interesting things
Gregory Mankiw plays a small but important role in the political ecology: an accomplished Harvard professor who validates Republican economic policies. It’s almost impossible to find empirical support for debt-financed tax cuts, but when George W. Bush proposed them, Mankiw and his Harvard pedigree were there to reassure that they
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My item on Rand Paul the other day, predictably, went over quite badly in the libertarian community. The Insomniac Libertarian, in an item wonderfully headlined “Obama Quisling Jonathan Chait Smears Rand Paul,†complains that my Paul piece “never discloses that [my] wife is an Obama campaign operative.†A brief annotated response:
1. I question the relevance of the charge, since Rand Paul is not running against Obama.
2. In point of fact, my wife is not an Obama campaign operative and has never worked for Obama’s campaign, or his administration, or volunteered for his campaign, or any campaign, and does not work in politics at all.
3. I question the headline labeling me an “Obama quisling,†a construction that implies that I have betrayed Obama, which seems to be the opposite of the Insomniac Libertarian’s meaning.
4. For reasons implied by points one through three, I urge the Insomniac Libertarian to familiarize himself with some of the science linking sleep deprivation to impaired brain function.
A more substantive, though still puzzling, retort comes from the Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf, a frequent bête noire of mine on subjects relating to Ayn Rand and Ron or Rand Paul. Friedersdorf raises two objections to my piece, which traced Rand Paul’s odd admission that he is “not a firm believer in democracy†to his advocacy of Randian thought. Friedersdorf first charges that the intellectual connection between Paul and Rand is sheer paranoia:
Chait takes the quote and turns it into a conspiracy … As I read this, I couldn’t help but think of Chait as a left-leaning analog to the character in Bob Dylan’s “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues.” Those Objectivists were coming around/They were in the air / They were on the Ground/ They wouldn’t give me no peace. For two thousand years, critics of unmediated democracy have warned about the masses abusing individuals and minorities. The American system was built from the very beginning to check democratic excesses.
But if Rand Paul distrusts democracy he must’ve gotten it from Ayn Rand.Â
A conspiracy? Am I imagining that Rand Paul has been deeply influenced by Ayn Rand? Paul himself has discussed the deep influence her work had on his own thinking. In college he wrote a series of letters and columns either quoting Rand or knocking off her theories. He used a congressional hearing to describe one of her novels at tedious length. How is this a conspiracy?
Friedersdorf proceeds to argue that Rand is not really very militant anyway:
It’s also interesting that Chait regards Rand’s formulation as “militant.” Let’s look at it again. “I do not believe that a majority can vote a man’s life, or property, or freedom away from him.” Does Chait believe that a democratic majority should be able to vote a man’s life or freedom away? …
In the political press, it happens again and again: libertarian leaning folks are portrayed as if they’re radical, extremist ideologues, even when they’re expressing ideas that are widely held by Americans across the political spectrum.
Well, here we come to a deeper disagreement about Ayn Rand. My view of her work is pretty well summarized in a review-essay I wrote in 2009, tying together two new biographies of Rand with some of the Randian strains that were gaining new currency in the GOP. My agenda here is not remotely hidden, but maybe I need to put more cards on the table. I’ve described her worldview as inverted Marxism — a conception of politics as a fundamental struggle between a producer class and a parasite class.
What I really mean is, I find Rand evil. Friedersdorf’s view is certainly far more nuanced and considerably more positive than mine. He’s a nice, intelligent person and a good writer, but we’re not going to agree on this.
