, just as millions begin to see its benefits.

But even with those cuts, Mr. Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman, is counting on a boost of economic growth to balance the budget, a boost he says will be gained by reducing the deficit. Many economists believe such dramatic spending cuts — especially those affecting the poor — would have the opposite effect, slowing the economy and lowering tax receipts.

Not that Ryan, who speaks for the bulk of his party on fiscal matters, has ever let something like the obviousness of reality get in the way of his ideological pursuits. As Jon Chait explains: 

The disintegration of Ryan's promise [to tackle poverty] reveals something very deep. It's not that he needs a little more time and a few all-nighters, or some more help getting fellow Republicans in line. His policy vision is fundamentally impossible.

Ryan and his party are committed to the following beliefs:

1. America faces an impending debt crisis, somewhere, which requires a balanced budget within the next decade;
2. Social Security and Medicare benefits for current and near-retirees amount to a sacred pact that cannot be violated;
3. Barack Obama has hollowed out the military, requiring defense spending to rise (as Ryan proposes), or at minimum not to drop;
4. Taxes can never, ever, ever rise at all, even as part of a trade for other desirable policy changes.

The only possible way to reconcile this combination of policy commitments is to impose staggering cuts to programs for the poor, which Ryan's most recent budget proposal does. Every previous version of the Ryan budget is, basically, a plan to cut benefits for the poor. At least two thirds of the cuts in last year's Ryan plan come from programs for poor people.

Paul Ryan is a Catholic, but essentially, beyond the basic trappings of their faith, he's the opposite of Pope Francis. His God is the "free" market (which is really just the Hobbesian state of nature, a state in which life is nasty, brutish, and short except for those who are strong enough (that is, rich enough) to survive by constructing their own Leviathan of the 1%), his savior is Ayn Rand (along with other fundamentalists like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman), and the disciples he places alongside her include Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp (who was just a bit more serious about helping the poor than he is). 

And here, as always, he intends to crush the poor, and pretty much the entirety of the 99%, as well as to stop the American economy in its tracks (however much his ideology might tell him otherwise), in order to enrich the already rich, empower the already powerful, and create the right-wing dystopia of his crazed imaginings.

GOP craziness may end crisis

By Frank Moraes 

Jonathan Chait wrote what I think is a very insightful article today, even if the title is a bit deceptive, "House Republicans' Ransom Demands Falling." What I would say is that their demands are changing, not falling. He provides some important history about the current standoff. The House Republican leadership (John Boehner, Eric Cantor, and Paul Ryan) have been planning this blackmail scheme, most likely since Romney lost the last election. The idea was to use the Debt Ceiling to force Obama to accept the usual Republican budget policies. You know: cut tax rates (supposedly without cutting overall taxes, but you know how that goes), cut entitlements, and so on.

Unfortunately, Ted Cruz ruined their plan by getting all the Republicans to support a government shutdown threat to somehow end Obamacare. This was the real reason that Boehner was promising his caucus a fight on the Debt Ceiling and why he tried to get the continuing resolution (CR) out of the way. Most observers (including me!) thought it was just Boehner's usual short term planning: get the CR out of the way and then deal with the Debt Limit. But that doesn't seem to be the case. I was right about one thing, though: all the supposed reasonable Republicans don't exist. Boehner is just as extreme as all the rest; he may just be a little more tactical.

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People will notice if the Republicans get any crazier

By Frank Moraes 

The other day, Jonathan Chait wrote a provocative post, "Are House Republicans Voter-Proof?" In it, he argued that the Republicans likely have nothing to worry about in going full-tilt Michele Bachmann. After all, most people don't even know which party is in control of the House of Representatives. Why would they blame the Republicans?

Under normal circumstances, I agree with Chait. If the Republicans keep doing what they have been doing killing the economy inch by inch, the electorate will not notice. As I wrote last week, I fully expect the Republicans to pick up some seats in the House and also likely take control of the Senate. But I do wish people would stop talking about the Sixth-Year Curse. This is the belief of political observers that the president's party loses big the sixth year of his presidency. Sean Trende has debunked this idea. What actually happens is that the president's party loses big in one of the midterm elections. That already happened to Obama in 2010. Although it is likely that 2014 won't be a good year for the Democrats, they are already doing about as badly as they can. There aren't many seats (in the House at least) that they can gain.

