In American politics, stupidity is the name of the game (Washington Post)
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Can a nation remain a superpower if its internal politics are incorrigibly stupid?
Start with taxes. In every other serious democracy, conservative political parties feel at least some obligation to match their tax policies with their spending plans. David Cameron, the new Conservative prime minister in Britain, is a leading example.
He recently offered a rather brutal budget that includes severe cutbacks. I have doubts about some of them, but at least Cameron cared enough about reducing his country’s deficit that alongside the cuts he also proposed an increase in the value-added tax, from 17.5 percent to 20 percent. Imagine: a fiscal conservative who really is a fiscal conservative.
That could never happen here because the fairy tale of supply-side economics insists that taxes are always too high, especially on the rich.
This is why Democrats will be fools if they don’t try to turn the Republicans’ refusal to raise taxes on families earning more than $250,000 a year into an election issue. If Democrats go into a headlong retreat on this, they will have no standing to govern.
The simple truth is that the wealthy in the United States — the people who have made almost all the income gains in recent years — are undertaxed compared with everyone else.
Consider two reports from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. One, issued last month, highlighted findings from the Congressional Budget Office showing that “the gaps in after-tax income between the richest 1 percent of Americans and the middle and poorest fifths of the country more than tripled between 1979 and 2007.”
The other, from February, used Internal Revenue Service data to show that the effective federal income tax rate for the 400 taxpayers with the very highest incomes declined by nearly half in just over a decade, even as their pre-tax incomes have grown five times larger.
The study found that the top 400 households “paid 16.6 percent of their income in federal individual income taxes in 2007, down from 30 percent in 1995.” We are talking here about truly rich people. Using 2007 dollars, it took an adjusted gross income of at least $35 million to make the top 400 in 1992, and $139 million in 2007.
The notion that when we are fighting two wars, we’re not supposed to consider raising taxes on such Americans is one sign of a country that’s no longer serious. Why do so few foreign policy hawks acknowledge that if they lack the gumption to ask taxpayers to finance the projection of American military power, we won’t be able to project it in the long run?
And if we are unwilling to have a full-scale debate over whether nation-building abroad is getting in the way of nation-building at home, we will accomplish neither.
Our discussion of the economic stimulus is another symptom of political irrationality. It’s entirely true that the $787 billion recovery package passed last year was not big enough to keep unemployment from rising above 9 percent.
But this is not actually an argument against the stimulus. On the contrary, studies showing that the stimulus created or saved as many as 3 million jobs are very hard to refute. It’s much easier to pretend that all this money was wasted, although the evidence is overwhelming that we should have stimulated more.
Then there’s the structure of our government. Does any other democracy have a powerful legislative branch as undemocratic as the U.S. Senate?
When our republic was created, the population ratio between the largest and smallest state was 13 to 1. Now, it’s 68 to 1. Because of the abuse of the filibuster, 41 senators representing less than 11 percent of the nation’s population can, in principle, block action supported by 59 senators representing more than 89 percent of our population. And you wonder why it’s so hard to get anything done in Washington?
I’m a chronic optimist about America. But we are letting stupid politics, irrational ideas on fiscal policy and an antiquated political structure undermine our power.
We need a new conservatism in our country that is worthy of the name. We need liberals willing to speak out on the threat our daft politics poses to our influence in the world. We need moderates who do more than stick their fingers in the wind to calculate the halfway point between two political poles.
And, yes, we need to reform a Senate that has become an embarrassment to our democratic claims.
Enough right-wing propaganda, Washington Post
Monday, July 26, 2010
The smearing of Shirley Sherrod ought to be a turning point in American politics. This is not, as the now-trivialized phrase has it, a “teachable moment.” It is a time for action.
This Story
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The mainstream media and the Obama administration must stop cowering before a right wing that has persistently forced its propaganda to be accepted as news by convincing traditional journalists that “fairness” requires treating extremist rants as “one side of the story.” And there can be no more shilly-shallying about the fact that racial backlash politics is becoming an important component of the campaign against President Obama and against progressives in this year’s election.
The administration’s response to the doctored video pushed by right-wing hit man Andrew Breitbart was shameful. The obsession with “protecting” the president turned out to be the least protective approach of all.
