Month: November 2010

Sad

by digby

Then:

Now:

Obama always promised to continue the war in Afghanistan, of course. But it would have been hard to imagine that image back in those heady days of the big win. People certainly didn’t see him as a clone of Bush, regardless of his promises.

One little detail that’s worth contemplating is the Daily Mail headline in the first compilation. There’s the glowing “Obama Takes His Place In History” headline and just below it is a huge headline that says: “Home loans: A Slap In The Face.” That juxtaposition was prescient.

h/t to @BagNewsNotes for the imperialism shot.

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We’re All Know Nothings

by digby

There are a lot of rather depressing findings in this latest Pew knowledge poll, including the fact the while 75% of the public knows that the Republicans ‘won” the last election, only 46% know they only won the House of Representatives. I joked before election day that a lot of Tea Partiers were going to be upset to find out that Barack Obama was still president on the day after, but I didn’t think it might actually be true.

As much fun as it is to contemplate that, I think these results are fairly understandable. Many people don’t vote and even those who do find politics an abstract, irrelevant subject most of the time. So they caught the general gist of the fact that the GOP won big, but the details of that didn’t penetrate. Obama’s still president, after all, so it’s not as if there’s been a wholesale changing of the guard.They pretty much got it right.

I think this may be the most revealing bit of info from the poll:

Overall, 39% of the public know that the government spends more on national defense than on education, Medicare or interest on the national debt. About one-in-four (23%) say the government spends more on interest payments and 15% say Medicare is the largest expenditure of these four alternatives. Government accounting estimates indicate that the government spends about twice as much on defense than on Medicare, and more than four times as much on defense as on interest on the debt.

More Democrats (46%) than Republicans (28%) know that the government spends more on national defense than the other items listed. Republicans are as likely to say the government spends most on interest on the debt (29%) as on defense (28%). A plurality of independents (44%) know that the government spends most on national defense.

Not even a majority of Democrats know that defense is the big budget item apparently, although some of that may be an unwillingness to admit it after having been mau-maued by the right for years about being soft on national security and always wanting to cut defense. Whatever the case, this is more evidence proving that deficit fear among the people (to the extent it actually exists) is just a proxy for generalized economic angst, which the Catfood Commissars and their wealthy benefactors are using to advance their own agenda. If the public doesn’t even know the vague parameters of where their tax dollars are going, how can they possibly know that it’s a waste?*

*That’s rhetorical, of course. Many people take it on faith that their money is going to people who don’t deserve it, which is why they want tax cuts for themselves and spending cuts for whomever they personally believe are undeserving parasites. But in a sane world such things would not be part of any discussion of spending priorities.

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Forget The Slurpees

by digby

Thomas Mann isn’t known as an angry partisan, so this might surprise some Villagers:

“There is simply no basis for meaningful bipartisan leadership meetings today,” Brookings scholar and congressional expert Thomas Mann told me. “Republicans are determined to defeat Obama in 2012; they have no interest in negotiating with him in order to provide him any sort of victory. This is a partisan war and the Republicans are playing to win. The only question is how long it will take Obama to accept this reality and act accordingly.”

On the other hand, if you read the whole article, it’s clear that the writer was completely oblivious to what he was saying, so who knows? Maybe even Thomas Mann is a dirty hippie blogger now.

h/t to bb

Virtuous Sabotage

by digby

Following up on my post from last night about the administration meeting with the Chamber of Commerce, I was struck by Steve Benen’s post this morning about the possibility that the Republicans have decided to affirmatively sabotage the economy and important national security initiatives like the START treaty, the opposition to which from the GOP has even the GOP elder statesmen astonished.

He says:

Historically, lawmakers from both parties have resisted any kind of temptations along these lines for one simple reason: they didn’t think they’d get away with it. If members of Congress set out to undermine the strength of the country, deliberately, just to weaken an elected president, they risked a brutal backlash — the media would excoriate them, and the punishment from voters would be severe.

All that assumed they thought they would be found out — Dick Nixon being the prime example of someone who sabotaged a peace process as well as Ronnie Reagan, who is suspected of double dealing in the Iran hostage crisis. And on economics, there’s always been widespread belief that the Fed manipulates interest rates on behalf of Republicans in election years. But be that as it may, these efforts were always covert and the politicians were always careful to keep up the fiction that they put the national interest above all else. So something has changed.