Chait mentions five factors that work in the Republicans' favor. The first is the silly Sixth-Year Curse. The second is that Democrats tend to do badly in midterm elections. That's true, but that's already figured into the calculation. The third is that there aren't many swing voters anymore. I'm not sure how this gives the Republicans an advantage when most of those swing voters are just Democrats now. The fourth is the observation that Democratic voters are concentrated and thus their votes don't count as much. That's true in the Senate races, but not in the House. So I don't get his point given that the big issue is the House. And the fifth is that the 2010 redistricting favors the Republicans. That's true, but again, already figured into the calculation.

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Conservative goals and the NSA

By Frank Moraes

Yesterday, I happened to hear David Brooks on NPR. He was asked about the huge NSA surveillance program. He said, "I'm somewhat bothered by the secrecy, but I don't feel it's intrusive. Basically, they're running huge amounts of megadata through an algorithm. That feels less intrusive to me than the average TSA search at the airport. And so I don't think it's particularly intrusive. It is supervised by the court. It has some congressional supervision." Okay, it's Brooks. What's the big deal?

Well, that morning, the Wall Street Journal editorial page wrote, "We bow to no one in our desire to limit government power, but data-mining is less intrusive on individuals than routine airport security." I think it is interesting that Brooks is brought on NPR as a "reasonable" Republican and he just spouts the WSJ editors. Brooks is not supposed to be just some random politician; he's supposed to be an independent thinker. But let's leave that aside.

Jonathan Chait wrote a good article yesterday, "Conservative Freedom Lovers: You're Doing It Wrong." In which he showed the cognitive dissonance in the conservative movement regarding issues of freedom. For example, noted that Jack Welch is a-okay with the NSA spying, even as he claimed that Obama was secretly manipulating the Jobs Report for his own nefarious purposes.

Or consider Roger Vinson, who was one of the lower court judges who struck down Obamacare. He claimed that if the government could force people to get health insurance, it could force them to do anything. So he's a big believer in freedom. Or at least certain kinds of freedom. As Chait noted, "Judge Vinson has reentered the news for having approved the National Security Agency's program of collecting all of the phone records in America."

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False equivalence and the hero archetype

By Frank Moraes 

Jonathan Chait thinks that all the calls for presidential leadership to get Congress to, you know, do its job is magical thinking. In a post yesterday, he wrote that there are two kinds analysts: quants and guts. Quants are people who look at the numbers. "The Democrats don't have a filibuster-proof majority so little gets done." Guts are people who just know that if Obama would show leadership and, say, part the red sea, everything would be fine. He's right as far as it goes: a lot of observers want to create a kind of romantic narrative where the president is Achilles who can win the battle through force of will.

Where I think Chait got it wrong is in assuming that these people are not apologists for the Republican Party. He noted that the pundits who are pushing this line largely agree with Obama. While that's true, they aren't liberals; they are professional centrists who tilt slightly to the right or left depending on the person. They cannot allow themselves to say that something is wrong with the Republican Party much less with our entire political system. And so they focus all of their disappointment on Obama's supposed lack of leadership.

These same commentators were not complaining about the watered down legislation that Obama did get passed when he had the power. That's because they all like middle-of-the-road legislation. Of course, it is even more the case that they don't want any actual economic reforms. After all, their lives are good. But when it comes to new legislation that might inconvenience gun buyers a tiny amount but otherwise would be useless, well, that's unacceptable! Maureen Dowd, Dana Milbank, and Ron Fournier want Congressional action for its own sake. If Obama had complete control the Congress and he decided to enact a financial transaction tax, I'm sure they would be outraged.

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Obamacare is bad for Republicans

By Frank Moraes 

Yesterday morning, I was reading Jonathan Chait about "The Obamacare Opposite-of-a-Train-Wreck Scenario." He argued that even though next year's implementation of Obamacare will likely have problems, these will be trumped by the fact that many millions of people will finally get health insurance. For a man who is too often mired in the middle, he is very blunt, "To the extent that the implementation brouhaha comes into any focus, it will shine a light on those people's struggle to get needed help from the government. Republicans aren't trying to get those people better help. They're trying to screw them."

