Clinton as VP? Biden as Secretary of State? A flashback to 2011

Here's an reminder of an interesting moment in politics from 2011.

Tom Hayden, who passed away in 2016, was writing then that he thought the talk about Clinton becoming Obama's Vice Presidential running mate in 2012 wass more than just frivolous media chatter. In Vice President Hillary Clinton? Secretary of State Joe Biden? Peace and Justice Resource Center 10/31/2011, he writes:

Democratic insiders worried about 2012 are discussing a Grand Switch, making Hillary Clinton the vice presidential nominee and Joe Biden the Secretary of State. Nothing is decided, but the talk cannot stay secret for long.

President Obama’s re-election is threatened in the electoral college and by potentially low turnout in key battleground states, including North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, New Mexico, Colorado and Nevada. On the face of it, the popular Clinton might help the ticket in several of those states, if only marginally more so than Biden.

But Clinton is seen as bringing a charge to the party’s critical levels of energy, registration and turnout. Enthusiastic support from women alone could make a major difference in an election considered to be dangerously close. It also would boost the 2012 campaign involvement of Bill Clinton, now an elder statesman and a popular campaigner, as well as the significant force of Hillary supporters among women and others seeking to make history. Her presence on the ticket would spare the party a nomination fight in 2016 should she decide to run for president at age 69.

As for Biden, Secretary of State would hardly be a demotion. While Biden has served Obama loyally and effectively, he may want to resume a high profile in foreign policy, his longtime specialty in the US Senate.

This looks now like an interesting suggestion of how much hope and confidence Obama and the Democratic establishment had for Hillary Clinton as the successor to Obama.

Tags: 2012 election, hillary clinton, tom hayden

Jennifer Granholm and a Kantian antinomy of the 2012 election

I went to this presentation at UC-Berkeley, Four More Years: Obama's Re-Election and the Prospects for a Second Term: Annual Review of the Presidency 04/15/2013, mainly because former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm was on the panel. My wife came with me, so Jennifer Granholm got to meet her biggest Austrian fan!

Among other things, Granholm seemed to be very confident that Hillary would run in 2016 and that she had good prospects. The panel discussed the Grand Bargain in process terms and I noticed she was careful not to talk about Obama's proposed SocSec/Medicare cuts as though they were in any way a good idea. I asked her afterwards, "How much of a screw-up do you think it was for Obama to propose benefit cuts to Social Security and Medicare?" She gave a modified version of the Obama loyalist answer, saying that she thinks it will probably work out okay because the Republicans won't agree to increased revenue and that it was a ploy to make the Reps look unreasonable. She said during the main presentation that if Obama agreed to a deal with just SocSec/Medicare cuts it would simply be doing what the Republicans want. Since that's the road Obama's gone down, I hope she's right as far as it goes. But there are way too many ways it could go wrong.

The hardcore Obama loyalist position was illustrated well by the brilliant Tom Tomorrow in this 04/15/2013 Moment of Truth cartoon, with Obama Middle Man explaining to the Obama Apologist why he's proposing cuts in benefits to Social Security and Medicare:

On other current issues, she thinks any gun regulation will die in the House. With the Senate's collapse on the issue today, her idea about the House may not get tested any time soon! But she was expected an even more watered-down version to get through the Senate. But she made the biggest emphasis of the panel on what that means in terms of the disconnect of Congress from the people of the country. She pointed out that more people in the US support background checks than believe in God and more than those who like kittens!

She also thinks Obama will make a serious push for immigration reform.

The other panelists included Mark Barabak of the Los Angeles Times, Tammy Frisby of the Hoover Institution, and Lynn Vavreck, a political science professor at UCLA.

The "Kantian antinomy" title occurred to me in connection with a discussion that took place especially between Vavreck and Granholm. Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781 with subsequent revised editions) gives four sets of antinomies, each of which is two opposing arguments about what in philosophy is known as "special metaphysics," questions about the God, the ultimate origin of the world/universe and the soul. Each pair of arguments is framed so that one completely excludes the other and neither can be reconciled based on the viewpoint they assume. This was a method of argument used by ancient Skeptic philosophers to argue against metaphysics as a valid source of knowledge.

Granholm and Vavreck didn't talk about Kant. Vavreck insisted on talking about statistical studies of what influences voter outcomes, and fixed in particular on her argument that an improving economy virtually guarantees the re-election of the incumbent President. Granholm and Frisby both mentioned how impressive the Obama get-out-the-vote (GOTV) operation was, and Vavreck made the argument that those didn't show up as statistically significant in the results. She insisted that Party affiliation and the state of the economy, and most specifically whether it was growing and by how much, were the only accurate predictors of the outcome of Presidential elections. She did allow that since the economy would work against Mitt Romney, he would have been well-advised to try shift the emphasis of the campaign away from the economy.

The Governor pushed back pretty hard on that line of argument. Of course, the "ground game" and the campaign style makes a difference in the outcome. Vavreck conceded that those factors only make small differences at the margins, and enough of those could theoretically add up to be significant.

The reason it made the think of the irreconcilable argument of Kant's antinomies is that in an important sense, there's no reconciling those two viewpoints stated with the assumptions at work. Also, I remembered having the same argument in the 1980s with an economics professor teaching a forecasting class. If you're using a mathematical model, economic data which are described in fairly consistent quantitative over extended periods of time will inevitable show up as strong indicators compared to more quantitative factors like the candidate's projection of a sympathetic personality or similar subjective factors. It's also a different question to ask, "what kind of data could I use to predict election outcomes ahead of time?" than it is to ask, "What were the decisive factors in the election outcome?"

There are also basic assumptions in looking at American Presidential election that are at work. You effectively have to assume there will be two main candidates with some reasonably similar party organization behind them and at least enough funding for both to mount a national campaign. If the incumbent President's party had badly split or the organizational infrastructure and fundraising ability had somehow collapsed over issues not closely correlating to economic growth and the opposition party was strong on both those factors, then it's very likely that neither the state of the economy nor elements of electioneering strategy nor the "ground game" on turnout would not be nearly such large factors.

I also wonder how well the 1980 Presidential campaign would stand up to that particular scrutiny. What that professors years ago argued that what was decisive was not that the economy was growing, which it was in the second half of 1980, but what the stage of economic growth was doing to the unemployment rate.

Granholm also mentioned several major accomplishments of the Obama Administration: the stimulus bill of 2009; the auto industry rescue; Obamacare; green energy investments, though she noted that this has been rolled way back since 2010; the "race to the top" educational initiative; and, ending two wars. (That part starts on the video at around 1:22:30.)

ags: 2012 election, barack obama, jennifer granholm

What Digby says, post-election version

Digby writes of President Obama's re-election mandate (A liberal victory Hullabaloo 11/06/2012):

If the Obama team learned anything from all this it should be that they cannot be all things to all people. We disagree in this country and that's ok. This election wasn't about post-partisanship, bipartisanship or "changing the tone." This was a strictly partisan victory made up of the Democratic Party coalition.

The liberals were validated this election and it behooves the administration to strategize their next four years with that in mind.

He's run his last race and all he has left to worry about is properly governing the country and solidifying his legacy --- and that legacy will be made or broken on how well he fulfills the agenda of those who have voted for him in massive numbers. He has a right and an obligation to unapologetically work to enact the agenda those people elected him to enact.

Tags: 2012 election, barack obama, digby

Obama's Victory Speech

President Obama's rhetoric was at its soaring, inspiring best in his re-election victory speech. (Prepared text: Remarks by the President on Election Night dated 11/07/2012.) Here is the PBS Newshour video of the speech 11/06/2012:

Obama's speeches, especially key ones like this, are worth a close reading. One thing that strikes me is that it's very much like his famous 2004 no-red-America-no-blue-America speech. For example, these lines from the victory speech last night:

... we remain more than a collection of red states and blue states. We are, and forever will be, the United States of America.

In the weeks ahead, I also look forward to sitting down with Governor Romney to talk about where we can work together to move this country forward.

... we are an American family, and we rise or fall together, as one nation, and as one people.

Now, a message of unity and community is the appropriate and expected thing for such a re-election speech. But given Obama's seeming obsession with a postpartisan ideal, we are justified in wondering whether his unity talk was more of a way of saying to the people who voted for you to shut up and cheer while he agrees with the Republicans on austerity economics and cutting benefits for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

This struck me as the best unity portion of the speech:

Now, we will disagree, sometimes fiercely, about how to get there. As it has for more than two centuries, progress will come in fits and starts. It's not always a straight line. It's not always a smooth path. By itself, the recognition that we have common hopes and dreams won’t end all the gridlock, or solve all our problems, or substitute for the painstaking work of building consensus, and making the difficult compromises needed to move this country forward. But that common bond is where we must begin.

