Michael Tomasky's Blog, page 52

Entertaining candidate-journalist smackdown | Michael Tomasky

Remember those polls a couple of weeks ago showing Carl Paladino, tea-partier and surprise GOP nominee for governor of New York, closing fast on Democrat and presumptive leader Andrew Cuomo? Well, I think Paladino may have peaked.

Via Tom Robbins of the Village Voice, you can read this detailed account of Paladino's threat he made yesterday to New York Post reporter Fred Dicker (there's also video footage about):

Cuomo's campaign, said Dicker, "says you've descended into the gutter by saying he had extra marital relations while he was married. Do you have any evidence of that, and if you don't isn't that going into the gutter?"

Paladino looks down. He chews his lip. "Hmm," he says. "Well a guy that's been in the gutter and spent a good part of his life in the gutter with Andrew Farkas should think twice about trying to characterize me."

(For obscure Farkas reference, see Barrett, W., Aug. 29, 2006: "Andrew Cuomo's $2 Million Man," now the subject of a Paladino attack ad.)

"You're a lawyer, what evidence do you have for something most people would consider a smear?"

Now Carl is looking up and the look is not nice. "I want to know why you sent your goons after my daughter."

"I sent no one," says Dicker.

"I want to know Fred," says Paladino.

"Do you have any evidence?" persists Dicker.

"Of course I do. You'll get it at the appropriate time. You're not entitled to it."

Dicker's hand now reaches out towards the candidate, stopping a couple inches short of Paladino's tie.

Michael Caputo, Paladino campaign manager, is heard warning Dicker about the hand. "Fred, fingers don't belong here."

It is too late, however. The two are in a school yard stand-off, cameras rolling.

"I have a daughter" shouts Paladino.

"You brought it out," says Dicker, the hand still waving.

Caputo jumps between them. "Fred, that's it." He tries to push the Post reporter away.

"Stay away from me," barks Fred, his chin jutting towards the candidate, stepping in closer, a classic boxing move to steal a foe's breathing space. "What evidence do you have?"

Paladino steps back. His finger goes up in warning.

"Do you have the evidence or do you not?" continues Dicker. "He's the attorney general of the State of New York!"

"Yes and you're his stalking horse! You're his bird dog."

They are circling now, Caputo still trying to push Dicker back.

Now comes the Republican's tough shot:

"You send another goon to my daughter's house and I'll take you out, buddy!"

"You'll take me out?"

"Yeah?"

"How you gonna do that?"

"Watch."

I remember when I was a cub reporter, and Tom a senior colleague of mine, that Fred was tackled by political consultant Norman Adler, then an adviser to the man who was the speaker of the state assembly at the time. I came to know Fred, and Norman, and like them both. Doesn't sound like I could say the same of Paladino.

On the larger point, it seems that Cuomo is well ahead again. Of more interest nationally is the fact in this same poll, incumbent Democratic senator Kirsten Gillibrand is 11 points up on GOP challenger Joe DioGuardi. With Dems continuing to gain modest ground in some generics I've seen, there might be something to the argument that the tea-party tide crested just a little bit early. In any case, one doubts this is Paladino's last surprise of the season.

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More power to conservative Democrats | Michael Tomasky

I was struck by Vicious Misanthrope's little anecdote in the previous thread:

Yesterday I went to a couple of my local working-class guys to get them to put Manchin signs up in their yards.

They've always supported Joe strongly in the past.

Not now.

Both gave the same reason---he supported the health care bill, and they are going to be forced to take health insurance or the government will be after them.

And there was no use in arguing the point with them unless you just wanted to burn bridges or something stupid.

Well, let's see. First of all, if it does end up that these gentlemen have to buy insurance, it seems to me likely there will come a day when they're glad they have it. But one can't really expect them to see that now, I suppose.

In the nearer term, there is no denying that Democrats in tough states and districts are running away from healthcare and the bailouts and Obama, and politically they have to. Here we have Jonathan Weisman in today's Wall Street Journal:

DOYLESTOWN, Pa.—Rep. Patrick Murphy, a fresh-faced rising Democratic star and loyal backer of President Barack Obama's agenda, is facing the fight of his life in a suburban Philadelphia district Mr. Obama won easily two years ago.

Across Pennsylvania, another Democrat, Rep. Jason Altmire, is competing in a district Republican John McCain took by a wide margin. Mr. Altmire is running away with it, by running away from the president.

