Michael Tomasky's Blog, page 51

Video | Tomasky Talk: US midterms 2010: Wisconsin

Video: Michael Tomasky returns with a new series of videos about the close races in the upcoming midterm elections. This week, the Wisconsin senate race

Michael Tomasky

Video | Tomasky Talk: US mid-terms 2010: Wisconsin

Video: Michael Tomasky returns with a new series of videos about the close races in the upcoming mid-term elections. This week, the Wisconsin senate race

Michael Tomasky

The death of climate legislation | Michael Tomasky

I highly commend to you Ryan Lizza's new New Yorker piece on why the climate-change legislation died. It's fairly long, but worth the time: you will really see how this stuff works on Capitol Hill.

You'll see John Kerry, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham map out a strategy of how to get the bill through. You'll see them go to other Republican senators who actually support the idea in their hearts, but then who, one by one, drop off because of the rise of the tea-party movement and home-state politics that would make supporting anything Obama was for impossible. Hence, the circumstance faced by Florida Republican George LeMieux:

But LeMieux didn't have the chance to try that, as he soon became another casualty of Republican primary politics. He had been appointed by the Florida governor, Charlie Crist, who was then running in a tight Republican primary for the seat against another Tea Party favorite, Marco Rubio. LeMieux couldn't do anything that would complicate Crist's life. In a private meeting with the three senators in December, he told them that he couldn't publicly associate himself with the bill. But, according to someone who was present, he added, "My heart's with you."

Then we have the continuing riddle of Olympia Snowe. I wonder if we should still be calling her a moderate. Lizza:

As for Olympia Snowe, the moderate Republican from Maine, who was known for stringing Democrats along for months with vague promises of joining their legislative efforts, she seemed to have a new demand every time Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman sat down with her. She also made it clear that granting her wishes—everything from exempting home heating oil from greenhouse-gas regulations and permanently protecting Georgia's Bank, a Maine fishery, from drilling—would not guarantee her support. She had used similar tactics to win concessions in Obama's health-care bill, which she eventually voted against. "She would always say that she was interested in working on it," a person involved in the negotiations said, "but she would never say she was with us."

You'll see how these things actually get negotiated with business - in this case, how the US Chamber of Commerce was given a free hand to write certain sections of the legislation in exchange for their sign-off.

You'll read that the Obama administration made its errors too. Somebody in the White House really screwed Graham at a crucial moment by leaking to Fox News of all places the inaccurate information that Graham backed a gas tax (K.G.L. is Lizza's shorthand for Kerry-Graham-Lieberman):

Graham was "screaming profanities," one of the K.G.L. staffers said. In addition to climate change, he was working with Democrats on immigration and on resolving the status of the prison at Guantánamo Bay. He was one of only nine Republicans to vote for Obama's first Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor. Now Obama aides were accusing him of backing a gas tax, which wasn't his idea and wasn't even in the draft bill. Worst of all, the leakers went to Fox News, a move which they knew would cause Graham the most damage. He called one of his policy advisers that day and asked, "Did you see what they just did to me?" The adviser said, "It made him question, 'Do they really want to get this done or are they just posturing here? Because why would they do something like this if they wanted to get it done?' It was more than an attempt to kill the idea. It was also an attempt to tag him with the idea, and, if you want him to be an ally on the issue, why would you do that?" Graham's legislative director, Jennifer Olson, argued that he should withdraw from K.G.L. that day.

Still, the White House eventually managed to calm Graham down. But finally, Harry Reid screwed Graham over by famously saying out of nowhere that immigration would come before climate change, even though there was no immigration bill, just because he was (and is) in a tough reelection fight and wanted to play to his state's Latino vote:

Senior aides at the White House were shocked by Reid's statement. "We were doing well until Reid gave a speech and said it was immigration first. News to us!" a senior Administration official said. "It was kind of like, 'Whoa, what do we do now? Where did that come from?' " Reid's office seemed to be embarking on a rogue operation. In a three-day period, Reid's office and unnamed Senate Democrats leaked to Roll Call, The Hill, the Associated Press, Politico, and the Wall Street Journal that the phantom immigration bill would be considered before the climate bill. Graham once again said that he felt betrayed. "This comes out of left field," he told reporters. "I'm working as earnestly as I can to craft climate and energy independence, clean air and jobs, and now we're being told that we're going to immigration. This destroys the ability to do something on energy and climate."

So there's blame to go around. And of course, as I mentioned back at the time, several Senate Democrats were against cap-and-trade for local and regional reasons. So this one is not purely partisan. Although let's remember here that it's pretty pathetic that there was only one Republican out of 41 who was willing to negotiate on this in the first place.

