One Foot Outside the Tent

Nothing But Words?

2012-01-23T15:15:00.005-05:00

If you believe Rasmussen, Newt Gingrich has picked up 31 percentage points against Mitt Romney (from 22 down to 9 up) among Florida likely voters in the space of two weeks. By all accounts, Newt's extraordinary performance in the debates leading up to the South Carolina primary was the proximate cause of his victory there, and thus the momentum that he's carrying into Florida. We've always known that having a way with words, especially with the unscripted words that can't be transmitted to a candidate by way of speech writers and teleprompters, is an important asset on the campaign trail. It clearly becomes all the more important an asset to the extent votes turn on the performance of the candidates in televised debates.

Let's stipulate that Newt's gifts as an extemporaneous rhetorician give him a leg up over Romney in the Republican primaries and probably would give him a leg up over Obama in general election debates. No one will argue with the proposition that Gingrich's fluency will help him make a case for himself as the Republican nominee and a general election candidate. But Newt's fluency is his case for his own presidential candidacy. At least you'd get that impression from this spot:

Has there every been a serious presidential candidate whose principal claim to a major party presidential nomination is less a matter of who he is or what he'll do as president, than how glibly he'll speak on the campaign trail? Ask yourself this: what does Gingrich regard as the most important thing to do after he gets to the White House? Although I've been paying pretty close attention, I couldn't begin to tell you. (I couldn't tell you off the top of my head with Romney either, but I'd know where to look it up.) But I know all about how, if he wins the nomination, Gingrich will challenge Obama to a series of Lincoln-Douglas style debates and, unlike the president, he won't need a teleprompter.

Who Won Iowa?

2012-01-19T13:53:00.007-05:00

You may have heard that the official recount of votes cast in the Iowa Caucuses ended with Rick Santorum 32 votes ahead of Mitt Romney, but with the votes from 8 separate electoral precincts missing, and therefore not recounted. The Iowa Republican Party has decided, on that basis, to call the election a tie.

Josh Marshall thinks that's a "cop-out for the ages":

"The rationale for calling this a tie, according to the Des Moines Register, which has the story as an exclusive, is that 8 precincts’ numbers are lost permanently and will never be certified. So in practice it’s a tie, too close to call, etc. That of course probably applies to pretty much all recount type elections — Bush v Gore, maybe Franken v. Coleman, etc. The vagueries of the process itself is too imprecise in some sense to tell you who ‘won’ in some Platonic (the other sense of the word) sense. But in normal elections where the people holding it aren’t deeply invested in not letting one guy win we have a name for that kind [of] situation — Rick Santorum won."

I guess I'll just have to add the views of Josh Marshall and the Iowa Republican Party to the immense list of things I don't get. Neither of them, as far as I can see, is making a lick of sense.

Let me see if I've gotten this straight. We have two vote counts, the original one conducted on the night the votes were cast and the recount undertaken over the last couple of weeks. You'd have thought that the original vote raised at least a rebuttable presumption that Romney won by 8 votes. Although I don't know it for a fact, I presume that the vote-counting methodology employed in the recount is at least marginally less fallible than the vote-counting methodology used on election night since, otherwise, there wouldn't be any point to recounting the votes in the first place. So let's stipulate that, to the extent the universe of votes counted and then recounted overlap, the recounted totals are more reliable than the totals yielded by the original count.

The question before us, then, is whether the recounted totals rebut the presumption that Romney won by 8 votes raised by the original count. Any vote-counting methodology, to be sure, comes with a margin of error. Yet we know one thing for sure: the universe of votes originally counted and recounted in this instance don't overlap, at least to the extent of the votes coming from the eight missing districts. So how can the recount rebut the presumption raised by the original count?

To join Marshall in calling Santorum the winner you have to subscribe to the preposterous notion that counting all the votes through unobjectionable methods on election night is a less reliable measure of an election outcome than recounting only some of the votes with marginally more accuracy. That's to say that you have to believe that vote totals compiled through normally acceptable methods that may be incorrect are less reliable than totals that are known to be incorrect with utter certainty. And to join the Iowa Republican Party in calling the election a tie you have to subscribe to the equally preposterous notion that the count and the recount are equally reliable measures of the election outcome that therefore cancel each other out.

Unless I'm missing something under these circumstances, there's still only one intellectually defensible answer to the question of who won the Iowa Caucuses: that would be Mitt Romney.

What's Newt For?

2012-01-17T16:23:00.012-05:00

As usual, nobody on the stage in last night's debate could match Newt Gingrich as an extemporaneous rhetorician. When anyone else was asked a question, he tried to give the appearance of responsiveness by stringing his talking points together seamlessly. Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum do this pretty well by now, but if you pay attention you can still spot the seams in their answers where one talking point ends and the next one begins. You hardly have to pay attention to spot them when Rick Perry's talking--you just have to notice the momentary panic in his eyes during the couple of seconds it takes him to figure out which of the four or five things he can remember to say comes closest to being an answer to the question asked.

Newt's playing in a different debating league. He composes cohesive paragraphs on the spot that squarely answer the question he's addressing. Even if, like me, you're not very sympathetic to most of what he has to say, you can't help but appreciate the economy and eloquence with which he often manages to say it. Consider this:

Whatever you think about the content of what Gingrich said, you'd have to be tone-deaf not to hear the music in his words. It's hard to think of any other political figure, including Obama, who thinks on his feet well enough to have pulled something like this off. If a presidential election were a debating contest, Newt would already be trying out desk chairs for the Oval Office.

But what good did his eloquence last night really do him as a presidential candidate? Newt didn't manage in the course of a two-hour debate to lay a glove on Romney, above all, because Newt wasn't willing to call him a predatory capitalist to his face. And did you hear a single word out of Newt's mouth that would tend to show that he, rather than Santorum, ought to be the standard-bearer of Republican conservatives? If anything, Santorum looked better equipped to mix it up with Romney and unite the party's doctrinaire conservatives. Newt did a bang-up job last night of making conservatives feel good about themselves, but he didn't do much to make them think of him as a potential president.

Truth be told, last night's performance confirmed something that we already knew: namely, that Newt has never been able to hold his own in hand-to-hand political combat against a skilled and determined opponent. Although he started from a position of strength, he got taken to the cleaners by Bill Clinton in the 1990s. And he was taken apart by the Romney campaign as soon as he established himself as the Republican front runner last November.

As a politician, Newt has always talked a better game than he played. His way with words is nothing to sneeze at. But Obama wouldn't already be president and Romney wouldn't be closing in on the Republican presidential nomination if they weren't players.

Has Obama Found His Voice?

2012-01-12T15:37:00.006-05:00

There’s a general feeling of relief in Democratic circles now that Obama has started making populist noises and bearing his teeth at Republicans. That’s understandable: it’s a lot easier to rally behind a president throwing punches rather than taking them on the chin. Moreover, there's no denying that Obama has scored his share of modest tactical victories over the last couple of months, like facing down House Republicans over a two-month extension of the payroll tax holiday.

I guess you can’t blame Democrats for clinging to the hope that, if Obama can win enough tactical skirmishes, we’ll reach a tipping point where disenchanted independent voters will start looking forward rather than backwards at the disappointments of the last three years. But when you think about it, that strategy's more than a little far-fetched. Consider how it looks to Yuval Levin from the right:

"Based on what the president and his advisers have said and done in recent weeks, that strategy appears to consist of creating populist confrontations with Congress and then complaining that Washington is broken because Republicans won’t let the president have his way. That’s a strategy that tells the public that the current situation in Washington is untenable and change is needed. Is that not an odd way for a Democratic incumbent president (whose party also controls the Senate) to run against a Republican outsider? . . .

