Michael Tomasky's Blog, page 46
October 26, 2010
GOP softens its weak accommodationist posture | Michael Tomasky
The above headline makes no sense to you, I'm sure, because it's a little joke occasioned by my happening across this piece from the Hill newspaper the other day, in which Mike Pence, Indiana congressman and strongly credentialed winger on both fiscal and social issues, sought to assure readers that if the GOP does indeed take back the House, there will be no compromise:
"Look, the time to go along and get along is over," said Rep. Mike Pence (Ind.), the chairman of the House Republican Conference. "House Republicans know that. We've taken firm and principled stands against their big government plans throughout this Congress, and we've got, if the American people will send them, we've got a cavalry of men and women headed to Washington, D.C. that are going to stand with us."
Pence said his party wouldn't compromise on issues like spending or healthcare reform, two of the weightiest items on Congress's agenda next year, when the Republicans could control one or both chambers.
Ah, I see, so the last two years have been about going along and getting along, but now the time for that is over. Although he does seem to contradict himself. In any case he goes on to say:
"Look, there will be no compromise on stopping runaway spending, deficits and debt. There will be no compromise on repealing Obamacare. There will be no compromise on stopping Democrats from growing government and raising taxes," Pence told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt Thursday evening. "And if I haven't been clear enough yet, let me say again: No compromise."
As the article goes on to explain, a couple of your more girly-mannish Republicans have apparently said lately that they're probably not really going to repeal Obamacare, and things of that sort. So Pence came in out of the bullpen to throw some heat.
Mind you, none of these Republicans has really said they're looking forward to compromising with the administration on the great issues of the day. They merely said that they might not waste loads of time passing a repeal that's going to be vetoed anyway. If that constitutes compromise, then a man assuring a woman that he won't say lewd and inappropriate things to her constitutes romance.
This story is just a reminder of how the GOP has so shifted reality in Washington that they now get away with saying things that no one could have said 20, 25 years ago. Back then, if someone had talked like that, David Broder and his friends would've gone into high dudgeon, pelting Pence with great pillows of high-minded rhetoric.
Today, no one bats an eye when a Republican talks like this. And notice: in the same article, Joe Biden continues to insist that compromise is "always possible."
The Democrats - Obama, yes, but all of them really - still hold on to this prayerful hope that Washington can be like it was, back in the 1970s, say. Washington will never be like it was (which had its downsides, too, but was preferable all in all to today). Washington is like the Republicans have made it. In a way one should not begrudge them. They fought, and the Democrats kept saying let's play nice.
Next year, the rubber will really meet the road. If Obama and the White House think they can work with these folks, they're just going to get rolled. And when Darrell Issa, the congressman who'll be running the investigations and subpoena wing of the House GOP, says there's "not a chance" that Obama will be impeached, I basically take that as comfirmation that they're damn well going to try.
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October 25, 2010
Are liberals disgusting? | Michael Tomasky
You're aware that the psychological dimensions of political conviction are of interest to this blog, but I don't quite know what to make of this, from the New York Times, via Yglesias:
But disgust does more than just keep us away from poisonous substances. It also exerts a powerful and idiosyncratic influence on judgment. People who are feeling disgust become harsher in their judgments of moral offenses and offenders...
...Subtle cues about disgust and cleanliness can affect social and political judgments as well. In an experiment conducted recently by Erik Helzer, a Cornell Ph.D. student, and one of us (David Pizarro), merely standing near a hand-sanitizing dispenser led people to report more conservative political beliefs. Participants who were randomly positioned in front of a hand sanitizer gave more conservative responses to a survey about their moral, social and fiscal attitudes than those individuals assigned to complete the questionnaire at the other end of the hallway.
In another experiment one of us (Dr. Pizarro) was involved in, a foul ambient smell — emitted, unbeknownst to test subjects, by a novelty spray — caused people answering a questionnaire to report more negative attitudes toward gay men than did people who responded in the absence of the stench. Apparently, the slightest signal that germs might be present is enough to shift political attitudes toward the right.
