Month: April 2013

Oh good: the Obama campaign apparatus is going to primary liberals from the right

by digby

Hey kids, guess what? The Obama campaign team is going to try to primary liberal Democrats from the right. I’m not kidding:

Rohit (Ro) Khanna isn’t a member of Congress yet, but people who encounter him might think otherwise. He’s outgoing and amiable. He wears dark suits and polished shoes. When we met for pizza in Palo Alto recently, he had already adopted the politician’s habit of speaking in the royal “we.” As in, “The old model of politics is to run against someone and point out their deficiencies. We want to try a new model—run a campaign that is excellent in substance, in execution, in figuring out how to get people involved and win on excellence, as opposed to tearing people down.”

Khanna, 36, is campaigning to represent California’s 17th District, which includes much of Silicon Valley. Apple (AAPL), Cisco (CSCO), and Intel (INTC) all have headquarters there. On paper, he’s the Platonic ideal of a candidate for 2013: He’s a first-generation Indian American, an Ivy League-educated technology lawyer, and already a veteran of the Obama administration, having done a stint as a deputy assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Commerce. Still, the odds of his representing anyone in Congress next year look awfully long. Khanna is vying to unseat incumbent Democrat Mike Honda, a seven-term congressman. In March, Honda’s campaign released a poll showing him with a 52-point lead over Khanna, who drew a meager 5 percent support.

What makes Khanna more interesting than your typical underdog is who else he has in his corner. On April 2, when he announced that he would challenge Honda, he also revealed that the people who will be running his campaign are many of the same ones who just got Barack Obama reelected. Even though Khanna has never been elected to anything, he has managed to sign up one of Obama’s top-three fundraisers, Steve Spinner, as his campaign chairman; Obama’s national field director, Jeremy Bird, as his chief strategist; and the president’s media firm, pollster, and data-analytics team, along with assorted other veterans of the reelection. Their aim is to build at the congressional level the same type of campaign they ran for Obama. It’s as if Bill Belichick and the staff of the New England Patriots decided to coach a high school football team.

You have to love the fact that they see their legacy in these terms:

Khanna is the first test case. He might seem an unlikely choice—not only because Hillary Clinton, or a promising gubernatorial candidate, or one of the many vulnerable Democratic senators up for reelection in 2014 all seem like more natural beneficiaries of this state-of-the-art campaign firepower, but also because Khanna is taking on a fellow Democrat. Yet the merit of challenging a popular establishment figure is deeply ingrained in the people who inhabit the president’s inner orbit. They see themselves as being loyal to something larger and purer than party alone. That was the rationale for challenging Clinton in 2008. It’s also the reason they give for supporting Khanna. “In 2007 we saw a guy who most people didn’t know and didn’t give much chance to be president,” says Larry Grisolano, a strategist and ad maker for Obama. “But we thought we could build a movement around his personal story and vision for the future. That’s what attracted us to Obama. These people don’t come around every day. But we all have an excitement about races that have that possibility. I think that in Ro, there’s the sense that he’s that kind of candidate.”
[…]
In Washington, Obama’s idea of a post-partisan America has gone stale. Khanna and his advisers believe that its power endures. His own flourish is recasting that idea as the pathway to economic salvation. “I believe there are ways of cutting past some of the ideological logjams in Washington when it comes to issues of American economic competitiveness and a pro-growth agenda,” he says. By implication, Honda, the reliable party man, is part of the problem—a message that doubles as an appeal to the independents and Republicans who will vote in the open primary.

“The Obama vision is still in demand,” Grisolano says. “I think you’ll hear candidates across the country trying to meet it. When you listen to Ro, you’ll hear it. It’s very Obama-like in its echoes of challenging Hillary.”

As I have often suspected, that campaign was more important to them than any victory over the Republicans. This was their ecstatic moment of glory and they just want to live it over and over again. I recall the president himself referencing the campaign for years after he was president as proof of his competence (even though political campaigns and governance only tangentially require the same skills.) Meanwhile, the rest of the country and all but the most delirious of campaign partisans moved on long ago.

If it weren’t for the vast sums of money they will tap to take out liberals I’d just dismiss this as sort of sad. Unfortunately you can’t ever dismiss that kind of money especially when it’s coming from the right.

Update:  Haha.  It looks as though they don’t have the support of everyone from the Obama campaign:

Honda’s staff issued a release early this morning announcing that President Obama has endorsed him for re-election in the 17th Congressional District, certainly one of the earliest endorsements of the 2014 congressional campaign cycle.