As usual, I got to thinking about this. I remembered all of the brouhaha from conservatives about immigration reform. "We will be creating 11 million citizens who will all vote Democratic!" (Well, I guess they would say, "Democrat.") I understand the concern and I've even argued that Republicans should not be for immigration reform, given that they are unwilling to do anything else to court the immigrant vote. Maybe the Republicans are doing the same kind of calculation with Obamacare.

What am I thinking? We know that poor people don't live as long as rich people. Part of that has to be due to the lack of good health care throughout their lives. By providing health insurance to everyone, the poor will live longer. The poor are overwhelmingly liberal. Therefore, Obamacare will make more liberals!

I know this sounds fanciful. And in truth, it is possible that the Republicans have not thought of this. There are, after all, a lot of reasons they hate Obamacare. The most fundamental one is that they think that the poor are morally inferior and they don't believe in helping them at all. But Obamacare is clearly a good political strategy for the Democrats and poison for the Republicans.

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)

Don't primary red-state Democrats

By Frank Moraes 

After a string of clueless attempts to be iconoclastic, Jonathan Chait managed to write something that is both iconoclastic and right, "Senate Democrats Wise to Block Background Checks." His argument is very simple: red-state Democrats have to make some non-liberal votes to maintain credibility with their voters; this bill was almost completely useless, or, as Chait puts it, "a compromise of a compromise"; therefore, this was a good bill to vote against. And as I noted on Monday, the final law could have been much worse than nothing at all.

One thing that Chait doesn't mention is that as much as these red state Democrats may annoy us from time to time, they are very strong members of the team. In fact, currently the Democratic Party has more discipline in the Senate than the Republican Party. So the calls I'm hearing from certain corners that we could to primary these red-state Democrats are just crazy.

There is a related issue that I think is really important. Democratic politicians from blue states are often quite conservative, especially on economic issues. Dianne Feinstein, from my own great state of California, comes to mind. When it comes to red-state Democrats, a primary challenge might end with a Republican winning the general election. But why aren't we primarying Democrats in blue states?

One of our biggest political problems is that the Republican Party is too extreme and the Democratic Party not extreme enough. One way to fix this would be to enforce a little ideological purity on our representatives from liberal areas. After all, what makes the Republican Party unacceptable is not that Orrin Hatch of Utah is an extremist. He's from an extremist state; he should be extremist. But why do the people of the very liberal state of New York have an economic conservative as governor?

So we need to stop this nonsense about primarying red-state Democrats and start talking about primarying their blue-state counterparts who have no good reason for being as conservative as they are.

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)

Enough with the Iraq pseudo-mea culpas

By Frank Moraes

Jonathan Chait made a mistake earlier this week: heexplained why he supported the Iraq War. It was very disappointing.

The main argument he makes is exactly the one that Peter Beinart makes in The Icarus Syndrome. He documents all the fear about the Gulf War based on our experiences in Vietnam. This is very true; everyone feared a total clusterfuck. So after the Gulf War was just a raging hard-on of a success for everyone, he was "conditioned" to trust the military hawks.

Let's step back a moment and think about that. After the Gulf War, I was glad that it was brief and that the US didn't lose many people. But I certainly didn't think it was a success. The purpose of the war (to put a monarchy back in power in Kuwait) didn't seem a particularly great reason to go to war. What's more, we ended up killing about 30,000 Iraqis, almost all of whom were poor conscripts. There were also several thousand civilian deaths. And the Iraqi Republican Guard was pretty much untouched by it. So Chait's takeaway from this war is entirely based upon its effects on the Coalition.

But even if we accept Chait's take on the Gulf War that it was ripping good fun, how could he equate the very clear and careful planning done by the Bush Sr administration with the slapdash preparations of Bush Jr? This is where Chait really gets himself into trouble. He knew that the administration's rationale for the war was a pack of lies. But this didn't bother him because he came up with an alternative way to justify the war.

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Unreasonable reasonable Republicans

By Frank Moraes 

(Ed. note: See also Chait's follow-up, after Scarborough threw a tantrum at him yesterday morning, "Joe Scarborough Hates Moms, PowerPoint." -- MJWS)

Do you know who is a real Reasonable Republican? Joe Scarborough. And that pretty much explains why the search for the lauded Reasonable Republican is such a foolish errand. When you find them, they simply have all the stupid policy prescriptions of other Republicans but don't think that rape victims ought to have to carry their pregnancies to term.