Friedersdorf waves away Rand’s (and Rand Paul’s) distrust of democracy as the same fears everybody has about democracy. Well, no. Lots of us consider democracy imperfect or vulnerable, but most of us are very firm believers in democracy. Rand viewed the average person with undisguised contempt, and her theories pointed clearly in the direction of cruelty in the pursuit of its fanatical analysis. A seminal scene in Atlas Shrugged described the ideological errors of a series of characters leading up to their violent deaths, epitomizing the fanatical class warfare hatred it’s embodied and which inspired Whitaker Chambers to observe, “From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: ‘To the gas chambers — go!’â€
Randism has never been tried as the governing philosophy of a country, so it remains conjecture that her theories would inevitably lead to repression if put into practice at a national level. But we do have a record of the extreme repression with which she ran her own cult, which at its height was a kind of totalitarian ministate. You can read her biographies, or at least my review, to get a sense of the mind-blowing repression, abuse, and corruption with which she terrorized her followers.
But the upshot is that I strongly dispute Friedersdorf’s premise that Rand’s theories are a variant of democracy, any more than Marx’s are. In fact, I find the existence of powerful elected officials who praise her theories every bit as disturbing to contemplate as elected officials who praise Marxism. Even if you take care to note some doctrinal differences with Rand, in my view we are talking about a demented, hateful cult leader and intellectual fraud. People who think she had a lot of really good ideas should not be anywhere near power.
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via Daily Intelligencer http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/06/rand-pauls-love-of-ayn-rand-a-conspiracy.html
Whether or not it you agree with it, and whether or not it will work, President Obama’s strategy on sequestration is perfectly obvious. His goal is to end the automatic budget cuts, which he regards as stupidly constructed and likely to harm the economy, and replace it with a long-term deficit reduction deal, balanced between cuts to retirement programs and closing off tax deductions. His plan to win involves isolating the unpopularity of both sequestration and the Republican Party’s goals (especially its refusal to raise taxes on the rich) in order to force the opposition to compromise.
The whole drama, then, lies with the Republicans. And deciphering the GOP strategy is as mysterious as gaming out the plans of a tiny band of warring clans in some mountainous region of Afghanistan. Nearly everything about the GOP strategy is almost completely inscrutable to outsiders. What is the party actually hoping to accomplish in the end? How do Republican leaders think they will arrive there?
Deepening the bafflement is that the Republicans’ apparent approach bears no relation either to political reality or to its stated goals. President Obama is offering up something – hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to Social Security and Medicare – that Republicans say they want, and which (due to their unpopularity) they have proven unable to obtain even when they have had full control of government. They are instead undertaking a public showdown against a figure who is vastly more popular and trusted, who possesses a better platform to communicate his message, and whose message itself – spread the pain among rich and middle class alike, don’t cut retirement programs more deeply than needed to protect tax loopholes for the rich – commands overwhelmingly higher public support.
I think the Republican Party’s behavior can be at least partly explained, though not necessarily rationalized. The main thing that’s going on is that, in the face of cross-pressures, the party’s anti-tax wing has once again asserted its supremacy. As has held true since 1990, when conservatives revolted against the (highly successful) deficit reduction deal negotiated between President Bush and Congressional Republicans, every priority has given way to the cause of lower taxes on the highest earning taxpayers. The party’s decision now is simply a replication of every decision it has made since then.
Part of the confusion is that Republicans have been saying for months that they really just want to stop tax rates from raising. They’re happy – nay, eager – to make the rich pay more taxes by reducing their tax deductions. Certain conservative economists believe this as well. Since Obama is offering to increase revenue in exactly this way, it might seem inoffensive to Republicans. Republican economist Martin Feldstein proposed a deduction cap that would raise four times as much revenue as Obama is asking! Ezra Klein can’t understand why Republicans won’t accept a deal to reduce the tax deductions they’ve been calling a pollution of the tax code, especially in return for entitlement cuts.
The answer to this piece of the mystery is clear enough: Republicans in Congress never actually wanted to raise revenue by tax reform. The temporary support for tax reform was just a hand-wavy way of deflecting Obama’s popular campaign plan to expire the Bush tax cuts for the rich. Conservative economists in academia may care about the distinction between marginal tax rates and effective tax rates. But Republicans in Congress just want rich people to pay less, period. I can state this rule confidently because there is literally not a single example since 1990 of any meaningful bloc of Republicans defying it.
