Tag: Daily Intel

As an incumbent president presiding over a painfully slow recovery in which congressional Republicans, the Federal Reserve, and even his own bureaucracy can block recovery measures, Barack Obama can’t run a “Morning in America” campaign. All he can do is try to convince voters that Mitt Romney won’t make things better.

This is just descriptively true, but Romney’s supporters have infused the description with tones of moral indignation. Republicans have been angrily accusing him of “distracting” voters from the economy with such things as attacks on Romney’s business career, gay marriage, talking up the auto bailout, advocacy of higher taxes on the rich, Romney’s gaffes, culture wars, even the “Fast and Furious” scandal. Jeb Ellis describes Obama’s strategy as “chemical warfare.” Obama’s strategy, he writes, “boils down to a simple question: can Mitt Romney be made so toxic as to enable the re-election of a president that a majority of voters would rather not re-elect?”

The unstated assumption here is that the race ought to be a referendum on Obama — and, in particular, a referendum on the lousy economy. But Romney’s strategy here is itself completely cynical and dishonest. I’m fairly sure that Obama genuinely believes that Romney won’t usher in greater prosperity. Does Romney himself actually believe that Obama deserves to be held accountable for the state of the economy? Here’s is that Romney said about this in 2004:

The people of America recognize that the slowdown in jobs that occurred during the early years of the Bush administration were the result of a perfect storm. And an effort by one candidate to somehow say, ‘Oh, this recession and the slowdown in jobs was the result of somehow this president magically being elected’ — people in America just dismiss that as being poppycock.

Romney manages to pack an enormous amount of condescension into this answer, doesn’t he? In one sentence, he deploys two “somehows” and one “magically” to cast the notion that the president is responsible for job loss four years into his presidency as utterly fanciful. And there is certainly a large degree of truth to the notion that external events beyond a president’s control drive economic outcomes. But even absolving Bush of any blame for the recession that began several months into his presidency — which I think is fair — the 2001 popping of the tech bubble and the 9/11 attacks were, in pure macroeconomic terms, a minor event compared to the worldwide financial crisis that began in 2008. Note that Bush had a far worse jobs record in his first term than Obama has in his.

You can believe that Bush deserves to be held accountable for the job losses in his first term but Obama does not (Obama’s crisis being both far deeper and having preceded his term). You can also argue that neither Bush nor Obama deserve to be blamed for the job losses of their respective first terms. (My view is much closer to the second than the first.) But there’s no possible way you can maintain that voters ought to hold Obama accountable for job losses, but should not have done the same to Bush in 2004.

Am I quibbling? I don’t think so. The entire case that Romney is putting before undecided voters — that the struggles of the economy prove Obama has failed — is something he does not believe himself. Sure, large elements of Obama’s campaign message about Romney’s history of outsourcing and closing plants lies somewhere between “oversimplistic” and misleading,” but at its core there’s a point that, I’m sure, Obama actually believes. Romney’s entire campaign is based on an idea he doesn’t believe. If you held his current campaign to some standard of intellectual consistency and forced him to make arguments about the president’s economic responsibility without shaping those arguments to partisan self-interest, his entire rationale would collapse.

The Republican plan is to leverage public discontent over the current state of the economy into an election victory they can use to push through sweeping changes to public policy. Obama wants the electorate to vote on that instead. Now he has a good reason for wanting this: The entire thrust of the Republican plan, to cut tax rates for the rich and cut the social safety net, is highly unpopular. Why is Obama’s approach of discrediting what he sees as the radical policies of the opposition less edifying from the standpoint of American democracy? And why is Romney’s plan to have voters base their entire decision around a single performance metric he himself considers abject nonsense any better?

Read more posts by Jonathan Chait

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via Daily Intel http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/08/video-proves-mitt-knows-whole-campaign-is-a-lie.html

Recently, Republican Senator and future Presidential Timber Marco Rubio compared a speech by President Obama to that of a “left-wing 3rd world leader.” It’s not the first time Rubio has drawn upon the comparison. Last year, he described an Obama speech advocating the cloture of a small number of upper-bracket tax deductions as “the kind of language you’d expect from the leader of a Third World Country.” At other times, he’s called Obama’s arguments “more appropriate for some left-wing strong man than for the president of the United States.”

It is no longer terribly newsworthy for even the most respectable Republicans to equate Obama’s policies with dictatorships. But Rubio appears to be fixated on a particular kind of dictator, the Third World strongman. What could explain this odd fixation?

Rubio’s parents, of course, emigrated from Cuba. His father first left in the waning days of the Batista regime, but some members of his family returned and then fled when Fidel Castro took power. Rubio inaccurately represented his family as having fled Castro, but in his defense, it seems likely that he grew up believing the rise of Castro precipitated their arrival in America, or at least the revolution loomed large in their story of how they could never return to their homeland. “They wanted to live in Cuba again,” Rubio has said of his parents, “They tried to live in Cuba again, and the reality of what it was made that impossible.”