Of course, in Scarborough's case, since he isn't in office, his thinking has been heavily influenced the Very Serious People in Washington. This was fully on display a couple of weeks ago when Paul Krugman came on Morning Joe to discuss the economy. Scarborough just could not understand what Krugman was talking about. How could the budget deficit not be the most important issue facing the nation when everyone Joe knows thinks it is?!

You think I'm kidding? After the show, Scarborough took to Politico to write a column, "Paul Krugman Vs. the World." In it, he wrote: 

But maintaining calm was not as easy for Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass, who agrees with former Joint Chief chairman Michael Mullen, that longterm debt poses the greatest threat to America's national security.

In other words: "I've talked to other people who know nothing about economics and they agree with me!"

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A good day for sanity

By Michael J.W. Stickings

It may be that "the House GOP is adopting a minority posture," as The Hill suggests, or it may just be that they finally realized that their hostage-taking strategy was a political loser, but whatever the case it was indeed a good day for sanity in Washington with Republicans backing off debt ceiling armageddon and, while still posturing stupidly (no pay for Congress? -- how unconstitutional), conceding that they won't in fact take the country to the brink of economic meltdown to get their extremist right-wing way on fiscal policy.

And it is a significant victory for President Obama. As Jon Chait wrote yesterday:

The main credit here goes to the Obama administration for recognizing that enmeshing the debt ceiling with policy negotiations was a horrible idea that it had to stop dead in its tracks. To let debt ceiling hikes become contingent on fiscal policy agreements was to set up endless future crises that would eventually trigger default when one party or another held out for a little too much.

The whole key to making Obama's extortion-squelching plan, and saving American government from endless cycles of hostage drama that would eventually end in a default, was to credibly insist that he would not trade anything for a debt ceiling hike. After he moved his red line on tax cuts, I doubted that Obama could really make this stick. But he has. 

Even after the president's repeated concessions to Republicans, even after he showed time and time again that he was willing to give up a great deal to get a deal done, on issue after issue, even after he seemed to give up his post-election leverage to push a bad fiscal cliff deal through the Senate earlier this month, I was hopeful that he would stand firm on the debt ceiling and take a firmer line on fiscal policy going forward, refusing to give in to Republican terrorism on Capitol Hill. We'll see how the budget discussions go, but on the debt ceiling at least he deserves our enthusiastic applause.

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Boehner: Obama must reveal mythic bad government

By Frank Moraes

Pollsters are constantly asking Americans how much the government spends on foreign aid and how much it ought to spend on foreign aid. The numbers never really change in any substantial way. In a poll in 2010, Americans thought that the government spends about 25% of its budget on foreign aid and that it ought to only spend 10% of its budget on foreign aid. In fact, the government spends 1% on foreign aid.

I know: Americans are ignorant. Nothing to see here. Dog bites man. Now if our political elites thought such rubbish, that would be a story. Jonathan Chait wrote a really insightful column this afternoon that addresses this very issue, "Why Republicans Can't Propose Spending Cuts." Basically, his argument is that Republicans are vague on what it is they don't like about government. But they are just certain that government is too damned big!

This, according the Chait, is why Boehner keeps yelling at Obama for not offering spending cuts. It isn't a negotiating strategy. Rather, it is Boehner asking Obama to show him the hundreds of billions of dollars in government waste that Republicans just know is hidden in the budget. The problem, of course, is there is no such thing. By the standards of developed countries, we spend very little on social programs. We do, undoubtedly, spend too much on our military, but the Republicans wouldn't think of cutting that. In fact, think back on Romney's budget proposal: he wanted to cut taxes, spend more on military, and spend more on Medicare. What does that leave? Medicaid, basically.

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Read Chait

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I used to read Jonathan Chait at The New Republic, now I read him at New York. He's one of the best.

Check him out at New York's Daily Intel blog, or here at his personal page.

**********

Here are a couple of recommended posts:

1) "The Agony of the GOP Establishment":

If you're a Republican opinion leader, you want to promote Romney over Perry. At the same time, you have to account for the possibility that Perry might win the nomination anyway, which means that you can't say anything that could be used against him in the general election. You need to gently suggest to Republicans that Perry is too crazy to be elected president, without suggesting to swing voters that he's too crazy to be elected president.

