The establishment Democrats' conservative instincts

A number of considerations are shaping my understanding and expectations of the this midterm election year:

• Democratic primaries are critically important for the direction of the party and whether or not the intensity gap with Republicans will be reduced. If progressives do well and a few conservative Dems like Diane Feinstein in California lose to progressive challengers, that will be an excellent sign on the policy and intensity fronts.
• The "out" party that does not hold the White House typically loses Congressional seats in midterms.
• Polls are showing a good likelihood that Democrats will retake the House in this year's elections. ( Seth Masket, A House forecast holds good news for Democrats Vox 02/12/2018)
• October will almost certainly see a flood of sexual harassment allegations of varying degrees of substance against Democratic candidates as a result of the Senate Democrats' hasty defenestration Al Franken under the Gillibrand Standard ("We should not have to be explaining the gradations between sexual assault, harassment and unwelcome groping.")
• Ginning up a war can give a President a burst in popularity. (See: Iraq, Invasion of, 2003)
• Even aside from the unique features of the current occupant of the Oval Office and his professional wrestling style, Republicans are terrible and governing but good at campaigning.

The Democrats have some well-established bad habits. Chief among them an instinctive conservatism on economic issues and a bad habit of distancing themselves from "the left," aka, their voting base. Let's recall The One True Thing David Frum Ever Said: "while Republican politicians fear their base, Democratic pols hate theirs." (Gibbs on the Left FrumForum 08/10/2010)

Establishment Democrats will be sorely tempted to look at the current situation this way: We have a big possibility of cruising to a win in November. So we have to be cautious not to offend any Republican voters who would never vote for us anyway. Our base voters have no place else to go! And we need to keep courting big donors and stick to our strategy of relying heavily on the same media consultants who we're used to losing with. So we'll complain a lot about the deficit, which gives us something to complain about even though no actual voters care about it. And we certainly don't want to disturb any rich people by loose talk about rolling back Trump's bandits' tax cuts. Or talking about Medicare for all. Or, Lordy no, we can't talk about bloated military budgets because that would step on our Russia-Russia-Russia talking points and might disturb military-contractor donations.

David Dayen has an excellent essay on the politics of the deficit. And how badly the Democrats played it during the Obama Administration, although the title maybe isn't the best for it, The Big Budget Deal Isn’t Irresponsible The New Republic 02/13/2018:

[Fred] Hiatt [of the Washington Post] longs for the halcyon days of 2012–2013, when [Republican] House Speaker John Boehner and President Barack Obama came together in a bid to slash Social Security and other domestic spending, nearly destroying the country’s full faith and credit in the process. While Social Security survived, the Republicans’ failed attempt to hijack the debt ceiling to cut the deficit led to the sequester, a painful, mindless policy that capped discretionary spending automatically across the board, regardless of whether the program was useful or not.

The result was the lowest public investment in the United States since the demobilization after World War II. Budgets for serious needs like infectious disease outbreaks or public defenders for the indigent were reduced indiscriminately. The United States wasted the chance to use low borrowing rates to rebuild outdated infrastructure, one of the biggest missed opportunities in recent memory. The output lost by capping spending amounted to trillions of dollars in lost income and reduced economic growth.

This unquestionably denied work and prosperity to millions of people, simply to feed the irrational desires of people like Hiatt. Public sector jobs sagged under Obama more than any president of the past 40 years. And because public spending disproportionately assists poorer and more vulnerable Americans—an inverse of a tax code which largely benefits the rich—the historic cuts fueled income and wealth inequality. [my emphasis]

The Democratic Party paid dearly for Obama's bipartisan obsession and his economic conservatism.

And the establishment Democrats haven't given up those habits, as Cenk Uygur reports, Democrats: Progressives KEEP OUT 02/12/2018:

Remembering the limits of Obama's political project

As they have been doing for years, The American Prospect team have been presenting insightful analysis on current politics over the last year, the first of the Trump Presidency.

Julian Zelizer reviews Jonathan Chait's account of Obama's Presidency, In Search of Obama 05/05/2017. Zelizer uses the review for some worthwhile commentary on his own. More critical commentary than the erratic Jonathan Chait would be comfortable making. As Zelizer explains:

In his book, the left comes across as a bunch of whiny, unrealistic neophytes who don’t know much about how politics work. In his chapter on revered earlier presidents, Chait means to show that the critics of Obama have little understanding of what actually happened in the past. But for Obama and all other mainstream, pragmatic liberals, the left has been an essential force for generating ideas and creating grassroots political pressure. Historians such as Doug Rossinow and Michael Kazin, whom Chait criticizes, have demonstrated that many of the best moments for liberals—such as the mid-1930s or the mid-1960s—come when the left keeps the feet of the Democratic leadership to the fire, forces issues onto the agenda, and helps create the kind of political momentum that leaders need to overcome political opposition. The left pushes Democrats as a whole to address big questions—like racial injustice or economic inequality—that seem unrealistic or out of bounds, until they are not. If Democrats had ignored the cries of the left, we might never have obtained the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the ACA, for that matter. Chait downplays the role of congressional Democrats and the left in driving the health-care legislation in 2009 and 2010 even when the administration buckled.

I've been very critical of both the left and the center-left for surrendering way too much of American democratic and historical symbolism to the Republicans and the rightwing extremists. The Republicans branded their opposition to Obama's liberal policies and his entire Administration with the symbolism of the American Revolution via the "Tea Party" activists. Astrotruf activists to a great extent, often funded by the Koch Brothers and similar Republican Party sugar-daddies.

The Democrats, meanwhile, can't even manage to defend the progressive sides of their own party founders, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, and the progress in democracy and human rights they rightly came to represent, despite the extent to which those advances were restricted to the white males who constituted the political community of their times.

So I think it is important to recognized the elements of distant and more recent progressive moments in American history, even when those who led it had their inevitable limitations, perhaps even seriously reprehensible ones. Obama's stimulus in early 2009, passed by the Democratic House and Senate against intransigent Republican opposition - the Reps claimed to be terribly worried about it effects on the federal budget deficit, you may recall - was sufficiently large to contribute substantially to kickstart the economic recovery. The EU, by contrast, relied on the ludicrous neoliberal notion of "expansionary austerity," which caused their economic recovery to lag noticeably behind that of the US. On the other hand, a considerably larger stimulus recommended by outside economists like Paul Krugman and Joe Stiglitz and by some of the Administration's own advisers, would have facilitated and faster recovery and perhaps have left fewer swing voters in 2016 feeling like they needed a change of the kind that Donald Trump was putting on offer.

Zelizer includes observations like this:

Chait recounts the many ways that the Affordable Care Act succeeded in expanding insurance coverage and containing costs. The economics of health care forever changed as a result of the policy. ... Dodd-Frank constituted a bold piece of financial regulation that curbed Wall Street’s riskiest and most destructive form of behavior. Chait even depicts more modest programs such as education reform as crucial policy innovations that would have been considered breakthroughs in other presidencies if it hadn’t been for the overwhelming number of other changes that took place.

But he also notes some of the very real limitations of Obama's project from a progressive and even a narrowly partisan Democratic viewpoint:

The organizational strength of the Democrats at the state and local level has withered under bad leadership, as Theda Skocpol has argued. To the dismay of congressional Democrats, the president has not always worked hard enough to help the party amass the resources that it needed to fight an aggressive GOP. His Democratic critics complained that Organizing for America, his political campaign operation, had always focused on Obama over the interests of the party in the states and localities. Unlike Franklin Roosevelt, Obama does not leave behind a coalition that, at least in the short term, has the muscle to protect what he built.

Obama had an unyielding belief in the potential for bipartisanship and civility. This was the promise of his brilliant speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention, when he questioned the idea of a hardened red and blue America and claimed the divide did not have to be permanent. He continually attempted to reach out to Republicans early in his term, putting compromises on the table even when it became clear that the Republican compromise would never come. [my emphasis]

Zelizer also alludes to what George Lakoff famously describes as Obama's and the Democrats' framing problem. Noting the beneficial effects of the stimulus, Zelizer rightly notes that " nobody seemed to give the administration any credit for what it had achieved." And that is in major part due to the fact that Obama insisted on defending his program in conservative terms, i.e., expressing apparently serious concern about the size of the deficit that most Republicans haven't cared about since 1980 at the latest.

Cautionary lessons of Obama's centrism

"Obama didn't play the hand that history dealt him. He didn't play it exactly right, and the Republicans did play the game very, very well." - Thomas Frank on why the Obama Administration was a disappointment to present-day New Deal-minded Democrats, aka, progressives. (Clinton and Obama Helped Make the Dems a Wall Street Party just after 4:25)

With the pollsters now talking about a good possibility of a "wave" election favoring the Democrats in 2018, I've started to worry how Democrats will approach such a political moment. And, if they do gain control of the Senate and/or House, how they will use that strengthened position against Trump and the Republicans.