But although most people probably didn't process it that way, I take this passage as a dig at what Obama regards as the left, i.e., organized labor and the rest of the Democratic Party's base:

I’m not talking about blind optimism -- the kind of hope that just ignores the enormity of the tasks ahead or the roadblocks that stand in our path. I’m not talking about the wishful idealism that allows us to just sit on the sidelines or shirk from a fight. I have always believed that hope is that stubborn thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us, so long as we have the courage to keep reaching, to keep working, to keep fighting. [my emphasis]

When it came to fighting for progressive priorities - a public option for health insurance, comprehensive immigration reform, the Employee Free Choice Act, to take only three examples - during his first term it was Obama himself who was willing to "just sit on the sidelines or shirk from a fight."

When it came to fighting Democratic base activists over some of those issues, we had then-White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel screaming at health care reform activists that they were "f****** retarded". Fighting his base was not something that Obama shirked. (To be fair to Rahm, he later apologized - to the mentally disabled for using the word "retarded.")

And Obama used that word "deficit":

Tonight, you voted for action, not politics as usual. (Applause.) You elected us to focus on your jobs, not ours. And in the coming weeks and months, I am looking forward to reaching out and working with leaders of both parties to meet the challenges we can only solve together: reducing our deficit; reforming our tax code; fixing our immigration system; freeing ourselves from foreign oil. We've got more work to do.

Of those three specific priorities, fixing the immigration system is the only one that sounds like a progressive priority for him. And even that's being generous. He did support the DREAM Act during his first term. But his main effort at "fixing our immigration system" during the first term was a drastic increase in the number of arrests and deportations, actions which Homeland Security handles so badly that thousands of Latino American citizens get swept up in them and deported. Plus the conditions of the detentions themselves are shameful.

The other three? For Obama, Deficit = the "Grand Bargain" to cut benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid; Reforming Our Tax Code = means cutting corporate taxes even more; and Freeing Ourselves From Foreign Oil = drill, baby, drill.

In other words, I recognize the quality of Obama's speeches, this one being an especially good example. But I heavily discount the rhetoric.

Tags: 2012 election, barack obama

Obama, Republican fanaticism and the politics of "total capitalism" in the US

Yes, in the United States we're shackled to a two-party system. But I don't spend a lot of time trying to chew off my hand because of it. Progressive, prolabor politics right now depends on an inside-outside strategy, with progressive groups pushing Democratic officeholders to do the right thing and progressive challenges in party primaries to hold Blue Dog Democrats accountable.

The upcoming fight over the Grand Bargain to cut benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid could well provide some decisive moments. Any and all Democrats who vote to cut benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid deserved to be challenged in the primary in their next race. Aspiring Congressional, Senate and Presidential candidates will have a chance to stake out a reputation for themselves as defenders of the popular programs by opposing Obama and the Republicans on efforts to cut benefits on them.

Yes, that will mean explicitly opposing the Democratic President. As Charlie Pierce for once understates it, "There is still justifiable skepticism about [Obama's] hunger for a Grand Bargain that will leave 70 years of Democratic social policy in ashes." (For Obama, the Clock's Running in His Own Head Now Esquire Politics Blog 11/04/2012)

So it's worth keeping an eye on some of the less flattering views of Obama from the left side of things, even if "left" in the Democratic Party at the moment means that you you oppose cutting benefits for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Although we Americans know, because our politicians of both parties tell us so all the time, that we're the Greatest Country In The World and everyone wants to be like us, to people in parliamentary democracies the two-party system we have can seem incredibly constricting in limiting voter choice and setting the acceptable range of respectable public discussion. Jakob Augstein writes in US-Präsidentschaftswahl Untergang des amerikanischen Imperiums Spiegel Online 05.10.2012:

Romney, der schwerreiche Investmentbanker, und Obama, der kultivierte Menschenrechtsanwalt, sind zwei Gesichter eines politischen Systems, das mit Demokratie, so wie wir sie verstehen, nicht mehr viel zu tun hat. Zur Demokratie gehört die Wahl. Aber eine Wahl haben die Amerikaner gar nicht. Obama lieferte den Beweis. Als er vor fast vier Jahren sein Amt antrat, schien das wie ein amerikanischer Neuanfang. Aber das war ein Missverständnis. Obama hat das Lager in Guantanamo nicht geschlossen, er hat die Immunität der mutmaßlichen Kriegsverbrecher aus der Bush-Administration nicht aufgehoben, er hat die Finanzmärkte nicht reguliert, und vom Klima war im Wahlkampf kaum mehr die Rede. Das Militär, der Apparat, die Banken, die Industrie - gegen ihre Macht ist alle Macht des Volkes nichts, und gegen sie ist auch der Präsident ohnmächtig.

[Romney the filthy rich investment banker and Obama the cultivated human rights lawyer are two faces of a political system that no longer have very much to do with democracy as we understand it. Democracy includes choice. But the Americans don't have any choice at all. Obama provides the evidence. When he took office almost four years ago, that looked like a new American beginning. But that was a misunderstanding. Obama did not close the camp in Guantanamo, he did not lift the immunity for the perpetrators of war crimes from the Bush Administration, he did not regulate the financial markets, and in the election [2012] there was hardly any more mention of the climate. The generals, the bureaucracy, the banks, industry - against their power all the power of the people is nothing, and the President is powerless against them.]

This is overblown. The new financial regulation of Dodd-Frank were inadequate; he proceeds to say that credit default swaps (CDS) were adequately inadequately restricted, and that's true. That leaves a huge vulnerability for the banks with CDS's left in the shadow banking system.

But that last sentence quoted seems to say that the US is simply an oligarchy and there's nothing people can do about it. It's comments like this that make it understandable have some people can go from being a supposed hardline leftist to a hardline rightwinger. To turn his statement that "[t]he generals, the bureaucracy, the banks, industry - against their power all the power of the people is nothing, and the President is powerless against them," into a rightwing statement you need only add the words and that's a good thing.

But he puts this as a prominent criticism, and that's excellent: "Obama did not close the camp in Guantanamo, he did not lift the immunity for the perpetrators of war crimes from the Bush Administration." This to me is potentially the most damaging of Obama's failures, because it goes directly to the rule of law and the Constitutional order. The one thing that Cheney's torture program needed that his Administration and the courts hadn't provided was a successor Administration that declined to prosecute the crimes. And the Obama Administration was and is obligated by international treaty to prosecute known torture perpetrators; not even prosecutorial discretion is supposed to stop them for prosecuting. He failed to do so. That failure, a very conscious decision justified as Look Forward Not Backward, is already having far reaching effects, from emboldening the most radical Republicans to creating a climate of impunity among corporate criminals.

And the next part of Augstein's article is a pretty straightforward description:

Nicht einmal die berüchtigten Credit Default Swaps, die das Investmenthaus Lehman Brothers in den Abgrund gerissen und die westliche Wirtschaft an den Rand desselben geführt haben, nicht einmal die wurden verboten oder auch nur besser reguliert.

Vermutlich ist es so, dass Obama mehr wollte aber nicht mehr konnte. Doch welche Rolle spielt das?

Wir wollen glauben, dass Obama an den Rechten im eigenen Land gescheitert ist. Und tatsächlich: die Fanatiker, von denen Mitt Romney sich abhängig gemacht hat, haben alles über Bord geworfen, was den Westen ausgezeichnet hat: Wissenschaft und Logik, Vernunft und Mäßigung oder einfach Anstand. Sie hassen die Schwulen, die Schwachen und den Staat, sie unterdrücken die Frauen und verfolgen die Einwanderer, und ihr Abtreibungsmoralismus macht auch vor den Opfern von Vergewaltigung nicht halt. Sie sind die Taliban des Westens.

[Not even the famous credit default swaps, which tore down the investment house Lehman Brothers and lead the Western economy itself to the brink, not even they were banned or even only better regulated.

It is alleged that Obama wanted more but couldn't get it. But what role does that really play?

We want to believe that Obama has been blocked by the rightists in his own country. And it actually the case, that the fanatics on which Mitt Romney has made himself dependent have thrown everything overboard that distinguished the West: science and logic, reason and moderation or even simple decency. That hate the gays, the weak and the state, the suppress women and persecute the immigrants, and their moralism on abortion doesn't stop even with the victims of rape. They are the Taliban of the West.]