That's fairly bizarre. I don't doubt that conservatives are more disgusted in general, but how does it follow that the prospect of cleaning one's hands leads to holding more conservative views?
It seems like conservatives win both ways here, no? If you're near a hand-cleaning machine, you become more conservative. But if you smell a foul smell, you are also more likely to become conservative. Maybe all this is yet another way of proving a point we all know already, which is that liberal belief really isn't something that comes naturally to most people, because you have to develop a consciousness about the world beyond your own doorstep. Which is not to say that everyone who does that will become a liberal, because clearly that's not the case. On the other hand, pretty much everyone who does not do that ends up kind of conservative, because they see the world's problems only in terms of how it affects them.
Plus it explains why I've never trusted that hand sanitizer stuff. Clean your hands without water? Can't happen, kids.
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Controversy in Rhode Island | Michael Tomasky
So Frank Caprio, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate in Rhode Island, is steamed that Obama isn't endorsing him, saying that the prez can take his endorsement and "shove it."
I can understand why Obama isn't backing Caprio. He's running against Lincoln Chafee, the former Repubican and now independent, who endorsed Obama in 2008. Some Democrats seems to be fulminating about this on background to reporters, but really, Obama is just paying Chafee back, and that's politics. In the old days, Caprio wouldn't have been paid a lick of attention, but now of course you can get attention easily, especially by making oblique and coarse reference to presidential anatomy.
What I don't understand from Obama's end is why he is going to Rhode Island tonight in the first place. What the hell? There's no Senate race there, and the Democratic incumbents in the House are both virtually guaranteed reelection.
What on earth is the point of going to Rhode Island? It's kind of pathetic, the equivalent of Bush in his last two years going to Oklahoma and Idaho and Utah, about the only places he was above 50% toward the end. Things aren't remotely that bad for Obama, but by doing this, he's feeding the impression that they are.
More mystifying political decisions from this White House. I mean, heck, if you're going up I-95, at least go to Massachusetts, where the Democratic governor is in a tight race and where Obama's approval is still well north of 50.
As the campaign has dragged on, I've become basically more and more baffled by Obama, his White House, and the Democrats generally. They're just not politically competent.
One example: If they were politically competent and willing to play hardball, they'd have found a way long ago to get Kendrick Meek to endorse Charlie Crist, who could then have beaten Marco Rubio. Rubio could not pull 51% of that state's vote. Neither could Meek. Crist could. So you get Crist the job, make sure he caucuses with the D's, and you later get Meek some decent job in the administration (without making an explicit promise up front, because that would be, horrors, against the law).
Well, they'll pay the price for all this soon, I guess. Rhode Island...
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Boot the Blue Dogs? | Michael Tomasky
I've been meaning to mention Ari Berman and his new book, Herding Donkeys, about the recent tussles within the Democratic Party (think mostly 2006-era feuds between Howard Dean and Rahm Emanuel, but updated nicely into the Obama era), which you can buy here.
Berman had a big op-ed in the Times yesterday (on a Sunday; primo real-estate!) called "Boot the Blue Dogs," in which he endorses the view that the Democrats should intentionally down-size (aside from the unintentional down-sizing they'll get next week) and let some of the Blue Dogs lose and just let those districts go Republican.
He quotes a Democratic activist in North Carolina with respect to Heath Shuler, one such Blue Dog. And after her comes Howard Dean, who in 2006 was a big proponent of the view that Democrats had to expand into purple areas with ideologically less liberal candidates:
Margaret Johnson, a former party chairwoman in Polk County, N.C., helped elect Representative Shuler but now believes the party would be better off without him. "I'd rather have a real Republican than a fake Democrat," she said. "A real Republican motivates us to work. A fake Democrat de-motivates us."
