Ambition, Impatience and Sloth

2012-01-22T08:07:00.001-08:00

Quick Takes on the Republican Race
Once again I'm finding myself caught between satisfaction at Republican actions that would seem to harm their chances of winning the presidency this November, and dismay-bordering-on-horror at the unprecedentedly horrible consequences if they do somehow win. It's hard to contemplate a Gingrich presidency without venturing into H.P. Lovecraft territory; even George Will this morning made reference to the nauseating prospect of entrusting nuclear launch codes to that unwell man.

To their credit, the "Republican establishment" pretty surely won't allow that to happen. Sure, they might be happy enough to countenance environmental catastrophe that mostly will be felt in their grandchildren's time, or to allow the accumulated unfairness of our economic system to push toward eventual destabilization and something like revolution--again, after they're gone. But when Newt has a case of the sads and nukes Iran, or even just calls Nancy Pelosi a See-You-Next-Tuesday in the middle of the State of the Union, they'd own a piece of that, and they can't find that acceptable.

So I don't think Gingrich ultimately will get much closer to the White House than he is right now. But who will they nominate? It must now be clear to the Republicans just how poor a politician Mitt Romney is, and how particularly mismatched he is to this moment. The core Republican premise since 1968 has been that the American electorate will countenance economic elitism so long as their leaders can portray cultural populists with conviction.

Thus their most successful presidential candidates have been really rich and/or politically experienced guys who nonetheless have the performance chops to connect with the pissed-off white Christian masses: Nixon (eventually), Reagan, George W. Bush. The guys who couldn't do it as well were Jerry Ford, who from history's distance just seems like too nice a guy; and George H.W. Bush, who won a race he probably shouldn't have in 1988 because of a personally beloved predecessor and an utterly inept Democratic opponent and lost a race he probably shouldn't have in 1992 because he faced a master politician in Clinton and the same inability to connect that now threatens Mitt Romney's prospects.

The more people see of Romney, the less they like him. Will also noted that Mitt now has competed in 25 elections in his career; his record is 6-19. True, neither Iowa nor South Carolina was very friendly ground for him--but I'd argue that those states are more representative of the sort of voters he'd need to win jump-ball states like Ohio, North Carolina and maybe Pennsylvania than the more favorable electorate in New Hampshire where he won. The paradox is that the more he chases those hardcore, less educated, white cultural conservatives, the more he probably damages himself with the moderates in both parties and independents who theoretically might choose him over Obama.

Why is Romney so ineffective as a politician? I think much of it has to do with how transparently hard he's trying! My brother-in-law among many others has made the point that, at bottom, he's kind of similar to Obama: seems even-keeled, digs on data, a moderate by temperament, bit of a cold fish. I guess to make up for this, he's attacked Obama in such over-the-top and factually incorrect terms that even (especially?) those who really do hate the president must feel they're being "sold to."

Probably this sense is reinforced when Romney shows his glass jaw--most obviously on the taxes, but in general when he's pushed on the predatory capitalism he helped create. This exposes a bug in the RomneyBot program: he's proud of what he did at Bain Capital, but knows on some level that it's politically disadvantageous to express this. Of course he hates the construct of "the 99 percent vs. the 1 percent"; he's in the 1 percent of the 1 percent! At the same time, he's clearly smart enough to understand how difficult it's going to be to make a substantive case both that he accumulated his wealth as a result of adding tangible value to the world, as a Steve Jobs or Bill Gates did, or that he's "earned" his absurdly favorable tax rate through the good his money has done. In both cases, he's been "successful" under the rules of a crooked game--rules, in some cases, that he helped create. So you get bumbling, stumbling, mumbling responses like this one.

I guess the theory of Romney's campaign and his establishment supporters is that the energy on the Republican side would come from opposing a president they revile, particularly if the economy remains tepid or, even better for their purposes, declines again. But you can't beat something with nothing, and Romney seems as close to nothing as we've seen in American politics in a very long time.

If the economy is bad enough and Romney is able to tack back to the middle, he still could win. But he's not loved and he's not trusted, even (especially) among the voters who should comprise the core of his support. Given that Gingrich, Frothy Mix and Ron Paul are all unacceptable and almost certainly unelectable, one is pushed toward the conclusion that the eventual Republican nominee for president might not even be in the race right now.

2011-12-31T08:56:00.000-08:00

My Year in Books 2011
So as we masticate the last few orts from the turdburger platter that was 2011, I'll finish this year here as I started it: with a list of books I read. Maybe it's an appropriate indicator of incremental progress that I had the 2010 list on the first day of 2011, but present the 2011 list on the last day of this same year.

Not that this is about raw counts, but I seem to have read, or at least completed, significantly fewer books this year than last--22 compared to 26. The difference might reside in books I got fairly far into this year before abandoning, a group that includes Daniel Walker Howe's What Hath God Wrought, a lengthy comprehensive survey of early 19th century American history that I got maybe 350 pages into before deciding I'd had enough, and River of Gods, a high-concept sci-fi novel of maybe 800 pages that I got a quarter through and concluded that it just wasn't coming together for me. I read, and loved, about half of David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster, a book of non-fiction essays; no doubt, I'll read the rest over the next few years. (With DFW, sadly, there's all too much motivation to stretch it out.) I also had a stretch this summer where I was reading quite a bit on my iPhone; a couple of the shorter selections noted below came through that format, as did a bunch I didn't finish: Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Thus Spake Zarathustra, The Devil's Dictionary, and The Prince, among probably others.

What's cool about the e-books is that you can download many of these classics for the low, low price of "free," making it even easier (at least psychologically) to start something you've always been curious about but never quite wanted to pay for or even haul out of the library, and go as far with it as you'd like. Thus I have, among others, Siddhartha and Paradise Lost sitting on my iPhone, against the day I might decide to give either a spin.

The novel I read this year that most strongly resonated with me was the first one I finished: Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel. The best non-fiction was the first volume of Robert Caro's LBJ biography, The Path to Power. (I'm about 340 pages into volume three now.)

The list, in rough order and as I recall or can reconstruct. Starred items are particularly recommended...

Wolf Hall (Hilary Mantel)*
Super Sad True Love Story (Gary Shteyngart)
Freedom (Jonathan Franzen)*
Daniel Patrick Moynihan: A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary (Steven Weisman, editor)*
1960 (David Pietrusza)
Old Man’s War (John Scalzi)*
The City and the City (China Mieville)
American Pastoral (Philip Roth)*
Notes from the Underground (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)*
The Mysterious Stranger (Mark Twain)
Losers (Michael Lewis)
The Fall of Paris (Alistair Horne)
The Wind-Up Girl (Paolo Bacigalupi)
A Place of Greater Safety (Hilary Mantel)
See a Little Light (Bob Mould with Michael Azzerad)*
The Path to Power (Robert Caro)*
Means of Ascent (Robert Caro)*
Man in the Dark (Paul Auster)
Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro)
The Enchantress of Florence (Salman Rushdie)*
Chronic City (Jonathan Lethem)

2011-12-30T13:12:00.000-08:00

Trying to Resist an Awful Pun
(See if you can guess what it is; answer at the end of the post.)

I was talking with a colleague recently, a woman in a same-sex marriage, about the election next year and Obama's record. She said she planned to enthusiastically support him even though she wishes he'd done more to advance gay rights. I agreed on both counts, but added that civil rights aren't for him to give, but for her (or any unjustly denied constituency) to take.

Was thinking about that again just now when I came across this article about the president's position on gay rights heading into the 2012 race:

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told an audience of diplomats in Geneva this month that “gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights.” And in an interview in November, Shaun Donovan, the secretary of housing and urban development, said that he was “proud” to support the right of same-sex couples to marry.

The president enthusiastically endorsed Mrs. Clinton’s message, issuing a presidential memorandum directing all federal agencies to promote gay rights overseas. And while he said nothing publicly about Mr. Donovan’s declaration — which went further than Mr. Obama’s own position on the issue — a senior administration official said that Mr. Donovan enjoyed “the trust and respect of the president.”

Mr. Obama’s strategy, administration officials and gay-rights advocates said, reflects two conflicting forces. He recognizes that support for gay rights and same-sex marriage is growing, particularly among young voters.

But he is reluctant in an election year to be drawn into a culture-war issue — one that reliably helps Republicans turn out evangelical voters in their favor and that also strikes a particular nerve with religious black voters, a bedrock Obama constituency in battleground states like North Carolina and Florida.

The original basis of my support for Obama during the 2007-2008 campaign cycle was a hunch I had that, like great past presidents, he had a compelling vision for where he wished the country to go on certain issues; a clear sense of where it was at the moment; and an idea of how to move it in the direction he supported. At various times on various issues, I've had reason to doubt not just the overall concept here, but all three components of it. On this one, though, I wonder if maybe the paradigm actually holds.

There's just no way I believe that Obama really doesn't support fully equal rights for same-sex Americans. The circumstances of his upbringing, the political circles in which he came of age, the totality of his known views about social justice and the grounds to be at least somewhat skeptical of his Christianity--by which I do NOT mean that he's a "secret Muslim," but rather that he embraced churchgoing for social and political reasons at least as much as from personal epiphany--add up to a very strong case. But while the trend is unmistakably positive, any lead of a (small-c) conservative temperament would be aware of the dangers inherent to pushing too hard, too fast. Thus it's politically logical, if not particularly admirable, for Obama to maintain this pretense of his views "evolving"--and to let the New Yorkers, Clinton and Donovan, walk point and convey the message to a deep-pocketed and increasingly powerful constituency.

Another point, which is actually very consistent with Obama's conduct through the first three years of his presidency: his personal views don't really matter! He can't issue an executive order mandating marriage equality. He has the bully pulpit, and in that sense his public statement might have some positive impact--but it also would additionally politicize an argument that really should transcend partisan battles. Remember that marriage equality passed in New York only because a small number of Republican state senators went along with it. Of course, they had numerous pragmatic reasons to do so--log-rolling by Gov. Cuomo, campaign contributions from Mayor Bloomberg--in addition to whatever part principle played. But if taking that stance would have put them on the side of a president hated by many if not most Republicans, it's very possible at least one or two of those Republicans would have declined to do so.

At the same time, I think Obama only can get away with this coy posture because he's already delivered on some major if lesser points: the end of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and the non-defense of the abhorrent Defense of Marriage Act. And while I don't know for sure, I think he's also solid on the one function of the presidency most consequential to his personal views on equal rights: judicial appointments. There are larger problems here, especially the slow pace of nominations, but I'd be very surprised if even one Obama nominee to a judgeship is positively known to be hostile to equality. The progress might be slow, but it's sure.

(The bad pun? "Leading from behind," of course.)

2011-12-17T11:36:00.001-08:00

Hitchens' Death
Like many people, I found Christopher Hitchens' writing both infuriating and irresistible: the smugness, the more than occasional gratuitous cruelty and flat-out wrongness (not inaccuracy, mind you, though sometimes that too) on the one hand, the usually superb construction of arguments, the erudition and the almost-always superb prose on the other. His last regular column, in Slate, was a regular pleasure even though it fell on the bad side of that line at least once or twice a month. When his cancer diagnosis became known, I always wondered how long he'd be able to keep it up; when he missed a week or two, I'd start wondering if the end was here. But it still came as a surprise when I read yesterday morning that Hitchens was dead, about two weeks after I'd read his column on the Republican presidential debates. There was no indication whatever that it would turn out to be his final one.

I find this easy to admire: while no doubt Hitchens was a world-class egomaniac and self-aggrandizer, the narcissism was untouched (at least in print) by self-pity at what happened to him. I love that he was unrepentant about all the drinking and smoking, though maybe even more that "I would have quit earlier hoping to get away with the whole thing." That's exactly reflective of a man who felt he was on his own in the universe, responsible for himself above all else and delighted at that prospect. You don't get the sense with Hitchens that he died feeling a great deal of regret about work left undone or much left unfinished.

The reaction to his demise has been interesting. For the most part it's been love and admiration, though not totally unmixed with reference to Hitchens' peevishness, disingenuousness and various other faults. Others have noted that Hitchens himself wasn't in the habit of deference to the deceased; his takedowns of the likes of Mother Teresa were legendary. Perhaps with that in mind, Glenn Greenwald has fired off the harshest postmortem on Hitchens that I've seen:

[F]for the public at large, at least those who knew of him, Hitchens was an extremely controversial, polarizing figure. And particularly over the last decade, he expressed views — not ancillary to his writing but central to them — that were nothing short of repellent.
...
Subordinating his brave and intellectually rigorous defense of atheism, Hitchens’ glee over violence, bloodshed, and perpetual war dominated the last decade of his life. Dennis Perrin, a friend and former protégée of Hitchens, described all the way back in 2003 how Hitchens’ virtues as a writer and thinker were fully swamped by his pulsating excitement over war and the Bush/Cheney imperial agenda...

There’s one other aspect to the adulation of Hitchens that’s quite revealing. There seems to be this sense that his excellent facility with prose excuses his sins. Part of that is the by-product of America’s refusal to come to terms with just how heinous and destructive was the attack on Iraq. That act of aggression is still viewed as a mere run-of-the-mill “mistake” — hey, we all make them, so we shouldn’t hold it against Hitch – rather than what it is: the generation’s worst political crime, one for which he remained fully unrepentant and even proud.

Fair enough, and to me at least Hitchens' cheerleading for the war against "Islamofascism" was his most obnoxious, unjustified and flat-out ugly position. (His over-the-top support for the hypocritical bastards who tried to impeach Bill Clinton in the late '90s, seemingly based on personal loathing for his fellow Boomer hedonist, was a fairly distant number two.) His willingness--his eagerness--to fellow-travel with the neoconservatives and provide intellectual and moral support for a global interfaith war was both tragic and, given his very public atheism, head-spinningly ironic. That he never stepped back and came closer to recanting the view than the occasional concession that the war in Iraq wasn't prosecuted all that well seems more evidence of his ego-mania than anything else. (It's a fascinating and, as far as I've seen, not-noted irony that Hitchens died within hours of the Iraq War coming to an official end.)

Even in his apostasy from the left, though, Hitchens refused to cede his intellectual or political agency. He favored Bush over Kerry in 2004, yet argued--at no personal or political advantage and probably to his disadvantage--that Bush probably stole the election in Ohio. The same stubbornness that bound him to the war in Iraq even after all its justifications collapsed had its root in the man's absolute and uncompromising resistance to totalitarianism in all its forms; in fact, I'm pretty sure that Hitchens hated Saddam Hussein for the same reason he hated the Catholic Church, and indeed organized religion in any form and flavor. He resisted control; he wouldn't accept any yoke whatever goodies, from a think-tank sinecure to the promise of eternal life, came with it.

As legacies go, this strikes me as a pretty fucking great one.

2011-12-03T12:30:00.000-08:00

When the Entertainers Run the Asylum
So it sounds like Herman Cain has shucky-duckied his way out of the Republican presidential contest, but thankfully we've got someone else returning to fill his sizable clown shoes: The Donald, who will be moderating a Republican debate with the frothing right-wing outlet Newsmax.

“Our readers and the grass roots really love Trump,” said Christopher Ruddy, chief executive of Newsmax Media. “They may not agree with him on everything, but they don’t see him as owned by the Washington establishment, the media establishment.”
...
[D]espite being derided by liberals – President Obama likened Mr. Trump to a “carnival barker” for his repeated assertions that the president was actually foreign-born – the real estate mogul carries weight with a certain element of the conservative base. And that sway seems particularly strong with the Tea Party wing of the base, which will be a decisive factor in the early primaries that are likely to determine the nominee. The debate, which unlike many recent ones will not be limited to a specific topic like national security or the economy, is set to happen just a week before the Iowa caucuses.

Newsmax sent candidates the invitation on Friday afternoon. It began, “We are pleased to cordially invite you to “The Newsmax Ion Television 2012 Presidential Debate,” moderated by a truly great American, Mr. Donald J. Trump.” Spokesmen for several candidates did not immediately respond to questions from The New York Times about whether they would accept.

Though presidential candidates may initially balk at the idea of appearing in a debate where Mr. Trump – with his bombast and The Hair – is the one posing the questions, they may ultimately see it as an invitation they can’t refuse. In fact many of the candidates have already met with him, some more publicly than others. Representative Michele Bachmann has sat down with Mr. Trump several times this year. Gov. Rick Perry of Texas had dinner with him at Jean Georges, the posh Manhattan restaurant. And Mitt Romney paid a visit but carefully avoided being photographed.

And Newsmax is a powerful player itself. It has a broad reach into the conservative base, with monthly Web traffic second only to Fox News among sites with conservative-leaning audiences.

Normally at this point I'd probably emit a sad sigh and say something about how this reflects the country's steep downward plunge. But while that sentiment is in there somewhere, right now I'm feeling more inclined toward schadenfreude: the chickens of Republicans turning over their party to its most entertaining and least serious elements are coming home to roost, and it couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch.

Trump essentially will be holding a televised contest for his endorsement: it probably will attract more attention than any other debate this year, and no doubt he'll make them work for it in full view of a public that mostly will be horrified at just how nutzo the Republicans have become... a point I don't think is generally appreciated. Because Trump is nuts--and the way to get his endorsement will be to ape him as closely as possible. For his part, is there any doubt at all whether Donald Trump cares more about the fate of the nation or the gratification of his own ego?

Two Republicans already have announced that they won't attend: the social moderate (but economic uber-con) Jon Huntsman and the libertarian Ron Paul. While Paul is pretty repulsive on a lot of fronts, he does seem to grasp the idea that the presidency is a dignified and important office that probably shouldn't be sullied by immersion in the spectacle of reality TV. (That said, Paul's flack seems to suggest that the old Texan would consider joining were Trump to publicly apologize for a past diss of Iowa Republicans... which is kind of clever if rather oily.) For Huntsman's part, he probably realizes he's got nothing to gain by fishing in that pool; his hope at this point is for Republicans to take a second look and realize that, one, the guy is a true conservative, and two, he probably could win. There's some reason to believe this is starting to happen.

Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich already has accepted the invite to Trump's debate show, making it that much more likely Mitt Romney will join as well. The other two Fox candidates, Frothy Mix and Batshit, surely will go and could emerge with the endorsement of their fellow entertainer. (If Trump doesn't give his nod to one of them, it's likely because he realizes they won't win and worries that his brand will suffer by association with a loser. When it comes to that sort of thing, the guy is legitimately sharp if no less repugnant.) Rick Perry, if he's not out by then, probably will go too; he's got the mammoth self-regard and sneering hatred of "libburls" that Trump will recognize and gravitate to, and it actually wouldn't shock me if Trump wound up supporting Perry.

I don't doubt that "establishment Republicans" are having a bad couple days with all this. They seem pretty conclusively to have lost control: when Karl Rove goes on TV to attack Republicans like Bachmann and Perry, you know The Plan has gone awry. They're still hoping for Romney, of course, but the guy inspires neither excitement nor trust.

Were this somehow all happening on the Democratic side, where shitting on the base is expected and in fact cheered, the likely result would be at least one or two candidates joining and delivering a "Sister Souljah moment": in this case, maybe taking Trump to task for his focus on Obama's birth certificate or other manifestations of Trump's unseriousness. But for every candidate other than Romney, this will be a case of like visiting like: Gingrich probably did more than anyone in the last thirty years to transform our politics into the zero-sum blood sport game that rightly disgusts so many Americans, and Bachmann and Santorum are both mostly known for extreme statements and personal eccentricity. (Well, maybe not in Santorum's case; he's best known as the deserving victim of the greatest political trick of the modern era.)

Romney is in a different and probably unique category. As I've written before, he passes the "me test": I don't for a second doubt that he's far smarter than I am, has better judgment and is incalculably more organized, so I'd rather see him in the presidency than me despite my disdain for his views. One recent New York magazine article presents a fascinating story of how Romney can make a pretty substantial claim as the architect of the modern "1% percent economy"--an accomplishment that's impressive whatever you think of its tangible results.

But he's got an evidently uncontrollable impulse to pander--which I think is at the core of why everyone, left and right, mistrusts him. Robert Draper's profile in this weekend's Times magazine leaves the reader equally with respect for Romney's intellect and managerial skills, and astonishment at his difficulty committing or connecting. Add in some recent signs of pique and the general and I think involuntary air he projects of being somehow too good for the (admittedly draining, depressing and disgusting) process of running for the presidency, and you're left with the impression of a candidate much stronger on paper than in reality.

It's almost enough to make you feel bad for the guy--and then you remember what he's actually for and the incredible damage his preferred policies already have done, and you're suddenly thankful for Donald Trump's ego and the rapacious stupidity of his co-partisans.

2011-11-13T14:05:00.001-08:00

On God Telling You to Run for President
Three of the Republican presidential candidates now have 'fessed up to be just following orders from the Almighty: Michele "Batshit" Bachmann, Rick Perry (who apparently needs more specific instruction), and now Herman Cain.

My first thought about this was to admire God's sense of humor. What if they're all telling the truth? I imagined Him and His buddies sitting in the divine version of a man-cave (switch the pronouns if you'd like), pounding brews and cracking up over how He's jerking these dopes around. Granted, the Simpsons already did this in the one where Lisa is Joan of Arc, but if you're going to excise the full Simpsons oeuvre from the realm of dramatic consideration, you've got very little left.

I posted something to this effect on BackSheGoes, and someone responded with the fair-enough point that in the milieu of the Republican primary voter, this both bestows cred and serves as a signifier of humility, because it suggests a motivation other than ambition. In the cases of Perry and Cain, any indication of something other than unlimited self-regard is probably welcome. Then again, humility is usually connected to self-awareness, and Bachmann falls terribly short on that score: I wouldn't be surprised if she literally started flinging poop at one of these debates, and no doubt she'd assert that also was on celestial instruction.

Of course, the thought I've always had regarding most of these folks and their conversations with God is that it's uncanny how often He tells them what they want to hear. I figured George W. Bush's vision of the Almighty was as a smarter version of W. himself, presumably without the daddy issues. That they view themselves as worthy of being God's instrument on Earth also suggests to me something different than, and in fact more like opposed to, humility.

In my admittedly limited grappling with theology, I never totally grasped the doctrine of unconditional election, the idea that God saved some while condemning others. I never wanted to understand it, I think; it felt too much like a blank check, a cosmic cop-out. If you're certain you're saved, you have nothing at stake; by the theory, there's no limit to what evil you can do without consequences, at least not the ultimate, eternal consequence. The twist, I suppose, is that nobody can be certain. But given the very evident self-regard of the individuals we're discussing here, can there be any doubt where they'd place themselves? We know what these people have done: Bachmann's hysterical homophobia, Cain's alleged acts of sexual aggression, Perry's pay-for-play despoiling of the earth. If they're all in God's good books, it's all forgiven... in fact, it's all encouraged: it's all Part of the Plan.

I guess there is another, more sympathetic view one could take. By most accounts, Lincoln's faith evolved while he was in office. This is understandable, of course; the life-and-death decisions he made every day surely created a powerful psychological pressure to find larger meaning, and the thought that all the suffering and destruction and extinguishing of life might have no larger purpose or higher sanction must have been unbearable. He famously said: "My concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God's side." The doubt suggested by that framing seems far more resonant with Christian humility as I understand it than the bleating of the Republican presidential candidates. But perhaps there's a similar, very human, very vulnerable, yearning for certainty buried in what seems so much like bluster. Who would want to act--let alone vote, much less run--against God?

2011-10-22T11:17:00.000-07:00

Some Notes on Occupy Wall Street
We now seem to be at a point with the Occupy Wall Street protest where it's more likely than not it won't just disappear, as those it has targeted no doubt were hoping, but nor is it certain where it's going or what its effects might be.

I think it's fairly clear that OWS at its core is a manifestation of economic populism, both contrasting with and complementary to the reactionary cultural populism of the Tea Party. A somewhat dumb and broadly dismissive compare and contrast article in today's Times almost but doesn't quite hit the core point: both ventures arise from a sense that the game is rigged against "ordinary people." The difference is that in the Tea Party's story, the government is the direct oppressor and "real Americans"--whites, Christians--are victims, while OWS places the blame on the economic elites who have bought the government and progressively concentrated wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands.

The way protest movements generally have worked in American democracy is that raw popular energy gradually translates into a policy program championed by political actors. This was true of the Populists (who were absorbed into the Democratic Party in the 1890s through the 1910s, and to whom both OWS and the TP can hearken back); the labor movement (a core element of Democratic coalitions for a century now); the civil rights movement (which initially wasn't partisan, but ultimately did more than probably any other single factor to prompt the ideological sorting that left all liberals in the Democratic Party and all conservatives in the Republican Party); and religious right (which is now a major component of the Republican coalition). It happened with the Tea Party as well--as you'd expect since the TP is essentially the back-engine of the Christian right, with its cultural resentments, attached to the lead car of the anti-tax movement. Most of the recognized champions of the Tea Party, senators elected in 2010 like Pat Toomey and Marco Rubio, are veteran politicians who cannily realized that this was a vehicle they could ride. I don't doubt the sincerity of their support for the movement--but the point is that the Tea Party agenda fit so closely with their pre-existing views as to represent continuity with, rather than a break from, what at least a big chunk of Republicans have sought for many years.

I'm not sure that will happen for Occupy Wall Street--though if it does, I think the impact will be far more fundamental in the direction of reform than has been the case with the Tea Party. In terms of style and culture, OWS is obviously much closer with the popular perception of the Democratic Party than the Republicans. What the protesters presumably want, though--a return to sensible regulation of the finance industry and a reduction of the role of money in politics and government--is as inimical to the Democrats of the last 25 years or so as it is to the Republicans. A core premise of the "New Democrat" movement and Democratic Leadership Council was that with labor's power declining, the party would have to become more business-friendly; otherwise it couldn't remain economically (and thus politically) competitive with the Republicans. The results have included the support of the Clinton administration for massive deregulation of the finance industry, low-lighted by the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. Famously, Wall Street strongly supported Barack Obama in 2008, and despite the perception that the finance industry now "hates" Obama, it's still not clear that the bulk of finance-sector sentiment and giving will oppose the president next year (though Mitt Romney surely is trying hard for that).

In other words, it's going to be tough for the Democrats to simply embrace (or, if you prefer, co-opt) OWS--because doing so would constitute a direct frontal assault on an enormous resource pool for the party. At the same time, though, keeping some distance from the Dems might bolster the viability of Occupy Wall Street as a real movement of reform. Popular opinion of the Tea Party began to decline as it became clear just how indistinguishable its priorities and goals were from those of the still-discredited an unpopular Republican Party. Views of OWS aren't entirely clear, but it seems like among those who know enough to have an opinion, majority sentiment is broadly positive.

Matt Taibbi points out that OWS is "bigger than left vs. right." This is both its peril and its opportunity--the former because our opinion class doesn't know how to tell political stories other than in that frame, and when it comes to views of how to treat the finance sector, there's little meaningful difference between the two parties; but the latter because, left or right, just about everyone in America realizes that there's something deeply wrong in our economy and politics, and wants to see real change.

2011-09-17T09:43:00.000-07:00

What I'd Be Blogging About If I Were Blogging
Each of these items probably merit a thousand words or so, if not more. But I don't feel like I have the time, and I'm less than sure I have the inclination, to give these topics the attention they deserve. So these summaries will have to do.

Ten Years Gone: Like everyone else, I was thinking about terrorism and its effects last weekend as we reached the tenth anniversary of 9/11. As it happened, I was out of town at a family wedding in Pennsylvania Saturday and into Sunday; at that happy occasion, there was very little talk about 9/11 itself but a surprising number of references, from liberals and conservatives both, to how dysfunctional and depressing our politics are these days. I talked with a very conservative older cousin from South Carolina who's been thinking about running for Congress (he would have primaried Joe "You Lie!" Wilson) who was fully as disgusted with everything as I am; other relatives and family friends made endless passing but blistering references to the mess in Washington.

Nationally, the response to the 9/11--the dumb war in Iraq put entirely on the national credit card, the expansion of the security state, the torture regime and the rest of it--divided the country even more profoundly after the Clinton impeachment and the 2000 election, and further deepened cynicism and despair regarding government. In New York City, though, where we suffered the most in both human and psychic terms, the awfulness of that shared experience--the horror of the day itself and the enormous grief of the days and weeks afterward--brought people together, and continues to do so. There was a sense after the attack, which remains today, of "fuck those fundamentalist assholes--I'm staying right here." Bush famously said that the terrorists "hated us for our freedom." I think closer to the truth is that bin Laden hated NYC for the same reason Hitler did: the diversity, the tolerance, the functionality of an open community in which millions of unplanned human interactions every day conduce to an unmatched volume of economic and creative activity.

New York is like DC in that you'll meet very few people "from" here. But I think it's far more common to "become" a New Yorker than a Washingtonian; for all the expense and inconvenience, the place gets its hooks into you, claims you, and changes you. The experience of 9/11, for all its horror and sadness, did something like that as well. In a weird way, it made New York stronger and more of a community. That this didn't happen for the country I think is part of the national tragedy.

Thanks again, 2008 Phillies. With thirteen games left before the playoffs, the Phillies are on pace to complete the greatest season in their 129-year history. This is the most absurdly loaded baseball team I've ever had the pleasure of rooting for, with three of the five or six best starting pitchers in the league, eight all-stars in the lineup, and tremendously impressive depth--as demonstrated by the fact that they're going to set a franchise wins record despite having lost more than half the lineup to the disabled list at different points this season.

Yet they're still more likely than not to fall short of winning a second world championship in four seasons, owing to a playoff tournament in which the factors that conduce to success over 162 games--depth in the rotation and lineup, a steady managerial hand at the tiller, and the capacity and willingness to change how players are used as circumstances dictate--mean far less than who's hot that week. I'm still pretty sure the 2010 Phillies were the best team in baseball, and they were bounced by a Giants team that had about-as-good pitching and a handful of hitters who were hot while the Phils' mashers went cold. It could happen again--as it did to the Angels in 2008, the 2007 Indians, the Mets and Yankees in 2006, the Cardinals in 2005 and 2004, the Yankees and Braves in 2003... all teams that won the most games in the regular season yet didn't get to celebrate with the big trophy at the end.

If this happens to the 2011 Phillies, it'll suck. The team is both admirable for their accomplishments and likable for who we perceive them to be, and many of their most prominent players--Roy Halladay, Cliff Lee, Roy Oswalt, Raul Ibanez, Placido Polanco--haven't won it all despite long and accomplished careers. For Philadelphia, though, the psychic necessity for this team to win it all is severely lessened by the fact that their 2008 predecessors already did it... breaking the 25 year championship drought that had even the most rational Philadelphians (admittedly, a low bar) wondering if the town might not in fact be operating under a curse. That such considerations won't be on the minds of fans this October should lessen the tension level to something survivable... though I'll still probably revert to functional alcoholism for the month. I'm not sure how else to do it.

One to watch. I might actually have an aspirant to political office to seriously cheer for in 2012: Elizabeth Warren, the consumer advocate who's running against the very pretty Republican Scott Brown in Massachusetts. In theory, Warren should be a strong candidate: at a time when the public detests career politicians, she joins the race as a 62 year-old outsider with modest roots and a great story of economic populism to tell. If she wins--and it's kind of extraordinary that even certain folks relatively far out on the right are open to her candidacy. And I felt this way even before seeing the word "workforce" in the top item on her "priorities" web page. In a time when the Democrats have at best allowed and at worst abetted the destruction of the middle class and a concentration of wealth unprecedented in recent history, Warren's message should resonate. Here's hoping,

2011-08-20T18:31:00.000-07:00

Some Musings on the Campaign
Because watching things fall apart can be fun...

Tim Pawlenty ended his campaign last week after losing to state-mate Rep. Batshit in Iowa. As he continued on in the race, Pawlenty increasingly reminded me of a fictional Minnesotan: Jerry Lundegaard, William H. Macy's hapless car sales manager/would-be kidnapper in "Fargo." Like Jerry, "T-Paw" seemed constantly to be trying to project a confidence and charisma he didn't feel, and perhaps thought himself smarter than he was. The theory of Pawlenty's campaign was that he could emerge as more tolerable to the Zombie Army than Mitt Romney while remaining acceptable to the money gang whose preferences are usually determinative. But this required showing something to both groups--and Pawlenty delivered for neither, failing to take Romney on in an early debate and proving unable to raise enough money to endure a setback in the silly straw poll.

I think this probably could have been predicted from Pawlenty's memoir title, "Courage to Stand." To stand for what? I think the silent subtitle is "For Whatever You'd Like Me to Believe." Even there, he was never going to out-pander Romney. That awful title has me trying to think up equally lame political memoir names: Forward to Our Future? My American Adventure? Patriotism and Principle? Blech.

The new Republican contender who's aiming to be mutually acceptable to the nuts and the greedheads is Rick Perry. He's got a much better chance than Pawlenty, because he's not boring. Perry's problem is that he's so obviously an asshole, and unlike New Jersey governor Chris Christie--another unapologetic asshole, but a pretty clearly intelligent and engaged guy--there seems to be little principle and less thought behind it. The Bush comps are obvious and valid as far as they go, but what the pundits seem to be missing is that the press corps on some level must feel remorse at having given Dubya such a relatively easy ride in 2000; they won't do that with Perry. His personality is just much uglier than Bush's, his politics far more raw, and the public will see all that in high-def.

