Michael Tomasky's Blog, page 22
February 4, 2011
Tomasky Talk: Egypt, Jon Huntsman and the Super Bowl - video
Michael Tomasky wonders how far Barack Obama should go in facing down Hosni Mubarak, explores the reasons for Jon Huntsman's resignation from his role as ambassador for China and gives his prediction for this Sunday's Super Bowl
Michael Tomasky
Obama and responsibility for Egypt's future | Michael Tomasky
So Hillary and Clinton and Robert Gates are arranging or trying to arrange Hosni Mubarak's immediate departure. The New York Times and the Guardian both have good accounts. From the Guardian:
But behind-the-scenes the Obama administration is in contact with Egypt's most senior military commanders as well as those politicians under Mubarak discussing a plan in which the Egyptian president would stand straight away.Earlier, Suleiman offered political concessions, inviting the long-banned Muslim Brotherhood to a dialogue. However, the Islamist movement and other parties have refused to talk until Mubarak steps down.
The Egyptian regime appeared to have dug in today, defying international pressure to begin an immediate transfer of power while launching attacks on journalists and human rights observers, a move condemned unreservedly by the US.
Well, it's the right thing to do under the circumstances. The preference would have been that Mubarak leave without this push, because it would have been cleaner if US didn't have to be involved here this directly. Obama said in both of his public statements, and Robert Gibbs repeated, that it wasn't the US's place to decide on other countries' regimes. But I guess inevitably it is the US's place to do exactly that, at least in this case. It's better than not doing it, especially with signs over the last two days that Mubarak and his cronies were willing to resort to violence to hold onto power (today in Tahrir Square, the army kept the pro-Mubarak demonstrators out, according to Al Jazeera English, which I've been watching this morning).
Assuming Mubarak does take the hint now, for better or worse now, Obama will "own" Egypt. As of today, the US has taken a more direct role here than it ever did, say, in 1989, when George H.W. Bush and Jim Baker largely stood back and watched. Now, Obama and Clinton and Gates and Joe Biden have committed the US firmly to the post-Mubarak era.
If eight months from now, after the elections, there's a democratic regime and a new openness in the country, then that's great. Obama is a world hero. And if the democratic fever spreads, then he and his aforementioned team are some of the greatest Americans of all time.
But what if...I'm far from sanguine about the Muslim Brotherhood. They can't in the short term be excluded from the process. But what if eight months from now Egypt is ruled by a fundamentalist regime that reneges on the peace with Israel, and the new leader visits Tehran and poses with Ahmadinejad? [see below]
The risk had to be taken under these circumstances. But risk it is. So we'll just have to see.
Sorry about the lack of posting yesterday. But I'm back in the saddle today. A new quiz will be up later today. Also a video, shot yesterday, featuring a little (now mildly outdated) Egypt musing plus reflections on John Hunstman and Sarah Palin and most notably my Super Bowl prediction, for which you'll have to watch to the bitter end!
UPDATE: This post originally carried the headline "Obama will own Egypt now," which offended and bothered some people, so I changed it. I don't really understand what the problem was. I guess it seemed to some that I was denying the agency of the Egyptian people. I meant it chiefly in terms of the domestic political debate here in the United States: If the administration has indeed committed itself to a post-Mubarak Egypt, which it apparently has, then it stands to reason that the administration will get the credit or the blame for what happens: in the US, and for that matter in the region and around the world. Maybe the problem is just that this usage of "own" doesn't translate to the UK. It's a very common thing in America and universally understood not to be literal.
Second, as tsalem notes although s/he could have done so less snarkily, the Muslim Brotherhood is indeed Sunni, while Iran is obviously Shia. There are, however, some historical links between the MB and Iran, described here. Nevertheless my chosen example above was probably hyperbolic.
Ian70 is quite right to mention the Gaza situation as pressing. And sure, a fundamentalist Egyptian regime would forfeit US aid. But couldn't that $3 billion, or at least a percentage of it, be obtained from another source? I am merely trying to point out that there are big risks here, and those of you pooh-poohing them can't predict the future any better than I can.
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February 3, 2011
Healthcare repeal votes and Democratic strategy | Michael Tomasky
The Republican effort to repeal the healthcare bill in the Senate failed yesterday, with 51 Democrats opposing and all 47 Republicans supporting. One Democrat, Mark Warner of Virginia, missed the vote, as did independent Joe Lieberman.