Ms. Johnson is right: Democrats would be in better shape, and would accomplish more, with a smaller and more ideologically cohesive caucus. It's a sentiment that even Mr. Dean now echoes. "Having a big, open-tent Democratic Party is great, but not at the cost of getting nothing done," he said. Since the passage of health care reform, few major bills have passed the Senate. Although the Democrats have a 59-vote majority, party leaders can barely find the votes for something as benign as extending unemployment benefits.
Hmmm. I take Johnson's point, I guess, but it's kind of hard to imagine this yielding more progressive outcomes in Congress, especially if the GOP takes the majority next week. But even if the Democrats hold on, I don't really see how a Democratic Party with, say, a 222-213 margin in the House in the House is going to be able to pass any slew of liberal legislation. There are only about 180 or 190 districts in the country (out of 435) that are basically safe Democratic seats. Every Democrat elected beyond that 180 or 190 will be from a district where she feels she has to hedge some bets. Those people won't reliably vote for liberal legislation. So I don't picture it adding up.
And then there's the Senate, of course, where matters are even more fraught.
Personally, I think some of this is solved with the right leadership. Nancy Pelosi has been a really effective speaker in some ways; she's very smart politically and better at her job, I think, than Harry Reid has been. And I hate bowing to this kind of reality, but the fact is, a woman from San Francisco in this day and age and climate etc. is just probably not the best choice for a House Democratic leader. The Democrats need someone who can speak to voters in districts like Shuler's, in western Tennessee.
I don't know if that's Steny Hoyer, the Marylander who seems likely to succeed Pelosi if the Democrats lose the House. But he is more in line with traditional House party leaders, which is to say, he'd be more of a compromise between factions, which I guess has its good and bad points. Pelosi got in there because she'd earned it, and as a history-maker. The first woman. I don't believe in Pelosi-bashing, but I do think the Democrats should probably change leaders if they lose the majority.
But giving up on Blue Dogs strikes me as wrong, frustrating as they can be sometimes. The alternative for Margaret Johnson to Heath Shuler is that the seat stay in GOP hands, and the Democrats there run candidates who can't win that district, which seem certainly less appealing to me than Shuler.
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California won't go to pot | Michael Tomasky
The sober judgment of Californians looks set to reject Prop 19 on legalising marijuana – and the key Republican candidates
No American election is complete without the usual strange array of California ballot initiatives, and this year brings us several, the most notable one being a measure that would make it legal (if localities decided to) for individuals to grow and possess small-ish amounts of marijuana. It's the brainchild of pro-pot activist Richard Lee, who put together the forces who went out and got the signatures to get it on the ballot.
Prop 19, as it's called, started out pretty strongly in the polls, but support has waned lately. Finally, on Saturday, a survey came out showing that the floor had more or less collapsed, with 39% supporting and 51% opposed. The pro-pot forces evidently haven't been able to scrounge up any money for television advertising.
Interestingly, men backed the measure by slight margins, while women were more likely to oppose.
Mothers. Are men careless parents? Are women over-protective? I actually do think mothers are over-protective on these kinds of things. If a teenage child wants marijuana right now in California, it's not as if it's exactly difficult for him to find some. There seems a whiff of Reefer Madness overreaction here, but I'm not in California; maybe some of you who are can tell us.
That said, I can't say I'm positive that I'd vote for it. I guess I'd lean in that direction. The revenue estimates by proponents are of $1.4bn. That's based on a tax-per-ounce of $50. It's been decades since I've, ah, monitored that business, but 50 bucks would seem to be to be awfully high, which is probably as it should be and might even mean, on balance, that that teenager would actually have a harder time affording marijuana if it were legal and taxed.
Even if those revenue estimates are optimistic, I would probably decide that it's an experiment worth trying. You?