I'm starting to wonder if Jon Huntsman has it somewhere in his head to go independent. The mullahs of right-wing radio surely will go fatwa on him after his TV appearance tomorrow morning, if they haven't already. His polling is in Gingrich territory. He's got little institutional support. But he projects reasonableness, he's got some clear admirers in the press corps... and the country is utterly disgusted with politics-as-usual. Also, his family is really, really, really rich. There are efforts in progress to secure national ballot access for independents. What if Huntsman announces in December or early January that he's leaving the Republican Party because our country's problems are too big for partisanship-as-usual--the same logic he can claim for his decision to serve in the Obama administration--and that he'll seek the presidency as an independent? If he could claim endorsements from every disaffected Republican--Colin Powell, Bruce Bartlett, Alan Simpson--and a bunch of civic-minded business leader/officials like Bloomberg? Maybe some of the old Clinton machinery would come around for him. It's a long shot, but I think there's a certain logic to it. He's damn sure not going to win as a Republican, and I think Sullivan is being over-optimistic yet again if he thinks the Rs will be more receptive to a Huntsman campaign by 2016.

Speaking of Sullivan, he published a letter of mine that essentially covered the same ground as the previous post. See it here, if you'd like. This is where I think both his own biases and his deep investment in Obama--which I readily grasp--blind him; Obama's "restraint" isn't even the issue so much as his willingness if not eagerness to continually shit on his "base." The evidence is coming in that this will be a huge problem for him next year.

2011-08-07T11:06:00.001-07:00

The Hollow Man
I'll admit to a great deal of personal embarrassment, almost to the point of shame, at how wrong I seem to have gotten Barack Obama. He was elected, in my view, above all else to change the story we Americans had been telling ourselves about the role of the public sector in the life of our country, and there was reason to believe he'd do this superbly.His 2005 Knox College commencement speech, which I've written about here many times, is an absolute masterpiece in this regard.

But Obama either no longer believes that story, or doesn't feel he can tell it. For all the political and policy successes his defenders can point to--and they are real--he hasn't done anything to restore the view held by Americans of past generations that government was on their side, actively defending their vulnerabilities and advancing their interests. As has been pointed out many times, he's bent over backwards to exonerate and incorporate many of the same Wall Street figures who were involved with the meltdown. The result is that If anything, the dysfunction of the federal government has people thinking even less of their representation than was the case three years ago--and increasingly drawing the conclusion that the system itself is broken. Hence Joan Walsh's piece in Salon.com a couple days ago (which I was going to write about at greater length, but I think it fairly speaks for itself) making a strong case that the real "crisis of confidence" in the country is that of government, and Democrats as the "party of government."

Yesterday I wrote about the disappearance of the Left, the absence of any force to balance the Zombie Army of Tea Partiers that has emerged from the closed informational loop of FOX News and right-wing radio, identified the many choke points within the system devised by the Framers and dragged our country rightward... and down. I think it's a fair charge that almost everyone who worked so hard and gave so much to put Obama into office has faltered badly since then. But the other side of the argument--that Obama himself sold us a bill of goods, and has proven to be someone very different from the inspirational progressive leader and impassioned reformer we thought we had elected--is valid too, and today in the Times has perhaps its most powerful and persuasive case that I've seen, by the researcher and consultant Drew Westen.

When Barack Obama stepped into the Oval Office, he stepped into a cycle of American history, best exemplified by F.D.R. and his distant cousin, Teddy. After a great technological revolution or a major economic transition, as when America changed from a nation of farmers to an urban industrial one, there is often a period of great concentration of wealth, and with it, a concentration of power in the wealthy. That’s what we saw in 1928, and that’s what we see today. At some point that power is exercised so injudiciously, and the lives of so many become so unbearable, that a period of reform ensues — and a charismatic reformer emerges to lead that renewal. In that sense, Teddy Roosevelt started the cycle of reform his cousin picked up 30 years later, as he began efforts to bust the trusts and regulate the railroads, exercise federal power over the banks and the nation’s food supply, and protect America’s land and wildlife, creating the modern environmental movement.

Those were the shoes — that was the historic role — that Americans elected Barack Obama to fill. The president is fond of referring to “the arc of history,” paraphrasing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous statement that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But with his deep-seated aversion to conflict and his profound failure to understand bully dynamics — in which conciliation is always the wrong course of action, because bullies perceive it as weakness and just punch harder the next time — he has broken that arc and has likely bent it backward for at least a generation.

The point that technological/economic change always precipitates a concentration of wealth as the best-connected use their informational advantages to take a disproportionate share, and the role of centrist populism (my words, not Westen's) in pushing through reforms in response to re-level the playing field, is 100 percent correct. I'm a little embarrassed that this hasn't previously occurred to me; that is *exactly* what happened with both Roosevelts, abetted by their successors of both parties (Taft and Wilson, Truman and Eisenhower). FDR was successful enough in creating a new regime of regulations and domestic institutions, in response to the Great Depression, and international institutions toward end of and following World War II, that the half-century after he died saw the flowering of the most successful civilization in human history--the America we all grew up in and expected would last indefinitely.

During the '90s and '00s, that order began to break down and things got badly out of whack. In addition to a new technological revolution (a tide that initially lifted all boats, as the lowest quintile saw income gains, and certainly did more than anything else to make Bill Clinton's presidency successful), we had the end of the Cold War, which had held things in check; the politically driven erosion of the New Deal regulatory apparatus; and the increasing role of money in politics, which was regarded widely, and on a bipartisan basis, as an enormous threat... but was never really addressed, at least not in a lasting way.

Clinton either didn't see all these things coming or didn't realize it would present such a problem; in any event, he owns a large share of this through his signing the repeal of Glass-Steagall which did a tremendous amount to set up the damage of a decade later. And of course George W. Bush was perfectly cast in the McKinley/Harding/Coolidge role of self-righteous schmuck who actively made things worse, throwing in unnecessary and calamitously expensive tax cuts and wars for good measure.

Elected in 2008 to set all this right, Obama seemed like our last, best chance to put everything back into balance. In this, it's hard to judge him as anything but a near-total failure. Westen tries to figure out why:

Like most Americans, at this point, I have no idea what Barack Obama — and by extension the party he leads — believes on virtually any issue. The president tells us he prefers a “balanced” approach to deficit reduction, one that weds “revenue enhancements” (a weak way of describing popular taxes on the rich and big corporations that are evading them) with “entitlement cuts” (an equally poor choice of words that implies that people who’ve worked their whole lives are looking for handouts). But the law he just signed includes only the cuts. This pattern of presenting inconsistent positions with no apparent recognition of their incoherence is another hallmark of this president’s storytelling. [...]

THE real conundrum is why the president seems so compelled to take both sides of every issue, encouraging voters to project whatever they want on him, and hoping they won’t realize which hand is holding the rabbit. [...]

The most charitable explanation is that he and his advisers have succumbed to a view of electoral success to which many Democrats succumb — that “centrist” voters like “centrist” politicians. Unfortunately, reality is more complicated. Centrist voters prefer honest politicians who help them solve their problems. A second possibility is that he is simply not up to the task by virtue of his lack of experience and a character defect that might not have been so debilitating at some other time in history. Those of us who were bewitched by his eloquence on the campaign trail chose to ignore some disquieting aspects of his biography: that he had accomplished very little before he ran for president, having never run a business or a state; that he had a singularly unremarkable career as a law professor, publishing nothing in 12 years at the University of Chicago other than an autobiography; and that, before joining the United States Senate, he had voted "present" (instead of "yea" or "nay") 130 times, sometimes dodging difficult issues.

A somewhat less charitable explanation is that we are a nation that is being held hostage not just by an extremist Republican Party but also by a president who either does not know what he believes or is willing to take whatever position he thinks will lead to his re-election. Perhaps those of us who were so enthralled with the magnificent story he told in “Dreams From My Father” appended a chapter at the end that wasn’t there — the chapter in which he resolves his identity and comes to know who he is and what he believes in.
...

A final explanation is that he ran for president on two contradictory platforms: as a reformer who would clean up the system, and as a unity candidate who would transcend the lines of red and blue. He has pursued the one with which he is most comfortable given the constraints of his character, consistently choosing the message of bipartisanship over the message of confrontation.

A lot of this stings. I read "Dreams From My Father" in summer 2007 while on vacation in California, and it moved me from likely favoring Obama in the race for the Democratic nomination to absolute, active, full-throated support. I left the book with a friend whom we stayed with and haven't re-read it since. I loved the idea of a president who was a better writer than me, but it also seemed clear that this was a man with unusual gifts of observation and analysis. As Westen observes, though, the truth is that he didn't really do that much in his pre-governmental career. And the "present" votes, in both the Illinois legislature and the Senate, seemed like such a transparently political attack that I shrugged it despite a slight tug of concern.

The last part especially registers, though. Obama's dual and dueling platforms were a perfect match for many of us conflicted ("self-hating" seems strong but maybe not inaccurate) liberals, who both wanted fundamental progressive reform and an end to the zero-sum politics of the previous twenty years, the Wars of the Clintons and Bushes. Our mistake, and maybe Obama's, was in thinking that this was somehow inherent to the Clintons: that the epistemic closure on the Right might open itself to a transparently temperate individual who both seemed to embody the possibilities of America and went out of his way to honor the perspective of his political opponents, even leaving rhetorical offerings at the Shrine of the Blessed Reagan. We thought that maybe Obama could win his political fights by co-opting his enemies rather than destroying them.

He could not, and in trying to do so only hurt his cause, and ours. The rising frustration so many of us now feel probably involves both our own culpability and increasing disbelief that he's still trying, rather than recognizing and responding to the true nature of an enemy that bears him a relentless, implacable and essentially lizard-brain hatred.

Edit: See here a vehement disagreement with Westen's argument. If you read it carefully, though, I think it's clear that 1) the writer's issue is less with the content of Westen's message than its form and some of the devices he uses, and 2) he blames liberals of Westen's stripe for seeing what they wanted to see in Obama rather than the candidate/president himself. Both points are fine, but neither really rebuts Westen's diagnosis of the problem: Obama isn't fighting, and as a result he, and progressivism, is losing. Badly.

2011-08-06T13:34:00.000-07:00

How the Left Was Lost
I'm surprised to find out that it evidently was John F. Kennedy, rather than Thucydides or someone like that, who said, "Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan." Taking his turn on the historical stage in a time when it was all but taken for granted that liberalism was the mainstream political philosophy of the United States, that Democrats were the country's national governing party, and that Democrats were reliably liberal, I doubt JFK would have an easier time making sense of what's happened in our country these last three years than I do. But I think even he would conclude that all of us who call ourselves liberals own a piece of the latest defeat.

This past week, the United States narrowly avoided an unprecedented default on our national debt, when a Democratic President and Democratic-majority Senate acceded to almost every demand of a Republican-majority House of Representatives, which had put the national credit at risk to win a political fight. The Republicans took a hostage they probably weren't really willing to kill, and were lavishly rewarded for it: at best, the deal that was struck gives Democrats a partial and provisional chance to win the portion of the fight that was deferred.

It's a shocking, almost unimaginable turnaround for a party that took unified control of the federal government just two and a half years ago, on the strength of consecutive huge victories in the 2006 and 2008 elections. The credit rating agency Standard and Poor's added a final, bitter punch line Friday night when they downgraded the country's credit even though default was averted, mostly because "we see ... America's governance and policymaking becoming less stable, less effective, and less predictable than what we previously believed. The statutory debt ceiling and the threat of default have become political bargaining chips in the debate over fiscal policy."

Both the spending to be taken out of the budget as a result of the agreement and the possible higher costs that will ensue from the credit rating downgrade will further hurt the economy, which increases the odds that a Republican will win the presidency in 2012. Again, it would be difficult to imagine how things could have played out better for Republicans.

How did this happen?

Observers seem to split along two lines of explanation: the Democrats are either false--in other words, not at all unhappy with a set of outcomes that seem utterly dismal for liberalism, the view held by the likes of Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi--or inept, as mainstream voices on the left seem to be arguing. (There's a third camp, which features Andrew Sullivan: he thinks Obama's playing rope-a-dope with the Right. I'd love to believe that, but I don't.)

Ultimately, though, Obama's reasoning or motivations, and those of the Democrats in the Senate, don't matter. What I think is more to the point is that even the greatest general can't lead an army that doesn't exist. There's no longer any effective Left to speak of in American public life.

This feels a strange complaint for me to make, as I'm probably an almost perfect example of a Left-disdaining moderate liberal Democrat: in other words, a stereotypical Obama voter. But what I'm realizing is that when you have a strong, active, determined Right, the absence of a countervailing Left means that the center will drift to starboard. Hence the dreary repeated pattern we're seeing of Obama compromising himself, and us, into virtual capitulation: unlike FDR and the question of whether or not to desegregate defense industries, nobody is "making him do it." (The link here, which I'd never read before to my recollection, is almost heartbreakingly prescient.)

I don't know how we turn this around. Ralph Nader--who has to be the absolute last fucking person I want to hear from on this particular question--thinks it's inevitable that Obama will face a primary challenge. I have to admit that the idea occurred to me last week, and not in a bad way. But all that's likely to accomplish is to push the president's re-election odds from about 50-50 to maybe 15-20 percent; incumbent presidents who face serious primary challenges simply don't win, because they take fire from their own co-partisans and have to expend badly needed time and resources simply winning renomination. (I'm not sure Nader's right. Any potential challenger will have to face an unprecedented deluge of money, and the complete and utter end of any further ambitions they might have for a role in public life.) Worse, we really can't afford another Republican presidency, with its likelihood of further tax and "discretionary spending" cuts and another war or two.

So what's to be done? It's not like there haven't been efforts made to build an activist infrastructure on the Left--but they only seem to work in certain even-numbered years (almost sufficing to beat Bush in 2004, then helping the Democrats to their big wins in 2006 and 2008). I found groups like Moveon.org increasingly annoying and ineffectual after an initial burst of enthusiasm for them in 2002-4, and thus tuned out... but my sense is that the Obama campaign pretty much ate them all in 2008. Again, that's not a good vehicle for obvious reasons.

Maybe, though, politics as such isn't the answer at all. Direct action, in ways that are fun for participants and attention-grabbing for press, could be one answer; another that I keep thinking about is if, say, ten million middle- and upper-class liberals announced they would tax themselves at the 15 percent rate applied to hedge fund managers rather than the higher rates they actually pay. That would both sting the government and highlight the crying need for tax reform. There have to be hundreds of other, similar ideas that could put meat to the bone of liberal thought and engage the public in a newly direct and powerful way.

Back in a day or two, hopefully, with thoughts on the centrality of government and how the narcissistic impulse might help explain why the un- and under-employed have been so quiet in their desperation.

2011-07-27T19:40:00.000-07:00

The Brink
These would be fascinating times except for the fact we have to live in them. Hour by hour, day by day, we're now seeing the full rank flower of 30-50 years of economic and political trends: the absolutist strain, able to perceive only total victory or utter defeat, in majoritarian-democratic politics; the ability of a solid faction, fermented in a closed informational loop, to throw into utter chaos a system consciously designed to force compromise and consensus by its many choke points; what happens when the Left altogether loses the courage of its ostensible convictions.

It's grimly satisfying to see the Republican establishment now shitting itself over its inability to corral the monster it created. The problem, again, is that we all will suffer the consequences--in higher interest rates, a double-dip recession, loss of national prestige--it won't be forgotten that we did this entirely to ourselves; smart economic and strategic competitors will bend themselves to thinking about how to get us to do this again (and indeed, other than 9/11 itself, what wounds have we suffered as a country over the last decade that weren't self-inflicted?)--and the greater likelihood that the same attention-deprived electorate that empowered this right-wing suicide cult will blame the well-intentioned but feckless Obama for the downturn, and replace him with a fellow-traveler of the people who brought this on us.

I don't know what the answer is; I doubt anybody does. Our economy and our politics each seem to reinforce the worst tendencies of the other; probably the same could be said of either with the culture that informs and encompasses both. The traditionally recommended remedy--more democracy--seems too susceptible to money and manipulation to pull us out of it; other means are both repellent and impractical.

What's kind of mind-blowing is that we're at the precipice of something profound and transformative, maybe more than anything in our lifetimes, and the protagonists--almost everyone on the right, and surely more than a few on the left--are still scrabbling for tactical advantage and trying to ensure that the other side eats the blame. I suppose they can't do otherwise, but that too says a lot about the bad road we're on.

Yet we can't just put this on the politicians. That they seem to reflect the country so well--in its smallness, selfishness, and myopia--is maybe the most discouraging element.

2011-07-03T12:00:00.000-07:00

The All-Stars of American Decline
In honor of the MLB all-star selections announced today, as well as Independence Day weekend, I’m handing out some honors of my own: the All-Stars of American Decline.

These aren’t the people “responsible” for our regrettable perch at the precipice: that distinction is probably best reserved for, one, the public officials and unelected political actors who have made the decisions that led us to imperial overstretch, fiscal teetering, and embedded (and legal) corruption of our business and political spheres; and two, the shapers of culture and popular opinion, mostly entertainment executives and media moguls, who have eroded our attention spans, blunted our compassion and capacity for reflection and nourished our appetite for spectacle. If you read this site, you know what I think of Grover Norquist and Rupert Murdoch. No, these are the folks who less caused the problems than embody them.

Right up at the top, and the inspiration for this idea, is the political pundit Mark Halperin. He’s in trouble, suspended from his job, for having called the president “a dick” after his White House press conference the other day. A notorious hack even by political pundit standards, Halperin personifies the despicable Beltway mindset that views politics in a way entirely disconnected from the real-world effects of public choices. What was absolutely typical of his work wasn’t the pseudo-controversial remark, after a few minutes’ buildup of "oh, I'm about to be NAUGHTY!," but rather the total absence of observation or analysis of how the ideologically extreme and frighteningly irresponsible positions of the negotiators in the budget reduction meetings might have prompted the president's ire.

(And, as salon.com notes, he's not even good at it. Mike Allen of Politico is just as hack-y in approach, but at least he brings something to the table as a journalist. Halperin's both insipid and dumb as shit.)

I don’t think I have the stomach to fill out a whole lineup of Decline All-Stars, but we can round out a top five of individuals and types. There’s Bristol Palin, her mother’s daughter in every respect with the absence of discernable talent, pronounced mean streak and evidently unlimited self-regard.

(Actually, self-regard is the consistent element of all these selections: despite a pretty much total lack of tangible accomplishment or demonstrated ability, they think the sun shines out of their collective ass. This is the sense in which these individuals embody our shared problem, which—to simplify, but not all that much—boils down to an inability to accurately assess ourselves.)

There’s Terrell Owens, who’s a somewhat problematic member of this club because he evidently is talented—exceptionally so—and at times has shown himself a hard worker to boot, as when he rehabbed furiously to suit up for the Eagles in Super Bowl XXXIX. But Owens is narcissistic at a level that might shock even these other narcissists: he wrecked a series of very strong football teams (most famously the 2005 Eagles), and now seems more interested in his reality TV show than anything else. (I heard a rumor that he tore his ACL working on the show, which I desperately want to believe, but can’t find anything to substantiate it.)

There’s every Wall Street asshole who made obscene money shorting the economy without any adverse consequence, then whined anonymously to the press—see this New York magazine story as the example—about how upsetting it’s been to be vilified by the president and others. The selective perception and willful historical amnesia of this group is also sadly representative of our larger problems; so too the absence of any meaningful policy correction to ensure that we don't repeat the mistakes of 2008 as the next bubble inflates.

And finally, because we can’t and shouldn’t let democracy itself off the hook, there are Representatives Anthony Weiner and Michele Bachmann. Congresswoman Batshit you know about, so I’ll just note that her total absence of legislative accomplishment or thought leadership on anything non-crazy would disqualify her from aspirations to higher office in a more functional country. As for Weiner, while I’m sympathetic to the view that his personal life is his own and that the Democrats showed their usual fear of their own shadows in pushing him offstage so quickly and insistently, there’s no arguing that his judgment and self-control were all-time awful. And that he evidently hit a wrong button—being old and tech-impaired, I don’t grasp how Twitter works, but my understanding is that he accidentally made public the dick-pic that was intended to be private—adds a comical element. Also, that his name is WEINER and he did all this.

Having watched the guy for a few years and met him once (he came to the think tank where I used to work for an off-the-record conversation in 2008, when he was expecting to run for mayor the following year), none of this was all that surprising. There was always a strong whiff of opportunism. presumption and entitlement to Weiner. His core political identity was that of an outer-borough moderate-to-conservative Democrat, which was how he ran against Freddy Ferrer in the 2005 mayoral Democratic primary. But as a more assertive Democratic left began to cohere online, he perceived, I suppose to his credit, that there was an opportunity to win fans and raise money by remaking himself as a loud ’n’ proud lefty. He’s by no means a dumb guy, though he’s also not nearly as smart as he thinks he is. Before the scandal, probably his most revealing moment was when he dropped out of the 2009 mayoral race, basically admitting that he didn’t want to risk his career against Bloomberg’s billions. As we now know, he might well have won had he stuck it out.

More principled people tend to take those risks, fighting for something larger than themselves. Which again is why Weiner joins this list.

2011-06-26T11:05:00.000-07:00

Batshit for President!
We now have the likes of Nate Silver suggesting that Michele Bachmann is "a legitimate contender to win the Republican nomination." She's polling 22 percent in Iowa, a point behind Mitt Romney, with strong "favorables" from that state's rabid social conservatives. Bachmann is a very accomplished fundraiser and highly effective retail politician. By all accounts, she "won" the most recent Republican debate a couple weeks ago.

She is also--there's simply no polite way to put this--certifiably fucking crazy, and one of the most vicious and hate-filled people in American politics. The evidentiary points here are almost innumerable, but Matt Taibbi has a good short primer of Bachmann's career to date. His summary assessment:

In modern American politics, being the right kind of ignorant and entertainingly crazy is like having a big right hand in boxing; you've always got a puncher's chance. And Bachmann is exactly the right kind of completely batshit crazy. Not medically crazy, not talking-to-herself-on-the-subway crazy, but grandiose crazy, late-stage Kim Jong-Il crazy — crazy in the sense that she's living completely inside her own mind, frenetically pacing the hallways of a vast sand castle she's built in there, unable to meaningfully communicate with the human beings on the other side of the moat, who are all presumed to be enemies.

Think about the characteristics you value in a leader. For me, the first four that come to mind are humility, intellectual curiosity, pragmatism, and a calm temperament. Bachmann claims that God has communicated with her personally, a la the microphone in the braces from "Real Genius"; gets facts wrong at a pace and on a level that makes Sarah Palin seem like Daniel Patrick Moynihan; and has claimed that lesbians are trying to kill her, that we're all at risk of having to live under Sharia law, and that President Obama and many if not most Democrats are "anti-American" and should be "investigated." She also has a legislative record pretty much entirely devoid of any actual accomplishment.

What she has, in addition to (as Taibbi perfectly puts it) "the gigantic set of burnished titanium Terminator-testicles swinging under her skirt," is, one, innate political talent, and two, a perfect, better-than-Palin story to tell of anti-intellectual, liberal-hating grievance that alone will swing something like 30 percent of the electorate. Under the wrong set of circumstances--say, a debt-limit default and deep double-dip recession, plus disentanglement from our various wars in a manner that reads as "defeat"--she could win not just the nomination, but the general election. A few months ago I would have put the odds of this below one percent; now, it's maybe in the high single digits.

One test I've started to apply in simply thinking about presidential candidates is whether I'd rather they have the office than me. Bear with me for a minute: this isn't nearly as egotastic as I'm sure it sounds. I think I would be, if not the worst president in American history, easily down there with Bush II, Buchanan and Harding. I'm lazy ("sloth"), I often don't prioritize well, and I overreact to things. I'm not even good at Civilization, despite having put probably thousands of hours into that wonderful and highly addictive game. But I'd rather see myself in there than Batshit Bachmann. Possibly even after suffering brain damage.

(Edit: though I sort of loathe him and his blatant soullessness terrifies me, I wouldn't hesitate to vote for Mitt Romney if the only two choices were him and me. Likewise, among the Rs running, Huntsman and Gary Johnson. Pawlenty, whom I see as a more pathetic Romney--he's empty without the money to create an impressive facade--I'd have to think more about, but probably. Gingrich no, Palin no, Perry probably not, and trying to put Ron Paul through the exercise makes smoke come out of my ears like a robot from a 1950s sci-fi flick caught in a logic paradox.)

No doubt, any journalist who watches this person will reach the same conclusion. So I'd suggest that Bachmann's candidacy isn't even a test of the electorate's collective intelligence and attention span--they failed that one in 2004, and as the line between democracy and entertainment completely disappears, I don't see them passing a re-test--but whether we still have anything like a press corps capable of playing its assigned role as the protector of small-r republican-government. I don't doubt that many of the corporate overlords who own media companies will look at Bachmann, with her right-wing ideology and absence of critical thinking skills, and see a powerful instrument for their own advancement. But profit doesn't mean much, I would think, if it comes amidst a general collapse.

2011-06-25T12:16:00.000-07:00

One for the Good Guys
Maybe it's a good thing that the actual moments in which society takes measurable steps forward are often about as dramatic as watching a guy carrying groceries and dry cleaning root through his pockets looking for his keys. So it was when the New York State Senate voted to enact marriage equality last night. Senator Stephen Saland, a moderate Republican whose district runs along the Hudson below Albany, provided the decisive 32nd vote that put the bill over the top after negotiating an amendment that allayed fears of liability on the part of religious institutions, and gave remarks that, on the page, seem fairly stirring. In the delivery, however, he may as well have been proposing to name a post office after some 19th century burgher, except that my guess is he'd have spoken with more passion. Tom Duane, the sponsor of the measure who's spent years fighting for a right intensely personal to him, was only slightly less subdued. Of the main characters, the only one who even sort of played his part was incomparable asshole Ruben Diaz Sr., an unashamed bigot who was petulant, incoherent and obnoxious as one would expect, though more regarding Senate procedure than the measure itself.

But this isn't about the moment; it's about the magnitude of what it accomplished. The vote came after days of stalemate, during which I'd drawn the conclusion that Senate Republicans--caught between the promises of the Conservative Party to deny them ballot access if they voted to allow same sex marriage, and the implied threat of their biggest funder, Mayor Bloomberg, to withdraw support if they didn't--would simply run out the clock and not bring it up for a vote. That they didn't is a tribute both to Governor Cuomo, whose actions backed up his stated commitment to equality (and who can count on some deep-pocketed friends with long memories when he runs for president in five years), and to Dean Skelos, the Republican Senate leader who voted against the measure but neither strong-armed his members to do the same nor pushed hard to avoid the vote.

For the state Senate Republicans, holding onto an artificial one-vote majority thanks to gerrymandering but fenced in by demographics and the increasing distance between the New York electorate (even outside the City) and their national party, there was no winning move here: vote yes, and lose a sizable chunk of their current support that they can't afford to part with, but vote no and face a furious financial and electoral onslaught when everyone's up again next year, led by a very popular governor. Skelos probably played it as well as possible: members like freshman Michael Grisanti, the Buffalo Republican representing a strongly Democratic district who provided the symbolically important 33rd vote, surely improved his chances to survive when trends don't favor Republicans nearly as strongly as they did in 2010. (Grisanti was also by far the best speaker of any who took the floor last night.) The Times also suggests that Republican Wall Street donors cultivated by Cuomo played a role almost as decisive as that of the governor himself.

It's no news to anyone who reads this page that I am not generally optimistic about the future of our society, particularly in its political guise--largely because we're well on the way toward making Margaret Thatcher's famous quip that "there's no such thing as society" a self-fulfilling prophesy. One can guess the view of Zaphod Beeblebrox on taxes; that's us now. Each of us sees himself as the Most Important Being in the Universe, with individual imperatives that cannot be violated. Economically, this is leading us toward a disaster that could hit as soon as this summer... yet, socially, it's taking us to a better place. (The Times story notes that the Wall Street big shots "were inclined to see the issue as one of personal freedom, consistent with their more libertarian views.") In a moment where we should take our satisfactions and signs of progress wherever we can, this is worth celebrating.

2011-05-30T09:56:00.000-07:00

Memorial Day

Maybe it's just the course of my activities this holiday weekend, but I feel like I'm seeing more attention paid to Memorial Day this year than has been the case in previous years. The Phillies-Mets game I attended yesterday (unfortunately for me, at least in terms of the outcome) featured all kinds of honors for military personnel; various stations on basic cable are going all-war-movie, all-weekend (though I found "Apocalypse Now Redux," which Annie and I watched Saturday night, kind of an interesting choice if the idea is to honor the American man/woman-under arms), and so on. The Phils-Nationals game I've got on right now features stars-and-stripes hats, and a sergeant just called "Play ball."

And perhaps this is me forcing the world to fit into my own views, but I can't help thinking this somehow reflects a large and growing discomfort with our country's role in the world, as policeman for global order and/or our own imperial prerogatives. With the news that an errant air strike killed another dozen-plus Afghani civilians on Saturday--retaliation for a Taliban attack that was retaliation for something we did, which was retaliation for a previous terror strike, and so on going back ten years now--can anyone cogently explain why we're there now? Or when we'll leave--really? Or why we won't make this mistake--whether you consider the mistake the initial intervention, or the absurdly prolonged deployment--again?

The other point, in terms of domestic considerations, is that these wars aren't cheap; we're over a trillion even by conservative official estimates, with outside analysts suggesting a much higher number. The debt concerns now obsessing Washington would be literally non-existent were it not for the wars and the tax cuts, all put on the national credit card, in the previous decade. But this is not much discussed; it's more emotionally satisfying to debate the few million spent on NPR and Planned Parenthood. If there's hope for a change in policy, though, this is where it resides: I'll be very interested to see if the presidential campaign of Ron Paul, who for all his despicable and flat-out bizarre views on other issues is consistent against the excesses of empire and not afraid to say so, gains any traction. And it probably doesn't hurt that the outgoing Secretary of Defense is urging this conversation on the country, even if he might not be comfortable with how it could resolve.

It's probably too easy to say that the fetishization of the military and the culture of enforced patriotism (or rather a certain type of hyper-nationalistic patriotism) is itself a way to sustain the status quo in terms of our absurdly disproportionate defense spending and hyper-aggressive foreign deployments. But it doesn't hurt, particularly with a silent but steadfast bipartisan consensus around both notions: the Republicans because the projection of American military power touches something deep and pleasurable inside many of them--on some level, inflicting civilian casualties might well be a feature rather than a bug--and the Democrats because, well, they're spineless cowards ("Democrats"). Until we figure out that it's possible to separate honoring military servicemembers from supporting the missions of empire we send them on, we'll continue to sacrifice soldiers and argue that their sacrifices must not be in vain.

2011-05-07T12:24:00.000-07:00

Tribalism, Revenge, Principle and Politics
Given how our media/political culture is structured, it was inevitable that within a day (at most) of the news that a U.S. operation had killed Osama bin Laden, speculation would start to bubble about how much this would help President Obama's prospects for re-election next year. While the news of bin Laden's death pushed lingering speculation over Obama's release of his "long-form" birth certificate completely out of the headlines, I'd argue that the two items (the birth certificate and the killing of bin Laden) are related.

The "birther" issue obviously and transparently was about Obama's "otherness": the emotional need on the part of those who hate and fear this president to believe he wasn't born an American tied to the idea that he differs, in appearance but also in perspective and formative experience, from what we instinctively call to mind when hearing the word "American." The release of the certificate dispelled one aspect of difference (polls show the number who believe he was not born in the U.S. fell sharply after the release); but the president's emphasis on "getting" bin Laden (however defined) creates a new point of emotional connection between the president and a segment of voters who might not previously have identified with him. I wouldn't be shocked if his support among the military community is up next year; if so, remember this week. His determination to capture or kill the mastermind of 9/11 and evident satisfaction in having done so binds him to the public in a way we hadn't seen before.

As the story broke Sunday night, I was flipping back and forth between the Mets-Phillies game on ESPN and news coverage while waiting for Obama to speak. The news filtered through Citizens Bank Park, prompting spontaneous "U-S-A!" chants; this was, perhaps, a nice moment of community, as were the gatherings outside the White House and in Times Square. But there was something about the celebration of what essentially was a murder--however justified--that troubled a lot of us. My wife very quickly said it didn't change anything in the geopolitical sense; this is probably true, and I think Glenn Greenwald is right that this is more likely to prompt us to double down on belligerent and unwise foreign policy decisions than, say, declare victory in Afghanistan and speed up the process of withdrawal. It's sobering to think that our failures rather our successes are more likely to prompt thoughtful reconsideration of choices made.