I think it’s just another step in the degradation of our societal norms. We are not living in a country anymore in which there is even a consensus about something as immoral as torture, so why should political sabotage be beyond the pale? And the mainstream media, which Benen points out should be charged with bringing some perspective to these issues and calling attention to the fact that the Republican Party is actively working to undermine the national interest, is so deep into their “Church of the Savvy” that they literally laugh at this phenomenon and then proceed to call balls and strikes as if it’s a sport to find out who can win with the most cynical strategy.

Yesterday, for instance, Andrea Mitchell interviewed Senator Richard Lugar, elder statesman and nuclear disarmament specialist. He was extremely agitated that the Senate was about to scuttle the START treaty for reasons that were petty and unintelligible to anyone who cares about the idea of a loose nuke or accidental launch of an ancient soviet missile. (One would have thought that group would include all elected officials, but clearly not.) Anyway, she interviewed him and then had on Ambassador Richard Burt who negotiated the original START treaty back in 1991. She said, “I haven’t seen Richard Lugar that fired up about this issue in quite a long time, and it’s because, on the face of it, what is the explanation? When you read this treaty, the preamble to the treaty, what is the explanation for saying that this is bad for U.S. interests? He replied, and I kid you not, that he thinks Republicans only want nuclear treaties to be signed under GOP administrations. Mitchell, of course, just said “ah” and blithely carried on as if they were talking about Karl Rove’s election strategy and that was that.

Perhaps one can attribute all this to the new media world in which everyone is now a political pundit and so strategy is considered a moral value in itself. And it’s certainly the case that those who live inside the conservative media bubble believe that Obama is a Muslim socialist terrorist sympathizer so, in their view, stopping anything he does by definition isn’t sabotage, it’s patriotism. (And when you saw people interviewed at the Glenn Beck rally, many of them simply couldn’t believe that Beck repeatedly called Obama a racist — so it’s possible that many right wing citizens haven’t totally abandoned these social norms, but that they just don’t realize their leaders have.)

Whatever the case, I do know that the the old “hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue” thing is long gone in national Republican politics and they are just blatantly proclaiming themselves to be virtuous by undermining the national interest in order to win elections. That is now seen as a positive good, not a shameful unpatriotic act. Because in American life, winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.

(This is also, by the way, why Wall Street criminals and banksters are given a pass. They “won” which means they are better and more worthy than the rest of us. Indeed, the Church of the Savvy, it turns out, is just an offshoot of the Church of Ayn Rand.)

Update: Kevin Drum talks a bit about this too, although I don’t think he agrees with me …

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Dissing The Foreigner

by digby

Ezra Klein wonders why everyone in the DC establishment is so much more overwrought about Pelosi keeping her leadership post than Harry Reid, pointing out that his hold on office is even less secure than hers and that if all the seats in the Senate had been up for reelection the Dems would have lost the majority there as well.

The answer is simple: Reid is a nice pro-life centrist man while the uppity beyotch from San Francisco needs to be taken down a peg. The gasbag chatter for the past two weeks has been quite clear in this regard — the reason the Democrats lost is because they made the ridiculous decision to put a foreigner in charge and Real America is not having it. It’s one thing to be a woman in a man’s rightful job, but being a liberal and a woman (and successful at passing liberal legislation!) is a bridge too far. This whole thing could get out of hand if they don’t watch themselves.

In fact, I have to say that Democrats defying that CW and keeping her as leader is one of the few bright moments of the past few months and it gave me hope that they aren’t completely brain dead yet. It’s a real act of defiance against the Republicans and the Villagers and I’m shocked they did it. I fully expected to see leader Hoyer (or worse.)

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What’s The Price Of Doing Business?

by digby

Well it looks like it’s not going to be populism:

After months of all-out political war with the nation’s most powerful business lobby, President Obama appears to be on the verge of launching a dramatic peace offering to the president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Tom Donohue.

Two sources familiar with the negotiations tell me that Obama was giving serious consideration to going into the lion’s den and delivering a speech at a Dec. 2 jobs summit hosted by Donohue, whose organization just spent tens of millions of dollars trying to bring the President’s agenda to a screeching halt by helping to elect more pro-business lawmakers in the midterm election.

“It was my impression they were looking very favorably on the invite,” a senior Chamber official told me about the White House, and a senior administration official did not quibble with that account when I checked with the White House on Friday.