In their contrasting fates lie broader lessons for the coming midterms: Live by the president and you could die by the president. Democrats who have been thorns in the president's side are doing well in some of the toughest districts for their party, from Alabama to the steel belt of western Pennsylvania. But swing-district Democrats who have voted with the president in Congress are struggling, even if they're now asserting their independence.

We're obviously in a pretty toxic situation right now. Sarah Palin is the chief figurehead of an outfit called takebackthe20, which is taking aim (complete with the by now de rigueur for the right crosshairs symbols on the 20 House districts in question) at House Dems in districts she and McCain won who voted for healthcare.

Weisman's piece goes on to suggest that the conserva-Dems who are running against Obama are holding their own so far. The result will be a smaller Democratic caucus in the House overall, with about as many Blue Dogs as now, which will increase their percentage and their leverage.

On one level, I'm not crazy about this at all, because it means that lots of things just won't be done, things that would have been common-sensical 30 years ago, like a big clean-energy bill. But it ain't 30 years ago. It's now.

Politically speaking, let's face it, the best possible outcome from these elections for Obama is that the Democrats hold the House by a narrow margin, and the Blue Dogs D's have more power, which means no more big liberal legislation, which means he can maybe recapture the middle again by 2012. Unfortunately the middle in this country today is well to the right of where it was 15 years ago, let alone 30. But that's another subject and a longer battle, one liberals have obviously been losing for a long time.

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Fresh start on taxes? | Michael Tomasky

I like waking up and discovering that the world is possibly catching up to the common-sense realities discussed on this blog. Such is the happy case today, as I read in the New York Times that some senators are discussing the question of why the Bush tax-cut debate absolutely has to be structured as it is:

President Obama has proposed preserving the cuts for middle-class Americans and letting them expire for the top 2.5 percent of taxpayers — individuals who make more than $200,000 a year and families whose income exceeds $250,000.

But others in Congress have questioned why ending what Mr. Obama frequently calls "tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires" should also raise taxes on families making $250,000. The Senate will not vote on the matter until after the midterm elections, and some Democrats are pushing for a compromise that would leave the cuts in place for those higher up the income scale.

"I think the $250,000 level is too low," said Senator James Webb, Democrat of Virginia. "I'm asking that it be raised."

I expect some other liberal blogs will have at me today over this, but so be it. I'm with Webb. From farther down in the piece:

But in some expensive sections of the country, many families with income levels near the $250,000 cutoff insist that they have more in common with middle-class Americans than millionaires or billionaires.

"You take a couple in Westchester County, a police officer with a lot of overtime and a principal at a public school," said Vincent R. Cervone, a certified public accountant in New York City. "They're grateful to be working. They aren't in danger of eviction or starving. But the cost of the average house is $500,000 — five times the national average. Taxes are higher than the rest of the country. If they have a couple of children in college, can you call them rich? Not by any common-sense standard."

It is kind of absurd to call a cop and a school principal "wealthy." Granted there aren't many cop-principal households that fall into this category, but there are enough around the country to matter. And there are enough high-cost-of-living areas where a married couple in which each person makes $125,000 is obviously far above average but still not wealthy in the ways we think of the term.

It seems to me that the real problem with the income-tax structure is this, which the article notes: "Mr. Obama's plan would charge the same rate on the 382,551st dollar of earnings as it would on the 30 millionth."

Now, a person (or a couple) making $382,551 a year is plainly rich in my book. But he/they still aren't LeBron James.

My preference, and this is where I assume I part company from Brother Webb, is to treat $300,000 and $3 million differently. Maybe raise the top marginal rate on $300,000 and above to 42.5%. But raise the top marginal on income above something like $2 million to 55%. A little more. Work out the specifics so that the end result is at least deficit-neutral, or ideally better.

Let's see the GOP defend that. They can't lean on the small-business crutch then, I doubt. It makes intuitive sense to folks that small business people might make $250,000, which I imagine is helping the GOP position in the current debate (that, plus the fact that they're lying about what constitutes a small business, as we've discussed).

All they'd be left saying then is class warfare - against the top .3% or so of earners. That's an argument the Democrats ought to be able to win, and it's one that can change, even if slightly, the terms of our current tax debate, which as I've written many times is the core problem in our politics. If Democrats can succeed in winning a debate that has an end result that establishes the principle of progressive taxation, that would be a pretty big deal.

I've been wondering for about two weeks, why just have the debate on terms already established a decade ago by Bush and the GOP? Invent new terms. So this is potentially a hopeful sign, although again, I doubt the D's are exactly rushing to embrace my 55% idea. But it's a start perhaps.