Recent history gives the Democratic base good reason for concern. One of the things the Democratic Party did right during the Bush II ascendancy was Howard Dean's 50 state strategy as head of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). That involved building the party infrastructure in all states, including ones considered safely "red" (Republican). Because the Democrats were to a point where they were letting Republicans run unopposed in Congressional elections, and not even trying to seriously compete in others. This allowed Republican candidates in safe states to send money from their campaign funds to other Republicans in more actively contested districts or states.

The successful result was that the Democrats retook a majority the House and the Senate and won a majority of governorships in the 2006 elections. But their general strategy was to play it safe, i.e., not aggressively challenging the Cheney-Bush Administration on policy, hoping to cruise to a Presidential victory in 2008. Which in retrospect seems like a pragmatic approach. But only in retrospect.

John McCain, the 2008 Republican Presidential candidate, was the darling of the mainstream press and widely considered to be a strong candidate, which of course he was. The fact that a black candidate running on a seemingly strongly reformist program defeated him could be taken as a validation of the play-it-safe strategy. An argument that the corporate Democrats will no doubt be eagerly making after any 2018 "wave."

But there was also the beginning of the Great Recession, punctuated by the dramatic financial crisis of 2008. Obama's vote was also in very significant part a vote for serious progressive change, as Thomas Frank argues. After the radicalism of the Cheney-Bush Administration and the numerous disasters clustering around it - the Iraq War, the Katrina response, the financial crisis - people wanted a real change at the national level.

Obama took office with Democratic majorities in both Houses, and for a while during the first half of his first term, even a two-thirds majority in the Senate. And Obama's Administration had some substantive accomplishments in those first two years: a significant stimulus package, which is now widely credited by realistic economists with providing enough of a boost to give the US a notably more healthy recovery than the austerity-burdened EU. The Affordable Care Act (ACA), now generally known as Obamacare, was passed. And it has so far proved durable enough to withstand the Republican onslaught during the Trump Administration. The auto industry was bailed out. The financial sector was stabilized and the moderate Dodd-Frank law approved. And, of course, Democratic judges got appointed.

And the entire eight years were plagued by Obama's still difficult-to-explain obsession with bipartisanship, seemingly for its own sake. Even the accomplishments noted above were limited by restraint at least partially due to the obsession with Bipartisanship.

But once the Republicans took back a majority in the House in the 2010 elections, they were largely able to block major initiatives by the Administration. And to go wild on investigations of Hillary Clinton pseudoscandals. The dynamic and innovative phase of Obama domestic legislation was heavily concentrated in those first two years. The chair of Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, Christina Romer, advised going for a much larger stimulus, echoed by outside economists like Paul Krugman. The dropping of the public option from Obamacare not only deprived the program of an important restraint on private insurance costs. It may still prove a decisive factor in the program's surviving the current Republican rule. The auto industry bailout extracted major concessions from labor, very unlike the obscenely generous terms of the bank bailouts. Millions of people lost their homes to foreclosure, a very large number of them due to lender misconduct, and Obama's efforts to help them could be very generously described as nominal.

Obama often seemed to follow the cynical advice long ago attributed to Richard Nixon of giving liberals the rhetoric and giving conservatives the substance. The maddening obsession with budget deficit and "fiscal responsibility" involved the ridiculous Simpson-Bowles Commission with its recommendations for cuts in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, which Obama repeatedly attempted to enact. The whole mess about the "fiscal cliff" and making permanent most of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy were clear signs of Obama's commitment to Wall Street economics. And repeatedly using that kind of conservative framing constantly reinforced the Republican narrative.

The result was that while reinforcing the Republicans narrative on many issues, the limits of his policies meant that the recovery's benefits were very disproportionately enjoyed by the wealthiest. The economic metaphor on which the Democrats have long depended, the rising tide that lifts all boats, is leaving more and more people foundering in the water as the decades roll on.

Thomas Frank has done a series of interviews with The Real News over the last few months dealing with the effects of Obama-style corporate-Democratic thinking that I've assembled into a playlist, Thomas Frank on Obama-Clinton Wall Street Orientation. Chapter 8 hits some of the high points, Obama Chose Wall St. Over Main St. - Thomas Frank on RAI 12/28/2017:

Almost any engaged Democratic activist could list several more examples from Obama's Presidency: the Firing of Shirley Sherrod (2010); the eloquent rhetoric against the Citizen's United decision followed by a half-hearted political response and a de facto embrace of it. The war in Libya (2011).

But this isn't just carping after the fact. In 2010, Democracy Journal 16 (Spring 2010) did a symposium on the alarming signs of opportunities being squandered, introduced by Michael Tomasky in What Happened?, half a year before the 2010 "wave" elections benefiting the Republicans. Michael Sandel (Obama and Civic Idealism) encouraged the Democrats to engage in class issues with the goal of restricting corporate power:

Unlike the anti-bigness liberalism of the progressive era and early New Deal, the social-welfare liberalism of FDR in 1944 is recognizable as the liberalism of our time. The great liberal causes of the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s — civil rights, Medicare and Medicaid, racial and gender equality, federal support for education, a more generous welfare state — were about using government to provide equal opportunity and a social safety net, not about using government to rein in the political influence of big banks and corporations.

Social-welfare liberalism seems a more practical doctrine than the anti-bigness version of earlier progressives. It is hard to imagine how to break up the large financial institutions and corporations that dominate modern economic life. And yet I believe it’s a mistake for contemporary liberals to give up on the old progressive project of exerting democratic control over economic institutions. In fact, it’s a mistake that has backfired on the Obama presidency. The initial reluctance of Barack Obama and his economic advisers to take a tougher line on the banks has led to a populist backlash that now threatens his agenda. [my emphasis]

I would note that Obama's fight to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid - even while he was trying to expand access to health insurance - showed a considerable distancing of the Democrats even from what Sandel calls "social-welfare liberalism."

Bob Reich (Principles Before Heroes) also criticized the essential timidity of Obama's reform positions:

If anything, the Great Recession has accelerated the trend toward greater concentration. Under its pressure, more firms have discovered how easily they can increase profits by shrinking their payrolls and laying off their workers, and how cheaply jobs can be done using computers and advanced software or using the Internet to outsource jobs to foreign workers who have become nearly as productive as Americans, but charge far less. This means many more Americans are facing the Hobson’s choice of joblessness or lower wages. At the other end of the income ladder, top corporate and Wall Street executives and traders with reputed “talent” and connections–those charged with discovering more ways to increase profits–are commanding ever higher salaries and bonuses.

Meanwhile, the political power that comes with wealth has shown no sign of abating. ...

Obama might have had more success if he had framed the challenge in broader terms. In 1965, Lyndon Johnson saw and described the economic and political challenge the nation then faced in structural and historic language: to use the power of the federal government to reduce poverty among the elderly and the chronically poor, to widen the circle of prosperity, and thereby to complete the agenda begun by Franklin Roosevelt and taken up by John Kennedy.

But Obama defined the economic crisis he inherited not in structural or large historic terms but, rather, as a cyclical downturn – albeit an especially deep one – after which, he assured Americans, the economy would return to normal. [my emphasis]

Social theorist Martha Nussbaum observed that "in the United States, the progress of liberalism is hampered by a mistrust of government and the legacy of Reagan-era policies." (Learning from the World)

This was in 2010, real-time criticisms of the dangers of Obama's Bipartisan ways. There was still time for a course correction. The costs for not doing so has been high.

"The Stream" on Obama's Legacy

There is already a lot of coverage of Obama's legacy, which will presumably intensify over the next month until the new President takes office.

Al Jazeera English's The Stream take a 25 minute look at Barack Obama's legacy 12/21/2016 with six different writers, including Sarah Jaffe, Mychal Denzel Smith, Michael Days, Trevor Thrall, Karen Attiah and Vijay Prashad:

Sarah Jaffe is one of my favorite political writers. But just after 10:15, she sends me into fingers-on-the-blackboard mode with, "the environment that Hitler rose out of was a massive, massive inflation crisis."

This is a zombie idea very popular with Americans. The infamous hyperinflation in Germany was mainly in in 1923-4, resolved in early 1924. Karl Schleunes' article on that period in the "Germany" entry of the trusty Britannica 2015 observes, "Although the inflation was rooted in the huge debt that Germany had amassed in financing its war effort, the hyperinflation of 1923 was triggered by the French-Belgian military occupation in January 1923 of the German industrial district in the Ruhr valley." It was directly related to the popular cause in Germany of opposing the occupation of the industrial German Ruhr district by France that began in 1923.

The political facts in this table from Peter Gay in his The Dilemma of Democratic Socialism: Eduard Bernstein's Challenge to Marx (1952), p. 209, have yet to put this zombie idea to rest. The Nazis (National Socialists in this table) pulled 0.9 million votes in 1924, a smaller vote of 0.8 million in 1928, then jumped to 6.4 million in 1930 and to 13.7 million in July of 1932, then down to 11.7 million in November 1932.