"The Obama team’s approach might make sense if the substance of their policy proposals were enormously popular, so that telling the public that these could be enacted if only Obama is given a few more years to push them might help his case. But what are those proposals? A payroll-tax holiday? Higher taxes on the wealthy? Is there anything else?"

To put Levin’s questions a little differently: what is the Republican “do-nothing congress” supposed to be keeping Obama from doing? In 2008, he came to the presidency assuring us that we could cure imperfections of the status quo without depriving ourselves of any of its substantial advantages. We could, for example, secure health insurance for 40 million-odd uninsured Americans without anyone having to give up the health insurance they already had; and we could pump less climate-changing CO2 into the air without suffering serious economic consequences because green jobs would quickly replace the jobs lost in the production of dirty energy. And as long as we were willing to revert to Clinton-era tax rates for families making more than $250K/year, we could do all this and much more without punching a hole in the federal balance sheet.

What sounded pretty good to a lot of us then now sounds like the sort of thing you’d find on a document preserved in a time capsule. That’s why Democrats are trying to say as little about about the agenda that got Obama elected as possible. That's understandable, I guess, inasmuch as the world looks a lot different now than it looked in 2008 from any ideological vantage point. Republicans, including presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich were saying things about health care reform and climate change that sound just as dated in exactly the same way.

Yet I think I know, at least in broad outline, what the 2012 Republican pitch will be. It will almost certainly go something like this: unless we as a nation enact some paler version of the Paul Ryan budget we’re going to end up like those tottering European social democracies. And if we do, we'll recover the liberty and prosperity we enjoyed under Ronald Reagan. Those words obviously warm a lot of Republican hearts, but to a lot of us they convey, at best, the attractions of a trip to the dentist.

So what’s Obama’s counter-pitch? So far it goes something like this: America’s future needn’t be nearly as different from its recent past as Republicans would lead you to believe but don't ask me in exactly what respect that's true . . . Oh, and did I mention that Republicans are a bunch of crazy extremists while I'm reasonableness incarnate and a fire-breathing warrior for the middle class?

Sorry, that’s not going to cut it. Obama won't find his voice until he comes up with something substantial to say.

Gingrich Going Off The Conservative/Republican Reservation

2012-01-09T17:57:00.004-05:00

I just finished marveling at what Rick Perry was saying about Mitt Romney's days at Bain Capital. Now a SuperPac supporting Newt Gingrich is producing a spot that you wouldn't be surprised to see coming from Moveon.org:

Gingrich has spent the last few weeks challenging Romney to take responsibility for what SuperPacs that support him are putting out. So I guess it's fair to impute responsibility for this to Gingrich. From the little I know about the mentality of conservatives, I would expect this to damage his reputation in conservative Republican circles irreparably--even to the point of endangering his future as a talking head on Fox News. Can conservatives really hate Romney enough to forgive Gingrich for an ideological and partisan sin of this magnitude?

Rick Perry’s Moral Incoherence

2012-01-09T15:01:00.008-05:00

I’m as astonished as the next guy that Rick Perry has campaigned so ineptly for the Republican presidential nomination. It never occurred to me five months ago that the nation’s longest-serving governor, presiding over the state with far and away the nation’s best record of job-creation at a time when job-creation is the most important thing on voters' minds, could make such a hash of things. It isn’t just a matter of how much trouble Perry has thinking on his feet—his “Oops moment” was an extreme case, but not an isolated one. The really shocking thing is the moral incoherence of some of his well-scripted utterances on the campaign trail. Perry has trouble making sense even when he knows exactly what he wants to say.

Recall how Perry countered Mitt Romney’s accusation that, as Governor of Texas, Perry had abetted illegal immigration by permitting undocumented aliens to qualify for in-state tuition rates at post-secondary educational institutions. It’s not that he was obliged to defend an indefensible policy. If you’re going to have illegal immigrants in your state anyway do you really want them to be less productive than they have to be? Yet Perry countered, not by defending his own policy on its merits, but by reminding voters that Romney had once hired a contractor who employed undocumented aliens to do yard work at one of his houses—as if it were the responsibility of people buying services from independent contractors to monitor their compliance with federal immigration law. The most revealing thing about Perry is that he and his brain trust actually thought that he’d put points on the board by blaming Romney for something for which he clearly had no moral responsibility.

This isn't an isolated instance of moral incoherence on Perry's part. Consider what he’s now saying in South Carolina about Mitt Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital. Apparently, under Romney’s direction, Bain invested in, and secured huge fees from, companies that closed a South Carolina photo-processing plant and a Kansas City steel mill, laying-off hundreds of workers in the process. Here, according to ABC News, is the inference that Perry would have the Republican primary voters draw (my emphasis):

“There is something inherently wrong when getting rich off failure and sticking it to someone else is how you do your business and I happen to think that’s indefensible,” said Perry. “If you’re a victim of Bain Capital’s downsizing, it’s the ultimate insult for Mitt Romney to come to South Carolina and tell you he feels your pain, because he caused it.”

The italicized phrases, I submit, are nonsense. If it has any content at all, “X caused Y” implies that, "But for X, Y wouldn’t have happened." Does anyone really believe that the workers in obviously dying industries like photo-processing in the age of digital cameras and American steel production would still have their jobs but for Bain Capital's investment and management strategies? You only have to ask that question to answer it.

So Perry’s trying to ingratiate himself to South Carolina Republicans, once again, by telling them to hold Romney morally responsible for things that plainly aren’t his moral responsibility. Indeed, he’s urging South Carolinians to blame Romney for not violating the fiduciary duty he had to Bain investors and the shareholders of the enterprises he was managing by conferring a benefit on South Carolina workers at the investors' and shareholders' expense.

Granted, there was a time when it often made more sense to hold the owners and managers of private enterprises morally responsible for throwing people out of work or not compensating them fairly for the work they performed. When capital markets were a lot less efficient than they are today, owners of profit-making enterprises often had a lot of leeway in deciding how to divide their profits with labor and other stakeholders in a local enterprise. But nowadays capital markets aren't sticky enough to keep capital from flowing to wherever it's likely to realize the highest rate of return for very long, whatever the consequences for workers and local communities. When he was running Bain Capital, Romney was the personification of modern capital-market efficiency.

When Democrats say the sort of things about Romney that Perry’s now saying, you can see their point as long as you’re willing to grant them a little poetic license. Romney may not be morally responsible for the suffering associated with layoffs at Bain-controlled enterprises. But when he was running Bain Capital, he personified a social state of affairs that liberals deplore, and want to ameliorate through political regulation of the marketplace. Moreover, in his latest incarnation as a center-right presidential candidate, Romney wants to punch holes in the social safety net that mitigates workers' exposure to the vicissitudes of impersonal market forces from which he once profited enormously. So when Romney touts his own private-sector experience as his principal qualification for the presidency, you can’t blame Democrats for pointing out that the combination of it and Romney’s readiness to dismantle the social safety net ought, if anything, to be disqualifying. Whether you agree or not, there's a morally coherent worldview hiding behind the Democrats' loose rhetoric.

Yet Romney's leadership of Bain Capital personified a social process (aka capitalistic “creative destruction”) that Perry, and the Republican Party he proposes to lead, celebrate as the one and only American way. So what’s Perry’s excuse?