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We the barbarians | Michael Tomasky

Kwame Anthony Appiah, the brilliant Princeton philosophy professor, has a new book out about how moral revolutions happen (called, perhaps fittingly, The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen). In conjunction with its launch he had an interesting essay in Sunday's WashPost on how future generations will look at us:

Once, pretty much everywhere, beating your wife and children was regarded as a father's duty, homosexuality was a hanging offense, and waterboarding was approved -- in fact, invented -- by the Catholic Church. Through the middle of the 19th century, the United States and other nations in the Americas condoned plantation slavery. Many of our grandparents were born in states where women were forbidden to vote. And well into the 20th century, lynch mobs in this country stripped, tortured, hanged and burned human beings at picnics.

Looking back at such horrors, it is easy to ask: What were people thinking?

Yet, the chances are that our own descendants will ask the same question, with the same incomprehension, about some of our practices today.

Is there a way to guess which ones?

He winds his way toward four answers: our prison system; industrial meat production; "the institutionalized and isolated elderly"; and the environment, by which he means our lack of will on "deforestation, wetland destruction, pollution, overfishing, greenhouse gas emissions - the whole litany."

I don't know. I think numbers one and four will still exist in the arena of political contention. He doesn't specify a point in time. But let's say 2110. Of course if we haven't achieved consensus on environmental action by then, all else might be moot. But I'm afraid I think that action on the environment is something humankind will delay and delay until the last (hopefully) possible minute.

Meat? Again, I don't know. Human have been eating meat for thousands of years. Whereas slavery, for example, didn't really exist for thousands of years, in the sense that we came to understand slavery, as an institution and an economic pillar, as it were. Slavery was the creation of a specific set of human circumstances - the building of ships, the development of trade routes, the colonial and conquering impulse. It exist for only a couple hundred years, maybe 250, and even then did not exist among all humans.

Whereas meat has been eaten in all cultures since cultures began. If the argument is strictly limited to industrial meat farming, then sure, laws will be passed eventually. But meat will always be around, I should think.

I will admit that I often wonder whether football will be around in 100 years. I mean my football, not that kicky game you folks play (you know, the one it actually makes sense to call football). There is the evidence of the quality of life of ex-NFL lineman as they enter their 60s, with their multiple surgeries and so on. And there's the occasional (but it seems to me slightly increasing) instance of severe injury or even death among youngsters. It will surely start as a crusade to save the children, as so many things do.

This pains me because I really do love the game as a fan. At the same time, I can see that it's a bit gruesome. Maybe someday we can go in the direction charted out by that famous Jetsons episode when George and Mr. Spacely got to a football game and it's played by robots. By then we might be able to make flawed animatronic bots whose behavior wasn't entirely predictable. This is a good idea for a screenplay...

Anyway, thoughts, people? About what are we barbarians?

United StatesMichael Tomasky
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Obama, crowds, individuals - and Will Smith | Michael Tomasky

Well, it looks like Obama brought a little of the old stuff last night, in Madison, Wisconsin. Police estimate that 27,500 people showed up. From the Wisconsin State Journal:

President Barack Obama served as the closing act Tuesday for a rock-n-roll, fire-up-the-troops extravaganza on the UW-Madison campus — a giant rally meant to recapture the excitement of the campaign trail and bridge the so-called "enthusiasm gap" among younger, Democratic voters.

Obama took the stage at Library Mall to a raucous crowd, following a performance by musician Ben Harper and a series of speeches by the state's major Democratic candidates. From the outset, the president made it clear why he was in Madison, and on campus, at this moment.

The Politico's account of his travels yesterday, however, noted the following:

Hours earlier, it was a different story. At times, Obama couldn't generate that same enthusiasm from a town-hall style audience in Albuquerque, N. M. Maybe it was the heat, but throughout the "backyard discussion," the horses peering through the fence behind the back yard of a suburban home seemed more curious than the 30 people the White House had invited to hear the president in an intimate setting.

I've covered lots of those kinds of things (not with presidents, but at every other level). When a reporter feels license to write a sentence like the horses seemed more interested...it was dull.

Obama can still rev up a crowd, but can he connect as an empath to one human being? That woman last week who said she was getting tired of defending him: that was an opportunity for either an empathic "I understand" to soften her anger or an energetic "You know what you tell people? Tell 'em this!" to fire up her engine. Instead, he just reiterated policy successes that she should be aware and proud of.