What has aided the easy reversion to form, with low taxes for the rich dominating all other considerations, is the pent-up rage and betrayal John Boehner has engendered among his most conservative members. Almost nothing Boehner has done since taking over as Speaker has endeared him to his ultras. Every subsequent compromise creates more embitterment, and the last few moves have provoked simmering rage. Conservatives had to swallow a tax hike, and then swallow an increase in the debt ceiling. Boehner has, incredibly, had to promise his members not to enter private negotiations with Obama.
The pressure for confrontation as a method has built up to the point where seemingly no deal Boehner could reach would leave him safe. The reason the parties have avoided negotiating is because they both know this. The Republican crazies have been denied the fight they rave and Boehner has to give it to them, however unwise it may be.
The question, though, is what happens next. Boehner’s Plan A is one everybody in the party can agree to – Obama caves in and offers to replace sequestration with cuts to social spending, without any revenue increase. But Plan A won’t happen, because it’s worse for Obama than even permanent sequestration. Obama won’t fold, and sequestration will begin, its effects taking effect slowly.
The first test will be whether Boehner can continue to hold the allegiance of his defense hawks, who only accepted sequestration in the first place because Boehner promised them it would never happen. They have mostly held their tongue, out of party loyalty, but the longer time goes on, the stronger will be their temptation to cut a side deal with Obama.
A second faction to peel off will be the party’s political realists – members from relatively vulnerable districts, party strategists, and others conscious of the party’s vulnerability to public opinion. For reasons noted above, the battle for public opinion is nearly hopeless, and Republicans will lose it just as they lost the fiscal cliff showdown, the 2010-2011 payroll tax showdown, and the Gingrich-era government shutdown showdowns. The pragmatists will give the ultras their shot to pull off the upset, but after some period of time – a week? A few weeks? – the brand damage will be undeniable and they, too, will sue for peace.
At this point, the question becomes what kind of peace they try to get. Do they try to replace sequestration by taking a version of Obama’s tax deductions-for-entitlement cuts offer? Or do they just try to get rid of sequestration and pretend to replace it, but come up with some kind of phony mechanism – future longer-term cuts, commissions, vague formulas – in an attempt to save the Pentagon budget without making the richies cough up any more taxes?
That eventuality is the hardest thing of all to forecast. The strangest thing about the party’s decision to fight rather than negotiate is that little sign can be found that any decision has actually been made at all, if you define a decision as a balancing of competing actual choices.
Republicans all agree that taxes are bad, defense spending cuts are bad, and some unspecified entitlement cuts would be good. The conservative media offer a window into the thinking of the Republican Party, and I follow it fairly closely. To read conservative pundits, Obama’s demand is higher taxes, full stop. Conservatives are not rejecting Obama’s offer. They are refusing to consider it at all. They will endorse Boehner’s impossible-to-attain goals, and they will denounce Obama’s imaginary all-tax alternative, and they will proclaim themselves ready to accept sequestration rather than submit to the socialist hell Obama would impose on them otherwise.
But consideration of the actual choice at hand – reduce tax deductions and cut Medicare and Social Security in a manner acceptable to Obama, versus seeing if Obama will cancel out sequestration with no replacement, versus accepting sequestration as permanent policy – is getting to hearing at all. I don’t know what Republicans will do, and I’m fairly sure they don’t either.
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via Daily Intelligencer http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/02/republican-sequestration-plan.html
From the moment President Obama set out to reform the health care system, Republican opposition was a Terminator robot driven by boundless, remorseless determination to kill. Every single Republican in Congress opposed the bill, and Republicans who even considered supporting something vaguely like it were ruthlessly purged. Even after it was passed, Republicans ginned up far-fetched legal challenges, held endless votes to repeal it, and vowed not to implement it at the state level. They couldn’t be bargained with, couldn’t be reasoned with, and felt no pity.