Augstein uses the phrase "total capitalism" to describe the American economic system of the moment. I'm not sure what all that might imply, but it strikes me as kind of vague. Maybe it's just a variation about the chronic (and shallow) European complaint about American materialism. Still, he's trying to explain this phenomenon:

Die Wahrheit ist, dass wir Amerika nicht mehr verstehen. Wenn wir von Deutschland aus dorthin blicken, von Europa aus, sehen wir eine fremde Kultur. Das politische System ist in der Hand des Kapitals und seiner Lobbyisten. Die Checks and Balances haben versagt. Und eine perverse Mischung aus Verantwortungslosigkeit, Profitgier und religiösem Eiferertum beherrscht die öffentliche Meinung.

[The truth is that we no longer understand America. When we look at it from Germany, from Europe, we see a foreign [and/or strange] culture. The political system is in the hands of Capital and its lobbyists. The checks and balances have failed. And a perverse mixture of irresponsibility, greed for profit and religious zealotry dominates public opinion.]

If "public opinion" is taken to mean elite opinion, and the dominant Beltway Village/punditocracy opinion, that would be more precise.

Dan Kervick also provides a coherent left criticism of Obama's first term in Defeat Mitt Romney New Economic Perspectives 11/04/2012:

I am voting on Tuesday to defeat Mitt Romney and the Republican Party. In my view, Romney represents the very worst aspects of American capitalism. Unlike so many of our politicians in Washington, he is not just a venal and servile defender of the barbarian plutocracy that runs this country. He is actually a ranking chief of the tribe. In his world of compulsive financial plunder, human beings and their labor are just chattel resources to be bought, traded, dismantled, used, abused, hired, fired and sold in the avaricious pursuit of personal gain. Now some might believe this approach to life is truly the American way. But whether that depressing proposition is true or not, the America of Romney’s hyper-capitalist pillage not the America I want to live in; and while I continue to breathe the air for which, so far, we do not have to pay, I will keep struggling against that darker America.

Romney famously expressed contempt for the 47% of Americans who do not measure up to his princely standards of serene and affluent independence from government. If anything, I believe that percentage vastly understates the number of Americans who mean nothing at all to him. [my emphasis]

Matt Stoller has managed to annoy a lot of liberals even with his criticism of Obama, including these two Salon pieces: Progressive Case Against Obama 10/27/2012; Why is the left defending Obama? 11/03/2012.

In the later article, he writes:

Obama came into office with a massive mandate, overwhelming control of Congress, hundreds of billions of TARP money to play with, the ability to prosecute Wall Street executives and break their power, and the opportunity for a massive stimulus. Most importantly, the country was willing to follow – the public believed his calls for change. Yet, instead of restructuring the economy and doing obvious things like hardening infrastructure against global warming, he entrenched oligarchy. This was explicit. Obama broke a whole series of campaign promises that would have helped the middle class. These promises would have reduced household debt, raised the minimum wage, stopped outsourcing, and protected workers. He broke these promises for a reason – Barack Obama uses his power for what he believes in, and Barack Obama is a conservative technocrat. Obama sided with Wall Street. He probably made the foreclosure crisis worse with a series of programs designed to help banks but marketed to help homeowners. These were his policies, they reflected the views of his most valued advisors like Robert Rubin and his Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. Moreover, he’s proud of this record – the only mistake he cites in his first term is inadequately communicating how effective he has been, focusing too much on getting the policy right. [my emphasis]

He's obviously making some judgment calls here, e.g., how politically feasible a more expansive stimulus proposal would have been. (I agree with his judgment on that one.)

But his basic evaluation of Obama's approach and policy is a fair and sensible one: "Barack Obama is a conservative technocrat." You could also call him a neoliberal technocrat, which pretty much comes to the same thing. The fact that the Republican Party is promoting plutocratic fantasies (Abolish FEMA!) that they call "conservative" confuses the terminology. But the Democratic Party under Obama is functioning as a center-right party opposed by a far-right, hardline obstructionist, Christian Right Republican Party.

This is also an important observation from that piece:

Consider that there is a crisis right now, in the Frankenstorm, Sandy. Parts of lower Manhattan are still without power, and much of the Eastern seaboard will never be the same. Late night comedians, NBC, and even Businessweek are jumping up and down and screaming that this catastrophic storm is a result of climate change. Yet, on Monday, no major environmental groups except Bill McKibben’s 350.org featured Sandy on its home page. These groups, from the Sierra Club to the Environmental Defense Fund – focused instead on the safety of chemicals, saving the Osprey, voting for Obama, or other such problems. As Brad Johnson noted, almost every left-wing journalist or advocate was equivocating as to whether climate change was the cause. This is the moment of leverage, when an organized advocacy space should have been arguing for a massive emergency mitigation and adaptation efforts. Tens of billions of dollars will flow into the Northeast, this money could be used for rebuilding unsustainable Con Ed, or for powering the New York with entirely renewable and robust energy. Instead, the right-wing, including Democrats like MSNBC contributor Ed Rendell, are working to undermine environmental, labor rules in the reconstruction while privatizing rebuilt infrastructure. [my emphasis]

Tags: 2012 election, barack obama, grand bargain

Tax cuts for the rich don't really promote investment, but the Republicans continue to insist they do

The Republicans got so upset about a Congressional Research Service (CRS) report refuting a favorite Republican talking point that had already been refuted many times over that Mitch McConnell bullied them into official withdrawing the report. (Jonathan Weisman, Nonpartisan Tax Report Withdrawn After G.O.P. Protest New York Times 11/01/2012)

The report is Taxes and the Economy: An Economic Analysis of the Top Tax Rates Since 1945 by Thomas Hungerford 09/14/2012.

Paul Krugman wrote of the report, "when the CRS report first came out I didn'’t write about it because it was basically old news (which is not to criticize the report, which did a fine job of putting the evidence together). Nobody has ever been able to find clear evidence of a link between high-end tax cuts and growth." (The Ultimate Zombie Idea) 110/03/2012.

This is further evidence, as though we needed any, of the strong authoritarian streak in today's Republican Party. Andrew Rosenthal commentede in Ideology Over Reality New York Times 11/02/2012, "The CRS is a highly respected, independent agency that prepares reports for members of Congress and routinely issues findings that disappoint or even irritate their clients, who usually just grin and bear it, or at least bear it. But Congressional Republicans seem to think that the CRS should function like Pravda."

Brendan Greeley reports on a presentation at a recent joint hearing of the Senate Finance and House Ways and Means Committees dealing with lower relative rates on capital gains, which gains are heavily concentrated among the wealthiest (Study Finds Benefit Is Elusive for Low Capital Gains Rate Bloomberg 10/04/2012):

Leonard Burman, who teaches economics at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School, presented a graph at the joint hearing that plotted capital gains tax rates against economic growth from 1950 to 2011.

He found no statistically significant correlation between the two. This was true even if Burman built in lag times of five years. After several economists took him up on an offer to share his data, none came back having discovered a historical relationship between the rates and growth over those six decades.

"I certainly did throw the gauntlet down for the true believers," says Burman. "If they found the relationship, they’re saving it for a special time."

Greeley notes, "Data from the Tax Policy Center shows that 70 percent of long-term capital gains go to the top 1 percent of earners, and that 47 percent goes to the top 0.01 percent."

As Krugman concludes:

Yet the tax-cut dogma remains politically intact, and it is at the core of Romney’s alleged plan for recovery.

There is, of course, no mystery here: just ask who benefits from the dogma that ever-lower taxes on the wealthy are just what we need, and you understand why there is always plenty of money for both economists and politicians who promote the dogma.

But it’s kind of sad to realize that our public discourse is so obviously, nakedly corrupt.

Tags: 2012 election, us economy

Tuesday's national election and progressive politics from Wednesday on

Election Day is Tuesday. For me, the fight over budget cuts and Obama's Grand Bargain to cut benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid will take center stage on Wednesday. Massive federal spending cuts would like slam the economy into another recession and leave us stuck in the depression, with employment far below 2007 levels, for years to come. In 2008-9, there was a fair amount of speculation about whether the US could have a "lost decade" like Japan in the 1990s.

We're halfway there now.

The fact that a Democratic President is likely to lead a drive to cut benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid shows how dangerously skewed toward the policies of plutocrats American politics are right now.

Jamelle Bouie has a thoughtful piece on progressives and the Democratic Party, Win or Lose, What Should Progressives Do Next? The Nation 11/02/2012. He looks at the nature of conservative organizing since 1964:

This sounds obvious, but it’s often missing from conversations around how to out-maneuver conservatives and bring progressive ideas to bear on national problems. Ask liberals how to best move forward in advancing policies, and you’ll get some constellation of familiar answers: “Better education,” “getting money out of politics,” “more grassroots activism,” “better messaging.”