(To be clear: I was glad to hear of bin Laden's death. I was in Lower Manhattan on the morning of 9/11, walked through the smoke and pulverized remains of the Towers to get to the Brooklyn Bridge and wander through Brooklyn toward home on that shocked, mostly silent morning. I had peripheral connections to a couple of those lost on that day, and like every New Yorker felt the deep wound that was inflicted on our City. Even worse, it remains my view that the attack knocked us off course as a nation and society; it ensconced the most consequentially harmful administration we've ever had, enmeshed us in multiple wars and pushed us down a dark road of war, lawlessness and debt that we remain on, and that I doubt we'll ever get off without consequences that might dwarf those of the attack itself. Maybe I'm just more inclined to mourn what I think has happened to my country than actively celebrate the demise of the individual among those most responsible for putting us on that unfortunate path. I don't begrudge others their rejoicing, but I couldn't really share in it.)

There are some who criticize what increasingly seems like an assassination mission, notwithstanding the claims of Pentagon officials that the strike team was prepared to take bin Laden into custody. I don't believe that, and while I share in the abstract Greenwald's concern that we don't seem particularly eager to hear the details... I'm not particularly eager to hear the details, and I can't shake the sense that we're better off with him dead than we would be with him in custody. We as a society aren't who we were 65 years ago, when the Nazi war criminals were tried for their crimes at Nuremberg; evidently we can't even try lesser terrorists, so there's no chance we could have done for Osama bin Laden. Instead, the national appetite for revenge would have been whetted that much further by the knowledge we could torture the mastermind of 9/11 whenever we wanted.

Self-indulgence, individual and collective, is now our universal watchword; we're bloodthirsty; we love spectacle; and we resolutely fail to perceive or even entertain the concept of causal relationships. If one faces these truths, it's clear no good would have come of imprisoning or trying bin Laden. In custody, he would have remained a symbol and rallying cry for terrorists and perhaps Arab Muslims more generally, depending on how things unfold with the Arab Spring. I wish things were otherwise, but they aren't, and it's difficult for me to believe that the president and his advisors didn't come to the same conclusion and thus gave the order to kill.

While the killing of bin Laden probably amounts to a political sugar rush for Obama, the development of this week that I think might really lift him next year was the Republicans' waffling on their proposed phase-out of Medicare. Every Republican in the House voted for this exceptionally unpopular measure... but then their leadership walked away from it. (It's something of a problem for the Republicans that without the Medicare changes, their budget doesn't get to balance even with all the other crazy assumptions--2 percent unemployment and so on--baked in.) The question is whether the Democrats can hang this on the Republicans next year, trapping the presidential nominee between a position the party's hardcore base and biggest donors are adamantly for but that large majorities reject. Given what they showed us in 2008, I think it's likely Obama's team will find a way to make this stick.

The Republicans have made an interesting bet on the politics of 2012: ostensibly that the public is ready to have a "serious conversation about the cost of government," but that it will buy their premise that all change should be on the spending side (NO NEW TAXES EVER! DADDY TOOK MY ICE CREAM!) and that almost all cuts should be on the backs of the poor and politically disadvantaged. This doesn't bespeak a wager on seriousness so much as selfishness and cruelty. I wish I had more confidence that they're wrong.

2011-04-16T13:35:00.000-07:00

Now We're Talkin'
Two and a half years into Barack Obama's presidency, my biggest disappointment has been his unwillingness or inability to articulate a coherent and resonant message about the proper role of progressive government in 21st century America. Obama the candidate seemed to promise both a return to progressive values--the rule of law, respect for individual freedoms, an unapologetic defense of the signature Democratic policy achievements of the last century (and expansion of them into this one) and the regulatory state--and a technocratic expertise in governance that would be appropriately humble about the limits of what could and should be done at the federal level which would manifest both in domestic policy (hence the repeated tips of the cap toward behavioral economics) and internationally.

On much of that, he simply hasn't delivered. The Obama administration has institutionalized nearly all of the Bush/Cheney Security State, continued the dumbassed and fiscally ruinous war on drugs, and viciously pursued whistle-blowers. There have been a few advances--perhaps most notably, the end of Don't Ask, Don't Tell--but by and large, the record on values is disappointing for liberals. Likewise the president's embrace of Republican frames in domestic policymaking: seemingly everything he's said has indicated acceptance of core premises that the federal government is feckless and inefficient. Even the battles he's "won," such as passage of the stimulus, Affordable Care Act and (if you care to call this a victory at all) the Dodd-Frank financial regulation law, generally haven't featured strong pushback against the talking points of the right.

Obama likely would assert that his use of stronger language or clearer contrasts with political opponents might have jeopardized even those accomplishments, furthering the very perception of government ineptitude that constrains him and Democrats more generally. This may or may not be true, but that perception endures anyway--as does the sense that this president has no stomach for big fights. His problem in this area is that presidential greatness doesn't come without conflict; it isn't achieved without risk, without a willingness to set one's position in clear contrast to that of the other side and offer the public the clearest possible choice. Ronald Reagan did that, in his time; Bill Clinton really didn't in his, which is why (as Obama himself noted during the '08 campaign) Reagan was a transformational president while Clinton was basically the most fun and interesting guest at the kick-ass party that was the 1990s.

This week, when he set his own view for deficit reduction against that of the Republicans, we might finally have seen Obama come out swinging:

[The Republican plan] says up to 50 million Americans have to lose their health insurance in order for us to reduce the deficit. Who are these 50 million Americans? Many are somebody's grandparents -- may be one of yours -- who wouldn't be able to afford nursing home care without Medicaid. Many are poor children. Some are middle-class families who have children with autism or Down's syndrome. Some of these kids with disabilities are -- the disabilities are so severe that they require 24-hour care. These are the Americans we'd be telling to fend for themselves.

And worst of all, this is a vision that says even though Americans can't afford to invest in education at current levels, or clean energy, even though we can't afford to maintain our commitment on Medicare and Medicaid, we can somehow afford more than $1 trillion in new tax breaks for the wealthy. Think about that.

In the last decade, the average income of the bottom 90 percent of all working Americans actually declined. Meanwhile, the top 1 percent saw their income rise by an average of more than a quarter of a million dollars each. That's who needs to pay less taxes?

They want to give people like me a $200,000 tax cut that's paid for by asking 33 seniors each to pay $6,000 more in health costs. That's not right. And it's not going to happen as long as I'm President. (Applause.)

This vision is less about reducing the deficit than it is about changing the basic social compact in America. Ronald Reagan's own budget director said, there's nothing "serious" or "courageous" about this plan. There's nothing serious about a plan that claims to reduce the deficit by spending a trillion dollars on tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. And I don't think there's anything courageous about asking for sacrifice from those who can least afford it and don't have any clout on Capitol Hill. That's not a vision of the America I know.

The America I know is generous and compassionate. It's a land of opportunity and optimism. Yes, we take responsibility for ourselves, but we also take responsibility for each other; for the country we want and the future that we share. We're a nation that built a railroad across a continent and brought light to communities shrouded in darkness. We sent a generation to college on the GI Bill and we saved millions of seniors from poverty with Social Security and Medicare. We have led the world in scientific research and technological breakthroughs that have transformed millions of lives. That's who we are. This is the America that I know. We don't have to choose between a future of spiraling debt and one where we forfeit our investment in our people and our country.

Without glossing over the details absent from the president's plan and its at least arguable want of real political courage (it's unlikely in the extreme that we can get to balance without any new taxes, directly or indirectly, on the middle class), this is both enormously preferable on the substance and a political winner. Every Democrat on the ballot next year should echo that "34 seniors pay $6400 more for health care so a billionaire can get a $200,000 tax cut" line, as it's the best representation yet of the clear truth that Republicans care less about deficit reduction than they do for tax cuts.

The fanatical Republican resistance even to tax reform that might close some distorting loopholes, let alone tax increases or expiration of fiscally irresponsible tax cuts, is one of the two biggest problems in this debate. The other is their refusal to understand why the US in the 20th century enjoyed both the largest and the most equitably distributed prosperity in history: our unprecedented investments in human capital. Enormous (and largely collective) investment in education begat the first mass middle class; as we start to disinvest, at least in relative terms, the middle class comes under increasing strain. I'm pretty sure Obama gets this, as he articulated in both his state of the union speech and Wednesday's address, and his team has reiterated in the vapid but probably effective "win the future" sound bite.

Staying focused on both these points gives him the edge over the Republicans in the contest for "who gets to be the grown-up," which is a decent proxy for who wins independent voters next year. It further helps that whoever gets to engage Obama in that fight as the Republican presidential nominee probably first has to go far, far in the other direction: it's only possible to win that nomination by catering to the most distorted, fact-resistant right-wing fantasies, both in terms of things like Obama's place of birth and the idea that the budget can be brought into balance solely by cutting Things Liberals Like (NPR, foreign aid). The cultivation and constant reinforcement of a hardcore 15-20 percent of the electorate on the far right helped the Republicans win back the House last year; next year, what's required to keep that base happy might have the effect of giving Obama a second term--another requirement for presidents who aspire to transformational status.

2011-03-19T09:15:00.000-07:00

The Irrelevant Public
I'm doubting that there ever has been a time in American democracy when the preferences of majorities seemed to matter less to elected officials than is the case right now.

Following the UN resolution passed Thursday night, the US military is about to intervene in Libya despite majority opposition. (Admittedly, the "no-fly zone" option has majority support in the underlying poll. The skepticism of the most prominent voices against intervention largely is based on the idea that intervention has an inexorable logic that will take us beyond no-fly enforcement and lead to casualties and expenses incurred.) There's no ambiguity about our role in Afghanistan despite unambiguous public opposition. The conversation domestically is only about cutting expenditures, and largely about cutting entitlements, despite strong opposition there. Majorities favor higher taxes on the wealthy—and always have—but no “serious” official suggests as much. (Sorry, Rep. Schakowsky; sorry, Senator Sanders. That what you're saying makes absolute sense and probably would come close to polling a majority among *Republican* voters doesn't matter.)

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that public opinion should entirely drive policy. In a representative democracy, I believe leaders are elected to lead, and that the great ones actually move public opinion in their chosen direction through a combination of persuasion and the demonstrated efficacy of their policy choices. But at the least there should be some effort to convince the public, or acknowledgement of the roads not taken. We don’t even have that.

I would guess that part of the explanation for the current irrelevance of majority opinion is that those who study politics as practically applied have concluded that partisan polarization is now so irreversibly advanced that maximum mobilization of one’s "own" voters, and demobilization of the other side’s, is the winning strategy. I kind of get this: increasingly bitter and disappointed as I am over Obama’s aping of the Republicans on security-state policy choices, lacking the courage of Democratic convictions on a whole range of domestic policy issues, and generally failing to lead in the manner described above, it’s just north of unimaginable that I won’t vote for him. (Not that this matters in non-competitive New York, but all that means is the addition of the words "just north of.")

There's a truism in politics that the most vicious fights come between factions that are largely in agreement. I'm not sure I'd characterize the Democrats and Republicans that way in philosophical terms: at bottom, the Republicans want the mainstream family/community arrangements of the 1950s with the economic context of "Blade Runner," while the Democrats want the economic context of the 1980s (when unions were starting to die but not nearly dead, regulation was far more lax than 10-20 years earlier but still valid and viable, etc) with the family/community arrangements of present-day Scandinavia. Tactically, though, both parties are looking to throw our military weight around and move the country back toward fiscal stability on the backs of the poor and middle class rather than the wealthy who continue to get wealthier.

That underlying philosophical debate, which is both far more interesting and ultimately far more important than the tactical fights over how much to intervene and how fast to cut government, we never quite have. Perhaps, if our society weren't structured such that it's so easy, in political terms, to start wars because only a tiny slice of the public bears the greatest costs, and that the rich as individuals and in their corporate aspect exert such an outside role in the country's politics, we might.

2011-03-12T09:34:00.000-08:00

Crack-Ups Have Consequences
I'm increasingly convinced we've become a society of delusional egomaniacs so singlemindedly intent on our own desires and perceived prerogatives that we're willing if not eager to destroy almost every vestige of community.

Consider, just for starters, the NFL work stoppage and the stripping of collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin. I'm slightly hesitant to opine on either issue for lack of deep and balanced research, but both seem strongly to fit the model.

In the case of the NFL, you've got a $9 billion industry the true value of which probably goes far beyond that. I don't know how you quantify the joy that the Saints' 2010 Super Bowl victory brought to beleaguered New Orleans, or what the Packers' win early last month did for their community. But it's not even solely about the winners; it's only a slight exaggeration to say that the Bills are mostly what Buffalo's got left, or that the Redskins (offensive team name and duly adjudicated asshole owner aside) are the single biggest unifying element in Washington, DC. That both those teams are awful and have been so for years doesn't diminish how crucial they are to their communities; indeed, the shared suffering of fans might even have the opposite effect.

When baseball endured its work stoppage in 1994-95--an event that damaged the industry for years, by the way, and cost both parties incalculable millions if not billions--there at least was a case to be made that some teams simply couldn't compete, in economic if not scoreboard terms, under the then-current rules of the business. Undoubtedly, raw greed and a desire to settle past scores were at play, but those probably weren't the only factors.

The issue that seems to be driving the current NFL dispute was simply the owners' push for a bigger share of that $9 billion pie, offered for no better reason than "we want it." Remember that these people are almost all billionaires, beneficiaries of an unimaginably lavish TV deal, operators of local monopolies, many of whom were given enormous public subsidies to build their stadiums at the opportunity cost of schools, roads and social services for hard-pressed urban communities. It's a real-life enactment of this famous "Simpsons" exchange:

Homer: You know, Mr. Burns, you're the richest guy I know. Way richer than Lenny.

Mr. Burns: Oh, yes. But I'd trade it all for a little more.

If I'm reading the NYT article linked above correctly, the owners realized yesterday that their bluff had been called and backed off the demand for further revenue rather than release their financial records to the union. But the NFLPA--which had been beaten like a rented mule in past labor disputes--essentially chose to demand disclosure anyway, leading to the lockout.

For "a little more," both sides now risk pretty much everything. I still can't believe they'd be so stupid as to jeopardize the country's most popular sport; there's more than a month until the draft and four months until training camps open. But emotion obviously is in the saddle now, and it's deeply discouraging that things have gotten this far already.

Which brings us to Wisconsin, where we're seeing the ultimate application of political greed over reason and the ethos of compromise that's vital for democracy to function. After arguing that public sector unions must essentially accede to castration in order to put the Badger State on sound financial footing--because the unions had already agreed to all manner of contractual concessions even as newly elected Republican Governor Scott Walker cut taxes for his preferred constituencies--the governor and his state senate majority decoupled the bill stripping the unions of collective bargaining rights from the budget measure so they could jam it through. The state senate Democrats, who'd left Wisconsin to deny their body a quorum needed for considering budget measures, thus won a pyrrhic victory--they'd proven the baselessness of claims that the action was about state finances rather than politics--but lost the war.

Then the senate majority leader admitted what was really at play:

"If we win this battle, and the money is not there under the auspices of the unions, certainly what you're going to find is President Obama is going to have a much more difficult time getting elected and winning the state of Wisconsin."

Perhaps it's naive to assert that politics largely should be limited to election season, with public business to dominate at other times. But increasingly politics seems to be all Republicans are about; it would be easier to take them seriously if every single one of their proposed suggestions to address public problems didn't happen to align perfectly with their expressed political intentions, such that they seem to think, or at least publicly hint, that nothing more need be done to balance the federal budget than eliminate funding for NPR and Planned Parenthood. This would seem to be the inevitable result of the closed informational circuit that is Fox News and right-wing radio; facts can't penetrate.

I'm still working through the marvelous collected letters of Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who suggested in politics an "Iron Law of Emulation": that institutions (in his original example, different branches of government) in opposition increasingly come to resemble each other. Hence we can trust that Wisconsin's Democrats will spend at least the next two years in single-minded opposition to Gov. Walker and his senate majority. If, as I believe, the Republicans are wholly willing to force a federal government shutdown not in spite but precisely because of of the damage this might do to the economic recovery and Obama's reelection prospects, it's inevitable that the Democrats will respond in kind.

And meanwhile we continue on a trajectory that inevitably furthers our collective decline, as our leading societal actors give less and less of a shit about our collective anything.

Moynihan also has a great line about the interrelation of politics and culture, on the back of the book: "The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself." I think the problem we have right now is that what's needed is for culture to change, and save, our politics. David Brooks was going on about this yesterday, and puts his finger on core issue. Is there any doubt that he could be talking about the NFL owners, or Wisconsin Republicans, or every self-worshipping asshole who's unaware of or indifferent to the larger damage created by their choices and actions?

If Americans do, indeed, have a different and larger conception of the self than they did a few decades ago, I wonder if this is connected to some of the social and political problems we have observed over the past few years.

I wonder if the rise of consumption and debt is in part influenced by people’s desire to adorn their lives with the things they feel befit their station. I wonder if the rise in partisanship is influenced in part by a narcissistic sense that, “I know how the country should be run and anybody who disagrees with me is just in the way.”

Most pervasively, I wonder if there is a link between a possible magnification of self and a declining saliency of the virtues associated with citizenship.

Citizenship, after all, is built on an awareness that we are not all that special but are, instead, enmeshed in a common enterprise. Our lives are given meaning by the service we supply to the nation. I wonder if Americans are unwilling to support the sacrifices that will be required to avert fiscal catastrophe in part because they are less conscious of themselves as components of a national project.
...
It’s possible ... that some of the current political problems are influenced by fundamental shifts in culture, involving things as fundamental as how we appraise ourselves. Addressing them would require a more comprehensive shift in values.

The "rise of the individual" has had some very positive implications: same-sex marriage, to take one obvious example, now looks all but inevitable. But it's dubious to me whether greater deference to individuals' choices entirely outweighs the decline of our shared institutions and the crumbling of our shared values.

2011-02-19T09:42:00.000-08:00

Expertise
A couple weeks ago, the Eagles shocked the football world by announcing that their longtime offensive line coach, Juan Castillo, would assume the role of defensive coordinator. A pretty well regarded position coach on the offensive side of the ball, Castillo had been a linebacker in college more than thirty years earlier, and a defensive coach at the high school level in the 1980s. Evidently he always wanted to get back to his roots, and had worked closely with the late and legendary Eagles defensive coordinator Jim Johnson on game-planning. Still, the move has been widely questioned if not criticized; the Philadelphia Daily News headline, "WTF?" was fairly representative of the reaction.

I think the notion of non-transferable expertise must be more deeply rooted in sports and academia than other realms of human experience. The idea, I suppose, is that one spends his/her years burrowing ever more deeply into a specialized area of knowledge; this process commences upon receipt of some credential or position (an advanced degree, a coaching job) and continues unto retirement or death. Maybe the idea of transfer is somehow insulting to those who believe most deeply in this model. But while I grasp this idea in the academic sphere--a professor of economics isn't likely to effectuate a successful mid-career shift to astrophysics--it seems less certain in sports, and then in other areas it doesn't and shouldn't hold at all.

Right now I'm reading a book of Daniel Patrick Moynihan's letters, released last year. Over his career in public life, Moynihan was a domestic policy advisor to Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon; a diplomat; and finally a Senator from New York. Each role was very different from the previous one, though I guess it's true that senatorial duties imply, or at least should imply, a broad expertise in both domestic and foreign policy. Meanwhile, George Shultz was Moynihan's colleague in the Nixon administration as Secretary of the Treasury, then served as Reagan's Secretary of State. Among his colleagues in that administration were James Baker and Don Regan--who famously switched jobs as Chief of Staff and Secretary of the Treasury in 1985.

These shifts seem to me of greater distance than Castillo's--in terms of subject mastery, I mean, not significance for humankind (though that too). For that matter, yesterday afternoon at work we saluted a colleague who's leaving the agency after nine years for a job in the private sector; during his tenure, he held senior roles in multiple departments each of which required deep subject knowledge. Yet he excelled in every one of those positions, in large part I think because his own skill sets--leadership, communication, empathy, the ability to think through and solve problems--were consistent.

I think when these sorts of moves founder, they do so because the person changing roles has a fault or faults that are totally distinct from the body of knowledge s/he must master in the new role. Mayor Bloomberg's appointment of Cathie Black to lead the schools might or might not prove such an example: he hired Ms. Black as a "superstar manager," which to my ear implies that she has many of the same characteristics as my former colleague mentioned above, but the article I've linked here casts some doubt on that characterization.

To bring things back 'round to Juan Castillo, his reputed strengths include motivation, communication and strategic thinking. If those strengths hold, it seems reasonable to assume that they'll transfer to his new role. There are limits on this, of course; I wouldn't want Castillo managing the Phillies, much as I wouldn't necessarily want a Moynihan or Shultz commanding the armed forces (though Trotsky managed okay during the Russian Civil War). But the notion that Castillo is doomed to fail seems silly given all the counter-examples of people who successfully managed similar transitions in other fields. What we mostly see here, perhaps, is that sports types take themselves surprisingly and excessively seriously in terms of how much these jobs demand.

2011-01-27T09:22:00.000-08:00

Pulling Away
One of the frustrations of my job is that I don’t have nearly as much time to read policy research as I used to. So until a fairly lengthy excerpt appeared in the Gotham Gazette (itself something I don’t read as often as I should) about a week and a half back, I was unaware that James Parrott of the Fiscal Policy Institute had recently released a report on income inequality in New York City. The key finding is that the top 1 percent of City residents now takes 44 percent of total income.

James tracks the historical evolution of this trend, which strongly supports the contention of Paul Krugman and others that we’re in a New Gilded Age in terms of concentration of wealth. Nationally, the share of wealth held by the top 1 percent held steady from about 1950 through 1980 around 10-12 percent, then began a largely uninterrupted ascent to the current level of about 23.5 percent. The reasons why are fairly well known: the explosion of the financial industry, the evisceration of unions in the private sector, the general shift to a knowledge-based economy. He notes how this played out in recent years, implying something very interesting about the growing gap between a collective mindset geared toward an ever-higher standard of living and overall income stagnation:

Today, most experts expect the pace of the nascent recovery from the Great Recession of 2008-09 to remain subdued in large part because of high household debt burdens, stagnant or declining wages, and a bleak job outlook. The recession was triggered by the bursting of the housing bubble and a speculative, excess-prone financial system, but it occurred in an economy with an increasingly shaky foundation characterized by weak job growth, continued export of middle-income jobs and wage growth that failed to keep pace with inflation and the growth in the productivity of labor.

This shaky foundation has a lot to do with the post-1980 hyper-concentration of income. The expansion from 2004 to 2007 was the first in which family incomes and median wages adjusted for inflation did not rise over the cycle to reach the peak of the previous business cycle. Despite economic growth, many Americans never saw their income return to the levels they had reached in 2000. Faced with this, families turned to debt, using credit cards and home equity borrowing to sustain their living standards. The crash of the financial and housing bubbles destroyed trillions of dollars in retirement and college savings that had been accumulated by middle- and low-income Americans, and decimated the value of their homes.

Locally, the concentration of wealth is much worse--cementing New York as the most economically polarized state in the country, and NYC as the most unequal of the 25 largest American cities. I think this concentration must exert a large distorting effect on everything from housing prices to policy choices at the local level, as is the case nationally; to the latter point, James cites the recent book “Winner Take All Politics,” which I’m afraid to read anytime soon, as anything that depressing shouldn’t be consumed in the winter.

Even more depressing is how farfetched it seems to imagine this situation reversing itself. Money hasn’t been this powerful in our politics for more than a hundred years, and my sense is that it will only get worse with the courts having settled for the indefinite future on a very permissive position with respect to campaign finance. This creates a vicious circle; if you’re poor and convinced your vote doesn’t matter, you’re that much less likely to exercise it—even in the unlikely event that there’s a viable candidate championing a platform that might improve your circumstances.

But the problem might go even deeper than that, to the level of culture and discourse. Among the majority of society that isn’t in desperate circumstances, we’ve largely stopped thinking about those who are, much less feeling like our well-being is in any way tied to theirs. A complacency now obtains such that you can’t even make the argument about public space and “shared sacrifice” that reaches the wealthy and powerful instead of solely the middle/working classes without being called a socialist. Hence we see political and economic elites earnestly speaking about bringing government budgets into balance--a fully worthy goal, if one we might wish was held as dear when one’s own party is in power as when the opposition is--not by a real consideration of what tax burden is bearable and appropriate, but by cutting “discretionary spending” (loosely defined as “spending on other people”) at first and middle class entitlements if need be.

Amazingly, what populism exists is aligned with the economic elites against the cultural elites—hence the Tea Party, which is “organic” but not really new. It’s Nixon’s Silent Majority, Reagan’s Reagan Democrats, Bush’s and Rove’s cultural conservatives, taken up a few notches in their rage by the closed circuit informational loop of Fox News. (Though maybe not quite entirely and only that: see Matt Taibbi’s take on the ‘baggers here. Sounds right to me.) One effect of the last forty years of policies that facilitate concentration of wealth has been to delegitimize the labor movement, which admittedly has helped the process along through its own tone-deafness and greed.

Self-interest could be said to reside at the core of the democratic idea. But what’s especially frustrating is that the self-interest that now seems to motivate public majorities is so narrow! To take one example recently in the news, we don’t want to restrict “gun rights” because we only see our short-term wish to own badass guns under threat, not the idea that ourselves or loved ones could get killed as a direct result of someone else’s untrammeled access to automatic weapons.

(Mayor Bloomberg had a line in his State of the City speech last week about this which I found almost touching: ““There has been a lot of focus in Washington lately about the Constitution. But we must remember that we have a duty to honor and uphold not only the Bill of Rights, but also our Founding Fathers’ common purpose: to ‘establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty.’ “As long as we allow dangerous and deranged people to buy guns, the promise of a more perfect union will remain empty for the thousands of Americans who are murdered with guns every year.” Occasionally, tragically, you get a Carolyn McCarthy—or a Gabrielle Giffords—whose life is horribly altered by gun violence. Those are stunning events that make the news. What fills the bulk of the statistics are mostly people we don’t care very much about. )

The list goes on. We don’t want to pay more for “Obamacare” because we don’t see that the problem of the uninsured indirectly costs us (more) money. Many of us don’t even want to see our elected officials vote to raise the federal debt ceiling because the abstract problem of federal debt evidently bothers us more than the disastrous impacts that will be felt if the country goes into friggin’ default.

There’s upside to this—the liberalizing trends in individual rights, seen most recently in the repeal of Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell and, we might hope, next extending to same-sex marriage. And in the abstract, greater economic autonomy isn’t a bad thing at all; professionally, I try to frame everything I’d like to see in the context of “helping people stand on their own two feet in the labor market.” That means educational attainment, workplace competencies, and (because there’s always some interdependence in complex societies) professional and social networks. The paradox, though, is that we can’t get there without deeper investments in human capital up front. On my worse days, I wonder if it’s not too much to say that we’re en route to “individualizing ourselves to death.”

2011-01-09T16:49:00.000-08:00

Apolitical Assassins
When I was a senior in college, my girlfriend at the time was directing a production of the Stephen Sondheim musical “Assassins.” I was tangentially involved in the production, working with some of the performers, so I got to know the show fairly well. It traces the stories of those individuals who attempted to kill American presidents, naturally focusing on Booth and Oswald but devoting attention to killers and would-be killers Leon Czolgosz (McKinley), John Hinckley (Reagan), Charles Guiteau (Garfield), Giuseppe Zangara (FDR), Samuel Byck (Nixon), and Squeaky Fromme and Sara Jane Moore (Ford), each of whom basically gets a song to explain themselves.

“Assassins” is far from Sondheim’s best work, and I’ve somewhat shied away from it in memory because that production was coincident with, and at least arguably related to, some painful things that happened in my life that year. But I’m thinking about it again in the wake of yesterday’s horrific news from Arizona—the attempted assassination of Representative Gabrielle Giffords, the murder of six innocent people and wounding of fourteen more, including the congresswoman—and the rush to “interpret” the event to fit a storyline already fixed in the mind of the interpreter.

What “Assassins” communicates (and what, I now see, James Fallows wrote online at the Atlantic last night) is that those who attempt to kill political leaders often do so for reasons that have little or nothing to do with the positions of those leaders; it’s their prominence, not their opinions, that renders them targets. There are exceptions, of course: Booth, a loyalist of the Confederacy, murdered President Lincoln after concluding that the president would give blacks the right to vote upon the conclusion of the Civil War. Czolgosz, a revolutionary anarchist, killed McKinley as a political act. But Hinckley, famously imitating “Taxi Driver” character Travis Bickle (himself inspired by the real-life would-be assassin Arthur Bremer, who paralyzed Dixiecrat presidential candidate George Wallace in 1972), was trying to impress Jodie Foster. Fromme and Moore were Charles Manson followers, intent on killing Ford to support the cult leader. Zangara saw no distinction between Herbert Hoover and FDR.

These individuals general bore animus against “the government” in general, but in most cases had no specific grievance against their targets, which mostly seem to have been chosen for convenience. I think this was the case in this instance. The suspect in custody had made internet videos showing a conspiratorial mindset and had been in trouble both with the police and a community college from which he was kicked out. He seems to share the typical antisocial profile and swung between extreme viewpoints (note the Sarah Palin staffer, understandably defensive given that her boss figuratively put Rep. Giffords in the crosshairs, but inexcusably accusatory in suggesting that the shooter was “left wing and very liberal”).

This isn’t to totally excuse the very ugly political culture of our times, or the general contempt for government that at the least sits as background and context for expressions of that contempt. It’s one piece of this story, as is the easy availability of automatic weapons and the difficulty in diagnosing and treating mental instability. But, unsympathetic as I am to Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin, the truth is that they have millions upon millions of listeners and supporters who don’t go out and shoot up public gatherings—and there’s no indication that this shooter had any affinity for them, or for the Tea Party. It seems that what we have here is a deeply unwell individual who saw an opportunity to momentarily impose himself on the consciousness of the world, and did so with tragic consequences. Unless and until information arises to the contrary, it’s irresponsible and ugly to put his horrifying act in a larger political context, and in some sense doing so reinforces the very problem it ostensibly is working against.

2011-01-02T16:25:00.000-08:00

Print the Myth
So the last book I read in 2010 was something I ran across totally by chance in the Barnes & Noble on Court Street in Brooklyn on December 29, after a meeting in their cafe. I was looking for Kristin Hersh's memoir and instead found a history of Husker Du by a Tennessee-based writer named Andrew Earles. When Annie saw it, she commented that it resembled a textbook; this is true, and in price as well as presentation (a hardback with a solid cover rather than a book jacket). It seemed unreal to me; there's a "What Would Husker Du?" bumper sticker inside the front cover, which itself is a great live pic of the band early in their run. In fact, I wasn't totally sure it had objective existence; it's the sort of thing I'd stumble across in a dream and bemoan the loss of upon waking.

But I'm looking at it on my shelf right now, so at worst it's an unusually persistent delusion. After purchasing the book Tuesday night, I finished its roughly 300 pages in about 30 hours despite the usual and proportionate activities of sleep, work, exercise, eating, and so on. Its considerable faults notwithstanding, I really enjoyed it--the substance of a book about my favorite band ever as well as the fact of its existence.

Earles is a year younger than me, and had even less experience of the Huskers during their existence than I did. I saw the band in early 1987 at a show at Temple University my best friend's older brother helped organize; it was the first real show I ever went to, and seeing Bob Mould and Grant Hart sitting in the stairwell was probably our equivalent of a devout Christian's vision of the Virgin. They played "Warehouse: Songs and Stories," which turned out to be their final album, almost straight through; it occurred to me at one point that they might be lip-synching, though if memory serves at one point they interrupted the run of songs with "What's Going On," which is not on Warehouse. I had a great time even though my back hurt from standing by the stage; the first opener was the Electric Love Muffin, my favorite band ever to come out of Philadelphia.

There's a ton of great information in the book I hadn't previously known, from the fact that Bob's guitar was an Ibanez knockoff rather than a real Gibson Flying V as always stated, to the story of Greg Norton's post-Huskers career as a restauranteur, the basic fact of which I knew but not the full story, which I found quite moving; it's great that the guy whose contributions were always underrated, and who personally seemed by far the most relatable and flat-out likable of the three, made a fulfilling and successful life for himself away from any spotlight. Earles tells that story, as well as Grant's more tumultuous post-Huskers road, with clear and appropriate warmth. He also gamely attempts to present the Huskers as not just a great band in their own right but true institution-builders in terms of the post-punk touring circuit and living a DIY ("Do It Yourself") aesthetic in everything from management to PR to recording and distribution.

That said, the book had its problems: the editing was pretty sloppy in both content--I think some whole paragraphs were repeated in different chapters--and theme; as Earles tells it, the band repeatedly "gives a final kissoff to hardcore," which you can really only do once. Having read a couple interviews with Earles this weekend after finishing the book, it sounds like he was largely on his own with this project, so it's probably fair to attribute these flaws to his own DIY process as well as rookie mistakes.

The other problem, which wasn't at all Earles' fault, is the absence of Bob Mould's voice. He asked all three for their participation in the project; Grant and Greg agreed, but Bob (whose autobiography is due this year) politely declined. While it's way too much to say that Bob "was" Husker Du--Grant carried an almost equal share of the songwriting load, and all three were huge contributors to the band's sound--if the story you're looking to tell is how the band built its business model as well as its sound, the absence of Bob's perspective is going to be felt. Grant himself acknowledges Bob's leadership on the business side as well as his victories in the band's various internal power struggles.