People in general are very bad imitators of success. In 1992, when that lady in San Diego asked Bill Clinton about the deficit, he famously walked to the edge of the podium and looked her in the eye and bit his lip and hauled out the violin. The American political media have been gaga about that moment ever since.

I would think that if I were a politician, I'd remember that. That's all you have to do. Move close to a person. Look him/her right in the eye. Talk not about policies and bills, but about understanding the pain the person and his/her family must be going through right now. Relate it something in your own past, which Obama can surely do because while never poor he was sure never rich until just recently. This is very fundamental stuff.

He's doing more of the face-to-face kind of thing today. We'll see if anyone around him had the sense, and if he has the instincts, to manage this.

You may say it's not that important, and maybe it's not, but the whole "he's aloof" thing is damaging, I think, and let's face it, his race plays into it. Without getting too deep into this, I will simply say that we all know the types of black men who come off as reassuring to white America. Will Smith, say.

Part of the problem here - and this should probably be its own post, but what the hell, I've started - is that the black men who have been reassuring to white America have all had an ability I would describe thus: They - Smith, Bill Cosby, Sidney Poitier - have been able to cut through artifice and things we don't normally discuss. They can say to white America, I am like you, and I am not like you. And they can make jokes about it, and everybody relaxes.

Obviously, a president can't say I'm not like you, and he can't make jokes about racial differences. But putting all that aside, he can just be more straightforwardly empathetic to one-on-one questioners.

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Government shutdown looming?

Jim DeMint, Republican senator of South Carolina/Tea Party fame, is threatening to shut the government down as of Sept. 30. It's all very complex procedural stuff, but it is well explained by this Daily Kos post from David Waldman.

The post starts out quoting Roll Call:

Traditionally, the Senate passes noncontroversial measures by unanimous consent at the end of most workdays, a process known as hot-lining. DeMint, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and others have fought against the practice for years and have dedicated staff members to reviewing bills that are to be hot-lined.

As a result, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) have generally given DeMint, Coburn and others time to review legislation before proceeding with unanimous consent agreements.

But in a terse e-mail sent to all 100 Senate chiefs of staff Monday evening, Steering Committee Chief of Staff Bret Bernhardt warned that DeMint would place a hold on any legislation that had not been hot-lined or been cleared by his office before the close of business Tuesday.

Okay, got that? Let me provide a little context by saying that for the better part of two centuries, both parties permitted unanimous consent on noncontroversial bills. Until Tom Coburn and Jim DeMint came along.

Even so, Coburn and DeMint usually agree to let minor bills pass through. But this week, with adjournment scheduled for Thursday, DeMint has just threatened to personally hold back any legislation, no matter how minor, that isn't agreed to by close of business today.

It also happens to be the case that the fiscal year ends Sept. 30, meaning government operations will end if Congress doesn't pass what are called continuing resolutions to keep things going - to keep national parks open, certain federal disbursements going out, etc.

David Dayen of FireDogLake doesn't think that in this case DeMint can probably hold things up for more than a few days, and he knows more about procedure than I do.

But I don't put much past DeMint. A government shutdown would really fire up the tea-party base. It would really fire up the liberal base too, of course. But it would put a lot of pressure on Democrats to win the spin war, with a president sitting in the White House on the day (Oct. 1) that government services - hated in abstract, quite useful in real life - suddenly become unavailable or stop arriving. I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say the D's are quite capable of screwing it up.

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American geniuses | Michael Tomasky

The 2010 MacArthur grant winners, or the so-called "genius awards," were announced today. Here is the list.

For those of you elsewhere, this is a big thing in America. These people are given $500,000 over five years simply because they've proven in their past work that they are intellectually exceptional, and they deserve a hundred thou a year because geniuses shouldn't have to worry about money.

Obviously, financial hardship isn't a criterion, because David Simon, creator of The Wire and Treme, won one. I was pleased by the inclusion of a typographer, Matthew Carter, who designed the fonts used by the New York Times since a subtle face-lift in back in 2003. I like typefaces, calligraphy, typographic design, etc. If Scorsese started making movies about the moral dilemmas of typographers, we'd be getting somewhere.

I was pleased also to see the inclusion of historian Annette Gordon-Reed, who was as I recall much frowned upon in her trade because she (she's African American fwiw) was the first to come out and say that Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings were indeed lovers and produced progeny that has a line that exists today. Resistance to that notion, which has melted away in the face of evidence, was rather strong at first, as you might imagine.

So resistance can melt away in the face of evidence. Someone should tell the Republicans.