[…]

“This would show the President will engage people with different views,” one senior Democratic strategist told me. “I think it would be a good thing.”

In fact, top Democratic strategists tell me senior White House officials like David Axelrod have been working aggressively behind the scenes to help facilitate a chance for Obama to finally bury the hatchet with Donohue and the rest of the business community…

While senior officials like Axelrod and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner have publicly tried to downplay any tensions with the business community, I’m told by these Democratic strategists that the administration is privately more concerned than they’re letting on about just how politically damaging the image of Obama being anti-business has been.

Images with whom? I’m sure the average voter won’t even know about this. This is about money and policy and all that that implies and I don’t think the administration is deluded enough to think that these guys won’t demand something big from him.

But there are signs that Obama may be able to form an unlikely alliance on some key issues with the Chamber of Commerce, which has a lot of sway with incoming Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and could help each side bridge at least some of their differences on economic matters.

Jen Psaki, White House deputy communications director, told me that a lot of the tension with the Chamber was overblown anyway and she believes they will be able to work together on billions in new infrastructure spending the President is trying to secure, as well as Obama’s push to double U.S. exports within five years – an idea that Chamber officials diplomatically note was actually first pushed by Donohue.

Uh huh. Like I said before “think NAFTA,” only with social security.

And I don’t think Obama is dumb enough not to realize that they will stab him in the back politically again anyway. After all, they did this:

While Donohue supported the stimulus plan as well as the auto bailouts early on in the Obama administration, the cooperation pretty much stopped there. It “went off the rails,” in the words of a senior Chamber official, over the President’s health care reform.

It’s always been known that the Chamber was fighting that plan tooth and nail, but nobody knew just how aggressively until this week, when Bloomberg reported that health insurers gave the Chamber a whopping $86.2 million to battle the plan – a staggering amount.

The Chamber spent tens of millions of dollars more to support Republicans – as well as some conservative Democrats – in the midterm election. Those efforts helped knock the President’s party out of power in the House, and weakened his hand in the Senate.

And despite the happy talk now about working together on other issues, let’s not forget that the Chamber will be glad to be part of any Republican effort on Capitol Hill to weaken the President’s signature health care and Wall Street reform laws.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t think of even one possible deal between these parties that could truly benefit the Democratic Party or the American people. And I certainly have no faith that the Obama administration is capable of outsmarting them.
So, it’s going to take luck, prayer or some kind of serious outside pressure (or all three) to keep this unholy alliance from blowing the place up completely.

Oy. It’s time for a drink …

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Game Plan

by digby

When asked about Joe Biden’s comments in which he said that extending Unemployment insurance is the right thing to and also to keep money flowing through the economy as it recovers, right wing propagandist Ernest Istook explained on Hardball that the last thing you ever want to do is take money out of the economy by raising taxes. It devolved into near gibberish from everyone on the show from that point on. I’m paraphrasing, but essentially it came down to “people need to have jobs, not to be dependent on government.” It’s sad that they have run out of unemployment but the problem is that businesses are sitting on 2 billion dollars because they afraid to spend their money without knowing how much they are going to be paying in taxes. Oh, and “the American people” told all the freshman Teabaggers they want their social security and Medicare cut.

I was going to try to unpack this nonsense, but it’s the end of a long week and I just don’t have the energy. Suffice to say that if you listened to his talking points you came away believing that the Democrats are proposing to enact a 2 billion dollar tax on businesses to pay for unemployment benefits.

Steve Benen put it this way earlier:

The conversation seems to have gotten wildly off track in Washington, and it’s not getting better. Republicans’ first post-election priority yesterday was going after NPR and opposing unemployment aid that boosts the economy. Going forward, the emboldened GOP wants to gut health care, cut spending, and protect a failed tax policy — but creating jobs isn’t part of the gameplan.

It’ll be up to President Obama and congressional Dems to try to get the political world focused again.

I think not creating jobs is definitely in their game plan. They’ve made it clear:

“the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

By any means necessary.

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Big Swinging Indies

by digby

Joan Walsh has a great post up about the myth of the vaunted “independent” voter (also known as the magical “center” to the Village idiots) in which she references this important piece by John Judis.