There was one more semi-free election in Germany in early 1933 after Hitler became Chancellor, but there was considerable political repression already in motion and that vote total isn't so meaningful, which is presumably the reason it wasn't shown on Gay's chart.

So, there was a very dramatic hyperinflation in 1923-4. It was stabilized and did not recur. Then, six years later in 1930, the Nazi vote shot up 800% from 1928 - because people suddenly got really upset about the 1923-4 hyperinflation? Or could the onset of the Great Depression, massive unemployment and deflation, and the Merkel-like austerity policies of Chacnellor Heinrich Brüning have had some affect on that voting outcome?

I'm certainly tempted to think so.

BTW, that decline in the NSDAP (Nazi) vote from July to November of 1932 was 15%.

Al Jazeera English calls the program the first in a series. (And it really is about Obama, not about prewar German politics.)

It's obvious that the fact of who and what his successor is will weigh heavily on our evaluations of Obama's Presidency, now and in the future.

Today's PBS Newshour 12/21/2016 has an interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates, How Obama’s unique background shaped his outlook on race. It's informative, though the video segment strikes me as a bit on the hagiographic side:

Jeffrey Goldberg elaborates the Obama Doctrine

Jeffrey Goldberg has published a long article on President Obama's foreign policy to date gave a major interview with Obama himself., The Obama Doctrine The Atlantic April 2016 issue.

It's understandably provoking reactions, such as, 'The Obama Doctrine' Is To Whitewash His Foreign Policy Moon of Alabama 03/10/2016. (No, the Alabama reference in the blog name does not make it a Trumpist criticism!)

Goldberg presents Obama's presumably own self-portrait as more realist and cautious than the humanitarian interventions:

The current U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, who is the most dispositionally interventionist among Obama’s senior advisers, had argued early for arming Syria’s rebels. Power, who during this period served on the National Security Council staff, is the author of a celebrated book excoriating a succession of U.S. presidents for their failures to prevent genocide. The book, A Problem From Hell, published in 2002, drew Obama to Power while he was in the U.S. Senate, though the two were not an obvious ideological match. Power is a partisan of the doctrine known as “responsibility to protect,” which holds that sovereignty should not be considered inviolate when a country is slaughtering its own citizens. She lobbied him to endorse this doctrine in the speech he delivered when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, but he declined. Obama generally does not believe a president should place American soldiers at great risk in order to prevent humanitarian disasters, unless those disasters pose a direct security threat to the United States. [my emphasis]

It's all relative, we might say, but that doesn't work for me as a description of Obama's approach.

And in way that has so frustrated base Democrats, he describes it in Republican terms, if not quite 2016 Republican terms:

Obama, unlike liberal interventionists, is an admirer of the foreign-policy realism of President George H. W. Bush and, in particular, of Bush’s national-security adviser, Brent Scowcroft (“I love that guy,” Obama once told me). Bush and Scowcroft removed Saddam Hussein’s army from Kuwait in 1991, and they deftly managed the disintegration of the Soviet Union; Scowcroft also, on Bush’s behalf, toasted the leaders of China shortly after the slaughter in Tiananmen Square. As Obama was writing his campaign manifesto, The Audacity of Hope, in 2006, Susan Rice, then an informal adviser, felt it necessary to remind him to include at least one line of praise for the foreign policy of President Bill Clinton, to partially balance the praise he showered on Bush and Scowcroft.

As an aside, let me just say that there are other perspectives on the Bush family that one might take. William Rivers Pitt writes (Please Clap: The Bush Dynasty Has Been Broken Truthout 03/13/2016):

Jeb Bush dropped out of the 2016 presidential race not long ago, and you could hear the earth itself heave a sigh of relief. When he announced he was suspending his campaign, head down with a pathetic shrug between his ears, a political dynasty that has looted and ravaged this nation and the world for going on 80 years was snuffed like a guttering candle in a forgotten church. In that darkness is the light, because the planet doesn't have to worry about the Bush family any more. They'll lurk, sure, like a purse snatcher skulking in the shadows next to an ATM, but the next time you see a Bush on television will be when they are getting lowered into their grave.

Goldberg passes along this bit of stenography:

Over the course of our conversations, I came to see Obama as a president who has grown steadily more fatalistic about the constraints on America’s ability to direct global events, even as he has, late in his presidency, accumulated a set of potentially historic foreign-policy achievements—controversial, provisional achievements, to be sure, but achievements nonetheless: the opening to Cuba, the Paris climate-change accord, the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, and, of course, the Iran nuclear deal. These he accomplished despite his growing sense that larger forces—the riptide of tribal feeling in a world that should have already shed its atavism; the resilience of small men who rule large countries in ways contrary to their own best interests; the persistence of fear as a governing human emotion—frequently conspire against the best of America’s intentions. But he also has come to learn, he told me, that very little is accomplished in international affairs without U.S. leadership.

This is classic Obama. There are a some things Democratic voters would like: the Iran deal, the Cuba opening. One that Dems would sigh and say, well, I hope it leads to something substantial: the Paris climate agreement. And one that is nails on the blackboard for most Democrats: the latest round of corporate-deregulation treaties packaged as "free trade" treaties. Obama apparently has been bringing more pressure on Congress to achieve that latter than just about anything else during his Administration of Holy Bipartisanship. And of course, a nice flourish of American Exceptionalist rhetoric, "very little is accomplished in international affairs without U.S. leadership." Goldberg also writes, "If Obama ever questioned whether America really is the world’s one indispensable nation, he no longer does so. But he is the rare president who seems at times to resent indispensability, rather than embrace it."

Goldberg even presents the Iran deal as something from which Obama wants to distance himself: “'The Iran deal was never primarily about trying to open a new era of relations between the U.S. and Iran,' Susan Rice told me. 'It was far more pragmatic and minimalist. The aim was very simply to make a dangerous country substantially less dangerous. No one had any expectation that Iran would be a more benign actor.'”

Holy Bipartisanship, Batman!

And if that's not already enough Bipartsanship to give Democrats heartburn, there's also this:

In his efforts to off-load some of America’s foreign-policy responsibilities to its allies, Obama appears to be a classic retrenchment president in the manner of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon.Retrenchment, in this context, is defined as “pulling back, spending less, cutting risk, and shifting burdens to allies,” Stephen Sestanovich, an expert on presidential foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, explained to me. “If John McCain had been elected in 2008, you would still have seen some degree of retrenchment,” Sestanovich said. “It’s what the country wanted. If you come into office in the middle of a war that is not going well, you’re convinced that the American people have hired you to do less.” One difference between Eisenhower and Nixon, on the one hand, and Obama, on the other, Sestanovich said, is that Obama “appears to have had a personal, ideological commitment to the idea that foreign policy had consumed too much of the nation’s attention and resources.”

Goldberg may be trying to stir up problems for the Democrats in the fall with the following. Or to have an excuse to use "s**t" several times. But it's still relevant to the primary campaign:

Obama would say privately that the first task of an American president in the post-Bush international arena was “Don’t do stupid shit.”

Obama’s reticence frustrated Power and others on his national-security team who had a preference for action. Hillary Clinton, when she was Obama’s secretary of state, argued for an early and assertive response to Assad’s violence. In 2014, after she left office, Clinton told me that “the failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad ... left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled.” When The Atlantic published this statement, and also published Clinton’s assessment that “great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle,” Obama became “rip-shit angry,” according to one of his senior advisers. The president did not understand how “Don’t do stupid shit” could be considered a controversial slogan. Ben Rhodes recalls that “the questions we were asking in the White House were ‘Who exactly is in the stupid-shit caucus? Who is pro–stupid shit?’ ” The Iraq invasion, Obama believed, should have taught Democratic interventionists like Clinton, who had voted for its authorization, the dangers of doing stupid shit.

Goldberg devotes a lot of space to the decision that Obama made not to massively and directly intervene militarily in Syria during his second term. In his description, this was a case of Obama acting wisely and prudently in the face of advisers include Joe Biden who wanted to go in guns blazing. Or, as Goldberg's stenography puts it, "Obama understands that the decision he made to step back from air strikes, and to allow the violation of a red line he himself had drawn to go unpunished, will be interrogated mercilessly by historians. But today that decision is a source of deep satisfaction for him."

Somehow, I get the feeling there is a lot of spin involved here. Yes, deciding not to do a massive direct intervention was one of the more significant good decisions Obama has made on foreign policy. But as Goldberg's own account shows, he foolishly drew a "red line" that he didn't need to over the use of chemical weapons by Assad's regime. But that was a dumb thing to do in itself. And we don't really know what to make of this until we know a lot more about just who was making which claims about the chemical weapons use. From the reports I've seen, including Goldberg's article, it's never been clear to me that it was the Syrian regime doing it and not one of the rebel groups.