Maybe this is a bigger deal for me than it would be for others because I'm a Bob Mould guy; in the now 23 years since Husker Du disbanded, I've purchased almost every piece of music Bob has made, through solo work and Sugar, and seen him play in different formats probably eight to ten times. While Grant wrote and sang a number of my favorite Husker Du songs (It's Not Funny Anymore, Pink Has Turned to Blue, Terms of Psychic Warfare, Back From Somewhere), I own none of his post-Husker Du work and haven't seen him play.

I'd still strongly recommend the book, both for its own merits and because Earles gets at what I consider the essential truth about this amazing band: the point is what they did on record and in performance, not their personal drama or excesses. (Many of which, by the way, I think can be chalked up to the convergence of a few home truths: young men are often jerks, artists are often jerks, and when you've got artistic young men working nonstop and living in close quarters for about a decade, tensions are inevitable.) He's appropriately expansive in considering their impact and legacy, though there is one point about their work I think he didn't get quite right. In my view, Husker Du never so much "moved past" pop-punk, hardcore, psychedelia or whatever other genre you care to name, the way Earles suggests they did, as mastered them, incorporated them into an ever-growing sonic palette, and then went off in search of new realms to conquer. At the end, they were playing music from the entirety of their career, and killing every song. The sound kept getting better, but they never really slowed down much, literally or figuratively.

2011-01-01T13:35:00.001-08:00

My Year in Books
The other day I made a list of everything I read in 2010, as best I could remember; this is something I often do toward the end of December, and I can usually come up with about two-thirds of the list on my own before going back to threads on BackSheGoes.com or email with friends to fill in the rest. (Of course, the ones I remember without any prompt are usually the best of the bunch.) What surprised me was how heavily I turned toward the novels in 2010, maybe as a result of having a big-boy job for the first time in about five years and just wanting/needing escape from that (or, for a less psychological explanation, because I was reading a fair amount of policy non-fiction--well, hopefully non-fiction--on a more or less everyday basis, so that's where I found the balance).

The list below includes only titles I finished; as usual, there were at least a handful I started and abandoned, whether because of boredom or a sense that I'd gotten what I was going to get out of them. A few, including relatively heavy non-fiction titles like Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (which I barely started) and Bobbitt's The Shield of Achilles (which I got more than halfway through and found totally brilliant), I hope to get back to. This is in rough but not perfect chronological order.

Gun With Occasional Music (Jonathan Lethem)
Under the Dome (Stephen King)
The Forever War (Joe Haldeman)
Shadow Country (Peter Matthiessen)
The Savage Detectives (Roberto Belano)
The Brooklyn Follies (Paul Auster)
The Bullpen Gospels (Dirk Hayhurst)
Let the Great World Spin (Colum McCann)
Anathem (Neal Stephenson)
The Passage (Justin Cronin)
Then We Came to the End (Joshua Ferris)
A Canticle for Leibowitz (Walter M. Miller Jr)
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (David Mitchell)
You Don't Love Me Yet (Lethem)
The Virgin Suicides (Geoffrey Eugenidies)
Netherland (Joseph O'Neill)
Tokyo Year Zero (David Peace)
The Night Gardener (George Pelecanos)
An Artist of the Floating World (Kazuo Ishiguro)
Motherless Brooklyn (Lethem)
The Ministry of Special Cases (Nathan Englander)
The Four Fingers of Death (Rick Moody)
Solar (Ian McEwan)
The Clinton Tapes (Taylor Branch)
Husker Du: The Story of the Noise Pop Pioneers Who Launched Modern Rock (Andrew Earles)

(I just went on the Brooklyn Library site to see if there were other titles I've forgotten. Unfortunately, unless you tell them to do so, they only preserve your past selections when there's a fine attached. I evidently owe them $7.50 for various failures to return or renew over the last several years. So be it...)

The best of these? Under the Dome (Stephen King getting back to what he does best--the plot-driven epic), Shadow Country (superb historical fiction set in a place and time--Florida at the turn of the last century--I had little knowledge of, with epic themes and very strong characterizations), The Savage Detectives (the book "On the Road" could have been, if Kerouac were a much better writer, a less self-involved person, and a true connoisseur of literature), The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (David Mitchell is, basically, God), and Solar (an effective fusion of McEwan's misanthropy, e.g. Amsterdam, and tenderness, e.g. Saturday). The ones I enjoyed least were probably "Then We Came to the End," which was replete with unlikable characters and wasn't remotely as funny as the author evidently thought it was, and "Let the Great World Spin," which was the literary equivalent of listening to U2 at their most self-important--there's something to it, but you just can't get past the self-satisfaction and just enjoy the damn thing.

The last two books here are, of course, non-fiction. Taylor Branch is one of my heroes: his three-volume civil rights history, "America in the King Years," is up there with Caro's "The Power Broker," DeParle's "American Dream" and Ben Cramer's "What it Takes" as the best social/political history I've ever read. He knew Bill Clinton when they were both young activists in the late '60s and early '70s, though they lost touch after working on the McGovern campaign together in 1972. Twenty years later, Clinton reached out to ask Branch to be his secret White House diarist through the vehicle of taped conversations about then current events. During his eight years in office, they met about 80 times; Clinton kept the tapes, but Branch made a second set of recordings while driving back to his home in Baltimore after their discussions to capture their content. Those tapes are the basis for this book (evidently the originals informed Clinton's own memoir, which I now kind of want to read).

To read Branch's book as an attempt at the history of the Clinton presidency entirely misses the point. All that's here is what Clinton said on the tapes, distilled through Branch's own memory. Their friendship shadows the material as well: Branch tries to balance that role with his duty to history as he sees it in the role of interlocutor, and steers away from (or at least rarely writes about here) the Lewinsky scandal and related matters. If you're interested in the Balkan wars, battles over the federal budget, and efforts to make Mideast peace, you'll get much more out of this than if your primary lens to view the '90s has to do with White House sexcapades. It's clear that Branch and Clinton themselves see those subjects as more historically significant; it's a perspective I sympathize with and share, but of course Clinton's personal failings limited his effectiveness as a political leader--a truth the president himself acknowledges.

What comes across above all else are, one, Clinton's political brilliance, and two, just how fucking hard the presidential job is. I was repeatedly struck by the similarities between the challenges he faced more than ten years ago and what Obama has been grappling with since he took office: the nihilism of the Republicans, the refusal of the liberals to fully engage with reality, the stunning vapidity of the media. Honestly, the Branch book is a depressing read in this light, because you get the sense both that the problems are far more intractable--the Republicans more vicious, the Democrats more feckless, the media more polarized and sensationalistic, the deficits staggeringly larger--and that Obama, for all his fine qualities, isn't close to the political animal that Clinton was and is. Of course, he also thankfully lacks Clinton's outsized appetites and weaknesses--which certainly contributed to Gore's "loss" in the 2000 election and many of our subsequent problems--and it's hard to imagine Obama endlessly complaining about his unfair treatment at the hands of the media the way Clinton did to Branch. (To be fair, he probably has much less grounds for complaint; I think the mainstream press really did dislike Clinton, where Obama's problems with them have to do not with their take of him so much as the incentives toward sensationalism and conflict. During the very productive lame-duck session of Congress I was consistently amazed and annoyed by how everything was presented as "a potential win (or loss) for the president"--as if that mattered more than the effects of ending DADT, or ratifying New START, or passing the DREAM Act.)

I have a whole thing on the Husker Du book too but will post that later, or tomorrow. Beats writing about football...

2010-12-29T17:55:00.001-08:00

Whiteout
Three days after the big snowstorm, full subway service was finally restored today with the B/Q--the lines we use most often--up and running as of sometime late morning. Caton Avenue is clear, but not the side streets that feed into it like Marlborough Road, as noted by Times columnist Michael Powell in a scathing article. The Mayor, initially defensive to criticisms of the City's response to the storm, about-faced and took a mea culpa today.

I've lived here for most of the last 15 years and remember a couple winter storms that seemed more severe, but no response as slow and weak as this one has seemed. Then again, when those blizzards hit, I was living in Manhattan or Park Slope--wealthier areas with better services. Maybe it's always this bad in worse-off communities, and maybe the unpleasant commutes I've had the last two days (on the F, mostly) are run-of-the-mill bad transit luck having nothing to do with the storm, and simply ill-timed to coincide with yet another fare increase that goes into effect tomorrow.

But maybe not. There was a story in the Times earlier this year about what's happening in communities across the country where revenues in the prolonged economic downturn were inadequate to both pay for expected levels of public services and balance budgets, and how those communities made cuts:

Faced with the steepest and longest decline in tax collections on record, state, county and city governments have resorted to major life-changing cuts in core services like education, transportation and public safety that, not too long ago, would have been unthinkable. And services in many areas could get worse before they get better.

The length of the downturn means that many places have used up all their budget gimmicks, cut services, raised taxes, spent their stimulus money — and remained in the hole. Even with Congress set to approve extra stimulus aid, some analysts say states are still facing huge shortfalls.

Cities and states are notorious for crying wolf around budget time, and for issuing dire warnings about draconian cuts that never seem to materialize. But the Great Recession has been different. Around the country, there have already been drastic cuts in core services like education, transportation and public safety, and there are likely to be more before the downturn ends.

Having to wait an extra day or two for streets to get plowed or sidewalks shoveled doesn't approach in severity a shift to a four-day school week, or shutting off streetlights and furloughing cops. But it does seem to be part of the story of the City's sluggish response to the snowstorm of December 2010. The Sanitation Department is down about 400 employees from a few years ago, and the insufficiency of the regular public workforce to the crisis is illustrated by the fact that NYC has hired hundreds of day laborers to aid in the dig-out effort. Factoring in overtime for those workers who remain, the expense of hiring at-need labor presumably wipes out a big chunk of whatever was saved through the reduction to Sanitation's workforce.

As anti-government sentiment becomes consistently both more extreme and more detached from reality, New York has mostly proven immune. Nobody could accuse Mayor Bloomberg of dismissing the power of the public sector to make positive change in the lives of the citizenry; from banning smoking in bars to mandating calorie counts in chain restaurants to winning control of the public schools, he's been arguably the most activist public official in the country over his nine years in office. But cuts in state and federal aid over the last few decades hurt the City in countless ways every day, directly and indirectly; this is just one instance, and we're probably blaming the wrong people.

Public discourse also overlooks the role of government activity in the economy itself. Ezra Klein posted today that the erosion of public sector employment through 2010 is among the biggest causes of our ongoing labor market doldrums. While anyone who draws a public paycheck (a group I count myself among) will also draw scorn from certain corners, there are plenty of times when you really want them on the job. Like when it snows.

2010-11-20T09:50:00.000-08:00

Livin' the Dream
If you’re at all attached to the media or popular culture, you can’t really escape the Palins. The half-term former governor, someone I personally regard as nothing more than an aging Mean Girl, a probable sociopath and possible sadist, inspires such ferocious devotion from a chunk of the electorate that she’s a plausible presidential nominee, with an outside shot she actually gets the job. Meanwhile, she has a highly popular “reality” television show and an upcoming book. One daughter evidently is about to win a dancing contest decided by voting that it’s difficult to argue is all that much more farcical than the elections we hold to determine political power. Another is either a hateful bigot, a typically immature teenager, or both. And so on.

I don’t think the ubiquity of the Palins is solely a function of the mother’s charisma or attractiveness (though admittedly she is the first presidential candidate to whom a heterosexual male could masturbate without deep misgivings, which obviously is a part of the story). In a moment when most sober observers note that the American Dream as classically understood seems to be slipping out of reach, the Palins are living the 21st century, bad-joke version of that Dream: they’ve gotten very wealthy and very, very famous despite the absence of any obvious talent or accomplishment.

Under any established or even coherent value system, this isn’t rational, much less admirable. From a narrative standpoint, it’s actually kind of offensive: you need to do something—overcome a challenge, show strength of character or intelligence, best a rival, deliver service, something—to earn the happy ending. Again, though, this seems entirely of a piece with where our politics and culture are going now.

The issue that just boggles my mind is the evident Republican rejection of the “New START” nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia--a decision which worsens that important international relationship, undermines European security and makes it much harder to contain Iran… all because these goals are far secondary to inflicting another political defeat on the president. Not quite as bad, but still pretty awful, is the unyielding rejection on the part of left Democrats, led by the incomparably tone-deaf Nancy Pelosi, of bipartisan deficit reduction plans that include adjustments to or reductions of benefits through social insurance programs.

(I could write a long separate piece about these proposals, to which I’m generally sympathetic on the merits even if I find some of the particulars--like the seemingly arbitrary call of Simpson-Bowles to cap spending and revenues at 21 percent of GDP--a little goofy. More than anything, they kind of make me sad: they represent a bygone conception of politics in which compromise wasn’t just inevitable but admirable, from a time before polarized media made that instinct a political death mark. Paul Ryan’s idealized notion of how to restore long-term fiscal balance is as unrealistic as Paul Krugman’s—but it’s possible both would rather see us default than accept that the other guy might have a point. The larger takeaway is that the policy is actually quite easy—see this New York Times application in which you can make a series of policy choices to close the deficit by 2030; I did it, generating a surplus of several hundred billion dollars, the majority coming from spending cuts rather than revenue gains, without core cuts to entitlements—there was a cap on Medicare increase and some Social Security benefit reduction to higher income seniors—or even going back to Clinton-era tax rates, which themselves were pretty low in historical terms—but the politics is fucking close to impossible.)

Outside of the mainstream, the culture seems more wistful than angry. As I type this, I’m listening to Bruce Springsteen’s “lost” album The Promise, recorded in the years between Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town, when The Boss was embroiled in fiendishly complex legal troubles and at something of a creative crossroads. The songs are all about disappointment and compromise and yearning, similar to but a bit more gentle than those that wound up on “Darkness”; it feels perfectly of this time, not the mid/late ‘70s. And I’ve just started reading Rick Moody’s The Four Fingers of Death, a novel released this year set a few decades from now, in which the economic desperation of the Rust Belt seems to have expanded across the U.S. in conjunction with a slow-moving environmental disaster and the sense that our historical moment has passed is pervasive:

We were citizens of a post-industrial economy that no longer produced much. Our rate of emigration exceeded our rate of immigration. Our GDP was contracting for what? The twelfth quarter? Tourism was down. Manufacturing was all but non-existent… This once robust superpower may have been on its last legs, but we still loved it, the way you love a dog in the backyard, whose attempts to close its jaws around your leg are stymied only by the rope tethered to the dead paloverde.

One more dumb war, one default, and I think we're just about there.

2010-11-02T20:50:00.000-07:00

A Quick Take on the Election Results
I think it's a near-consensus view that the president's re-election chances really hinge on how the economy performs over the next two years. Of course, the Republican Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, has said that his top priority is making sure that Obama is a one-term president. So does it follow that the now-empowered Republicans will try to thwart any action to boost the economy?

The obvious response (promptly offered when I wrote this on BackSheGoes.com) is that they've been doing just that the last two years, so why expect anything to change. There's something to this, I grant, but with the House of Representatives under their control, they probably will need to come up with something to say to the country beyond "No." With even a tiny majority--and it looks like they're going to have a pretty big one--you can push anything through the House, and so the Republicans surely will.

But, as others have written, this is a blessing not even all that well disguised for Obama in a political sense. He has a foil now. Put his ideas and ability to communicate against Speaker-presumptive John Boehner's, and as a progressive I'm feeling pretty good about who wins that argument.

Add in that Boehner is going to have a hell of a time with his caucus (see this very informative National Journal piece) and it should be at least pretty interesting. What Boehner wants to do, per my read of that article, is impose reforms that give the appearance of empowering new members, somewhat de-emphasizing seniority and strengthening committees, but that don't actually cede power. I guess the gamble is that the new Republican members, predominantly hard-right types, will focus their ire on the (probably still) Democratic Senate and/or President rather than Boehner and his leadership team; I have my doubts.

I'm a Democrat at this point primarily because I believe they're more serious (though not nearly serious enough) about honestly addressing the major structural problems the country faces, and secondarily because they're more in line with my personal values (individual freedoms, equality of opportunity, equal rights, etc). While it might not have mattered given the economy, I do think the Dems failed utterly to point out how totally incoherent the Republicans are on those same challenges: foaming-at-the-mouth angry about deficits and debt but unwilling even to support common-sense measures to rein in health care costs, look hard at military expenditures or ever contemplate letting a tax cut lapse, let alone an increase. Mindlessly bleating American triumphalism but ignorant of the economic basis of our world-historical success--human capital plus smart public investments--and thus intent on killing the golden goose (or, more accurately, letting it continue to die). Eager to pick fights all over the world without acknowledging simple logic of cause and effect, or that wars ain't cheap. And so on.

My guess is that Obama will suddenly find it a lot easier to expose the hash of the Republican agenda and make the case that he's the grownup in the room. Ultimately, though, we need the Republicans to get serious too. The real bad news about this year's results might be that with so many clowns winning office, that's probably going to take longer than it would have if the nuts got clobbered again. And, worse, many of the less clownish Republicans--Mike Castle most obviously, but he's not the only one--didn't even win within their party.

2010-10-31T09:50:00.001-07:00

Cablevision Agonistes
I got to watch Game Three of the World Series last night on my TV. This wouldn't be remarkable were it not for the fact that I wasn't able to watch the first two games of the Rangers-Giants series, nor the entirety of my beloved Phillies' six-game loss to the Giants in the National League Championship Series, owing to a dispute between the carrier, Cablevision, and News Corp, the parent company of Fox, that kept Fox's New York City affiliate off the air in the homes of Cablevision subscribers from October 16, when the NLCS began, until sometime yesterday, on the 30th, when the two parties reached an agreement in principle. (I watched the NLCS, drinking heavily and generally slipping into despair as the favored Phillies fell behind and ultimately were sent home in six games, on this computer, through a foreign stream of dubious legality in a window about the size of a new-school package of stamps. Partly because of lingering pain over the Phils getting bounced, partly because it didn't seem worth it anyway, I only listened to the radio for a bit of World Series Game Two while doing some work.)

The NewsCorp-Cablevision pissing contest was unusual in the annals of such disputes for its length--they usually don't last even a full day--and bitterness. And while details of the resolution aren't yet public, it sure sounds like Cablevision caved, meaning that I and everyone else will have to pay more on the ol' cable bill for stations available for free over the air! Check out their statement:

In the absence of any meaningful action from the FCC, Cablevision has agreed to pay Fox an unfair price for multiple channels of its programming including many in which our customers have little or no interest. Cablevision conceded because it does not think its customers should any longer be denied the Fox programs they wish to see.

Cablevision thanks its customers for understanding the reasons for the dispute and for staying with us. We are also grateful to the 175 government leaders who raised their voices to urge government intervention and binding arbitration to prevent this blackout. It is clear the retransmission consent system is badly broken and needs to be fixed.

In the end, our customers will pay more than they should for Fox programming, but less than they would have if we had accepted the unprecedented rates News Corp. was demanding when they pulled their channels off Cablevision.

From the outset of the dispute, Cablevision announced its willingness to accept binding third-party arbitration; News Corp did not. As the shot at the FCC suggests, the former company's repeated requests for federal intervention were rejected--perhaps because News Corp has given money early and often to officials in Washington, ">primarily but not exclusively to Republicans. Still, public outrage might have forced a quicker resolution had the Yankees' playoff series been on Fox rather than TBS (or if they'd won that round and advanced to the World Series), or were the Giants on Fox last weekend rather than ESPN's Monday Night Football. (They're on a bye this week, though the Jets are on Fox as they're hosting Green Bay; that probably impelled Fox to make whatever fig leaf of a concession they ultimately did.)

News Corp's profits in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2010 were $875 million. Poor Cablevision, a much smaller entity, made "only" $61 million in the same three-month period.

The greed of these two entities is shocking enough, but government's unwillingness or inability to intervene in what seems like a pretty clear case of market failure is what I can't get past. I have no real alternative to Cablevision; my understanding (this might be wrong) is that they have a local monopoly in this neighborhood, and a satellite dish isn't feasible in this building. I could have bought a $25 antenna to attach to my TV to get Fox over the air--but I didn't really feel like paying any additional money on top of what we already spend on cable every month. So I watched a shitty feed on my desktop during the NLCS and hoped they'd resolve in time for me to catch some of the Series.

I worry that this is symptomatic of a current trend that's about to accelerate, big-time: obscenely rich corporate entities battling over how to split up their ever-growing pie, while consumers suffer in helplessness and the government that ostensibly speaks for them sidelines itself because it's somehow convinced itself that it needs the companies more than vice-versa. (Remember that these are publicly owned airwaves, in theory at least.) In another one of those fiendishly brilliant moves they seem able to pull off every few years, Republicans evidently have convinced a majority of the likely-voting public that companies accountable to nobody but their shareholders somehow are more reliable caretakers of the public good than are the elected and appointed officials of democratic government. (How else could having insurance company bureaucrats exercise effective control over your health care decisions be preferable to "government bureaucrats" doing the same?)

I haven't seen any public polling on which entity is perceived to bear the bulk of blame in the Cablevision-News Corp kerfuffle. But based on this, the answer is probably "Barack Obama." Until the public grasps the facts rather than a dishonest story told by self-interested parties, the field will become ever more clear for the News Corps of the world to act in vile and irresponsible ways, and even be cheered for it.

2010-09-25T10:55:00.000-07:00

The ACA and the USA
I've been thinking recently about how the future of the Affordable Care Act, the health care reform law passed last March, could be read as (not to be too dramatic) the future of American politics itself.

Here's a measure that, warts and all, provides for a massive expansion of coverage to people in need and cost savings that could range from minor to game-changing, depending on the course of implementation. (See here for an excellent examination of how the biggest battles in the health care reform war remain to be fought in the years to come.) Within the context of those goals, it's business-friendly to a fault. Each state has a great deal of leeway in setting up its exchanges and other provisions. It's the arguably more conservative version of what Mitt Romney did in Massachusetts.

And the Republicans, who never engaged in good faith in helping to shape the policy, want to cripple or kill it for reasons they can't even coherently articulate.

For starters, Republicans say they will try to withhold money that federal officials need to administer and enforce the law. They know that even if they managed to pass a wholesale repeal, Mr. Obama would veto it.

"They’ll get not one dime from us,” the House Republican leader, John A. Boehner of Ohio, told The Cincinnati Enquirer recently. “Not a dime. There is no fixing this.”

Republicans also intend to go after specific provisions. Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, a senior Republican on the Finance Committee, has introduced a bill that would eliminate a linchpin of the new law: a requirement for many employers to offer insurance to employees or pay a tax penalty. Many Republicans also want to repeal the law’s requirement for most Americans to obtain health insurance.

Alternatively, Republicans say, they will try to prevent aggressive enforcement of the requirements by limiting money available to the Internal Revenue Service, which would collect the tax penalties.

Republicans say they will also try to scale back the expansion of Medicaid if states continue to object to the costs of adding millions of people to the rolls of the program for low-income people.

In addition, Republican lawmakers may try to undo some cuts in Medicare, the program for older Americans. Many want to restore money to Medicare’s managed-care program and clip the wings of a new agency empowered to recommend cuts in Medicare. Recommendations from the agency, the Independent Payment Advisory Board, could go into effect automatically unless blocked by subsequent legislative action.

The political problem with the ACA is twofold: one, it came along in a moment when everyone is suspicious if not contemptuous of government to start with, and two, its painful components might be better known, and are generally easier to explain ("the government is going to force you to do something!") than its goodies ("states will set up and regulate a series of exchanges through which you can choose among a range of health coverage options"). Knowing this, the Republicans have made "repeal and replace" the centerpiece of the campaign manifesto they released this week.

That this makes absolutely no sense isn't deterring them. They claim to want to keep the candy provisions (for instance, no discrimination by insurers for pre-existing conditions) while cutting the veggies (the individual mandate) that pay for the candy. They boisterously oppose Medicare cost savings less draconian and intrusive than what they put forward a few years back. And they killed provisions that would have saved far more money--the public option, early Medicare buy-in--probably because they knew those components of the reform would be popular and effective, undermining the whole "gummit's no good, so let us run it" argument. Their favored replacement strategies--capping malpractice lawsuits, ramping up Health Savings Accounts, and killing state-based regulation of insurers--would do very little, do pretty much nothing, and make things worse, respectively. (They could have had at least the first two provisions within the ACA if they'd actually negotiated on that legislation rather than trying to kill it for purely political reasons.)

The core premise of Republican health care reform is the same it's always been: their focus is on lowering costs for the relatively affluent who already have coverage, rather than expanding coverage for those who lack it. That this does little to constrain overall system expenditures, because the uninsured will continue to get (much more expensive) emergency room care, continually seems to elude them. At a values level, they seem not to care at all that millions will remain uninsured because they can't afford coverage.

The worst of it? This bottomlessly cynical and real-world counterproductive strategy might work. I don't think they'll get outright repeal, but between their political skill, the Democrats' gutlessness and the nature of how policy debates are covered, they might manage to de-fund the ACA and render it dead on the books. What a triumph that would be: tens of millions still without health coverage, no regime for controlling costs, but at least we'd be saved from some ignoramus's misguided fear of rampant, icky "socialism."

And needless to say, if we can't even get this right, we're never, ever going to be able to grapple successfully with the larger problems of demographically driven busted budgets, declining global competitiveness and potential environmental disaster that are looming just over the horizon.

2010-08-31T21:55:00.000-07:00

So This is Concerning
With the benefit of hindsight, I think it's pretty clear that the 2006 elections represented a rejection of the ruling Republicans rather than an endorsement of the Democrats. This was probably also true, maybe to a slightly lesser extent, of 2008.

I also think it's clear that 2010 will be a (possibly really huge) rejection of the Democrats rather than an endorsement of the Republicans, who are still very poorly regarded per public opinion polls. (This will get worse, not better, when Speaker of the House John Boehner and/or Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell are on TV every day.) The biggest commonality of 2006 and 2010 seems to be that the opposition's voters are intensely fired up, while the majority's voters are severely demoralized; I could look this up and link it, but I'm not even going to bother because I'm so sure it's true.

So the Republicans are going to take majorities in or both houses of Congress. Yet it doesn't seem like anybody seriously thinks that they have an agenda that will get the country out of its economic rut, or do much else other than "investigate" the White House, block everything the president or minority Democrats propose, and maybe--y'know, for giggles--shut down the government again.

I guess there's an argument to be made that a Republican Congress and a Democratic president both up in 2012 have a shared interest in building a record of accomplishment, but I doubt anyone actually involved will see it that way; the Republican electorate views Obama as fundamentally illegitimate, and that will be reflected in a newly swelled Republican caucus filled with people who will make their 1994 class look like a bunch of squishes, while the Democrats will look to fire up their currently demobilized constituencies in advance of 2012 by highlighting the evils of the Republicans. At best, they'll all be hoping for an economic turnaround without great conviction one is on the way.

If I had to guess, I'd still bet that Obama wins re-election, and maybe the Democrats make some gains. But this is almost incidental to the larger problem: neither party, nor the executive or legislative branches, has anything like the support and confidence of the public. None of these entities or institutions is widely perceived as having any use other than as a vehicle for expressing unhappiness with the other side--like the Democrats four years ago and the Republicans this year.

How can this end well?

2010-07-18T11:11:00.000-07:00

No Self Control in the Age of the Self

About a week ago, I wrote a piece on The Good Phight examining the Phillies’ performance in the first half of the baseball season through the prism of a dozen chosen metrics, six for hitting and six for pitching—runs scored, on base percentage, innings pitched from starters, strikeout to walk ratio, and so on. I thought that collectively those twelve stats pretty well told the story of the team’s strengths and weaknesses through a bit more than three months of play, how they compared both to the rest of the National League this season and to their 2009 performance (both also included) and highlighted areas where improvement is needed.

A night later I was watching “The Colbert Report,” and saw a statistic that startled me much more than anything the Phils have done this season: in 1991, the U.S. state with the highest percentage of obese residents (Mississippi, at just over 15 percent) had a considerably smaller share of really overweight folks than the state with the lowest percentage of obese residents today (Colorado, at over 19 percent). As a country, we’ve gotten much fatter in not a very long piece of time. (I was 18 in ’91, and I’m 37 today; needless to say, I’ve probably contributed more than my share to this increase. But at least I have metabolism as a (somewhat lame) personal excuse.)

This seems at least as meaningful a metric as any number measuring the Phillies’ anemic offensive performance or bullpen inconsistency, and it got me thinking about what other data points I’d want to collect for a picture of America’s “performance”—our strengths, weaknesses and needs—in 2010, with comparisons both to our collective past performance and to the global “competition.” I think the proper metrics would include things like average educational attainment, personal savings rate and indebtedness, average hours worked, life span and wellness (including something like average days of illness in a year as well as the obesity rate), political participation and other forms of interconnectedness.

While a number of these might seem more immediately telling than the obesity stat, there’s something about that one that feels unusually revealing. I think it has to do with this very perceptive piece from a recent New York Times Sunday magazine, titled “Dysregulation Nation.” Taking as a starting point the disaster of the BP oil spill and the larger question of regulation in our polity, Judith Warner suggests that the real problem is a failure of self-regulation:

The signs that something is amiss in our inner mechanisms of control and restraint are everywhere. Eating disorders, “in general a disorder of self-regulation,” according to Darlene M. Atkins, director of the Eating Disorders Clinic at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, grew epidemic in the past few decades, and in recent years have spread to minority communities, younger girls, older women and boys and men too. Obesity is viewed in many cases by mental-health experts as another form of self-dysregulation…

Mental-health professionals report seeing increasing numbers of kids who are all out of sync: they can’t sustain attention, regulate their rage, moderate their pain, tolerate normal types of sensory input. Some of this is biological; a problem of faulty brain wiring. But many of the problems — in both children and adults — according to Peter C. Whybrow, director of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at the University of California in Los Angeles, come from living in a culture of excess.

Under normal circumstances, the emotional, reward-seeking, selfish, “myopic” part of our brain is checked and balanced in its desirous cravings by our powers of cognition — our awareness of the consequences, say, of eating too much or spending too much. But after decades of never-before-seen levels of affluence and endless messages promoting instant gratification, Whybrow says, this self-regulatory system has been knocked out of whack. The “orgy of self-indulgence” that spread in our land of no-money-down mortgages, he wrote in his 2005 book, “American Mania: When More Is Not Enough,” has disturbed the “ancient mechanisms that sustain our physical and mental balance.”

If you put a person in an environment that worships wealth and favors conspicuous consumption, add gross income inequalities that breed envy and competition, mix in stagnant wages, a high cost of living and too-easy credit, you get overspending, high personal debt and a “treadmill-like existence,” as Whybrow calls it: compulsive getting and spending.

In Freudian terms, the id has kicked the superego’s ass. We’re now seeing the consequences play out in virtually every corner of public life, from the otherwise inexplicable decision of Lebron James to announce his free agency destination—a choice that almost inevitably would anger exponentially more people than it pleased—on a bloated one-hour TV special, to the unhinged voices at the political extremes… one wing of which, in terms of sheer numbers, can’t really be characterized as “fringe.” Thanks to a media culture that does the same thing writ large, the “Tea Party” has made blind, unreasoning, illogical rage the It Girl of American politics in 2010.

This is a particularly concerning problem because our society seems inexorably to be evolving toward a model in which the individual is more empowered than at any previous time in human history. This helps explain why we’re getting more “liberal” on issues like gay rights even as we’re becoming more “conservative” on a range of economic questions; the common thread is toward greater personal autonomy. Phillip Bobbitt, a longtime academic and former National Security Council member during the Clinton administration, calls this emerging societal/governance model the “market-state”:

The “market-state” is the latest constitutional order, one that is just emerging in a struggle for primacy with the dominant constitutional order of the 20th century, the nation-state. Whereas the nation-state based its legitimacy on a promise to better the material well-being of the nation, the market-state promises to maximize the opportunity of each individual citizen.

In his brilliant and massive work “The Shield of Achilles,” which traces the evolution of constitutional orders, Bobbitt mostly concerns himself with the interaction between warfare abroad and societal change at home. Leaving aside the military aspect—and its core assumption of collective action and conformity as necessary conditions for success, which is somewhat problematic for his larger hypothesis—I find his analysis of the emerging market-state enormously compelling. Everything from the decline of unionization rates and the increasing link between educational attainment and positive labor market outcomes to the decline in strong religious affiliation, the increasing vogue of libertarian ideas among better educated Americans and the endless proliferation of entertainment options and Internet-driven subcultures suggests that we’re both more “into ourselves,” and succeeding or failing based on our individual attributes and competencies, than has been the case in more than a hundred years.

