NewsWorks - Blogs

Teach the Children Well

Sun, 12 Sep 2010 06:00:56 +0000

Discussions of public education today sometimes seem to dwell on money, taxes, contracts, scandals and power plays.

"A brilliant amateur"

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 14:59:25 +0000

It's easy to dismiss the Republicans when they reflexively attack President Obama, because, well, they're Republicans. And because, by dint of their own words and actions, they have intended all along to destroy him.

But it's not so easy to dismiss the work of Ron Suskind.

Liberals were always thrilled when Suskind, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and Pulitzer Prize winner, wrote damning books and stories about the Bush administration. Suskind, after all, is the guy who popularized the phrase "reality-based community," by quoting a Bush aide who disdained the notion that policy should be based on reality. And Suskind, drawing on thousands of internal government documents, concluded in one of his books that Bush was fixated on invading Iraq long before 9/11 gave him a pretext.

But now it's Obama's turn. Kudos to Suskind for working as a traditional journalist - taking the story wherever it goes, irrespective of any partisan inclinations. The result is Confidence Men, a buzz-worthy book that may well provide Republicans with fresh weaponry. So be it. If Obama's own economic insiders are painting him as an ineffective leader, the reality-based community will be hard pressed to dismiss the portrait.

The usual caveats apply, of course. Dissing the boss in mid-tenure has become a Washington tradition; prior to Obama and Bush, it happened to Bill Clinton. Ticked off aides typically have motives of their own ("if only he had listened to me" and "it's not my fault"). And some players quoted in these books typically insist that they never said the nasty stuff that was attributed to them (a standard attempt to cover their derrieres.)

But, knowing what we already know about Obama (notably his penchant for floating above the fray, before swooping down to endorse half-measures or to surrender altogether), key passages in the book ring true. Especially since other books have chronicled episodes of dysfunction within the Obama economic team.

For instance, Paul Volcker, a former Fed chairman who ran an Obama's economic advisory board, told Suskind: "Obama is smart, but smart is not enough. Leadership is another thing entirely, about knowing your mind enough to make real decisions, ones that last." And Lawrence Summers, who was arguably Obama's gatekeeper on economic matters, reportedly complained to budget director Peter Orszag, "We’re home alone. There’s no adult in charge. Clinton would never have made these mistakes." (Summers, a controversial figure, now denies he said that. For what it's worth.)

It's indisputable, as Obama always reminds us, that he inherited an economic disaster from the hapless Bush regime. But Suskind, having absorbed the views of several hundred sources, writes with authority that Obama ("a brilliant amateur") lacks the requisite leadership skills to clean things up.

These passages may strike a familiar chord with disillusioned Obama supporters: "The administration’s domestic policy was fast becoming a debate society....Obama would sit on high, trying to judge if there was any shared ground between the competing debate teams that might coalesce into a policy." Obama himself told Suskind in an interview that he's always looking for "the perfect technical solution."

But Suskind questions whether Obama's "above-the-fray perch" was "a model for sound decision making, (or) a crutch to delay or avoid the decisions only a president can make, or a recipe for producing half-measures — a pinch of this, matched with a scoop of that — masquerading as solutions."

Suskind writes that Obama's statesmanlike passivity has similarly dictated his dealings with the Republicans who are bent on destroying him. During the first two years of his tenure, Obama was always "respectfully acknowledging opponents' positions, even those with thin evidence behind them, that then get stitched together into some pragmatic conclusion — but hollow."

Worse yet, Suskind writes that Obama blew early opportunities to get tough with Wall Street, because he allowed himself to be "systematically undermined" by key aides (starting with Treasury chief Tim Geithner) who came from Wall Street and were thus part of the problem. Yet although, in Suskind's words, the aides' behavior was "perilously close to insubordination," Obama never slapped them down. And when word got around that it was possible to block Obama without paying any price, other powerful Washington players took it as evidence that the president could be rolled. As Suskind puts it, the bankers and the health care providers quickly concluded that Obama "exhibited certain human frailties that might be easily exploited. What they also saw - many of them managers in banking and health care with long experience - were that his words were not being translated into action."

The White House, as expected, is pushing back on the Suskind book, listing various factual errors. (For instance, economic aide Gene Sperling actually played tennis at the University of Minnesota, not at the University of Michigan. I'm glad that's settled). Whatever; Suskind can clean those up for the paperback. The bottom line is that the Obama fans who loved Suskind's harsh depictions of Dick Cheney will have a tough time contending that the author's reportorial toolbox is any different now.