And the Obama Administration also decided to feed the conflict by putting in "clandestine" support for the very dubious Free Syrian Army and who knows who else. Goldberg says that we're currently fielding "a clandestine CIA-aided army of 10,000 rebels battling in Syria." Real news! We've found the Syrian Moderates!! (I'm sure a herd of unicorns will turn up any day now, too.) His policy of insisting on the departure of Assad also looks reckless so far. His Syrian policy looks an awful lot like Obama muddling along, trying to satisfy a variety of competing demands without deciding on a clear and practical policy.

Okay, and this is just depressing: "one of the few foreign leaders Obama respects, Angela Merkel, the German chancellor." (my emphasis)

[Deep sigh]

Obama is trying to distance himself from his own "surge" in Afghanistan: "He was tired of watching Washington unthinkingly drift toward war in Muslim countries. Four years earlier, the president believed, the Pentagon had “jammed” him on a troop surge for Afghanistan."

Goldberg quotes Obama as saying a lot of fluff that amounts to little more than a regurgitation of standard rhetoric that shouldn't much disturb the Very Serious People, e.g., "we’ve got to be hardheaded at the same time as we’re bighearted."


The Jeffrey Goldberg article is another part in Obama's push to create a conventional wisdom among the Very Serious People about his legacy. The article is embarrassingly stenographic. One good sign is the number of nails-on-the-blackboard comparisons of Obama to this Republican and that, comparisons Obama obviously likes. Holy Bipartisanship, Batman! And if you like pages worth of stuff like the following, you'll find it downright entertaining reading. If you have a gag reflex at compulsive Bipartisanship ... not so much:

"Those who speak with Obama about jihadist thought say that he possesses a no-illusions understanding of the forces that drive apocalyptic violence among radical Muslims, but he has been careful about articulating that publicly, out of concern that he will exacerbate anti-Muslim xenophobia. He has a tragic realist’s understanding of sin, cowardice, and corruption, and a Hobbesian appreciation of how fear shapes human behavior. And yet he consistently, and with apparent sincerity, professes optimism that the world is bending toward justice. He is, in a way, a Hobbesian optimist."

Obama admits to Goldberg that his Libyan intervention, a very dubious achievement for which Hillary Clinton also claims credit, was a failure. But at the same time, he defends it:

“So we actually executed this plan as well as I could have expected: We got a UN mandate, we built a coalition, it cost us $1 billion—which, when it comes to military operations, is very cheap. We averted large-scale civilian casualties, we prevented what almost surely would have been a prolonged and bloody civil conflict. And despite all that, Libya is a mess.”

Mess is the president’s diplomatic term; privately, he calls Libya a “shit show,” in part because it’s subsequently become an isis haven—one that he has already targeted with air strikes. It became a shit show, Obama believes, for reasons that had less to do with American incompetence than with the passivity of America’s allies and with the obdurate power of tribalism.

“When I go back and I ask myself what went wrong,” Obama said, “there’s room for criticism, because I had more faith in the Europeans, given Libya’s proximity, being invested in the follow-up,” he said.

Goldberg devotes a couple of paragraphs to the Administration's policy toward Latin America, where he quotes Obama criticizing the leaders of Venezuela and Nicaragua. There is no mention of Obama's support for the coup in 2009 Honduras and the "soft coup" in Paraguay in 2012. Both are incidents which have significantly affected the image of his Administration in Latin America. The latter is a significant model that influences the current effort to oust left-leaning Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff.

I think this article would have benefited from more active editing. Besides its suck-up tone, a lot of it just seems to be chatter to illustrate the cool places Goldberg got to go with the President.

Obama's Oval Office Address on Terrorism 2015

Obama's speech on terrorism Sunday evening was a typically frustrating Obama speech for me. (Address to the Nation by the President WhiteHouse.gov 12/06/2015)

He sounded sensible and Presidential, discouraging mindless bigotry against Islam and Muslims and stating he wouldn't be drawn into a ground war. That made it far better than what we hear from Republicans these days. Even if there is a bit of semantic trickery in calling the Special Forces and others American combat personnel who are and will be participating something other than ground forces. He made sensible sounding proposals about better gun regulation, which he is unlikely to press in any serious way.

But then he talked about terrorism exclusively in terms of Muslim perpetrators (Bipartisanship!), declared he would escalate US military intervention in Syria/Iraq with no obvious coherent political strategy (Bipartisanship!) and talked about American Exceptionalism (Bipartisanship!). And there wasn't ONE WORD addressing the recent murderous terrorist attack by a violent Christianist in Colorado Springs. (Bipartisanship!) And the Republicans will reward him by calling him soft on Islam and appeasing of terrorists, and demand even more military escalation.

During the speech, I couldn't help but think back to Obama's let's-all-come-together speech after a rightwing nutter shot Congresswoman Gabby Giffords in the head in an attempted political assassination of a sitting Member of Congress of the President's own party. If Obama had taken the opportunity then or with any of the other rightwing terrorist incidents during his first term to start stigmatizing the Ted Nugent/Jim Gilchrist NRA and similar gun-proliferation advocates, he might be in a position now to achieve some substantial progress on limiting gun proliferation and holding Republicans morally responsible for blatantly encouraging far-right violence. And, so far as I know, Cliven Bundy is still out there mooching off the federal government and his supporters who showed up for an armed confrontation with federal agents have suffered no consequences for their actions. Bipartisanship! (A year after armed standoff, Cliven Bundy still star of his own Tea Party-tinged western Guardian 06/01/2015)

But he wasn't interested in doing that. I think his seemingly intense desire for Bipartisanship as such is limiting him even at this stage of his Presidency.

"Keeping the American people safe" - to the exclusion of the Constitution

The White House website presents President Obama's address later today this way: "On Sunday, December 6, at 8:00 pm ET, President Obama will address the nation from the Oval Office about the steps our government is taking to fulfill his highest priority: Keeping the American people safe." (my emphasis)

The experience since 2001 of the so-called "war on terror" has convinced me that such seemingly innocuous formulations are actually dangerous.

From Article 2, Section 1 of the Constitution: "Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, he shall take the following Oath or Affirmation:—'I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.'"

Defending the Constitution of course includes defending the people of the country against foreign enemies and domestic ones that threaten the Constitutional order: "The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened), against domestic Violence." (Article 4.4)

But preserving the Constitution and a "Republican Form of Government" also means protecting due process of law and basic freedoms. Including the freedoms of speech, press, religion and assembly. Not just the Ku Klux Klan version of the Second Amendment.

And we've seen way too much of government officials and Members of Congress, both Republican and Democratic, showing indifference and even hostility toward basic Constitutional freedoms in the name of "keeping the American people safe."

But the right to war profiteering, its main beneficiaries tend to think that "safety" will protect their most sacred right just fine.

Lee Fang and Zaid Jilani report in Defense Contractors Cite “Benefits” of Escalating Conflicts in the Middle East The Intercept 12/04/2015:

Major defense contractors Raytheon, Oshkosh, and Lockheed Martin assured investors at a Credit Suisse conference in West Palm Beach this week that they stand to gain from the escalating conflicts in the Middle East.

Lockheed Martin Executive Vice President Bruce Tanner told the conference his company will see “indirect benefits” from the war in Syria, citing the Turkish military’s recent decision to shoot down a Russian warplane.

The incident, Tanner said, heightens the risk for U.S. military operations in the region, providing “an intangible lift because of the dynamics of that environment and our products in theater.” He also stressed that the Russian intervention would highlight the need for Lockheed Martin-made F-22s and the new F-35 jets.

Trying to transform the Middle East and making a mess of it

Andrew Bacevich in Don't let the US try and solve Arab world problems Aljazeera 03/31/2015 talks about the evolution from the Cheney-Bush Freedom Agenda in the Middle East to Obama's policies for the region:

The great conceit of the Freedom Agenda was that the United States possessed the capacity - primarily measured in armed might - to discard one US-devised order and replace it with another more to its own liking. In Iraq that enterprise failed irredeemably. In Washington, however, the implications of that failure, stemming primarily from a reckless misuse of military power, have yet to sink in.

Today the limited stability that [Condoleeza] Rice treated with such disdain is well and truly gone, as events everywhere from Libya to Yemen to Syria to Iraq make abundantly clear.

Yet in responding to the chaos that Rice and her colleagues did so much to foster, US President Barack Obama clings to the expectation that US military power, wielded directly or through proxies, can somehow or other restore a semblance of calm, however partial or imperfect.

Credit Obama with having learned one important lesson from his predecessor: Sending US troops to invade and occupy countries in the Greater Middle East is a dumb idea.

Fault him for not appreciating the larger lesson that US military intervention in this part of the world is inherently counterproductive. Air strikes, drone strikes, cyber strikes, special operations forces dispatched to advise or train or kill: None of these will suffice to check the anarchic forces that the United States itself helped let loose.

Obama took office as President after the neoliberal economic policies ascendant since 1980 in the US had produced the Great Recession and when the Cheney-Bush radical foreign policy had produced a visible disaster in the Iraq War and failure in the Afghanistan War.

Both situations were an ideal opportunity for a Democratic President seeking to be transformational. But Obama's intent and orientation was transactional rather than transformative.