The repeal machine has suffered a series of devastating blows – the Supreme Court upholding the individual mandate, Obama’s reelection, the decision of several Republican governors to accept the program’s expansion of Medicaid – and continued to lurch forward. But Governor Rick Scott’s announcement that he will enroll uninsured Floridians in Medicaid appears to be a real death blow, the moment the cyborg’s head is crushed in a steel press.
From the moment he appeared on the national stage, Scott seemed to be engineered to fight health care reform. The wealthy owner of a vast hospital chain that paid massive fines for overbilling Medicare during his tenure, Scott bankrolled an anti-reform lobby, then ran and won in 2010 on a platform of obsessive opposition to Obamacare. He has steadfastly vowed to turn down federal subsidies to cover his state’s uninsured, and even concocted phony accounting assumptions to justify his stance. Rick Scott really hates health care reform.
But Scott is a vulnerable incumbent in a swing state. And his refusal to accept Medicaid expansions would have left his state’s hospitals on the hook for $2.8 billion when uninsured Floridians show up in emergency rooms, prompting them to lobby Scott to change his mind. And so he has. For an enjoyable sampling of conservative apoplexy, try Philip Klein (“waving the white flag is an accurate description of Scott’s decision,â€) Mario Loyola (“the most grievous blow since the Supreme Court’s decision upholding Obamacare last year,â€) and Michael Cannon (“will he sell out Florida’s job creators too?â€).
Cannon’s outrage in particular is almost poignant. He has served as a health care adviser to Scott in Florida, and as a founder of the “Anti-Universal Coverage Club,†lent Scott the closest link, of all the governors, to the conservative movement’s maniacal hatred for providing health insurance to those too sick or poor to obtain it on their own. The ability of governors to turn down Medicaid funding is the last line of defense against Obamacare, and Scott’s betrayal of the cause – choosing the financial health of his own state’s hospitals over the chance to deny medical care to his own state’s poor – lands a blow of both substantive and symbolic power.
We are not about to enter a new era of peace and health care love. The death struggle between liberals fighting to make health insurance a basic right and conservative fighting to prevent that is over. What’s replacing it is a more mundane form of trench warfare. The new conservative position will come to revolve around expanding the role and prerogative of private insurance, and the liberal goal will be to strengthen regulation and help the poor and sick.
A glimpse of the new conservative health care line comes from former Romney adviser Avik Roy and conservative think-tank apparatchik Douglas Holtz-Eakin in a joint-bylined column. In it, they point the way toward the future of the health care debate. Gone is the millennial struggle to preserve the dying embers of freedom. They actually allow that the central architecture of Obamacare – the establishment of subsidized exchanges where individuals can purchase private insurance – is an “important concession to the private sector.â€
Right! It’s a Republican-designed idea! It might have helped if Republicans had noticed this, instead of screaming about socialism, back when Obama was trying to pass the plan.
In any case, Roy and Holtz-Eakin argue that their discovery that Obamacare consists mainly of a free market health insurance mechanism offers conservatives a wonderful opportunity. Here their thinking grows extremely confused. The problem with Obamacare , they argue, is that the exchanges are regulated. The “community rating†provision, which prevents insurers from charging higher rates to people more likely to get sick, “will dramatically increase premiums for young people.†They propose to get rid of such regulations and turn the exchanges into a free-market paradise “modeled on the Swiss system.â€
As a policy guide, this is utterly daft. Health care economist Aaron Carroll fisks the op-ed and concludes that they have no idea at all how the Swiss system works. It’s more regulated than Obamacare, not less. Community rating is needed because that’s how you make insurance affordable to sick people – otherwise, insurers will just sign up healthy customers.
But as a political roadmap, Roy and Holtz-Eakin offer what looks like the most plausible way forward for the GOP. The health insurance industry doesn’t want the government forcing them to sell products to money-losing sick people. Insurers will want to skim the healthiest people from the pool. And conservatives don’t like regulation. That is a perfect match of constituency and ideology.