The Obama team did not question, let alone challenge, the video. Instead, it assumed that whatever narrative Fox News might create mattered more than anything else, including the possible innocence of a human being outside the president’s inner circle.
Obama complained on ABC’s “Good Morning America” that Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack “jumped the gun, partly because we now live in this media culture where something goes up on YouTube or a blog and everybody scrambles.” But it’s his own apparatus that turned “this media culture” into a false god.
Yet the Obama team was reacting to a reality: the bludgeoning of mainstream journalism into looking timorously over its right shoulder and believing that “balance” demands taking seriously whatever sludge the far right is pumping into the political waters.
This goes way back. Al Gore never actually said he “invented the Internet,” but you could be forgiven for not knowing this because the mainstream media kept reporting he had.
There were no “death panels” in the Democratic health-care bills. But this false charge got so much coverage that an NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll last August found that 45 percent of Americans thought the reform proposals would likely allow “the government to make decisions about when to stop providing medical care to the elderly.” That was the summer when support for reform was dropping precipitously. A straight-out lie influenced the course of one of our most important debates.
The traditional media are so petrified of being called “liberal” that they are prepared to allow the Breitbarts of the world to become their assignment editors. Mainstream journalists regularly criticize themselves for not jumping fast enough or high enough when the Fox crowd demands coverage of one of their attack lines.
Thus did Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander ask this month why the paper had been slow to report on “the Justice Department’s decision to scale down a voter-intimidation case against members of the New Black Panther Party.” Never mind that this is a story about a tiny group of crackpots who stopped no one from voting. It was aimed at doing what the doctored video Breitbart posted set out to do: convince Americans that the Obama administration favors blacks over whites.
And never mind that, to her great credit, Abigail Thernstrom, a conservative George W. Bush appointee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, dismissed the case and those pushing it. “This doesn’t have to do with the Black Panthers,” she told Politico’s Ben Smith. “This has to do with their fantasies about how they could use this issue to topple the [Obama] administration.” Instead, the media are supposed to take seriously the charges of J. Christian Adams, who served in the Bush Justice Department. He’s a Republican activist going back to the Bill Clinton era. His party services included time as a Bush poll watcher in Florida in 2004, when on one occasion he was involved in a controversy over whether a black couple could cast a regular ballot.
Now, Adams is accusing the Obama Justice Department of being “motivated by a lawless hostility toward equal enforcement of the law.” This is racially inflammatory, politically motivated nonsense — and it’s nonsense even if Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh talk about it a thousand times a day. When an outlandish charge for which there is no evidence is treated as an on-the-one-hand-and-on-the-other-hand issue, the liars win.
The Sherrod case should be the end of the line. If Obama hates the current media climate, he should stop overreacting to it. And the mainstream media should stop being afraid of insisting on the difference between news and propaganda.
Good news from Deval Patrick
Friends,
Recent economic news continues to confirm that Massachusetts is on the mend and on the move, and is coming out of this recession faster and stronger than other states. You don’t have to take my word for it. On Tuesday, CNBC ranked Massachusetts as the 5th best state for business, the highest we have ever appeared on those rankings, and yesterday it was reported that the state added 3,400 private-sector jobs in June, for a total of 45,000 jobs added since December.
This comes on the heels of other good economic news, including:
- A report issued by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia that concluded that the Massachusetts economy outperformed 48 other states during the last 3 months of 2009.
- The Associated Industries of Massachusetts (AIM)’s Business Confidence Index has increased 14 of the last 16 months, and consumer confidence is the highest it’s been since before the recession.
- Studies from The New England Economic Partnership (NEEP), Northeastern University, and the University of Massachusetts, show that the Massachusetts economy’s recovery is “firmly on track.”
- All three independent rating agencies — Fitch Ratings, Moody’s Investors Services, and Standard & Poor’s — continue to affirm the state’s AA bond rating, and credit our leadership during the global economic crisis.
- According to pre-census reports, for the first time in twenty years, more people are moving into Massachusetts than moving out.