And this is precisely what establishment Republicans are doing, including the nefarious Karl Rove. But will they succeed, with the party's grassroots base aligned against them?

2) "Romney Out-Debates Perry While Perry Out-Themes Romney at the Fox-Google Debate":

In general, Romney took his weak hand and played it far better than Perry, who at times appeared to be drugged, and perhaps is still suffering from a recovery from back surgery. But though Romney won most exchanges on a question-by-question basis, Perry probably emerged with the stronger meta-theme. His overarching condemnation of Romney is as a slippery, quasi-Democratic figure. Romney has nothing anywhere near so strong to deploy against Perry. He has tried, elliptically, to paint his foe as unelectable. But the deeper Romney expresses contempt for Obama — tonight he accused him of never having held a job — the harder it must be for Republican voters to imagine that any nominee would actually lose to this unemployed, socialist, America-hating failure.

An excellent analysis of last night's "debate." Romney is by far the stronger candidate, at least in general election terms, and has much more substance to him than Perry, but Perry has a stronger case to make to the base, a much more compelling narrative to spin. (This is precisely the difficulty the establishment faces.)

A failure of leadership: Jonathan Chait and Paul Krugman on Obama, the budget, and the government shutdown that never was

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I haven't written much on the budget/shutdown, mainly because I just haven't had much to say. I never thought a shutdown was likely. Boehner was certainly facing enormous pressure from the right, but most Republicans understood that a shutdown would hurt them politically (if not the country generally), and it was inevitable that a Democratic Party that fears confrontation and that is, for better or worse, all about compromise, would give in. And that's just what happened.

So who won? -- a question Jon Stewart amusingly looked into last night. Well, the Republicans, perhaps, as they came away with fairly significant concessions from the Democrats (even if this was just about domestic discretionary spending), but many on the right aren't happy, whether over the continued funding for Planned Parenthood or over the fact that spending wasn't cut even more -- and while Boehner emerges intact, it's not clear how long he'll be able to hold off the Tea Party. But I'm not really sure the Democrats lost. A shutdown would have been bad for everyone, and so avoiding a shutdown without giving up too much is a sort of "win" for them, as long as they can take the fight to the budget battle still to come and thence into 2012.

And Obama? For a president who is all about compromise, yet another compromise is also a win, and he'll now be able to position himself to secure even greater support from independents when the time comes. He stepped in when he needed to, acted like the mature adult in a world of petulant children, and, however this may irritate progressives (myself included), accepted a deal that will benefit him politically at the expense of fighting the Republicans' disastrous agenda.

That's just the way I see it. I'm not saying I like it.

And the big political problem, it seems to me, is that, once again, Democrats just caved without much of a fight at all, even a symbolic one, except over Planned Parenthood (which, to be fair, is worth fighting for, but it's not the be-all and end-all of federal budget issues), allowing Republicans to secure the upper hand, and a fairly significant "win," despite the fact (forgotten by the media, it seems) that they're still the minority party (controlling the House but not the Senate or the White House) -- even after last November's "shellacking." At TNR yesterday, Jon Chait offered a number of reasons for why this happened. Yes, Democrats are generally more conciliatory (to their credit, perhaps, if not so much in the crucible of legislative politics), and, yes, the issue generally favours Republicans (who can spin their economic and fiscal agenda as "small government" (and who likes taxes? who likes government (until you realize what it does for you)?). But this, to me, is the most convincing explanation:

Republicans were able to credibly threaten a shutdown of the government. That willingness to impose harm on the entire country if they didn’t get a sufficiently friendly outcome proved to be powerful bargaining leverage, moving the goalposts progressively closer to them.

In other words, Republicans are just tougher negotiators, willing to push the country to the brink, or at least to bluff that way, to get their way. It's a game of chicken, and Republicans know that Democrats swerve first. Of course, Democrats should have known better. They should have called that bluff and challenged Republicans to shut down the government. Sure, the government may then have been shut down, but wouldn't Democrats then have "won" politically? At the very least, they would have had a strong case to take to the American people.

But, no. Not this time. Not ever, it seems.