Can Democrats Win By Running Against Greed?

2012-01-05T15:18:00.006-05:00

Take a look at this spot from moveon.org:

The general idea animating this spot is the same moralistic notion that animates OWS, viz., that the people in the middle and lower strata of the economic pyramid are being victimized by the greed of people in the upper strata. And Mitt Romney’s career in private equity at Bain Capital is Exhibit A. The laid off steel worker featured in the spot makes the point as pithily as it can be made: “Mitt Romney wants to call himself a “job creator”? Mitt Romney doesn’t care about jobs. He cares about money.”

There’s no denying that this laid-off worker cuts a sympathetic figure and that the idea that Romney has something to apologize for still packs some rhetorical punch—if it didn’t, a guy like Newt Gingrich wouldn’t have given voice to it in the heat of a Republican presidential primary campaign. But isn’t this a matter of our surrendering to an anachronistic moral reflex? How many people really believe that Kansas City would still have a thriving steel industry, and the guy in the ad would still have his job, if only guys like Mitt Romney had just been a little less greedy? And how many people, for that matter, really subscribe to the more general proposition that the economy fell off a cliff in 2008 and hasn’t climbed back as fast as we expected because the Mitt Romneys of this world suddenly got greedier?

According to Greg Sargent, however, Democrats are banking on a lot of people buying into these preposterous ideas (my emphasis):

“The battle to define Romney’s Bain years will be epic — as critical an election narrative as the war over the true nature of John Kerry’s Vietnam years was in 2004. If Romney can sucessfully persuade the public that his Bain years have left him with the tools necessary to tinker around under the hood of the economy and get it humming again, it could be very dangerous for Dems. The primary Dem pushback will be to go hard at the true nature of his Bain work and the type of capitalism it embodied, arguing that it was all about profiting off of mass layoffs; that Romney was not a job creator, but a job killer; that he’s the candidate of the one percent.”

It’s one thing for Democrats to say that we’re in bad economic shape in no small part because Republicans are keeping us from enacting good public policy. That’s a promising pitch because it arguably has the incidental benefit of being true. But the idea we’re in bad shape because Republicans and the high-rollers to whom they give aid and comfort are bad people is neither of those things. Indeed, it doesn't even make sense inasmuch as everyone believes that economic recovery depends, among other things, on lots of people being greedy enough to put their capital where it will achieve the highest rate of return. It's just the sound of Democratic activists stroking themselves.

The Reality Principle

2012-01-03T16:00:00.006-05:00

George Packer is puzzled. He thinks the proposition that “the Republican Party has descended into unreality and extremism” is too obvious to stand in need of a defense. And, at least in liberal circles, he’s surely right about that. Yet why is a political party that has allegedly been taken over by crazy Tea Partiers almost certainly going to nominate a presidential candidate who, for all his manifest imperfections, isn’t at all crazy in the manner of an allegedly crazy Tea Partier?

“The great puzzle of the Republican campaign is that, in an era of unprecedented ideological fervor, the party will almost certainly nominate the candidate who is the blandest, least ideological, and least trusted by conservatives of them all (that would be Mitt Romney—Jon Huntsman doesn’t count as long as he’s in the low single digits). The reasons for this are not easy to see, and in some ways they’re fluky.”

Calling the reasons for Romney’s ascendance “fluky” suggests that only an improbable series of accidents explains it. But, since Rick Perry had his “oops” moment, Romney has been the only imaginable president in the field of declared Republican presidential candidates. And there never was an unpresidential figure with a serious chance of winning the nomination as a Tea Party candidate, and that includes not only Ron Paul, Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann, but Newt Gingrich. Granted, we can imagine a number of more authentically conservative candidates who might have given Romney a run for his money had they chosen to run—Mitch Daniels, Chris Christie, Paul Ryan, et al. But none of them fit the profile of a crazy Tea Partier either.

You might have thought that the way the Republican presidential campaign is working out would cause someone as intellectually scrupulous as Packer to revisit the alleged truism that the “Republican Party has descended into unreality and extremism.” If he did, he’d have to contend with suggestive results like these from Gallup (as characterized by Charles Lane):

“Gallup recently asked Americans to rate their ideology on a liberal-to-conservative scale of 1 to 5. The average result was a right-of-center 3.3.

More alarming for Obama, voters scored him at 2.3, to the left of center — and put Mitt Romney at 3.5. Every other GOP contender was to the right of the mean, except Jon Huntsman, who hit the ideological bull’s-eye. But even Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann came closer to the middle than Obama did.”

As a rule, I don't put much stock in allegations that one's politicial opponents have gone crazy. That, after all, is something that genuinely crazy people say about sane people all the time. I suppose it’s not impossible that nothing but dumb luck explains why a guy as ideologically suspect as Romney is going to be the presidential nominee of a party that's been taken over conservative dogmatists. But you can only marvel at Packer’s certainty that conservative Republicans are the ones descending into unreality.

Have House Republicans Given Democrats a Leg Up in 2012?

2011-12-21T16:20:00.008-05:00

You know that House Republicans have stuck their foot in it when even the Wall Street Journal editorial page is calling them out:

"The GOP leaders have somehow managed the remarkable feat of being blamed for opposing a one-year extension of a tax holiday that they are surely going to pass. This is no easy double play. Republicans have also achieved the small miracle of letting Mr. Obama position himself as an election-year tax cutter, although he's spent most of his Presidency promoting tax increases and he would hit the economy with one of the largest tax increases ever in 2012. This should be impossible."

Let's stipulate to two things: first, that having been out-maneuvered by Harry Reid, John Boehner and the Republican House caucus have some egg on their faces; and second, that a lot of voters are going to be pissed off when their paychecks suddenly get a little lighter after January 1 if the standoff between the House and the Senate isn't resolved. Do either of those assumptions really give the Democrats a leg up in the next election?

I'll grant you that they're yet another reason for voters to disapprove of Congress as a whole. But Congress doesn't appear on the ballot, individual congressmen and senators do. And Obama will be be running not against Boehner or the Tea Party caucus, but against the eventual Republican presidential nominee. Moreover, virtually everyone who will be on the ballot is on record as favoring, and if they're already in Congress as having voted for, an extension of the payroll tax holiday.

Is it really plausible, then, to think that an appreciable number of votes in congressional elections are going to turn, one way or other, ten months from now on the House's refusal to pass the Senate's bill, even if it means a temporary interruption of the payroll tax holiday? And are voters going to hold the pig-headedness of Republican congressmen against the Republican presidential nominee eleven months from now?

I submit that you just have to ask the questions to know the answers, and they aren't the ones you're hearing from "informed sources" and political pundits.

More Surprising Polling Data

2011-12-19T16:43:00.011-05:00

I've devoted a couple of posts lately to the disparity between what liberals presume the state of public opinion should be in light of facts on the ground and what it appears really to be. You might have thought, first, that, while we're still reeling from the Wall Street-induced financial crisis of 2007-8, ever larger numbers of people must be thinking that they have more to fear from big business than big government. Alas, that appears not to be case. And you might have thought, second, that with unemployment at 8.6% and with Occupy Wall Street and all, that people would be a lot more distressed about growing inequality in the distribution of wealth and income than they appear actually to be.