As many of us have intuitively understood (based upon personal knowledge of “independents”) most people who designated themselves that way actually vote for one party exclusively and for a variety of reasons just don’t want to identify with the party. But Walsh cites some fascinating info about the Indies who voted in 2010:

[A]nother interesting footnote is the way the composition of that “independent” vote changed in 2010. Many independents who voted in 2010 didn’t turn out in 2008 or 2006, so pollsters are clearly comparing apples and oranges when looking at these three volatile elections. But a Pew Survey of self-identified independents this year divided them into four groups: Shadow Republicans, Disaffected Republicans, Shadow Democrats and Doubting Democrats. The two “Shadow” groups had much in common — they tended to be white and affluent and unlikely to declare a party affiliation because they think of themselves as, well, independent — and yet they pretty reliably vote with one or the other party. The other two groups, Disaffected Republicans and Doubting Democrats, also have much in common economically — they are overwhelmingly white, not college educated and most make less than $75,000 a year. They tend to swing back and forth to support the party they perceive as helping them economically — or to punish the party that hasn’t.

This year’s independent cohort also included more white working-class men and women, whose allegiance has eluded Obama since the 2008 primaries. Their doubts were too often dismissed as racism two years ago, but there’s always been evidence they’re open to populist appeals — and to real assistance in this economic crisis. Judis concludes:

“Yes, Obama does have to pay attention to those white working-class voters who shift uneasily from one party to the other, but the way to win them over is to get them jobs–and if that fails because of Republican obstructionism, to make sure that these voters blame the Republicans not the Democrats and his administration for the result. If he can’t do that, his only recourse may be to get on his knees and pray that unbeknownst to most voters and many economists, a strong and buoyant recovery is about to begin.”

(A lot of us have been prescribing the prayer strategy.)

I never thought that “Doubting Democrats” didn’t warm to Obama because of race, because racists just don’t ever vote for Democrats for obvious reasons — it’s where all the black and brown people (and women) are who are ruining everything for the Real Americans are. But they were doubtful of his and the Party’s commitment to their well being. (Obama’s inartful comments about guns and religion were an attempt to articulate their feelings, although it’s fairly clear by his subsequent policies that he placed his faith in the idea that helping elite institutions was the way to fix the economy. So in some sense their heuristic impulses were right.)

But judging from what I’m seeing among the beltway political gasbags, it is an article of faith that Obama and the Democrats catered to leftist radicals for the past two years and that he needs to go to the “center” by being more friendly to Big Business and extending tax cuts for the wealthy while demanding “sacrifice” of average Americans — which is actually doubling down on what lost them 60 seats. This is the Village dilemma: they believe themselves to be average Americans and so their concerns are the same as average Americans’ concerns. But they have as much in common with average Americans as Average Americans have with Brangelina.

It remains to be seen if they still believe that if only they can appease the plutocrats all their problems will be solved. The fact is that the plutocrats are just fine and see this as an opportunity to break the welfare state (such as it is) and the unions and ensure cheap labor and low taxes for the foreseeable future so that strategy isn’t working and it’s not magically going to now. They need to either prevail over the obstructionists or bring the rhetorical hammer down in a way that those Swinging Indies will understand that the Republicans are consciously trying to make things worse for them in order to get their votes.

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Tea Partiers For Obama!

by digby

These deficit fetishists are starting to speak in tongues. Henry Cisneros, a Democratic member of the Rivlin-Domenici commission, is on my TV with Mrs Alan Greenspan telling me that the economy is about to come roaring back with huge growth so we don’t need to worry about hurting the recovery by slashing government spending starting next year — something he says must be done or we won’t have growth. He epitomizes the establishment “liberal” approach on this, which is to differentiate himself from the Republicans by agreeing to throw old and sick Americans, including Veterans, into poverty, economic stress and insecurity but also asking nicely if millionaires maybe might want to agree to pay a couple of thousand dollars a year more or that a defense contractor could be quietly asked to phase out a program that hasn’t been relevant since 1952 a little bit earlier than scheduled (say 2038.) That’s what passes for compromise. Huge sacrifice and suffering from the people, unnoticeable change for the wealthy.

He also just made shit up:

In about ten years we will pay social security, medicare and interest and have no money for any other form of government, including defense.

All these deficit fetishists seem to have an unusual proclivity for using bogus, apocalyptic talking points. I don’t know if they are all uninformed and biased like Alan Simpson or if they’re dishonest and dumb. But my suspicion is that people like Cisneros aren’t particularly engaged — they’re just board members who show up for some briefings — and then rush out with the Village consensus without really knowing what they hell they’re talking about.