But the history of the conservative movement—and its triumph over moderates in the Republican Party—tells a different story. Yes, conservatives built think tanks, trained messengers and developed new ideas. But they also invested in the hard and dirty work of winning elections. And not just on the presidential level—for decades before the GOP revolution of 1994, or the election of George W. Bush in 2000, conservatives were building political organizations at the local and state level. Conservatives—some organized, others inspired—worked to dominate school boards, city councils, state legislatures and other more granular positions in American political life.

In other words: organize, organize, organize.

But not just any organization will improve things. Bouie doesn't get into the need for unions, but unions are a vital part of any progressive political movement. In terms of organizing effort transforming into political clout, unionizing is the most highly effective kind I can think of. And legislation like the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) that would facilitate union organizing - and which Obama promised to support as a candidate in 2008 but pretty much forgot the day he was elected - should be a high priority for progressives and Democrats who want their party to be more than a center-right party contending with a loony-right Republican Party. Bouie:

Over the next four years, progressives should work to build their strength at the local level, and at the same time, try to use the party primary system to push the Democratic Party in its favored direction. Some liberals prefer third parties, which is understandable—Democrats have been lackluster, at best, when it comes to advancing progressive ideas. But to borrow a phrase, we fight with the system we have, not the one we want. Odds are low that the United States will move away from a first past the post, winner-takes-all electoral arrangement. As such, odds are even lower that we’ll move away from a two-party system. For now at least, the Democratic Party remains the best vehicle for progressives, and we should take advantage of that. Doing something as straightforward as replacing a moderate Democrat with a liberal one can go a long way toward increasing the currency of our ideas.

The pay off to all of this isn't just a strong roster of progressive lawmakers—it’s a country where progressives have deep influence in the halls of power, and can exercise power in a serious way. It may take a generation to succeed, but as we’ve seen with the conservative movement, it can and will work.

There are groups like Blue America that are working on getting progressive Democrats nominated and elected to Congress. As Digby points out in a specific case, (They'd rather have a crazy Republican than even try to elect a progressive Hullabaloo 11/03/2012), the Democratic Establishment can be hostile to progressives even when they have a great shot at winning against a hardline Republican. The case she describes there with the help of a Chris Hayes video involves the 11th Congressional District in Michigan.

Both Digby and Howie Klein of Down With Tyranny keep track of Blue America candidates. Speaking of Howie Klein, he makes an interesting observation about the expectations of the Romney campaign in Romney Knows It's All Over 11/02/2012:

Today, for the first time in memory, the Republican Party failed to deliver the weekly radio address to stations. Romney taped it, but never distributed it. He's just going through the motions now and riding out the embarrassment that's coming his way on Tuesday, probably worrying about how harsh the attacks from the far right on him and his world will be once AP calls the election for Obama. Romney's closing argument is, basically, vote for me or the House Republicans will wreck the economy by refusing to raise the debt ceiling. Sounds to me like a clarion call to defeat Republicans running for Congress. Even with unrelenting GOP obstruction of every single attempt Obama and the Democrats have made to fix the horrendous economy Bush and the GOP left, the final jobs report before Tuesday was more terrible news for Romney (and great news for America): 171,000 jobs added in October, coupled with sharp upward revisions to the prior two months data brought the average over the last three months to 170,000.

Tags: 2012 election, austerity economics, democratic party

Romney, FEMA and anti-government dogma

Joe Conason writes about Mtt Romney's sad attempts to navigate the politics of Frankenstorm Sandy in Hurricane Sandy Blows Away Political Pretense and Ideological Nonsense National Memo 11/02/2012:

As he played his role in this flummery, Romney repeatedly refused to answer questions from reporters about his vow to dismantle FEMA as a cost-cutting measure. It would be “immoral” to spend money on federal disaster relief, as he told a debate audience in 2011, when the government is running a substantial deficit. And it is true that the budget and tax policies promoted by Romney and his running mate, Paul Ryan, would require such significant cuts in domestic spending as to decimate disaster relief.

Disbanding FEMA and discarding its skilled personnel apparently would be fine with Romney, who said “absolutely” when asked by CNN’s John King whether he would consign disaster relief to the states rather than the federal government. For that matter he would go still further, said the former Massachusetts governor; best of all would be to let the private sector assume FEMA’s responsibilities.

Nobody asked Romney how a privatized FEMA would function, but it is interesting to imagine the private-equity version of disaster management—and how that entity might squeeze profit from tragedy. Under present circumstances, the Romney campaign denies any plan to abolish FEMA, but who really knows?

Tags: 2012 election, hurricane sandy, mitt romney

Argentinian Spanish-language news report on the US Presidential election

From TV Pública Argentina, Presidenciales del 6 de noviembre: Crisis y elecciones en EEUU 11/03/2012 and the world economic crisis:

Tags: 2012 election

Days before a close election, Obama publicly looks forward to - deficit cutting and bipartisanship!

President Obama will be very visibly focusing of emergency management with the "Frankenstorm" for much of the time between now and the election a week from today.

But prior to the storm, he was back at his postpartisan. deficit-cutting schtick to which he seems remarkably committed.

In this case, it seems to be in defiance of what the most obvious and conventional campaign calculations would dictate. If his campaign thinks there is really a great passion to slash the federal budget including annoying frivolities like federal disaster relief and emergency preparedness, then maybe it makes sense.

But in the middle of a depression and ongoing climate disaster, nobody but
David Brooks much wants to hear about Democrats cutting the deficit. And in the last two weeks of a close Presidential campaign, you would think that even the most cynical electioneering would make Obama want to emphasize the differences with the Republicans, if not for his own sake for the sake of the downticket races.

Romney and the Republicans would have been especially vulnerable on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid if Obama had kept up a sustained attack with heavy emphasis on fighting to preserve benefits on those programs. But since on Wednesday of next week, whether Obama wins or loses, the fight against his Grand Bargain to cut benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid will be the most urgent domestic political event. It's understandable, if still surprising, that the White House may be calculating that it would make it too difficult for him to win those cuts if he campaigned prominently against such cuts leading up to Election Day.

Talking about "working across the aisle" is standard campaign stump rhetoric. It's especially important for Republicans who need to take some of the edge off the damaging programs and unpopular positions they take. But Obama is going out of his way to predict new-found piece and harmony with Republicans in Congress after the election. Is he serious? Does he not care about the downticket races? Would he maybe prefer having a Republican House and Senate?

There is something to be said for his hopes for Republican cooperation. If his goal is to cut benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, since the Republicans in Congress hate those programs and want to privatize or eliminate them, they made decide to let him have those cuts and take the political fallout for them. And the Republicans have cooperated on Obama's foreign policy; we really can't say they've been obstructionist on foreign policy during his first term. When they largely agree with his approach, as they generally do on foreign policy, they have shown they can be willing to cooperate.

Still, after four years of ruthless obstructionism on domestic policy, after four more years of progressive radicalization of the Republican Party, it really is wishing for a lot to say some of the things Obama has been saying publicly. Sabrina Siddiqui reports in Obama, In Morning Joe Interview, Predicts War Inside Republican Party If He Is Reelected Huffington Post 10/29/2012:

President Barack Obama said in an interview Monday that the Republican party would have to overcome an internal war if he were reelected, but expressed hope that the partisan gridlock in Washington could come to an end.

"There are a whole range of issues I think where we can actually bring the country together with a non-ideological agenda," Obama said in a pre-taped interview on MSNBC's "Morning Joe." ...

Asked by host Joe Scarborough what would be different if, in a second term, Obama was once again dealing with a Republican majority in the House, the president expressed more optimism that Democrats and Republicans would come together to tackle the debt and deficit.

"I truly believe that if we can get the deficit and debt issues solved, which I believe we can get done in the lame-duck or in the immediate aftermath of the lame-duck, then that clears away a lot of the ideological underbrush," he said. "And then now we can start looking at a whole bunch of other issues that, as I said, historically have not been that ideological."

It's hard to know what to make of that. The "deficit and debt issues" basically involve everything that needs to get done in politics. So that hardly makes sense. It's almost too much too believe that Obama really thinks that the Republican Party won't continue to use "deficit and debt issues" to beat him and the Democrats over the head, even thought they don't actually care about either.

The implication of Obama's statements on this is that he expects there to be some kind of moderate wing fighting a right wing inside the Republican Party. That might be feasible if there were a moderate wing left. It would be stretching it to say there's even a moderate remnant left. There are factions within the Republican Party grouped around individuals (politicians and billionaires). There are major religious factions (traditional fundamentalist Protestants, fundamentalist Catholics, fundamentalists demon-chasing Pentecostals and fundamentalist Mormons. Some parts of the Party may be closer to this business lobby than they are to that one.