Something similar seems to be happening with respect to foreign policy as well. Four or five years ago, when occupied Iraq was descending unmistakably into civil war, it seemed safe to say that people across the political spectrum we're beginning to agree that invading Iraq had been a dreadful mistake perpetrated by an administration that didn't know what it was doing. Even a lot of the people who backed the troop surge in late 2007 and early 2008 on the theory that it was too late to turn back seemed to be thinking along these lines. As I recall, most them weren't still putting up much of a fight if you suggested that we'd have been better off trying to contain Saddam going forward than getting rid of him back in 2003.

Who'd have thought that now, when the last troops are finally coming home, that public opinion would be turning back in favor of the Iraq war. It appears, however, that something along those lines is happening. Consider this poll of Americans (as opposed to registered or likely voters), from the Pew Research Center:

Put questions of the intellectual merits of the liberal worldview aside for the time being and concentrate just on its popularity. If you'd have asked me after the 2004 election to design a scenario most likely to enable liberals to score ideological points with respect to both domestic and foreign policy with the American public, I don't think I could have dreamed up anything much better than what we've actually experienced between, say, 2005 and 2009.

Of course, I would have posited a robust economic recovery starting in early 2009 and extending indefinitely into the future. But liberals can't have everything, especially when the economic doldrums we're now experiencing are being felt across the industrialized world to the detriment of center-right and center-left governments alike. I confess that, even had I known how tepid our economic recovery was going to be, it still would never have occurred to me that liberals would be losing this much ideological ground with the American public.

Are Voters Getting More Class-Conscious?

2011-12-16T11:48:00.011-05:00

Here are two more graphs from Gallup, throwing more cold water on the idea that Democrats can engineer an electoral breakthrough in 2012 by positioning themselves as the party of (for the want of a better term) "class consciousness." To my untrained eye, the first graph suggests that class-consciousness among the polling sample, or something like it, peaked sometime in 2008, and has been regressing to the historic mean ever since:

Moreover,if you consult Gallup's partisan breakout of these numbers, you find that self-identified Democrats are now slightly less class-conscious (58% vs. 61%) than they were three years ago, while Independents are markedly less so (37% vs. 48%).

If that weren't bad enough news for Democrats, it gets worse. To the extent people are class-conscious enough to identify themselves as either "haves" or "have nots," their self-identification has been remarkably stable since the end of the late 1990s economic expansion. Yes, there's a measurable upward slope in the line representing the percentage of people who regard themselves as "have nots" since 1989. But it's not very steep, and it hasn't gotten noticeably steeper over the last couple of years:

Granted, both of these graphs are crude measures at best of the egalitarian sensibility to which Democrats are trying to appeal in 2012. But neither graph suggests that the number of people that share it is much bigger than it was in 1996 and 2008, when Bill Clinton and Obama got elected by pushing class-based appeals into the background of their campaigns. Democrats are betting the ranch on the hope that these polling results are misleading.

Political Blackmail

2011-12-15T12:02:00.007-05:00

Imagine an enterprising blackmailer shaking down a woman, her identity concealed behind dark glasses, in the already dark recesses of an out-of-the-way roadhouse. "It would be a pity," the blackmailer observes, "if the world found out how little you really care about your wedding vows. It's going to cost you to keep that from happening." Trouble is, the blackmailer's talking to Kim Kardashian.

This report from the Associated Press suggests that the blackmailer and today's Democrat Party have a lot in common:

"Democrats backed away from their demand for higher taxes on millionaires as part of legislation to extend Social Security tax cuts for most Americans on Wednesday as Congress struggled to clear critical year-end bills without triggering a partial government shutdown.

"But Republicans, frustrated that a bipartisan $1 trillion funding bill was being blocked by Senate Democrats, floated the possibility of repackaging the measure and passing it Friday in defiance of President Barack Obama and his allies in control of the Senate. Stopgap funding runs out Friday at midnight."

Just a week or so ago, Democrats were congratulating themselves for backing Republicans into a corner by tying an extension of the payroll tax cut to a surtax on millionaires. Democrats figured that, if Republicans didn't swallow the whole package, their dirty little secret would be revealed to the voting public: viz., that Republicans really care as much or more about shielding millionaires than middle class families from tax increases.

Trouble is, Republicans have never made a secret of that. Indeed, they've been proclaiming it to anyone who would listen for the last 30 years. They're pleased to have the chance to show the world that Democrats are the only ones intent on making the country choose between tax relief for millionaires and the middle class. As far as Republican are concerned, Democratic blackmailers were threatening to make them a campaign commercial.

Moreover, Democrats could learn a thing or two about blackmail from Republicans who knew what they were doing when they countered by tying an extension of the payroll tax holiday to the approval of the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. It is a dirty little secret of the Democratic Party that the interests of environmentalists and the private sector working class frequently come into conflict, and that when they do, the Democratic Party nearly always sides with the environmentalists.

None of this means that the Republican pitch on taxes is a recipe for electoral success in 2012, or that the Democratic pitch is a recipe for failure. On that score, only time will tell. But the fact that the Democrats try keeping a lot more such secrets from voters than Republicans goes a long way toward explaining how the party that controls the White House and the Senate manages to lose so many of these legislative skirmishes.

Republican Demonology

2011-12-14T13:16:00.006-05:00

Take a look at the latest Romney spot taking aim at Newt Gingrich:

What exactly, according to the Romney campaign, makes Newt an "unreliable leader"?

It can't just be that Newt once favored legislation to regulate CO2 emissions in the interest of combating climate change. When Romney was governor of Massachusetts he imposed carbon emission caps on power-generating facilities in the state. If anything, he thereby betrayed a more radical commitment to controlling climate change than Newt.

Romney was perfectly willing to make Massachusetts residents pay more for energy and put Massachusetts businesses at a commercial disadvantage relative to out-of-state competitors. And he did it knowing full well that, taken by themselves, the CO2 emission caps wouldn't make Massachusetts air any cleaner or the planet any cooler. At least the federal legislation Gingrich and Pelosi were pushing probably would have had a very small, but measurable, impact on global temperatures because American actions would have been conditioned on the cooperation of other industrialized and industrializing nations. That doesn't make it a good idea, but it wasn't an entirely empty gesture like Mitt's carbon emission caps.

Is the measure of Newt's unreliability just his readiness to extend his hand across the aisle to get something done? That can't be it either. Romney has been bending our ear off for years about how much good stuff he managed to get done in Massachusetts in concert with a Democratic state assembly. He used to tout the Massachusetts carbon emission caps alongside RomneyCare as cases in point. At least Newt has been telling Republicans that getting on the global warming bandwagon was "the dumbest thing [he's] done in years." To my knowledge, Romney hasn't said a word about his own climate-control misadventures.

So what failure of leadership on Newt's part does that leave us with? Take a look at the Romney spot's title: the black mark against Newt can only be letting himself be photographed sharing a couch with Nancy Pelosi. Worse, he was giving aid and comfort to Al Gore in the process! It's one thing for a Republican presidential nominee to be ready to reach across the aisle to join hands with, say, a Ben Nelson, a Mary Landrieu or a Claire McCaskill, especially if it's a way of politically isolating the president and the Democratic congressional leadership. But clutching the hands of political soul-stealers like Pelosi, Gore (or, heaven forbid, Obama) is another matter entirely.