We are leading the nation out of this recession because we have focused on job creation as our top priority. We have invested in our core industries: the life sciences, biotech, information technology, health care, and education. We are improving public schools. We are also leading the nation out of the recession because of the work of business leaders across the state.
That is why today I was proud to announce the chairs of our new council, “Business Leaders for Deval Patrick and Tim Murray.” This group will be integral to our outreach and organizing efforts within the business community. The chairs represent a wide variety of business interests, from small business owners to the CEOs of some of the Commonwealth’s largest employers. You can find out more about them here.
But even as positive as this news is, there is still much work to be done. The global economic collapse has cost too many jobs, and the Lt. Governor and I will not stop working until everyone who seeks a job can find one. We need your help to do that and to finish what we started. Please forward this email to ten of your friends, and ask them to join our cause.
Thanks,
Don’t underestimate Obama (Washington Post)
Obama’s next act
Friday, July 16, 2010
In the political marketplace, there’s now a run on Obama shares. The left is disappointed with the president. Independents are abandoning him in droves. And the right is already dancing on his political grave, salivating about November when, his own press secretary admitted Sunday, Democrats might lose the House.
I have a warning for Republicans: Don’t underestimate Barack Obama.
Consider what he has already achieved. Obamacare alone makes his presidency historic. It has irrevocably changed one-sixth of the economy, put the country inexorably on the road to national health care and, as acknowledged by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus but few others, begun one of the most massive wealth redistributions in U.S. history.
Second, there is major financial reform, which passed Congress on Thursday. Economists argue whether it will prevent meltdowns and bailouts as promised. But there is no argument that it will give the government unprecedented power in the financial marketplace. Its 2,300 pages will create at least 243 new regulations that will affect not only, as many assume, the big banks but just about everyone, including, as noted in one summary (the Wall Street Journal), “storefront check cashiers, city governments, small manufacturers, home buyers and credit bureaus.”
Third is the near $1 trillion stimulus, the largest spending bill in U.S. history. And that’s not even counting nationalizing the student loan program, regulating carbon emissions by Environmental Protection Agency fiat, and still-fitful attempts to pass cap-and-trade through Congress.
But Obama’s most far-reaching accomplishment is his structural alteration of the U.S. budget. The stimulus, the vast expansion of domestic spending, the creation of ruinous deficits as far as the eye can see are not easily reversed.
These are not mere temporary countercyclical measures. They are structural deficits because, as everyone from Obama on down admits, the real money is in entitlements, most specifically Medicare and Medicaid. But Obamacare freezes these out as a source of debt reduction. Obamacare’s $500 billion in Medicare cuts and $600 billion in tax increases are siphoned away for a new entitlement — and no longer available for deficit reduction.
The result? There just isn’t enough to cut elsewhere to prevent national insolvency. That will require massive tax increases — most likely a European-style value-added tax. Just as President Ronald Reagan cut taxes to starve the federal government and prevent massive growth in spending, Obama’s wild spending — and quarantining health-care costs from providing possible relief — will necessitate huge tax increases.
The net effect of 18 months of Obamaism will be to undo much of Reaganism. Both presidencies were highly ideological, grandly ambitious and often underappreciated by their own side. In his early years, Reagan was bitterly attacked from his right. (Typical Washington Post headline: “For Reagan and the New Right, the Honeymoon Is Over” — and that was six months into his presidency!) Obama is attacked from his left for insufficient zeal on gay rights, immigration reform, closing Guantanamo — the list is long. The critics don’t understand the big picture. Obama’s transformational agenda is a play in two acts.
Act One is over. The stimulus, Obamacare, financial reform have exhausted his first-term mandate. It will bear no more heavy lifting. And the Democrats will pay the price for ideological overreaching by losing one or both houses, whether de facto or de jure. The rest of the first term will be spent consolidating these gains (writing the regulations, for example) and preparing for Act Two.
The next burst of ideological energy — massive regulation of the energy economy, federalizing higher education and “comprehensive” immigration reform (i.e., amnesty) — will require a second mandate, meaning reelection in 2012.
That’s why there’s so much tension between Obama and congressional Democrats. For Obama, 2010 matters little. If Democrats lose control of one or both houses, Obama will probably have an easier time in 2012, just as Bill Clinton used Newt Gingrich and the Republicans as the foil for his 1996 reelection campaign.