But transactional in the right direction is far preferable to continuing with a disastrous direction. As Bacevich notes in this piece, "To think of history as tragedy comes closer to the truth" than thinking of it "as a series of problems that the United States is called upon to solve."

James Mann recounts in Rise of the Vulcans (2004):

In the days immediately after September 11, the Vulcans [the Cheney-Bush foreign policy team] were determined to do things differently from in the past. Now they were no longer to listen to old excuses, old rationalizations, old ways of thinking of the sort that they had had to tolerate when they had dealt with the world in previous administrations. This blend of resolve and righteous indignation cut across the Bush administration, from hawks to moderates and from central issues of terrorism to peripheral ones. Richard Armitage [Deputy Secretary of State 2001– February 22, 2005] was a perfect example of the new mood.

Mann recounts a meeting of Armitage just after the 9/11 attacks in his office with the head of Pakistan's intelligence agency ISI, Gen. Mahmoud Ahmad, and Pakistan's Ambassador to the US Maleeha Lodhi:

Now, Armitage said, Pakistan faced a choice. Pakistan was either on America's side or not. You can report that back to General Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistani president, Armitage said. When Ahmad tried to explain the background to Pakistan's relationship with the Taliban, Armitage cut him short. "History starts today," he said. [my emphasis]

That kind of transformative attitude proved to be disastrous in reality.

Chuck Hagel resigns: was he too militant or not militant enough in pursuing New Hitler?

Chuck Hagel resigned as Secretary of Defense today. It's pretty clear he was fired.

The Young Turks discuss Hagel's resignation/firing in Pentagon Boss Chuck Hagel Fired - Why And What Now?

This is the PBS Newshour report on the resignation, Why is Chuck Hagel stepping down? 11/24/2014. One of the two guests interviewed is neoconservative Thomas Donnelly from AEI, aka, Neocon Central. The other is P.J. Crowley, a former Assistant Secretary of State in the Obama Administration.

Robert Reich posted on Facebook today that he thinks Hagel was dumped from being Defense Secretary because Obama and his advisers think Hagel's not enthusiastic enough for more wars:

Why is Chuck Hagel being canned after having been Defense chief for less than two years? Competence aside, part of the answer is the White House has moved from seeing events in Iraq and Syria through the Vietnam lens to the Nazi Germany lens, and Hagel is still seeing them as Vietnam.

For the last fifty years, American foreign policy has swung between two polar-opposite views: Through the Vietnam lens, we don’t want to be dragged into foreign civil wars that can end up costing tens of thousands of American lives. But through the Nazi Germany lens, we must stop barbarous and aggressive fascist movements before they overwhelm civilization. Obama himself began with Vietnam lenses but he and his advisers view the Islamic State as more like Nazi Germany.

I hope Reich is wrong about the Obama team seeing Middle East crises through a "Nazi Germany" lens. One of the biggest problems in US foreign policy since the Second World War is that policymakers inflate opponents in "Hitler." It gets particularly dysfunctional in a situation like Syria where no one can really decide whether the New Hitler is the Islamic State group or their mortal enemy the Assad regime.

One of the most useful books I've ever read on US foreign policy - one we're unlikely to see Little Tommy Friedman ever quoting - is The Specter of Munich: Reconsidering the Lessons of Appeasing Hitler (2006) by Jeffrey Record of the Army Air War College; a version of it is available via that link. He thinks the "Munich analogy" has been so overused that it not only ignores the real history of "Munich" in 1938 and why it was a bad policy for the West but also leads to wildly inflating threats and over-reacting in self-destructive ways. As he puts it, the real Hitler and Nazi Germany were not only enormously powerful militarily (and got a huge boost from the Skoda arms factories they got in Czechoslovakia from the Munich Agreement) but were also "unappeasable *and* undeterrable." And, "No post-1945 foreign dictatorship bears genuine comparison to the Nazi dictatorship."

When Chicken Littles like Sen. Lindsay Graham squawk that the Islamic State is going to come "kill us all" in the United States, that's just crackpot warmongering. Only bad policy comes out of that.

Historian Andrew Bacevich has been one of the best analysts of US military affairs for the last decade plus. He has basically a conservative-realist framework for looking about foreign and military policy, based on the thinking of Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. He has meaningful criticisms of both Democratic and Republican thinking on foreign policy without falling into the vapid Both Sides Do It cliches our star pundits so often use. This piece of his at TomDispatch addresses the current poor state of US foreign policy, Malarkey on the Potomac: Five Bedrock Washington Assumptions That Are Hot Air (with an introduction by Tom Engelhardt) 11/23/2014.

But as The Young Turks discuss in the clip above, it's not entirely clear that Hagel is being pushed out because of his caution and restraint.

Chemi Shalev writs in The bitter irony is that Israel is the sorriest to see Hagel go Haaretz 11/24/2014:

Hagel was brought in to withdraw American forces from Iraq and Afghanistan at a time of severe budgetary cuts, but reality in the Middle East and elsewhere had other plans. Rightly or wrongly, through its own fault or that of others, the Pentagon has been perceived in recent months as being caught flat-footed by the rampage of Islamic State in Iraq, the survival of Bashar Assad in Syria, the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the belligerency of Vladimir Putin in Ukraine and more. Under these circumstances, the credibility of America’s veiled threat that “all options are on the table” against Iran also took a serious hit.

But rather than displaying the kind of resolute confidence and leadership needed in such dangerous times, Hagel often sounded like Chicken Little shouting “the sky is falling.” He told Charlie Rose only last week that ISIS is “an incredibly powerful new threat” to every interest we have, the likes of which have never been seen before. Hagel’s panicky overkill, which already rankled Obama back when he still referred to ISIS as “junior varsity” may have been the final nail in his coffin: better the momentary embarrassment of an appointment gone wrong, Obama’s advisers reasoned, than the long term damage incurred by a defense secretary who sometimes sounds as if he hasn't convinced even himself that he can get the job done. [my emphasis]

For the next Secretary of Defense, I hope he Obama at least finds a Democrat to nominate this time.

Cenk Uygur on permanent war

Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks talks about permanent war and Obama's part in it, Endless War Is Here To Stay - Thanks Obama! 10/08/2014:

David Bromwich's Obama

I find David Bromwich's analyses of President Obama's politics consistently helpful because he pays close attention to his public persona and parses the President's words carefully. So he often highlights important moments for understanding Obama's politics.

On the other hand, Bromwich sometimes overgeneralizes from the attitude Obama takes toward liberals and progressives. And he tends to psychologize Obama's politics a bit much for my taste.

We see the virtues and shortcomings of Bromwich's approach in The Leader Obama Wanted to Become and What Became of Him Huffington Post 03/09/2014. For instance, he writes:

In Confidence Men [2011], the most valuable study so far of the character and performance of Obama as president, the journalist Ron Suskind noticed the tenacity of the new president's belief that he enjoyed a special connection to the American people. When his poll numbers were going down in late 2009, or when his "pivot to jobs" had become a topic of humor because he repeated the phrase so often without ever seeming to pivot, Obama would always ask his handlers to send him out on the road. He was convinced: the people would hear him and he would make them understand.

He sustained this free-floating confidence even though he knew that his town halls, from their arranged format to their pre-screened audiences, were as thoroughly stage-managed as any other politician's. But Obama told Suskind in early 2011 that he had come to believe "symbols and gestures ... are at least as important as the policies we put forward."

I'm not sure about the original context of that last quote from Suskind. But it's something that I often think, that Obama is substituting "symbols and gestures" for substance. This is something all politicians do to some extent, of course.

But I would focus on Obama's version differently. It seems to me that Obama is particularly inclined to make the assumption that liberals and progressives will be satisfied with the symbolic satisfactions and not expect policies to back them up. But his pursuit of Bipartisanship has meant that he was far too willing to give conservatives the policy options they preferred.

The sequester is a case in point, one of his signature bipartisan compromises. It meant big cuts in domestic spending, something very much in line with conservative priorities and against liberal priorities.

His Grand Bargain, whose core turned out to be Obama's repeated proposals from 2011 to early 2013 to cut benefits on Social Security and Medicare, was definitely a substantive policy proposal. It wasn't just "symbols and gestures." Liberals were energized in opposition to it. And Republicans were so uninterested in Obama's treasured Bipartisanship that they passed up the opportunity to put those programs on the road to abolition and be able to blame Obama for it.

Suskind's Confidence Men spends a great many pages on the economic policy of the first Obama Administration, in which Obama deferred heavily to figures like Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner, who were Democrats but very much on the conservative, lighter-regulation, don't-hold-the-banks-accountable-for-misdeeds side of those debates.