Anyway, it's a well-reported and well-constructed piece of journalism. Makes you see how many moving parts there are to a big piece of legislation like that. It's so much easier being a Republican and not caring about prissy little things like the future of the planet. Cutting taxes and slashing regulations is so much more fun.

US politicsObama administrationUS CongressClimate changeMichael Tomasky
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Did the GOP peak too soon? | Michael Tomasky

I'd suspect many of you have been reading these "did the GOP peak too early?" analyses. I find that I don't have that much to say about the issue. It's all sort of speculative, it's all based on polls. I can read them as well as the next person, and several of them (even Rasmussen) show the GOP lead diminishing. But who really knows.

If this turns out to be the case, though, I would advise you to listen closely in the future to Simon Rosenberg, of NDN, a center-left think tank, who has been saying this a while now and was well ahead of the curve. On his blog today he writes:

More evidence this morning confirming the argument we've been making for the past few weeks - the Republican wave has crested, and a new dynamic in election 2010 has taken hold. New Rasmussen and Washington Post polls each show a 7 point swing towards the Democrats in the national Congressional Generic in the past few weeks. As we wrote yesterday this movement tracks similar movement seen in other polls released over the past few days, indicating that the Democrats have made substantial improvement in their position over the past month.

Part of the reason I can't get too invested in this story line is that I don't see exactly what the Democrats did that was so brilliant. Maybe it's mostly that the GOP loused things up with that silly Pledge business. Maybe the tried-and-true Democratic tactic of scaring people about Social Security still works in the same way that I'd bet if they still played "Precious and Few" (from my day) at a middle-school dance, the kids would still slow dance.

All that said, Rosenberg makes a very interesting point about the media:

There is a clear understanding now in the political class that things have changed, but the big hedge is still on. In the lead Washington Post story on their new poll, the 7 point Democratic gain was "modest," and the 6 point Republican lead "significant." Not sure how that got by their editor this morning but shows how fundamentally invested much of DC's political class is in the September version of this story which had Democrats losing the House, a wave election and big Republican gains were already "baked in the cake."

The downside for the Democrats in this is as Rosenberg suggests - there's a new dynamic happening that's better for Democrats and the media are downplaying it because they've spent months being invested in the landslide theory and can't walk away from it.

The upside for Democrats is that if the media keep their chip on the landslide square and then the GOP doesn't take back the House or Senate, the story line - even if they pick up 31 and seven seats, respectively - will be that the Republicans failed. And I think all that is traceable back to John Boehner's "one hundred seats" are in play nonsense from the spring.

US midterm elections 2010DemocratsMichael Tomasky
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John Gault joins the fire brigade | Michael Tomasky

The situation of a Mr. Gene Cranick of Obion County, Tennessee has been attracting a bit of attention, and for obvious reasons. From Joshua Holland at Alternet:

Call it Ayn Rand's stark, anti-governmental dream come true, a vision that last week turned into a nightmare for Gene Cranick, a rural homeowner in Obion County, Tennessee. Cranick hadn't forked over $75 for the subscription fire protection service offered to the county's rural residents, so when firefighters came out to the scene, they just stood there, with their equipment on the trucks, while Cranick's house burned to the ground. According to the local NBC TV affiliate, Cranick "said he offered to pay whatever it would take for firefighters to put out the flames, but was told it was too late. They wouldn't do anything to stop his house from burning."

The fire chief could have made an exception on the spot, but refused to do so. Pressed by the local NBC news team for an explanation, Mayor David Crocker said, "if homeowners don't pay, they're out of luck."

It's kind of difficult to imagine the commitment to ideology that would make a fire chief just have his men stand there while an actual fire engulfed an actual home of an actual human, especially when said human is vowing that he'll pay not just $75 but anything they want.

I'll grant you: the residents of Obion County who haven't paid their $75 are surely paying up in spades today. Point made.

However, this is fairly incredible, isn't it? Interesting post on the matter from the National Review's Daniel Foster, who takes the view that it's pretty overboard and "bad for libertarians," while office mate Kevin Williamson was in the "let the sucker burn" school based on application of the Pareto Principle.

I only know very literally what the Pareto Principle is and don't understand its relevance is to the current case. Foster make an unconvincing (and possibly half-hearted, since it wasn't his view but Williamson's) case for its application here.

I won't quite go the full nine yards of saying that this is what life would be like in tea party America. Not quite. But I'll go 4.5 yards for sure. Remember, this country (like pretty much all countries) used to have private fire departments. They didn't work well.