Republicans are going to keep at it. Lindsey Graham and others are pursuing a bill that would allow individual states to drop out of the bill: good old "nullification," in that fine South Carolina tradition. Let's see. The nullification crisis was 1828, and the Civil War started in 1865, so on that schedule, the next civil war should kick off in about 2048. Of course things move faster these days...
I was gratified to read this in TPM:
Top Democrats have suggested that if Republicans keep forcing votes on full repeal, they'll put the legislation on the floor, and during the debate, force votes on amendments to exempt popular aspects of the law.
Exactly. I've been wondering about this. The Democrats can force any vote they want to force, as long as they run the Senate. So why not make Republicans vote on the expansion of coverage of young people up to age 26 in their parents' plans? Or on the elimination of the Medicare donut hole? That one in particular should have some staying power. Let the Republicans vote against more and better coverage for senior citizens' prescription drugs.
The White House and congressional Democrats should be working on the assumption, just to be safe, that the Supreme Court is going to rule the mandate unconstitutional. They should be doing everything they can to highlight the positive aspects of the bill and make the Republicans declare themselves against those provisions.
Finally, apropos a thread yesterday: I think left halfback is probably right that liberals are not as passionately supportive of the bill as rank-and-file conservative are passionately against it. Therefore, my argument that the side that is dissatisfied with the Supreme Court's decision will turn out and vote in 2012 in huge numbers doesn't quite hold water. This is probably true for the liberal side.
But it's still the case that a ruling upholding the law will infuriate conservatives. They will turn out in massive numbers if that's the case. It will be the 2012 equivalent of the 2004 anti-gay-marriage initiatives, which goosed the conservative turnout in several states. I would bet my last nickel that Karl Rove is secretly cheering for Kennedy to join the liberals. Elect more Republicans so we can undo Obamacare will become the rallying cry of the campaign, and Obama will be dragged into a campaign that will basically turn on the two candidates' positions on the bill.
Can't you picture the debates being dominated by the question? Yes. And since the bill is unpopular among independents, a campaign that is about the bill is a campaign in which independents are more likely to go Republican, if healthcare reform sits in the forefront of these voters' minds. This is why I maintain that in the long run, Scalia and company would be doing the president a political favor by striking the bill down. He can live through a week of embarrassing headlines and change the subject. Whereas if the bill is upheld, it hangs around his neck all campaign season.
What about substance, you say? Substantively I would not like seeing the bill struck, of course. But it's not a great bill. It's an okay bill. Maybe the dialectic will assert itself and after five or eight more years of healthcare costs going through the roof, and the Republican Party de-Becks itself to some extent, we'll be able to pass a better bill. I'm not counting on that. Just saying that we can't predict these things.
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February 2, 2011
Egypt and the divide on the US right | Michael Tomasky
We have here an interesting situation in the schism on the American right over Egypt. You have the faction, chiefly either religious extremist or concerned first and foremost about Israel or both, that thinks the protestors are rabble and we must not desert Mubarak. Then you have the group, foreign-policy neocons who are at least consistent in their hopes for democracy for the region, that backs the protestors.
The leader (one supposes) of the former faction is Glenn Beck, whose conspiracy theories about Egypt were nicely captured by Michelle Goldberg in The Daily Beast. Beck has been banging on about Egypt all week. I tried to watch one installment. It wasn't even that it was infuriating. It was just incoherent. Goldberg:
Beck, hero of the Tea Party, has become the hysterical tribune of the anti-democracy forces, linking the uprising in Egypt to a bizarre alliance of all of his bête noirs. "This is Saul Alinsky. This is STORM from Van Jones," he warned on Monday, continuing, "The former Soviet Union, everybody, radical Islam, every—this is the story of everyone who has ever plotted to or wanted to fundamentally change or destroy the Western way of life. This isn't about Egypt. Everything is up on the table." It would all end, he warned, with the restoration of a "Muslim caliphate that controls the Mideast and parts of Europe," along with an expanded China and Russian control of the entire Soviet Union "plus maybe the Netherlands."
Mike Huckabee has punched his ticket on this train, as well as Newt Gingrich.
Others are behaving more admirably. Golberg cites AEI's Michael Rubin as being with the protestors. And Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations and Commentary has been making good sense:
I fully understand the dangers of what is happening in Egypt. I am as apprehensive as anyone about the possibility of the Muslim Brotherhood exploiting current events to gain power. I am fully aware of how Hosni Mubarak has been a useful ally in many ways. Yet, when I watch pro-government thugs attacking peaceful protesters, I am rooting wholeheartedly for the protesters and against the thugs...