It's all well and good that most Americans still find Obama to be "likeable." But what Confidence Men makes clear is that a president can't be effective unless he is respected, unless the players in town fear the consequences of crossing him. If Obama's own economic team feel free to cross him, then why should his critics feel cowed? And is it too late for Obama to man up, as he seems to be doing this morning, with his tax-the-rich deficit-reduction plan? All questions worth pondering by the reality-based community.

-------

Follow me on Twitter, @dickpolman1

"A graveyard for good ideas"

Fri, 28 Jan 2011 18:32:49 +0000

Warning: This is not a sexy story. Legislative procedure is never sexy.

But it’s worth noting what didn’t happen this week in the scerlotic U.S. Senate. The leaders in the so-called “world’s greatest deliberative body” - though I prefer to call it Dysfunction Junction – had a golden opportunity to cure their notorious institutional paralysis, but instead they basically said this:

Nah.

Even with their feet stuck in quicksand, they refused to fight their way out. Given the chance to reform the Senate’s filibuster rules, and thereby end the gridlock that has increasingly plagued the Senate for several decades, Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell announced yesterday that they had reached a gentlemen’s agreement to do virtually nothing. Which means that minority tyranny will continue, that a supermajority of 60 senators will still be required, as a matter of routine, to break filibusters and get stuff enacted.

Reid and McConnell insisted that they had forged a compromise. It’s a voluntary deal. They’ll supposedly “exercise restraint” in tying up the chamber’s business. But in practice, the deal is useless, because the rank and file isn’t bound to it. Freshman Utah Republican Mike Lee, one of the tea-party guys, promptly declared yesterday that he intends to filibuster the crucial Senate bill to raise the national debt ceiling.

This winter, a number of ideas were being kicked around to curb the filibuster (the word is derived from vrijbuiter, which old Dutch for “looter”), to at least make the tactic more difficult to sustain. Reform was long overdue. Until the 1960s, the Senate averaged one filibuster a year; during the ‘60s, it averaged 4.6 a year; during the ‘70s, it averaged 11.2 a year. Rampant exploitation of the rule became de rigueur during the ‘90s, when ideological fervor truly took hold.

That decade saw an average of 36 filibusters a year – although, in retrospect, that stat is a pittance. Since 2007 the minority Republicans have used the tactic on an unprecedented scale - 70 per year - to grind the process to a halt; last December, the Senate last month couldn't even pass the annual budget.

If the famed French social critic Alexis de Tocqueville was alive today, he would knowingly nod. Back in 1832, while observing the Senate in action, he praised the quality of its members, but warned in his writings that “a minority of the nation dominating the Senate could completely paralyze the will of the majority…and that is contrary to the spirit of constitutional government.”

The handful of senators who were pushing filibuster reform would surely agree with that. They had suggested a number of ideas – lowering the number of senators required to break a filibuster, bringing it steadily down from the current 60 during the first eight days of paralysis; requiring the obstructionists to actually stand there on camera and actually conduct the filibuster, rather than paralyzing the chamber by merely threatening to filibuster; requiring that a fixed number of filibustering senators hold the floor on day one, and hike the required number for days two, three, and beyond; requiring that the tactic be used only when a bill is up for final passage, as opposed to its use on any or all amendments.

None of those reforms will happen, not just because the Republicans predictably said no, but because a sizable share of Democrats also prefer the status quo. After all, they could be in the minority some day (perhaps as soon as 2013), and they might want to avail themselves of the same paralysis tactic – partisan payback, giving the GOP a taste of its own bitter medicine. What a far cry from the Senate of 1832, when de Tocqueville was lauding the members for their “lofty thoughts” and “generous instincts.” (The senators of 1832 had yet to employ the filibuster.)

Lofty thoughts are a luxury today, with the 24/7 news cycle and the ideological discipline. The routine obstruction of Senate business via filibuster has become an American tradition, like steroids and Twitter. Far be it for the Senate to address its own inertia. Foiled reformer Tom Udall, the freshman New Mexico senator, said the other day that the Senate is merely “a graveyard for good ideas,” which strikes me as an apt description – given the leaden tread of life in Dysfunction Junction.