The psychologizing can be illustrated by this passage:

Perhaps the thin connection between Obama's words and his actions does not support the use of the word "conviction" at all. Let us say instead that he mistook his preferences for convictions -- and he can still be trusted to tell us what he would prefer to do. Review the record and it will show that his first statement on a given issue generally lays out what he would prefer. Later on, he resigns himself to supporting a lesser evil, which he tells us is temporary and necessary. The creation of a category of permanent prisoners in "this war we're in" (which he declines to call "the war on terror") was an early and characteristic instance. Such is Obama's belief in the power and significance of his own words that, as he judges his own case, saying the right thing is a decent second-best to doing the right thing. [my emphasis]

This and other parts of Bromwich's article suggests that Obama generally lacks conviction. But is that really justified?

In the immediately following paragraph, he suggests that a lack of conviction leads Obama to value conformity with the views of The Successful, and also includes one of those interesting observations I hadn't heard mention before, Obama's aversion to any association with Jimmy Carter:

More than most people, Obama has been a creature of his successive environments. He talked like Hyde Park when in Hyde Park. He talks like Citigroup when at the table with Citigroup. And in either milieu, he likes the company well enough and enjoys blending in. He has a horror of unsuccess. Hence, in part, his extraordinary aversion to the name, presence, or precedent of Jimmy Carter: the one politician of obvious distinction whom he has declined to consult on any matter. At some level, Obama must realize that Carter actually earned his Nobel Prize and was a hard-working leader of the country. Yet of all the living presidents, Carter is the one whom the political establishment wrote off long ago, and so it is Carter whom he must not touch. [my emphasis]

The appeal of conformity to the rich and powerful is easy enough to understand. On the other hand, being President of the United States is the standard proverbial definition of American Dream success. You know, we're the country where any child can grow up to be President! Which means that Presidents have a considerable number of options for pursuing success, both in office and in their post-Presidential careers.

It seems more likely to me that Obama is generally committed to the conservative Democratic vision he's largely pursued: neoliberal economics, a conventional continuation of the US positions as a global hegemon with a pragmatic emphasis on not getting stuck in protracted wars, extreme secrecy, the staggering domestic electronic surveillance, moderate regulations on banking, and a significant expansion of access to private health insurance. He's made some good court appointments, and the average democratic appointee to Cabinet departments and other parts of the bureaucracy are presumably on the average more liberal than a Republican President would appoint. His stimulus in early 2009 was enough to kick the economy into a better state than a continued free fall would have been. Whether the weak economy of right now will be seen as in a weak recovery or as a weak recovery in the middle of a longer depression remains to be seen.

Obama is a President committed to a transactive leadership style of relatively gradual tinkering with existing policies, not a transformative one who wants to create a new New Deal or Great Society. Even taking into account the extreme antics of the current Republican Party in Congress, I don't see any reason to believe that he lacks conviction in the general direction he's leading as just described. What looks like timidity to liberals - the restricted nature of the stimulus, the dropping of the public option from health care reform, his muted response to the massive BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico - isn't reflected in any lack of commitment to the more conservative policies he's adopted. The White House pushed back hard against liberals and progressives who wanted to keep the public option in the Obamacare package, for instance. And his steadfast defense of the NSA spying and his legal war on whistleblowers don't show evidence of timidity or lack of conviction.

Tags: barack obama, david bromwich, obama administration

Drone strikes and the Obama legacy

I think this is right: "President Barack Obama is criticized every day for the problems and difficulties associated with the Affordable Care Act. But in the long term, it's likely history will scrutinize the CIA’s use of drone strikes during his administration with a far more critical eye."

I hope it's right.

That's a quote from Jay Busbee, New book: Obama told aides that drones make him 'really good at killing people' Yahoo! News 11/04/2013. The article's title references a quote from the new book by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, Double Down: Game Change 2012 (2013). Busbee reports:

... Obama told aides in connection with the CIA's drone program that he is “really good at killing people.”

It’s the kind of quote likely to make Obama supporters cringe or scramble for justifying explanations, perhaps by rationalizing the quote as either false or out of context, or critiquing the information-gathering methods of authors Mark Halperin and John Heilemann. The writers spent two years interviewing dozens of people connected with both the Obama and Romney campaigns.

Whether uttered in jest or in resignation, the Obama quote will only add to the concerns of those wondering whether the president has embraced the Godlike, life-and-death power of the Oval Office. After campaigning against the intense interrogation procedures pursued under President George W. Bush, Obama has vastly expanded the drone program. Despite its intense unpopularity overseas, in part because of civilian casualties and in part because of its unclear, secretive mandates, the Pakistan drone program continues as it has since 2004.

Tags: barack obama, drone+war, obama administration

Debt limit dust settling?

The House hasn't passed the agreement as of this writing. So we don't know until the votes are counted. But it seems like the debt ceiling fight will now move on to its next round. (Update: The House passed the deal at 10:21 EDT, as Annie-Rose Strasser reports, along with analysis of the deal in Countdown To Catastrophe: The Latest Updates On The Shutdown And The Debt Ceiling Think Progress, dated 10/15/2013 but still being updated on the 16th.)

The Senate bill that looks to be the immediate solution is a deal, even though Obama claimed not to be negotiating over the debt ceiling. One of the provision is a tightened income verification on recipients of government subsidies for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act (ACA/Obamacare). George Condon, Jr. discusses the politics of this in a piece written before he had access to details on the latest Senate bill, White House: Debt-Ceiling Deal's Obamacare Change Not ‘Ransom’ National Journal 10/16/2013:

The deal, brokered by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, includes a section that modifies Obamacare to include new income-verification requirements for those seeking subsidies under the law. Only five weeks ago, the administration threatened to veto a Republican effort to force income verification for those same subsidy recipients.

Because that language has not been made public, it is unknown how close the two versions are. But White House officials insisted Wednesday that they aren't even close. "Two different proposals," said one top official.

Speaking on background, the official said the House bill would have put "at risk" the basic structure of the law's tax credits and subsidies for individuals "by making them contingent on an IG prospectively certifying that the system was sound. This would have caused unnecessary uncertainty" and delayed health care coverage for millions. In contrast, the version agreed to in the Senate would have the Health and Human Services secretary certify to Congress that eligibility is being verified. The official said that the compromise has the Inspector General "perform a retrospective analysis, which is consistent with the traditional role of an IG, and will not impede or affect the provision of benefits to individuals through the ACA."

Press secretary Jay Carney also struck a confident pose when he dismissed the suggestion that the president had paid even a little bit of ransom in moving on the GOP verification effort. That provision, Carney told reporters, "was negotiated by Senate Democrats and Senate Republicans and is a modest adjustment to the existing Affordable Care Act law. We have always said we are willing to make improvements and adjustments to the law. Ransom would be a wholly different thing." Pressed at his briefing, Carney added, "We're fine with it."

He said the president stuck to his guns in refusing to accept any effort by Republicans "to extract unilateral political concessions in return for Congress fulfilling its fundamental responsibilities." [my emphasis]

It remains to be seen how serious a problem that could become. The Republicans in Congress and the courts are already chipping away at the ACA, even though the quixotic defunding attempt failed. They can be expected to continue such efforts.

Peter Grier in Debt limit debacle: Who won and who lost? Christian Science Monitor 10/16/2013 talks about a major feature of the non-ransom deal, the short time it sets up for the next major round of what we just went through:

The Republican Party’s poll numbers have plunged to record lows, but numbers for Democrats have fallen as well. Mr. Obama’s job approval rating has reached a new low in the RealClearPolitics rolling average of major polls: 51.4 percent now have an unfavorable opinion of his actions.

Yes, the Senate compromise leaves the GOP with virtually nothing new to show for the shutdown and default crisis. But is that victory for the Democratic Party? Spending levels remain locked at sequester levels, much lower than Democrats would like. The agreement only keeps the government open until Jan. 15 and raises the debt ceiling until Feb. 7. That means it’s possible we'’ll be back in the same fight next year. [my emphasis]

The "next year" in question is three months from now. That's quite a limited victory, from my viewpoint.

And for all my criticism as well as many others of the craziness of the Congressional Republicans' recent behavior, there was an at least not-unreasonable ground to believe they could have pressured Obama into making major concessions over the debt ceiling.

And political fiscal crises, as much as they seem alike, take place amid subtly different circumstances, so we wouldn't rule tactics in or out. Remember, the GOP thought Democrats would crack this time, as they did in 2011's budget battle. But that experience just made the administration all the more determined to hang tough this time. [my emphasis]

And a sobering portion of this fight, which for the Democrats was a more hardline stand than we're used to seeing them take, was that not only Obama but other Dems like Dick Durbin were eager to offer up "entitlement reform," i.e., cuts in benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, as a post-non-negotiation negotiation after the debt ceiling was raised.

Felix Salmon also emphasizes the significance of the timetable (Barack Obama vs zombies Reuters 10/16/2013):

But as a feeling of relief courses through Washington and the markets, let’s not get carried away. Yes, as Jonathan Chait says, it’s very good news that the House Republicans’ plan collapsed. But the can hasn't been kicked very far down the road: we’re going to hit the debt ceiling again in just a few short months. And at that point, one of two things will happen. Either the Republicans, licking their self-inflicted wounds from the current fiasco, will quietly and efficiently pass a bill while getting nothing in return. Or, in the spirit of "if at first you don’t succeed", they will try, try again.