Specifically, the idea of competition proved inimical to the successful fighting of fires, or put more broadly, to the successful implementation and continuation of a common good. As I have been suggesting in other recent posts, we may be entering a historical period when we have to relearn these old lessons all over again.

United StatesMichael Tomasky
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Congress campaign cost shows how much is at stake

Some very wealthy interests must feel that they have a lot riding on the outcome on 2 November

What on earth does it mean to have an election – not even a presidential election, mind you, but one in which we elect 535 people to a Congress most Americans do not follow and say they despise – that will cost $5bn? That's rather a lot of money. It's a thousand millions. Times five. In a nutshell, it means that some very wealthy interests must feel that they have a lot riding on the outcome on 2 November.

It means also that thanks to a recent decision of the US supreme court, in the so-called Citizens United case, that corporate interests can spend to support or oppose candidates virtually without limit. This is the first election being held in the US in the wake of that decision, and we may see in these last weeks before the voting a torrent of television advertisements produced and placed by shadowy outfits that have to reveal virtually no information about themselves (who funds them, for instance) while telling viewers that candidate A is a moral reprobate and that without candidate B to defend it, America will surely crumble.

Technically, the Citizens United decision applies to unions, too. But it's worth focusing on corporations for two reasons. First, they have a lot more money. Second, it seems to be the case that significant portions of corporate America have decided, or been persuaded, that the mildly ameliorative steps taken by the Obama administration to address the financial crisis amount to socialism and must be stopped at all costs. So there is much spending in the healthcare area on behalf of candidates running on the promise that they'll work to repeal Obamacare. And Democrats get their share of corporate money as well, along with almost all money from unions and from lawyers and legal associations. So there's lucre to go around.

How to stop it? There is no way to stop it. There are ideas about, but our system of campaign finance in America is probably broken beyond repair and subject to the paradox that while it's horrible for the republic and (nearly) everyone knows it, it's good for each legislator individually, so there's never any incentive for real change.

If nothing else, the dollar figure tells us how much is at stake in this election. If the Republicans gain control of Congress, they will talk a lot about purifying the nation's soul, which plays well in the cheap seats. But when they get down to business they'll be doing their level best to save corporate America billions of dollars.

US midterm elections 2010US CongressUS politicsUnited StatesMichael Tomasky
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Third party future? | Michael Tomasky

Tom Friedman's Sunday column is generating a lot of buzz around the interwebs. He called for a third party:

I've just spent a week in Silicon Valley, talking with technologists from Apple, Twitter, LinkedIn, Intel, Cisco and SRI and can definitively report that this region has not lost its "inner go." But in talks here and elsewhere I continue to be astounded by the level of disgust with Washington, D.C., and our two-party system — so much so that I am ready to hazard a prediction: Barring a transformation of the Democratic and Republican Parties, there is going to be a serious third party candidate in 2012, with a serious political movement behind him or her — one definitely big enough to impact the election's outcome.

There is a revolution brewing in the country, and it is not just on the right wing but in the radical center. I know of at least two serious groups, one on the East Coast and one on the West Coast, developing "third parties" to challenge our stagnating two-party duopoly that has been presiding over our nation's steady incremental decline.

President Obama has not been a do-nothing failure. He has some real accomplishments. He passed a health care expansion, a financial regulation expansion, stabilized the economy, started a national education reform initiative and has conducted a smart and tough war on Al Qaeda.

But there is another angle on the last two years: a president who won a sweeping political mandate, propelled by an energized youth movement and with control of both the House and the Senate — about as much power as any president could ever hope to muster in peacetime — was only able to pass an expansion of health care that is a suboptimal amalgam of tortured compromises that no one is certain will work or that we can afford (and doesn't deal with the cost or quality problems), a limited stimulus that has not relieved unemployment or fixed our infrastructure, and a financial regulation bill that still needs to be interpreted by regulators because no one could agree on crucial provisions. Plus, Obama had to abandon an energy-climate bill altogether, and if the G.O.P. takes back the House, we may not have an energy bill until 2013.

These days, talk of a serious third-party candidacy can to my mind mean only one thing: Mike Bloomberg. For the simple reason that it would take many many many millions of dollars. You have to start by paying people to get you on the ballot in 50 states, and to survive legal ballot challenges. That's probably $20 million right there.

I have never been a big Bloomberg fan. He's been a competent to very competent mayor. But I wasn't wild about the idea of a liberal Democrat, which he was up to 2001, suddenly becoming a Republican for convenience so he wouldn't have to face a primary. That could have been just show. But then, beyond that, he actually embraced the national GOP to a considerable extent, having Dick Cheney over to his house for a fundraiser and such. I thought he was a good manager and decision maker, but a bit of a moral coward.