Electoral Battles, Ideological Wars

2011-12-13T14:34:00.011-05:00

I've spent a lot of time on this blog lamenting the fact that, while Democrats have generally held their own in elections during my adult life, liberals have been steadily surrendering ground in the battle for American hearts and minds. Here's a dramatic graphic representation of the phenomenon courtesy of Gallup:

Notice that, as you might expect, the concern generated by "big labor" is roughly commensurate with organized labor's declining influence in the private sector over the last 45 years. And concern about "big business" stays pretty consistently in the mid-to-low 20s except for spikes during the recessions of 1979, 2001 and 2008. That strikes me as a decent proxy for the success liberals have had over the years convincing Americans that big business wields too much political influence. They've never been able to hold the ground they gained during recessions.

The upward slope of the distrust of "big government" line, however, is pretty constant. It spiked more upward still during the Johnson administration and drastically downward only with the rally-around-the-flag effect of 9/11 and the anti-Wall Street backlash provoked by the 2008 financial crisis. If you're a liberal, it's a depressing fact that the upward slope of the "big business" line remains pretty constant throughout the Carter and Clinton presidencies. It's even more depressing that it slopes even more sharply upward than the historic trend line throughout the Obama presidency. And, if all that weren't bad enough, Gallup's partisan breakout of the sample reveals that, between 2009 and 2011, the number of Democrats who viewed "big government" as the gravest threat to the country rose from 32 to 48%, while only 42% of 2011 Democrats identify "big business" as the gravest threat.

Taking all this in, you have to wonder whether Democrats know what they're doing by positioning themselves unabashedly as the party of activist government in the run-up to 2012.

The Gravitational Pull of Movement Conservatism in the Republican Party

2011-12-09T12:37:00.008-05:00

I’ve commented before on how Democrats’ decision to position themselves for the next election as egalitarian populists is raising the ideological stakes in the next election. Substantially the same thing is happening within the Republican Party. Remember the Paul Ryan budget that a Republican House passed last April to show the nation that it means business when it comes to getting a handle on unfunded entitlement liabilities? Suddenly, the Romney camp is doing its best to make sure that Republican primary voters don’t forget it. Take a look at its latest campaign spot:

Let’s take a step back and contemplate a little recent history. House Republicans passed the Ryan budget, with its draconian spending cuts and its proposal to change Medicare from a fee-for-service to a premium-support program, as an act of ideological solidarity with the Tea Party movement. At the time, Democrats couldn’t believe their good fortune. Republicans were enabling them to recover the support of seniors who’d defected from the Democratic coalition in the 2010 election. Pretty soon, you couldn’t help seeing Democratic videos about pushing granny off a cliff. Those spots helped Democrats win a special congressional election in upstate New York in a reliably Republican district early in the summer.

Recognizing that their party had let ideological zeal get the better of it, cooler Republican heads decided that the less said about the Ryan budget the better. Lucky for them, the nation was turning its attention to negotiations over raising the debt ceiling which would make the Ryan budget irrelevant as a governing document. Better still, the Republican Party would soon be turning its attention to selecting a presidential nominee. Ryan’s decision not to run for president guaranteed that someone else would soon become the party’s voice on budgetary issues. That gave the Republicans a welcome opportunity to pivot away from the less popular aspects of the Ryan budget.

Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich were the two Republican presidential candidates that worked hardest to preserve their room for maneuver in this respect. In June, Romney expressed his admiration for Ryan’s clear-headedness and political courage, but made sure Republican insiders knew that, discretion being the better part of valor, he’d be proposing his own budgetary plan later in the fall that would be calibrated to win a presidential general election. When he insinuated that Ryan was a right wing social engineer, Newt Gingrich was sending substantially the same signal.

So now that the GOP presidential field has been winnowed down to Romney and Gingrich, you might have thought that the Ryan budget would be ancient history. But here’s Romney, the candidate of the Republican Party’s moderate wing, bringing it up to get to the right of Gingrich, the candidate of the party’s conservative wing. What happened?

It’s probably partly a matter of the Ryan budget looking a little less radical to establishment Republicans than it did last June in light of a credit downgrade of U.S. treasuries and the debt crisis within the European Union. But Romney's embrace of the Ryan budget testifies to the gravitational pull of movement conservatism on the ideology of the Republican Party. It's steering Romney to a position that's drastically to the right of any he even threatened to take four years ago when was trying, unsuccessfully, to impersonate a movement conservative on the presidential campaign trail. And gravitational attraction will probably soon have Gingrich confessing that (along with pushing climate-change legislation along with Nancy Pelosi) dissing Ryan was another of his "biggest mistake[s]."

All of this is yet another sign that the next election will be an ideological extravaganza.

Newt's Ideological Capital

2011-12-08T12:38:00.013-05:00

Nate Silver furnishes a compelling answer to a good question. Why, he asks, does the Republican base bristle at the inauthenticity of Mitt Romney's conservatism while it readily acknowledges Newt Gingrich's ideological authenticity. That's a good question because Gingrich has taken as many heterodox positions as Romney, and even some of the same ones (e.g., in favor of an individual health insurance mandate and doing something about climate change).

Silver's answer takes the form of a graph charting the position of the median House member on the ideological spectrum on the basis of a statistical analysis of roll call votes:

The larger red circles represent the House sessions over which Gingrich presided as Speaker. Seeing all this laid out before us, it's hard to resist the conclusion that the Gingrich insurgency represented a genuine tipping point in the ideology of the chamber. And since the House is the most democratic branch of the federal government, it's arguably the best measure we have of the ideological composition of the country as a whole.

It's not just that the Gingrich insurgency moved the median House member drastically to the right--the Democratic victory in 2006 effected a larger movement from right to left. Yet as impressive as that leftward movement may have been, it was obliterated by the election of 2010. The Gingrich insurgency had staying power inasmuch as, after a slight retrenchment in 1998, the ideological position of the median House member shifted considerably to the right in the next three elections. It arguably shifted the ideological center of gravity of American politics in a way that Democratic victories in 2006-8 clearly haven't.

That's all the more impressive when you compare the House sessions of the Gingrich and post-Gingrich years to those of the Reagan and H.W. Bush years. We think of Reagan as a transformative president who shifted the nation's ideological center of gravity substantially to the right. And it's true that his coattails moved the median House member noticeably rightward in 1980, but that still left him on the liberal side of the graph. Moreover, even that rightward movement was virtually wiped out in 1982 and the median member moved noticeably leftward in each election from 1986 through 1992.

It doesn't much matter whether we say that, ideological speaking, what we think of as the Reagan Revolution was really the Gingrich Revolution, or that Gingrich was just the most effective executor of Reagan's conservative legacy. In either case, Newt was there at the moment in the evolution of our political culture when conservatives really started believing that they could win, and liberals really started fearing that they might lose, their ideological war. Evidently, that makes up for a lot of heterodoxy in conservative circles.

Obama’s Osawatomie Speech

2011-12-07T14:51:00.012-05:00

The speech the president delivered yesterday in Osawatomie, Kansas has liberal pundits dancing in the streets. Robert Reich calls it “the most important economic speech of his presidency.” Michael Tomasky thinks the speech showed that Obama “finally gets it”: “[t]his was [his] best speech in a very, very long time, and it showed that he and his political people have finally figured out how to express the new quasi-populist mood in the country . . .”

Granted, Obama gave a nice speech inasmuch as it artfully wove together the themes that he'll be running on in the next election. But other than the strained historical comparison the president drew between himself and Teddy Roosevelt, can you find in it a single idea, even a single formulation of an idea, that you haven't heard countless times before? As far as I can tell, there was nothing new programmatically. It’s not as if we haven’t heard Obama say things like this before:

"But in the long term, we have to rethink our tax system more fundamentally. We have to ask ourselves: Do we want to make the investments we need in things like education, and research, and high-tech manufacturing? Or do we want to keep in place the tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans in our country? Because we can’t afford to do both. That’s not politics. That’s just math."