But the political calculus is what proves how incredibly out of touch these wealthy Villagers are on this subject:

Mitchell: What’s the plus side for the president here if he adopts some of these tough measures. Does it help him move to the center and regain support of the Independents and maybe even Tea Party activists? [Oh dear.– ed]

Cisneros: I think this is one of the few ways the president can establish that he is a leader in this environment and capture the center. because he is dealing with a problem that people in this country intrinsically know is a problem. Americans have to balance their budgets, they can’t go into permanent debt the way the government can and they know it’s wrong. They understand a bit of debt. They understand a time of deficits, but they cannot comprehend just continual spending, running the credit card forever.

So if the president were to strike a tough pose on this I think, despite being battered by activists on the left and hardliners on the right, for various pieces of it, he could establish support with independents and the center again in a way that makes him competitive in 2012.

This is delusional and very, very dangerous. Here’s Joan McCarter with some interesting new poll analysis:

* According to national exit poll data, Democrats lost seniors by historic proportions—21 points—in the November mid‐terms. Even in 1994, Democrats only lost seniors by 2 points.
* The survey reveals Democrats no longer have the advantage they traditionally have enjoyed on Social Security. However, candidates who made Social Security an issue often saved their seats, and voters who say Social Security was a top voting issue voted more for Democratic candidates.
* As we have seen in previous work, voters see little relationship between the deficit and Social Security.
* Voters strongly oppose cutting Social Security benefits, even under the rationales of reducing the deficit or making the program more solvent in the long run. They strongly oppose cutting benefits for those earning above $60,000, and they strongly oppose raising the retirement age to 69 years‐old. This includes voters of all ages and partisan groups, including Republicans and Tea Party supporters.
* There is also strong bipartisan support for lifting the cap to impose Social Security taxes on all wages above $106,800. Support for this is stronger when both employers and employees are taxed.

…Social Security was a particularly important voting issue for independents who voted for a Democrat in this election, voters aged 65 to 74, and older voters who are women, independent, moderate, white and African American.

As Joan goes on to point out, Democrats cannot lose these voters. Moreover, if they lose their moral center by “leading” the destruction of the safety net and therefore the compact between the people and their government, they will also destroy any remaining rationale for the Party to exist.

Update: You’ve got to love Simpson on some level. He is one of the few people willing to translate the agenda into plain English:

The Republican co-chair of the White House’s fiscal commission predicted this morning that his controversial recommendations for reducing long-term deficits will have a real opportunity to become enacted next year, when the nation brushes up against its debt ceiling, and newly elected Republicans threaten to send the country into default.

“I can’t wait for the blood bath in April,” said Alan Simpson at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast roundtable with reporters this morning. “It won’t matter whether two of us have signed this or 14 or 18. When debt limit time comes, they’re going to look around and say, ‘What in the hell do we do now? We’ve got guys who will not approve the debt limit extension unless we give ’em a piece of meat, real meat, off of this package.’ And boy the bloodbath will be extraordinary.”

Yeah.

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Reality Campaigning

by digby

I don’t really have a point in bringing this Media Matters observation up other than to just point out for the 458 thousandth time that conservatives are dishonest hypocrites:

On November 15, 2008, shortly after Obama’s election, [Fox’s]Pinkerton opined that MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, who at the time was reported to be considering running for Senate in Pennsylvania, “should resign and not have a platform on the air.”

Now fast forward to the October 9, 2010, edition of Fox News Watch, during which Alan Colmes brought up (to the obvious discomfort of host Jon Scott) the fact that Fox News employs several people who, by that point, were widely reported to be potential presidential candidates. Pinkerton responded by dismissing Colmes’ point, saying “at most there’s three” potential candidate working for Fox out of “at least fifteen Republicans” who were considering running:

I think it’s worth thinking about the implications of this new situation in which potential candidates are given years long sinecures with a media company. In Fox’s case, we’re seeing a primary playing itself out on the air (which is fairly amusing at this point with all the Rove/Palin sniping.) But with Citizens United I’m assuming there are no problems with in-kind contributions or anything like that so this may evolve into the way politics is done.

How long before all presidential campaigns become Reality TV shows, with primaries voted on through through texting and twitter? Isn’t it inevitable?

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