And this in turn is why Warner’s hypothesis—that, collectively, we’ve lost our self-control, as borne out in part by rising obesity rates, indebtedness, etc—is so troubling. If we really are on our own, it becomes that much more important to make wise choices about everything from eating right to staying in (or going back to) school in order to boost employment prospects and earning power. Too many of us aren’t doing that, and, worse, we seem entirely resistant to the notion of taking responsibility for our own mistakes, or learning from them. As she notes, the various policy implications of “nudge theory”—behavioral economics—are intended as a better fit for a political climate inimical to mandates and centralization, informing better choices and shifting incentives. Like others, though, I worry that the problem goes deeper than something that calorie counts or credit card terms disclosure can ameliorate. And as always, the political incentives in a democracy align against telling hard truths and forcing hard choices as much on a societal level as we evidently are facing now at an individual level.

2010-06-20T11:50:00.001-07:00

The Decline and Fall of AIS
So I'm not writing much on this blog these days, and I figured I should at least note why that is.

One of the two big reasons is simply that I have much less time than I did from 2005-2009. Working full-time after a not-quite five-year stretch of consulting has had its benefits and drawbacks, but one consequence is that upwards of 50 hours per week (including transit) previously at least somewhat available for free-form cogitation is now accounted for in the service of New York City. And while I'm not exactly breaking rocks out there on a daily basis, I do find it much more physically and psychologically draining than I did working at home. Many nights I don't even turn on the computer after I come home... though the misery of the Phillies over the last month or so has contributed to that as well.

The other big reason is because, when I think about what I might want to write in terms of topicality and tone, it's all ground I've covered before: the matched-pair dysfunction of our governance and political systems; the difficulty in getting a profoundly flawed punditariat to engage with issues and shrug off historical amnesia; the vacillation between appreciating what the Obama administration and Democratic Congress have accomplished and profound disappointment in their moral (more than political) failures; and the underappreciated importance of human capital as an economic input. Then there's the linking-to-stuff-other-people-wrote mode of posting, in which I mostly quote and add perhaps a word or two of commentary. That's pretty boring to me at this point; the only thing more boring is the horse-race view of political races that one can find pretty much everywhere else on the internet. I could shift focus to writing about books and movies and music, all of which I've found myself more into--or maybe just getting more out of--since starting the job. But for the most part I doubt I have anything particularly of interest or importance to say about those subjects.

(A third, more minor reason is that, working for New York City, I feel much less free to opine here about politics and policy in the five boroughs. Probably it would be fine, but there seems no reason to risk it.)

So that's why it's been mostly radio silence here over the last few months, and why it's likely to remain that way, with perhaps the occasional exception, into the indefinite future.

2010-06-06T11:52:00.000-07:00

From the Back of the Bandwagon
I actually first came to sports fandom through ice hockey. A bit embarrassing to admit, it started with cards: one night, my dad went into the drugstore, meant to get me Battlestar Galactica trading cards (this was 1978, I'm pretty sure, so we're talking the original Lorne Greene iteration) but couldn't find them and got me National Hockey League cards instead. I was upset for a couple minutes--then decided that the sports cards were awesome. I began to follow hockey, then baseball, then football.

By the time I was six or seven, I was hooked; the Flyers tore off a 35 game undefeated streak during the 1979-80 season that I think is still a record, and lost in the Finals to the New York Islanders in six games, largely owing to an offsides call that wasn't, of which you can still hear Philadelphians of a certain vintage complain. Actually my parents claim my hockey fandom actually predates my memory: during the 1975 Finals, won by the Flyers, I pronounced players' names, including unusual ones like "Orest Kindrachuck."

I think this is the first time I've ever written about hockey on this blog, but it might have been my favorite sport through my early teen years. I probably went to at least three or four games a year. The Flyers made it back to the Finals in 1985 and 1987, losing both times to Wayne Gretzky's Edmonton Oilers. (One of the cards I got among those early packs my parents bought was Gretzky's rookie card. It's under plastic somewhere in my mom's house to this day; I don't know what the value is, in part because I don't know what its condition is.) Then the team went into a multi-year skid, really the first in a solid history dating back only six years before I was born, and I developed my deeper attachments to baseball and football. The Flyers stayed at the periphery of my attention through the '90s, making it back to the Finals in '97, but never quite recaptured the dynastic heights they'd once enjoyed as star player Eric Lindros became better known for injuries and familial drama than for his on-ice accomplishments. Worse, one of my dear friends, who was an absolute hockey fanatic to the extent that he started a 'zine in 1998 and acquired a press pass, dropped dead one night in December 1999. When the Flyers blew a three games to one lead in the conference finals the following spring against the hated New Jersey Devils, I pretty much gave up on hockey.

Now they're back in the Finals, currently tied at two wins apiece with the Chicago Blackhawks, and I'm finding myself a bit drawn in. I watched big chunks of Games Two and Three, after peeking in at different phases of the earlier rounds of the playoffs. I think I'm more drawn to the unlikely story of how they've gotten there than to the game itself; as I said to Annie the other night, I generally find watching hockey simultaneously boring and stressful. But the Flyers, a preseason favorite in their division and conference, suffered through a season so disappointing that it took a win in a shootout after overtime in their last game of the season just to get them into the playoffs. Then, as the seventh seed, they upset the second-seeded Devils in a satisfying five-game series.

At that point, things got really improbable: they lost the first three games in a best of seven series against the Boston Bruins, came back and won three straight to tie the series despite losing their starting goalie to injury in Game Five (in all, they've dressed seven goalies this season), fell behind 3-0 in the deciding Game Seven in Boston in the first period, then came back to win that game 4-3. They made the Finals by defeating the fabled Montreal Canadians--the eighth-seeded team in the conference, against whom the Flyers improbably enjoyed home ice advantage--in five games, to take on the heavily favored Blackhawks. After narrowly losing the first two games in Chicago, they won both at home to knot the series, which continues tonight.

I'd like to think that my generalized snobbery is rooted in, if not expertise, at least solid familiarity. But I'm not sure I could name more than nine or ten players on the Flyers, and no more than one or two if that on Chicago. I still won't watch the whole game tonight, and going forward if there's a choice between Game Six or (maybe) Seven of the Stanley Cup Finals or a rather less important June Phillies game, I'm probably going to watch baseball. But I would get a thrill seeing my childhood heroes, or rather their much-younger-than-me successors, skating around the rink holding aloft the coolest trophy in sports. For me, for my late friend Jeremy and his family, for the city of Philadelphia which, even after the Phillies' recent win, could use an injection of joy. With all that in mind, the bandwagon isn't so terrible.

2010-05-29T11:09:00.001-07:00

Spot the Tell
With both houses of Congress having passed financial reform legislation, the measure now goes to conference so the bills can be reconciled before a final vote. Here are the Senators who will join that meeting:

In a tweet, the Senate Dems said the conferees will include Sens. Chris Dodd (D-CT), Tim Johnson (D-SD), Jack Reed (D-RI), Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Richard Shelby (R-AL), Mike Crapo (R-ID), Bob Corker (R-TN), Judd Gregg (R-NH), Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Tom Carper (D-DE) and Saxby Chambliss (R-GA).

Schumer represents New York, home to all the big banks who did so much to fuck the economy (and remain staunchly unapologetic and ungrateful for the money we gave them in the process of unfucking it). He's the biggest recipient, by far, of Wall Street money; he's not going to be strong for reform. Johnson hails from South Dakota, which you'll recognize as the state from which much of your credit card-related correspondence originates; Carper comes from Delaware, among the most corporate-friendly states in the union. In which direction would you expect them to push the measure?

Not among the conference participants are Russ Feingold, Maria Cantwell and Bernie Sanders, all of whom were critical of the bill from the left (Sanders ultimately voted for the measure, where Feingold and Cantwell did not). Also not included is Senate Whip Dick Durbin, Schumer's likely rival for the Democratic leadership if Harry Reid loses in November; Durbin famously said of Congress last year, in the depths of the downturn, that banks "frankly own the place."

Again, these are the Democrats. Perhaps it's fear of all that Wall Street money, freed by the Citizens United decision of constraints or limitations on its use, supporting Republicans in the fall. Maybe it's that they really do share a perspective with the finance sector; perhaps it's that the Obama administration, ever solicitous of an industry that's come to despise them, insists on the kid glove treatment in fear that the market will plummet again. To be fair, it seems entirely plausible that the banks will tank the economy in the short term to get people more sympathetic to their interests--difficult as that is to imagine--in power; concerned above all with self-preservation, the Democrats surely are looking to avoid that fate while giving the appearance of having done something.

Who knows--but in any event, this is why so many of us who worked hard and dug deep to put this president and this Congress in power likely will be sitting on our hands this November.

2010-05-23T19:10:00.000-07:00

Our Pop Turns 30
So it turns out that this weekend saw two anniversaries of tremendous significance: 30 years ago this past Friday, May 21, "The Empire Strikes Back" first hit movie theaters, and a day later, "Pac-Man" was released. This likely makes May 21-22, 1980, the most culturally consequential two-day stretch of my childhood, maybe that of my whole generation.

To be honest, if asked when Pac-Man first appeared a week ago, I probably would have answered 1981. But it was the previous year when the original came out in Japan, then called Puck-Man. You can probably guess why they changed it for American release. I was probably a bit too young to really obsess over Pac-Man, though I was sufficiently into it that somebody did give me a little paperback book of tips for winning the game. Reading this piece on the game's "meaning," though, I'm struck by what a technical accomplishment Pac-Man was, and is.

Ultimately, it is Pac-Man's simplicity that brought it such a huge audience. Yet to designers like Meretzky, trying to replicate that was no easy task. Meretzky recalled designing a title called Hodj 'n Podj, which featured several reworked classic games, including a remake of Pac-Man. "It made me much more appreciative of the game," he said. "It was really, really hard to get the game balance right, and get the [artificial intelligence] of the ghosts right. You look at Pac-Man and you think it's such a simple game and an easy game to clone. But it's hard to get the balance right."

...[C]lassic games like chess, checkers, and Go are all conceptually easy to understand, but take a lifetime to master. "I think Pac-Man does very well on that metric," Garriott said. "It's easy to understand and sit down and try to play. But then [you see its] wide variety of foundational strategies that unfold only after you have played many, many times."

It still holds up pretty damn well, as anybody who wasted time Friday or Saturday playing the version coded into Google's homepage can attest.

Still, at least for my personal development, Pac-Man's significance pales next to that of "Empire." I'd been bearing the unbearable waiting for the "Star Wars" sequel to come out, reading fan newsletters that I couldn't really understand (being 5 or 6), obsessively playing with my toys, daydreaming myself into the story. When the day came, I skipped school--a parentally sanctified transgression that had an aura of holiness to it--with my uncle, his girlfriend and my brother, age four. (Somehow, almost every great parental or family act of my childhood was Star Wars-related. I still think my mom's parenting pinnacle was the month or so in 1977 when she took me to see "Star Wars" every Wednesday.)

The movie was a fucking mind-blower. I don't think it quite traumatized me, as it evidently did for this guy, but it certainly opened up new dramatic horizons and moral vistas within the world of make-believe. It probably helped that I wasn't totally blind-sided by the setbacks the heroes endure: after all, the title "The Empire Strikes Back" is a fairly transparent giveaway that some heavy shit is in the offing. Still, the wrenching shock of "No, Luke: *I* am your father!" sets an unreachable standard for psychological awfulness, the new piece of information that explodes every preconceived notion you hold.

What Luke does in the face of that knowledge, as well as his own defeat at the hands of evil, made a lasting impression too: he steps off the walkway into the emptiness of the air shaft. I remember feeling shock as it became clear what he was about to do--and then, when he did it, seven years old and accustomed to audience participation, I started to applaud. The theatre was otherwise utterly silent; after two claps, I stopped. So in addition to everything else, "Empire" gave me my first experience of social awkwardness stemming from incongruous behavior. Of many.

There's one more aspect of "Empire" worth noting, something it brought to the table that's almost unimaginable now: it was pretty much spoiler-free and, at least to my young eyes, self-contained as a story. Without the internet, and probably owing to the extreme secrecy fetish of George Lucas and all those he ruled, no secrets were leaked. (The only way one could have had the surprise exposed was some loudmouth talking about it as the previous screening let out--a scenario "The Simpsons" played out in one of the many flashback episodes to the courtship of Homer and Marge.) And while there were commercial tie-ins aplenty--the Burger King "Empire" glasses probably lasted most of the decade in our home--they didn't seem to be the point, as sadly felt like the case three years later when "Return of the Jedi" finished the trilogy. I remember watching the movie, again on the first day while out of school, and thinking that the Ewoks were primarily there to sell toys and swag.

I wrote a novel (not published, not even shopped, but "finished") in which one of the characters muses that everything bad about growing up in the '80s was made up for, and then some, by being kids when "Star Wars" played out. It's even still paying off for us, most recently in the form of "Robot Chicken" episodes that were much more loving homage than parody. It's probably not too much to say that Star Wars saved our childhoods, and that "Empire" gave those movies the bulk of their lasting power.

2010-05-22T14:00:00.000-07:00

Unbusting the Budget
Here's a cool (policy nerd division) web offering from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget where you can try to stabilize the U.S. Debt by 2018. The task is to get the debt to 60 percent of projected GDP by that year, the point at which things are likely sustainable "without huge costs to [the] standard of living at a minimum and most likely a severe crisis." That target would be down considerably from the 85 percent it's now projected to be by that time (under the same set of projections, debt will fully equal GDP by 2022 and be double the GDP by 2038... the year I'd be eligible to retire under current law, as it happens). The app takes you through various pages that represent parts of the federal budget, including military and foreign aid expenses; current entitlements; the newly passed health care law (which is a debt reducer); and a range of discretionary categories of expenditure.

I'm happy to say that I managed to get the debt down to 59 percent of GDP by 2018--while lowering the corporate tax rate from 35 to 30 percent, passing an additional $210 billion Jobs Bill, making several tax credits (child tax, research and development) permanent, and significantly increasing funding for public transit. And I didn't go out of my way to soak the rich; no surcharge on millionaires, for example, or shifting of the home mortgage deduction to a capped credit, both of which were options. That said, every ox was gored at least a little: significant drawdown of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, cancellation of various weapons systems, closing tax loopholes, passing of a carbon tax or cap and trade regime, limiting how much high earners can itemize deductions and deduction state/local taxes; but also passing of medical malpractice reform, higher Medicare premiums and switch to a voucher system, selling certain government assets, raising the eligibility ages for Social Security and Medicare (as well as the cap on income calculated for SS and broadening the universe of workers required to pay in, plus other changes to Medicare shifting cost burden to beneficiaries), reductions of Food Stamp spending to pre-stimulus levels, passing a 5 percent Value-Added Tax with partial rebate, cutting earmarks by half.

I did give my personal preferences some rein--otherwise, what's the point? (Don't answer that.) No cuts to federal education spending or TANF, etc. Anything that seemed likely to bolster the country's human capital, I left alone or actually spent more on, figuring that some of those things are revenue-positive in a longer time horizon than this exercise considered. But in an actual governance/bargaining situation, of course, I'd compromise on much of that; take for instance how Ross Douthat got to 60 percent. He and I had about half overlap; we probably could figured out a set of changes we both could live with in twenty minutes, if need be.

The obvious lesson: our politics, not our policies, are at the core of the long-term budget problem. The seniors lobby--which isn't even rational, since proposed changes wouldn't affect current beneficiaries--defense contractors, trial lawyers, Big Ag, fossil fuel companies and others stand in the way of putting our budget on a sustainable path. I wonder if the answer for well-intentioned groups like the Peterson-Pew Commission, which sponsored the budget app, isn't really political process reform, curtailing the power of lobbies to put their private interests ahead of the public interest. Easier said than done, of course, but taking on that fight before trying to fix the budget makes a lot more sense than attempting to impose the needed course corrections on a political field that's now tilted impossibly toward groups with so much invested in the status quo.

2010-05-15T12:28:00.001-07:00

Why Americans Hate Government
When I was in college, very long ago now, I read a great book which I still have around here somewhere titled "Why Americans Hate Politics." Revisiting the subject almost a decade after its publication, author E.J. Dionne described his book thusly:

In Why Americans Hate Politics, published on the eve of the 1992 election and which the editors have asked me to revisit here, I argued that voters were tired of the false choices presented by an ideologically driven "either/or" politics, and impatient with a political debate that emphasized "issues" over "problems." Issues were used at election time to divide voters. Problems demand solutions after the election is over. Following Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., I argued that most Americans preferred to see politics as involving "the search for remedy."

The book saw conservatives as suffering from a deep tension between their free-market, antigovernment libertarian wing and a traditionalist wing more interested in defending values that had come under attack in the 1960s than in market economics. Liberals were also in trouble. While their core programs (Medicare, Social Security, help for the needy, equal rights) were broadly popular, the left had stopped justifying its efforts in the name of values to which most Americans subscribed?work, family stability, consequences for criminal behavior, and a respect for the old-fashioned bonds of locality and neighborhood.

With both parties to the debate in difficulty, politics worked itself out as a series of wars. Conservatives might not unite around a program, but they could agree to roll back liberalism. To do so, they used tensions in American life over race, gender equality, and cultural change (or "race, rights and taxes," as Thomas and Mary Edsall put it plainly) to divide the liberal camp and hive off working class voters suspicious of liberalism?s core values. Liberals often played into conservative hands by seeming to deny that a virtuous community depended on virtuous individuals and by opposing changes in the welfare state aimed at reinforcing certain values (work and family stability among them).

Almost twenty years after its publication, though, I'm wondering if now maybe it's government, not politics, that we hate. After all, voter participation has gone back up from its '90s-era lows. Fox News and MSNBC offer 24 hour intensive politics-based entertainment, and they're doing great. The 2008 Obama campaign drew in millions of energized young Americans whose feelings toward politics, at least politics that year, were closer to love. The Tea Party movement of the current moment similarly has thousands, maybe millions, fired up and ready to go. Government, however, is all but universally reviled: the Zombie Army took out Bob Bennett last weekend in Utah, evidently for the crime of being a three-term incumbent who showed occasional interest in legislating rather than devoting every moment to mindless partisanship, while the Democratic primary electorate might be poised to do the same to Arlen Specter this coming Tuesday in my native state of Pennsylvania. Anyone associated with Washington, or incumbency in any form, is tarred; all alleged bums must be thrown out, regardless of whether they're even actually bums.

What's intensely troubling is that this detestation for government comes at a moment when there's reason to conclude that it's performing better than has been the case in years and years. We've avoided the second Great Depression many had feared was imminent in late 2008, to the point where the economy might create more jobs this year than was the case through eight years of the Bush administration (a factoid that's rife with caveats, but still). Health care is done, after more than sixty years of trying. Financial reform looks likely to pass, and to be meaningful. Even before those two significant legislative landmarks, Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute was calling this Congress one of the most productive in nearly fifty years.

So what's the rage about? Unlike some on the left, I don't think it's primarily much having to do with race. The right-leaning Tea Party crowd is almost all white, and no doubt racist sentiment is more prevalent within its ranks than outside, but the real issue is an emotional (and irrational, and painfully uninformed) reaction to profound socioeconomic and cultural change. People who've come up to see themselves as the built-in societal winners perceive a loss of status, and they're mad as hell about it. On the left, the Obama administration's perpetuation, and indeed intensification, of some of the worst Bush/Cheney anti-terror/civil liberties practices is demoralizing disillusioning at best and infuriating at worst. And his nomination of a footprints-free careerist of no discernible conviction like Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court certainly demotivates me from wanting to give time or money to ensure Obama continues to enjoy a Democratic Congress.

I know this is irrational, yet I defer to it. And maybe that's the crux of the problem: nobody, not even this president with his unique gifts as a communicator, is consistently out making the case for the nature of government as something of which we shouldn't expect emotional satisfaction, just considered attention to the nation's needs and appropriate, efficient, effective action in response to its problems. If the country doesn't need a full-blown civics lesson and high-level debate over what size of and role for governance is best, at least it could benefit from seeing a brighter spotlight shone upon the frankly mad practices of the legislature that both gum up the works and perpetuate the agita.

To go back to Dionne and "Why Americans Hate Politics," toward the end of the book he called for "a new political center" to merge the public's "liberal instincts" and "conservative values." What I think would be more helpful now is a new, reality-based assessment of government: judging it on results rather than the bug-eyed fear and loathing on the right or the unrealistic expectations on the left, and a commitment to making it work better for whoever is in charge--meaning the elimination of nonsense like secret Senate holds, possible reconsideration of the filibuster rule, and imposition of the presidential line-item veto. On the outside, the key might be simply remembering that ultimately government is our creature and a reflection of our collective will. I've thought that since Obama took office, explaining this--restoring government's good name--was his historical mission; earlier this month, at a commencement speech at the University of Michigan, he gave it a good first shot. Perhaps with an improving economy and effective repetition, the message will take; if it doesn't, I fear we're condemned to keep riding the roller coaster of uninformed public sentiment, with crashes and injury the near inevitable result.

2010-04-24T13:00:00.000-07:00

In Which We Waste a Crisis
I don't think that teachers' unions are ruining America. But when you read stories like this, it's hard to summon up much enthusiasm for their value:

Peter Borock, 23, is in his second year teaching history at Health Opportunities High School in the South Bronx. It could be his last.

With New York City schools planning for up to 8,500 layoffs, new teachers like Mr. Borock, and half a dozen others at his school, could be some of the ones most likely to be let go. That has led the schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, into a high-stakes battle with the teachers’ union to overturn seniority rules that have been in place for decades.

Facing the likelihood of the largest number of layoffs in more than a generation, Mr. Klein and his counterparts around the country say that the rules, which require that the most recently hired teachers be the first to lose their jobs, are an anachronism in the era of accountability that will upend their efforts of the last few years to recruit new teachers, improve teacher performance and reward those who do best.
...
Unions argue that administrators want to do away with seniority protections so they can get rid of older teachers, who are more expensive.

They say that without seniority safeguards, principals could act on personal grudges, and that while keeping the best teachers is a laudable goal, no one has figured out an accurate way to determine who those teachers are.

“There is no good way to lay people off,” said Randi Weingarten, the former leader of the city’s teachers’ union, who is now the president of the American Federation of Teachers. “But to be opportunistic and try to rush something through without knowing if there’s some degree of objectivity and a comprehensive and valid evaluation system is appalling.”

Full disclosure compels me to admit that I've never found Randi Weingarten to be much more than an apologist for mediocrity in education and an impediment to most of the more interesting and aggressive education reform efforts in NYC or anywhere else. But what she's saying here is especially repulsive, because it elides her years of staunch resistance to any evaluative steps that might rise to the level of "objective, comprehensive and valid." You can't use test scores; you can't use student or peer or parent evaluations; heaven forbid you use administrator assessments. Somehow, a malicious actor will always be able to use the standard to carry out a grudge against a poor defenseless teacher whose classroom outcomes just happen to stink.

The last-in, first-out policy is especially infuriating given the high rates of attrition among new teachers in the city anyway--based on a study done by the New York City Council a few years back, a quarter of them leave within two years, and half within five, both rates far in excess of national averages. It's probably not too much to say that it's more demanding and difficult to be an inexperienced educator in New York City than anywhere else in the U.S. It doesn't help that another advantage of seniority is much more freedom in choosing where to teach--meaning that the newbies routinely get the toughest assignments in the system, a great way to drive out all but the most dedicated.

Adding to the irrationality is the fact that, unless things have changed in the last few years since I looked closely at the demographics of the New York City teaching workforce (and given the attrition trends and seniority rules, I'm not sure how they could have), the bulk of our educators are within a relatively few years of retirement. Meaning that as cohorts leave the workforce, the city will have to scramble to replace them. I don't know if contractual or budgetary considerations render this impossible, but early buyouts of some of the older teachers seems to be a smarter way to absorb the cuts than indiscriminately cutting loose young teachers great and lousy.

The real point is that we need to find better ways of determining teacher quality--because the one thing we know in the befogged world of education reform is that high-quality teachers make an enormous, lasting difference. There's a lot of work going on right now to do just this--but it doesn't sound like clear answers will emerge soon enough to inform the city's teacher workforce reductions, even if the United Federation of Teachers accepted that the conclusions were valid and not the nefarious product of some teacher-hating education bureaucrat.

2010-04-17T12:06:00.000-07:00

The Strange Death (?) of the American Graduation Initiative
A few days ago, The New Republic performed an unpleasant but important bit of public service, telling the story of how President Obama's proposed American Graduation Initiative, a plan to assist five million more individuals toward a community college degree by 2020, was a collateral casualty of last month's successful fight for health care reform. As the consequence of some fairly involved budget calculations that resulted from the reconciliation of the health care bill with (very positive) higher education lending reforms, the $12 billion proposed for AGI was cut to $2 billion in U.S. Department of Labor funding for community colleges.

The whole piece is worthwhile reading just as a reminder of how ugly and illogical the sausage-making of public policy can get, but its real value lies in the message that we court no greater risk to shared long-term prosperity than neglecting our stock of human capital. The stunningly divergent outcomes of more and less educated Americans in the now-concluding Great Recession illustrates the individual economic consequences for educational attainment; in the longer term, the question is how we can stay at the forefront of economic innovation with a national workforce comparatively less well educated than that of competitors.

There's also a great deal of time and money wasted in post-secondary educational endeavor. As the TNR article notes, upwards of 30 million adult Americans report educational attainment of "some college, no degree"--meaning that they started, but didn't finish. Leaving college without a credential but with a shitload of debt is a singularly lousy way to start adult life, but far too many Americans find themselves on that hard road.

I would guess that the administration finds its way back to this issue, perhaps in the context of Obama's 2012 reelection campaign. But with stronger Republican caucuses in Congress, perhaps an outright majority in the House, it won't be easy. Crucial as it was for the president and the Democrats to win the health care fight, it came a price both very high and not much appreciated, even among those who should know.

2010-04-10T11:59:00.000-07:00

Love Small Government? You'll Miss Stevens
Whoever President Obama nominates to succeed retiring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, you can predict what issues will dominate the debate: abortion, gay rights, racial/gender preferences, probably the constitutionality of health care, maybe a bit on the role of money in politics. Past rulings and paper trails will be scoured, and there will be no shortage of hyperbole. Weepy, malicious idiots will beat their chests for imperiled liberties; belabored analyses of election year judicial politics will abound.

An issue I doubt will get the attention it deserves is the proper extent of executive power, where Stevens did his greatest work in defense of American rights over the last, fraught decade. As the Times recounted in an appreciative editorial today, the 89 year-old Illinois native was our strongest judicial defender against the repeated power grabs of the Bush years:

He may be best remembered for his firm resistance to the post-Sept. 11, 2001, drive to roll back civil liberties in the name of fighting terrorism. He wrote the majority opinion in Rasul v. Bush in 2004, rejecting the Bush administration’s assertions of executive authority and made clear that federal courts had the authority to determine whether detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, were properly held. In 2006, he wrote for the majority in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, which held that the military commissions established to try detainees held in Guantánamo violated the Geneva Conventions.

Yet Stevens' central role in recent American jurisprudence seems oddly underappreciated. He's been recognized more for his searing dissents in cases like Bush v. Gore in 2000, the 2007 school desegregation case, and the campaign finance ruling handed down this past January, than for leading the often successful resistance to executive overreach. (He also doesn't seem to be quite as reviled on the right as was David Souter, another appointee of a Republican president who retired last year--maybe because so few on the right today remember when Stevens was appointed by Gerald Ford, himself a not especially partisan president, in 1975.)

Sadly, it seems unlikely that Obama will appoint anyone with remotely the same fidelity to restraints on executive power. The reasons for this are twofold: one, the only rumored possibilities who hold such views are those who, because of their more leftward positions on hot-button social and economic issues, would spark the toughest political battles in an election year when Democrats are already anticipating heavy losses, and two, the administration itself, starting with the president, seems increasingly inclined toward a distinctly Bush-like view on executive power. The result is that a post-Stevens Supreme Court likely will rule in ways much more sympathetic to the expansive view. As Glenn Greenwald, writing about current Solicitor General and rumored front-runner Elena Kagan, puts it:

Over the past decade, the Court has issued numerous 5-4 decisions which placed at least some minimal constraints on executive power. Stevens was not merely in the majority in those cases, but was the intellectual leader justifying those limits. And he often went further in demanding due process and accountability for the Executive than even the "liberal" wing in general was willing to go -- as exemplified by his joining Justice Scalia's dissent in Hamdi, where the two unlikely allies both argued that the President could never detain U.S. citizens as "enemy combatants," but instead must charge them with a crime (e.g., treason) and obtain a conviction in order to imprison them.
...
Given Stevens' status as the leader of the Liberal wing, The Nation's Ari Melber said today: "With Justice Stevens retiring, it will take a nominee like Harold Koh just to maintain the Court's status quo."

The danger that we won't have such a status-quo-maintaining selection is [that]... for both political and substantive reasons, the Obama White House tends to avoid (with a few exceptions) any appointees to vital posts who are viewed as "liberal" or friendly to the Left; the temptation to avoid that kind of nominee heading into the 2010 midterm elections will be substantial ... [and] Kagan has already proven herself to be a steadfast Obama loyalist with her work as his Solicitor General, and the desire to have on the Court someone who has demonstrated fealty to Obama's broad claims of executive authority is likely to be great.

A number of retrospective pieces about Stevens published in recent months that anticipated his announcement Friday featured an elegiac, almost wistful tone owing to his status as the last World War II veteran on the high bench and the now-unimaginable unanimity (98-0) with which he was confirmed to the High Court by the Senate in 1975. While these are understandable and appropriate sentiments, what I worry about is that Stevens' departure from the Court removes the last strong voice in favoring of limiting government power on perhaps the most important questions of all, concerning how broadly the state can use force to pursue strategic goals. Admittedly, he wasn't the only vote in favor of restraint--but he was the instigator, the thinker, the persuader of his colleagues toward that view. It is very much in doubt that this president, or indeed anyone on the national stage these days, appreciates how much might be lost if he is not suitably replaced.

2010-04-04T21:44:00.000-07:00

Bye Five
They finally did it. In the division, to a bitter rival, for not even a first-round pick. A fairly ignominious ending to Donovan McNabb's superb Eagles career, one that spanned eleven seasons and saw the team reach five conference title games and a Super Bowl.

A few hours after the announcement, the shock is still pretty strong, but a few quick thoughts:

The deal kills whatever slim hopes the Eagles had for 2010. They're probably the worst team in the very tough NFC East now--remember, the Redskins had as bad or worse injury problems as the Eagles last year, and the Giants had an idiot coaching their defense--and newly installed QB Kevin Kolb will take his lumps as a starter. I'd put the over/under at 6 wins, and if I had to bet either way, I think I'd take the under.

But maybe low expectations are partly the point, at least as far as Kolb is concerned. He can learn in a low-pressure environment, and the coaches can leave young players out there on defense to suffer and learn as well--no more in-season patch jobs with veterans who might have heart and desire but no tread left on the tires. So long as the offensive line is good enough to keep Kolb in one piece, this really isn't the worst thing. Kolb gets to grow with DJax, Maclin, Shady and Celek, the group of early to mid-20s skill players that gave McNabb his best set of weapons as a Bird last year; if Kolb is even decent, they'll make him look pretty good. Now they just have to build as good a young core on defense, which is where the draft picks come in.

I'll be rooting for Donovan McNabb wherever he plays, as long as he plays. Still.... I wish it wasn't the Redskins. Between the racist name, the unbearable owner and super-arrogant coach, and especially the obnoxious non-city in which they don't even really play, they might be my second most hated NFL team.

I hope McNabb gets his due from the Philly public, if not from the media imbeciles. I hope he's one day called to the Football Hall of Fame in Canton, and that he graces it in Eagle green.

2010-04-03T12:05:00.000-07:00

Imaginary Radicals, Then and Now
Doing some reading at the gym last night, I came across these two articles in succession: an American Prospect piece on the right's continuing obsession with the (now semi-defunct) antipoverty organization ACORN and the welfare rights champion Francis Fox Piven whose research more than forty years ago helped bring it into being, and this lengthy assessment of financial reform by the always excellent David Leonhardt in last Sunday's Times magazine.

Reading them in order told a story of assertion and repudiation--the utter certainty of the modern Right that the Obama administration and "liberals" are out to wreck the country, and the pretty much definitive proof that what they're actually up to is an all-out effort to save American capitalism and perpetuate the economic order of the late 20th century.

The assertion, which is pretty much a perfect example of the Paranoid Style, goes something like this: in 1966, Piven and her co-author Richard Cloward wrote a piece in The Nation titled "A Strategy to End Poverty," which proposed activism on behalf of poor Americans to stretch the welfare system beyond its capacity, with the goal of getting the federal government to establish a guaranteed minimal income. In the telling of Glenn Beck and other professional paranoids, this is the ur-strategy for every left-of-center politician and non-elected public figure: "create a crisis" to set the stage for profound, radical change. Obama, as a former community activist with all the unsavory leftist associations thus implied, is purportedly doing this with health care and of course the economy as the cover for creating a new socialist order. That this health care plan is far less "liberal" than anything previously proposed by Democrats in more than a half-century of debate is entirely irrelevant; remember, this is faith-based paranoia.