Nor did Obama break much new rhetorical ground when it came to enunciating core values. Granted, he has never been one to wear his liberal values on his sleeve. Indeed, he has said that one of the errors of his first term was letting himself be mistaken for a traditional “tax and spend liberal.” But the passages in yesterday's speech that are reputed to have captured the country's new "populist mood" are indistinguishable from things Obama was saying when he was still trying to play the honest broker standing between the liberal base of his own party and the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party:

"I’m here to reaffirm my deep conviction that we are greater together than we are on our own. I believe that this country succeeds when everyone gets a fair shot, when everyone does their fair share, and when everyone plays by the same rules. Those aren’t Democratic or Republican values; 1% values or 99% values. They’re American values, and we have to reclaim them.”

So why are people like Reich and Tomasky suddenly so giddy? If the explanation has little to do with what Obama actually said, it can only be a matter of the way he said it. Liberal platitudes that used to clutter the background of Obama’s speeches have now been pushed to the foreground. That’s enough to exhilarate people who’ve been observing the president from the left the same way conservative Republicans were exhilarated in 1964 and 1980 when Goldwater and Reagan started saying things out loud that other Republican presidential candidates would mutter only under their breath, if they bothered to say them at all.

Recall, however, that the similar levels of exhilaration excited by Goldwater and Reagan in conservative circles didn't predict the very different outcomes of the 1964 and 1980 elections. A lot of conservatives, captivated by Goldwater’s ideological forthrightness, succumbed to the wishful thought that he’d mobilize an army of “stay-at-home-Republicans” who’d dropped out of the political process during the Eisenhower years. Nominating Goldwater facilitated a Democratic landslide that enabled Lyndon Johnson to expand the welfare state by, among other things, enacting Medicare and Medicaid. Conservatives would have to wait another 16 years before they'd get a comparably intense, but longer-lasting, buzz off Reagan.

Is Occupy Wall Street a good enough reason for people like Reich and Tomasky to be so confident that, for liberals, 2012 will be more like 1980 was for conservatives than 1964?

Newt: The Grandfather of Gridlock?

2011-12-05T16:38:00.006-05:00

Most of us remember Newt Gingrich as the guy who spearheaded the political insurgency in the early 1990s that first expelled the Republican congressional leadership that was too comfortable in the role of a minority party, and then led Republicans to their first House majority in forty years by teaching complacent Democrats how political hardball is played. As Speaker, he forced not one but two government shutdowns before leading the charge on Bill Clinton’s impeachment. It wasn’t long before Gingrich's congenital abrasiveness wore out the patience even of Republican colleagues.

So it’s a little amusing that, now that Newt suddenly finds himself with a shot at the Republican presidential nomination, he wants us to think of him as a kindly old uncle from a gentler time:

Consider David Axelrod’s understandable, but misguided, reaction to the spot:

“I was amused by the Newt Gingrich ad because you talked about he was going to bring the country together to solve problems,” he said. “You’re talking about the godfather of gridlock here, the guy who two decades ago really invented the kind of tactics that have now become commonplace in Washington. So this is a whole new Newt.”

Axelrod’s quite right to acknowledge Gingrich’s immense influence as a partisan tactician. More than anyone else, Newt turned congressional/executive branch politics into a guerrilla war among straight-laced ideologues. To see his influence you only have to compare post-Newt congressional leaders like Tom DeLay and Nancy Pelosi with pre-Newt figures like Tom Foley and Robert Michel.

But does that make Newt the “godfather of gridlock”? Granted, both he and Clinton played some mean hardball. Together, however, they managed to preside over a governing process that, among other things, generated a budgetary surplus and reformed a dysfunctional welfare system without compromising the social safety net. The fact that hyper-partisanship didn’t get in the way of bipartisan government then should disabuse us of the ridiculous notion that it (rather than the partisans being sincerely committed to incompatible things) is what's keeping us from bipartisan government now.

Liberals Doubling Down

2011-12-02T11:32:00.005-05:00

From what little I know, Greg Sargent has put his finger on the strategic pulse of the administration and the Democratic Party going into the next election (my emphasis):

“[N]ow Dems think the battle has finally shifted on to turf favorable to them. Dems believe the public’s rising concern about inequality has created an environment in which their class-based argument will have newfound resonance. As Chuck Schumer said recently, Dems think this rising anxiety is rooted in a fundamental shift in the public’s perceptions of the economy: That the bottom has fallen out from under the middle class because the old rules — work hard, and you’ll get ahead — are no longer operative for anyone but those at the very top.”

When you boil this down to a campaign pitch, it means that Democrats from the president on down will be telling voters that raising taxes on high-earning families isn’t just a painful necessity dictated by hard times, but a matter of simple decency that Republicans oppose only because they’re shameless shills for rich people. The corollary is that it would be shameful of the Democrats not to insist on raising tax rates on families in the upper income brackets. That suggests how much work the notion that there has been “a fundamental shift in the public’s perceptions of the economy” is doing in Sargent’s formulation.

Recall that in 2009-10, nothing was stopping the Democrats from repealing the Bush tax cuts for upper-income families while keeping those for middle-class families in place, or at least dramatizing their differences with Republicans in this respect by making them filibuster a bill to that effect. The fact that didn’t happen in the run-up to the 2010 elections suggests that Obama and the Democratic congressional leadership had concluded that voters wouldn’t be inclined to hold the Republicans accountable for their shamelessness or the Democrats accountable for their shamefulness.

That suggestion was made all the more credible in the lame duck congressional session after the election when Obama and congressional Democrats consented to an extension of the “Bush tax cuts for the rich.” The bump the president received in the polls after the deal was done suggests that they then had a pretty decent handle on the state of public opinion. That's what made Obama willing to take the flack fired in his direction by his liberal base.

As far as I know the standards of simple decency haven’t changed since then. So how do you explain the Democrats' newfound sense of shame and outrage at Republican shamelessness? Can it really be that they’re responding to a sudden change in public perceptions? It’s not as if the issue of government insolvency, and the vexing trade-offs implied by spending cuts and tax increases, weren’t already on the table before the 2010 elections—if they weren’t, Obama wouldn’t have appointed the Simpson-Bowles Commission to neutralize it as an election issue. You wouldn’t think either that public values could change so completely that quickly, or that experienced Democratic politicians could have so badly misconstrued public opinion going into a pivotal election.

So it’s not very plausible, I submit, that running on the issue of distributive fairness could have been a bad idea in 2010, but suddenly become a good one now. The liberal base of the Democratic Party always thought the Bush tax cuts were not just ill-advised but shameful, but it couldn’t get the party leadership to listen to it. The thing that has now changed is that Obama and other party leaders are doubling down ideologically because they're listening. Maybe that's because they've decided that they were wrong before, or maybe it's just a matter of people with liberal instincts realizing that their backs are against the wall and figuring that, if they're going to go down, they may as well go down swinging.

If running on distributive fairness proves to be a good decision on the leadership's part it will be because the Democratic leadership is doing this election cycle what it should have been doing during the last one. If it turns out badly, the damage to liberalism as we know it may be irreparable.

Why Do Conservative Republicans Disdain Jon Huntsman?