...The United States, a nation born in a liberal revolution, has no choice but to stand with the people. In many ways, this is a continuation of the same battle fought in the streets of Europe in 1848 and 1989: the quest of a people yearning for freedom against the representatives of a corrupt and entrenched ruling oligarchy. America's role, as the champion of liberty, should be to usher Mubarak out of power as quickly and painlessly as possible in order to avert further bloodshed and to make it harder for malign elements to take advantage of the disorder for their own nefarious purposes. We did not do enough to aid democrats in Russia in 1917 or in Iran in 1979; in both cases, we stuck with a discredited ancien regime until it was too late and reacted too slowly to revolutionary upheavals. Let us not repeat that mistake in Egypt.
The Weekly Standard rounds up 2012 wannabee statements here. Missing? The old half-termer, who's been pretty mum on Egypt, which after all can't be seen out of any American windows. This presents an interesting conundrum for her. On the one hand, she's an inveterate chiliast. On the other hand, she is under the tutelage of some pure neocons.
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Reagan's lawyer: mandate is kosher | Michael Tomasky
Think Progress reports that Charles Fried, Ronald Reagan's solicitor general and no one's idea of a liberal, thinks the individual mandate is clearly constitutional. He tells the Senate:
I am quite sure that the health care mandate is constitutional. … My authorities are not recent. They go back to John Marshall, who sat in the Virginia legislature at the time they ratified the Constitution, and who, in 1824, in Gibbons v. Ogden, said, regarding Congress' Commerce power, "what is this power? It is the power to regulate. That is—to proscribe the rule by which commerce is governed." To my mind, that is the end of the story of the constitutional basis for the mandate.
The mandate is a rule—more accurately, "part of a system of rules by which commerce is to be governed," to quote Chief Justice Marshall. And if that weren't enough for you—though it is enough for me—you go back to Marshall in 1819, in McCulloch v. Maryland, where he said "the powers given to the government imply the ordinary means of execution. The government which has the right to do an act"—surely, to regulate health insurance—"and has imposed on it the duty of performing that act, must, according to the dictates of reason, be allowed to select the means." And that is the Necessary and Proper Clause. [...]
I think that one thing about Judge Vinson's opinion, where he said that if we strike down the mandate everything else goes, shows as well as anything could that the mandate is necessary to the accomplishment of the regulation of health insurance.
LHB, neither I nor any of us questions your legal credentials, of course. At the same time, this man was the solicitor general of the United States. No dummy he.
But as I've said, half of me wants to see it overturned because I think it will be better for the D's in 2012 if that happens. And, I could even argue that overturning this law will be better in the long run from a policy perspective.
I could?! Someone has! Matt Miller in today's WashPost begins his columns with this future reverie:
Good afternoon, I'm Brian Williams reporting from Washington, where it looks like October 26, 2017, will be a day that truly goes down in history. In a few moments, at a table not far from where I now stand, President Hillary Clinton will sign into law the universal health-care legislation - "Medicare for All," as she calls it - that completes a journey Mrs. Clinton began nearly 25 years ago. Back then, as first lady, her attempt to reform the health-care system proved a fiasco that cost Democrats their hold on power. Who would have thought then - or later, when President Barack Obama's big health reform was overturned by the Supreme Court in a controversial 5 to 4 ruling in 2012 - that today's bipartisan bill would be the result? For some perspective on the twists and turns of history, we're joined by NBC's David Gregory. David, health reform seemed dead in the water in 2012. How did we get from that Supreme Court ruling to today?"
"Brian, when historians look back on this period, they'll see it as a classic case of shortsighted politics - of Republicans winning the battle but losing the war. It really dates to the fight to overturn Barack Obama's health reform. There's no question the GOP got a boost from that 'victory' - it galvanized their base, and, combined with high unemployment and the dollar crisis right before the 2012 election, denied President Obama a second term.
I think Miller is wrong about the short-term politics: as I wrote yesterday, the side that is angry is the side that'll turn out and vote in huge numbers, and if the ACA is repealed, the angry side will be liberals.