Then came his striking support for the lower Manhattan Islamic building and I thought, this is a new side of this guy.

So maybe it would take a guy who has a billion dollars to spend (and he does) to elect himself president. Let's say hypothetically he did that, and we had President Bloomberg in 2013.

The question then would be, okay, he got himself elected, without owing anything to a single corporation or trade union in America; but he's not emperor, he's president, and he still has to work with these 535 people down Pennsylvania Avenue who all have special interests they serve. Could he really break that logjam?

Let's say he proposed a grand budget bargain in which the Social Security retirement age was raised (bitter pill for the left) and some kind of tax, personal or corporate, was increased (bitter pill for the right). Would he have any chance of getting this through?

I think the D's would roll, because a) D's just roll, it's what they do, and b) half the D's support that idea anyway. But getting the R's to sign onto a tax increase...that's a taller order. He'd probably have public opinion behind him, at least at first, but the right-wing noise machine would just start in reminding people that this guy was a liberal Democrat and is going back to his roots and is, afteral, from New York City and is very, uh, "cosmopolitan."

I have a really hard time envisioning how the two-party system, dysfunctional as it is, is dislodged, defining "dislodged" not merely in electoral terms (i.e. could a Bloomberg win an election) but in governing terms. I'm not sure how different it would be from a moderate Democrat.

US politicsMichael BloombergMichael Tomasky
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The terror alert and the psyche | Michael Tomasky

I suppose some conspiracy theorists may be suspecting that there's some political reason behind this announcement by the Obama administration about a possible terrorist attack being imminent on the continent, and the warning to US travelers.
The UK government has evidently joined the US. Germany says it sees no evidence.

I guess the thinking would be that well, the Bush administration raised threat levels during campaign seasons. Tom Ridge, who was Bush's homeland security chief, wrote in his book that he came to think that those "orange threat" announcements were political. So if Bush did it, would Obama do it as well, for the rally-round-the-president effect? This was the gist of a conversation on NPR this morning between host Steve Inskeep and Cokie Roberts.

The problem with the theory is that it's well-known that terrorist threats help Republicans. There's been lots of academic research on this since 9-11. The general idea is that thoughts of terrorism lead people to think about death - specifically their own deaths. And when people start worrying about dying in a political context (because terrorism is political), they start thinking about which leaders are more likely to protect them, and for most people that means Republicans, which is not immediately logical since the only really huge terrorist attack in US history happened while Republicans were in charge of protecting the homeland, but logic has nothing to do with it and rhetoric and perception have everything to do with it.

See this paper, for example (pdf). The operative phrase is "mortality salience" - i.e., concerns about one's own mortality go up the ladder of one's concerns and priorities.

Democrats probably wouldn't try to exploit terrorism fears because that isn't how their brains are wired. Republicans tend to be believers in authority, and they want people to depend on them for protection. Democrats tend to recoil against that sort of thing. At any rate, even if Democrats tried, it would backfire on them.

United StatesGlobal terrorismMichael Tomasky
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Rick Sanchez and Joe Sobran | Michael Tomasky

So we saw a huge fuss over one allegation of anti-Semitism over the weekend, but not nearly enough of a fuss over another.

I would imagine you all followed the business of Rick Sanchez, the CNN afternoon host who gave an interview on satellite radio last Friday morning, said some things about Jon Stewart and Jewish people generally that were ill-advised to say the least, and then found himself fired on Friday afternoon.

Sanchez's offending words were like these, to pluck one representative paragraph that covers the full rainbow of he-said-what-ism:

Very powerless people… [snickers] He's such a minority, I mean, you know [sarcastically]… Please, what are you kidding? … I'm telling you that everybody who runs CNN is a lot like Stewart, and a lot of people who run all the other networks are a lot like Stewart, and to imply that somehow they — the people in this country who are Jewish — are an oppressed minority? Yeah.

That's pretty bad. But in fact it got even worse. According to the web site of the show's host, Pete Dominick, there was also this exchange, which is far worse and which, rather stunningly, hasn't been reported:

Pete asked, "They can't relate to that? A Jewish person doesn't have a constant fear in the back of their head that we could [inaudible] the Holocaust?"

"I think his father could," Sanchez replied, referring to Stewart.

"I think every Jewish person feels that way," Pete said.

"I hope so," Sanchez responded.