Here is a list of major California ballot propositions. To me, the most important one is probably Prop 25, which would permit the state to pass a budget with a simple majority of votes rather than the two thirds of the legislatures now required. The two-thirds requirement to raise taxes would still be in effect; but one step at a time. Prop 25 started out way ahead but is now pretty neck-and-neck, thanks to a no campaign funded by the Chamber of Commerce, Chevron and various other usual suspects.
By the way, the same poll that showed the pot measure losing showed Jerry Brown and Barbara Boxer opening up comfortable leads: Brown over Meg Whitman by 13 points, and Boxer over Carly Fiorina by 8 points. Brown's devastating ad showing Whitman aping the Governator cliche-for-cliche has apparently done the trick. You really ought to watch it if you haven't.
So, California, at least, resists the extremist temptation, for the most part.
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October 22, 2010
Video | Tomasky Talk: US midterms 2010: Florida
Michael Tomasky looks at the potential Republican wins in Florida, where Tea Party favourite Marco Rubio is the frontrunner in a three-way senate race, and Democrat Alex Sink is neck-and-neck with Rick Scott in the contest for governor
Michael TomaskyWilliams and the First Amendment | Michael Tomasky
First of all, we're going quiz-less this Friday, I'm afraid, because other pressures have intervened this Friday morning. The quiz returns next week.
Now. More on Juan Williams. There is a broad misunderstanding in my country of the First Amendment. It does not mean a person can say anything, anywhere. It most certainly does not mean a person can say anything, anywhere and expect to be paid for it. And it definitely does not mean that any time a person is punished for speech, his or her First Amendment rights are being trampled upon. The First Amendment is a value, and as is the case with any value, other values countervail and push against it, and balance must be found.
First of all, there's the value of editorial judgment. The Guardian or the New York Times or whatever might, say, turn down an opinion column submission from someone. That person might scream (in America) that the NYT suppressed her freedom of speech, especially if what she has to say runs counter to the Times' position. Well, no. The NYT has editors who make continuous judgments about the value of submissions. They have every right to make those judgments.
Then there is, alas, commerce. NPR was paying Juan Williams. It wasn't paying him to do whatever he wanted or say whatever he wanted. It was paying him to do a specific thing. As any NPR listener knows, that thing included not venturing personal opinions, because they're extremely careful about that. Williams is quoted in today's Washington Post:
In an interview Thursday, he said, "As a journalist, it's unsupportable that your employer would fire you for stating your honest opinion, and I daresay your honest feelings, in an appropriate setting."
That's a statement that I'm sure many readers will find compelling on its face, but it is actually a completely preposterous statement. Let's say a BBC reporter (standards and practices similar to NPR's on these matters) went on a left-wing show and said in his view, the white race, or Christianity, was a disease. If political opponents of that view made enough of a stink, he'd be fired, I should think. He could say exactly what Williams says above: he was just expressing his honest feelings. Which shows, I think, how absurd a statement it is. In that same WashPost article, an NPR exec is quoted as saying:
"Juan has a First Amendment right to say whatever he wants. He does not have a First Amendment right to be paid by NPR for saying whatever he wants."
This is absolutely true. Especially in this day and age: Juan Williams can, with very little seed money and in about an hour or two, start a blog, where he can say whatever he wants to say. But NPR has no obligation to pay him to say whatever he wants to say. It's true across media properties. If I someday say something that runs afoul of some Guardian rule of taste or ethics, they'll have every right to terminate me on taste or ethics grounds. Put aside the question that the First Amendment doesn't exist in Britain; there's sill a robust tradition, at this paper in particular, of freedom of speech. But even that tradition by no means ensures that I can say anything I want to say, if that thing, in the editor's judgment, violates a canon of taste or ethics. His call.
No opinionator has the right to be paid to say whatever s/he wants. The Washington Post has every right in the world to say someday to Eugene Robinson or Charles Krauthammer, "We're tired of you. Take it somewhere else." The Post need give no reason, in fact. They're employees, or maybe technically contractors, but in either case, they work at the employer's will, as I do. There would be no First Amendment issue there at all in my eyes.