But this looks to me like a recipe for continuing radicalization. I don't see any of those factions mounting a major dissent in favor of women's rights, or in opposition to the segregationist voter-suppression laws the Party has adopted nationally as a key strategy to keep the electorate as white as possible. A pro-union faction? Ha!

Obama also just told a radio interviewer (Michael Smerconish, Obama Talks Second Term Plans Huffington Post 10/28/2012):

Well, I think the most important thing is, after the election -- and I believe I'm going to win -- to once again bring the Republicans together with my administration and Democrats and say to them, the election is over; we still have some big problems to solve, and the goal of making me a one-term president is behind us. And the question now is, how do we move forward in a way that strengthens middle-class families, makes sure that job growth is strong, and that wages are going up.

Probably the first piece of business is going to be to go ahead and fix our deficit and debt issues, and make a decision about how big our government is and how we're going to pay for it. And I put forward a $4 trillion deficit reduction plan - we've already cut a trillion dollars' worth of government spending. We can do the rest by a sensible combination of spending cuts and some revenue.

And if we can spend the first four, five, six months getting that done, so that the American people feel like the parties came together and put us on a more solid fiscal footing, where we don't have to worry about taxes going up sky high for everybody, we don't have to worry about massive cuts that would hurt our economy and our growth, then I think that that will break the fever here in Washington. [my emphasis]

All this postpartisan happy talk is 12 years after Bush v. Gore, nearly three years after Citizen's United and four solid years of Republican obstructionism on domestic policy and nonstop poo-flinging from their media operations, Obama is still talking about how he's going to get the Republicans to behave like nice bipartisan lambs. In order to (gulp!) spend the first half-year or so of his 2nd term reducing the deficit and implementing the Simpson-Bowles let-grandma-eat-catfood ideas on cutting benefits for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

And with an economy still has years to go to reach the level of employment we had just before the depression started in 2007 and interest rates still up against the zero bound, a push for deficit reduction in late 2012-early 2013, when we should be planning more stimulus, is begging for a "1937" effect, when Franklin Roosevelt's premature turn to budget-cutting pushed the economy into a new recession and prolonged the Great Depression. As Paul Krugman just wrote (Cliff Confusions 10/29/2012):

While I have access, let me point you to an excellent post by Suzy Khimm making a point I should have made: the only reason to worry about the fiscal cliff is if you’re a Keynesian, who thinks that bringing down the budget deficit when the economy is already depressed makes the depression deeper. And the same logic actually says that we should not just avoid spending cuts, we should raise spending right now.

With Obama focused instead on getting his Grand Bargain as quickly as possible and spending six months whacking away at the deficit, the phrase, "I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue" comes to mind.

Tags: 2012 election, barack obama, republican party, us economy

Al Gore on the 3rd Presidential Debate

From Current TV, Al Gore: Mitt Romney 'basically endorsed President Obama's strategy' during third debate 10/22/2012:

Tags: 2012 election, al gore

Obama's accomplishments

The Salt Lake City Tribune endorsement of Obama had a good, brief statement of his accomplishments as President (Tribune endorsement: Too Many Mitts - Obama has earned another term 10/19/2012):

In the first months of his presidency, Obama acted decisively to stimulate the economy. His leadership was essential to passage of the badly needed American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Though Republicans criticize the stimulus for failing to create jobs, it clearly helped stop the hemorrhaging of public sector jobs. The Utah Legislature used hundreds of millions in stimulus funds to plug holes in the state’s budget.

The president also acted wisely to bail out the auto industry, which has since come roaring back. Romney, in so many words, said the carmakers should sink if they can’t swim.

Obama's most noteworthy achievement, passage of his signature Affordable Care Act, also proved, in its timing, his greatest blunder. The set of comprehensive health insurance reforms aimed at extending health care coverage to all Americans was signed 14 months into his term after a ferocious fight in Congress that sapped the new president’s political capital and destroyed any chance for bipartisan cooperation on the shredded economy.

Obama's foreign policy record is perhaps his strongest suit, especially compared to Romney’s bellicose posture toward Russia and China and his inflammatory rhetoric regarding Iran's nuclear weapons program. Obama’s measured reliance on tough economic embargoes to bring Iran to heel, and his equally measured disengagement from the war in Afghanistan, are examples of a nuanced approach to international affairs. The glaring exception, still unfolding, was the administration’s failure to protect the lives of the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other Americans, and to quickly come clean about it.

The Benghazi incident was one repercussions of our intervention in Libya, which I've always thought was a bad idea.

And that could be only the beginning of an unfortunately involvement in post-Qadaffi Libya, as Stephen Walt warns in Arm, train, fail (repeat as necessary) Foreign Policy 10/16/2012.

Tags: 2012 election, barack obama, libya

Ignored by the Presidential campaign

The two-party system, for better or worse, forces a binomial choice on us in most elections. With very rare exceptions, third party efforts are significant in how they affect the outcome of the binomial choice between Democrats and Republicans. The last time a new party emerged to become a lasting one was the Republican Party, which was founded in 1854 and first ran a Presidential candidate in 1856.

And one of the effects of the two-party system, especially to the extent big money dominates the political process, is that important issues can and do get pushed to the sidelines of political discussion and debate. Regulating private stores of firearms, "gun control," has virtually disappeared from actual public discussion except as a scare tactic to sell more guns and demonize Democrats, who in reality (with all-too-rare exceptions right now) hope their passive opposition to gun control will just make the issue go away.

Global climate change has also dropped off the board for discussion in the Presidential campaign, at least in that form. The obvious consequences of various aspects of the phenomenon are addressed in isolation, e.g., emergency assistance to areas affected by extreme weather events. Charlie Pierce writes in 2012's Incredible Disappearing Issue: Climate Change Esquire Politics Blog 10/17/2012 that "climate change is an issue that has become an orphan in this campaign because it is simply too big for our political system to handle."

Dan Froomkin points out another matter of very serious concern in the continuing expansion of Executive power in the name of the national security state in The Big Chill: How Obama Is Operating in Unprecedented Secrecy -- While Attacking the Secret-Tellers Huffington Post 10/17/2012:

The post-post-9/11 period finds the U.S. aggressively experimenting with two new highly disruptive forms of combat -- drone strikes and cyberattacks -- for which our leaders appear to be making up the rules, in secret, as they go along.

Troubling legal and moral issues left behind by the previous administration remain unresolved. Far from reversing the Bush-Cheney executive power grab, President Barack Obama is taking it to new extremes by unilaterally approving indefinite detention of foreign prisoners and covert targeted killings of terror suspects, even when they are American citizens.

There is little to none of the judicial and legislative oversight Obama had promised, so the executive branch's most controversial methods of violence and control remain solely in the hands of the president -- possibly about to be passed along to a leader with less restraint.

More than a decade after it started, we still have no clue how much the government is listening in on us or reading our email, despite the obvious Fourth Amendment issues.

And the government's response to this unprecedented secrecy is a war on leaks.

Froomkin notes that the press is partially to blame for this in terms of their habits of deference to power, which too often extends to downright servility. (Judith Miller; do we need to say more?)

But it's even more a failure of responsibility and even explicit Constitutional duty on the part of Congress. Congress and the courts are supposed to act as a check on excessive Presidential power. And they aren't doing it nearly adequately enough, though the federal courts haven't yet been completely brought to heel. Since 9/11, Congress if anything has been more willing to authorized huge expansions of authority at the expense of individual rights than the Executive has. And that's a lot!

Digby "stop the Grand Bargain" Parton talks about another major failing of current politics, the framing of the discussion of benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in the context of a Grand Bargain to cut them driven by largely scam assumptions in Obama and the vision thing Hullabaloo 10/16/2012. Speaking of President Obama's dedication to a Grand Bargain to cut benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, she writes:

I still do not know what his vision is aside from that glittering promise to transcend all divisions and make us all one. If he has a policy vision that's consumed him for his entire first term, I'd say it's what Matt Yglesias called his white whale: the Grand Bargain. But I still have no idea why he thinks that's such a worthy goal, except as a way to tick off a bunch of discrete policy objectives all at once, ostensibly in order to clear contentious politics from the deck so we can all get together an govern for the common good. More fantasy. ...

At this point I have to hope that the tepid reception to his speech at the convention, the downright poor reception to his debate performance (and the clear potential for an upset in this election) will have finally shaken the last of the gauzy cobwebs of 2008 out of the campaign's memories --- and forced them to recognize that for all the happy talk on the trail about how "we" did this and that, the problem is that people don't know what "he" is going to do. I don't think they need any more big vision statements about "bringing people together" -- they've learned about that the hard way. What they probably would like to hear from the president is some conviction that he will fight for them.

