Michael Tomasky's Blog, page 42
November 5, 2010
Pelosi not stepping down | Michael Tomasky
Okay, today is the day I'm officially getting old. Moving toward the mushy middle. At least on this one question. Nancy Pelosi is going to run to keep her job as leader of the Democrats, and I am not down with this at all.
I think she was a good to very good speaker. In interviews and other occasions I had to speak with her, she's not what you'd call an intellectual, and I dislike this habit she has of interrupting her own sentences and changing direction like a pinball that's just hit a bumper. But she's a sharpie, believe me. Maybe not up there with Schumer, but good political instincts.
But simple question: How can you preside over the biggest ass-whupping since 1938 and keep your job? You can't. Simple.
She has to run, as I said, so maybe she won't win. Although today it looks like she would. her deputy, the more moderate Steny Hoyer of Maryland, with whom she's never gotten along, has said he wouldn't challenge her. The remaining moderates and Blue Dogs will come up with someone, but many moderates and Blue Dogs got wiped out. The ones who remain tend to be more liberal, and Pelosi just raised a lot of money for them, so they owe her.
So I guess she wins. Unless a candidate of the rump faction really takes off in the next two weeks. Or unless some big party leader, like the highest-ranking Democrat in the country, were to step in and say no, change direction. Gee, who would that be...
I'm not sure this is a disaster. I am sure it's a missed opportunity. When your house gets burned like that, you slap a fresh coat of paint on it. And I bet it's happening because some liberal grassroots groups, like Americans United for Change, which does good work on health care and Social Security and so on, got in the middle of an intraparty fight that as far as I can see has little to do with "change" and in fact quite a lot to do with the status quo - a status quo that just lost 65 seats.
I'm not sure it's a disaster. If she only has 190 votes in her pocket, she really won't matter much. The wheeling and dealing will be done between Boehner and Obama. But she'll be there as a handy symbol. Her mere presence probably makes things harder for Obama in 2012.
But I don't care about all this gaming out of the future. It doesn't matter whether she'll be good or merely bad or spectacularly bad. What matters is, you lose 65 seats, you resign. Period. There should not be a question.
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Video | Tomasky Talk: US midterms 2010: The fate of Palin's endorsees
Michael Tomasky looks at how well the candidates backed by Sarah Palin did on election day and what that means for the Republican party
Michael TomaskyObama, McConnell and Boehner | Michael Tomasky
Gosh, folks, I'm so humbled by the way the poetry comment thread is shaping up (the comity, the fellow-spirit, the posting of beloved poems, even kind words from ngavc for my "nearly balanced" posts this week!) that I'm loathe to dive back into politics. But I do feel that I need to post at least two a day. I usually do more than that, sometimes far more, but we supposedly have a video coming today as well, so that counts for something.
I've been wanting to write a post on the troika above-captioned. You've seen, I'm sure, that McConnell is sticking to his guns about his highest priority being getting Barack Obama out of the White House. I get what he means. But this used to be the kind of thing no one EVER dared say publicly. I guess now you can just say it. What's shocking is that it's no longer shocking.
Boehner is playing semi-good cop. Let me say, I felt Boehner struck a decent and respectable note Tuesday night. When he started tearing up, I wondered momentarily if this long-time allegedly heavy smoker wasn't having a heart attack. But I'll accept that they were tears. That's nice. I mean that. Unfortunately, he doesn't mean any of what little he said about working with Obama. Or he may possibly have meant it in the moment, but the nature of his Republican membership, what with the kinds of folks who'll be in his caucus come January, will render it null and void.
McConnell says Obama must be crushed. Boehner says Obama and the Democrats are in denial. Obama says, I'm looking forward to working together. In some sense the president is hemmed in. It brings disrepute on the office of the presidency to talk in too starkly partisan terms - he erred when he used the word "enemies," and he copped to it. A president isn't supposed to talk like that because of the majesty of his office. But there's no majesty to congressional titles, so those two are free to fire away.
Yet at some point wouldn't ya think it'd occur to Obama to say something like: You know guys, there's still a president in town, elected with 53% of the vote, still a higher rating than you two, in fact higher by far. Yeah, I'll meet you halfway on some things. But halfway is halfway, gentlemen, not 85% of the way.
Hold your breath waiting for that statement, eh?