"A thumb on the scales"

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 14:35:18 +0000

Good news: The federal Defense of Marriage Act - the anti-gay Clinton-era law that defined marriage as a union of man and woman - seems destined to become as obsolete as the videocassette.

"Artificial deadlines"

Thu, 20 Jan 2011 16:30:11 +0000

On the hilarity meter, Ricky Gervais at the Golden Globes is a distant runnerup to John Boehner on Capitol Hill. Yesterday, as the Republican House was gearing up for its vote to "repeal" health care reform - a long-awaited stunt, roughly equivalent on the substance scale to the news that our Zodiac signs may have changed - Boehner said that his party brethren would soon develop their own reform ideas. Indeed, he had directed four House committees to get right to work.

But when would the GOP's bright ideas be translated into actual specific legislative proposals? Here was Speaker Boehner's punchline response, delivered with a straight face:

"I don't know that we need artificial deadlines for the committees to act."

Quelle surprise! That remark epitomizes the Republicans' multi-decade non-response to the health care crisis. In translation, it means that the committees will drag things out and do as little as possible. Nothing new there. Republicans have never championed substantive, specific solutions, largely because it's not in their DNA. Worse yet, they have typically denied that such a crisis even exists.

They basically ran Washington during the first decade of the new century, yet even as the crisis got increasingly worse - according to the Commonwealth Fund, the number of underinsured Americans (those whose coverage wasn't sufficient to protect them from high costs) jumped 60 percent between 2003 and 2007 - Republicans did virtually nothing. President Bush best summed up the party attitude when he said, in July '07:

"I mean, people have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room."

So Boehner yesterday was right in character. House Republicans knew they had to throw a bone to the tea-party crowd by making good on their (symbolic) campaign promise to repeal; it was no sweat to sloganeer one more time, the party is brilliant at that. But when it comes to the hard work of governing - in this case, the need to actually replace the health reform law with something presumably more effective - that's another story entirely.

House Republicans really have no clue what to do next. If they did have any such inkling, they would have spent their two years in exile working on their own reform specifics, and readying substantive bills for a timely winter '11 rollout. But, no surprise, they did nothing. Not a word about how they'd extend coverage to more than 40 million uninsured, or how they'd bar insurance firms from kicking sick people off the rolls, or how they'd help those with pre-existing health woes who have been denied coverage.

Instead, they're passing a non-binding resolution about how those four House panels, acting without "artificial deadlines," will henceforth kick around the usual broad Republican themes - tax credits, free-market solutions, medical malpractice reform - none of which even begin to address the systemic injustices.

Anybody remember what happened in November 2009, when the minority House Republicans served up a cursory health reform plan of their own? The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office checked it out, and concluded that the GOP blueprint would extend health coverage to three million uninsured Americans in the first 10 years - barely keeping pace with population growth - and that it would cut $68 billion from the deficit in 10 years....whereas the '09 Democratic plan would extend coverage to 36 million people, and cut the 10-year deficit by $104 billion. (The CBO has since upped the projected deficit cuts, under the health reform law, to $140 billion.)

No wonder the GOP is in no hurry to get specific about a replacement plan; why risk being embarrassed again? And even if the House Republicans somehow did manage to drill down into the details of such a plan, they may well have trouble uniting all their members. In 2010, a rising Republican star, congressman Paul Ryan, floated a deficit-reduction bill that featured some health reform ideas - namely, a partial privatization of Medicare and Medicaid. Care to guess how many of his fellow Republicans signed on as co-sponsors last summer? Thirteen.

Yeah, they do have a few specific ideas. For instance, they want to let people buy health insurance across state lines, as a way to expand choice and competition - so that, for instance, if you live in New Jersey and see a cheap, bare-bones coverage plan in Alabama, you should be free to buy the Alabama plan.

The problem is, some states regulate the insurance industry more severely than other states. (This is called state's rights, a concept that Republicans supposedly embrace.) State insurance officials who vigorously regulate the industry, and who require that the industry offer decent coverage, don't want to see their bailwicks flooded with lousy coverage plans from low-regulation states. If that race to the bottom ever happened - in accordance with GOP free-market fantasies - you might as well throw out the concept of state consumer protection. And it probably won't happen anyway; besides, the new health reform law already permits cross-border purchases - coupled with rules designed to protect the consumer.