In that last sentence she gets at the frustrations that progressive Dems are feeling right now. On the one hand, a second Obama Administration would be more beneficial (or, if you prefer, less risky) than a Romney-Ryan Administration. So progressive are hoping he sounds enough like a Democrat to get re-elected, at the same time knowing that he will have bad policies that progressive Democrats need to fight, not least through primary challenges to EVERY Democrat in Congress who supports reductions in benefits to Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid.

Daniel Ellsberg makes a good expression of the frustration of progressives in this particular binomial Presidential election (Progressives: In Swing States, Vote for Obama Huffington Post 10/18/2012):

An activist colleague recently said to me: "I hear you're supporting Obama."

I was startled, and took offense. "Supporting Obama? Me?!"

"I lose no opportunity publicly," I told him angrily, to identify Obama as a tool of Wall Street, a man who's decriminalized torture and is still complicit in it, a drone assassin, someone who's launched an unconstitutional war, supports kidnapping and indefinite detention without trial, and has prosecuted more whistleblowers like myself than all previous presidents put together. "Would you call that support?"

But label it "support" or not, what Ellsberg winds up saying is that in the binomial Presidential election, from a progressive viewpoint it's urgent that Obama beat Romney.

After that: the fight over the Grand Bargain.

Tags: 2012 election, barack obama, grand bargain

Presidential debate 2, wherein Obama actually shows up this time

I know from the Biden-Ryan debate that I'd better check with Charlie Pierce before I blog about Tuesday's debate. And, sure enough, he had some great things to say, America Has Now Met the Many Romneys, and America Knows They Can Get Their Asses Kicked: At the Debate Esquire Politics Blog 10/17/2012:

Those of us who lived under the barely distinguishable leadership of Willard Romney in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (God save it!) know very well that the emotional membrane separating Lofty Willard from Snippy Willard is thin indeed, and that the membrane separating Snippy Willard from Dickhead Willard is well-nigh translucent. Both of those membranes were tested fully here on Tuesday night by the president, by Candy Crowley ... and by the simple fact that certain members of The Help tested the challenger's ideas and found them wanting and, my dear young man, that simply is not done. And both of those membranes failed like rotting levees in a storm. ...

But not even I expected Romney to let his entitled, Lord-of-the-Manor freak flag fly as proudly as he did on Tuesday night. He got in the president's face. He got in Crowley's face. That moment when he was hectoring the president about the president's pension made him look like someone to whom the valet has brought the wrong Mercedes.

"You'll get your chance in a moment. I'm still speaking."

Wow. To me, this was a revelatory, epochal moment. It was a look at the real Willard Romney, the Bain cutthroat who could get rich ruining lives and not lose a moment's sleep. But those people are merely the anonymous Help. The guy he was speaking to on Tuesday night is a man of considerable international influence. Outside of street protestors [sic], and that Iraqi guy who threw a shoe at George W. Bush, I have never seen a more lucid example of manifest public disrespect for a sitting president than the hair-curling contempt with which Romney invested those words. (I've certainly never seen one from another candidate.) He's lucky Barack Obama prizes cool over everything else. LBJ would have taken out his heart with a pair of salad tongs and Harry Truman would have bitten off his nose.

The Bush question was one that Pierce liked Obama's response, as did Bob Kuttner (Game, Set, Obama American Prospect 10/17/2012), Karoli at C&L (Obama Paints Romney as 'Me-Too Mitt', More Extreme Than Bush 10/17/2012) and Ari Melber (How Obama got even in the debate rematch MSNBC 10/17/2012). I actually thought this was one of his weaker moments. Because given the opportunity to remind the whole country why Bush and Cheney left office with approval ratings not much higher than sour milk, Obama instead talked about areas where he supposedly is more like Bush than Romney is. His point to make Romney sound more extreme on social issues than Bush was okay as far as it went, but pointing to previous Presidents of the other party and making them sound more enlightened than the current standard-bearer is a pretty routine tactic. In this case, Obama displayed one of the political failings of his Administration, which is that he didn't maintain a narrative framework about how the Bush-Cheney Administration and their bad policies were responsible for so many problems. Look Forward Not Backward for Obama extends even to politicking. It's one way his essentially centrist, center-right perspective has limited him as the head of the Democratic Party.

But Obama's success in that debate was in getting in lots of good points that reinforce his campaign themes, like his references to Romney's tax breaks for the rich and the break he gets on his own taxes on his $20 million annual income.

I make fun of the punditocracy for practicing theater criticism on these debates, because they are often very superficial or even focused on trivial or foolish points, Al Gore's supposed excessive sighing in 2000 being the all-time classic example so far.

But in a debate, it can be hard to separate substance on the one hand from style and technique on the other. Obama's technique involved jamming Romney on weak points and hoping to create forced errors on Romney's part, and that worked. But that technique was effective because Obama used his jabs at Romney not just as isolated gotcha moments but to build his campaign narrative on the issues addressed. By bringing up Romney's multi-million-dollar annual income and low tax rate and connecting that to Romney's policy proposals, he made it much easier for the audience to connect Mitt's stage demeanor when he let "let his entitled, Lord-of-the-Manor freak flag fly." By talking specifically about Bain and the outsourcing of jobs to China, he suggested to the audience a framework for processing Mitt's scowling and peevishness as the cynical, soulless corporate boss who lays off 30,000 people per year and gets bonuses for doing it, rather than as Mitt being, say, the "experienced job-creator" who sometimes has "to make tough choices."

Tags: 2012 election, barack obama, mitt romney

David Bromwich on Obama's speaking style

David Bromwich is a close observer of Obama's words and how they connect with his policies. Also he sometimes dabbles in pop psychology while doing it, I've found his analyses of Obama particularly insightful.

A couple of years ago in The Fastidious President (London Review of Books 32/22 11/18/2012), Bromwich talked about Obama's two basic speaking styles with particular reference to press conferences:

I recently listened to some of John Kennedy’s press conferences, and was struck, not by his charm and easy control of the press, the usual traits that people bring up, but rather by his quickness and conversational rhythm. Kennedy’s answers are detailed and matter of fact, and though he occasionally speaks of his own views, he treats Congress as an equal partner. He sometimes shows irritation and is none the less cogent for that. He can speak a whole paragraph when a thought comes all at once without a pause. Any observer of Obama realises that, by contrast, he is always slow, always circumspect, and he has two distinct registers of diction: one for talking to very clever but abstracted people, the other for talking to well-meaning people who are very young or very old and certainly need remedial help. In the higher idiom he talks of a ‘critique’ of policy and ‘trend lines’ and the ways to ‘incentivise’ better care and ‘prioritise’ the next steps of government assistance to show that we are ‘doing everything we can to accelerate job creation’. It is the language of a technocrat, the man at the head of the conference table. In the lower idiom, there are lots of ‘folks’, ‘folks who oppose me’, ‘a whole bunch of folks’, interspersed with vaguely regional comfort words like ‘oftentimes’. [my emphasis]

That second kind of diction was very much on display in the first debate with Mitt Romney. The next day, Obama was able to use a speech to ridicule some of Romney's position in a way that he was completely unable to do the evening before.

The second debate is set up in town-hall format, so we can expect Obama to be more in that second, "remedial help" mode there. Not that it's bad. After all, the man won the Presidency in 2008 as the first African-American elected to that office. He was obviously doing something right.

Although it's not entirely clear if Bromwich was including traditional campaign speeches in that two-dictions part, the one-way type speech when Obama addresses a crowd gives him a chance to use soaring but vague rhetoric, e.g., "the fierce urgency of now." Or, "This is our time, America!"

Bromwich has a recent piece in which he observes that Obama is comfortable with those types of speeches, how they are compatible with his seemingly compulsive centrist/postpartisan aspirations, and what it was about Biden's debate performance last week that was particularly effective: Saying It Straight in October Huffington Post 10/13/2012.

What Biden did that Obama failed to do in the first debate was to give people arguments against the Romney-Ryan positions and in favor of the Administration's. Jennifer Granholm on Current TV commented that Biden gave a lot more detail. But my impression watching the debate was Ryan seemed to be rattling of a lot of figures (of dubious reliability), the kind of talk that made him look like the punditocracy's dream of a Serious Conservative Policy Wonk. Biden shot that down by talking about specific policies but doing so with in a conceptual framework that let people view Obama's policies favorably and Romney-Ryan's unfavorably. It wasn't so much the detail as the relevance.