This isn't really about the First Amendment. If Williams had said something about Jews being greedy, would O'Reilly and Gingrich and Palin have leapt to support him? Of course not. You can't talk that way about Jews. And rightly so of course, and no one would defend it.
But now suppose that Williams had said something about Mexicans being lazy and been released by NPR. Here, I'd bet, depending on the exact wording, the troika mentioned above would have backed Williams. Why? Because the American right sees Latinos as a class that's coddled and protected by the, dare I use the phrase, professional left. They see Muslims that way, too.
There is truth in those claims, I won't deny it. Liberals will look out for blacks, Latinos, Muslims, gays, Jews (on minority-persecution issues, but not on the occupation of course). Conservative will look out for whites, Catholics, southerners, straights, Jews (on "Greater" Israel and the occupation).
But let's not pretend this is about the First Amendment. This is about our ongoing culture war. Inasmuch as it's about Muslims, it is also about our post-9-11 war footing, and the clash of two other social values, security versus pluralism.
All that said, NPR probably should have just quietly not renewed Williams' contract whenever it expired. Now, they face some bother. If the Republicans take over the House, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see them go after the network's funding. As a practical matter, that won't be a big deal; very little of NPR's money, in fact, comes from the federal government. They made sure of that before Gingrich took over back in the 90s. All the same, the GOP will make a big deal of it.
But I hate it when people say of these situations, well, whatever the actual truth might be, NPR handled it badly, and that's the bottom line. No. That's not the bottom line. How NPR handled this is a question of political judgment and expediency. The question of principle is whether NPR had the right, under the First Amendment, to do what it did. The obvious answer to that is yes.
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October 21, 2010
Actually not amusing | Michael Tomasky
A priceless quote, which I saw via Andrew Sullivan but which appeared originally in the NYT:
"This so-called climate science is just ridiculous," said Kelly Khuri, founder of the Clark County Tea Party Patriots. "I think it's all cyclical.""Carbon regulation, cap and trade, it's all just a money-control avenue," Ms. Khuri added. "Some people say I'm extreme, but they said the John Birch Society was extreme, too."
Well, yes, Kelly, they did say the John Birch Society was extreme. And they said it because...it was extreme. Is. Still is. Still exists. The JBS opposed civil rights, called Eisenhower a communist tool or agent who might be guilty of "deliberate treason"; the general who defeated Hitler! (Sorry, Monty). Robert Welch, the JBS founder, also said:
"Both the U.S. and Soviet governments are controlled by the same furtive conspiratorial cabal of internationalists, greedy bankers, and corrupt politicians. If left unexposed, the traitors inside the U.S. government would betray the country's sovereignty to the United Nations for a collectivist New World Order, managed by a 'one-world socialist government."
We tend to laugh these people off, but sometimes you have to remember that it really isn't a laughing matter. From Kelly Khuri to Ginni Thomas to Sharron Angle and Rand Paul and Ken Buck to many many others, these are some of the unfunniest people out there.
I was thinking earlier today. When I started covering politics, it was the age of Reagan, and conservatives of the day were, I thought then, pretty tough customers. And they attacked liberals and liberalism quite sharply, and were convinced that they were fighting people whose ideas were really bad for America.
But now on the right we have people who have genuinely persuaded themselves that they're fighting evil and tyranny. That's qualitatively different. Did liberals feel that way about Bush and Cheney? Sure, to some extent. But not this extent, such that maybe 40 or 50 people who think like that will be not just writing blogs and staging protests here and there but will actually be elected members of the Senate and House.
Christine O'Donnell is different. She's still funny.