Cuban émigré politics famously lean right, but there seems to be more going on in Rubio’s heated imagination than standard anti-communism. The former colonies of Spain and Portugal traditionally feature massive disparities of wealth, which in turn create a poisonous dynamic in which elites cling ferociously to their wealth, while pro-redistribution politics often take the form of crude or even violent populism. The U.S. is not as unequal as Latin America, but the gap between us is shrinking, and conservative politics in the United States have increasingly given off more than a whiff of the panicked fear of the grasping mob that would be familiar in Batista’s Cuba or any other economically stratified former Spanish colony.

That political style, automatically equating any pro-egalitarian politics, however mild, has become Rubio’s hallmark. In 2010, Obama proposed a fee to make large financial institutions repay the federal government for a portion of their TARP bailout (here’s an endorsement by Marxist guerrilla Brookings Institution fellow Douglass Elliott). Rubio opposed the fee, a position that drew criticism from liberals. Rubio seemed to view the mere existence of disagreement as an outrage, writing in National Review:

Earlier this week, I spoke out against President Obama’s wrongheaded decision to place an onerous and punitive new tax on the financial institutions Americans rely on to loan them money to buy homes, safeguard their money, and fund their businesses. Since then, I have been subjected to vicious attacks from Democratic party operatives, liberal bloggers, and even some in the media….

This is life in Obama, Reid, and Pelosi’s America, where not only is free enterprise attacked, but so too is anyone who dares to defend it.

It is actually fascinating that Rubio equates the mere existence of criticism from political commentators and the opposing party as a dangerous and frightening development. He may not advocate any policy agenda of suppressing dissent, but he clearly envisions an ideal place where he can defend the interests of his country’s wealthiest industry without incurring any bothersome opposition (or “vicious attacks”). Rubio defines this nirvana of yore as “America,” but the panic it represents is more rooted in the political culture of Latin American oligarchy.

Read more posts by Jonathan Chait

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via Daily Intel http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/07/marco-rubios-recurring-obama-nightmare.html

For those of us old enough to remember the time when President Obama’s reelection campaign was flailing and desperate allies were bombarding him with advice — it was about two weeks ago — it feels a little soon for Republicans to dissolve into panic of their own. And yet here we are.

The basic chronology of the latest panic is as follows. First, Rupert Murdoch — who commands a vast global media empire — decided his personal Twitter feed was the medium of choice to communicate his belief that Romney needs to replace his campaign staff. Fellow right-wing business titan Jack Welch concurred. Then the Wall Street Journal editorial page fired off a jittery editorial bemoaning his “insular staff and strategy that are slowly squandering an historic opportunity.”

All this was the backdrop for Romney’s poorly received interview yesterday, in which he attempted to clarify his position on whether the individual mandate is a tax. His adviser Eric Fehrnstrom initially said it was not. Now Romney says it is. Dropped into the roiling waters of Republican discontent, this is the perfect recipe for an early summer campaign freak-out.

It’s worth bearing in mind a couple points, though. First, there’s not a whole lot of evidence that Romney is actually blowing it right now. The polls have registered a slight uptick for Obama, possibly related to his campaign’s ability to hammer home the ugly underside of Romney’s business career, or possibly reflecting a random statistical blip.

The mandate-tax brouhaha merely reflects the impossible position Romney finds himself in. Remember, as late as 2010, Romney was praising Obama’s decision to include an individual mandate in his health-care law. Then Republicans decided it was unconstitutional, and since then have concluded it is the only thing worse than unconstitutional: a tax. So Republicans insisted that Romney not undercut them and concur that it is indeed a tax. So he did. And when asked about the identical policy he introduced to Massachusetts, here was his attempt to draw a distinction:

Actually, the — chief justice, in his opinion, made it very clear that, at the state level — states have the power to put in place mandates. They don’t need to require them to be called taxes in order for them to be constitutional. And — and as a result, Massachusetts’ mandate was a mandate, was a penalty, was described that way by the legislature and by me. And so it stays as it was.

I have read this passage countless time in an attempt to make sense of it. Romney seems to be asserting that Obama’s individual mandate is a tax because the Supreme  Court ruled it is justifiable under the taxing authority, and because his individual mandate never faced a legal challenge, it never had to declare itself a tax, so it isn’t, even though it is exactly the same thing. This is bizarre.

On the other hand, you try explaining a coherent worldview when you’re in Romney’s position. It’s impossible. The best you can to is emit some kind of word salad.

Here is the deeper problem. Conservatives say they want Romney to change his staff or alter his campaign tactics. But what they really want is a different candidate and a different electorate. They want to believe that the American people are hungering for detailed endorsements of Republican plans to cut entitlement spending  and taxes for the rich and launch a philosophical assault on the welfare state. But that’s not what the public wants and Romney knows it.