But continuing in the week's surprisingly good spirit, I will say I do not blame McConnell and Boehner for laying down markers. They're in a position to. But Obama needs to lay down a couple of his own, and he has a right to, too.
In the spirit of this morning's post and the memory of Martin, Barton and Fish, herewith a wee poem:
Obama, McConnell and Boehner
It scarcely could be any plainer
That the two years ahead
Shall be filled up with dread
Acrimony seems quite a no-brainer
Obama, McConnell and Boehner
Which of the latter two's meaner?
So far it's been Mitch
But it is rather rich
To hear John vow a government cleaner
Obama, McConnell and Boehner
Which of the three's the worst droner?
He might say to Michelle
They can both go to hell
But in public he can't sound the moaner.
Revise, extend and improve as you wish. Or make up your own.
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Friday quiz: unacknowledged legislations | Michael Tomasky
I noticed last week when Vicious Misanthrope posted a little piece of poetry by James Wright, the 50s-60s-70s American poet of whom I admit I've barely heard, several of you responded enthusiastically not only to Wright, but to the subject generally.
Well, I thought. Here's something we haven't covered. And so, today, we'll dip into Poets and Poetry, as they call it on Jeopardy! I'm hesitant in a way because I'm guessing that this probably won't generate as long or interesting a comment thread as Swinging London did. Prove to me that I'm misunderestimating you.
Actually, that last sentence of the above graf goes against the grain of my whole ethos about things like poetry, theater, contemporary art...Appreciation of these things is generally considered, by both admirers and detractors, a marker of refinement. But I think our culture gets too caught up in that. A poem is just a thing, like a television show or a pop song. One can think and think and think about it, but really, you either respond to it or you don't. Just relax about it. At the same time, I think there probably is something to the fact that the act of creating a poem involves more, shall we say, scrutiny of one's soul, and of life generally, than the writing of a television show, although of course there exist both bad poetry and great television to challenge that rule.
Anyway I think it's a shame that a lot of people are probably turned off by the idea of poetry as something remote and incomprehensible, when in fact they would find poetry they really liked if they bothered to look for it. One of the great things about the interwebs is that you can just sit down at your computer and read poetry, because unlike novels, nearly all the great poems and poets are online in full. I do this occasionally: Wordsworth pops into my head, or whomever, or someone is mentioned in something I'm reading; and I just sit down and Google the person up and read half a dozen poems, or more if I'm enjoying them. Try it sometime.
Until then, try this. We'll stick to the 20th century and leave the pre-moderns for another day.
1. This poet was walking along seaside cliffs in Trieste in 1912 when he heard a voice calling out to him, which he put into these famous and lovely opening lines of his masterwork, a set of ten elegies that he wrote over the course of a decade in which war had shattered his nation and world view:
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?
and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart:
I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Every angel is terrifying.
a. Gabriele d'Annunzio
b. Ettore Schmitz
c. Rainer Maria Rilke
2. This poet was also a bohemian and general bon vivant in Paris until his death just after World War I at age 38; he was perhaps best known as an art critic who championed the early modernists and coined the term "Surrealism".
a. Tristan Tzara
b. Guillaume Apollinaire
c. Jean Cocteau
3. When this poet won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923, he remarked that it was "part of Europe's welcome to the free state."
a. William Butler Yeats
b. Jovan Popovic
c. Laszlo Nagy
4. This American poet spent most of his adult life working as an insurance-company lawyer in Connecticut. But he found time to visit Key West on many occasions, a locale where he once punched Ernest Hemingway in a drunken argument, and one that inspired him to lines like these, in "The Idea of Order at Key West":
The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard.
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.
a. Wallace Stevens
b. e.e. cummings
c. William Carlos Williams
5. What kind of hopes were expiring on what sort of decade as Auden sat in that dive on 52nd Street?
a. mendacious/stark, friable
b. clever/low, dishonest
c. guileless/cunning, callous
6. Most people know that Ezra Pound made pro-fascist broadcasts from Italy during World War II. Some people know that he wrote major sections of his masterwork, The Cantos, while in US custody in Italy after the war. But fewer know that when he was returned to the United States in 1946:
a. He was pardoned by Harry Truman, who was a fan of his writing, and given a position at Princeton.
b. He was ordered to live among the then-forming Jewish community of Miami Beach and came to soften his views considerably.
c. He was incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital in Washington, DC for 12 years.