And it doesn't help that Obama himself wasn't really up for a fight. As Paul Krugman writes:

What have they done with President Obama? What happened to the inspirational figure his supporters thought they elected? Who is this bland, timid guy who doesn't seem to stand for anything in particular?

I realize that with hostile Republicans controlling the House, there's not much Mr. Obama can get done in the way of concrete policy. Arguably, all he has left is the bully pulpit. But he isn't even using that -- or, rather, he's using it to reinforce his enemies' narrative.

His remarks after last week's budget deal were a case in point.

Maybe that terrible deal, in which Republicans ended up getting more than their opening bid, was the best he could achieve -- although it looks from here as if the president's idea of how to bargain is to start by negotiating with himself, making pre-emptive concessions, then pursue a second round of negotiation with the G.O.P., leading to further concessions.

And bear in mind that this was just the first of several chances for Republicans to hold the budget hostage and threaten a government shutdown; by caving in so completely on the first round, Mr. Obama set a baseline for even bigger concessions over the next few months. 

I still think Obama succeeded politically, continuing to set himself up nicely for re-election next year. But Krugman is right that he weakened himself and his party over the long run, essentially giving Republicans still more confidence that they can they way, or at least a great deal of their way, just by controlling the House.

It will take more time to sort out who "won" and who "lost" this shutdown battle, but with an absence of principled, determined leadership in the White House, the losers ultimately are the American people, who need something other than the Republican agenda and who have a president who is apparently unwilling to fight for anything at all.

Quotes of the Day: Jon Chait and Ezra Klein on health-care reform (what else?)

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Chait:

I don't mean to be too glum. Heath care reforms still stands a good chance of passage, and it hardly lacks for supporters. Still, the general thrust of elite sentiment has been, as I said, depressingly myopic. It's natural to focus on improving a piece of legislation whose details remain in flux. The problem comes when the desire to improve becomes the dole focus for evaluating it. Nearly any of the great political advances in American history, viewed from ground level, looked like a pastiche of grubby compromises and half measures. At some point the imperative is to take the broader view. If they ever do that-- whether health care reform succeeds or fails -- the critics from the delusional left, the hysterical right and the sullen center will feel ashamed.

Klein:

Reading Chris Bowers's excellent list of the progressive priorities fulfilled or partially fulfilled by the health-care bill's sidecar amendments is a reminder of how peculiar the framing of this debate has been. There's no doubt that progressives have suffered some real losses in the legislative process. The public option, for one. But along the way, a lot of progressives have lost sight of the fact that the very existence of this legislative process is a huge progressive victory. 

I don't mean to be anti-progressive, or anything of the kind, as my own views on health care -- I support the single-payer model -- are deeply progressive. But let's be real about this. The Senate bill + patches isn't ideal, but it's something, something historic, something that could lead to additional reforms down the road. It's what Democrats, and those on the left broadly, have been working for and waiting for for decades.

Klein is right, there have indeed been "some real losses" for progressives. And it's also true that Obama didn't do enough to promote a more progressive reform package, one with a robust public option. But what are we going to do about that now? Sabotage this incredible opportunity to get something done, something that is still, in an imperfect way, transformational?

Klein again:

[T]he fact of it is that this bill represents an enormous leftward shift for American social policy. It is not, in my view, a sufficient leftward shift, but it is unmatched by anything that has passed into law in recent decades. Progressives have lost some very hard battles but are on the cusp of winning an incredibly important war. For all its imperfections, health-care reform itself is deeply, deeply progressive. And if you don't believe me, just ask the conservatives who have made opposing it their top priority.

There you go.

It is a bitter thing, I know, to have to swallow a compromise bill written to appeal to "ConservaDem" support, and to accept demands made by the likes of Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman. It doesn't seem like a win. But it is, and it's a big one, and it's time, long past time, to put aside our differences and to accept that this is it, like it or not, that it's much better than nothing, that it contains some genuinely progressive elements, that millions of people will benefit from it, and that it could very well be the start of a major shift in America towards greater justice and fairness not just with respect to health care but more broadly within society as a whole.

That, it seems to me, is worth fighting for -- and, to that end, worth uniting for.

Shelby backs down, American democracy makes slight recovery

By Michael J.W. Stickings

So Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama has ended his "hold" on 70 of President Obama's nominees, effectively filibustering them (and requiring 60 votes for confirmation).