“Congressman Mike Honda is the right leader for the 17th district. Together, we’ve worked hard these last four years to bring meaningful, positive change to our nation, but there is much more to do,” Obama said. “As we continue rebuilding our economy from the middle out, we know expanding educational opportunities is critical. Congressman Honda’s lifelong commitment to education and fierce advocacy for innovation and technology is exactly what this nation needs as we continue to move America forward.

“We need Congressman Mike Honda in the United States Congress, and I urge you to vote to keep him there.”

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“A know-nothing Archie Bunker style argument”

by digby

I was going to write about the ruling yesterday which threw out the Obama administration’s edict that Plan B cannot be distributed over the counter to teenagers (because daddies are uncomfortable with it) but this scathing indictment of that original edict by Chris Hayes last night saves me the trouble:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

(It’s interesting to see Karen Hunter taking the Archie Bunker role with relish there in the roundtable. Whodah thunk?)

Good on Chris for leading off Friday night with a feminist discussion that most TV hosts show very little interest in exploring.  It’s actually quite relevant to half the population.

You can watch the whole show here, if you missed it.

Update:  I think Irin Carmen says it all on the Kamala Harris controversy.

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Exxon follies

by digby

Duck feathers are lined with oil, so additional oil actually doesn’t hurt them. Look at this happy guy! #ExxonCares twitter.com/ExxonCares/sta…
— Exxon Cares (@ExxonCares) April 5, 2013

Yes, this is a joke account.

But the issue isn’t a joke. These pictures from the Arkansas oil spill are horrible.

h/t to JF

A couple of elite Villagers explain their formula for deciding what’s “sensible.” 

by digby

I was in the car yesterday, listening to NPR like a good liberal, and was privileged to hear the full range of elite Villager opinion on the President’s budget proposal:

E.J. DIONNE: It sure doesn’t look so at the moment. I think – first of all, I’m very glad a lot of Democrats came out against the president’s proposal to change the index for Social Security because, if nothing else, this shows that President Obama has really been willing to put some hard stuff on the table. He is, you know, the Medicare cuts, the way he structured them, probably won’t inspire the same opposition from Democrats.

But Republicans so far have not been willing to give any ground at all. I do think that if the Republicans ever gave on revenue, there probably would be enough Democratic votes to pass it. And I agree with the implications of Scott Horsley’s story that if anybody can push this along, it’s the group of Republican senators the president is going to be meeting with. I think he’s going to be meeting with the same group of Republican senators a lot on absolutely everything from the deficit to guns to immigration.

Robert SIEGEL: David, is there some gang out there working on the economy?

David BROOKS: There’s no shortage of gangs. I, too, am glad Democrats came out against because it suggests there’s something sensible in what Obama has proposed. You know, I give this sort of a B-plus. I think he’s – I’m a little mystified by his political strategy. Some weeks, he’s going left, some weeks he’s going to the center, but this week he’s going to the center.

And he’s proposed a bill which does have this Social Security reform. His Medicare reforms are inadequate. I do think, though, there is a small possibility of a small deal. And the one thing I would say, and I’ve heard from many Republicans or at least several, that they’re soft on revenues.

They will be willing to tolerate a revenue increase if the president will give them a structural change in Medicare, not just tamping down the reimbursement rates, not just less spending but some structural reform at the foundation.

The president’s proposal has their votes, obviously, although Brooks needs a little bit more in cuts for the elderly and the sick to truly make him happy. And Lord knows, the White House yearns to make David Brooks happy.

It’s good to know that one thing hasn’t changed, even in this era of right wing cranks and Tea Party intransigence:  Villagers automatically approve of  anything the liberal faction of the Democratic Party is against.  I’m a little bit surprised that it still has such salience but I shouldn’t be.  These people are very uncomfortable with the idea that the salt-o-the-earth Real Americans might be the true radicals while the tired old hippies and their nerdy political heirs are just trying to hold on to a country that doesn’t starve old and sick people.

It’s a very lazy and convenient way to order the world, but I’m afraid that when it comes to Social Security and medicare it might not be the best guide to how the people feel about it.

Meanwhile, some in the Party may be waking up just a little:

But now, it seems possible that more Democrats running for re-election in the 2014 midterms may find themselves running away from Obama. Especially with liberal activists making not-so-veiled threats of primary challenges to incumbents who link themselves to the chained CPI.

Peter Fenn, a veteran Democratic political consultant, said in an interview that those kinds of challenges could be dangerous for his party:

“We better be careful we don’t get into a Republican situation here where you have somebody who you beat with an ultra lib in the primary, then they can’t survive the general [election].