7. Pablo Neruda helped discover this Latin American poet, inviting him the Second International Congress of Anti-Fascist Writers in Madrid in 1937. Five years later, the two came to blows over Neruda's refusal to be published in an anthology this poet was helping to collect:
a. Jorge Luis Borges
b. Cesar Vallejo
c. Octavio Paz
8. The famous title of this poem serves also as its opening and closing lines; in between, the rest of it reads like this, in its entirety:
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.
Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—
a. "My Dreams, My Works Must Wait Til After Hell," Gwendolyn Brooks
b. "I, Too, Sing America," Langston Hughes
c. "The Day Will Not Just Come but Must Be Made," Frank Marshall Davis
9. In the famous poem, what did the writer see...
"destroyed by madness, starving hysterical
naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry
dynamo in the machinery of night . . ."
And who was the poet?
a. The best minds of his generation, Allen Ginsberg
b. Kennedy and Khrushchev and all their little fur-man martinets, Lawrence Ferlinghetti
c. The ad men, the mad men, the hawkers and hucksters and hustlers, Gregory Corso
10. In 2009, her son, Nicholas, produced with her husband who was also a poet, hanged himself after suffering years of depression.
a. Sylvia Plath
b. Marianne Moore
c. Elizabeth Bishop
11. This poet also wrote lyrics for Roberta Flack and composed a few film scores; she said, after Barack Obama's election, and perhaps prematurely, that "We are growing up beyond the idiocies of racism and sexism."
a. Nikki Giovanni
b. Maya Angelou
c. Audre Lord
12. This American poet of the commonplace and everyday, a recent US Poet Laureate, is known for works such as "I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey's Version of 'Three Blind Mice,'" which begins:
And I start wondering how they came to be blind.
If it was congenital, they could be brothers and sister,
and I think of the poor mother
brooding over her sightless young triplets.
Or was it a common accident, all three caught
in a searing explosion, a firework perhaps?
If not,
if each came to his or her blindness separately,
how did they ever manage to find one another?
Would it not be difficult for a blind mouse
to locate even one fellow mouse with vision
let alone two other blind ones?
a. Robert Pinsky
b. Donald Hall
c. Billy Collins
I trust that was a lot more fun than you thought it was going to be. Let's see how you did. And for bonus points, who uttered the quote I'm stealing from for this post's headline?
Answers: 1-c; 2-b; 3-a; 4-a; 5-b; 6-c; 7-c; 8-b; 9-a; 10-a; 11-b; 12-c. Bonus: Shelley said poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
Notes:
1. This is from the Duino Elegies. For me, Rilke is at the top of the heap, my number one. D'Annunzio was a pro-fascist Italian poet, and Ettore Schmitz was the real name of Italo Svevo, whose novel Confessions of Zeno appeared around the same time as the elegies.
2. I've mentioned him before. I'd think this one shouldn't have been too hard.
3. Should've been easy, especially for you Brits, although the non-Yeats answers are also poets vaguely associated with national aspiration in their countries, so in that, I tried to make it a little tricky.
4. The insurance factoid was meant as the giveaway.
5. One of my all-time greatest questions, along with the one about Chuck Berry's guitar.
6. I love the idea of Pound among the Jews of Miami. Too bad it didn't work out that way. Or maybe not.
7. Tough; the two fakes are plausible. But something tells me a certain instinct would lead most of you to Paz.
8. Would Brooks have called herself "brother"? And I made up the Frank Davis title.
9. My fake answers are pretty strong here (those aren't Ferlinghetti and Corso lines, I invented them), but that's a really famous phrase.
10. So sad, no? Plath killed herself when the boy was just a year old, which seems inconceivable to me, but I guess that's what hideous chemical problems of the brain do. Or maybe she didn't mean to.
11. Very plausible fake answers, but Maya should seem the most likely to have befriended Flack, I would think.
12. I'm friends with Billy. Just as funny across the table as on the page.
As always, tell us how you did, what you liked and didn't like, and share with us your poetic enthusiasms. I felt some trepidation about this topic but feel it worked out well.