People will draw comparisons with, say, the talk-radio hosts who regularly say horrible things about black people, and lots of folks make excuses for them. But being a TV host is different from being a shock jock. TV hosts are supposed to be bland. Well, except on one cable network we know of, but that network isn't a news operation in any known sense but a propaganda outfit (read Krugman today - do it). Maybe a lengthy suspension and later on-air penance could have sufficed, but CNN's decision is understandable.

Meanwhile, the weekend also brought news of the death of Joseph Sobran, far less well-known than a television host but for a number of years in the 1970s through the 1990s a reasonably influential conservative opinion journalist, a hand-picked acolyte of Bill Buckley at the National Review.

Sanchez is a Latino guy who has experienced discrimination and has some weird issues with the people he sees as controlling his fate and belittling him. Sobran was fairly clearly an anti-Semite. So it was strange to read the New York Times obit by William Grimes, which applied brush to air with the restiveness of a latter-day van Gogh:

Mr. Sobran's isolationist views on American foreign policy and Israel became increasingly extreme. He took a skeptical line on the Holocaust and said the Sept. 11 terror attacks were a result of American foreign policy in the Middle East, which he believed that a Jewish lobby directed. Not surprisingly, he spent much of his time defending himself against charges of anti-Semitism.

"Nobody has ever accused me of the slightest personal indecency to a Jew," he said in a speech delivered at a 2002 conference of the Institute for Historical Review. "My chief offense, it appears, has been to insist that the state of Israel has been a costly and treacherous 'ally' to the United States. As of last Sept. 11, I should think that is undeniable. But I have yet to receive a single apology for having been correct."

An effective counter to this was penned by Jeet Heer, a Toronto-based journalist who writes frequently on intellectual history:

The fact is, Sobran did more than "take a skeptical line of the Holocaust." Sobran, to be blunt, became a Nazi fellow-traveler. Most readers of the Times won't know what the Institute for Historical Review is. The name is certainly benign enough. It is in fact an organization devoted to Holocaust denial and other forms of Nazi apologetics.

And anyway, as Heer points out: "a skeptical line on the Holocaust"...what does that even mean? Only three million? Or dismay that it didn't finish the job, or what? Some of Sobran's defenders say he was anti-Israel, not anti-Semitic, but Heer produces several examples of statements by Sobran that show him attacking the idea of Jews in a European society, not attacking Israel. It surprised me that the Times didn't have a better institutional memory than that.

United StatesMichael Tomasky
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Short reality check | Michael Tomasky

Yglesias, citing the FT's Ed Luce on the Pledge for America. These two grafs are Luce's:

In contrast, John Boehner, the Republican leader in the House of Representatives, flanked by the "Young Guns", only one of whom is younger than Mr Cameron, promised to maintain all the tax cuts that George W. Bush instituted, never raise any taxes again in any shape or form, and do all this while restoring America's budget to balance.

All of which might have been plausible were it to have spelt out the draconian spending cuts that would therefore be necessary to bring the budget back to surplus. But it declined to do so. Instead it ring-fenced more than three-quarters of the US federal budget – social security, Medicare and defence spending – and promised to impose caps on the remaining, "discretionary" portion of it.

And Yglesias:

The only question at this point is why this comes as a surprise to anyone. Since 1980, we've had two movement conservative presidents and this is what they both did—cut taxes drastically, increased military spending, reduced spending on a few things, blew up the deficit, and relaxed regulatory enforcement. Both George HW Bush and Bill Clinton reduced the deficit with a mix of higher taxes and lower spending, and both were denounced by the right for doing so. But deficit reduction isn't a mystery. You need higher taxes and lower spending.

Shouldn't this be easy for the Democrats? Ladies and gentlemen, for all they talk about deficits, look at the last two conservative presidents, two of the most conservative presidents we've ever had. Both cut taxes and exploded the deficit. So that pretty much proves you can't do both. So Boehner is talking nonsense and he knows it, and when push comes to shove, what he and his buddies really want to cut taxes on the rich.

It would be a cleaner argument if, as I said this morning, the Democrats defined "rich" more accurately, as starting at $300,000 but really kicking in at something quite above that.

I'm headed out of town for a day for a meeting. This means, alas, no quiz tomorrow morning, and probably no posting tomorrow, as I will be in aforementioned meeting. But I may throw down a couple of bonus posts over the weekend. In the meantime, why don't some of you use the occasion of this thread to give your fellow commenters some mini-quizzes of your own? Hegelian can do German philosophers, Bookfan can do Dutch history, and Vicious Misanthrope can test your knowledge of points of commonality between the oeuvres of Michael Mann and Lucien Goldman. Good times.

US midterm elections 2010Michael Tomasky
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