And why? Is it really because he got "the White House's attention" on a couple of issues, as his office claims? Or, putting aside the spin, is it rather because his largely indefensible tactic got some negative media attention, Democrats pushed back, and he was forced to cave?

You have to be a partisan fool to take him at his word.

**********

But what of the tactic itself? As TNR's Jonathan Chait explained the other day, the rise of the "hold," like the rise of the filibuster (or, rather, the more common usage of it), is a sign of historic "Senate dysfunction":

The "hold" is a now similar tool to what the filibuster was forty years ago. It's a sparingly-used weapon meant to signal an unusually intense preference. A Congressional scholar reports that putting a blanket hold on all the president's nominees has never been done before. But there's no rule that says you can't. It's just not done, until it is.

Shelby is using his blanket hold to demand pork for his state. It's a telling sign of the decay of the process, another indication of the power parochial interests have to block rational policymaking. But what's to keep the minority party form simply blocking all the president's nominees, from day one? Sure, they might catch some heat. But the president would eventually catch even more heat as his undermanned administration slid into dysfunction. And politics is a zero-sum game.

That may sound like a crazy scenario. But history shows that you can't count on social norms to prevent competing parties from trying to maximize their advantage. The only way to change this kind of behavior is to change the rules.

It's a sign of "the decay of the process," yes, but also, and more dramatically, of the corruption and decline of American democracy. This is what it has come to, after all -- at least as long as Republicans try to prevent the majority party from governing, that is, as long as they try to grind America's federal government to a halt.

And they call themselves patriots?

Paul Krugman makes an apt historical comparison (with more here):

So, here's the news from the Senate. Martha Johnson was nominated to head the General Services Administration, and was confirmed by a nearly unanimous vote -- but only after having had her nomination held hostage for nine months by Senator Kit Bond, who wanted more pork for Kansas City. And now Senator Richard Shelby has placed a hold on -- are you seated -- all, all, Obama administration nominees, until he gets some pork for Alabama.

What's going on? The Senate has rules based on the idea that it was a chamber of gentlemen who would find ways to work together. But now, 41 Senators belong to a party that has no interest in a working government, no desire to work with the majority in good faith.

There's a precedent for all this. In effect, we've now become 17th-century Poland.

Things weren't good there and then, and they aren't good here and now.

Back then, you could blame various "Polish magnates" for taking Poland to "the brink of collapse." Now, you can blame the Republicans for doing just in a country that is supposedly, and still proudly, a "democracy."

The coming (Democratic) victory on health-care reform

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I think TNR's Jon Chait, like his colleague Jon Cohn, has done some fantastic work writing on the health-care reform issue, and one of his latest posts at The Plank is worth quoting in full:

The biggest story in health care reform this year has not been the town hall meetings, or President Obama's big speech on health care. It's that the Senate Democrats have decided they're going to pass a bill. You just haven't heard much about this story because it’s mostly taken place behind closed doors.

Yesterday's Roll Call has some details. Here's what I think is the key passage:

As a fallback, Senate Democratic leaders have stepped up their pressure on centrists to stick with the party on procedural votes. At a minimum, leaders have asked all 60 Democrats to allow them to bring a health care bill to the floor in order to make sure Republicans cannot filibuster it.

Democratic Senate aides familiar with the thinking of Conference moderates said centrists want to vote for a health care reform bill -- even one that is politically problematic -- because it appeals emotionally to their inner Democrat.

A month ago I wrote that it's nearly impossible to see health care reform failing because it would entail a Democrat voting to filibuster the central progressive goal of the last sixty years. That proposition was looking shaky for a while because there were some Democratic Senators who acted as if they actually wanted to kill health care reform. (Hi, Senator Conrad.) But they're all now pretty clearly acting like they really want to pass something.

It's very strange. We've had months of sturm and drang, and massive attention focused on the question, Whither health care reform? It's just quietly turned into a fait accompli.

I hope he's right -- and I think he is. Though I worry about the remaining holdouts -- Nelson, Lincoln, Landrieu, etc. -- I do think Democrats will ultimately pull together to overcome a Republican filibuster, meaning that there will be a vote on the floor on a reform package likely with a public option component (given that Reid seems to be committed to it now).