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November 4, 2010
Democratic coalition in tatters for now | Michael Tomasky
Here are four people I always read after an election. I mean I read them anyway but especially after an election.
First, Ron Brownstein, of which I have only a pdf that isn't linkable but appears in the National Journal if you want to Google it:
Democrats emerged from their pasting on Tuesday with a hole directly in the center of their electoral coalition.
The hole can be measured demographically, and it can be mapped geographically. Either way, it leaves President Obama in a precarious
position as he tries to recover from Tuesday's debacle—the biggest midterm House loss for either party since 1938—before he faces the voters again in 2012.The coalition that elected Obama in 2008 revolved primarily around three groups: minorities, young people, and white-collar (college-educated) white voters, particularly women. In 2008, Obama carried the first two groups by big margins and the upscale white women narrowly.
In a few places this week, that coalition held together and powered some of the Democrats' lone bright spots...
[snip...California, Colorado, Nevada]
...But this formula collapsed in other states where it had previously worked for Democrats (particularly Illinois and Pennsylvania), either because minority and youth turnout declined too much or because Republicans cut too heavily
into the upscale white vote, or both. The bigger problem is that in many states between the coasts, the Democrats' coalition isn't big enough on its own to provide a majority; to win, Democrats must run competitively among the rest of the white electorate, the college-educated white men, and noncollege white men and women. And on Tuesday, too few Democrats could meet that test.
Next up, Ruy Teixeira, writing with John Halpin:
Many progressives conversely argue that President Obama and the Democrats have been too timid in their plans, particularly on economic recovery, health care, and financial regulation, and that they didn't do enough to tar the opposition with the bad economy. The economy faltered, the conservative right and the Tea Party enjoyed all the enthusiasm, and the progressive base was demoralized. A range of tactical arguments across the progressive spectrum tie into this main criticism, primarily saying that the president and Congress did a poor job on the communication and politics side of the bailouts and stimulus plans; that the 18-month focus on health care squandered precious time and political capital and ultimately left people confused; and that the White House and Democrats failed to effectively combat the massive misinformation and fear campaign launched by Fox News, Tea Party leaders, and conservative corporate interests.
Each of these explanations enjoys some grain of truth that we'll consider in turn, and some arguments contain more relevance than others. But all of them miss the mark in terms of the larger picture.
Years of political science research show fairly conclusively that structural issues explain most of the variance in election results. Context, candidates, and politics matter, of course. But progressives should examine the basics if they want to understand why 2010 happened as it did: the poor condition of the economy; a conservative-leaning midterm electorate; and a Democratic Party with many marginal seats to lose. Strategic and policy decisions certainly made some difference in the magnitude of losses, but in a horrible economy it's difficult to escape the reality that Democrats were poised to lose a significant number of seats no matter what they did.
Teixeira and Halpin offer loads of exit-poll data analysis, and if that's your bag, you'd better click through and hold onto it.
Republicans can certainly make the case that this election cuts short the kind of Democratic majority that Ruy Teixeira and I foresaw in our 2002 book, The Emerging Democratic Majority. But they would not be justified in suggesting that it revives the older Republican majority. The Republicans remain (as they were after the 2008 election) a bitterly divided party without an accepted national leadership. You essentially have Karl Rove, Haley Barbour, Mitt Romney, and Mitch McConnell on one side; the Tea Parties, Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, and Glenn Beck on the other. The Republican National Committee is virtually defunct.
In 1994, when the Republicans won the Congress, the election was not only a repudiation of the Clinton administration, but also an affirmation of the Republican alternative. According to one poll, 52 percent of voters approved, and only 28 percent disapproved of "Republican Congressional leaders' policies and plans for the future." This election, however, was not a victory for the Republicans, but a defeat for Obama and the Democrats. According to exit polls, 53 percent of voters in House races had an unfavorable view of the Republican Party and only 41 percent had a favorable view. I found this myself in interviewing suburban Philadelphia voters last weekend. Even those who said they were Republicans had grave doubts about what the party stood for and regarded the Tea Partiers as "wackos."
The election results themselves did not represent a full-blown realignment, but a more modest shift in existing loyalties.
