Month: January 2011

Bingo!

by digby

I’ll be playing the SOTU drinking game tonight myself, but for those of you who don’t indulge, Susie has an alternative for you:

Do you keep falling asleep during the State of the Union address? What about those long and boring “rebuttals”? Here’s a way to change all of that!

I’ll probably just shout into the void as usual, but that’s just me.

Update: it looks like you need to add the word “hammock”.

From Paul Ryan’s rebuttal:

“Our nation is approaching a tipping point. We are at a moment, where if government’s growth is left unchecked and unchallenged, America’s best century will be considered our past century. This is a future in which we will transform our social safety net into a hammock, which lulls able-bodied people into lives of complacency and dependency. Depending on bureaucracy to foster innovation, competitiveness, and wise consumer choices has never worked – and it won’t work now. We need to chart a new course.”

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Learning From Ronnie

by digby

Long time readers will recall that I took issue with Obama when he said during presidential campaign that he admired Reagan and Rick Perlstein in turn took me to task saying that if Obama wanted to use Reagan to advance his own cause there was a perfectly legitimate, liberal way to do it — the same way Reagan had used FDR. Here’s a piece of that exchange:

I’m saying that he advanced the Reagan Myth, which was based upon conservative propaganda devised for the specific purpose of keeping the conservative movement viable even when it is out of power and restricting any possibility of advancing progressive programs. That’s the whole point of the Reagan myth. I tried to point out that Democrats have been doing this, to their own disadvantage, for years now. Accepting the view that Reagan responded to the people’s belief that liberal excess and big government were ruining the country is a grave misreading. Reagan, and the conservative movement that nurtured him, created that view and its hellspawn have advanced it ever since.

But I was wrong is saying you should never evoke Reagan at all. There’s a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it. Rick Perlstein, who as far as I know has taken absolutely no public position in this primary and has no dog in the fight, explained it elegantly in an email this morning:

Reagan didn’t praise FDR. He stole from him. As in, “This generation has a rendez vous with destiny.” We should steal from Reagan too. As in: “There is no left and right. Only up or down.” He would then use that intro to frame some outrageously right-wing notion as “common sense.” We should do the same for left-wing ideas.

Also, use Reagan to mess with righties’ heads. As in: I agree we need a Reaganite foreign policy. When Reagan realized we were caught in the crossfire of a religious civil war in Lebanon, he got the hell out. He would have done the same thing in Iraq. The rule isn’t “never say anything nice about Reagan.” It’s “use Reagan for progressive ends.”

Obama failed that test.

Since the inauguration, I’ve been fairly sure that Obama and Co were running the Reagan playbook, namely that they would grin and bear the bad economy during the first two years and then prepare for Morning in America. The question was always whether the policies he enacted actually resulted in Morning in America and whether the Republicans in congress would cooperate as Reagan’s Democrats did. The jury is still out on the first and I think we know that the answer to the second is a resounding no. But one thing is clear — on a political/rhetorical level, Obama has taken a very different tack than Reagan did.

Perlstein again explains, in this article in this week’s Newsweek:

Ronald Reagan scored a comfortable victory in 1980, promising a new day in Washington and the nation. Then Reaganomics ran into brick wall. Unemployment—7.4 percent at the beginning of his term—was heading toward 10 percent by the summer of 1982. The gross domestic product declined 1.8 percent. On Election Day, voters punished him by taking 27 House seats from his Republican Party, including most of the ones gained in 1980. That gave the Democrats a 269–166 seat advantage—far greater than the 51-seat advantage Republicans enjoy today.

The day after that woeful election, Reagan’s aides sent him into a press conference with defensive talking points. He tore them up. “We’re very pleased with the results,” he said, claiming that the GOP had “beat the odds” for off-year elections (he went back to 1928 to make the claim). “Wasn’t he in worse shape for 1984?” he was asked. “I don’t think so at all,” he replied. Hadn’t it been a historically uncivil campaign? He agreed—because of all the opposition did to “frighten voters.”