The bottom line is that House Republicans really aren't serious about replacing what they have symbolically repealed. That kind of governing is way too hard. It's much easier to just talk about replacement, as part of a messaging plan for the '12 election cycle. They do that sort of thing quite well - although, even here, they do have some challenges. According to the new bipartisan NBC-Wall Street Journal poll, only 25 percent of Americans believe that the congressional Republicans will bring the right kind of change, only 34 percent view them favorably, and 55 percent believe they'll be too inflexible when dealing with President Obama; by contrast, 55 percent believe that Obama will strike the right balance with the Republicans, and, most tellingly, Obama's approval rating is now 53 percent, his highest in 18 months. At minumum, Republicans may well be on notice that Americans in general wish to see substantive replacement ideas, as opposed to the usual protestations of No.

After all, the unrepealed health reform law has some alluring consumer-friendly provisions; on the House floor yesterday, one congressman duly listed them: "Making sure people don’t lose their coverage once they get sick; letting dependent children stay on their parents’ insurance until they turn 26; making sure anyone who wants to buy insurance can purchase a policy, regardless of pre-existing conditions."

So said Joe Heck of Nevada...a Republican.

Do the Republicans have any substantive plans to re-enact what their own guy so concisely lauded? Maybe in some distant era. As Speaker Boehner pointed out, there's no need for "artifical deadlines."

"Blowing the chance"

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 14:41:40 +0000

In a potential reprise of 2010, conservative Republican ideologues somehow seem determined to help the enemy Democrats win seats in the U. S. Senate.

You'll recall what happened two years ago. Republicans had a slam-dunk race in Delaware, with Mike Castle all teed up to win the seat - until the ideologues botched the scenario by handing the GOP nomination to laughable Christine O'Donnell. It was the same deal in Nevada, where Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid was ripe for the picking - until the ideologues botched the scenario by handing the GOP nomination to laughable Sharron Angle.

Now the pattern threatens to repeat itself. Maine was an easy GOP keeper until moderate Olympia Snowe summarily announced her retirement and said she was fed up with purity politics; now, the likely winner this fall in Maine is an independent who would give the Republicans fits. Elsewhere, Nebraska appeared to be an easy GOP pickup thus autumn (Democrat Ben Nelson is leaving), but the litmus-test groups are ignoring the most electable Republican, the state's attorney general, and instead supporting a "fiscal conservative" purist who has lost three previous Senate races. Same thing in purple-state Wisconsin, where the GOP seems poised to snatch the seat now held by retiring Democrat Herb Kohl - but the litmus-test groups are ignoring the electable ex-governor, Tommy Thompson, and boosting a more conservative guy who has twice lost statewide races.

Kimberly A. Strassel, a conservative Wall Street Journal columnist, lamented the other day that the purists, by "ginning up divisive GOP primaries," are making it more difficult for the Republicans to achieve their primary aim: winning control of the Senate chamber. She warned: "Any group messing in a state that ought to be a Republican lock is messing conservative priorities....The question for every conservative in this election is whether the possibility of getting a slightly more ideologically pure senator is worth blowing the chance" of winning back the Senate. Republicans currently hold 47 seats, and have little margin for error if they hope to attain 51.

Which brings us to Indiana, arguably the best example of all.

Dick Lugar, the popular six-term Indiana Republican senator, is currently fighting for his political life - early voting in the May 8 GOP primary began yesterday - because his occasional forays into bipartisan cooperation have rendered him anathema to the right-wing absolutists. Six years ago, in a bad Republican election year (Bush, Iraq), Lugar won re-election with 87 percent of the vote, and he's be a cinch for another win this fall. But the absolutists based in Washington (Club for Growth, FreedomWorks, National Rifle Association) are working to knock him off on May 8 and replace him with a right-wing guy who'd be far more vulnerable to a Democratic challenger in November.

Put simply, moderate Democratic congressman Joe Donnelly wouldn't have a prayer against Lugar. But if Donnelly is matched against tea-partying Richard Mourdock, a reclusive geologist who hates the limelight, and whose entire political career consists of 16 months as state treasurer...well, suffice it to say that Donnelly's prayers would be answered.