So the broader struggle will never end. But the conservatives understand that the struggle to preserve “American exceptionalism†in health care – America’s standing as the sole advanced democracy without universal citizen access to medical care – is over.
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via Daily Intelligencer http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/02/scott-delivers-death-blow-to-obamacare-repeal.html
The Washington Free Beacon has a report, sourced to “Washington Free Beacon Staff,†that Chris Hughes is purging Jews from The New Republic. (Occasionally the Free Beacon publishes stories too embarrassing for any staffers to be associated with by name.) The sensationalism of the article is structured in hilariously descending fashion, with each successive addition to the story draining its plausibility until nothing remains at the end. But the Free Beacon’s report offers a helpful window into a social problem, in which millions of conservatives are held in a constant state of bug-eyed rage because they’re being manipulated for financial and ideological profit by right-wing pseudo-journalists.
The headline — “Hughes Drops Jews†— implies that the magazine’s new owner has undertaken a broad anti-Semitic purge, a prospect that would surely alarm, among others, his newly hired Jewish editor, Frank Foer. The introduction to the story blares, “The New Republic has quietly dropped at least five prominent Jewish writers from its masthead in a move that may signal the publication’s continued drift away from a staunchly pro-Israel standpoint.†Oddly, this sentence conflates Jewish writers with pro-Israel writers, an odd equation favored by hard-core anti-Semites.
As we read on, “masthead†turns out to mean the list of “contributing editors,†which is a broad list of former staffers, friends of the owner, or people generally enlisted to fill out a masthead without getting paid. As a rule, few contributing editors contribute, and no contributing editors edit. (Michael Kinsley once joked, “There are two kinds of contributing editors — the kind who don’t write, and the kind who you wish wouldn’t.â€) I happen to be a contributing editor at TNR. The pay isn’t good (by which I mean, it is nonexistent), but, then, the demands are equal to the pay.
Needless to say, none of this context is provided in the Free Beacon’s story. Instead, the story describes the purged Jews as “well-respected longtime contributors to the magazine,†an odd description for a group that has — with, I think, one exception — not published anything in the magazine for years.
However, by the end of the fourth paragraph, after listing the purged Jewish contributing editors, the story notes by the by that one of them, Peter Beinart, “is the publisher of Open Zion, an anti-Zionist Daily Beast blog sponsored by the New America Foundation,†a development the story concedes, with hilarious understatement, to be “complicating the picture.†So it’s sort of a combined purge of Jews and anti-Zionists?
Then finally, by the end, the piece includes still more information. “Seven additional writers have been dropped from the newly redesigned masthead. They include: Gregg Easterbrook, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Jeremy McCarter, Maggie Scarf, R.V. Thaw, Alan Wolfe, and Robert Wright.” So the facts of the story turn out to be that a magazine has conducted some routine trimming of its unpaid, ceremonial list, and five of the writers deprived of their ceremonial title are Jewish and seven are not! (Wolfe is reportedly Jewish, an easily Google-able fact the Free Beacon misses in an immovable object-versus-irresistible-force collision of the Beacon’s desire to make the story as sensationalist as possible against its lack of basic journalistic competence.
So, in a mere 314 words, we have gone from a purge of Jews to a report that half the writers removed from a titular list of former contributors are Jewish, and some of them hold hawkish positions on Israel, and one holds dovish views. (A scan of the current and still rather long contributing editor roster suggests that the remaining proportion is at least as heavily Jewish as those ushered off it.) This is not quite the publishing Kristallnacht the Free Beacon’s readers were promised.
The Washington Free Beacon is a smear sheet founded by Matthew Continetti, occasional contributor to the Weekly Standard and son-in-law of Weekly Standard editor William Kristol. Continetti wrote a founding credo for the Free Beacon, titled “Combat Journalism,†which is notable because it openly defined an ethos that has come to define large chunks of the conservative journalism world. Continetti described what he perceives as a lurid conspiracy of the liberal establishment, and promises to match it:
At the Beacon, all friends of freedom will find an alternative to the hackneyed spin, routine misstatements, paranoid hyperbole, and insipid folderol of Democratic officials and the liberal gasbags on MSNBC and talk radio. At the Beacon, we follow only one commandment: Do unto them.