As Bromwich puts it:

By nature and disposition, Barack Obama is a man who blends and consolidates. The plaintive undertone that you hear sometimes, under his heartiest shout, really says to his listeners "How can anyone reject what I'm saying? This is so reasonable. And we know it already -- it's enough to remember what we know. Now, come along with me and agree that this is what we've always stood for."

But not everyone knows, not everyone agrees, not everyone will call it reasonable unless the arguments and history are laid out in a connected order. In last night's debate, Joe Biden brought a reminder of what it sounds like when a politician offers reasons. He did not vaguely concede and back away as Obama did a few nights earlier when he said he probably agreed with his opponent about Social Security. Biden recalled that Republicans want to privatize Social Security and that, as recently as 2005, they were for entrusting personal holdings to the stock market. How well would that have worked? Beyond the minutiae of Medicare and vouchers, Biden remembered that the Republican Party was unfriendly to Medicare from the start.

And he argues this was effective because, "These weren't extended reasons, and they didn't develop as full arguments, but they were reasons and arguments: the part of persuasion that Obama has always dismissed too lightly."

He uses as an example Obama's referring to "the mess we're in" being the result of previous policies. But Obama doesn't then give a sketch of what those policies were and how they harmed the country. Bromwich recommends that for the second debate and the rest of the campaign generally that Obama should "think twice about calling a time of widespread suffering 'the mess we're in.' It isn't something that someone spilled in the kitchen. The reality has a history, and there are names that can be named."

Tags: 2012 election, barack obama, david bromwich, joe biden

Obama and the perils of centrism

Robert Kuttner: "Romney and Obama have each muddled their views -- but Romney does it in a way that helps him, while Obama's muddling helps the Republicans." (Muddled Ideology, Muddled Debate Huffington Post 10/15/2012)

Obama's centrist positioning, which should really be called center-right, if "conservatism" in the US hadn't decayed to Dixiecrat segregationism, is a substantive problem in this election that compounds whatever personal disinclination he may have to confront Republicans. As I've said before, I don't see that he's had any trouble confronting his own Democratic base.

And the central role that the notion of a Grand Bargain to cut benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid plays for him is part of the problem. To jam home the differences between him and Romney, especially given the weak economy and the lack of obvious substantive differences on foreign policy between Obama and Romney, the Obama campaign needs to maximize the advantage that Democrats have built up over decades on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. But he's constrained in that because of his desire for a post-election Grand Bargain.

Joe Biden last week in the Vice Presidential debate made the most of that advantage within the constraints of wording it so as not to rule out a Grand Bargain to cut benefits n Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. If they would flat-out declare that they would never allow such cuts, that would be far better. But Obama won't do that.

(I should note on foreign policy that in a binomial choice, the difference between the candidates are important. Romney's and Ryan aggressive, bellicose rhetoric on attacking Iran is a notable difference, though Obama's policy also carries an unnecessary degree of risking war.)

What Kuttner means by his comment in Romney's case is that his Etch-a-Sketch approach to changing his positions to try to please everybody makes him look phony and engenders distrust. He uses Romney's mealy-mouthing about his plans to gut Social Security and Medicare as an example.

But he also argues that neither Obama nor Biden have yet shot down that position as effectively as they could. Part of his explanation in Obama's case is personal: "Even after nearly four years of merciless pummeling by obstructionist Republicans, Obama is just not comfortable punching back."

Biden is better than Obama at framing potentially complex and confusing ideas in an accessible way, though not as good as Bill Clinton, who is a master at it. Kuttner sees Obama's weakness in that task, which he calls "the wonk problem," this way:

A lot Romney's lies involve manipulations with statistics. For instance, it is not possible to cut everyone's taxes by 20 percent without increasing the deficit, cutting valued programs, or giving the rich a tax-break -- or all three. There are just not enough loopholes to close to make up for $5 trillion dollars in new tax cuts. But Obama seems to have trouble offering straightforward rebuttal without descending into wonkery that leaves the audience unclear whose numbers to believe. This is not a function of the topic but of the president's own weak performance. The stuff isn't that inherently complex in the hands of an effective politician.

And he gets to the substantive policy core with this:

But the most important weakness is the Democrats own ideological muddle.

For instance, if Obama drew a bright line that Democrats will not under any circumstances cut Social Security or Medicare benefits, he would be offering a much clearer story and would have an easier time putting Romney on the defensive.

However, that is not the Obama position. The point where I wanted to throw the TV out the window was when Jim Lehrer tossed the president a nice softball to blast out of the park.

MR. LEHRER: Mr. President, do you see a major difference between the two of you on Social Security?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: You know, I suspect that on Social Security, we've got a somewhat similar position. Social Security is structurally sound. It's going to have to be tweaked the way it was by Ronald Reagan and Democratic Speaker Tip O'Neill.

You remember that tweak. They raised payroll taxes, cut benefits and raised the retirement age by two years. This is what Obama is embracing?

The good news for supporters of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid is that the Presidential campaign gives the Democrats' maximum incentive to sound like they are defending benefits levels in those programs. Even if Obama's Grand Bargain positioning limits their effectiveness, the more they use a defense of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in the campaign, the harder it will be to cut benefits on them in a Grand Bargain.

Although, as Kuttner notes, in the first debate Obama took a pass on defending Social Security at all!

Sadly, Kuttner is right in saying, "The problem here is not a lack of debating skills. Obama has been persuaded by the likes of Erskine Bowles, Alan Simpson, Pete Peterson, Peter Orszag and company that cuts in Social Security will have to be part of a grand budget bargain. That's why he won't draw a clear, bright line."

Tags: 2012 election, barack obama, medicaid, medicare, social security

Biden-Ryan debate: Iran and the Grand Bargain to cut benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid

Joe Biden's performance in Thursday evening's debate against Paul Ryan reminded me of Abe Lincoln's famous comment about General Grant: "He fights."

Bill Press picks up on that aspect of the debate in Bill says Vice President Biden saved the day 10/12/2012:

Since I can't offer a better analysis of what went right for Biden than Charlie Pierce, I'll refer you to his post from the early AM, VP Debate 2012: The Real Paul Ryan Is Bad for America 10/12/2012.

You know what's the difference between Sarah Palin and Paul Ryan?

Lipstick.

There were some substantive problems with what Biden had to say, much as I enjoyed his clobbering the Ayn Rand fanboy. They were points on which the Romney-Ryan ticket is worse than the incumbent President's trajectory. But for those of us who don't look at national policy as purely a binary partisan matter, they're worrisome. (See the transcript for text.)

Biden used the Republicans' bluster against them on the subject of Iran. Biden said, "The last thing we need now is another war." And, "War should always be the absolute last resort." Peace is good politics. He also did a good job of debunking the scare talk about an Iranian nuclear weapon. I like that he said in this connection, "facts matter."

But he also said of the Iran sanctions, "These are the most crippling sanctions in the history of sanctions, period, period." That sounds an awful lot like being only one short step from war. The US policy toward nuclear nonproliferation is dangerously one-sided in the Middle East. Nuclear nonproliferation is extremely important. But it doesn't justify an unprovoked attack on Iran. "Aggressive war", aka, preventive war, is a threat to peace, international law and nuclear nonproliferation. The Obama Administration's Libya policy can also be faulted in that regard. Muammar Ghaddafi's regime had cooperated with the United States on nuclear nonproliferation and gave up their nuclear weapons program. Then the US sided military with rebels against that government.

The other big concern was Biden's weasily-worded comments on Social Security and Medicare. People following the grim negotiations on the "Grand Bargain" to cut benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, what Biden said wasn't entirely reassuring, though he drew sharp and necessary contrasts with Ryan. David Dayen looks at those moments in VP Debate: The Constrained Discussion on Social Insurance FDL News Desk 10/12/2012:

... the myth that Biden didn't confront sprung from the very premise of the question.

"Both Medicare and Social Security are going broke and taking a larger share of the budget in the process," said Martha Raddatz, marring an otherwise good moderating performance. Social Security has nothing to do with the federal budget. It has a dedicated funding stream from the payroll tax, and is fully funded for the next two decades, which is more than you can say about pretty much any other government program. A good portion of Medicare comes from its hospital insurance tax, another dedicated funding stream. That Medicare is taking a larger share of the federal budget is an artifact of higher health spending in the United States generally, and Medicare is the least important driver of that. In fact, the antidote for higher health spending is more Medicare, a single payer program that can bargain down these higher costs. ...