Barack Obama gave a press conference the day after his “shellacking” too. The contrast to Reagan couldn’t have been more stark. Ignoring the fact that the electorate had pretty much been switching their party preference every two years since 1992, he conceded the loss as an epochal sea change. “I did some talking,” he said of his meeting with Republican leaders the night before, “but mostly I did a lot of listening.” When asked about jobs, he talked about the deficit. He then boasted that when it came to what was essential to recovery, he really didn’t have essential principles at all: the answers were not to be “found in any one particular philosophy or ideology.”

Can you see the difference?

Perlstein points out that Reagan was in much worse shape politically than Obama was due to his bad economy when he made those comments:

But then came the remarkable economic recovery. Inflation, which had been 11 percent upon his inauguration, fell to 2 percent. Unemployment fell from a very familiar 9.6 percent to 7.5 percent. Economic growth began charting a remarkable 7.2 percent rate of annual growth.

That’s just the sort of thing that Obama is praying for; the state of the economy, experts agree, is the most reliable indicator of whether a president gets reelected. But it wasn’t the mere fact of recovery that let Reagan take 49 states and cement the sense, as historian Sean Wilentz put it, that we are living in the Age of Reagan. It was that Reagan had been laying the groundwork to take the credit for the recovery since before he was inaugurated. He did it by laying all blame on his political adversaries.

I think Obama has done something quite different. He hasn’t effectively pushed the blame game, perhaps out of temperament or perhaps because he just really doesn’t believe the Republicans did anything particularly wrong. And he is allowing the Republicans to take credit for the recovery:

Already, Republicans are claiming credit for modest gains since the election; they attribute it to the very act of impaneling a Republican Congress. It increased “business confidence”—one of their bumper-sticker slogans.

There’s nothing intrinsically right wing about explaining complex economic processes in easily digestible ways; FDR—Reagan’s rhetorical role model—did it all the time. Reagan’s story was very simple: “Our government is too big, and it spends too much.” So he would reverse everything Carter had done (except when Congress wouldn’t let him—and then the problems were Congress’s fault, weren’t they?). Then, lo and behold, the economy recovered. As the historian Wilentz put it: “The slogan ‘stay the course,’ which had once sounded like whistling in the dark, now reverberated like an irresistible battle cry.”

I agree that the “stay the course” slogan was hugely important. I certainly remembered it. Instead of doing a “mid course correction” that everyone in Washington always demands, he insisted that he was sticking to principles. And in the end, when the economy recovered, those principles appeared to be hugely validated and ushered in 30 years of conservative dominance. Sure, he compromised like crazy, but he always framed it in terms of his beliefs not pragmatism. It’s a very different approach.

And this, I think is key to why Reagan was truly transformational:

Despite his skill at vividly conjuring his enemies, Reagan somehow managed to be seen by a large majority of the public as a unifying figure—then and now. “This belief that Reagan had ‘brought the country’ back together was a recurrent refrain in voter interviews during the campaign … and in election-day exit polls,” Lou Cannon writes—even among voters who said they didn’t like his policies.

Staking out firm ideological ground, and being perceived as a uniter, not a divider, are not incommensurate tasks. Ronald Reagan proved they can be strongly reinforcing. It is an alchemical task—one of consummate leadership. How did he do it? By projecting strength—a strength that blinded the public to the contradictions at hand.

FDR had that ability as well. Indeed, projecting strength and gaining enough confidence from the people to allow them to govern successfully without sacrificing the party’s ability to come back and fight another day, may be the key to being a transformational president.

Read Rick’s whole piece. It puts it all together much better than I have here. The president and his men seem to have been following certain aspects of the Reagan playbook without fully understanding how he did it so I’m not sure he’s going to be rewarded in the same way. We shall see.

Update: The first batch of advance excerpts of Obama’s speech indicates that he’s going to talk about investments in terms of national pride. (I guess he’s going with the JFK model which isn’t a bad idea.) The problem is that the “Sputnik Moment” of our time is climate change, which he doesn’t seem to connect up to this.