If that is not clear, Continetti assails his opponents for their “hackneyed spin, routine misstatements, paranoid hyperbole†and open partisanship, and then, in the next sentence, promises to do the same thing right back to the liberals. The results are precisely what you’d expect. There has always been a certain amount of bad reporting and shoddy argumentation in journalism, but mostly it arises out of genuine ignorance or ideological fanaticism. The Free Beacon is an important innovator in the right-wing pseudo-journalism world. Hackneyed spin, routine misstatements, and paranoid hyperbole are not the accidental by-product of ideological zeal but its stated goal.
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via Daily Intelligencer http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/01/hitler-alive-and-well-owning-liberal-magazine.html
The largest and clearest point of distinction in the presidential race is universal access to health insurance. If President Obama wins reelection, his law to provide access to the uninsured will go forward. If Mitt Romney is elected, it will be gutted, and Medicaid — the bare-bones coverage plan for the most desperately poor and sick — will face enormous additional cuts.
Commonwealth Fund has released a report comparing the stark choice. Estimating conservatively, Romney’s plan — to the extent that the report was able to piece it together — would increase the uninsured population to about 72 million, while Obama’s would cut it to 26 million (his plan does not cover illegal immigrants.) Probably more telling is Romney’s official campaign reaction:
“Under ObamaCare, Americans have seen their insurance premiums increase, small businesses are facing massive tax increases, and seniors will have reduced access to Medicare services,†Ryan Williams, a Romney spokesman, wrote in an email to POLITICO. “The American people did not want this law, our country cannot afford this law, and when Mitt Romney becomes president he will repeal it and replace it with common-sense, patient-centered reforms that strengthen our health care system.â€
Note that the statement is almost entirely an attack on Obamacare, with a brief clause at the end vaguely promising something good will take its place. But that something requires resources. Most people lacking insurance are either sick or have a sick family member or they’re poor. If you want to cover them, you need to cough up some money. Obamacare undertook the massive political heavy lift of providing those resources, and that’s what Romney attacks — he included higher taxes on “small businesses†(i.e., people making more than $250,000 a year) and “reduced access to Medicare services†(i.e., cuts in reimbursements to Medicare providers, as a trade-off for providing them with 30 million new paying customers.)
Romney’s budget is premised on denying the government enough resources to fund any kind of universal health insurance program. His promise to cut tax rates by 20 percent would reduce tax revenue well below current levels. But even if you accept Romney’s arithmetically impossible claim that he can cut tax rates by 20 percent and raise the same tax revenue as the tax code does right now (and without raising taxes on the middle class), merely holding revenue at current, Bush-set levels would make any kind of universal coverage impossible.
Both campaigns describe the election as a stark choice, and this is correct. It’s a choice between universal health coverage for legal citizens and preserving the Bush tax cuts.
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via Daily Intel http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/10/study-measures-romney-plan-to-screw-poor-sick.html
George Will is a longtime hater of liberalism, and a longtime hater of football, so it makes sense that he would try to align his hatreds and write a column arguing that college football is an expression of liberalism:
College football became a national phenomenon because it supposedly served the values of progressivism, in two ways. It exemplified specialization, expertise and scientific management. And it would reconcile the public to the transformation of universities, especially public universities, into something progressivism desired but the public found alien. Replicating industrialism’s division of labor, universities introduced the fragmentation of the old curriculum of moral instruction into increasingly specialized and arcane disciplines. These included the recently founded social sciences — economics, sociology, political science — that were supposed to supply progressive governments with the expertise to manage the complexities of the modern economy and the simplicities of the uninstructed masses.
Football taught the progressive virtue of subordinating the individual to the collectivity. Inevitably, this led to the cult of one individual, the coach.