“Let’s not fall on our swords here. We’ve managed to avoid it. It wouldn’t be a healthy thing.”

Also, Fenn says for some congressional Democrats, it won’t necessarily be a bad thing if they can claim some “daylight” between themselves and the president in the midterm elections.

A primary challenger doesn’t have to be an “ultra-lib” (whatever that is) to run against a Democrat who voted against Social Security. They could be a moderate or conservative, especially if there is a large elderly or veteran population. And it certainly doesn’t have to be in a swing district where a Republican might win the General. In fact, this will most likely happen in liberal districts if a progressive Democrat is foolish enough to vote with the president instead of her constituents. That’s where the activists have the most clout.

Of course, it won’t be confined to liberal districts because Social Security and medicare are so popular that even someone who is running from the right can use it to beat up a Democrat. I could see it happening in any Democratic district in the country. And certainly any Republican challenger will have no compunction about doing it: their only growing demographic is the elderly.

It’s a huge mistake to equate this with the Tea Party. Defending Social Security, veterans benefits and medicare is in the DNA of the Democratic Party and is as mainstream as it gets. They’ve been organized around it for over six decades. There’s nothing fringy or radical about this:

That 65+ number has to worry the GOP. And despite the numbers in that march Poll, a month earlier the Pew delved more deeply and found that Republicans don’t really want cuts to Social Security and medicare:

While Republicans are more supportive than Democrats of cutting funding for Medicare, Social Security and food and drug inspection, these remain minority positions within the GOP. More Republicans want to increase, rather than decrease, funding for Social Security (35% vs. 17%). And Republicans are as likely to say funding for Medicare should be increased as to say it should be decreased (24% vs. 21%).

Oh, and unlike a lot of important issues, these are issues voters understand very well and they vote on them. It’s not abstract and theoretical.  It will affect every American.

Not that it matters in the Village.  To them the world stopped sometime around 1975 and “sensible” policies are defined by opposition to the crazy hippie fringe   I guess it makes them feel young again,

Update: This post was about politics but I should once again make clear just how ridiculous it is to do this on the merits. Social Security contributes nothing to the deficit. It has no business being in this discussion at all. In fact, even Paul Ryan had the brains not to go after it his dystopian hellscape budget. Whatever problems the system has can be solved outside this obscene obsession with spending cuts. And certainly cutting the program now because the program might fall short of revenue in the future — and then patting yourself on the back for “saving it” — is just perverse.

As for medicare, we have just instituted a bunch of very large cuts, the costs are coming down, we have a big change in the health care system on the way. There’s no good reason to do more cuts right now. Let the health care reforms settle a little bit and then see where we are.

Finally, the deficit “crisis” itself is a big pile of nonsense. We shouldn’t even be talking about it while the economy is under such stress. It’s political malpractice on such a gigantic scale that I only wish I could be alive long enough to read the incredulous histories of this era. We’ve already seen massive amounts of middle class wealth lost through the crash of both the equity and housing markets, cut state and Federal budgets by the trillions watched as poverty rates have risen and unemployment has stayed stuck at historically high levels, delayed and possibly destroyed an entire generation’s hopes and dreams over the past five years. Enough.

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Republican policies mean women die earlier

by David Atkins

Social scientists David Kendig and Erika Cheng did a county-by-county study of women’s health in the United States from 1992-2006. What they found is that women’s health and life expectancies are actually declining in Republican and rural areas.

Here’s the map:

There’s something oddly familiar about this. Oh, right:

It’s a little unfair to blame this on Republicans specifically. Rural areas tend to be poorer, and poverty tends to negatively impact health.

Still, it’s hard not to notice the political correlation.

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Your moment of zen

by digby

“John McCain’s campaign has suggested that the best answer for the growing pressures on Social Security might be to cut cost of living adjustments or raise the retirement age. Let me be clear: I will not do either.”

Cutting social security during wage stagnation is madness

by David Atkins

Since cutting Social Security, a retirement program directly tied to wage earnings, appears to be a bipartisan thing now (sigh), it’s worth noting that wages are stagnant even for college graduates. Heidi Shierholz at the Economic Policy Institute explains:

The wages of young college graduates have fared poorly during the Great Recession and its aftermath. Between 2007 and 2012, the wages of young college graduates dropped 7.6 percent (9.4 percent for men and 6.6 percent for women). As the figure shows, however, the wages of young graduates fared poorly even before the Great Recession began; they saw no growth over the entire period of general wage stagnation that began during the business cycle of 2000–2007. Between 2000 and 2012, the wages of young college graduates decreased 8.5 percent (6.1 percent for men and 10.9 percent for women). These drops translate into substantial amounts of money; for full-time, full-year workers, the hourly wage declines from 2000 to 2012 represent a roughly $3,200 decline.