He doesn’t put social security explicitly on the menu, so that’s good. But he doesn’t explicitly take it off, either (no “save social security first”…) So it’s back to reading tea leaves on that.

Update II: Howard Fineman sez:

The speech is a tight-shot focus on the president in his role as a leader, inspirer, explainer, lightning rod, antagonist and storyteller. It’s clear from the leaks and the briefs that President Barack Obama thinks the American people — still worried about their jobs, their mortgages and keeping their heads above water — want to hear reasons why, against evidence, they should be optimistic. Think of this speech as Hope 2.0 — at least, President Obama hopes you do.

The president will argue that budget cuts are necessary, but that only new investments in research, education and infrastructure will guarantee the nation’s long-term economic future. Republicans will argue that only a drastic reduction in the size of government — we’ll see if they are willing to be specific — will guarantee that prosperity. Last year, the word “jobs” was the most-mentioned term. This year, it’s going to be “future”

Chuck Henry on CNN framed the “Sputnik moment” this way:

At 9.4% unemployment, this president realizes that a lot of Americans are not feeling that bounce right now. You mentioned that five year budget freeze, the president is going to say that, look, these are tough choices and it’s this generation’s “Sputnik Moment,” John

So I guess it’s been decided that deficit reduction is the key to getting jobs back and the president is challenging this generation (which generation?) to make tough choices, which is sort of like the space program? Huh?

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Friendly Reminder To President Obama

by digby

“The revenue loss over the next 75 years just from extending the tax cuts for people making over $250,000 — the top 2 percent of Americans — would be about as large as the entire Social Security shortfall over this period,” write Kathy Ruffing and Paul N. Van de Water at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “Members of Congress cannot simultaneously claim that the tax cuts for people at the top are affordable while the Social Security shortfall constitutes a dire fiscal threat.”

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What Republicans Really Want

by digby

Funny. MSNBC host asks what Republicans want out of the SOTU:

Luke Russert: There already is a lot of buzz up here on Capitol hiss. There already has been some parts of the State of the Union speech leaked out over the past few days and they specifically had to do with what president wants to have more investments in the American economy. Listen to how Speaker Boehner perceived that word today in a press conference on Capitol Hill

Boehner (video): The American people know that we can’t continue to borrow and spend our way to prosperity. They understand that we have to tighten our belt. And I’m hopeful that the president is listening to the American people. I’m hopeful that word “investment” isn’t more stimulus spending and more government here in Washington.

Russert: You can see the correlation between the word investment and and more stimulus spending made by Speaker Boehner right there. The number on issue on capitol Hill for Republicans that they want the president to address tonight is spending and the economy.They want to see some massive spending cuts in the speech tonight so the country can go forward without accumulating more debt.

Another thing they want to see is President Obama decouple himself, in the words of Eric cantor, from his policies of the last two years. Obviously the first two years of the administration put forth a lot of those classic Democratic policies like health care reform. They want him to shift the tone and leave that rhetoric in the past. It will be interesting to see if President Obama will water down his accomplishments of the past two years of which there are many in the 111th congress but that’s really what the GOP would like to see going forward.

I’m sure the Republicans would also like him to officially repudiate the Democratic agenda and switch parties too. It will be interesting to see if he does that.

I have to give the GOPers credit, actually. They never lose sight of their goals. Here’s Mitch McConnell with the GOP’s opening ante — zilch:

But at a breakfast event hosted by Politico’s Mike Allen this morning in D.C., which ThinkProgress attended, McConnell expressed a vision of cooperation that looks more like capitulation. McConnell said he is willing to work with Obama, as long as the president “is willing to do what I and my members would do anyway”:

MCCONNELL: If the president is willing to do what I and my members would do anyway, we’re not going to say no and –

ALLEN: But that’s not much of a concession. That’s not bargaining, to just give you what you want.