And Joe Klein:
Normally, I don't have much patience for the whining on the left about the Blue Dog democrats--who were sliced in half on Tuesday, losing at least 28 of their 54 seats. When they lose, the Democrats lose control of the Congress. This year, however, I do feel that there is an argument that, to an extent, the Dogs brought this on themselves by being penny-wise, dogpound-foolish. The argument goes like this: a larger stimulus package might have helped the economy recover at a faster clip, but the Dogs opposed it on fiscal responsibility grounds. A second argument: the public really has had it with Wall Street, but the Dogs helped water down the financial regulatory bill, gutting the too-big-to-fail provisions. There is real merit to both points. If the stimulus had been bigger and the financial reform package clearer and stronger, the public would have had a different--and, I believe, more positive--sense of the President's agenda...
...The point is, ideological myopia is counter-productive whether it's found on the left, the right...or the center.
Lots of interesting stuff there. I think that to some extent (and I'm aware of the wishy-washy-ness of that phrase, but so be it), Obama will get his core coalition back together for 2012. And the divides in the GOP to which Judis alludes might blow up into some full-scale war. Republicans are usually good at keeping these things quiet, but the tea-party faction isn't necessarily loyal to the party in the same old-fashioned way.
All that said, whatever reason or spin you put on it, the bottom line from all this is that the Democrats lost a really serious amount of ground Tuesday, and it's not like they were in great shape anyway. They were in good shape. And there was the illusion of their being in great shape, since Obama won the biggest Democratic presidential victory since 1964. But it was never a realignment, as I always warned.
And I think Klein is right about the Blue Dogs. They represented on average poorer people who needed more government intervention in their lives, but were Foxified out of taking the logical position. Even so, on balance the Democrats are worse off without them. There's no path to a congressional majority for Democrats - repeat, no path, nada, none - without some Blue Dogs.
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The sacred rule of law | Michael Tomasky
Eric Holder, the current attorney general of the US, in January 2009:
Asked just minutes into his confirmation hearings whether waterboarding qualified as torture, Holder was unequivocal in his response.
"If you look at the history of the use of that technique used by the Khmer Rouge, used in the inquisition, used by the Japanese and prosecuted by us as war crimes, we prosecuted our own soldiers in Vietnam, I agree with you, Mr. Chairman, waterboarding is torture."
George W. Bush, in his new book, via TPM:
In his new memoir, former President George W. Bush says he personally gave the order to waterboard Khalid Sheik Mohammed in 2003.According to the Washington Post, Bush writes that the CIA asked him if they could use the torture technique on Mohammed.
"Damn right," he said.
So what's going to happen now? Well, exactly nothing, in all likelihood. Except of course that if the day comes that Republicans now in control of the House discover through hearings that Barack Obama once gave a student his U of Chi parking permit, or forgot to declare some Bears tickets Andrew Rezko gave him, something tells me that the "rule of law" will suddenly become more sacred.
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What's different about North Carolina? | Michael Tomasky
One thing that happened Tuesday night is that pretty much throughout the south, the while male Democrat was nearly killed off. This is a major historical development, one that has actually been in process and inevitable for some time now but is still an interesting event to witness.
These things go back, as most things do down there, to the civil war, but just within my lifetime a radical change has taken place. When I was born, the year JFK was elected, essentially the entire southern delegation to Washington consisted of white males (almost all segregationists, I'd point out, except some of you would carry on about my bias against the south again).
Black representatives had routinely (though in very small numbers) been elected from some urban districts of the north going back to the 1930s and 40s. But the south didn't have any black members of Congress until after the 1970-72 redistricting.
Excellent US political trivia question: who were the first black members of Congress from the south? There were two elected in 1972. Hint: one male, one female. Extra hint: the woman, a Texan, has passed away, the man is still active. Third hint, for you younger people: the man made a kind of famous appearance on the Colbert Report during the writers' strike, because Colbert's father and this man had many years before mediated a hospital strike in the south.
Okay, anyhoozers. Across the 11 states of the former Confederacy, 14 white male Democratic candidates, all but one of them incumbents, lost. Check out this NYT/Nate Silver results map and look around.
Only a small number remain. Two of those remaining come with asterisks. Ted Deutsch of Florida, for example, represents a heavily Jewish and strongly Democratic district that is there because of Miami-Lauderdable-Palm Beach, which is to say, aberrant in southern terms. Another asterisk is Gerry Connolly of northern Virginia; the northern Virginia suburbs around Washington are no longer old south in demography or spirit, and anyway Connolly hung on by a thread, winning by fewer than 1,000 votes out of 220,000 cast.