Obama is down, but it’s very early in the play. Like Reagan, he came here to do things. And he’s done much in his first 500 days. What he has left to do he knows must await his next 500 days — those that come after reelection.
The real prize is 2012. Obama sees far, farther than even his own partisans. Republicans underestimate him at their peril.
Gov. Patrick in Lynn Sunday
Please join Governor Deval Patrick
in Lynn on Sunday!
On Our Side: Communities Connecting for Governor
Patrick and Lt. Governor Murray
What: An opportunity for the Governor to talk
directly with supporters about his administration’s
achievements, the upcoming reelection campaign,
and the Patrick/Murray campaign’s vision for a better
Commonwealth.
Where: Zion Baptist Church, 4 Adams Street Ext., Lynn, MA
When: Sunday July 18, 1:00 p.m.
Contact: Matt Patton
mpatton@timmurray.org
617-367-2010
Please join us at www.devalpatrick.com to learn about the campaign, organize
supporters, volunteer, and help Gov. Patrick and Lt. Gov. Murray!
Printed in-house. Labor donated.
Tea Party and racism (E.J. Dionne, Washington Post)
What the NAACP is really asking on racism within the Tea Party
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Good for the NAACP. We need an honest conversation about the role of race and racism in the Tea Party. Thanks to a resolution passed this week at the venerable organization’s national convention, we’ll get it.
The minute you say there are racist elements in the Tea Party — reflected in signs at rallies, billboards and speeches from some of its major figures — the pushback goes from cries of persecution to charges that those who are criticizing divisiveness are themselves the dividers.
So let’s dispense with the obvious: Most of the opposition to President Obama comes from people who are against his policies, not his race. The Tea Party is motivated primarily by right-wing ideology, not by racism.
But guess what? Nothing the NAACP is saying contradicts this. Its contention is that there are clearly racist strains in the Tea Party and that the movement’s leaders and the politicians who profit from its activism should denounce them plainly and unequivocally.
Here’s what Ben Jealous, president and CEO of the NAACP, asked of the Tea Party during a speech at the civil rights group’s convention in Kansas City, Mo.: “Expel the bigots and racists in your ranks or take the responsibility for them and their actions. We will no longer allow you to hide like cowards.”
The NAACP is doing what conservatives have done for decades in demanding that liberals and progressives separate themselves from left-wing extremists who trashed America, burned flags and praised foreign dictators. The racists are the Tea Party’s flag-burners. It’s fair to ask the democratic left to condemn extremism. It’s fair to ask the same of the democratic right. (Note the small “d.”)
When I reached Jealous by telephone, he went out of his way to emphasize that his group is not making a blanket charge of racism. “We have never called the Tea Party racist,” he said. “We know there are black Tea Party members, and we want black people to feel comfortable taking leadership positions in all parties in this country.”
But speaking of Tea Party leaders, he added: “We’ve seen the signs, we’ve heard the slurs, and all we’re asking is for you to act responsibly and say there’s no space for bigots in the Tea Party.”
That, of course, is not what the NAACP is saying.
She went on to refer to “America’s past racism,” and identified herself with Ronald Reagan, who said it was “a legacy of evil.” And then Palin brought the conversation back to herself.
“Having been on the receiving end of a similar spurious charge of racism,” she said, “I know how Tea Party Americans feel to be falsely accused.”
This is a shameless, narcissistic dodge. “Palin wants to construct a false argument,” Jealous said in the interview. “Palin wants the terms of debate to be about people calling her racist, and nobody’s calling her racist.” The NAACP, he said, is simply challenging her along with other Tea Party leaders to separate themselves cleanly from “racist behavior” by some in the movement.
“We have seen what’s happened in the past when we let groups play ‘hide the ball’ with racism in their ranks,” Jealous said.
He’s right, and it’s time for mainstream conservatives to follow the admirable example of my Post colleague Michael Gerson, who recently deplored “Tea Party excess” and spoke of the need to distinguish “the injudicious from the outrageous.”