2011-11-30T16:31:00.001-05:00

Ross Douthat asks an interesting question. Conservative Republicans are lusting for an alternative to Mitt Romney. So why are they trying to rekindle an old flame like Newt Gingrich when they could be making eyes at Jon Huntsman?

Everyone recognizes, after all, that Newt carries more baggage than your average ocean liner. Huntsman travels light by comparison by virtue of an unblemished biography and a sparkling gubernatorial record that’s markedly more conservative than Romney’s and ideologically comparable to Rick Perry’s. Moreover, Huntsman has the intellectual dexterity that Perry plainly lacks to go toe-to-toe with Gingrich, Romney and Obama on a debating platform. So why is Gingrich a finalist in the Republican presidential campaign and Huntsman isn’t?

Douthat thinks it’s because Huntsman’s guilty of “political malpractice.” He could have positioned himself in the spot that Gingrich now occupies by default, as the most electable candidate to Romney’s right. Instead, Huntsman decided, inexplicably, to pitch himself as the guy who was going to save the Republican Party from all those crazy Tea Partiers. As a result, conservatives never gave a first, much less a second, look to a candidate they should have had their eyes on all along.

I can’t speak for conservatives, but I suspect that Douthat’s forgetting the thing that most disqualifies Huntsman as a presidential candidate in their eyes: viz., he accepted Obama’s invitation to be his ambassador to China. Obama’s election was widely regarded as the death knell of “movement conservatism,” the ideological well-spring of the Republican Party since it surrendered to its Reagan wing in the 1980s. And it wasn’t only liberals who were saying that.

Pundits who’d been card-carrying members of the conservative movement, like David Frum and David Brooks were saying substantially the same thing and looking like they weren’t very sorry to say it. They knew that, by jumping ship in rough waters, they’d be burning their partisan bridges to the Reaganite Republican Party and their ideological bridges to movement conservatism. But they were betting that the 2008 election signaled that these were bridges to nowhere anyway. When he decided to serve as Obama’s ambassador to China, Huntsman was laying down substantially the same bet.

We can leave aside the question of whether the death of movement conservatism would have been a good or bad thing because, by any reasonable standard, Obama’s election gave it and the Reaganite Republican Party new life. I presume that Frum and Brooks don’t need to be advised that they’ve been left without a partisan and ideological home. However tightly he may now embrace the Paul Ryan budget or rate-reducing tax reform, substantially the same thing goes for Huntsman.

The Last Men Standing

2011-11-29T16:54:00.007-05:00

As hard a time as I have seeing him as the Republican presidential nominee, much less in the White House, I can’t help being impressed by Newt Gingrich’s recent surge in the polls. Words matter to a party’s base, and you have to admit that he’s quite a wordsmith. As far as I’m concerned, however, the most impressive thing about Gingrich’s new found popularity is that it almost certainly means that he and Mitt Romney are going to be last candidates standing in the Republican presidential campaign.

Remember the conventional wisdom holding that the Tea Party movement had turned the Republican Party into an assembly of raving anti-intellectuals who don’t care whether the people they elect to high office have the candlepower or the education to do the job? Remember, for that matter, when it was widely presumed among non-Republicans that Sarah Palin was the presumptive leader of the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party for just that reason? Well the Republican presidential field has been whittled down to the finalists and, whatever you might say against them, there's no denying that they’re both pretty well-credentialed intellectuals.

Romney’s an accomplished technocrat by any reasonable standard with a well-earned reputation for subjecting public-policy issues to rigorous empirical analysis before making up his mind. You might think that some of the decisions he has made were ill-considered, but they certainly weren't unconsidered. Granted, Romney's mastery of decision-making technique hasn't yet secured him the allegiance of the conservative wing of the Republican Party. But it's turning, instead, to a guy with a Ph.D. in history who has authored twenty-some books covering the political waterfront.

To be sure, both Romney and Gingrich have conspicuous weaknesses as presidential candidates. Romney’s penchant for substituting analysis for principled conviction has people searching for his core. Gingrich’s lack of discipline and grandiosity raises widespread doubts about his presidential temperament and electability. But in each case, their weaknesses are characteristic of intellectuals straining to unite theory and practice. If the Republican Party is a cauldron of anti-intellectualism, narrowing its presidential options down to Romney and Gingrich is an odd way of showing it.

So how wise is the conventional wisdom about today's Republican Party? The Tea Party has undoubtedly made the Republican Party more conservative but, by in least one important respect, it hasn't diminished its thoughtfulness. Nobody, after all, would ever have mistaken John McCain and Mike Huckabee in 2008 or George W. Bush and John McCain in 2000 for a couple of intellectuals.

Reflection on the Retirement of Barney Frank

2011-11-28T15:13:00.012-05:00

Most liberals, and a lot of people who aren't liberals, will experience a pang of regret hearing that Barney Frank won't be running for reelection. There aren't many familiar Washington figures that people across the political spectrum want to hear from, even if they expect to disagree with what he has to say. When Frank opens his mouth, everyone knows they're about to hear the voice of unvarnished liberalism from a guy who knows a thing or two about public policy. Among politicians who can't do anything but recite talking points, that was often a breath of fresh air.

That's not to say that Frank has ever been especially doctrinaire--he was always too good a legislator to let perfection become the enemy of the good. Nor is it to say that he's always been right (think about his embarrassing assurances respecting the solvency of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac). What distinguishes Frank from the other liberal war horses of his congressional generation (which includes Nancy Pelosi, Chris Dodd, Henry Waxman et al.) is the fact that what he said was unusually trenchant and frequently very funny.

That mattered because most of Frank's congressional career coincided with the presidencies of Reagan and the Bushes. That meant that his was usually a voice in the ideological wilderness. In an era when liberals were usually fighting rearguard actions, no one held his ground better than Barney Frank.

But what did Frank achieve in the way of governance? He and his generation of liberals didn't really get a chance to show off their chops as legislators until 2009-10. There's no denying that their output was quantitatively impressive. Jonathan Bernstein makes the case for its quality (my emphasis):

"To a large extent Frank typifies the story of the historic 111th Congress, which was one of the most productive in decades. That’s the story of veteran Democratic legislators who developed their skills before the 1994 Republican landslide finally having the chance to get big things done once Dems took control of Congress and the White House. They proved themselves very much very much up to the task. Not just Frank and Chris Dodd, but also Henry Waxman, David Price, Rosa DeLauro, Tom Harkin, Max Baucus, and many others. Remember that the stimulus in 2009 and the Affordable Care Act and Dodd-Frank in 2010 were all omnibus bills, containing lots of smaller pieces of legislation, and therefore the product of lots of Members of Congress who had been working on specific problems for years."

Bernstein commends the 111th Congress's output (and Frank's generation of liberal legislators) mostly because he thinks that it's generally sound public policy. Maybe you agree, maybe you don't, but let's put those questions aside. Legislating isn't only about making public policy. It's also about legitimizing public policy by enacting it in such a way that even the people who originally opposed it recognize that it represents an authoritative political decision. Part of "getting things done" is doing them in such a way that they won't soon be undone.

Does anyone believe that 111th Congress, and Frank's generation of congressional liberals who led it, were "very much up to the task" of legitimizing its output? If they were why would we now be heading into an election in which Republicans are pledging to undo most of its work, and Democrats are doing their best to deflect the voters' attention from what they've done to the crazy things that the Republicans might do? I can’t think of another case where anything quite like this happened before. Maybe that's a result of people like Frank ramming "omnibus bills" through Congress that nobody, including the congressmen who voted for them, understand well enough to have the foggiest idea of whether they'll achieve their stated objectives.