One flaw with Will’s thesis here is that the regions of the country most enamored with college football are least enamored with liberalism. College football is most popular in the Deep South, followed by the Midwest, followed by the West Coast, followed by the Northeast. The popularity of liberalism by region is that list in reverse.
The obvious solution here is for George Will to tour the Deep South explaining to rabid football fans that they have been taken in by the sinister hand of progressivism.
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via Daily Intel http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/09/george-will-is-not-ready-for-some-football.html
Conservative anxiety has stalked Mitt Romney since the outset of his presidential campaign, expressing itself in a series of hopes that a nominee who was not Romney might win, and then, after his nomination became inevitable, as endless caterwauling for Romney himself to act less … Romney-like. Romney’s vice-presidential selection has begun to serve as a stand-in for these demands, and as recently as a week ago, they split between calls for him to pick Paul Ryan and calls for Marco Rubio.
But since then, Romney’s position has steadily eroded, intensifying the conservative panic. And a report by National Review’s Ryan Costa that Romney was giving Ryan strong consideration focused all the attention on the dreamy House Budget Committee chairman and unofficial party leader. Suddenly Ryan’s potential nomination has become the sole locus of the conservative movement’s longings.
The reason Ryan had earlier been deemed unlikely was that Romney intended to run a campaign focused entirely on the economy. His reasoning was sound enough. Romney’s status as the challenger during an economic crisis with mass unemployment was a gigantic asset, but it was (aside from his growing Superpac advantage) his only asset. America still hated the Republican Party, hated its Congressional wing, and bitterly opposed the fiscal priorities it championed. Romney understood that he needed to bring together nearly every voter dispirited with the status quo, and not only those also eager to join a crusade to smash the welfare state.
Conservatives had been itching to enlist Romney more openly in just such a crusade, out of the same overweening ideological confidence that drove them to enlist the Republican Congress. And Romney’s campaign plan has begun to look increasingly shaky. Obama has successfully defined him as a self-interested agent of his economic class. Polls have shown that Romney’s perceived advantage in handling the economy, his only advantage, has dwindled to little or nothing. (The latest Fox News poll has Romney’s advantage on the economy dropping from 7 points to 3; In CNN’s poll, just 29% agreed that the economy will improve only if Romney wins – this is his entire campaign premise! – while 31% said it would improve only if Obama wins.)
The oft-repeated conservative argument for Ryan is that Romney has already endorsed the Ryan plan closely enough to incur its liabilities, so he might as well pick the politician best equipped to defend it. There’s certainly something to this. Ryan gets too little credit for his political skills. He has won consistently in a moderate district. He has managed to build a reputation among the national press corps as a thoughtful, compromise-friendly moderate while hewing to the right wing of his party. The major argument of my profile of Ryan from last spring is that his public persona is a giant scam; but pulling off a scam like that is the mark of a skillful pol.
On the other hand, Ryan’s capacity for national-level wholesale politics has yet to be proven. He has masterfully played the Washington press corps, but it remains largely an inside game. Most Americans have not formed an opinion about him. He has a long record of radical votes and is the functional leader of a wildly unpopular Congressional wing. The one real electoral test of his plan’s political tolerability came in a special election in a Republican district in upstate New York in 2011, in which an underdog Democrat swept to victory by relentlessly pounding Ryan’s plan, and especially its provision to privatize Medicare.
At this point, joining Ryan to the ticket would be a huge gamble. Romney would be tapping into Ryan’s immense political talent, but giving up on his win-by-default strategy that has taken a beating but might look good again if, say, some international disaster craters the recovery between now and November. In any case, the conservative drumbeat for Ryan has grown so overwhelming that it’s no longer even clear that Romney could turn Ryan down for an Incredibly Boring White Guy, even if he wants to. The Republican Party belongs to Ryan.
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via Daily Intel http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/08/romney-may-have-no-choice-but-to-pick-paul-ryan.html
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?â€
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.â€
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.â€
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 attacksâ€). 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