MCCONNELL: Um, I like to think I’m a pretty good negotiator.

He is.

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Red State On Bloodshed

by digby

I wonder if he was dressed in a pimp costume?

Planned Parenthood, a perennial protest target because of its role in providing abortions, has notified the FBI that at least 12 of its health centers were visited recently by a man purporting to be a sex trafficker but who may instead be part of an attempted ruse to entrap clinic employees.

In each case, according to Planned Parenthood, the man sought to speak privately with a clinic employee and then requested information about health services for sex workers, including some who he said were minors and in the U.S. illegally.

Planned Parenthood’s vice president for communications, Stuart Schear, said the organization has requested an FBI probe of the man’s claims and has already fielded some initial FBI inquiries. However, Schear said Planned Parenthood’s own investigation indicates that the man has links with Live Action, an anti-abortion group that has conducted previous undercover projects aimed at discrediting the nation’s leading abortion provider.

Lila Rose, Live Action’s founder and president, described Planned Parenthood’s assertion as “very interesting.” She declined to confirm or deny that the clinic visits were part of a Live Action operation, but did indicate in a telephone interview that an undercover videotape project of some sort was in the works.

“The story that speaks loudest will be in the evidence,” she said. “I can’t comment until we release the visual evidence.”

I would guess the release of some edited videos will be timed to coincide with the House’s jihad on funding for abortion services, particularly Planned Parenthood. Purely coincidentally, of course.

Meanwhile, as you’ve probably heard, you’ve got CNN correspondent Erick Erickson’s web-site making this proclamation:

Here at RedState, we too have drawn a line. We will not endorse any candidate who will not reject the judicial usurpation of Roe v. Wade and affirm that the unborn are no less entitled to a right to live simply because of their size or their physical location. Those who wish to write on the front page of RedState must make the same pledge. The reason for this is simple: once before, our nation was forced to repudiate the Supreme Court with mass bloodshed. We remain steadfast in our belief that this will not be necessary again, but only if those committed to justice do not waiver or compromise, and send a clear and unmistakable signal to their elected officials of what must be necessary to earn our support.

The absurdity of Red State conflating themselves with Northern abolitionists aside, there little doubt that the right is doubling down on social conservatism. The only difference is that now, violent revolutionary rhetoric is all the rage.

Erickson unconvincingly responds to criticism of his site’s proclamation by ignoring what the proclamation clearly says and then supporting the proclamation. But then, that’s the usual MO and the media usually accept the dispute as a “he said/she said” and let it go. That must be why CNN is having Ericksson help “analyze” the State of the union address despite his sites clear statement that bloodshed will be necessary if those “committed to justice do not waiver or compromise.” He’s mainstream now.

Update: Amanda Marcotte has a great round-up of responses to Red State’s creepy screed here.

Won’t Let It Go

by digby

Mrs Greenspan is on a roll this morning. After presidential adviser Melody Barnes announced that Obama was going to freeze federal spending, here’s her reply:

Mrs Greenspan: I think you’ve just made some news in talking about the Pentagon freeze and as well the five year discretionary spending freeze, but we all know you’ve got to do what Willie Sutton did, you’ve got to , you know you rob a bank because that’s where it is, that’s where the money is and you’ve got to deal with social security, Medicare and huge entitlement growth if you’re really going to get spending cut and that’s not addressing any of that.

Barnes: remember this is the president who put in place the fiscal commission. He did that because he is serious…

Mrs Greenspan: But he hasn’t responded Melody! He has not yet told us what he thinks of their recommendations.

Barnes: No actually he has responded Andrea, After the commission came out with his report, he thanked them for the work they had done. He asked our colleague jack Lew, the office of Management and Budget to talk to the members of the commission to analyze their ideas so that we can go forward. And in a couple of weeks, the president is going to be putting forth a budget that will articulate very clearly where we want to go in the future.It will be a balance of the right investments, that I just talked about and dealing with our deficit spending in a very serious way.