The wage declines since 2000 stand in sharp contrast to the strong wage growth for these groups from 1995 to 2000. During that period of low unemployment and overall strong wage growth, wages rose 19.1 percent for young college graduates. The stark difference between these two economic periods illustrates how the outcomes of young graduates vary considerably depending on whether the overall economy is experiencing low unemployment and strong wage growth or high unemployment and wage stagnation. Young graduates who enter the labor market during periods of strength (e.g., 1995–2000) face much stronger wage prospects than young graduates who enter the labor market during periods of weakness (e.g., 2001 to the present).

There’s even a handy chart:

Keep in mind that this is college graduates we’re talking about. Those with less education are faring even worse in this economy. Nor is it a secret that the boom of the late 1990s isn’t likely to be replicated any time soon.

But it’s not that everyone is hurting. The wealthy are doing great:

Workers’ wages are stagnant. The 401K system is a disaster. Unemployment is high. We have record income inequality and record corporate profits that aren’t translating in a trickle down of jobs. We face multiple emergent crises, not least of which is climate, that require a major jobs program to solve.

Cutting government jobs and wage-based social insurance programs at a time like this isn’t just bad policy. It’s madness.

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No the liberals do not have to make Sophie’s Choice


by digby

Greg Sargent has frequently made the case that liberals are going to have to choose between the sequester cuts and the Grand Bargain and therefore will need to make the affirmative case for why they are choosing the sequester.  (I never get the sense that if they “choose” the Grand Bargain that anyone other than a bunch of loser liberals will demand an explanation.)

And Greg is probably right that if the Republicans are smart enough to take yes for an answer, the liberals in the House will face the wrath of their Party apparatus and the president (and the liberal establishment) if they end up voting against a Grand Bargain. But it is NOT like the health care vote in which they were faced with the choice of walking away from a plan that greatly expanded healthcare for the working poor or giving up a public plan they wanted.  That was a choice between two positive outcomes — nobody was going to lose something they already had.

This, on the other hand, is a choice between two negatives.  Essentially, as before, the White House and the Democratic centrists are holding hostages but this time they’re basically telling the progressives that a hostage is going to get shot no matter what: Head Start and food inspections today or the elderly, the sick and the veterans tomorrow and they have to choose which one.  Why should progressives bear that responsibility? They didn’t get us into this mess.

I say they should just say no. Republicans do it all the time and everybody just throws up their hands and says, “well, I guess we’d better figure out something else.” They should hold fast and say “the sequester sucks and so does the Grand Bargain and we don’t support either one.” Most of the progressives didn’t vote for the sequester in the first place and bear no responsibility for it.  (And even those who did have no obligation to defend the monster that everyone assured them had no chance of ever becoming law.) This is a failure of the leadership of both parties and progressives are not required to betray their most fundamental values and defend any of these ridiculous cuts to anyone.

Just say no.  The “sequester vs Grand Bargain” is a phony construct made by man, not God, and there’s no reason on earth why any progressive should be forced to own either one. Find another way.

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A change in the consensus?

by digby

I am very hopeful that this great piece by Ezra Klein will be influential among the pundit class in Washington and give the congressional Dems some ballast. In essence he spells this out in great detail, with graphics and charts:

[Social Security] is not generous enough to counteract the sorry state of retirement savings nationwide. In a report for the New American Foundation, Michael Lind, Steven Hill, Robert Hiltonsmith and Joshua Holland survey this data and conclude that the ongoing debate over how to cut Social Security is all wrong: We need to make Social Security much more generous.

And then this — problematic in some respects, but really radical by establishment discourse standards:

Medicare uses its massive market power to negotiate much lower prices than private insurers. For that reason, the Congressional Budget Office estimated in 2011 that “average spending in traditional Medicare will be 89 percent of (that is, 11 percent less than) the spending that would occur if that same package of benefits was purchased from a private insurer.” Back during the health-care debate, the CBO estimated that a public option able to use Medicare’s pricing power could save more than $100 billion over 10 years.