But he is quite possibly right that a repeal or strike-down of Obamacare would likely lead to the US doing nothing for a few more years, then the system hits the point of complete crisis, and then there's enough support for actual healthcare reform along the Medicare for all lines he sketches out.
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Nominate her | Michael Tomasky
From TPM:
The last time a Democratic presidential candidate carried either South Dakota or Nebraska in a general election was the same year that the Beatles released their debut U.S. album. Yet if the Republican Party nominates Sarah Palin for president, two PPP polls indicate that President Obama would have a strong chance of bringing both states into the Democratic column for the first time in a half century.
In Nebraska, PPP found Palin leading Obama by just one point, 45% to 44%. Compare that to last cycle, when John McCain won the state by 15 points -- though, since Nebraska awards some electors to the winner of each congressional district, Obama did take one electoral vote for winning Omaha's district. In 2004, George Bush trounced John Kerry by 33 points there.
In South Dakota, the bad omen for a Palin presidential bid is even starker. There, PPP found her outright trailing Obama by eight points, 48% to 40%.
PPP's Tom Jensen says that if the GOP nominates Palin, and circumstances are more or less as they are now (Obama at 50, 51%), the only safe Republican states would be ones John McCain won by 20 points or more. In other words, she'd win Idaho, Oklahoma, Utah, Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama, and probably eke out a few more, maybe reaching 100 electoral votes, if she managed to hold Texas, where man once walked with dinosaur.
I would actually like having a Republican Party that was tethered to the same planet as the rest of us. Conservative, fine, but not hostile to basic facts and science and not so wrapped up in its self-righteous rhetorical excitations. A Republican Party de-Becked and de-Limbaughed, basically. It could be just as conservative on paper, but it would dispense with some of the hostility to earth logic. That would be a fine Republican Party to deal with. Maybe sending Palin into battle and getting tarred would finally move the party in that direction.
But since they're unlikely to do that, I am left wondering, as I often do, how long it will take for the GOP to move back to where it was, say, in 1985. At the time, that seemed pretty conservative to me. Now, they'd excommunicate that vintage as too wishy-washy.
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Sarah Palin: Nominate her | Michael Tomasky
From TPM:
The last time a Democratic presidential candidate carried either South Dakota or Nebraska in a general election was the same year that the Beatles released their debut U.S. album. Yet if the Republican Party nominates Sarah Palin for president, two PPP polls indicate that President Obama would have a strong chance of bringing both states into the Democratic column for the first time in a half century.
In Nebraska, PPP found Palin leading Obama by just one point, 45% to 44%. Compare that to last cycle, when John McCain won the state by 15 points -- though, since Nebraska awards some electors to the winner of each congressional district, Obama did take one electoral vote for winning Omaha's district. In 2004, George Bush trounced John Kerry by 33 points there.
In South Dakota, the bad omen for a Palin presidential bid is even starker. There, PPP found her outright trailing Obama by eight points, 48% to 40%.
PPP's Tom Jensen says that if the GOP nominates Palin, and circumstances are more or less as they are now (Obama at 50, 51%), the only safe Republican states would be ones John McCain won by 20 points or more. In other words, she'd win Idaho, Oklahoma, Utah, Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama, and probably eke out a few more, maybe reaching 100 electoral votes, if she managed to hold Texas, where man once walked with dinosaur.
I would actually like having a Republican Party that was tethered to the same planet as the rest of us. Conservative, fine, but not hostile to basic facts and science and not so wrapped up in its self-righteous rhetorical excitations. A Republican Party de-Becked and de-Limbaughed, basically. It could be just as conservative on paper, but it would dispense with some of the hostility to earth logic. That would be a fine Republican Party to deal with. Maybe sending Palin into battle and getting tarred would finally move the party in that direction.
But since they're unlikely to do that, I am left wondering, as I often do, how long it will take for the GOP to move back to where it was, say, in 1985. At the time, that seemed pretty conservative to me. Now, they'd excommunicate that vintage as too wishy-washy.
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What next for Obama on Egypt? | Michael Tomasky
And now things have taken a nasty turn. Reading the Guardian and the New York Times, my sense so far is that the violence isn't terrible: clashes and teargas, yes, and some people beat up, but no police or soldiers shooting at people or things like that. Night is beginning to fall there now, so maybe this will end and prove to have been a one-off. But someone is orchestrating the pro-Mubarak forces, and this could turn very ugly.