Mrs Greenspan: Well if he’s responded other than to thank them and commend them for their work, we’ve yet to hear that. And earlier today your colleague Valerie Jarret said that response to the deficit commission will be in the budget itself, which we of yet … of course that will be in February

Barnes: Just a few weeks.

If President Obama thinks these villagers are going to allow him to avoid taking a position on this, he’s nuts. He’s going to have to make his position clear at some point — evidently, it’s not going to be tonight.

I’ve been getting some blowback for failing to “trust” Obama not to cut social security. I have no idea what’s in his heart, but I do know that there is tremendous pressure coming from business, the political establishment and the media to slash social security. Mrs Greenspan was practically spitting nails. So, I think it behooves those of who give a damn about this to try exert some pressure from the other side. It’s not personal. If the president does want to protect social security as everyone says he does, then he will welcome this cover as he goes into negotiations. If he doesn’t, he will know that people in the base will be unhappy. It’s not much power but it’s all we’ve got.

And obviously, we have to keep our eye on this budget.

Also: The commission did not issue a report. The two chairmen pre-emptively issued their own with no legal basis, the commission could not get enough votes. Once again, Cokie’s Law prevails. I’m guessing that well over 50% of what people erroneously believe about their government is directly caused by journalistic malpractice of this sort.

Update: I only use the term “Mrs Greenspan” for Andrea Mitchell when she channels her famous husband’s Randian economic views.

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Happy Little Princes

by digby

Politico:

We spoke with Steve Massocca, co-CEO of Pacific Growth Equities in San Francisco, about the strong market rally yesterday heading into tonight’s State of the Union: “Clearly the market has been reacting in part to what has been coming out about the speech, especially lowering corporate tax rates and reducing the deficit. … [President Obama] seems to be coming around on some of these issues. … And I’m not sure it was just the midterms. I think [former President Bill] Clinton’s visit to the Oval Office had an impact. I think Clinton probably sat him down and said, ‘You are going to be looking for a new place to live in two years if you don’t change your approach to business and job creation.’ So I think [Obama’s] gotten religion on some of these things and the market is happy to see it.”

Well that’s a relief. Because these poor Wall Street guys have really been through hell since Obama took office:

Apparently, that’s just not good enough. They also need to be allowed to be bailed out by taxpayers and never pay even the slightest price for fucking everything up so badly in the first place. Moreover we are evidently supposed to politely beg them to do it all again.

I liked it better when Obama told it like it is:

“It’s almost like they’ve got — they’ve got a bomb strapped to them and they’ve got their hand on the trigger,” President Obama said on Thursday of the banks he’s chosen to bail out. “You don’t want them to blow up. But you’ve got to kind of talk [to] them, ease that finger off the trigger.”

Seems he’s been schooled since then not to speak out of turn.

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Just For One Day

by digby

Everything sucks right now and I’m finding it hard to keep my spirits up about the future. But there are heroes that make me hopeful and this is one:

h/t top bt.

Shakin’ Not Stirring

by digby

They must be really worried about Tim Pawlenty’s wimp factor:

Between this and his constant references to his “red hot smokin’wife”, I don’t know if he’s running for president or auditioning to play James Bond. There is such a thing as protesting too much.

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Common Ground

by digby

In your face, lily-livered libs:

The Tea Party Patriots, a national umbrella organization for local Tea Party groups, announced on Tuesday morning that it will be celebrating the second anniversary of the Tea Party movement in late February with a “policy summit.” The focus will be promoting the “the three core values of Fiscal Responsibility, Constitutionally Limited Government, and Free Markets” through politics, education, law, and culture.* But there are no details about the agenda. There isn’t even a promised big-name speaker to draw in crowds or create buzz, just a coy promise that “when you hear who will be joining us—you’ll be really glad you have a seat.”

In light of this general vagueness, it is remarkable how detailed the email announcement is on the subject of why it chose to hold the summit in Phoenix. The Tea Party Patriots call Phoenix “the great southwestern city, born from the ruins of a former civilization, now the rebirth place of American culture. It will also be our opportunity to support the citizens of Arizona in their current political battles that carry so many national implications.”