Aside from those two, you have Lloyd Doggett of Texas, Jim Cooper of Tennessee, and John Barrow of Georgia. And that's it. Until...
Look at North Carolina, where, strangely enough, six of that state's seven white male Democrats survived. Only one, David Price, represents a really heavily Democratic district, which takes in the Research Triangle. Three of the other six have a Republican partisan voting index, and three a Democratic one, but in any case, this is an oddity. Consider also that the GOP captured both the state senate and the state house Tuesday, making I think the first time since Reconstruction that the Republicans have controlled both state houses (another marker of how long it takes for tradition and habit to die). The Republican incumbent senator won handily, too, so it's not as if Republicans just had an off night there.
What explains this? Well, it seems to me the obvious, Occam's Razor conjecture is that North Carolina simply has more white Democrats per capita than Georgia or Mississippi does. But on reflection that seems unlikely. Sure, in Price's district, which includes UNC and Duke. But why elsewhere?
Maybe all those Republicans ran uniquely crappy campaigns. Maybe the NC Democratic Party has a crackerjack leader. I don't know, but it certainly stands out.
At any rate, there are 11 white men in Congress from the south. Two represent spiritually northern districts that just happen to be in the old Confederacy. And of the remaining nine, six are in Tarheel country. Maybe this bodes not-so-badly for Obama's chances to win that state again, assuming a better economy? Or maybe not. But North Carolina certainly was different Tuesday from the rest of the south. Any of you live there and actually know?
I'll let you take a stab at the quiz question for a while, and if no one gets it right, I'll answer it down thread a ways. What made me type "a ways"? See how southernisms creep in? Insidious!
CORRECTION: I missed one. Mike Ross of Arkansas won reelection, so that makes four non-Tarheel white male Democrats in the non-Tarheel, non-asterisk south, and 12 overall rather than 11.
Added thought: One might say, well, these NCers are all Blue Dogs (except Price, who has a fairly liberal district). Very well. But those D's who got pummelled in Virginia and Tennessee and elsewhere across the south were mostly Blue Dogs too. So something else must explain why they held on.
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November 3, 2010
Obama's sad sack press conference | Michael Tomasky
Well, that was not one of Obama's better performances, eh? Sheesh.
If he doesn't have anything more original or compelling to say than that, I don't understand why he even goes out there. I'd like to be able to compare this against Bill Clinton's hangdog November 1994 press conference, after that GOP takeover, and even Ronald Reagan's November 1982, when his party lost 27 seats, if he did anything then.
Here, I just found this transcript of Clinton's remarks from the day after that election, via Michael Crowley at Time, and except for some issue names, lots of it reads like it could have been said by Obama today. I mean, it's kind of amazing in passages.
Which one of them said this:
If you ask me for one of the mistakes that I think that I have made since I've been here, I have spent so much time trying to pass bills through Congress that I haven't spent as much time as I was able to spend when I was running for President making sure that the people understood, were in on, and felt a part of the process by which we make decisions. And I believe that, again I will say, as much as the specific decisions that were made, it was the alienation people feel from the Government and the process.
Remarkable, no?
The problem now is that Obama says the same things over and over again. Should he have said something in this press conference designed to make news? He and his people obviously thought no, the hell with it, let's try to make the election a one- or two-day story. Or something like that. But this election is an all week story. I think he might as well have made some news ("Obama challenges Republicans to meet him halfway on blah"). At least he would have seem to be on the offensive. He's just going to spend the week getting kicked around in the press, and he looked and acted like a guy who's going to spend the week getting kicked around in the press.
Then he's going to Asia for nine days. That may seem like bad timing, and it may in fact be bad timing. But this is the trip he's postponed two times. He can't cancel this now. Besides, there is a G-20 meeting involved, and negotiations with South Korea and Japan and China. Presidents do actual substantive things sometimes.
Finally, there's the question of whether his comportment today means anything to anyone except news junkies. Probably not. But I believe my main point still holds. If you're going to get out there in front of reporters, which he doesn't do often, make it worth their while. It's an old saying: if you don't give 'em a lede, as we spell it in j-school, they'll go out and invent one. And by the way the quote above is from Clinton, but Obama said something very like it today.