Speaking of evidence that Republicans avoid, economist Emmanuel Saez copped one for his work on proving the market value of teachers. His more discussed work in my realm is with his colleague Thomas Picketty on tax policy and income inequality, and they speak much sense.

The novelist on the list is Yiyun Li. She wrote The Vagrants. Haven't read her. Have you?

Anyway, I am kind of astounded that the emolument has been $500,000 since the awards began in 1981. Back then $500,000 was real money. Today a hundred thousand a year isn't anything special (it is tax free, I think). Apparently Anna Deveare Smith said that after she won, Susan Sontag told her, "Don't start taking all your friends out to dinner, it's not really that much money." I guess society has bigger problems, but I can't believe there hasn't been pressure to raise the take home.

United StatesMichael Tomasky
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More Rahm and Axe, and Obama's instincts | Michael Tomasky

Josh Marshall raises a question that's been gnawing at me:

The word out tonight is that Rahm Emanuel is leaving the White House and his departure will likely happen this week. I know people have strong feelings on both sides about Rahm. But I must say I find it somehow unseemly and almost bizarre what a rapid departure he's making.

Chief of Staff is usually considered a pinnacle job rather than a stepping stone. You do it until the president is done with you or you burn out, neither of which usually takes very long. And five weeks before an election? On very short notice? It just doesn't seem right.

It is strange, there's no question about it. Sure: if he wants to run for mayor he'd better get a move on to raise money and so forth. But not even staying until the election? My guess would be that's his timetable, not Obama's. That is, Rahm think the election is going to be a bloodbath, and he doesn't want the articles in the Trib and Sun-Times a few weeks from now to open, "Former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, fresh off working on an election that was a disaster for his party, announced his candidacy today..."

That Obama is letting him do this raises another question about Obama's instincts. Some insight is gleaned into those instincts in Noam Scheiber's informative TNR profile of David Axelrod (TNR is firewalled to non-subscribers, so I'm not sure that link will take you to the whole piece, but it might, so give it a shot if you're interested). This to me was an interesting little set-piece:

One of the first major political questions the White House faced after the inauguration was how to handle public outrage over bonuses at bailed-out companies. Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill offered an answer: a bill preventing any executive at a company on government life-support from making more than the president, or $400,000 per year. "David liked that a lot," says a strategist close to the White House. But Obama ultimately sided with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who believed it would discourage firms from participating in programs designed to stabilize the financial system.

In a way, it's reassuring that the technocrat in Obama prevailed over whatever demagogue is in him. Geithner probably had a point - people react to incentives and disincentives. However, there was the question of public mood, which Obama chose not to placate. As I say, that's admirable to a point. But am I alone in getting the feeling that maybe Obama makes a bit of a fetish of not kowtowing to public opinion?

Axelrod - Scheiber does note that he saw most of the political trouble coming, telling Obama shortly after the election that the economy was in crisis, would be for at least 18 months, and his poll numbers would fall accordingly - is portrayed as beaten town by this town. And so next year, he's trading places with David Plouffe.

All this shaking-up should be a positive for the White House. Emanuel and Axelrod haven't exactly been the Jordan and Pippen of American politics (Brits: they're the real-life dynamic duo in recent American history, the sine qua non of two great superstars who made everyone around them better). Maybe Plouffe and whomever will make it better. But "whoever" seems likely to come from the inside.

As I've said before, I think Obama needs to see that he needs people around him who weren't on the campaign or his Senate staff, don't have that attachment to him and have only an attachment to results. Of course Emanuel was supposed to be that person, but he has a different problem, just of being a jerk to too many people.

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Off-topic post on prohibition | Michael Tomasky

I see from Yglesias that he's responding to Boardwalk Empire, the big new HBO series that is a Scorsese creation of some sort, with an indifference similar to mine. Well, maybe his reasons are different. I just don't find gangsters particularly interesting.

I used to feel bad about this because men are supposed to love the existential conflict and the male codes and all that. But I just think they're thugs. I don't even like The Godfather all that much. Excellent filmmaking, sure. I can see t...

Will of the people, eh? | Michael Tomasky

We took note of a poll last week showing that Americans think the top 20% ought to own about 32% of the wealth, as opposed to the 84% it actually owns and the 99% Republicans believe it ought to own.

Now we stumble upon another piece of evidence showing how deep the chasm is between what the people believe makes sense and what our political system is capable of delivering:

A new AP poll finds that Americans who think the law should have done more outnumber those who think the government should...