Frank was a hero to liberals because he said what was on our minds better than we could say it ourselves. But you can't say he, and his generation of liberal legislators, have been particularly good at persuading people to be more liberal.

A "Radical" Suggestion?

2011-11-22T14:40:00.012-05:00

Here, in the wake of the Super Committee's failure, is Dick Durbin's "radical" proposal for enabling the Senate to confront our budgetary challenges:

“'I think we ought to say, after February 1st of next year, any 12 senators, six of either party, who produce a plan that can reduce this deficit by at least as much as the supercommittee was charged to do, ought to be able to bring it to the floor for a vote,' said Durbin on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. . . .

“'It’s time to move to the committee of the whole. Let’s start moving beyond these special committees and let’s do something pretty basic and maybe radical,' said Durbin."

This looks to me like a pretty blatant attack on Harry Reid's stewardship of the Senate. I'll leave it to people with a better grasp of Senate procedure to decide whether the limits Durbin proposes to put on the Majority Leader's control of the calendar are a good idea. I'm still trying to get my mind around the fact that the guy making this argument is a member of the Democratic Senate leadership.

By all accounts, we're headed into a pivotal election in which control of the Senate hangs in the balance. Yet at this late date, most of us don't have the slightest idea what our Democratic Senators' budgetary priorities really are. All we really know is that, as a group, Democrats prefer a bipartisan budget deal that raises taxes and doesn't cut entitlements while Republicans prefer a deal that cuts entitlements but doesn't raise taxes. That tells you next to nothing about the governing priorities that would enable Democrats to calibrate trade-offs between social costs and benefits. Those can only be inferred from their recorded votes over a series budgetary proposals that are usually made in the normal course of democratic governance. But those Senate votes haven't happened over the last two years.

Now we seem to have gotten to the point that someone of Durbin's stature and influence thinks he has to propose a "radical" procedural innovation to oblige Senators to put their budgetary priorities on the record. Isn't that a problem that Durbin should take up, and be able to solve, with Harry Reid, and if not with Reid then with the White House? I can only presume that Durbin's tried that and failed.

Democratic Indecision

2011-11-21T14:22:00.010-05:00

Well, it's official. The Super Committee has folded up its tent without reaching a budget deal. That pulls the trigger on a bunch of spending cuts that were supposed to be so draconian that we could count on the Super Committee to keep them from happening. Now right-thinking people from across the political spectrum are supposed to be suitably appalled and getting on with the business of allocating blame for this sorry state of affairs between the parties. If you ask me, that enterprise is not only tiresome, but pointless.

Maybe there's something wrong with me, but I was always more appalled by the idea that the representative branches of government would delegate core governmental functions to special committees in the first place. Budgeting, after all, is the most basic governmental function there is inasmuch as it's the precondition of the government doing anything at all. That's why it's supposed to be performed subject to decision-making procedures that have been painstakingly developed over time to produce serviceable decisions that enjoy political legitimacy. Otherwise, they're so lacking in finality that we have to keep making them over and over again.

I'm willing to contemplate emergency conditions presenting us with unforeseeable and non-recurring demands on the treasury under which such institutional improvisation is excusable. But now we're addressing budgetary challenges that are not only perfectly foreseeable, but long foreseen. The idea that we can make momentous public decisions about our fiscal future through ad hoc methods designed to insulate the decision-makers from democratic accountability, and then expect people with inconsistent budgetary priorities to honor them indefinitely, could only have been dreamed up by people who've never given a thought to what makes a public decision politically legitimate.

Suppose the Super Committee had been able to reach a deal that cut the deficit through some combination of spending cuts and tax increases and even gotten it ratified by the full congress before it was signed into law by the president. Is there any reason to expect that, knowing its institutional pedigree, future presidents or congresses, or even this president and congress in six-month's time, would continue to honor its terms? If you think there is, how do you explain the fact that influential congressman are already talking about undoing the budgetary triggers that were supposed to hold the feet of the members of this Super Committee to the fire? Why should the next ad hoc decision be any more authoritative than the last one?

The fact that these jokers delegated their solemn governing responsibilities to a special committee already showed that we desperately need another election to reshuffle the deck. The cure for democratic indecision isn't more bobbing and weaving on the part of politicians running for cover, it's more democracy. It's time we got on with it.

Remembering George Harrison

2011-11-18T13:17:00.012-05:00

A piece of advice for liberals: hold Andrew Ferguson’s conservatism against him if you must, but don’t let it keep you from reading him. If you do, you’ve been missing the best copy to appear this year about the field of Republican presidential aspirants. Take a look, for instance, at the remains of Newt Gingrich’s reputation as an intellectual after Ferguson finished operating on him.

It testifies to Ferguson's range that he has a lovely piece up on the Weekly Standard website on George Harrison. It’s mostly about how our memories of him are a function of our quasi-religious reverence for the Beatles. Nothing else, Ferguson suggests, can explain why we not only tolerated, but admired Harrison for, his own tiresome religiosity. You can test Ferguson’s thesis by asking yourself this: would you have changed the station when “My Sweet Lord” came up on the car radio if the record had been made by anyone else?

We didn’t tolerate Harrison’s lecturing us from his grand estate about the degradation of living in the material world because of his magnetic personality or his overflowing reservoir of talent. Truth be told, he wasn’t much of a singer and, although he certainly had his moments as a songwriter, his contribution to the Beatles catalogue was miniscule in comparison to Lennon and McCartney’s. We boomers over-rated his guitar playing when we first heard it because we were too young to remember the people he’d stolen his rockabilly licks from. There's no denying that Harrison gave us some memorable licks of his own (think of “I Feel Fine,” “Day Tripper” or “Paperback Writer”), but the cutting edge of rock guitar-playing had passed him by years before the Beatles broke up in 1970. As for his post-Beatles career, I’ll bet that you can’t name more than three songs he put out in the next thirty years off the top of your head.

Yet say this for Harrison’s ostentatious spirituality: it has worn a lot better than Lennon’s strident peace-mongering or McCartney's serial marital bliss. I'd now rather listen to “My Sweet Lord” than “Give Peace a Chance” or "A Silly Love Song." And aren’t you still a little grateful to George for never imagining that he was so formidable a musician that he could afford to share the stage with a tone-deaf wife?

Ferguson reminds us that George had something going for him that John and Paul sorely lacked, viz., humility born of self-awareness, and religiosity probably had something to do with it:

“One of George Harrison’s most appealing traits was self-awareness. He would have seen (and said) how absurd such talk [about his musical prowess] was. ‘I was never a real guitarist,’ he once told his friend Klaus Voormann. And he wasn’t; he couldn’t launch the fireworks like Eric Clapton or Jeff Beck, and the disciplined technique of Andrés Segovia or Julian Bream never interested him. About his songwriting, he told an interviewer: ‘There’s no comparison between me and someone who sits and writes music. What I do is really simple.’ Right again. He compared himself to a pastry chef, able to combine musical ingredients nicked from others to make a pleasing presentation of songcraft. He made many marvelous records, but as a source of fresh musical ideas, he said, ‘I’m not really that good.’ . . .

“Whether his religion led him to his clear-eyed modesty, or it worked the other way around, the two were connected. Along with the humility, his unapologetic religious faith made him the most unlikely rock star in history.”

Amen to that.