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The looming Bush tax cuts | Michael Tomasky
Soon, as you know, the lame-duck Congress - the one extant, not the new one voted in yesterday - will return to Washington to discuss the Bush tax cuts. If no action is taken by the end of the year, almost everyone in the US will get a tax increase, so this is one time that we can be sure Congress will do something or other.
But what? The issue as you'll recall has to do with extending the cuts for households earning more than $250,000 a year. The Republicans want to. Obama does not. (Everyone agrees on extending the cuts for households below that figure.) Adding the wealthiest households adds $700 billion to the deficit over 10 years. When Democrats call Republicans hypocrites, Republicans answer by saying no, let's cut discretionary spending.
In today's NYT, David Leonhart outlines five ways this whole thing could go:
1. Cut some discretionary spending, including military. Won't make up the $700 billion by a long shot, but will show that they can cut something.
2. Close loopholes. Also unlikely to cover $700 billion.
3. Obama could offer business tax cuts and spending on job-creation as a compromise.
4. Agree to a millionaires' or multimillionaires' tax - that is, leave people from $250K to, say, $1 million at 35% top rate, but raise the top rate above $1 million to 39%. Remember, every dollar up to the 999,999th is still taxed at the lower rate.
5. Extend the below-250 cuts permanently and the above-250 cuts for just two years, and let the next Congress deal with it.
No. 5 seems about the best Obama could hope for. But it sure seems to me that lots of retiring Blue Dog Dems, probably angry at the White House right about now, are going to vote with the R's here. I think Obama is bound to lose this fight.
But it might matter how he loses. He ought to at least put something on the table so that he's the one making the proposal, and making them react to him instead of vice versa. I think the White House should pitch some spending cuts along with the millionaires' tax. If you raised the 39% rate to those above a million, leaving those from $250,000 to $999,000 alone, Republicans could not plausibly prattle on about small business people. That just would ring false to most Americans. It could easily be packaged to be deficit reducing, I should think, so it's a winner on three counts: reduces deficit, shows willingness to cut some non-military federal programs, and takes away the GOP claim about small businesses while raising some revenue.
How the White House handles this will be an early sign of how they might try to deal with the next two years.
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Turnout: explains a lot | Michael Tomasky
By comparing these 2008 national exit polls and these from yesterday, both from CNN and asking essentially identical questions, we learn some useful things.
Certain figures weren't very different from 2008. The men/women split was the same over both elections, 47% male and 53% female. The "white-no college" category, which we roughly equate with the concept of the white working class, accounted for the same 39% of this year's vote as it did in 2008. Those voters did vote somewhat more Republican this time. They went for McCain by 58-40% and voted Republican this year by 62-35%.
Here, as far as I can see, are the three big top-line differences:
1. The 2008 electorate was 74% white, plus 13% black and 9% Latino. The 2010 numbers were 78, 10 and 8. So it was a considerably whiter electorate.
2. In 2008, 18-to-29-year-olds made up 18% and those 65-plus made up 16%. Young people actually outvoted old people. This year, the young cohort was down to 11%, and the seniors were up to a whopping 23% of the electorate. That's a 24-point flip.
3. The liberal-moderate-conservative numbers in 2008 were 22%, 44% and 34%. Those numbers for yesterday were 20%, 39% and 41%. A big conservative jump, but in all likelihood because liberals didn't vote in big numbers.
Add to these figures the fact that overall turnout was down by about a third, or more, from nearly 130 million to about 82.5 million. That's at least 45 million no-shows, and the exits tell us the bulk of them were liberal, young, black, Latino. If 25 million of these no-shows had voted, Democratic losses would pretty obviously have been in the normal range, and they'd still control the House.
There tends to be a lot of hand-wringing after an experience like this about the Really Big Questions of what the party stands for, and I have and will do some of that, because it matters. But it may well matter less than electoral mechanics. Democrats would probably do far better to invest $200 million in 2014 GOTV operations than in soul-searching, who-are-we projects. Off-year turnout is a perennial problem for the party, and it's only going to get worse as ideological battle lines in society become more rigid, which they are. So this will be something I'll be watching for to see if Democrats understand the climate they're in.
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