In a policy paper for the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation, Robert Berenson, John Holahan and Stephen Zuckerman propose a package of changes that would save more than $700 billion over 10 years. One of the changes they propose is raising the age of eligibility from 65 to 67. But in order to blunt the impact of that change, they propose letting people between the ages of 65 and 67 buy in to Medicare on their own — that way, they can take advantage of Medicare’s lower prices, even if they’re paying for them out-of-pocket. “Buying into Medicare gives them as good a deal as they’re going to get,” Berenson says.

If it’s such a good deal for the 65-to-67 crowd, then why not let 55-year-olds buy into Medicare, or even let everybody buy into Medicare? “I’ve always assumed it was just political opposition from Republicans,” Berenson replied. I asked him to put aside the politics and just assess whether it would work. “Conceptually, I don’t see a problem,” he said.

Ezra might as well have screamed “No blood for oil!” in the pages of the Washington Post by suggesting that. And good on him. It’s a question that needs to be asked over and over again: if Medicare is the most cost effective system then why don’t we at least offer it to everyone?

Read the whole thing. I don’t know if any of this is doable, but he sure makes a good case for why we should try. Send the link to journalists and other influentials. Maybe this will be the the beginning of the turn-around for the beltway consensus. Let’s hope it’s not too late.

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The big why

by digby

I keep getting asked why I think the President wants to cut the so-called “entitlements.”  “It just doesn’t make sense,” they say.  “There must be some good reason.”

I do not know the answer to that. But he does want to cut them, there can be no doubt.  He said he wanted to do it since before he took office in 2009 and has continued to say it ever since.  No, he has not been explicit about it very often (although he has upon occasion) and campaigned on a murky fill-in-the-blank phrase “balanced approach to deficit reduction” but it’s been out there for the past four years.

So why?  Here’s what Krugman thinks:

So what’s this about? The answer, I fear, is that Obama is still trying to win over the Serious People, by showing that he’s willing to do what they consider Serious — which just about always means sticking it to the poor and the middle class. The idea is that they will finally drop the false equivalence, and admit that he’s reasonable while the GOP is mean-spirited and crazy.

Obviously, I can’t see into his heart, but that makes the most sense to me. I also think this has to do with his original desire to be the trans-partisan president who broke down all the partisan walls and “changed Washington.” If his legacy is the signing a private sector style health care plan while cutting “entitlements”, lowering the deficit, allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire for those making more than 400k a year, reversing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and turning Bush’s Global War on Terror into a Global Covert War on Terror, he will have succeeded in mostly pleasing people who hate him and disappointing those who placed their hopes and dreams in his hands — which by Village standards is the ultimate accomplishment.

The problem is that it will not have changed Washington — it will merely have changed the Democratic Party. Republicans will never acknowledge him as someone who “met them halfway.” A good number of them literally believe he’s the anti-Christ. So, they’re not going to give him any credit, ever. I think his liberal legacy is probably in bigger trouble (and definitely is if he ever signs a bill to cut Social Security, veterans benefits and Medicare.) But I think he’s counting on the Villagers pushing the idea that he did all the “tough” things, jumped on the third rail, passed health care, raised taxes etc — all the bad medicine these wealthy elites insist the silly rubes need to swallow in order for the country to be healthy again. And I guess they’ll be happy to give him that in the first rewrite of history. But it’s unlikely it will hold up because the keepers of his legacy will be liberal partisans and this isn’t the kind of record that makes them go out of their way to hail him as a Great President.

Keep in mind that while his opponents are clearly nuts, unlike Bill Clinton he is not fighting off mad dog Republicans and a political establishment that are so hostile that they will even detonate the nuclear option of impeachment. Nor is he presiding over a once in a generation economic boom. The love that Democrats have for old Bill is not based on his centrist policies or his ability to make deals with Republicans, although he certainly had and did both. He’s remembered fondly by Democrats because he survived a mortal threat to his presidency. It’s that old Darrell Hammond SNL sketch of Clinton coming to the podium after the failed Senate vote on impeachment saying “I…am…bulletproof. Next time, best bring kryptonite.” Partisans like that sort of thing, unsurprisingly.

I don’t think Obama will be remembered that way. He’s seen as trying to appease them not beat them. He and Clinton are basically the same animals on a policy level — but very different politicians. And when it comes to legacy, politics counts for a lot.

Anyway, I don’t really know what motivates any politician. All you can do is look at what they say and what they do and judge them on that basis. I just don’t think the Very Serious Villagers will care enough to protect President Obama’s “tough medicine” legacy beyond his last day in office. His enemies will continue to attack it, of course,it’s what they do. And it remains to be seen if his friends will defend it. There’s no guarantee.

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