(I should note here that I read about this Piven/Cloward strategy many years ago, either as an undergrad or graduate student, and I always thought it wasn't just stupid but at least a little immoral. Rather than guaranteeing a handout--essentially, expanding the conditional entitlement that was Aid to Families With Dependent Children--our purpose always should have been expanding opportunity. This is why I wasn't as upset about welfare reform as just about any other liberal I knew, and why I support the anti-poverty approaches of the NYC Center for Economic Opportunity, pretty much all of which are focused on human capital development and asset-building rather than handouts. At any rate, while the "welfare rights movement" did lead to a much bigger AFDC and it briefly looked like Nixon might accept an income floor in the early '70s, the Piven/Cloward plan ultimately didn't lead to much and certainly is a dead letter for the modern center-left.)

The charge is invalidated, at least to anyone willing to look at reality, on the grounds of financial reform. If ever there was opportunity to "create a crisis," it was in late 2008 and early 2009, when the world's capital markets were on the brink of meltdown and we seemed at the precipice of a second Great Depression. Here's how Leonhardt sets the stage in his piece:

A weak system of regulation allowed Wall Street firms to take on enormous debt. Those debts let the firms make more and riskier investments than they otherwise could have, lifting their profits. But when the value of the investments began falling, the firms had little margin for error. They were like home buyers who made a tiny down payment and soon found themselves underwater.

It was tempting to let the banks fail. They certainly deserved it. But big bank failures often cause terrible damage. Credit dries up, and the economy can enter a vicious cycle of falling asset prices and job losses. That is what began to happen in 2008. To get credit flowing again, the federal government came to the rescue with billions of taxpayer dollars. It was a maddening story line: the government helped the banks get rich by looking the other way during good times and saved them from collapse during bad times.

While the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) was passed during the Bush Administration, it's likely that then-Senator Obama could have killed it in late 2008 by signaling his opposition, which would have carried weight with Democrats in Congress--and, given how unpopular the bailout was with the public, might have yielded him an even bigger win in the November election. Instead, he and John McCain (as well as VP candidate Joe Biden) voted in support of the measure.

Without the bailout, a number of major banks would have collapsed (don't take my word for it; even liberal economist Dean Baker said as much in testimony last year), and in all probability the economy would have cratered. Imagine if Obama had come into office on January 20, 2009, with an even bigger political wind at his back and a much deeper crisis facing the public. What powers could he not have asked for and received? What transformational changes would have been beyond his grasp? Nationalization of banks, single-payer health care, public job creation on a scale beyond the New Deal era programs, vast new regulatory regimes... all the fever dreams of the most committed lefties could have been his. Whether it ended in disaster or glory, his would have been the most transformational presidency since Lincoln's.

Obama just isn't that guy--and thank goodness. What I try to impart to those to my left who call for some or all of these things is that transformational change isn't ever frictionless. Individuals, families, communities are mangled when the wheels of history turn too fast. I don't deny that there would have been satisfaction in letting the banks suffer their full comeuppance--but we all would have suffered with them, and probably worse than they.

After reading the Leonhardt piece as well as other recent writing on the substance and prospects of financial reform, I feel better about the proposal--but the point is that even leaders who, like Obama, have an affirmative believe in the power of government to intervene for the public good, are most effective and successful when they look to intervene in as limited a manner as possible. That this doesn't align with the disaster-porn fantasies of the fringe thinkers on the right is primarily their problem. Hopefully it'll stay that way.

2010-04-03T10:57:00.000-07:00

Dragged Forward
We don't go to the movies very often, but we've seen two in the last week: "Hot Tub Time Machine" last Saturday night, and "Greenberg" last evening. From the marketing campaigns, you wouldn't think these are very similar films: "HTTM" is going for a two-toned audience of folks who appreciate gross-out teen sex comedies on their own merits, and those who liked such entertainments a couple decades ago and now appreciate them ironically, while "Greenberg" is aiming for the sort of chin-scratching indie crowd that likes more pathos and thought in their comedy.

But when the credits were rolling at the end of "Greenberg," I turned to Annie and said that it was the same movie as "Hot Tub Time Machine," and she agreed. Both revolve around men in early middle age who ponder the second half of life with deep ambivalence, considerable regret and not a little self-loathing. Maybe that resonates with us as soon to be 37 and 45 year-olds respectively. But I suspect it applies much more broadly, and I think I understand why: this notion all of us born after 1950 or so grew up with, that we're somehow entitled to perfect happiness in every sphere of our lives. Every relationship can offer perfect emotional and sexual gratification; every job should be remunerative and stimulating and satisfying; every home should be safe and functional and forever appreciating in value. When problems do arise, they're never so complicated or intractable that they can't be solved in 22 or 48 minutes.

This is, of course, total crap. Perfection isn't just impossible, but harmful as an ideal to strive for in any but the most abstract sense. Every aspect of life will bring aggravation, disappointment and pain at some point or another. "Pretty good" is as good as it gets.

In addition to the movies, I'm thinking about this in the context of my grandfather, who passed away last weekend two months short of his 94th birthday. I think he would have agreed that his life was a pretty good one: married for almost sixty years (until my Nan passed in 2003), two kids, four grandkids, lived in the same place for the last sixty years or so, comfortable enough that he retired at 62, spending the last third of his life in relative ease reading books by the gross, swimming just about every day and shooting the bull at the Abington Club a few blocks from his house. He served his country with distinction for two and a half years during WWII. He spent decades helping to promote and support Scouting. He and Nan took great vacations to the Caribbean.

But there was disappointment and unpleasantness in the story as well. Pop was accepted to Antioch College after high school, and planned to go there to write. His ambition was to go into journalism and ultimately be a newspaper publisher in a small town somewhere. But his father got sick, he had to stay close to home and work, and he went to Temple. Then he joined the Army a few months before the war broke out, met my grandmother while training, married her when he came home in '44, and reluctantly entered a textile sales career that he didn't enjoy for a company he didn't respect. He told me years later that he'd made extensive notes for a book about that experience, titled something like "Don't Let the Door Hit Your Ass on the Way Out." He never wrote it.

Nor would I say that he handled this disappointment perfectly. Even in his relatively mellow retirement, he flashed temper, and I understand it was much worse when my mom and uncle were young. And I remember him and my Nan, probably the single best person I've ever met, bickering a lot when I was a kid. On balance, though, he dealt with it. He was absolutely dependable and virtuous; his integrity and honesty were beyond anyone else I've known. He wasn't emotive or expressive, but you never doubted his heart. And he never, ever, lost his sense of humor--probably the defining trait of the man to those who didn't know him closely enough to see the deeper virtues.

As I mourn and celebrate my grandfather and move ever deeper into my 30s, I'm trying to keep this in mind--that while disappointment is inevitable (and some reflection upon the past is appropriate and human), it should never define you or obscure the good which I feel I have in abundance.

Oh, and I'd mildly recommend both movies.

2010-03-24T20:18:00.001-07:00

The Crack-Up
I always thought that we wouldn't see the true extent of right-wing craziness until the Democrats were back in power. To some extent, I've been surprised that there hadn't been more seething vitriol from the farther reaches of the right through the first fourteen months of the Obama presidency; in fact, I was thinking about this recently and concluded that this president likely inspired less visceral loathing than Bill Clinton had--perhaps because Clinton, as a white southerner, was perceived as somehow treacherous, or perhaps because his personal flaws seemed, from a certain perspective, to embody hippie self-indulgence and Baby Boomer excess.

But those conclusions were obviously premature. In the three days since the House of Representatives passed health care reform, the full dimension of the rage on the right has revealed itself. Democratic members of Congress have seen their offices vandalized and received death threats, this days after the civil rights hero and Georgia congressman John Lewis was called the n-word and Massachusetts congressman Barney Frank endured anti-gay slurs.

Hopefully this is a short-term reaction, fueled by the recency of the outcome and perhaps the surprise that a measure which many in the press had left for dead in fact became the law of the land. But I'm not sure about that--any more that I'm now sure the opposition to Obama is more restrained and substantive than it was to Clinton:

A new Harris poll that reveals some shocking things about how Republican voters view President Obama.

Key findings:

67% believe Obama is a socialist.
57% believe Obama is a Muslim.
38% believe Obama is "doing many of the things that Hitler did."
24% believe Obama "may be the Antichrist."

Probably anyone with strong partisan feelings is at least occasionally prone to excessively demonizing public figures of divergent views. But I'm honestly trying to think what the parallels would be for someone of my views considering the right-wing figures I most deplore: Tom DeLay, Dick Cheney, Sarah Palin. I can't. I think they're all deeply wrong on just about everything, I find them vicious and hypocritical, and at least in the cases of DeLay and Palin I can see how their basic views of Christianist identity politics, the unlimited national security/militaristic state, and the effective fusion of big business with government-- taken (I'm glad to say) to far more of an extreme than anything they've directly expressed--could inform a fascist structure. But I wouldn't call them overt fascists, much less someone like George W. Bush who seemed less personally driven by pure hate for his opponents. (Disdain? Certainly. But not hate. Maybe it's a class thing; I think it's more of a stretch for anyone born wealthy to hate in the manner that a Palin does or a Nixon did.)

I don't know how we de-hyperbolize our politics, especially given that the most active partisans are also now the ones least likely to leave the echo chambers--and I doubt Fox News, Redstate.org or other outposts on the right are going to send the message to cool it down and act like grownups. Sadly, the Republican leadership probably won't either, in the belief that the Tea Party folks who feed on raw rage might write them off altogether. But it's absolutely a necessity if we're ever going to move on the big items left on the national agenda in this period: tax and entitlement reform, getting a handle on our finances, mitigating the effects of climate change. We need to get back to what I remember American Conservative Union leader David Keane said a few years when interviewed by Bill Moyers and asked if he agreed that liberals were traitors: "Bill, you're not a traitor. You're just wrong." It has to be possible to regard opponents as "just wrong," rather than irreconcilable enemies who pose an existential threat to America, freedom, puppies and life itself.

2010-03-14T14:38:00.001-07:00

The Unmade Closing Argument
It sounds like one way or another, we'll know the fate of health care within the next week or so. The Democrats certainly seem to be confident, a welcome change from their usual embrace of fecklessness and despair. But enough possible mines still lay in the road--the Congressional Budget Office score, a new round of polling or two--that I'm far from certain the legislation will pass.

I've written a great deal about what I think is riding on the outcome here: not just a long forward step toward universal coverage and getting costs under control, but a signal that our fractured and fractious political system can address and make progress on big challenges. It's deeply unfortunate, and I think entirely unprecedented, that this measure will pass (if it passes) on a partisan basis... but less unfortunate, and no more unprecedented, than the Republicans' total subordination of policy outcomes to political considerations.

As it happens, the Republicans do have a vision for changes in health care policy. It's just that, as Jonathan Chait describes, their core objective for reform sharply diverges from what the Democrats want to accomplish:

What separates the two parties is not how far to go, but in which direction to go. The divide is simple. Democrats propose to shift resources from the rich and the healthy to the poor and the sick. Republicans want to do just the opposite. Republican health care plans reflect the party’s increasingly widespread belief that good health, like other forms of prosperity, is a matter of personal responsibility. Democratic plans to help the sick at the expense of the healthy therefore amount to socialism.
...
The Democrats’ health care plan aims to create pools for people outside of the employer market, joining healthier individuals together with the sick, so that the former effectively subsidize the latter. The common element of all the Republican plans is to do the opposite-to separate the healthy from the sick.

Republicans have long championed Health Savings Accounts, which give individuals who buy insurance a tax deduction for money they set aside for a high-deductible plan. Since tax deductions are worth more to people in higher tax brackets, and since high-deductible plans appeal more to those with lower medical expenses, the plans attract the rich and healthy, leaving the poor and sick behind.

The thrust of the GOP ideas currently on offer is to reduce health insurance regulation. Republicans would create financial incentives that, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), would encourage states to cut regulation; they would also let businesses and individuals buy insurance from other states. (Health insurance is regulated by state governments.) As a result, health insurance regulation would sink to the level of whichever state offered the laxest regulations. If it worked like the credit card industry, governors would be competing to undercut each other’s regulations in order to lure insurers to their states.
...
Republicans boast that the CBO says their plan would reduce insurance premiums. This is true. The CBO predicted this would happen because the GOP plan would reduce premiums for healthy people, bringing more of them into the insurance pool, and raise premiums for sicker people, driving more of them out.

Why would Republicans favor a result like this? The better question might be, why wouldn’t they? The modern Republican domestic agenda is, above all, an attack on redistribution, a crusade to free society’s winners from shouldering the burdens of its losers.

This short but devastating article took me back about twenty-five years, to when I first started thinking about political issues in a systemic way. Simply put, when I was 12 or 13 I realized that the conservative movement in the age of Reagan seemed to embrace concentration of wealth and protection of privilege as their desired end, with the means of twisting "values" principles to support those goals. The liberals--muddled, ineffectual and contradictory as they were and are--at least occasionally seemed to embrace the notion that society is best advanced by actions to equalize opportunity. The formulation of WITT ("We're in this together") vs. YOYO ("You're on your own") is a bit flip but nonetheless apt. (For an even more breathtaking example of Republican devotion to comforting the comfortable, check out this Center on Budget and Policy Priorities assessment of Rep. Paul Ryan's budget roadmap. Long story short, it creates the greatest upward redistribution of wealth in history--million-dollar tax cuts for the very richest with higher taxes for just about everyone else--while wrecking Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid... and failing to eliminate the debt, despite Ryan's statements to the contrary. )

I've always thought that this was the story Obama was meant to tell: that as a nation we can come closer together, to our broadly shared benefit, or drift farther apart, to the great advantage of a few but the collective detriment of all. Indeed, he's told it better than anybody, at the 2004 Democratic convention and again in his 2005 commencement address at Knox College. The president's political team is obviously skilled; perhaps they tested this message in the context of health care, found that it didn't play, and bent their efforts toward trying to make this a case for self-interest ("without this reform, you're at the mercy of the insurance companies"). But this has to be in there somewhere, not least because the rest of Obama's agenda, from education to immigration to taxes to entitlements, will rise or fall on the same lines. Only the identities of the privileged/protected few--including some pretty powerful Democratic constituencies--will change. It might not be too much to assert that his presidency will succeed or fail on how effectively he can make this case. And if his presidency itself is as consequential as I believe it to be, we all have a great deal at stake.

2010-03-07T11:50:00.000-08:00

Koch Against the Machine
I’ve never been an Ed Koch fan. His personality combo of bully and nebbish rubs me the wrong way; much more to the point, he’s been a huge asshole in his politics pretty much ever since leaving the New York City mayoralty, famously supporting George W. Bush against John Kerry in 2004 among a slew of lesser offenses. He also sucks as a film critic.

But I have to tip my cap to the guy for what he must be thinking of as his last major political act at 85 years old (and coming off the same major heart surgery I had last year plus a quadruple bypass): a campaign to clean up the sinkhole that Albany.

Given that Koch initially came to prominence way, way back in the day as a reform champion, then saw his mayoralty undermined and his reputation wiped out from all the corruption on his watch (even as nobody suggested Ed himself was a crook), this has the potential to become a nice redemption story. Nobody doubts Koch's love for the city where he made his name--or, perhaps, his enduring enmity for a state capital he never quite was able to conquer; his 1982 gubernatorial bid ended in defeat as Mario Cuomo, whom Koch had bested in the 1977 mayoral race, won the Democratic nomination and went on to serve three terms as the state's chief executive.

That said, I doubt it works. The criteria for identifying "the worst ones" in Albany--whom he describes as "evil"--almost certainly will prove too nebulous, for one thing. For another, it will be very, very easy for many of the targeted incumbents on the Democratic side at least to pull a Clay Davis and ascribe the goo-goo opposition to racism, rather than than their spectacular track records of corruption. If Koch and his allies were smart, they'd seek backing from African-American and Latino political organizations.

Perhaps a better approach would be to present a "reform pledge" to all candidates, incumbents and challengers alike, calling for sweeping changes to how business is done in Albany: this list might be a good start. Of course, this strategy only works if there's enough money behind the implied threat: if you don't live up to your promises, we're going to drive you out of office and wreck your career. Absent a durable marriage of high-minded principle and brass-knuckle politicking, any new stab at state government reform is as surely doomed as the last try--in 2006, when a crusading state attorney general named Eliot Spitzer promised us all that "On Day One, Everything Changes." Needless to say, nothing did.

2010-03-07T08:28:00.000-08:00

“An Enormously Profound Test of Our Democracy”
I would guess that everybody overstates the importance of the times in which they live; why else would religious types always proclaim that the end of the world is coming imminently? So it's certainly possible that I’m making the same error with the current political moment, and that the country is no more at risk than in the 1790s, 1830s, 1880s, 1970s or any other time in which prognosticators warned of imminent and irreversible decline.

But whatever the true stakes, I think it's inarguable that we have some problems. This interview Ezra Klein conducted with Colorado Senator Michael Bennet really does capture what we're up against, with long-gestating problems about to burst into the forefront just as our system seems unprecedentedly stymied and almost willfully counterproductive:

I believe we are right now going through an enormously profound test of our democracy and our democratic institutions. We do, as a country, face some enormous challenges. Even before we were driven into this recession, the last period of economic growth is the first time our economy grew and median family income declined. We've created no net new jobs since 1998. And we’ve done nothing to change educational outcomes for kids going to school in our country. We’ve managed to burden our children with $12 trillion in debt. Think about the policy decisions that have to be made amid these political incentives. We have to figure out how to change the political culture so that people’s incentives in this job point in the right direction.

While Bennet's main point is the dysfunction of the Senate and how the political benefits of reflexive oppositional positioning extract a staggering institutional cost, what I've bolded here is the context and background, far too rarely stated in these direct terms, for the budgetary hand-wringing over entitlement costs and foreign adventures. These problems, combined with the widespread sense that those in power have enriched themselves at our collective expense and might not even be interested in finding solutions, are what could destroy us as a society even if we do find ways to reform the filibuster, eliminate holds and take other steps to streamline governance processes.

In this light, the coming final showdown over health care really does take on a significance even beyond whether we'll extend insurance to more than 30 million Americans currently without it, and perhaps begin to get costs under control. It now sounds like the Senate has the votes; the House is less certain. Once again, it’s a fairly small issue—abortion—that threatens to scotch the whole deal. I’m not saying that abortion is insignificant or unimportant; obviously it’s a question that gets to individuals’ deepest values. But given the uncertainty over what the language in the Senate bill even means—whether or not it supercedes the Hyde Amendment—it seems madness to me to hold a major piece of legislation that the protesters (supposedly) otherwise support hostage to the question. If the bill founders on that issue, that outcome will reinforce the deepening skepticism over government’s ability or appetite to take on even the relatively solvable problem of health care, much less the bigger icebergs not yet in view.

To be honest, I haven’t yet read Bennet’s proposals for Senate reform—but I find the manner in which he frames the problems here enormously compelling. Sadly, he’s one of the many appointed Senators who replaced departing Democrats after the 2008 elections—a group that also included placeholder Ted Kaufman for Vice-President Joe Biden, the stunningly lame Kirsten Gillibrand for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and of course the deeply compromised Roland Burris for President Obama himself. Bennet replaced Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, meaning that almost certainly the best and most thoughtful term-completer stepped in for the least consequential departing Senator. But he’s in perhaps worse political shape than even Gillibrand, who’s protected by our state’s deep blue hue and the deep pockets and long reach of Chuck Schumer; Bennet trails Colorado Republicans in early polling. Let's hope he hangs in.

2010-02-28T08:19:00.001-08:00

Krugman Keeps it Real
We made the mistake of watching "This Week" on ABC this morning, and were stunned that the last five minutes or so of the "Roundtable" was taken up with discussion about the resignation of the White House social secretary. Did she quit or was she fired? What does this say about failure and its consequences in the administration? Does the move signal the start of an exodus from the administration of the Obamas' Chicago friends? And so on.

As Annie and I looked at each other in disbelief, the Beltway lifers Cokie Roberts, Sam Donaldson and George Will went back and forth on these and other issues with considerably more energy and engagement than they'd spent on health care. Paul Krugman, the fourth panelist, sat there in silence until the end, when he finally said: "There are 20 million people unemployed in this country, and we're arguing about the White House social secretary?" While I might have wished for an editorial preface of "what the hell is wrong with you people?" it was still pretty satisfying.

One more quick note: John Smoltz as a Republican Congressman is one of those perfect convergences of evil, like J.D. Drew or Billy Wagner playing for the Braves or George W. Bush cheering for the Cowboys. It's actually kind of nice to know that my loathing for the guy won't have to end just because he's likely to hang up his spikes. I just hope he doesn't try to outlaw Citizens Bank Park, or go all Uganda on gay rights.

2010-02-21T09:59:00.001-08:00

The Great Adjustment
One way to frame the current national discontent is as a near-universal concern that our old ways of doing the public's business are at sharp and increasing odds with current and projected needs. There are parallel disconnects between our means (revenues) and ends (expenditures), and between our processes (broken) and outcomes (unsatisfactory and/or non-existent).

In today's Times, Tom Friedman refers to the current American moment as the dawn of "the lean years." This characterization is understandable but, I think, largely erroneous: for a plurality to majority of Americans (and probably a large majority of voting Americans), the present and future look as good as or better than the recent past.

To understand what I mean, check out this recent report from the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University: the very dry title ("Labor Underutilization Problems of U.S. Workers Across Household Incomes at the End of the Great Recession") buries the lede right before the subtitle ("A Truly Great Depression Among the Nation's Low Income Workers Amidst Full Employment Among the Most Affluent") digs it back up. The point of Andrew Sum and his colleagues is that we don't really have "one economy" any more, if we ever really did; those who are rich stay employed even in bad times, while those who'd earned lower incomes when they were working are now far, far less likely to remain on the job.

This may sound circular, but it's not. The last major report I worked on for the Center for an Urban Future, released last month, took on this same question from a very slightly different angle (and took a local rather than a national view, though I think the same dynamics are entirely at play; an unstated premise of the report is that New York City's economy is "like America's, only more so"): we published a table of unemployment rates in the throes of the downturn by educational attainment, a measure strongly correlated with earnings. Here it is:

Another table in the report shows the difference in average annual compensation between a high school graduate and a bachelors degree holder: almost $20,000 a year in New York City. So you're twice as likely to have a job in a down economy, and that much richer. See why those two individuals might not view themselves as sharing an economic experience?

Notwithstanding his failure to differentiate between what the economy looks like for the fortunate educated/comfortable/employed and for their opposites--a harrowing window into which is offered by this Times story also in today's paper--Friedman makes a couple very important points:

[T]o lead now is to trim, to fire or to downsize services, programs or personnel. We’ve gone from the age of government handouts to the age of citizen givebacks, from the age of companions fly free to the age of paying for each bag.
...
President Obama’s bad luck was that he showed up just as we moved from the fat years to the lean years. His calling is to lead The Regeneration. He clearly understands that in his head, but he has yet to give full voice to it. Actually, the thing that most baffles me about Mr. Obama is how a politician who speaks so well, and is trying to do so many worthy things, can’t come up with a clear, simple, repeatable narrative to explain his politics — when it is so obvious.
...
Alas, though, instead of making nation-building in America his overarching narrative and then fitting health care, energy, educational reform, infrastructure, competitiveness and deficit reduction under that rubric, the president has pursued each separately. This made each initiative appear to be just some stand-alone liberal obsession to pay off a Democratic constituency — not an essential ingredient of a nation-building strategy — and, therefore, they have proved to be easily obstructed, picked off or delegitimized by opponents and lobbyists.
...
To be sure, taking over the presidency at the dawn of the lean years is no easy task. The president needs to persuade the country to invest in the future and pay for the past — past profligacy — all at the same time. We have to pay for more new schools and infrastructure than ever, while accepting more entitlement cuts than ever, when public trust in government is lower than ever.

This strikes me as the less apocalyptic version of what James Howard Kunstler has been saying for awhile now (though JHK likely would sooner submit to unmedicated colonoscopy than accept a comparison to Thomas L. Friedman): we need to start reversing our habits of sprawl, wasteful expenditure and pointless consumption and figure out how to revise communities at much more intimate scale. I much prefer Friedman's version, which strongly implies that the drift is reversible; Kunstler basically (and somewhat gleefully) believes we're fucked, as he sets out in well-written detail in The Long Emergency.

I'm not at all convinced of that, but I think the fix--getting a firm grasp on our collective means and ends, reforming our broken processes to better solve our seemingly intractable problems (the worst of which haven't remotely begun to hit yet), and making the simultaneous investments and cuts Friedman rightly suggests we need--might represent a political challenge about equal in magnitude to the material challenges of World War II or the Cold War. If Obama can meet it, he'll have fulfilled the promise so many of us saw in him during the campaign and accomplished something comparable to what Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt did. But there's a reason those leaders stand so tall in our history; very, very few can measure up.

2010-02-20T11:52:00.000-08:00

In Defense of Sports
One failing to which I think everyone is prone, but self-styled intellectuals especially, is to extrapolate from one's personal likes or dislikes some larger conclusion or principle. So it is with Christopher Hitchens, who's evidently not a sports fan:

I can't count the number of times that I have picked up the newspaper at a time of crisis and found whole swaths of the front page given over either to the already known result of some other dull game or to the moral or criminal depredations of some overpaid steroid swallower. Listen: the paper has a whole separate section devoted to people who want to degrade the act of reading by staring enthusiastically at the outcomes of sporting events that occurred the previous day. These avid consumers also have tons of dedicated channels and publications that are lovingly contoured to their special needs. All I ask is that they keep out of the grown-up parts of the paper.

Or picture this: I take a seat in a bar or restaurant and suddenly leap to my feet, face contorted with delight or woe, yelling and gesticulating and looking as if I am fighting bees. I would expect the maitre d' to say a quietening word at the least, mentioning the presence of other people. But then all I need do is utter some dumb incantation—"Steelers," say, or even "Cubs," for crumb's sake—and everybody decides I am a special case who deserves to be treated in a soothing manner. Or else given a wide berth: ever been caught up in a fight over a match that you didn't even know was being played? Or seen the pathetic faces of men, and even some women, trying to keep up with the pack by professing devoted loyalty to some other pack on the screen? If you want a decent sports metaphor that applies as well to the herd of fans as it does to the players, try picking one from the most recent scandal. All those concerned look—and talk—as if they were suffering from a concussion.

I'm not actually sure what the point of this column was; it seems mostly to do with the current Winter Olympics, about which I'll admit to personally not caring at all, and he makes a half-hearted case that sports competition , rather than helping to facilitate greater comity as is sometimes alleged, can actually worsen relationships between different countries or communities.

But mostly it seems to me that Hitchens has taken his personal dislike for big-time sports and spent some Newsweek column inches trying to justify it in a broader sense, to make a virtue out of his preference. I sort of get where this is coming from. I've never watched a minute of "American Idol" or "Survivor" or any of the various imitators of those two TV franchises. At times I've been tempted to draw some larger, self-justifying conclusion from that personal choice. During the 2008 Democratic nominating contest, I might have found the news that while Hillary Clinton's favorite show was "Idol," Barack Obama's was "The Wire" (which I hadn't even seen to that point, but knew was probably pretty great; now I consider it among humanity's greatest achievements) somewhat comforting in that it reinforced a conclusion I'd already drawn.

Really, though, who fucking cares? Cultural preferences are just that.

The more interesting question to me is whether we can make a positive argument for sports in the culture, one that perhaps even justifies its intrusion into that part of the newspaper Hitchens feels should be reserved for reportage on "crises." Given the Phillies links on the side of the page and the fairly frequent posts about the Eagles and other NFL/MLB subjects here, it's probably not surprising that my answer is yes. I can think of at least two arguments for this view.

One is that sports really does provide common ground for people who might otherwise not have an easy time communicating, or even find it possible. It's a class leveler: the CEO and the guy who sells her coffee every morning might have nothing else in common, but if he wears a Yankees cap and a series of player jerseys and she never misses a home game, they've got that. New York, with its abundance of teams, actually isn't a great example for this; a city like New Orleans, even discounting its traumas in recent years, probably comes together far more completely when they have a cause for joy like the Saints. And this isn't necessarily about home-team affinity either; as a displaced Phillies and Eagles fan, I have a direct rooting interest against most of the people I talk to here. But at least I can talk to them knowledgeably about baseball and football (and to a lesser extent, about the lesser sports). That's already helping at my new job, as it has in probably every one I've held since I was 21.

The other point is one Hitchens likely would dismiss with a sneer upon hearing, but maybe would grant had something to it two years later, after thinking about it: that sports simply provides another context for the same narratives we find compelling in other formats. Whether it's the "hero's quest," the temptations of new fortune, redemption, addiction, coping, adaptation, material want, sacrifice, blind luck or twenty other things, it's all there, funneled through a high-stakes ringer set up to produce drama. To dismiss sports is in some sense to dismiss story itself.

Whether or not one is a follower of sports has largely to do with family, culture and context. My parents were big football and hockey fans when I was a little kid; the Phillies of Schmidt, Carlton and Rose were great at the time, and my grandparents were baseball fans, so I got that too, and found that baseball was the one I personally liked the best--maybe because the cards were the most interesting. It seems to me that suburban kids, boys especially, are the most likely to develop strong sports loyalties; that's probably the biggest way in which they identify with "their" cities, which at least when I was a kid 25 years ago were otherwise commonly presented as dirty, dangerous places. In any event, intense sports fans with other things in common (family connections, work, outside interests) form communities of affinity that seem to me stronger than most: they gather to watch big games, or form fantasy leagues for low stakes and bragging rights, or--as I'm doing in three and a half weeks, counting down not just the days but the hours--taking trips to spring training or other sports destinations.

I started my new job this past week the day pitchers and catchers reported to Florida. It was a pretty good first day anyway, but that annual mid-February day, to my recollection, has never, ever not been a good one.

2010-02-16T09:22:00.000-08:00

Screw You, Evan Bayh
I try not to do too many posts like this anymore--their absence is probably the biggest reason why there's been such a decline in quantity between the first couple years I kept this blog and the last year or so; my hope, and belief, is that what does go up here is generally a little better--but I can't help myself on this one. Evan Bayh's announcement yesterday that he won't seek re-election this year might hurt the Democrats politically, but he'll be enriching the party, if not the Senate, by his departure from public life.

Salon.com columnist Steve Kornacki sums up my feelings about this lizardly pseudo-Democrat more ably than I could:

Evan Bayh inherited all of his father's drive for national office but none of his progressive backbone. From his father's defeat, he seemed to draw a lesson: You can dream big dreams if you're a Democrat from Indiana -- you just can't be proud to be a Democrat. And that has been the defining principle (to the extent there's been one) in Evan Bayh's quarter-century political career, which began with a successful 1986 campaign for secretary of state in Indiana and which now may be ending, with his stunning decision to exit the Senate after two terms.

To his home state's largest newspaper, Bayh painted himself as an innocent bystander in a Capitol overrun by partisan bickering -- a "centrist" surrounded by the extremists of the left and the right. (In Bayh's telling, the left is always equally, if not more, culpable for the country's problem's as the right.)

“Just last week, a major piece of legislation to create jobs -- the public’s top priority -- fell apart amid complaints from both the left and right," he told the Indianapolis Star. "All of this and much more has led me to believe that there are better ways to serve my fellow citizens, my beloved state and our nation than continued service in Congress.”

Funny that he mentioned jobs. After all, it was Bayh and fellow moderate Senate Democrats who insisted last year that President Obama's first major initiative as president -- the stimulus bill -- be pared by about $100 billion, depriving the economy of hundreds of thousands of new jobs. Not that it mattered much to Bayh, who showed far more concern last year in the GOP's new pet issue: government spending and the federal deficit.
...
Birch Bayh's Senate career was a remarkable one. He knocked out the loathsome Homer Capehart in 1962 and beat back two strong GOP challengers, William Ruckelshaus in 1968 and Richard Lugar in 1974 -- all well pursuing a defiantly progressive agenda. In perhaps his proudest moment, he turned on the Vietnam war early -- at great political risk -- and helped push through the 26th Amendment, lowering the voting age to 18, so that those fighting in Vietnam could vote on the leaders who'd decided to send them there.

And his son? Well, when George W. Bush launched his "war on terror" and turned his focus to Iraq, no Democrat cheered louder than Evan Bayh. And even when the tragic folly of that war and of the broader neoconservative agenda became apparent, he learned nothing. A confrontation with Iran? Sign Senator Bayh up.

24 years ago, Evan Bayh set out to prove voters that he wasn't like his father. As his Senate career ends, we can safely say: Mission accomplished.

Evan Bayh tried to position himself in Washington as a deficit hawk, a breed of which we need more in these fiscally frightening times. But as Kornacki's Salon colleague Glenn Greenwald noted last year, there was one category of public expenditure where Bayh was always onboard: wars.

I don't think there's much more demoralizing for a political party than to have one of its nationally prominent members constantly running it down, as Bayh did with the Democrats. (I loved Ezra Klein's take on his retirement: "He said he wants to spend more time scolding his family for moving too far to the left.") Nor is there much worse for the credibility of a legislative body than to have a member with a national profile as brazenly self-contradictory, if not outright hypocritical, as Evan Bayh.