What does Washington do now? Does Obama just keep going out there making new statements every day? No. When I wrote last night that Obama's statement didn't quite go far enough and he shouldn't even have bothered, this is the kind of thing I had in the back of my mind. Don't say anything unless you really have something to say that can impact the situation. Now, I worry that the White House has set up a dynamic where people are going to be expecting public statements every day.
The important work now, it seems to me, has to be done behind the scenes. Try to ensure that this doesn't get any worse tonight, and that it does not happen again tomorrow. That's it. And do it quietly. Obama stood up there yesterday and said "no violence," and now there's violence. Nobody's going to blame him of course, but there's more risk now in big public statements than reward, in case things spin out of control.
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The case for pepperoni | Michael Tomasky
So much heavy stuff going on. Let's start today on a lighter note. The New York Times has one of those only-in-the-Times kind of pieces about the pepperoni backlash. What, you haven't heard of it? Well, reports Julia Moskin:
ACROSS the United States, artisanal pizza joints are opening faster than Natalie Portman movies. But inside those imported ovens, pepperoni — by far America's most popular pizza topping — is as rare as a black swan.
In these rarefied, wood-fired precincts, pizzas are draped with hot soppressata and salami piccante, and spicy pizza alla diavola is popular. At Boot and Shoe Service in Oakland, Calif., there is local-leek-and-potato pizza. At Paulie Gee's in Brooklyn, dried cherry and orange blossom honey pizza. At Motorino in the East Village, brussels sprouts and pancetta. But pepperoni pizza? Geddoutahere!
What, exactly, is pepperoni? It is an air-dried spicy sausage with a few distinctive characteristics: it is fine-grained, lightly smoky, bright red and relatively soft. But one thing it is not: Italian.
"Purely an Italian-American creation, like chicken Parmesan," said John Mariani, a food writer and historian...
And what, I ask you, is wrong with that? Pizza itself, at least we understand it today, is an Italian-American creation, which is to say that "pizze" (pie) of course has existed in Italy for centuries, but in typical fashion, it took Americans to come up with the ideas of huge servings, massive globs of cheese and an endless variety of toppings.
Call me what you will. I say nothing tops pepperoni. No salami, no soppressata. Nothing. Why? Partly because pepperoni lacks, mercifully, those big globules of fat one finds in other cured meats. Don't get me wrong. All cured meats are pretty excellent. But nothing beats pepperoni. Especially on a pizza. Moskin catches the crucial point farther down in the piece:
Opinion is divided on whether a slice of the stuff should curl when cooked, or lie flat. Some say that the little cups of cooked pepperoni perform an important job: confining the spicy, molten fat from pouring out over the surface of the pizza.
I'm pro-cup myself, although in my experience that pepperoni is getting harder to find. Or maybe it's used less around these parts.
Anyway I should come clean and acknowledge that pepperoni is profoundly important to the history of West Virginia, because my home state is known for one and only one culinary invention: the pepperoni roll. It's still a regional treat only. The world doesn't know what it's missing. Read more here.
Pepperoni is ubiquitous in Britain, is it not? I know that George Harrison once recorded a song called "Thanks for the Pepperoni," so that must mean something.
I say to blazes with these anti-pepperoni fussbudgets.
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February 1, 2011
Obama Egypt statement comes up short | Michael Tomasky
I guess I'm wondering why Obama felt compelled to make the statement he just made a few moments ago, shortly before 7 pm Tuesday night east coast time. Sure, he had a tightrope to walk, and he walked it, but he probably walked it too carefully.
If you're going to bother to make a statement, I'd think it needs to be for the purpose of changing the situation in some way. But he just endorsed the new status quo, in which Mubarak will step down but not immediately.
The line that will grab the headlines was this: "An orderly transition must be meaningful, must be peaceful and must begin now." That's the only moment in the statement when I sat forward. I was waiting for one more sentence reinforcing the time frame. Just one more sentence, even a very short one: "Not seven months from now, but now." Seven months from now is September; the elections. That short seven-word sentence would have sent a clearer and more welcome signal to Tahrir Square.
I don't know. Here's Mark Halperin on my teevee saying the president did "a very skillful job" of nudging Mubarak along. Maybe. It was too subtle for me, and I'd reckon for most Egyptians.
I don't think there was any need for this speech. I doubt it does harm (although there's a chance it could, if the protestors see it as dramatically too timid). But I don't think it did any good, and it's therefore hard to understand why he gave it.
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