Club for Growth, which takes pride in knocking off Republican incumbents it deems insufficiently pure, today launched a new radio ad against Lugar, telling Indiana primary voters: "Dick Lugar might be a statesman, but he's not a conservative." That message neatly encapsulates where we are today, as a political culture: It's now considered bad to be a statesman. In today's Senate, there's apparently no room for that sort of person anymore.

Lugar has been devoted for decades to the issue of nuclear arms control. The problem is, success on that crucial security issue can only be achieved by (gasp) working across party lines - which he did many years ago with Democratic Senator San Nunn, and which he did, far more recently, with another Democratic senator, Barack Obama...

Bingo! Cue the right-wing ads that currently tag Lugar as "Obama's favorite Republican."

Another big sin is that Lugar voted for Obama's two Supreme Court nominees (that used to be a common bipartisan practice); plus, he voted for the government rescue of Wall Street and the auto industry. On the other hand, Lugar is resolutely anti-abortion, he opposed Obama's economic stimulus, he opposed Obamacare, he has endorsed Paul Ryan's right-wing budget plan, he has endorsed the Keystone XL oil pipeline plan - but apparently none of that is good enough for the ideologues. Apparently they'd rather put Indiana in play for the Democrats.

But Lugar himself is still very much in play. His in-state financial and political network is vast. He has a lot more money than Mourdock, who by circumstance has been forced to rely on the broadcast clout of those outside purist groups. And that very fact has given Lugar a potent issue. Lugar is 80 years old, but clearly hip to the potency of negative advertising. He's painting himself as the true parochial Hoosier, running ads that assail "Mourdock and his D.C. cronies," and warning that "Mourdock has already sold out to D.C. outsiders."

That's a bit rich coming from Lugar, who has been living in tony McLean, Virginia since 1977, but, who knows, he just might be able to help save the contemporary GOP from its worst absolutist tendencies. And to strike a blow for the apparently archaic notion that, every once in awhile, it might be wise to reach across the aisle.

-------

Breaking news this afternoon: Rick Santorum has pulled the plug on his quixotic candidacy, rather than risk being embarrassed by a defeat in his home state. (Remember how he boasted during the debates about twice winning Senate races in a swing state? Never mind.) And Mitt Romney immediately benefits from his departure, saving the $3 million that Mitt was set to spend on attack ads in Pennsylvania. I'll do a proper Santorum euology here, early tomorrow.

-------

Follow me on Twitter, @dickpolman1

"Can't anybody here play this game?"

Tue, 12 Apr 2011 15:11:12 +0000

Don't forget to circle May 5 on your calendar! Fox News is slated to broadcast the first Republican debate of the '12 presidential election cycle, live from South Carolina, and the stage will undoubtedly be crowded with the party's best and brightest...

Whoa, allow me to amend that. Here are the debaters: Newt Gingrich (unelectable), Buddy Roemer (huh? who? he's an ex-Louisiana governor who hasn't run for anything in 20 years), Ron "Gold Standard" Paul (unelectable), Tim Pawlenty (he's on the waiting list for a charisma transplant), and Rick Santorum (unelectable). Right now, that's it. And Newt hinted yesterday that he might not even show up.

Good grief. Tuning in to watch that lineup is akin to buying baseball tickets for the Camden Riversharks. Can't the Republicans field even a decent minor league team? Or, as Casey Stengel reputedly said while managing the New York Mets, "Can't anybody here play this game?"

The Republican talent thus far seems so thin that NBC, Politico, and the Ronald Reagan Foundation recently felt compelled to postpone, until autumn, a long-planned California debate originally scheduled for May 2. A Reagan Foundation spokesman said with great diplomacy that those sponsors prefer to wait until numerous "impressive" candidates inevitably come to the fore. But the South Carolina Republican party is forging ahead on May 5 anyway. I know I speak for all Americans when I say that the impending Game of Thrones on HBO can't possibly be more scintillating than watching Buddy Roemer cross swords with Ron Paul.

As I said in my Sunday newspaper column, Barack Obama's re-election prospects are enhanced by the opposition's vacuum at the top. This vacuum is also historic; according to Gallup, rank-and-file Republicans haven't been this tepid about their choices since the dawn of modern polling in 1952.