People don’t like the health-care law because they have no idea what it does and think it was a distraction from the economy. Romney’s best and only campaign strategy is to exploit discontent with the disastrous economy. He needs the votes of as many people as possible who feel frustrated with Obama, which is why he is leaving his alternative as vague as possible. Obama is the candidate who wants to turn the election into a specific choice between competing visions for the future, because Obama’s preference — in which taxes for the rich are higher and entitlement spending gets cut less — is vastly more popular. What’s more, Romney’s history as father of national health insurance and sometime-advocate of the same national plan as the one Obama passed exposes the philosophical inanity of the Republican belief that Obamacare represents socialism.

The smart move for Romney is to ignore conservative caterwauling. The only question is whether he’ll be able to, or whether his base, as it has done from time to time, will force him to run the campaign they want rather than the one Romney needs.

Read more posts by Jonathan Chait

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via Daily Intel http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/07/hey-republicans-leave-mitt-aloooone.html

Jan Crawford has an amazing report showing what many of us suspected immediately when the Supreme Court announced its shocking and bizarre decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act: John Roberts switched his position on the law because he feared the crisis of legitimacy he would create by embracing such an activist position. He is perfectly eager to join in future bouts of right-wing judicial activism, but this particular one, and this particular time, frightened him away from the precipice.

I should explain why I call the decision shocking and bizarre. There were numerous arguments for the constitutionality of the law. The argument that it could be uphold under the power to tax struck me as convincing (Jack Balkin made the case a month before the decision) but not completely airtight. You could plausibly deny the mandate was a tax, whereas the arguments denying it as a function of the Commerce Clause were insanely tendentious. Liberal lawyers were unanimously supportive of the Commerce Cause justification and divided on the taxing arguments. Conservative lawyers were divided on the Commerce Clause and united on the taxing authority. The overlap of legal minds willing to accept the fantastical right-wing arguments against the law but also to accept the weakest liberal argument for it contained nobody at all, until Roberts himself stepped forward to claim this unoccupied territory.

Crawford’s report will enrage conservatives. (The conservative justices and/or clerks who spoke with her probably leaked the story precisely in the hope that it would.) They’re right to be enraged. The essence of law is to decide cases on the basis of what the law says, not on the basis of personal preference or some other consideration. Roberts seems to have corrupted his role as a judge, deciding upon the outcome that made him most comfortable and working backward to a justification for it. The epithet legal scholars use for this sort of thing is a “results-oriented decision.”

And this suggests why, as reassuring as the bottom-line result of Roberts’s decision may be, the process by which he arrived at it was so unnerving. The legal arguments he did endorse were simply crazy. And, beneath the legal gobbledygook, the form of craziness was crude and obvious.

The case against the law was, basically, to devise a series of often niggling, semantic or outright false distinctions between Obamacare and other of the many ways in which Congress has regulated commerce before. Then, freed from precedent, it could turn the decision into a philosophical game, imagining that upholding this law would enable some future law which adopted a vaguely related rationale to some horrible dystopian end (mandatory broccoli!) You could use this kind of dorm room logic to declare any law unconstitutional. All you have to do is find some way in which it’s different from previous laws – and every law is different from other laws in some way – then imagine President Stalin and a complaint Congress twisting the justification to some unimaginable purpose, and presto, unconstitutional.

David Frum brilliantly compares the this-isn’t-really-in-the-Constitution-so-I’ll-wing-it logic of the conservative dissent to the famous liberal activism that liberal justices used to create a right to sexual freedom in Griswold v. Connecticut. That earlier case, rightly scored by conservatives for decades, declared that “emanations” from the Third, Fourth, Ninth and Tenth Amendments created a right to privacy that extended to sex. The four conservative justices insisted Obamacare couldn’t be constitutional because… well, just because:

What is absolutely clear, affirmed by the text of the 1789 Constitution, by the Tenth Amendment ratified in 1791, and by innumerable cases of ours in the 220 years since, is that there are structural limits upon federal power—upon what it can prescribe with respect to private conduct, and upon what it can impose upon the sovereign States. Whatever may be the conceptual limits upon the Commerce Clause and upon the power to tax and spend, they cannot be such as will enable the Federal Government to regulate all private conduct and to compel the States to function as administrators of federal programs.

They can’t say what limits the government can prescribe upon private conduct. But they don’t like this health care business. So they’ll just cite the Constitution in general as their source here, with all the legal precision of some guy in a tricorner hat at a Tea Party rally. (Scalia also hates dope smokers so anything he may have said about limiting their private conduct does not apply to health care.)

Roberts was willing to endorse the legal logic of this thinly veiled justification, but unwilling to accept the political consequences of it. If his decision was justice, it was justice of the roughest kind.

Read more posts by Jonathan Chait

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via Daily Intel http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/07/john-roberts-writes-his-own-law.html