But he didn’t challenge this premise, this idea that these vital programs are “going broke,” and that the role of government is just to hang onto them rather than design them in a more adequate way to increase security for older Americans. We need a Social Security system that increases benefits to those who need it. We need a Medicare program that covers really everyone, but certainly more people, to increase its bargaining power. But Biden, inside the contours of the question, and determined to maintain the wiggle room the President clearly wants, could only say that he opposed a voucher system for Medicare and privatization for Social Security. I agree, but that’s not the only answer.

The Obama Administration created a (still relatively small) exception to the very useful argument that Social Security does not draw on the General Fund budget. He and Congress financed the temporary payroll tax reductions by having the General Fund reimburse the Social Security Trust Fund for the cost. This always bothered me from the standpoint of defending Social Security. If it's supposedly going broke, why would we cut the taxes that pay for it? Well, the answer is that the General Fund is reimbursing Social Security. But that opens the program up for the Republicans to call it a "welfare" program that draws down General Funds. The obvious alternative would have been to provide those subsidies in the form of refunds coming directly to payroll tax payers.

Here's what Biden said:

Look, I was there when we did that with Social Security, in 1983. I was one of eight people sitting in the room that included Tip O'Neill negotiating with President Reagan. We all got together, and everybody said, as long as everybody's in the deal, everybody's in the deal, and everybody is making some sacrifice, we can find a way. We made the system solvent to 2033.

We will not, though, be part of any voucher plan eliminating the voucher says, Mom, when you're when you're 65, go out there, shop for the best insurance you can get; you're out of Medicare. You can buy back in, if you want, with this voucher, which will not keep pace will not keep pace with health care costs, because if it did keep pace with health care costs, there would be no savings. That's why they go the voucher they we will be no part of a voucher program or the privatization of Social Security. ...

Quickly, the bottom line here is that all the studies show that if we went with Social Security proposal made by Mitt Romney, if you're 40 in your 40s now, you will pay $2,600 a year you get $2,600 a year less in Social Security. If you're in your 20s now, you get $4,700 a year less. The idea of changing and change being, in this case, to cut the benefits for people without taking other action you could do to make it work is absolutely the wrong way.

These look, these guys haven't been big on Medicare from the beginning. Their party's not been big on Medicare from the beginning. And they've always been about Social Security as little as you can do. Look, folks, use your common sense. Who do you trust on this? A man who introduced a bill that would raise it $6,400 a year, knowing it and passing it, and Romney saying he'd sign it? Or me and the president? [my emphasis]

This formulation clearly leaves the door open for cuts in benefits to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in a post-election Grand Bargain.

The politics on this is kind of twisted. Because the Republicans got away in the Congressional campaigns of 2010 with claiming that projected savings to Medicare that do not reduce benefits to recipients were actually cuts to Medicare, they've recycled it in 2012 with the "$716 billion" meme. Instead of attacking Obama on the cuts he actually proposed in the debt ceiling negotiations last year and clearly intends to propose again in the lame-duck session this year, the Reps are attacking him with a phony claim. Shameless prevaricators that they are, even they don't seem to have found a way to attack him on the Grand Bargain proposals o cuts benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid because they are actually down with that program.

Biden repaired some of the damage Obama did to their campaign in the first debate when he said there were no real differences between him and Romney on Social Security. But there's still a Grand Bargain fight coming after the November election between supporters of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid on one side and Obama and the Republicans on the other.

Finally, Biden's answer on abortion was a strong variation on the standard Democratic politician's position - to say they're personally against it but support choice for women - and it very effectively made the point that the Democrats are pro-choice and the Republicans anti-choice. And that helps the Democrats.

But given the success of the fanatical anti-abortion movement in passing restrictions to access to abortion services, their newly visible front against contraception more generally, and their success in framing the issue to the point that violent and even murderous attacks against abortion clinics and providers aren't even called "terrorism" by politician or the government or the mainstream news media - the I'm-personally-against-it-but-support-a-woman's-right-to-choose really isn't good enough any more. Advocates of choice, including Democratic politicians, need to be making a case on the medical facts central to the Roe v. Wade decision: that a fetus cannot survive outside its mother womb until the third trimester and is therefore medically a part of the woman's body. The mushy, subjective dodge just doesn't work well enough any more. Law needs to be based on medical realities. Because "facts matter."

Tags: 2012 election, abortion, joe biden, paul ryan

Biden-Ryan debate tonight

After last week's Obama-Romney debate, we all got to be theater critics for a few days. This week I've been seeing a lot of analysis and criticism of the theater criticism. This is how we news junkies entertain ourselves.

I'll give my own pre-theater criticism of tonight's debate and say that I would expect Joe Biden to come across better than Paul Ryan to most people, unless he has a stroke or something just beforehand and walks out on the stage buck nekkid and babbling incoherently. Biden's old-fashioned political glad-handing style is kind of enduring, though it does produce the occasional hyperbole that our star pundits gleefully treat as one of the "gaffes" they love to chatter about. But he also conveys a seriousness about public service and a sense that he actually enjoys the process of democratic politics.

Paul Ryan, on the other hand, is a pompous stiff. Charlie Pierce's epithet for him, "zombie-eyed granny-starver", catches his general style pretty well.

As I was writing this, I went to the Esquire Politics Blog to pick up the link to a clip of Ryan that Pierce recently used, and I see he already did the same pre-theater criticism I did in the above paragraphs in just the headline alone, The Zombie-Eyed Granny-Starver Takes on the One Man Who Relishes This Mess: Your 2012 VP Debate Preview 10/11/2012. But I'll go ahead and post mine anyway, though any thin claim to originality is clearly shot already. As Exhibit 1 from his post shows:

Joe Biden is not riven with self-doubt. Joe Biden is not exhausted by the hurly-burly of politics. Joe Biden is not burdened by the weight of events and laid low by the constant battle against know-nothing obstructionism. Joe Biden is not going to take the stage tonight and find himself wishing he were anywhere else. I mean, god be good to him, as my gran' used to say, but Joe Biden actually likes all these silly performance pieces in which we insist he be engaged in order to stay vice-president. He revels in them. He would do ten of them a day, if he could. When I consider Joe Biden, and I look at the enthusiasm with which he throws himself into the various cataracts and torrents of hogwash that constitute our politics these days, I find myself looking at him the way I look at people who sky-dive or drive in demolition derbies. I have no idea why they do what they do, and I have absolutely no intention of doing it myself, ever, but, goddamn, do those people look like they're having fun.

I'll go ahead and add to Pierce's observation that Ryan "is as ambitious as Satan," that Ryan is likely to look better to a lot of people after this because it will be the first major exposure a lot of people have to him. At least partisan Republicans are likely to be jazzed by his presentation. Shoot, partisan Republicans were jazzed by Sarah Palin's performance against Biden in 2008. Some audience segements are easy to please.

Here's the BuzzFeed video of Ryan being a prickly jerk, Paul Ryan Gets Testy And Ends Interview 10/08/2012:

Aside from his testiness, it also seems to me in that clip Ryan is struggling to string together several favorite conservative cliches into a coherent whole. He probably wished he hadn't said that not even Obama was proposing new gun laws, because his base believes that Obama is part of a massive UN conspiracy to take away everyone's guns so the federal gubment can force us all into homosexual marriages and unisex bathrooms. Or something like that.

And he also seemed to slip when he blurted out that the answer to crime was to create opportunity in the inner cities, which sounded in the context like he was suggesting that social conditions and economic situations might actually have some meaningful effect on causing crime! It was as if Ramsey Clark had taken over his mouth for a few seconds. But then he proceeded to the Christian-Right-ly Correct position that all those black people in the ghetto inner-city dwellers need to learn Discipline. Culture-of-poverty and all that, you know.

While I'm on the topic of debates, the discussion about whether debates matter in Presidential elections has taken on metaphysical overtones, or at least the after-work-drinks version of metaphysics at the local pub. Political scientists and sociologists and (gulp!) economists can come up with analyses and even models showing that debates have no effect on Presidential elections at all. Because their models need data that can be quantified and correlated, and it's hard if not impossible to isolate quantifiable measures that would isolate perceived debate performance to its effect on the final vote.

Of course the debates matter, because they are in this and the last several Presidential elections, major focuses of the Presidential campaign and voters ultimately make a choice based on a variety of factors. Voting matters, so turnout matters, so get-out-the-vote operations are important. TV is the single most important communication channel for the elections, so ads and ad buys matter.

And what candidates say matters. Even if we have to read their lips very carefully. William Saletan offered a good analysis of Willard Romney's weasel-words on abortion in Romney’s Abortion “Agenda” Slate 10/10/2012. It's worth paying attention to what major Presidential candidates say and how they say it.

Tags: 2012 election, joe biden, mitt romney, paul ryan