Indeed, Mitt Romney - who formally announced his exploratory committee yesterday, and who, by dint of his business and political experience and his '08 campaign seasoning, should normally qualify as the clear frontrunner - barely pulls 20 percent of likely Republican primary voters. Actually, his Massachusetts health care plan, a model for the new federal law, is only part of the problem; and his Mormon faith, which turns off a lot of Christian conservatives, is only part of the problem. More fundamental is the fact that he comes off as a conventional politician - at a time when the Republican base is looking for someone unconventional. In the words of ex-Bush strategist Mark McKinnon, "People don't want the Cola. They want the Un-Cola." Yet Romney's 20 percent tops the field; that's the worst showing for a GOP top guy in Gallup history.

The situation is apparently so dire that Republicans on Capitol Hill are openly dissing the prospective candidates. Senator John Boozman of Arkansas reportedly said yesterday, "Republicans have always been for who's next in line, and there's nobody in line." Congressman Charlie Dent, who represents a Pennsylvania swing district said that "people back home want to see more options." And California congressman David Dreier said - here's a shocker, you've never heard this one before - "Everybody's looking for a Ronald Reagan, and they don't see one."

But if the GOP's House and Senate members are so unimpressed with the likely '12 lineup, why don't they put some of their own serious players on the field? (Ron Paul and Michele Bachmann are not serious contenders; besides, no sitting House member has ascended to the presidency since 1880.) The Senate is the natural place to look, but not a single sitting senator has voiced interest in running for president (John Thune and Marco Rubio have said no) - and that's unusual, given the fact that your average senator sees a president when he looks in the mirror. Why so few takers on Capitol Hill? Because congressional Republicans are engaging in risky political behavior - threatening shutdowns, proposing to dismantle Medicare and Medicaid - and that could easily burden a candidate who has no choice but to own it.

And why do so many other Republican desirables seem inclined to sit out 2012? Because it's tough to take on an incumbent who's armed with $1 billion and who will likely be buoyed by an incrementally improving economy. Yesterday, in fact, The Wall Street Journal surveyed 56 economists and found that 71 percent foresee a likely second Obama term (plus, there was a general consensus that the economy will hit 3.6 percent growth by the end of the year, that it will add 200,000 jobs a month over the next year, and that the jobless rate will be down to 8.3 percent by the end of 2011).

Which brings us to that May 5 minor-league contest. I have a fantasy solution for Fox News: Scrap the whole thing, and propose an alternative debate that would be limited only to those Republican players who have exhibited zero or fleeting interest in the race: Mitch Daniels, Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, Thune, Rubio, Gen. David Petraeus, and perhaps Mike Huckabee....that would be a far more impressive lineup. I'm not sure what should be done with the ubiquitous but increasingly marginalized Sarah Palin, but perhaps she would thrive best off stage, sharing birther chatter in a padded room with Donald Trump.

"Class warfare!"

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 15:35:01 +0000

Like Pavlovian dogs, Republicans in recent days have reflexively barked their favorite rhetorical trope: "Class warfare!"

How tiresomely predictable. While President Obama was readying his tax-the-rich deficit-reduction plan for a Monday rollout, the GOP were already howling on the Sunday shows about the dreaded CW. In the words of budget maven and aspiring Medicare-killer Paul Ryan, "Class warfare will simply divide this country more." He was duly echoed by Republican brethren like Sen. Lindsey Graham, who remarked, "When you pick one area of the economy and you say, 'we're going to tax those (rich) people because most people are not those people, that's class warfare."

This has been the GOP's conditioned response to tax-burden issues since around 1992, when party wordsmiths began to own the phrase via frequent repetition. What's amazing, of course, is that the Republicans have been allowed to get away with it - given the fact that the GOP's rich clientele has been incrementally getting richer at the expense of everyone else. If there has indeed been "class warfare" in this country during the past three decades, the rich have already won. They have already staged their victory parade, brandishing a surrender document signed by most of their fellow citizens.

What's also tiresomely predictable is that the Democrats long ago ceded the CW phrase. Republicans understand so much better than their hapless opponents that capturing the language is crucially important - because when you capture the language, and frame the terms of debate, you have a darn good chance to capture hearts and minds.

In our inverted political universe, if you demand that the richest Americans sacrifice more in order to benefit the rest of the citizenry during a severe fiscal crisis, supposedly that's "class warfare." But if you defend the rich, safeguard their money, and demand (via deep federal program cuts) that the burden of sacrifice fall on the people far lower on the income scale...nope, supposedly that is not "class warfare." We might as well be characters in a Superman comic book, dwelling in Bizarro World, where the motto is "Us do opposite!"