We have every reason to believe that the latter will be the case.

And Salmon reminds us that there is, for Democrats, an unpleasant recent precedent for this situation the non-deal deal creates:

Remember that the sequester was initially put into place as a way to force the hand of any self-interested, logical group of politicians. They had to either come to an agreement — or face an outcome which was specifically designed to be as unpalatable to as many different interest groups as possible. And yet, despite the Sword of Damocles hanging over their heads, the politicians squabbled until it fell. The bigger sword, the debt ceiling, has not fallen yet — but I for one have no particular faith in the ability of Congress to always prevent it from doing so.

It's nice that Congress appears to be ready to back off from the House Republicans' attempt to crash the world financial system. But now the same fight is coming up again right around the corner.

Rick Perlstein on Facebook flagged this article by Bob Kuttner, A Letter From the GOP to Itself: Why We Will Come Out Ahead 10/14/2013 Huffington Post . Perlstein commented, "Kuttner brilliant explicates my principle that Obamaism loses, even or especially when it wins."

In this case, the result of a supposed Democratic win is to keep the sequester levels of austerity spending in place and set up another near-term battle in which the Republicans can threaten the faith and credit of the United States with a refusal to raise the debt limit, which in turn is likely to result in additional austerity. I don't won't to be pessimistic. But I do want to be realistic about what we're seeing.

We need better than "Obamaism" from the Democratic Party.

Tags: debt ceiling, obama administration

What happens when the debt ceiling is reached?

October 17, this coming Thursday, is the date that the Treasury Department has established as the deadline for increasing the debt ceiling, based on cash-flow projections. That's the day that the federal government is estimated to start having too little cash to pay its bills. That does not mean that the government starts defaulting on bond payments at 12:01AM Thursday morning. But it means that the government would have to start postponing payments on bills and cutting back in a significant way on ongoing federal expenditures. At sometime around the last week of October, the government would apparently have to begin defaulting on bonds.

Here are a few articles looking at the likely consequences if a default happens. Two cautions are in order. One is that nobody can predict exactly how a US government default on bonds will affect the world economy. The dollar is still the only reserve currency for the world. And the rock-solid reputation of US bonds is a main pillar of the world financial system.

The other caution is that the President of the United States clearly has options to avoid defaulting even without Congress raising the debt ceiling: invoking the 14th Amendment to continue financing the government; minting a platinum coin of a $1 trillion or other denomination to fund the government; and, creative bond-issuance techniques that would provide government the funding it needs without technically violating the debt limit. I'm assuming that, faced with a catastrophic default, President Obama will use one of them. Part of the uncertainty here is that if he wants to keep maximum pressure on the Fort Sumter Republicans in Congress to do the right thing by Thursday, not announcing in advance that he will do that is a key element of doing that. (Christopher Matthews discusses those three options in Three Not-So-Crazy Ways Out of the Debt Ceiling Crisis Time 10/05/2013)

Obviously, Obama has a responsibility here. This mess is clearly the fault of the Republican Party by any remotely coherent view. But the newfound Constitutional restraint that the White House has been claiming the last several days that Obama has now embraced should not prevent him from using Executive power - that really is pretty straightforward, especially with the platinum coin option - to save the world economy from the collective derangement of the Republican Party in Congress.

This unsigned Bloomberg View article, Congress's Blueprint for Global Catastrophe 10/10/2013, gives an outline of various consequences of an actual default. Including:

Forced spending cuts will kill the economic recovery. Over the course of a year, the Treasury borrows roughly $1 out of every $5 it spends, so hitting the debt ceiling would require it to cut outlays by about a fifth — and by much more in the short term, because flows into and out of the Treasury are lumpy. Such a severe fiscal squeeze would crush a still-tentative recovery at a time when widespread unemployment is threatening to do permanent damage to the country’s productive capacity. [emphasis in original]

This part is predictable, and to a large extent quantifiable. Conservatives have been whining ridiculously about the debt and deficit making the United States into "Greece." But a default like the Republicans are trying to bring down on our heads, really would put the US into the position of Greece. New, severe budget cuts would tank the already-weak recovery, shrinking the economy and reducing government revenues, which would require further cuts which would further weaken the economy - rinse and repeat, over and over and over. That is what happened to Greece in the euro currency trap and the brutal austerity programs forced onto them primarily by German Chancellor Angela Merkel. It's happening still, not only in Greece but also in Cyprus, Ireland, Italy, Spain and Portugal. Again, this part is predictable. How sudden or severe a new financial crisis would be is less so.

John Glover invokes the "H" word, though not in a goofy way, in U.S. Risks Joining 1933 Germany in Pantheon of Deadbeat Defaults Bloomberg Businessweek 10/13/2013. Again, not raising the debt ceiling would be a statement by Congress that they intend to push the US into default. It does not mean that the US goes into default on Day 1 or that the President has no options to prevent it.

Simon Johnson cautions about the uncertainty inherent in a US debt default scenario in The Debt Ceiling and Playing With Fire Economix 01/24/2013: "The main problem is that no one knows what would happen if the federal debt were to hit its legal ceiling."

Brad Plumer looks at the schedule for catastrophe in A very simple timeline for the debt-ceiling crisis Wonkblog 10/08/2013.

The creative bond-issuance techniques I mentioned are also discussed in:

Matthew Boesler, Everyone's Talking About This Sneaky Solution To The Debt Ceiling That Might Be Even Better Than The Platinum Coin Business Insider 10/08/2013

Matt Levine, Mint the Premium Bonds! Bloomberg View 10/02/2013

Felix Salmon looks at the debt prioritization process in Felix Salmon smackdown watch, debt prioritization edition Reuters 10/07/2013.

David Keohane in US default stripshow FT Alphaville 10/08/2013 gets into some of the consideration the Treasury would be wrestling with in a potential default situation to minimize the immediate damage on the world financial system. Cardiff Garcia does the same: Raise your hand if you know how the Treasury’s payment systems work ... Anyone? 10/06/2013

Mike Konczal checks in with how some of the conservative bigwigs have been analyzing the potential consequences of keeping the current debt ceiling: What are Conservative Experts Saying About Breaking Through the Debt Ceiling? Rortybomb 10/07/2013

Then there's the 600-lb. gorilla on these matters, the Shrill One, Paul Krugman. The title of this October 6 blog post gives an idea of the range of possibilities on the effects of a default, Hitting the Ceiling: Disastrous or Utterly Disastrous?, in which he writes:

... Goldman Sachs has a short paper (not online) arguing that the government probably could prioritize payments on Treasury bills, avoiding the breakdown of markets that would come from putting the world’s key safe asset into default. They don’t sound too confident. But even if they’re right, the government would still go into arrears on many other payments, from contractor bills to medical bills. And it would be forced into savage spending cuts, around 4 percent of GDP, that wouldn't just cause hardship (Surprise! No Social Security for you this month!) but amount to a severely contractionary fiscal policy, sending us into recession if it lasted any length of time.

I think this is important. Lots of people have been focusing on the possibility of a mega-Lehman event, but even if we somehow avoid that, this will be a catastrophe.

He reminds us that we should Blame the Deficit Scolds 10/07/2013. He makes an important point in Deficit Deniers 10/08/2013:

As we close in on the debt limit, with Obama insistent that he will not give in to hostage-taking, there is a growing chorus of voices on the right insisting that the whole debt limit thing is scare tactics from the administration, and that hitting the limit will be no big deal.

And the truth is that there is some real uncertainty about exactly what happens if we hit the ceiling. I think the administration has made a tactical error by putting all the weight of its warnings on the financial consequences; we might have a Lehman-type event, but we might not, and if it turns out not, the administration will have hurt its credibility. What sane people should be emphasizing is that in addition to the risk of financial disruption, there’s the certainty of huge pain from spending cuts and a crippling hit to economic growth. [my emphasis]

And in The Debt Ceiling and the Housing Bust 10/10/2013, he explains the process by which a default scenario would push the United States into a Cyprus/Greece/Ireland/Italy/Portugal/Spain austerity spiral, as income falls short of outlays without the government being able to borrow to close the gap:

This deficit would have to be closed immediately, cold turkey, in the event of a debt-ceiling breach. Probably the default — because it would be a default, even if interest payments are being made — would take the form of a “delayed payment regime“, with the government falling ever further behind on its bills.

So, when did we last see a spending shock this big? As it happens, we’re looking at something just about the size of the post-bubble housing bust, which was also about 4 percent of GDP[.]

You can argue that these spending cuts wouldn't have as much impact as the housing bust, because payment would be delayed, not cancelled, and at least some players would continue to expect eventual payment. On the other hand, as I pointed out in my last post, this time around we would have disconnected the automatic stabilizers — as GDP fell, revenues would fall, forcing another round of spending cuts, and so on.

Again, my point is that we could well be looking at a Great Recession-sized event even if we avoid a purely financial crisis.