Let’s start with former representative Tom Tancredo’s speech at a Tea Party convention last February that never got the attention it deserved. The reason we elected “Barack Hussein Obama,” Tancredo said, is “mostly because I think we do not have a civics literacy test before people can vote in this country.” He was cheered for this.
Should anyone be surprised that members of the NAACP might be alarmed over the suggestion that we need “literacy tests,” phony devices once used to keep African Americans from voting?
Guilt by association is wrong, but it’s legitimate to insist that those who believe in democracy and freedom take forceful steps to disassociate themselves from people in their movement who peddle racism, intolerance and fear. That’s what the NAACP is asking.
It’s your move, Sarah.
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Passive Democrats
The left needs a right brain
By E.J. Dionne Jr. (Washington Post)
Monday, July 12, 2010
If the midterm elections were held now, Republicans would probably take control of the House of Representatives. It’s as hard these days to find a Democrat who’s not alarmed as it is to find a Cleveland Cavaliers fan who’s cheering for LeBron James.
Worse for Democrats: They face two very different challenges, and addressing one could exacerbate the other. Think of it as a set of simultaneous equations.
On the one hand, independent voters are turning on them. Democratic House candidates enjoyed a 51 percent to 43 percent advantage over Republicans in 2008. This time, the polls show independents tilting Republican by substantial margins.
But Democrats are also suffering from a lack of enthusiasm among their own supporters. Poll after poll has shown that while Republicans are eager to cast ballots, many Democrats seem inclined to sit out this election.
The dilemma is that arguments that might motivate partisans could further alienate the less-ideological independents. The classic formulation holds that the party can either move left to excite its base or move to the center to win back independents.
If there is an answer to this conundrum, it lies in the reality that many voters — partisans and independents alike — are not particularly ideological. They respond to facts as they see them (a stalled economic recovery) and to a party’s performance (the Senate Republicans’ obstruction ends up hurting Democrats because they are supposed to be in charge).
The GOP’s gridlock strategy was well-thought-out and has paid enormous dividends. Republican leaders understood that delay was their friend because the immediate elation over President Obama’s election was bound to wear off. And while Republicans erected their blockade, they insisted that all the nastiness arose from Obama’s failure to reach out to them.
The politics of passive-aggressiveness worked twice over. Independents hated all the fighting. And even when Democrats won on health care and other issues, they emerged less with a renewed sense of purpose than with feelings of exhaustion and frustration over all the compromises it took to eke out victory.
Turning all this around is a White House mission, and the president’s campaign stops last week in Missouri and Nevada previewed his effort to paint Republicans as both extreme and recalcitrant. His speech in Kansas City included one major innovation, an echo of a legendary 1940 assault by Franklin D. Roosevelt against his political opponents in Congress — “Martin, Barton and Fish.”
Obama went after the alliterative trio of “Barton and Boehner and Blunt,” references to Reps. Joe Barton of Texas, John Boehner of Ohio and Roy Blunt of Missouri. Challenging them for their resolute opposition to every Democratic approach, Obama asked “if that ‘no’ button is just stuck.”
He hopes that this Republican trinity can do double duty. It creates a tangible group of foes against whom Democrats can rally. And it reminds independents that a Republican vote this fall would not simply be a rebuke to Washington but also an affirmative ballot for Republican leaders who are none too popular themselves.
Democrats are counting on a similar twofer from their attacks on the current brand of Republicanism as being too doctrinaire and too extreme. The energy that the Tea Party provides Republicans could be offset by a negative reaction in the electoral middle to the new movement’s ferocity. This is the GOP’s simultaneous equation puzzle: It must benefit all it can from Tea Party organizing without getting tarred by its members’ frequently radical outbursts.
But there is an intangible: Passion counts in politics. It motivates a movement’s most fervent followers but can also carry moderates attracted to those who promise change and profess great certainty about how to achieve it. Barack Obama got himself elected president by understanding this.
Passion may come especially hard to Democrats this year, and even in the best of times it can be difficult to muster among liberals. As the philosopher Michael Walzer observed in his book “Politics and Passion,” liberals by their nature highly prize skepticism, irony and doubt. Walzer argued that “administrators do well when they follow their rational convictions,” but “political activists must be more passionately engaged, or else they will lose every struggle for political power.”