2010-02-15T09:27:00.000-08:00

A Theory of Presidential Success
In deference to the reason we're all off work today--well, those of you who have jobs where you're allowed to go to work; I'd be home anyway, thanks to the hidden/palsied hand of city bureaucracy--some musings on presidential success and failure.

I started thinking about this in the context of Ronald Reagan, cited recently by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie as a "great president"--an assessment with which few if any Republicans would disagree, but many Democrats likely still dispute. Given the myopic tendency toward thinking about public affairs, there's a strong correlation between "great" and "does/did things I support." Add how Reagan has been encrusted in myth over the 21 years since he left office, and it's not so easy to parse out the man from the legend.

I grew up detesting Reagan, first for what seemed like his obvious falsity (I remember watching his Iran-Contra mea culpa speech at my grandparents' house when I was 13 or so, and just being amazed at how obviously full of shit he was) and what seemed (and still seems) like his somewhat cruel sense of humor. Then when I was a little older and I couldn't totally argue away his accomplishments, I found other grounds to dismiss them, e.g. "sure, the Cold War ended without nuclear war or the succumbing of the West to communism, but we spent ourselves into what will turn out to be oblivion anyway, so, yeah!" Rosalynn Carter's line about Reagan's politics making people comfortable with their prejudices stayed with me too. Some of that still holds: the dirty wars in Central America Reagan supported were horrific, and his various panderings to racists--from starting his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi without reference to the atrocity that happened there two decades earlier to the frequent references to "welfare queens" and "strapping young bucks"--were deplorable. Likewise his indifference to AIDS until it started killing people he knew and was fond of, like Rock Hudson.

But whatever one thinks of Reagan the person, and for that matter whether or not one thinks Reagan was a "great" president, there's no doubt in my mind he was a successful president, probably the most successful president since FDR. He accomplished the vast majority of what he set out to do, and the country unquestionably was in better shape when he left office than when he took the oath. Those have to be the two primary criteria for presidential success: roughly speaking, how the president did, and how the country did. The first speaks to the president's political effectiveness, the second to how his policies impacted the country and how well he did at avoiding terrible mistakes. (One could add a third criterion, having to do with lasting political or policy impact, and make a strong argument that it's the most important--but again, that's the most subjective area of analysis. Was Reagan's legacy the end of the Cold War, "restoring America's confidence," or massive deficits? The arguments can and do go on forever, defying resolution.)

Stepping back from it a bit, it's not hard to see why Republicans so quickly turn to Reagan. Consider what else they have to lean on since Eisenhower (whose decided moderation makes him a problematic hero for today's arch-conservatives anyway). Nixon's record of political and policy accomplishment was mixed, but some of his "wins" don't do much for the modern right (the EPA), and of course the circumstances of his departure from office obscured everything else. Ford was a non-entity whose accomplishments were negative--he managed the transfer of power without disaster--and failed to win re-election (a big deal in this analysis). Bush I is looking better all the time to non-ideologues, but between the tax hike and his 1992 loss he gets no love from today's Republicans. Bush II was a political success, and his inheritors seem to want the exact same set of policies he favored... but nobody is willing to admit their abiding belief in those policies. He left office widely despised, and there's no question the country was in far worse shape in 2009 than it had been eight years earlier.

Not that the Democrats have much to brag on either. More than forty years later, we're still not sure how we feel about LBJ: the way in which the history has been written--by the Republicans who mostly held power thereafter, and the liberals who opposed the Johnson administration at the time--decidedly emphasizes the negatives of his tenure. The similarities between LBJ and Bush 43, two Texans who took office under unusual (albeit very different) circumstances and saw their clear domestic agendas overtaken by poorly thought out foreign wars that drained treasury and political capital--might be more apparent to future historians than they are to us today. Jimmy Carter has very few overall defenders. Bill Clinton is the most interesting case, as usual: his first-term agenda was largely foiled and much of his second term was spent fending off scandal, but the country thrived during his administration. Even most sane Republicans will now admit that the guy they loathed during the '90s did a decent job.

Which brings us to Obama. He took office amid hopes that he might emerge as "the liberal Reagan," a compelling leader with superb communication talents who could begin to reorient the country. For many reasons, this hasn't happened so far. It's not so much that his popularity has fallen; Reagan's did as well, in 1982, and his party took big losses that year. But by then he'd passed a lot of legislation, and had lain a foundation for a mammoth re-election win two years later and further accomplishments in his second term. If anything, it seems Obama will face a more difficult set of challenges going forward in terms of making policy.

I remain optimistic about Obama's 2012 prospects, as well as the eventual vindication of the stimulus. But the reverses he's taken, or seems to be taking, on health care and other issues confound the Reagan comparisons. There are all sorts of explanations and justifications for this; the one I find most compelling is that while Reagan had a cohort of southern Democrats in Congress who mostly supported his agenda, Obama faces an unprecedentedly united political opposition. But ultimately history doesn't factor in excuses. I suspect that on the second criterion, the state of the country at the end of a presidential term compared to the beginning, Obama will look good; how could he not? But his own political effectiveness seems very much in doubt right now.

2010-02-08T17:09:00.001-08:00

Don't Fear the Quitter
It usually doesn't work, but once in a while I can stop myself from getting overanxious about amplified right-wing bile by mentally taking myself back to the magical summer of 1992. I'd been watching the Republican National Convention at home before going to visit some friends, and I'd gotten very upset at the sound and fury of Patrick Buchanan basically shouting that I and everyone and everything I loved was evil and hateful and un-American. I went to see my friends with storm clouds over my head, and when they asked what was wrong I told them about Buchanan's spew and the rapturous response his speech had drawn. And my friend Abby, bless her, looked at me like I had two moron heads--she did that a lot when we were teenagers--and asked why I would let the blatherings of marginalized imbeciles ruin my mood.

I was thinking of this a couple days ago when I heard about Sarah Palin's speech to the Tea Party. Yeah, it was hateful, ahistorical and nonsensical--but again (thought my 19 year-old self) the fact that so many people ecstatically lapped it up had to be a little troubling. And it is, it is, but on the big question, whether Palin will ever win the presidency, I'm still certain that the answer is no.

Why? Four words: SHE QUIT HER JOB. Enough remains of the traditional American character that she'll never draw over 40 percent or so in a general election campaign--and I'd guess half that is a more realistic forecast, particularly given the likelihood of a third candidate--for that one simple reason.

We as Americans don't especially care if someone half-asses a job, or barely shows up. (Witness Obama's two-thirds of a Senate term.) The rule is that you can leave the job for a better one--again, as Obama did. But you can't just walk away from your responsibilities for no good reason, and "making lots of dough stoking the fears of the invincibly ignorant" doesn't count.

There's no tolerance in our culture for quitters. I'm still not sure Ross Perot wouldn't have won in that same year of 1992 had he not dropped out of the race for awhile later that same summer. My guess is that if Palin does even run--and I'm still not convinced she will; why chance damaging her future ratings or book sales with an undertaking likely to end in failure that carries all kinds of risks?--Romney or Huckabee or some governor who actually finished his/her term and achieved something, anything, will knock her off in the primaries. A plurality of Republicans will conclude that it really would be better to have someone in there with proven aptitude for and interest in showing up to work.

Palin represents a perspective in our national conversation that's been present at least since the Know-Nothings in the mid-19th century, through the darker strains of Populism, the rise of the Klan, Father Coughlin, Joe McCarthy and the John Birch Society, the Moral Majority and Christian Coalition. It's ugly and frightening, and the new aspects of it--Palin's status as the first demagogue who can plausibly haunt the sex fantasies of the older white men who form the core Fox News audience, and the protective shield of an unambiguously partisan media--add an additional layer of concern.

But the same media dynamic that props her up now will bring her low later, if she even does run. The total absence of "there" there will burn off the novelty, particularly in contrast to a substantive guy like Obama. She can only say the very limited number of things she can say in so many different ways, if you get my meaning. That kind of rhetorical red meat is crack for the Rage Right, and their tolerance for it will build up quickly.

(If you want to really worry about something, try this one on: a more skilled and intelligent public figure with the same basic message, without Palin's baggage and abundance of "odd lies," who knows how to maximize the financial backing of corporations unleashed by the Citizens United ruling as well as how to play the mainstream media. If Marco Rubio wins the Florida Senate race, he might be the one we need to keep an eye on.)

2010-02-06T17:28:00.000-08:00

This Stupid Country
Here's some good timing: the same day that the scared-of-their-own-shadow Democrats met for their aptly named winter retreat and the Tea Party people ("The other White Party!"?) convened for a weekend of rage, Slate details the national dumbassery:

Anybody who says you can't have it both ways clearly hasn't been spending much time reading opinion polls lately. One year ago, 59 percent of the American public liked the stimulus plan, according to Gallup. A few months later, with the economy still deeply mired in recession, a majority of the same size said Obama was spending too much money on it. There's nothing wrong with changing your mind, of course, but opinion polls over the last year reflect something altogether more troubling: a country that simultaneously demands and rejects action on unemployment, deficits, health care, climate change, and a whole host of other major problems. Sixty percent of Americans want stricter regulations of financial institutions. But nearly the same proportion says we're suffering from too much regulation on business. That kind of illogic—or, if you prefer, susceptibility to rhetorical manipulation—is what locks the status quo in place.

At the root of this kind of self-contradiction is our historical, nationally characterological ambivalence about government. We want Washington and the states to fix all of our problems now. At the same time, we want government to shrink, spend less, and reduce our taxes. We dislike government in the abstract: According to CNN, 67 percent of people favor balancing the budget even when the country is in a recession or a war, which is madness. But we love government in the particular: Even larger majorities oppose the kind of spending cuts that would reduce projected deficits, let alone eliminate them. Nearly half the public wants to cancel the Obama stimulus, and a strong majority doesn't want another round of it. But 80-plus percent of people want to extend unemployment benefits and to spend more money on roads and bridges. There's another term for that stuff: more stimulus spending.

This is why I don't think much of polls: for the answers to have any guiding relevance to elected officials, it seems the answering public should have some idea about the facts on the question on which they're opining. But all we know is what we want: "We despise the government, but want it to solve all our problems. We pay too much in taxes but will see services cut, even demonstrably wasteful ones, over our dead bodies. We're always for forceful response and bold action, until reality confounds us again by not immediately conforming to what we want it to be or, above all, moving as quickly as we wish it to."

Human nature being what it is, it's actually neither surprising nor, in the larger sense, particularly distressing that so much of public opinion seems indistinguishable from a teething two year-old. Most people don't have the time or inclination to follow the news closely, and given the imperatives of for-profit media, what they mostly do see when they're paying attention is process-guided conflict freighted with despicably parochial considerations, not a clash of principles or ideals. The Founders intuitively understood this, which is why we have a representative democracy with a wealth of checks and balances (probably more than is good for us in a moment when partisan forces act in bad faith) rather than a plebiscitary system or something more directly responsive to popular will at any given moment. Ugly as it was when George W. Bush spoke in early 2005 about the "accountability moment" he'd faced and survived in the 2004 election, he wasn't wrong: that was the electorate's chance to express a judgment on his record. On an everyday basis, public opinion simply shouldn't matter very much.

But even the core leap of faith--that the electorate generally gets it right when called upon to do so--comes into question when polling so strongly suggests a foundational ignorance of the issues. That's doubly true when politicians gleefully fuel and exploit that ignorance:

The politicians thriving at the moment are the ones who embody this live-for-the-today mentality, those best able to call for the impossible with a straight face. Take Scott Brown, the newly elected Senator from Massachusetts. Brown wants government to take in less revenue: He has signed a no-new-taxes pledge and called for an across-the-board tax cut on families and businesses. But Brown doesn't want government to spend any less money: He opposes reductions in Medicare payments and all other spending cuts of any significance. He says we can lower deficits above 10 percent of GDP—the largest deficits since World War II, deficits so large that they threaten our future as the world's leading military and economic power—simply by cutting government waste. No sensible person who has spent five minutes looking at the budget thinks that's remotely possible. The charitable interpretation is that Brown embodies naive optimism, an approach to politics that Ronald Reagan left as one of his more dubious legacies to Republican Party. A better explanation is that Brown is consciously pandering to the public's ignorance and illusions the same way the rest of his Republican colleagues are.

I don't mean to suggest that honesty is what separates the two parties. Increasingly, the crucial distinction is between the minority of serious politicians in either party who are prepared to speak directly about our choices, on the one hand, and the majority who indulge the public's delusions, on the other. I would put President Obama and his economic team in the first group, along with California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Republicans are more indulgent of the public's unrealism in general, but Democrats have spent years fostering their own forms of denial. Where Republicans encourage popular myths about taxes, spending, and climate change, Democrats tend to stoke our fantasies about the sustainability of entitlement spending as well as about the cost of new programs.

I really like this typology of public figures. Unfortunately--and this gets back to the severe structural problems that I and others see bedeviling us right now--the incentives are all lined up against those who try to be honest and constructive. This past week, Republican Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin did something I think unique for his party since it's been in opposition: he proposed a serious long-term budget that would eliminate the federal deficit. I don't think it's a great proposal on the merits: Ryan wants to privatize Medicare, and do so in a way that would render the program far less effective, and revive the private accounts model for Social Security that Bush tried to push forward five years ago. But it's an actual attempt to grapple with problems. And Democrats are attacking it to score political points in a manner roughly as shameless as the Republican barrage against the proposed health care reforms.

Thus it becomes that much more difficult for Ryan or any other Republican who might be inclined to propose something necessary but politically painful. And we continue to want ever more from government while putting in ever less.

2010-02-02T14:28:00.000-08:00

Slow and Steady
While I entirely buy the premise that the time is always right to do what's right, I'll admit thinking that the complaints of liberals over President Obama's evident unwillingness to issue an executive order ending the ban on gay Americans serving openly in the armed forces are both naive and a bit hypocritical. The hypocrisy has to do with the fact that we didn't much like it when President Bush did most anything by diktat; the naivete is an unwillingness to face the reality that when you're pushing a cultural (I guess in this case, subcultural) change of some significance, there will be tension and potential or actual conflict. On a human or political level, I can't imagine a worse outcome than Obama or any perceived liberal Democrat ordering an end to "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," and then some Army unit beating the hell out of or, God forbid, killing a known or suspected gay soldier. A conversation I had last summer with a former Marine of unquestionable liberal views suggested that this was all too real a possibility if the change came too quickly.

So the news earlier this week that the administration and top military brass are moving forward on repealing that odious policy was welcome indeed--arguably it was the first good news we've heard in public life in 2010--and I wasn't troubled by the caveat that it might take a year or so. The key element will be to manage the change, preparing servicemen and servicewomen for the possibility of a gay comrade. The hierarchical nature of the military probably makes this slightly easier than it might be in other walks of life. That the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs characterized repeal as "the right thing to do," joining the civilian president and secretary of defense, is very encouraging in this regard.

As it happens, I think that allowing gay soldiers to serve openly not only will prove much ado about nothing in terms of peoples' fears on the question, but could represent a huge step forward in finishing the job of normalizing homosexual orientation in our society. Certainly it doesn't seem to be a major issue for some of our most culturally similar allies. But perhaps more to the point, there's nothing like direct experience and proximity, particularly under stressful conditions, to break down walls of misunderstanding and dispel myths. Support for same-sex marriage is sharply higher among people who actually know gay folks (or rather, I should say, know they know gay folks). Once the utter sameness of newly out gay soldiers is evident to all, a lot of straights mustering out are likely go home and spread the word that the fear and animosity toward gays they might have grown up in is groundless. At that point, it'll be much more difficult to maintain the other vestiges of legal bias on grounds of sexual orientation.

2010-01-31T10:29:00.000-08:00

Moral Satisfactions of the 2009 NFL Playoffs
It's probably no surprise to regular AIS readers (the few, the proud!) that I was emotionally crushed and spiritually appalled by the Eagles' pair of season-ending blowout losses to the Dallas Cowboys, an organization I'd rank near the Club for Growth, if not NAMBLA and al Qaeda, in terms of pure evil. If it weren't for the company and comfort of friends, and some high quality musical entertainment enjoyed with vodka and beer immediately after the second of those losses, the aftereffects might have lingered much longer. (I guess it's arguable too that I've grown up some since my late teenage years, when an Eagles loss on Sunday would weigh on my spirits till about Thursday. Though my wife might argue that one.)

But while nothing can totally remove the sting of my beloved Eagles getting waxed by those bastards--and the shot of Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and George W. Bush high-fiving in a skybox after the game-sealing touchdown in the third quarter was one of the most horrifying images I've ever had to endure--the way the NFL postseason subsequently played out was pretty gratifying. First, the Cowboys themselves got embarrassed by the Minnesota Vikings eight days later, losing 34-3, with the last Vikings touchdown coming on a fourth-down attempt with under two minutes left. It might have been the most beautifully vicious fuck-you gesture in pro football since former Eagles coach Buddy Ryan called a fake kneeldown against the Cowboys that led to a touchdown in the final seconds of a 1987 game the Birds won 37-20. That Vikings coach Brad Childress was a longtime Eagles assistant, and surely had been talking to former boss and good friend Andy Reid during the week, added an extra dose of zing.

After the Vikings performed that socially useful fumigation purpose, they went on to face the New Orleans Saints for the NFC title last week. From a narrative standpoint, that game saw the perfect end of the Brett Favre story, which has agitated football fans for years. If you don't know, it goes something like this: Favre, the object of more sports-yak fellatio than anyone this side of Derek Jeter, publicly vacillates on the subject of whether or not he'll retire at the end of each football season--then comes back, basks in adulation, plays well for awhile and then fucks up in some highly consequential moment, killing his team. In the morally absolute football universe dreamt of by ESPN's Gregg Easterbrook, Favre is undone by his hamartia, or tragic flaw--in this case, the same need to be the star and hero of the story that drives his annual offseason Hamlet routine. All I know is that after a season in which he was uncharacteristically careful with the football, the "ol' gunslinger" threw just about the most damning interception possible at the last and worst moment, with his team on the cusp of victory... and now he and his team will watch the Super Bowl at home like the rest of us. This is beyond perfect:

(But the vexing thing about Favre is that, like Jason or Freddy or Michael Myers, however many times you seem to kill him, he keeps coming back! His last pass could have been the interception he threw against the Eagles in overtime of the NFC Divisional Round in January 2004, leading to a 20-17 loss for his Green Bay Packers. Or, more plausibly, his last pass for the Packers four years later: another overtime interception, against the Giants, to set up the game-ending field goal that gave New York a 23-20 win in one of the most exciting games I've ever seen. Or in the season-ending 24-17 loss to the Dolphins in 2008 while with the New York Jets that finished a 1-4 tailspin after an 8-3 start to miss the playoffs. But the guy simply doesn't fucking go away. I guess it's almost as admirable as it is pathetic.)

The Super Bowl matchup of Saints vs. Colts next weekend is the one a lot of us were hoping for as far back as three months ago, when both teams looked like they might get there undefeated. While that didn't happen, there's no villain that I see; it should be nice to enjoy the game without hoping someone will get a comeuppance and fearing that they won't.

2010-01-30T14:55:00.001-08:00

This Could Take Awhile
A little less than a year ago, I had the opportunity to interview economist Anthony Carnevale for CUF. During our conversation, he made a point I hadn't previously thought about: the way recessions work now is that the bulk of job loss isn't cyclical, but rather structural. In other words, you don't grow out of modern economic downturns by hiring back people who've been laid off from their old positions, but rather by creating whole new categories of jobs for them to fill.

A New York Times blog post from a couple days back made much the same point:

Lots of the bloodletting we’ve seen in the labor market has probably been permanent, not just cyclical. Many employers have taken Rahm Emanuel’s famed advice — never waste a crisis — to heart, and have used this recession as an excuse to make layoffs that they would have eventually done anyway. Some economists refer to this as the “cleansing effect” of recessions.

As a recent Congressional Budget Office report put it, “Recessions often accelerate the demise or shrinkage of less efficient and less profitable firms, especially those in declining industries and sectors.”

Think glassmaking. Or clerical work. Or, for that matter, newspapers.
...
There are multiple ways to explain why permanent job-losers represent a higher share of the unemployed this time around. Maybe, as others have suggested, many of the jobs gained in the boom years were built on phantom wealth. Or maybe the culprit is a corollary of Moore’s Law, the idea of exponential advances in technology over time. That might suggest that innovation and automation displace more and more workers by the time each recession rolls around.

Whatever the underlying cause, the result is disconcerting: compared with previous recessions, many more of the employment gains in this recovery will have to come from new jobs.

That is much easier said than done.

The diagnosis of a structural versus cyclical recession changes the prescription for how to ease the pain and restore growth. In addition to steps like putting more money into programs like unemployment insurance and food stamps, there's much more of an imperative for government to take what actions it can to accelerate the process of new business development and job creation. That means investment in research and development, financial support for post-secondary education of all kinds and at all levels, and steps to make credit more readily available. Obviously, the Obama administration did a good deal of this through the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act passed a year ago in February, but it's now clear that they underestimated just how bad this recession would be and passed a too-small, too-slow measure as a result. (Frustratingly, the truly bright folks like Carnevale didn't--but they weren't "centrist" Republican Senators or "pragmatic" White House insiders, so their views weren't determinative.) And it's arguable that other measures within the ARRA that clearly had a longer-term focus and purpose, while probably justified in and of themselves, exerted an opportunity cost of less "stimulus" per se.

The political problem for the Obama administration and the Democrats in Congress is twofold. One, if they don't see economic gains this year, they're going to get wiped out in November and even the president's reelection in 2012 might be at risk; two, the unprecedented lack of faith in government's ability to do pretty much anything both constrains what they can do in response, particularly with fears of the structural budgetary imbalance now well established in the public mind. (That Republicans are approaching all these challenges with utter cynicism--blasting the president on deficits with a straight face, then turning around and voting en bloc against restoration of pay-as-you-go budgeting, because cutting taxes is more important than moving the budget toward balance--doesn't help either; and that they're counting on the cognitive dissonance of the electorate to shield them from paying for this hypocrisy at the ballot box is additionally depressing.) In December, the president described this as "about as difficult an economic play as possible": trying to goose growth while being prepared to slam on the spending brakes as soon as the recovery is deemed secure. This is the signal they're trying to send by mooting the (substantively quite dumb and ineffectual) freeze on discretionary domestic spending.

Long-term, the problem is that the American public isn't ready to come to grips with the fact that our means--the revenue structure we've created for ourselves--are nowhere near sufficient to pay for our desired ends of generous entitlements, super-aggressive (and by any rational standard wildly and wastefully excessive) international/"defense" posture, and expansive safety net. I think Obama gets this, and he probably has a sensible plan to bring the country toward that realization. But unless we pull out of the worst of this downturn by 2012--with unemployment below 8 percent and real wage gains at the median--he probably won't have the chance to try it. For everyone's sake, other than perhaps the Republicans hoping to ride economic misery back into power, let's hope those new jobs show up sooner than later.

2010-01-16T10:55:00.000-08:00

Down We Go
As it becomes increasingly likely that the Democrats will suffer a catastrophic loss in the Massachusetts Senate election to fill the remainder of Ted Kennedy's term, I'm not sure that anybody other than perhaps Sullivan fully grasps what's at stake here.

But first a quick word on the race itself. I don't find it "shocking" that Martha Coakley is probably going to lose; by all appearances, she's a mind-blowingly awful candidate. (This gaffe might be the last shovelful of dirt on the coffin of her candidacy; as an unforced error, it's truly hard to believe.) I just don't understand why anyone with no aptitude or appetite for retail politics chooses to run for office; there are certainly enough other routes to ego gratification or "power" in our world. Even in "deep blue" Massachusetts, I don't think it's a shock that a skilled politician, as Scott Brown seems to be, beats an awful one in a special election--which ensures both lower turnout and a closer focus on the personal attributes of the contestants on the part of those who are following the race.

No, the significance is that Brown is going to kill health care reform (for, it should be noted, no evident reason of policy substance--which is not surprising), and when it dies--whatever one thinks of its merits--a lot will go with it.

As I've written here many times, we have huge problems in this country that have festered for a very long time. Health care, complex as it was and is, should have served as a stretching exercise for some of those bigger issues, the most important of which are the country's long-term financial outlook and climate change. We needed the experience of solving a less intractable problem before taking on those tougher ones. Instead, we saw an unprecedentedly nihilist Republican minority solely interested in winning the political fight rather than solving the problem--with one result being that, even if reform still somehow passes, the Republicans kept their own most helpful ideas and priorities, such as tougher cost containment measures and tort reform, on the sideline rather than getting them into the legislation by the accepted path of negotiation. Meanwhile, a Democratic majority first failed to realize the new state of things, wasting months fucking around in the Senate Finance Committee with bad-faith Republicans Grassley and Enzi and Snowe before moving on, and then, at the endgame in December and January, snarled itself in the usual net of venality (the "centrists" in the Senate) and "principled" myopia (historically illiterate House liberals, who will deliver the death blow after Brown's election by accepting the unsustainable status quo over the already-passed Senate version... evidently failing to understand that they can come back to fix some of the problems BEFORE THE BILL GOES INTO EFFECT).

When he set out to do health reform, President Obama had a good idea in isolation--letting Congress, basically castrated during the Bush years, take the lead as it's supposed to do under the Constitution (and as Clinton didn't allow them when Democrats last took this on in 1993-94)--but one that failed to take into full account the realities that we've moved a good ways toward a de facto parliamentary system, or that he was a lot more popular than they were. (Still is, though they're both way down.) First-year presidents make tactical mistakes; as those go, this wasn't an awful one, but it's going to cripple him for the rest of his term.

And it's going to hurt all of us, Democrats and Republicans, in ways we can't yet fully perceive, by striking a potentially mortal blow to public faith in our governance system. That system is complex. It was never supposed to be easy to produce major change. But as the public increasingly expects instant gratification and self-selects into partisan echo chambers, failing to acknowledge that "the other side" might ever have a point--indeed blocks itself off from any information source that might convey a contrary view--frustration with the system's inability to deliver will mount. We already have an incipient proto-fascist movement in this country; I'm beginning to believe that a parallel, though probably smaller, movement will coalesce on the left. With this as backdrop, it might not take more than another terrorist attack, economic crisis, or natural disaster to unleash radical, destabilizing forces that bring us to grief.

2010-01-13T17:23:00.000-08:00

How Did This Happen?
I should never have asked the question: What could be worse than having Kirsten Gillibrand, an unprincipled hack whose one political talent seems to be the ability to raise massive sums money, representing New York as a Democratic Senator? The answer: Harold Ford Jr.! The one-time golden boy of Tennessee politics and Democratic Leadership Council honcho evidently lives here now, and wants to run against Gillibrand for the Senate. His Wall Street friends--Ford is a Vice Chairman at Merrill Lynch, who seems to have avoided interactions with non-rich folks (other than the odd cabdriver, perhaps)for however long he's been here--think it's a swell idea, for reasons that seem pretty obvious: Ford is "a capitalist," except when the big guys fuck up. Then, evidently, his compassion overflows and he transforms into a socialist.

After an in-parts embarrassing interview with the New York Times, deservedly savaged by Gawker.com here, the Ford boomlet might be about to go bust. I hope so. Reading the full Times interview, I'm reminded of my impression of Ford when he ran for Senate in Tennessee four years ago: why the hell is this guy even a Democrat? Back then--his current elisions to the contrary--he actually tried to run to the right of Republican Bob Corker on "God, guns and gays." He's shamelessly flipped on all those--even more so than Gillibrand, who had her own set of conversions after being appointed to fill Hillary Clinton's seat--but if anything he's moved to the right on economic issues. He doesn't explain (and Times reporter Michael Barbaro doesn't push him to explain) why a relentless barrage of tax cuts from 2001-2006 didn't help produce long-term growth or other positive economic outcomes, but would do so now. There isn't a word about poverty, not a word about education, not much about finance reform--certainly no admission that the deregulatory policies of the last decade, which I believe he supported, did so much to create the current downturn. Again, why is he a Democrat? (The answer, of course, is that his daddy was, and Ford Jr. pretty much inherited Ford Sr.'s seat in Congress.)

Again, I'm no fan of Gillibrand. I wanted Carolyn Maloney to run against her. Or Carolyn McCarthy. Or Steve Israel. Hell, I would have supported Bill Thompson if he'd primaried her. The Tracy Flick comparison seems apt, and that she's an unelected senator appointed by an unelected (and thoroughly inept) governor is almost itself enough reason to want to see her challenged. But Ford has all of Gillibrand's flaws--the obnoxious and transparent ambition, the total absence of core beliefs, the evident faith that politics is about money--and a few of his own, notably the carpetbagging and the crony capitalist inclinations. If that's the choice, it's an easy call for me... but more than anything, it's infuriating that in a state with as many good progressives in public life as New York, our options seem to be limited to these two clowns.

2010-01-09T10:50:00.000-08:00

Truths We Can't Admit
Inspired by Glenn Greenwald’s latest remaking of an obvious but largely taboo point—that American actions in the world bear some causal responsibility for anti-American sentiment, which is occasionally expressed in attempted acts of terrorism—I’m thinking about other logical conclusions we don’t allow to be expressed in our politics. Here are three to start:

Commitment to economic deregulation and “innovation” is in fundamental tension with commitment to a stable society. This is the underlying premise of the Jim Manzi essay I recently discussed: the faster the rate of economic change, the more intense the resultant dislocation and the more severe the punishment on those who lose out by these changes. It’s the fault line that lies beneath the Republican political coalition, one that some smart and financially independent pol eventually will exploit whenever other scapegoats for why “real Americans” are having so much trouble fall beneath a certain threshold of plausibility.

On the other side of the political spectrum, the center-left coalition fails to accept that neither “leveling the economic playing field” through actions such as strengthening organized labor or imposing living wage laws, nor “investing in education” through the aspiration of college for all will alone suffice to ensure broad prosperity. You need both—a truth that neither side seems willing to acknowledge, as seen in this recent back-and-forth between liberal advocates Michael Lind and Will Marshall. As is true on the right, this disagreement stands in for a larger cultural disconnect between the two core Democratic constituencies, which we can describe in shorthand as low-income communities and “knowledge workers,” that usually plays out in the party's presidential nomination contest. (In 2008, the twist was that Obama was African-American. Were he another white guy, based on the substance of the campaign he ran, he would have followed the well trod path of beautiful losers like Gene McCarthy, Gary Hart, Paul Tsongas, Bill Bradley and Howard Dean. That said, the fact that he's turned out to be such a centrist in policy, if not style, offers a hint that the "beer track/wine track" divide is more style than substance, if not straight up pig crap.)

There was no Golden Age, ever. To take the most glaring example, I find it darkly hilarious that the “Tea Party” crowd hearkens back with such feeling and strong identification to the founding of the American Republic: the guys that created the country were elitists and snobs far beyond the measure of the modern liberals so deeply loathed by the average Fox viewer. Were today’s angry righties around in the 1780s, they probably would have been shoveling crap on the estates of the Founders, or else swelling the ranks of Shays’ Rebellion or other abortive resistance movements. Probably the smartest of them would have been anti-Federalists.

I might come back to this, as I'm pretty sure it's an almost infinite subject.

2010-01-05T18:15:00.000-08:00

Toward a Nihilist Majority
Coming home to the news that Sen. Dorgan won't run for re-election, making it even more likely that the Democrats will lose their super-majority this November, I'm thinking with even more apprehension about an Ezra Klein column published a couple days back that asks a very disturbing question:

What happens when one of the two major parties does not see a political upside in solving problems and has the power to keep those problems from being solved?

If all this is sounding familiar, that's because it is. Congress doesn't need a two-thirds majority to get anything done. It needs a three-fifths majority, but that's not usually available, either. Ever since Newt Gingrich partnered with Bob Dole to retake the Congress atop a successful strategy of relentless and effective obstructionism, Congress has been virtually incapable of doing anything difficult because the minority party will either block it or run against it, or both. And make no mistake: Congress will need to do hard things, and soon. In the short term, unemployment is likely to remain high and the economy is likely to remain weak unless Congress can muster another round of serious stimulus spending. [...]

Further out, the long-term deficit problem, which is driven largely by health-care costs, is startling. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that debt will reach 300 percent of gross domestic product come 2050 -- and that estimate might be optimistic. But solutions seem unlikely. No one who watched the health-care bill wind its way through the legislative process believes Congress is ready for the much harder and more controversial cost-cutting that will be necessary in the future.

Similarly, Sens. Kent Conrad and Judd Gregg recently suggested a bipartisan deficit commission that would reach a consensus on the budget and report back to a grateful Congress. On Tuesday, a Wall Street Journal editorial showed the conservative interest in such compromises: Republicans should "agree to a deficit commission only if it takes tax increases off the table," it said, reminding wavering Republicans that "President George H.W. Bush renounced his no-new-taxes pledge and made himself a one-termer."

These two problems get to the essential difficulties confronting the nation: There is no doubt that minority parties generally profit in elections when the unemployment rate is high. But given that reality, what incentive do they have to help the majority party lower the unemployment rate? Further out, there is no doubt that the majority party has an incentive to prevent a fiscal crisis on its watch. But what incentive does the minority party have to sign on to the screamingly painful decisions that will avert crisis?