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Second (and better) half of Clarence Thomas bash | Michael Tomasky
As I mentioned below, the second half of my earlier Clarence Thomas post somehow got lopped. I know it's standard practice to insert it in the original post, and maybe I'll go back and do that, but I decided to post it separately because I think more of you will see it that way. So let's pick up with the final sentence from part one and go from there:
So 19 years later, here comes Ginni Thomas to stand by her man. Hey, I'm not a marriage counselor, and all marriages are mysteries and all of that. But if I were Ginni Thomas, I think I'd just prefer to let this sleeping dog lie, rather than remind half the country why they think her husband is a liar and a buffoon who belongs in the Supreme Court building as a tourist at best.
But Ginni Thomas thinks that half of the country is evil, and she now runs a "grassroots" group, Liberty Central, dedicated to ending the Obama "tyranny." She's a citizen, and that's her right of course.
But her outfit was started with more than half a million dollars in seed money from donors she need not name. The potential for conflict for her husband here is so obvious as to be banal. What if one of her donors someday has material interests at stake in a court decision?
The only way we'll ever know is if Thomas recuses himself. Recusal cannot be called for by any outsiders. It's entirely between the justice and his conscience. On this front, history is not encouraging. As a district court judge, Thomas heard a case that involved a dispute between two pet-food manufacturers. One of the companies happened to have been founded by the grandfather of John Danforth – Thomas's political mentor. Thomas' first job out of law school was an assistant to Danforth, then Missouri attorney general. Danforth held $7.5 million in stock in the company at the time of the lawsuit.
Grounds for recusal? How dare you question Thomas' integrity!
He voted to overturn a multi-million dollar judgment against Danforth's company.
And now Ginni Thomas can go about her intensely ideological business, no harm, no foul. Imagine if Stephen Breyer's wife had founded a group in 2002 called Justice Central devoted to fighting the Bush agenda tooth-and-nail and had spoken publicly of Bush's "tyranny" and raised money from unidentified liberal donors. They would have bayed for Breyer's impeachment.
But this never would have happened. Why? Because Breyer would never have permitted such a thing in a hundred million years. It's not even something I say about Breyer in deep admiration. It's just basic ethics. But well beyond the grasp, alas, of the man who perjured his way onto the court.
And that was how it ended. There now, that feels better.
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A question for our conservative friends | Michael Tomasky
Here's a question for our conservatives (and for all of you, by all means). Back during the healthcare debate, many of you were fond of pointing out, and indeed still point out now and again, that Obama and the Democrats ignored the will of the people and passed a law the people didn't want, and for that they will be punished, and rightly so, because democratic leaders are supposed to listen to le peuple.
I wax French above for a reason, which is this. What are Nicholas Sarkozy and his political allies doing right now in France? Given the scope of the unrest over the retirement age proposals, I think it's not going too far out on a limb to say that Sarkozy is most definitely ignoring the will of the French people. So if Obama should have backed off, shouldn't he?
I've been thinking, by the way, about the riposte many of you offer whenever I post on the hypocrisy of the Republicans accepting and pleading for and bragging about getting stimulus money. For those unfamiliar, you say: These are the rules of the game, and they'd be silly not to play by them, and on that logic, Tomasky, shouldn't the Democrats have refused their Bush tax cuts?
This old dog can still learn a new trick here and there. Having pondered the matter, I say yes, Democrats who vote against tax cuts should indeed forego their share of them, or calculate the amount and donate it to charity, since working out the foregoing of tax dollars with the IRS sounds like an impossible thing to do. When the polity is confronted with this question again someday, you have my word that I'll write from whatever forum I then have exactly this.
Still, I don't think they're quite the same. The tax cuts for 200-odd legislators, even if a good chunk of them are millionaires, amount to a sou compared to the billions that stimulus-hating GOPers are trying to grab from the treasury. Also, most Democrats in 2001 didn't go around saying the tax cuts were tyranny and socialism and fascism, just that they were bad policy.
But as to the main question here: what about it? If Obama was arrogant, isn't Sarkozy? Don't say "but France's pension system is in crisis." America's healthcare system is, too, in the macro sense, very much so. Let's see what you got.
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