I first recall hearing the CW phrase in '92, when incumbent George H. W. Bush put it in frequent rotation ("Candidate Clinton is playing the old games that liberals love to play, class warfare, divide Americans rich from poor, one group from another"). Bush lost that race, but the GOP was undaunted. Newt Gingrich used it a lot during his brief House ascent, and the younger George Bush bludgeoned Al Gore with it during the 2000 campaign. (Then, in 2001, came the Bush tax cuts that were heavily tilted toward the rich, and that helped exacerbate the growing income disparity between the rich and the middle class...but, according to the GOP's framing of the phrase, that was not "class warfare.")

How weird it is that the GOP can skate relatively unscathed with its insistence that taxing the rich will "divide this country" - when, in fact, we are already starkly divided along economic lines, with the rich reaping the largesse. I hesitate to cite the obvious empirical facts - because numbers are boring and post-fact readers will choose not to believe them anyway - but what the heck:

For instance, as The Wall Street Journal reports: "The average tax rate for the top 400 earners in the U.S. fell to as low as 16.62 percent in 2007, from a recent peak of 29.9 percent in 1995," thanks largely to the Bush tax cuts on capital gains and dividends. As the Journal pointed out, roughly 56 percent of the top earners' incomes, on average, are comprised of capital gains" - a percentage that humble citizens can't hope to match.

Indeed, as studies have shown, the various Bush tax cuts on investment income did wonders for those who make $10 million or more a year - boosting take-home pay by an average of $500,000 per household. By contrast, those windfalls did little for the average person. As one recent statistical chart pointed out, 70 percent of the money garnered from the investment tax cuts went to the people who make more than $200,000 a year - the top two percent on the income scale. All this, during a decade when the average household income was flat or falling.

This was hardly just a Bush phenomenon, of course; the rich have been getting richer, while everyone else has been falling behind, since at least 1979. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, "Between 1979 and 2007, the average after-tax incomes for the top one percent (of earners) rose by 281 percent after adjusting for inflation - an increase in income of $973,100 per household - compared to increases of 25 percent ($11,200 per household)" for the middle class.

As Warren Buffett quipped on ABC News back in 2003, "Well, I'll tell you, if it's 'class warfare,' my class is winning."

The Obama team was right last night when it circulated an email denouncing the Republicans' recycled CW language as a "rhetorical smokescreen." As the stats make clear, the people who have clout have long waged "class warfare" against those who lack it. And if all the polls are accurate, most Americans are open to the idea of demanding more fiscal sacrifice from those who can best afford it.

Obama and the Democrats may never own the CW language, but they do have a fresh opportunity to frame this deficit-reduction debate as a choice between sacrifice and selfishness - and to challenge the GOP to pick a side.

-------

The White House wants the tax-burden battle to dominate the news cycle, if only to divert attention from the embarrassing new book by Ron Suskind, chronicling the Obama economic team. (I referenced it here yesterday.) And here's a new embarrassment:

In the book, Obama aide Anita Dunn was quoted as complaining that "this place would be in court for a hostile workplace....Because it actually fit all of the classic legal requirements for a genuinely hostile workplace to women." A few days ago, Dunn insisted that she had been quoted of context. But Suskind had recorded his Dunn interview; yesterday, he shared it with a Washington Post reporter. And today, the reporter shared it with us. Here's Dunn, talking to Suskind:

"I remember once I told Valerie that, I said if it weren’t for the president, this place would be in court for a hostile workplace. Because it actually fit all of the classic legal requirements for a genuinely hostile workplace to women."

When a Washington player claims that he or she was quoted out of context, it generally means that he or she has been busted.

-------

Follow me on Twitter, @dickpolman1

"Everyone and no one"

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 16:19:48 +0000

One year from now, assuming we don't suffer another hanging chad crisis, we'll know the tally of the '12 presidential election. There's no point trying to predict it, because there are way too many variables - most notably, the volatile public mood and the fact that all the major players are burdened with baggage.

Starting with President Obama.

"It is dreck"

Thu, 23 Sep 2010 13:46:04 +0000

The most striking and startling aspect of the House Republicans' "Pledge to America" – a purported governing document, unveiled today – is its implicit message to the tea-party insurgents.