And I think a lot of this shift has to do with Obama's re-entry into the fray with his address to Congress, as well as, and even more significantly, with his campaigning behind the scenes. Some centrist Democrats may think that coming out against reform benefits them politically, given that they represent heavily red states and need to prove their conservative bona fides to win re-election, but I actually think the reverse is true. Swing voters in their states won't vote against them if they oppose reform, they'll vote against them if Democrats fail, and if Obama fails, that is, if they fail to get things done, notably with respect to health care and the economy. What good would it do for them to campaign essentially on a record of voting against Obama and their own party? Would their constituents actually reward them for that? Unlikely. Much better, it seems to me, to side with Obama and their party, and to hope -- and it's a reasonable hope -- that the economy continues to stabilize (and perhaps begins to show signs of improvement) and that health-care reform (with a public option) proves to be as popular as the polls suggest it might very well be (once people get past the Republican lies and actually understand what's in it for them, and for the country).

What I wonder is how much Obama's huge political machine, the one he built so successfully during the campaign last year, plays into this. Surely these holdouts know that a vote against Obama could be a vote against their very political survival. After all, in return for their support, Obama could unleash his machine in support of them in their re-election efforts. But if they were to vote against the sort of robust reform package Obama seems to want, and that the overwhelming majority of Senate Democrats are pushing for, including the leadership? Do they really want to sacrifice Obama's support, and everything his machine can bring them, just to try to win over some of their Republican-leaning constituents?

But let's not get ahead of ourselves -- or, rather, let's tone down our expectations. Democrats may "want to pass something," but it's not entirely clear what they a) want to pass, and b) will be able to pass. All we have to go on, as of right now, is a lot of talk, a lot of internal party division, and reform proposals, like Baucus's, that are hardly all that desirable.

So while I think Chait is right, and while my optimism is going strong, I still have my nagging doubts. There is still so much to be done, and the opposition is fierce.

Quote of the Day: Jonathan Chait on who, or what, is really to blame for the whole health-care debacle

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Well, the Republicans are to blame, of course. But, for Democrats, here's some much-needed perspective from TNR's Jon Chait:

The Senate is what controls the process. That's the chokepoint for any health care bill. The question isn't how badly Obama wants a public plan, or how much he cares about bipartisanship. It's whether moderate to conservative Democrats in the Senate will filibuster a bill that has a public plan or lacks GOP support. Everything else is details.

In other words, it's not all Obama's, or even primarily Obama's fault. And if Democrats, and especially the more progressive ones, want to lay some blame, they should look no further than the Senate.

I sort of buy this and sort of don't. Obama certainly could have done more -- and should do more -- to promote meaningful health-care reform with a robust public option. But he's also a realist, and there's only so much he can do, not just given these structural/institutional limitations but given how much political capital he's already spent on the stimulus package and the bank and auto bailouts.

And the key is not so much to secure the support of obstructionist Republicans opposed to reform, including the three in the Gang of Six, but to keep moderate/centrist Democrats in the fold. Which is easier said than done, of course, what with the likes of Joe Lieberman, Mary Landrieu, Max Baucus, Kent Conrad, and Ben Nelson now doing their best Republican impressions. (It's also a bit rich for the generally moderate/centrist Chait to be calling upon liberals in the party to try to oust these more right-leaning Democrats. For more on this, see Greenwald.)

There is still hope for reform, of course. With Republicans looking more and more like the obstructionists they are, and showing more and more that what they really want is not compromise but no reform at all, Democrats are slowly but surely turning away from the possibility of a bipartisan bill, realizing that, if reform is to get done, they'll have to go it alone. Whether they'll be able to or not, given the Republican-lite positions of Lieberman et al., remains to be seen, just as it remains to be seen whether Obama will put a stop to the phony "post-partisan" niceties and lead the fight for meaningful reform. Which may be his plan, after all: Make a show of reaching out, genuinely, to Republicans, allow Republicans to expend their energy refusing to negotiate in good faith, move in and promote a Democratic bill while Republicans are relegated to the sidelines, blamed for their obstructionism, and emerge with what he wanted all along.

Once again, I fear I'm being naively optimistic. Regardless, I think Chait is right that it's hardly all Obama's fault. He can only do so much, after all, and there is only so much that can be done with members of his own party blocking the way.