On paper, Democrats have a rational solution to their political math problem. They must still find the passion that executing it will require.
Phil Sweeney’s Post
It’s discouraging to live in a period when all together too many people applaud thoughtless and unfounded comments. In an age when intelligent people don a mask of stupidity to avoid peer censure, that in most cases is predicate upon the droppings of media vulgarians. In a time warp that has enveloped so many people in a miasma of negativity that is slowly polluting the air of civility.
Phil Sweeney
A child’s knowledge of government- that’s how to get elected
When politics goes primitive
(Washington Post)
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
For a time earlier this year, I thought Sen. Michael Bennet had to be the biggest jerk in Washington. I had been spending some time in Colorado, daily ingesting Bennet’s campaign commercials in which he presented himself as an anti-Washington provincial. In one commercial, he stood — conventionally suited — before the U.S. Capitol and denounced Washington. The spot then cut to a casually dressed Bennet standing in Washington County, Colo., which has real problems and real people who really know how to solve those real problems if only the other (non-real) Washington would just leave them alone. Click went the remote control. Who is this jerk?
After a while, I repaired to my laptop and summoned up information on this Bennet. He is the very new senator by virtue of being appointed to replace Ken Salazar, drafted by President Obama for the thankless task of interior secretary. (Welcome to the gulf, Ken.)
But as I read on, I was shocked — and I mean just that — to discover that Bennet had been the much-admired superintendent of the Denver school system, a highly successful investment banker, chief of staff to the mayor of Denver, an aide to the governor of Ohio, a graduate of Wesleyan University and Yale Law School . . . and was raised, of all places, in Washington where his father, Douglas J. Bennet, had been a longtime public servant and diplomat. The senator was born in New Delhi, where his father served on the staff of the U.S. ambassador, the illustrious Chester Bowles. (“Birthers,” take note.)
My jaw dropped. This was not the guy I had been seeing on the screen — nothing about his education, his experience, his time abroad or that his grandparents survived the Warsaw Ghetto. He was, to my mind, the perfect senatorial candidate — familiar with domestic and foreign affairs, well-traveled, well-educated and coming from a family whose accomplishments had to amount to a rich legacy. Yet, because Bennet faces a primary, and if he survives that, a general election, none of these things could be mentioned. In the current political environment, it behooves the wise candidate to hide his qualifications. We have come to value ignorance.
There was a time when a U.S. senator was supposed to both know and care about foreign affairs. There was a time when a U.S. senator was supposed to be a person of some sophistication, erudition and a more than modest amount of brain power. Colorado itself in the not-too-distant past was represented by Gary Hart, celebrated for his intellect and ideas, and the equally smart Tim Wirth and Floyd Haskell. It was not considered scandalous to actually know something about how Washington works and to advocate ideas that were rooted in reality.
In contrast, we now have politicians who lack a child’s knowledge of government. In Nevada, Sharron Angle has won the GOP Senate nomination espousing phasing out Social Security and repealing the income tax as well as abolishing that durable conservative target, the Education Department. Similarly, in Connecticut, Linda McMahon, a former pro wrestling tycoon, is running commercials so adamantly anti-Washington you would think she’s an anarchist. In Arizona, Andy Goss, a Republican congressional candidate, suggests requiring all members of Congress to live in a barracks. This might be tough on wives, children and the odd cocker spaniel, but what the hell. Nowadays, all ideas are equal.
Bennet’s reticence about his stellar qualifications represents something sad: the collapse of the elite. People who should know better — who, in fact, do know better — slum with political primitives, thinking they can be wallflowers at the tea party and still go home with their integrity intact. The elite — often wrong, often unwise — are scorned not for their mistakes but for their very credentials. It is somehow better to know a little than a lot. In this way, the average person gets a government in his own image — a standard no one would seek in a dentist.
Maybe Bennet has changed his TV persona since I was last in his state. I have since met him and found him personable, humorous — and very, very smart. I would vote for him without hesitation. He has the knowledge, the experience and the proper — which is to say, my — values. I was wrong about him. He is not in the least bit a jerk. He just played one on television.
Patrick/Murray Grassroots Appeal
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