I suspect that part of what's going on here is that the same technological advances that provide politically engaged citizens greater access to their elected representatives and partisan champions, are pushing those representatives and champions toward actions designed to deliver more short-term gratification. This means acting in ways that thwart the opposition wherever and whenever possible; that's how you capture media attention, raise money and generate and sustain enthusiasm. You can't be too rabid or partisan; indeed any deviation from the party line now will be noticed, broadcast and condemned. Lindsay Graham, of all people, has been censured by two Republican groups in his home state of South Carolina for, far as I can tell, not being a global warming denier.

It's been said, and I agree, that the current group of professional Republicans are all tactics, no strategy. But the more important point might be that they now seem to care about power and ideology, not about what they do with the power or what ensues when abstract theories smack into reality. Consider the line Klein quotes about Bush 41, who "renounced his no-new-taxes pledge and made himself a one-termer." Never mind the myriad logical flaws and historical misreads here; that 1990 budget deal, along with the party-line 1993 deficit reduction (which probably had more to do with the Democrats losing Congressional majorities in '94 than Bush's "breaking his pledge" did with his defeat at the hands of Bill Clinton), were decisive in teeing up the longest economic expansion in American history.

Shouldn't that count for something? Somewhere along the line, isn't the idea to make policy choices that serve the public good? The contemporary right seems to reject the whole premise that real-world results, not fidelity to some notion of purity that majorities don't even share, are what do and should drive election outcomes.

I've written many times here that I worry the norms and structures of our politics and governance institutions are inadequate for the challenges of our times. The blend of ideological absolutism, proud anti-intellectualism and pure spite in one of the two major parties as well as a proto-fascist populist movement doesn't do much for my confidence.

2010-01-04T11:48:00.000-08:00

Dark Skies
This piece by conservative thinker Jim Manzi is getting some attention, including a mention in Ross Douthat's column today. I read it a few weeks back when one of Sullivan's guest bloggers mentioned it, and I agree it's a worthwhile and thought-provoking analysis of some of the "big questions" around the American economic, cultural and political scene. Which isn't to say that Manzi doesn't get a few things really quite wrong, even as he frames the overarching problem well and nails a few of the particulars:

Our strategic situation is shaped by three inescapable realities. First is the inherent conflict between the creative destruction involved in free-market capitalism and the innate human propensity to avoid risk and change. Second is ever-increasing international competition. And third is the growing disparity in behavioral norms and social conditions between the upper and lower income strata of American society.

These realities combine to form a daunting problem. And the task of resolving it turns out not, by and large, to be a matter of foreign policy. Rather, it compels us to consider how we balance economic dynamism and growth against the unity and stability of our society. After all, we must have continuous, rapid technological and business-model innovation to grow our economy fast enough to avoid losing power to those who do not share America's values — and this innovation requires increasingly deregulated markets and fewer restrictions on behavior. But such deregulation would cause significant displacement and disruption that could seriously undermine America's social cohesion — which is not only essential to a decent and just society, but also to producing the kind of skilled and responsible citizens that free markets ultimately require. Moreover, preserving the integrity of our social fabric by minimizing the divisions that can rend society often requires government policies — to reduce inequality or ensure access to jobs, education, housing, or health care — that can in turn undercut growth and prosperity. Neither innovation nor cohesion can do without the other, but neither, it seems, can avoid undermining the other.

Manzi edges up to, but doesn't quite explicitly describe, a puzzle I've been noodling over for a few years now: the stark contradiction between Republicans' calls for a radically deregulated economy and for "a return to traditional values." At least if we're talking about low rates of divorce and out-of-wedlock births, it was a lot easier to sustain these things when employment was stable and the fruits of prosperity were more equitably shared. (The irrefutability of this premise is why I think that eventually a political faction we might characterize as "Buchananite"--favoring intrusive regulation in both the bedroom and the boardroom--might gain prominence. It isn't happening now because there's no economic model for such a political party: someone like Sarah Palin, the most obvious leader for such a faction and someone not overburdened by a deep and nuanced understanding of economics or, indeed, much else, is too dependent on big-money support to move in that direction. But someone probably will figure this out sooner or later; maybe this is what the "Tea Party" movement turns into, though right now that too is financed by super-rich a-holes like the Koch brothers.)

Manzi mostly sidesteps this nexus of tough questions (other than an allusion to the Nixon-era blending of cultural pushback and economic interventionism, and Reagan's subsequent political triumph of fusing traditional morality and laissez-faire economics--which was easily sold by the master pol since no experience had yet proven its impossibility) by labeling the Democrats as the party of "cohesion." This is a big oversimplification that I think muddies his whole analysis, but at least lets him move on to the points in which he's more interested anyway.

Fortunately, he's on more solid ground here, noting a cultural schism that poses a significant threat to our long-term well being and, admirably, doing it without recourse to the hypocritical finger-waggery of a crypto-racist jerkass like Charles Murray. Manzi simply asserts, I think inarguably, that some social norms "work" better than others in terms of the life outcomes they tend to generate:

Increasingly, our country is segregated into high-income groups with a tendency to bourgeois norms, and low-income groups experiencing profound social breakdown.
...
[W]hile affluent and educated Americans are returning to the traditional family model, the poor and less educated are not. The gap between rich and poor today is also a gap in cultural norms and mores to a degree unparalleled in our modern experience. The overall divorce rate, for example, exploded in the 1970s, but has since returned to just about its 1960 level for those with a college education. For the less educated, however, the rate has continued to climb — and women without high-school diplomas are now about three times as likely to divorce within ten years of their first marriage as their college-educated counterparts.

Child-rearing has seen a similar split. In 1965, almost no mothers with any level of education reported that they had never been married. Today, this still holds true for mothers who have finished college: Only 3% have never been married. But that figure stands in stark contrast with the nearly 25% of mothers without high-school diplomas who say that they have never been married. In fact, last year, about 40% of all American births occurred out of wedlock. And about 70% of African-American children — as well as most Hispanic children — are born to unmarried mothers. But this situation obtains for low-wage, non- college- educated whites as well: It is estimated that about 70% of children born to non-Hispanic white women with no more than a high-school education and income below $20,000 per year were born out of wedlock.

The level of family disruption in America is enormous compared to almost every other country in the developed world. Of course, out-of-wedlock births are as common in many European countries as they are in the United States. But the estimated percentage of 15-year-olds living with both of their biological parents is far lower in the United States than in Western Europe, because unmarried European parents are much more likely to raise children together. It is hard to exaggerate the chaotic conditions under which something like a third of American children are being raised — or to overstate the negative impact this disorder has on their academic achievement, social skills, and character formation.

Unfortunately, he can't resist following this insightful observation with an ideologically derived cheap shot: blaming "the welfare state," which "creates incentives that push people toward short-term indolence, free riding, and self-absorption." Other than the descriptor "short-term," this could have appeared verbatim twenty years ago, and it would have made a lot more sense back then. Today's "welfare state" has a very different shape and purpose, as Jason DeParle (author of the superb American Dream, probably the best book ever written about public assistance in America) detailed in an unsettling piece that appeared in Sunday's Times about the millions of Americans whose only current "income" is Food Stamps.

After a bracing and perceptive discussion of inequality that includes an allusion to what I think might be the most disturbing economic trend of the last forty years--the decline in income mobility--Manzi again wallows in his welfare state phobia. This is where I believe he really gets it wrong, badly mischaracterizing the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed last February:

The first major initiative of the new president and Congress was the artfully labeled stimulus bill, which will have the federal government spend nearly $800 billion over the next ten years — less than 15% of it in fiscal year 2009. More than a short-term emergency measure, the stimulus represents a medium-term transformation of the character of federal spending — and government action — in America.

Only about 5% of the money appropriated is intended to fund things like roads and bridges. The legislation is instead dominated by outright social spending: increases in food-stamp benefits and unemployment benefits; various direct and special- purpose spending relabeled as tax credits for renewable-energy programs; increased funding for the Department of Health and Human Services; and increased school-based financial assistance, housing assistance, and other direct benefits. The objective effect of the bill is to shift the balance of U.S. government spending away from defense and public safety, and toward social-welfare programs. Because the amount of spending involved is so enormous, this will be a dramatic material shift — not a merely symbolic gesture.

This is misleading, if not actually malicious, in at least two respects: first, "increases in food stamp benefits and unemployment benefits" are explicitly temporary responses to an economic emergency rather than some kind of diabolical plot to revive Big Gummit. That's the "Recovery" part of the ARRA (along with the tax cuts, which had the least stimulative effect and were included in a misguided and failed bid for some Republican love).

The "Reinvestment" part, which Manzi also erroneously dismisses as a move toward "social democracy," is designed as a down payment on human capital improvements, reorienting our educational and job training infrastructures toward a 21st century model. I think there's a case to be made that it was disingenuous to characterize this as "stimulus," since the spending was primarily intended to yield long-term gains. Nonetheless, ultimately this represents a big bet on dynamic capitalism--setting the conditions for economic growth rather than trying to define what it will comprise.

The other piece of Manzi's argument that the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress is steering the country toward a European-style quasi-socialist state is the interventions in the finance and automotive sectors. Again, I think you can take issue with the policy choices, and you can argue that the motivations were political--the direct and indirect consequences of standing idly by while GM and Chrysler died might have been unbearable for the Democrats--but putting it on ideology just seems flat wrong to me given Obama's innate operational conservatism, not to mention the administration's decision not to nationalize the banks when it probably could have early last year.

One problem with a "tour d'horizon" (as Douthat somewhat douchily calls it) such as Manzi's is that when you throw so many points into the mix, the good ones can get lost. So it is here: with some big exceptions--notably his call to avoid "a government takeover of health insurance" (which we did, probably to a fault)--I can at least sort of get behind most of Manzi's suggested agenda going forward. Financial regulation to "contain busts" that would eliminate the current moral hazard problem? Sign me up. Likewise the notion to "reconceptualize immigration as recruiting." He really nails this: "It is hard to imagine a more damaging way to expose the fault lines of America's political economy: We have chosen a strategy that provides low-wage gardeners and nannies for the elite, low-cost home improvement and fresh produce for the middle class, and fierce wage competition for the working class." This is fairly brave for a conservative, though perhaps less coming from a Manhattan Institute fellow than, say, a state senator from somewhere in the southwest.

Even his call to "deregulate public schools" is pretty defensible. I find this tough to argue with, for instance:

In a nation where about 40% of births occur outside of wedlock, many children will be left behind. Nonetheless, schools remain one of our primary policy instruments for enhancing both social mobility and our competitive position. They are essential to the task of balancing innovation and cohesion. To function effectively, though, America's schools need to be improved dramatically. Our basic model of public schooling — accepting raw material in the form of five-year-olds, and then adding value through a series of processing steps to produce educated graduates 12 (or more) years later — reflects the vision of the old industrial economy. This worked well in an earlier era, but improvements that might have kept this model up to date have been stalled for decades. We now need a new vision for schools that looks a lot more like Silicon Valley than Detroit: decentralized, entrepreneurial, and flexible.

His call for "a market in which funding follows students, and far broader discretion is permitted to those who actually teach and manage in our schools" is something you're about as likely to hear from very liberal activists as well as conservative think-tank types. Of course, the impact of any educational reform is ultimately limited by how bought in the parents prove to be--which takes us full circle to the point about cohesion at the family and community levels.

It's a mixed bag overall. But these days there are so few attempts from the right to think seriously about the problems we face as a nation and as a society that it seems worthwhile to grapple in good faith with thoughtful pieces such as this one.

2009-12-30T08:08:00.001-08:00

Ten Years in Review
I've been trying to sum it all up in a way that doesn't seem ponderous, cheesy or both, without success. All I can come up with is that this was a much, much better decade for me and for most of the people I care about than it was for the country or the world--this year in particular, as I traveled to Australia and Japan, had a much quicker and easier recovery from open heart surgery than I could have hoped for, saw my brother get married, and got a new job at the end of it (as did Annie).

Clearly, this beats the alternative, though it's a little disconcerting to feel out of step with the times. May the year and decade to come be as good for me and mine, and may the wider world catch up.

2009-12-26T10:18:00.000-08:00

We're Still Waiting for Us
Ross Douthat has mostly disappointed me as the New York Times' token right-winger in the paper's editorial stable. Particularly compared to his blogging at the Atlantic, Douthat often has come across as a ponderous scold, dutifully promulgating Republican talking points within somewhat-to-very disingenuous examinations of issues and slightly creepy forays into pop-culture philosophizing.

But his piece in Saturday's paper on "The Obama Way" reminds me why I had some regard for Douthat in the first place: when he can put the BS aside, the guy has a pretty sharp eye.

Obama baffles observers, I suspect, because he’s an ideologue and a pragmatist all at once. He’s a doctrinaire liberal who’s always willing to cut a deal and grab for half the loaf. He has the policy preferences of a progressive blogger, but the governing style of a seasoned Beltway wheeler-dealer.
...
In hindsight, the most prescient sentence penned during the presidential campaign belongs to Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker. “Perhaps the greatest misconception about Barack Obama,” he wrote in July 2008, “is that he is some sort of anti-establishment revolutionary. Rather, every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them.”

Both right and left have had trouble processing Obama’s institutionalism. Conservatives have exaggerated his liberal instincts into radicalism, ignoring the fact that a president who takes advice from Lawrence Summers and Robert Gates probably isn’t a closet Marxist-Leninist. The left has been frustrated, again and again, by the gulf between Obama’s professed principles and the compromises that he’s willing to accept, and some liberals have become convinced that he isn’t one of them at all.

They’re wrong. Absent political constraints, Obama would probably side with the liberal line on almost every issue. It’s just that he’s more acutely conscious of the limits of his powers and less willing to start fights that he might lose than many supporters would prefer. In this regard, he most resembles Ronald Reagan and Edward Kennedy. Both were highly ideological politicians who trained themselves to work within the system. Both preferred cutting deals to walking away from the negotiating table.

Actually, I don't think this is quite right. Douthat overstates Obama's core liberalism: if that were correct, he'd start engaging on issues with much farther left positions than has been the case. On health care, he might have used the specter of a single-payer plan at the jump to ensure that a public option survived into the final bill, for instance; instead, he expressed just enough support for a public option to keep it alive as a bargaining chip, but ultimately didn't expend any political capital to save it.

This take also misses a big piece of Obama's institutionalism: his deference to Congress. Perhaps this is more political expediency--letting the legislators take the lead is a good way to somewhat insulate the White House when things go sour--but I have to believe that the former Constitutional law professor and Senator has some fairly strong views about Article I. (This is lost, of course, on the right-wing hysterics who bleat about the incipient tyranny of Obama: at least when it comes to domestic policymaking, he might be the most institutionally deferential president we've had since Ford or even Eisenhower.)

But Douthat nails the essential pragmatism--which is why I thought the guy could be a successful president in the first place. I have the feeling that Obama's first year might look much better from the perspective of 20-30 years down the road than it did in real time--much as Reagan's has. (This is a point Andrew Sullivan keeps making as well. I think the analogy is somewhat overstated: Reagan had a large clutch of Southern Democrats who supported him on most big issues, giving everything he did a veneer of bipartisanship beyond Obama's wildest dreams, for one thing. But politically, barring some new disaster, it seems likely Obama will hit a dramatic economic upswing leading into his bid for re-election, and if he wins as convincingly as Reagan did in 1984, he might yet effect a similar political realignment.)

And yet the admittedly impressive list of legislative accomplishments it looks like Obama will be able to claim by the time he gives his State of the Union speech isn't exactly thrilling many on the left who worked so hard to get him into the White House and invested such hopes in his presidency. While they're blaming Obama--understandably, I believe, given large choices like the administration's deference to Congress and smaller ones such as not drawing lines on health care--that strikes me as less than half the story. A recent conversation on "Bill Moyers Journal" between the host, American Prospect editor Robert Kuttner and Rolling Stone contributor Matt Taibbi--all opinionated liberals who have been disappointed with the first year of this presidency--covered much of this ground, and Kuttner made a fantastic point:

The other thing that's missing, if you compare him with Roosevelt or LBJ or Lincoln, the other thing that's missing is a social movement. In all of these great periods of transformation, you had social movements doing a complicated dance with the president, where sometimes they were working with him, sometimes they were beating up on him. That certainly describes the civil rights movement and Lyndon Johnson. It describes the abolitionists and Lincoln. It describes the labor movement and Roosevelt. Where's the movement?

My strong suspicion is that Obama understands this--and if anything, maybe he's been too subtle about communicating it. We know that there's enough of a "movement" on the left to power a campaign such as his to the Democratic nomination, and he's enough of a centrist to win the presidency from that perch. But the work of the organized left obviously isn't complete: it seems they can't yet exert a political price for taking them for granted, and I don't believe they've made a compelling case to the country why more liberal solutions will be embraced.

Unfortunately, it's not likely that Obama ever again will have as favorable an alignment in Congress as he does right now. At best, he'll have about a 10-12 seat majority in the Senate (down from 20 now) and maybe 20-30 in the House for the balance of his presidency. That will mean either changing the rules of the Senate, as many are beginning to talk about, or finding some Republicans willing to take a role in governing again. The man and the movement will have a lot of work to do.

2009-12-17T18:19:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the Big Leagues
No, this isn't another baseball post; it's addressed to the Democrats and liberal activists hoping that the health care bill dies in the Senate. To put it succinctly, they're frakkin' nuts.

This isn't to offer a blanket defense of the measure. Frankly, there's a lot wrong with it--at least in the sense that it could be much, much better. My personal gripe list? I'd have loved to keep the Medicare buy-in for Americans ages 55 to 64, I think the individual mandate to buy insurance could be designed better (I like this idea, which suggests letting people opt out of the mandate but blocks them from opting back in afterwards for five years), and I would have included some degree of malpractice reform--which isn't the panacea the bad-faith Republicans present it as, but would help at the margin and isn't in because the Dems are shills for the trial lawyers. I also would have liked some more forceful reforms to push the system toward rewarding outcomes rather than interventions of any type whether effective or not--though it's possible that the cost controls measures that are included eventually will yield that result.

Maybe there's more; I don't present myself as a health care policy expert. But the guys whom I do regard as experts, people like Ezra Klein (here and here, and really throughout his excellent blog over the last few weeks, which I'll be adding to the permanent links around here) and Jonathan Cohn (here and here), are foursquare behind this measure. So are Nate Silver (here and here, among other places), Paul Starr and Mark Schmitt, as astute among liberal-leaning big picture political thinkers as you'll find anywhere.

They support the measure--again, while being fully attuned to its faults--for a myriad of reasons that I think are worth reading and considering in detail (which is my polite way of saying that I'm not gonna do that here). But boiled down, the two "for" arguments are that this measure still does much more good than harm, and that the track record of major social welfare reforms is that they get better, not worse, over time. Social Security and Medicare weren't what they are today when they were first passed; subsequent Congresses responded to public concerns over the flaws of those measures and improved them. So too will health coverage, which all but becomes an entitlement, be improved over time. We're getting a foot in the door, a nose in the tent, or whatever body part into an opening you choose to contemplate.

Really, though, it's even more fundamental than that. The Democrats--the progressive movement in America, arguably even the totality of people in this country who retain some faith in government's ability to take on and positively address major structural problems--need to win this one, and the win here is passing something. Enacting a bill that one can plausibly call "health coverage reform" would represent the biggest success for progressives in more than a generation. I know the polls are bad; as of yesterday, even the miserable status quo polls preferably to the measure.

But the Democrats need to ignore that data--which, as I noted a few days back, the polls really just show that the public is in a foul mood. They're in a foul mood because the economy still sucks for anyone who wasn't loaded three years ago and/or isn't well educated, and they're fed up with Washington because, in their eyes, this debate is taking friggin' forever. That it's the Republicans, who simply want to deny the White House a win without any regard for the policy consequences, who are holding things up, doesn't register.

Emotions are running high in this debate. Nobody loves the measure. But when those passions fade, what we're going to have--if this passes--is a major step forward for disadvantaged Americans, and a framework for a much better health care system in years to come. I wish all those on the left who are fired up to kill this bill would instead take the smart tactical approach and turn their energies toward figuring out how they'll improve it once the foundation is laid. They need to accept the reality that this is what it means to govern: you fight as hard as you can, take what you can get, celebrate the wins and mourn the losses, and then immediately turn to making it better.

2009-12-16T16:45:00.000-08:00

"A Dream Come True"
At the beginning of this decade in 2000, Phillies ace Curt Schilling basically talked his way out of town. Upset that the team wouldn't sign him to a lucrative contract extension a year and a half before his deal was up and convinced that ownership would never show the financial and organizational commitment to winning that he himself felt, the large right-hander parlayed his excellence on the baseball diamond and his uncanny talent for generating media attention into a trade to the Arizona Diamondbacks.

Two years later, third baseman Scott Rolen followed pretty much the same path--with the important difference that the team did want to pay Rolen an astonishing amount of money. But he just hated one or more of the manager, Veterans Stadium, and the city of Philadelphia so much that he turned down their offer, and after general manager Ed Wade misplayed his hand in the Rolen situation even more egregiously than he had Schilling, the Indiana native finagled his way to "baseball heaven" in St. Louis through a trade. (Five and a half years later, when Rolen had soured on the Cardinals organization, he did it again and wound up moving on to Toronto--making the Phils look considerably better in retrospect.)

Schilling and Rolen were the signature players of the Phillies in the 1990s, remaining so into the new decade, and they both couldn't get out of town fast enough. Their attitude seemed of a piece with the team's uniquely miserable history and the decrepit stadium in which they played. Through the 2002 season that saw Rolen shipped out, the team had posted losing records in all but two of the previous sixteen years.

But it began to change that winter. Despite Rolen's judgment, the team wasn't far off: they'd posted one of those winning records in 2001 and finished just game below .500 in '02. A good young nucleus was in place on the field, with more talent--Chase Utley, Ryan Howard and Cole Hamels, to name three--already in the organization. And they knew they'd be opening a new stadium in 2004. So in early December 2002, the Phillies went out and signed the biggest name on the free-agent market, slugging first baseman Jim Thome, to what was by far the biggest contract in team history: six years, $85 million, with a vesting seventh year that brought the total value to $98 million. And with that, the Phillies were back on the baseball map in a sustained way for the first time in about 20 years.

The thing about the Thome contract, though, was that they overpaid. The only other serious suitor was the Cleveland Indians, Thome's old team, who offered fewer years and much less total money--something like four years, $55 million. The Indians were on the downswing as a franchise, and had fired their manager and Thome's close friend, Charlie Manuel, the previous summer. But it was known that if the deals were remotely comparable, he would have stayed in Cleveland. Only when the Phils guaranteed the sixth year and added the seventh (2009) as an easily reached vesting option did he sign his name.

Which is what makes today's conclusion to the team's yearlong pursuit of former Blue Jays ace Roy Halladay so astounding to me. Unlike Schilling and Rolen, Halladay talked his way *to* Philadelphia. Halladay's contract included a full no-trade clause, and he made it clear to Toronto management that he'd only waive it for a few teams, including the Phillies. It took two Blue Jays general managers and considerable giving way on the part of Phils GM Ruben Amaro Jr, who ultimately dealt several prospects he'd previously characterized as guys he absolutely wouldn't trade--plus, by most accounts, the unfortunate decision to trade Cliff Lee, the onetime Indians ace whom the team had acquired instead of Halladay last July, to provide payroll relief and replenish the minor-league system depleted in the Halladay deal--but the match has been made.

And not only did the pitcher, among the five best in the game and a possible future Hall of Famer, target Philadelphia as his destination; he agreed to a contract extension with the team almost certainly worth millions of dollars less than he could have made on the open market. Halladay's deal is for three years, $60 million, with two vesting options at the same average annual value of $20 million per; had the Red Sox and Yankees and Mets and Dodgers been involved, it's almost unimaginable that he would have gotten less than four or five years guaranteed, at a total value over $100 million. Knowing that the team wouldn't trade for him without the bargain extension, THE GUY TOOK LESS MONEY TO BE A PHILLIE.

From the press conference this afternoon:

"This is where I wanted to be. That was the bottom line for us. It was an easy decision. Once the opportunity came up to be a part of this it was something I couldn't pass up. I think there are things not only in business but in life that are worth it. For me, this is one of those things. There are so many positives to this for me and my family. I just couldn't pass it up."

"This is a dream come true. The longer you play in your carer the more important (winning) becomes. I've been able to establish myself, achieve things. The more I play, the more I realize how important that is for me. To see a team do it in back-to-back years and have that success says a lot about the players in the clubhouse and people that are putting the team together. It's not an accident. I want to be a part of that. I've heard great things about the people and great things about the organization. That is big for me."

"The biggest thing is having a chance to win and hopefully do it a couple of times. For me, that was the biggest factor."

That he made these two decisions, to highlight the Phils as the team he wanted to join and to accept less money--still a vast fortune, to be sure, but less than he could have made--as a condition of staying for awhile, is a tribute to what the team started to build even back when Schilling and Rolen were grousing their way out of town. The kids in the system then, Jimmy Rollins and Utley and Howard and Hamels, are superstars now. Thome's old friend Charlie Manuel, who was hired by the Phils organization almost as an afterthought that same winter of 2002-2003, has been the team's manager for five years now and is generally regarded as the greatest in its history. They'd built such a deep and talented minor-league system, through three GM regimes, that they could trade for both Lee and Halladay from their top prospects of just a year ago. They won back to back NL pennants, the first of which led to their becoming world f---ing champions, and with Halladay in the fold will start 2010 as favorites to become the first NL team in almost seventy years to make it three straight.

While part of me wonders what Scott Rolen thinks of all this, I'm mostly just gobsmacked and delighted that it all turned around so wonderfully in less than a decade. The circle is now complete.

2009-12-11T09:49:00.001-08:00

Munch on My Poll
It's getting to the point where I wish I could install some filter on my computer to block out all results of public polling. Between the fickleness, the contradictions and the deep vein of ignorance that underlies it all, this information is really as useless as it is impossible for officials to ignore. Here are just two of many topical examples:

Skepticism of global warming is sharply up:

As U.S. negotiators fly to the Danish capital to forge a political agreement based on President Obama's proposal to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by about 17 percent, most of the American public doesn't know what the talks are about, according to the Harris survey.

Just 51 percent of adults questioned said they believed carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases would cause the Earth's average temperature to increase. Two years ago, fully 71 percent of respondents linked greenhouse gases directly to global warming.

But so is support for Congress to pass cap and trade legislation to mitigate its effects:

An Ipsos Public Affairs survey finds that 52% of respondents support a cap and trade plan, similar to that working through Congress, with 41% opposing the measure.

The poll also finds that messaging is make or break for the initiative: Support drops to 43%, with 55% opposed, when cap and trade raises monthly electrical bills by $25, but support jumps to 60%, with 36% opposed, when that same spike in prices accompanies the creation of "a significant number of 'green' jobs."

On health care, a majority of respondents oppose reform...

--Voters disapprove 52 – 38 percent of the health care reform proposal under consideration in Congress, and they disapprove 56 – 38 percent of President Obama’s handling of health care, down from 53 – 41 percent in a November 19 survey.

--American voters say 63 – 30 percent that extending health insurance to all will raise their cost of health care, although they are split 47 – 46 percent on whether they are willing to pay more to make sure everyone is covered.

...but support the public option that's considered the most politically untenable aspect of the measure:

The new CNN poll like many others finds greater support (53% to 46%) for a "public option" than for the Senate Health Care Bill which just 36% support, and 61% oppose.

Not that they understand the public option: large majorities admit that they couldn't explain it to friends. The explanation behind this illuminates much of what's wrong with our entire system at the place where politics, policy and issues of substantive governance intersect:

This is one of those revelations that is newsworthy without being very new. Polling on the public option has long revealed that Americans loved the idea of a government-run insurance program -- until they hear any possible counter-argument. That's because polls aren't good barometers of popular support. They're good evidence that Americans feel perfectly comfortable taking hard stands on ideas they don't totally get.

Back in September the Washington Post released a poll that taught lawmakers this: (1) A majority (55 percent) support a government-sponsored health care plan. (2) A minority (46 percent) support health care reform overall. (3) A plurality (50 percent) support health care reform overall if you take out the public option. Killing the most popular part of health care reform makes health care reform more popular? I mean ... you figure that one out for yourself.

I guess I should add schizophrenia to the indictment of short attention span and ignorance laid out above. We despise the government, but want it to solve all our problems. We pay too much in taxes but will see services cut, even demonstrably wasteful ones, over our dead bodies. We're always for forceful response and bold action, until reality confounds us again by not immediately conforming to what we want it to be or, above all, moving as quickly as we wish it to.

It's easy and somewhat accurate to blame the media for this: people who should know better (but perhaps don't) cite these poll results and countless others--the public opposes the war in Afghanistan but approves of Obama's escalation speech--and present them as meaningful. The real kick in the teeth is that, in the sense that they bear some relationship to electoral outcomes and thus help set parameters for what government actually does, they do mean *something.* But parsing out informed opinion from received wisdom and context is almost impossible. At this moment, the public is in a foul mood about pretty much everything: right-wingers still hate the President and the Congressional majorities, those on the left feel mostly deep disappointment and betrayal, folks in the middle perceive little difference from two years ago in terms of lack of movement on key issues, and the millions suffering economically are just in despair and, I fear, increasingly receptive to demagogic messages. This helps explain why not only Obama is less popular than he was ten months ago, but a bunch of his possible Republican opponents in 2012 are as well.

It's no fun to admit this, but between official venality and mass public imbecility I find myself increasingly pessimistic that we'll ever have a functional political system again.

2009-12-02T09:12:00.000-08:00

No Good Options
I just read Obama's speech from last night on the escalation in Afghanistan; given the depressing nature of the material, I decided that it wasn't worth not going to the gym to watch it live.

I was adamantly against the escalation, seeing it as another sad perpetuation of our national policy of "when in doubt, choose more war" at a time when we particularly can't afford it and in a place where success is particularly unlikely. But I have to admit that the other choices on the table--withdrawal or perpetuating the status quo--are pretty much every bit as bad as escalating. Withdrawal means condemning that country to yet more open-ended misery, with the Taliban likely taking over again and women in particular facing nightmarish repression and torment. The status quo means that the Karzai-led kleptocracy muddles through for however much longer American and NATO troops are there to protect his crooked ass--and probably just defers the moment of decision.

So we'll try to force the issue. Andrew Sullivan seems to think that the notion here is to give the military basically what it wants, hope it works, and withdraw if it doesn't.

Obama was saying last night is that he is determined to return America to normal, to unplug this vast attempt at global control in Muslim countries that Bush and Cheney unleashed. He is trying to unwind the empire, not expand it.

How best to unwind the empire? By giving McChrystal what he wants and giving him a couple of years to deliver tangible results. If McChrystal delivers, fantastic. I will do a ritual self-flagellation and bow down to the man with no body-fat and a close relationship with 33 Kagans of various generations and genders. If McChrystal does his best and we still get nowhere, Obama will have demonstrated - not argued, demonstrated - that withdrawal is the least worst option.

The far right will accuse him of weakness - but they will do that anyway. All he need do is remind Americans of what the far right version of "strength" is: engaging an enemy on his own turf, sustaining an insurgency by our very presence, draining the Treasury of trillions, sacrificing more young men and women to shore up one of the most corrupt governments on earth, and basically returning to Bush-Cheney land. And that will be a very telling argument in 2012: do we want to go back to Cheneyism? To torture and endless occupation and a third war with a Muslim nation, Iran?

On reflection, Obama was saying something quite simple: one more try, guys. We owe it to those who have sacrificed already to try and finish the job. He has given the effort the full resources it needs at a time of real scarcity. He has given COIN doctrine one more chance to prove itself. He has put Petraeus and McChrystal and the 45 Kagans on notice: prove your case. And in this, I think Obama has found a middle balance that reflects where a lot of us are on this and that also offers a good faith chance for progress - with a good sense exit ramp after a reasonable length of time.

Maybe he's right, but my problem with it is that our politics don't really allow any president to be rational when it comes to "losing a war." In 2011, Obama will be starting his reelection campaign. If things are continuing to go to crap in Afghanistan, will he really begin a withdrawal? I just don't see it. Rahm Emanuel among others will make the case, echoing Lyndon Johnson, that the electorate will "forgive you for everything except being weak." Sullivan, and by extension Obama, posits a far more rational version of America than the one I perceive.

The one thing that could possibly upend this dynamic is the growing realization that we can't afford it. Democrats who are anti-war anyway, people like David Obey, are already getting on this train (and--not that my opinion particularly matters to anyone but me--it's a big part of my objection to the escalation); by 2011, as millions of Baby Boomers start to hit retirement age, some Republicans who for whatever reason can't call for huge cuts to entitlements might be there with them. The growing realization that our resources are finite and our finances aren't divinely assured of eternal solvency might be the factor that forces us into a rational assessment of costs and benefits.

But that's just a guess at what the tenor of public debate might be in eighteen months, as two political memes--the old chestnut that a president can't lose a war, and the upstart notion that a president can't blow the budget--directly collide. By then, this will be our longest war, ever.