Well yes. But they aren’t supporting all Arizonans. They are showing their solidarity with allies like the Minutemen:

In August of 2009, Al Garza, a leader in the anti-immigrant movement, left his post as vice president of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps (MCDC), once the largest, richest and most politically connected border vigilante group in the country. In an e-mail to supporters, Garza explained: I do not see an end in sight for the problems plaguing what was once the greatest citizen movement in America.”

It had been an embarrassing summer for the group. A former member, Shawna Forde, was arrested and charged with murdering a Latino man and his 10-year-old daughter in Arizona. Forde allegedly believed that she would find drugs and cash in the victim’s home, on a dirt road only a few miles from the US–Mexico border. Prosecutors contend that Forde was enacting a delusional plan to fund her breakaway faction—the Washington State–based Minutemen American Defense—by robbing Latin American drug cartels that she imagined were out to get her. The details about her fringe character that later emerged—her interest in starting an underground militia, her string of arrests for prostitution and petty theft, information from a co-defendant that her nickname was “White,” because “she hates all ethnicity with the exception of Caucasians”—further wrecked whatever credibility the Minutemen had.

The publicity surrounding the case enabled Garza to recruit hundreds, including former Minutemen, to an alternative group he soon created, The Patriot’s Coalition. “A lot of people felt, well, you’re a Minuteman, you’re a killer,” Garza told me, at a truck stop near his home in Cochise County, Arizona. “The name Minuteman has been tainted by organizations that didn’t want us at the border, that say we’re killers, that we’ve done harm.” Fortunately for Garza and others, their desire to reinvent coincided with a unique opportunity to do so—the emergence of the Tea Party movement on the national political horizon.

A few months before he broke with the Minutemen, Garza met Joanne Daley, his local Tea Party coordinator, at a tax day protest she had organized. Daley was a nexus of conservatism in Cochise County, spearheading health care reform town halls and a chapter of Glenn Beck’s 9/12 Project. When Daley met Garza, she said, “we…found out we had a lot in common, mostly outrage.” And when the time came for Garza to rebrand himself and his cause, he turned to Daley. She had expertise seeding nonprofits, developed through an old job with the state of Arizona. She registered Garza’s new group with the Arizona Corporation Commission, listing him as president and herself as a member of the board of directors.
[…]
[T]he flirtation between nativists and Tea Partyers that began during the healthcare debate last summer, as coverage for illegal immigrants became a flashpoint, has intensified. The lines between the movements are blurring, as members overlap at the grassroots and leaders make official appearances at each other’s events. Roy Beck, executive director of NumbersUSA, spoke at the Tea Party’s first convention in February. “There’s a whole lot of cross-pollination between the Tea Party movement and the anti-immigrant movement,” says Marilyn Mayo, co-director of right-wing research for The Center on Extremism at the Anti-Defamation League, which monitors nativist groups. “We’re starting to see a lot of focus on immigration in the Tea Party. It’s the next step for them after healthcare.”

SB-1070, the Arizona law that requires police to ask for proof of legal residency from people they believe could be undocumented immigrants, has been a catalyst. Activism around the law this summer showcased the chemistry between nativists and various Tea Party groups. The Tea Party Patriots gathered thousands of signatures in favor of the law. The Tea Party Nation co-sponsored a rally in Phoenix on June 5, which proclaimed the backing of the broader patriot movement. The slogans on the T-shirts and buttons for sale there broadcast a wide array of messages and causes not related to immigration, including: “Dictators Prefer Armed Citizens” and “Karl Marx Was Not A Founding Father.” An overwhelming 88 percent of Tea Party “true believers” in Washington also back the law, according to a University of Washington poll.

Same old far-right bullshit in a tri-corner hat. Tucson didn’t change a thing for these people. However liberals are being very careful with their language now so I’m sure the nation will shun these extremists.

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