If Congress goes with the force-the-US-into-default option and Obama decides to use Executive options to prevent that from happening, the House of Representatives would likely impeach him. But they will probably impeach him regardless, so he might as well save the economy from a self-imposed disaster. Not having another global economic catastrophe works for me.

Tags: angela merkel, austerity economics, debt ceiling, euro, france, françois hollande, greece, obama administration

Negotiating with the Mad Hatter Tea Party

Digby is right in her assessment of the logical negotiating implications of the White House's current position (Trading spaces, kabuki style Hullabaloo 10/12/2013):

Unless the president can extract some kind of ironclad agreement [from the Republicans] to never do this again, which is impossible, the whole thing will end up being a kabuki spectacle that rewards the craziest dancer.

Personally, I don't see how it could ever have worked --- once the dam on the debt ceiling was broken in 2011, I think this was bound to happen. The Republicans will have to lose and lose big, and explicitly because they become so out of the mainstream that even some of their own voters decide they're too nuts to be elected before this fanatical behavior stops. Until that happens, I think Democrats have to start being a little bit more strategic and wield their power more effectively than they have been. These people are nuts and kabuki dances pretending to "win" when you didn't actually win isn't going to cut it.

I have to think, however, that even on a kabuki level, Democrats whispering to reporters that they "recognize" that they're going to have to compromise after they've made such a huge deal out of never giving in probably isn't the best idea. It's hard for me to believe that came from the leadership or the White House because it would be completely ridiculous at this point. [italics in original]

The Republican Party in Congress is acting collectively crazy. They view the 2011 face-off over the debt ceiling as having been successful for them. The Obama White House has lately been saying that they see it more-or-less the same way. This time he needs to stop them cold.

But that only works if he really is willing to use one of the Executive options open to him to stop a default on the federal debt: the 14th Amendment, the platinum coin, or creative bond structuring.

Tags: debt ceiling, obama administration

Sean Wilentz and Jack Balkin on the debt ceiling crisis and the 14th Amendment

Sean Witlentz gives some historical perspective on Obama and the Debt New York Times 10/07/2013, in which he argues that the Republicans' threat to throw the United States government into default amounts to "proposing a blatant violation of the 14th Amendment, which states that 'the validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law' is sacrosanct and 'shall not be questioned.'"

Jack Balkin challenges part of his argument in Sean Wilentz on the Debt Ceiling Crisis: Imprudent Advice Balkinization 10/08/2013, arguing that "although Wilentz's history may be sound, his normative prescriptions are not."

Specifically, the question is whether the President could legitimately invoke the 14th Amendment to ignore the debt ceiling. Wilentz says yes, Balkin no.

Wilentz argues that debt-related language in the 14th Amendment aimed "to prevent precisely the abuses that the current House Republicans blithely condone." While "precisely" is a tricky word to use for such comparisons, I'm inclined to agree with him. He describes some of the political and legislative history involved:

Congress passed the 14th Amendment and sent it to the states for ratification in June 1866. Its section on the public debt began as an effort to ensure that the government would not be liable for debts accrued by the defeated Confederacy, but also to ensure that its own debt would be honored.

That was important because conservative Northern Democrats, many of whom had sympathized with the Confederacy, were in a position to obstruct or deny repayment on the full value of the public debt by paying creditors in depreciated paper money, or "greenbacks." This effective repudiation of obligations already accrued — to, among others, hundreds of thousands of Union pensioners and widows, as well as investors — would destroy confidence in the government and endanger the economy.

As the wording of the amendment evolved during the Congressional debate, the principle of the debt’s inviolability became a general proposition, applicable not just to the Civil War debt but to all future accrued debts of the United States. The Republican Senate leader, Benjamin F. Wade of Ohio, declared that by placing the debt "under the guardianship of the Constitution," investors would be spared from being "subject to the varying majorities which may arise in Congress." [my emphasis]

The strongest argument Balkin makes is this one:

... by acknowledging in advance that he will disregard the debt ceiling, Obama gives Republicans no reason to act responsibly in a debt ceiling crisis. They can happily refuse to budge knowing that Obama will bail them out and subject himself to impeachment. Even if Obama planned an emergency action along the lines of what Wilentz suggests, it would be foolhardy for him to announce it in advance. His proper strategy is to insist that the 14th Amendment does not give him the power to raise the debt ceiling without Congressional authorization, which is also the correct legal answer.

There he's considering what Wilentz recommends that Obama do immediately:

Surely the lawyers advising and defending the White House, let alone the president, know as much. Refraining from stating this loudly and clearly, and allowing Congress to slip off the hook, has been a puzzling and self-defeating strategy, leading to the crippling sequester and the politics of chronic debt-ceiling crisis. More important, by failing to clarify the constitutional principles involved, the administration has neglected to do its utmost to defend the Constitution.

I'm inclined to agree with Balkin on the negotiating strategy. My own preference would be for Obama to really refuse to negotiate with the Republicans, even refuse to negotiate about negotiating, and continue to insist that the Reps need to raise the debt ceiling and re-open the government. He could then wait for a couple of weeks as the Reps' poll ratings go through the floor, until a day in which the stock markets go into a serious panic. After the close of the markets that day, he would announce that he's had a trillion-dollar platinum coin minted that he will use to keep paying the bills, explaining, "I had to do this because the Lord of the Flies Republicans were determined to destroy the world economy. Again."

If I actually expected that Obama were willing and able to pull off something like that, I would agree with Balkin. But based on his negotiating record so far, I would actually feel more comfortable if he were to go with an earlier declaration of an Executive debt ceiling solution.

Balkin seems to think that Obama can and should avoid having the Republicans impeach him. But at this point, the Republicans in Congress and the broader "conservative movement" are certainly acting like their in Lord of the Flies mode. So I doubt Obama has much actual influence over whether the Reps impeach him or not. His basic stance on impeachment ought to be more along the lines of, "Bring it on, Cracker Party!" Also an all-but-unimaginable position for Obama the Great Bipartisan to take.

As the countdown to a US debt default gets closer to d-day, the gameboard is shifting more rapidly every day. As of yesterday, here are the views presented by Sleepy Mark Shields and David "Bobo" Brooks on the PBS Newhour Political Wrap section on 10/11/2013, Shields and Brooks on shutdown's 'tectonic' effect for Republicans:

Both are in their default mode of giving their own variations on conventional wisdom. Sleepy Mark rambles about the Erie Canal and land-grant colleges. Bobo gives his own calm-voice spin on how this isn't really so bad for the Republicans. Bobo's "tell" is that when he's really delivering a version of Republican ideology comically divorced from the real world, he assumes a soft, calm, imminently reasonable tone. He keeps that tone through most of this segment.

Bobo quote of the day: "It's not, like, a transformational news event." (after 9:50 in the video; they don't seem to have the transcript up as of this writing.)

At least Obama is still holding out for the Republicans to act like minimally responsible elected officials. As Billy House et al report in White House Rejects House Offer; Hope for Fiscal Deal Now Lies in Senate National Journal 10/12/2013:

Many House Republicans were openly angry following Saturday morning's meeting. They accused the White House of not only misleading House Republicans, but of pitting House and Senate Republicans against one another.

Rep. Tom Price, R-Ga., who also said the most recent House Republican offer had fallen through, described it as "a short-term debt limit extension with a budget process, and specific negotiations on reopening the government."

But Obama informed Boehner last night that he wasn't interested.

In the Senate, talks are in the hands of Majority Leader Harry Reid and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. "At the end of the day, what we all are supporting is the effort that's under way between Senator McConnell and Reid," said Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn.

The Fort Sumter Party no doubt feels that it's a victory for them that the President even held his supposedly non-negotiation negotiations with them. But you can understand how he doesn't feel that the Republicans have been entirely reliable negotiating partners:

This is also an interesting snippet of Republican opinion that they provide:

"The challenge that we have here, very simply, is that the Republicans have control of the House, the Democrats have control of the Senate, the White House and the media," said Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz. "The equation there is very asymmetric one for House leadership."

"I'm convinced that, given that equation, that we're doing the best we can," Franks said. "And there's a fifth issue—and that [is] we're dealing with a president who unfortunately doesn't hold himself … to the truth or his own word. That's my conviction."

Rep. Raul Labrador, R-Idaho, said, "I haven't been more proud of my leadership than I've been over the last three weeks. I think they're holding strong and they feel that the Senate Republicans are undermining their negotiations."

Said Price: "I'm just astounded that the president can't take yes for an answer. It really is remarkable that he refuses to accept basically what was his offer initially. So we'll see. Hopefully he'll wake up this morning a little smarter and a little more observant of what has actually been proposed."

Meanwhile, others said they were going home to their districts until the House is scheduled to return to session on Monday, subject to a callback from House leaders.

"I have not seen my 2-year-old for two weeks," said freshman Rep. Trey Radel, R-Fla.

The punchlines to that just write themselves!

Tags: debt ceiling, obama administration