Jonathan Chait's Blog, page 8

Rick Perry's Original Thinking

[Guest post by Nathan Pippenger]

It’s not the worst thing Rick Perry has said in his young presidential campaign, but I did scratch my head after reading the governor’s recent comments on border security:

I mean, we know that there are Predator drones being flown for practice every day because we’re seeing them, we’re preparing these young people to fly missions in these war zones that we have. But some of those, they have all the equipment, they’re obviously unarmed, they’ve got the downward-looking radar, they’ve got the ability to do night work and through clouds. Why not be flying those missions and using (that) real-time information to help our law-enforcement? Because if we will commit to that, I will suggest to you that we will be able to drive the drug cartels away from our border.

A number of news outlets (Politico and Huffington Post among them) have run with these remarks, implying that Perry is suggesting something novel. He is not.

If you’re an average voter (and not, say, the governor of Texas), you could be forgiven for not knowing the details of our current southwest border surveillance efforts, which include 250 towers with daytime and nighttime cameras, 38 truck-mounted infrared cameras and radar systems, 130 planes and helicopters, and, yes, a fleet of unmanned aircraft systems. The only possible charitable interpretation here is that by “drones,” Perry specifically meant autonomous unmanned aircraft, not remotely-controlled unmanned aircraft (“drone” technically refers only to the former, though it’s generally used to refer to both). It doesn’t sound like Perry was making that distinction, and in any case, it’s unimportant, because this is already policy. It is not, in any way, a new idea. In fact, The New York Times reported on the use of unmanned aircraft at the border almost two years ago. And it’s been over six months since DHS Secretary Napolitano gave a major speechannouncing that Customs and Border Protection had Predators covering the entire southwest border, from the El Centro sector of California all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. She even gave the speech in El Paso! This shouldn’t be news to the governor of a massive border state. 

 

 

Update, 6:40 p.m.: The banner headline right now on Huffington Post is “PERRY ON BORDER PATROL: UNLEASH THE DRONES”—ignoring the fact that President Obama is already doing this.

Second update, 8:50 p.m.: HuffPo's story has been updated.

 

&c

 -- Excellent parody of horserace, no policy substance or moral judgement journalism. 





-- The difference between Mitt Romney and Rick Perry on the Fed. 





-- From about two weeks ago: former Bush CEA Chair and current Romney adviser defends former Bush CEA chair Ben Bernanke. 





-- Former Reagan CEA chair praises a weaker dollar. 

-- An ideological map of the Super Committee. 

Rick Perry's Original Thinking

[Guest post by Nathan Pippenger]

It’s not the worst thing Rick Perry has said in his young presidential campaign, but I did scratch my head after reading the governor’s recent comments on border security:

I mean, we know that there are Predator drones being flown for practice every day because we’re seeing them, we’re preparing these young people to fly missions in these war zones that we have. But some of those, they have all the equipment, they’re obviously unarmed, they’ve got the downward-looking radar, they’ve got the ability to do night work and through clouds. Why not be flying those missions and using (that) real-time information to help our law-enforcement? Because if we will commit to that, I will suggest to you that we will be able to drive the drug cartels away from our border.

A number of news outlets (Politico and Huffington Post among them) have run with these remarks, implying that Perry is suggesting something novel. He is not.

If you’re an average voter (and not, say, the governor of Texas), you could be forgiven for not knowing the details of our current southwest border surveillance efforts, which include 250 towers with daytime and nighttime cameras, 38 truck-mounted infrared cameras and radar systems, 130 planes and helicopters, and, yes, a fleet of unmanned aircraft systems. The only possible charitable interpretation here is that by “drones,” Perry specifically meant autonomous unmanned aircraft, not remotely-controlled unmanned aircraft (“drone” technically refers only to the former, though it’s generally used to refer to both). It doesn’t sound like Perry was making that distinction, and in any case, it’s unimportant, because this is already policy. It is not, in any way, a new idea. In fact, The New York Times reported on the use of unmanned aircraft at the border almost two years ago. And it’s been over six months since DHS Secretary Napolitano gave a major speech announcing that Customs and Border Protection had Predators covering the entire southwest border, from the El Centro sector of California all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. She even gave the speech in El Paso! This shouldn’t be news to the governor of a massive border state. 

It's the Austerity, Stupid

[Guest post by Simon van Zuylen-Wood]

Yesterday David Cameron said that Britain was in the midst of a “slow-motion moral collapse,” while denying that his country’s austerity program was at fault for last week’s riots. Cameron is right that the early media hypothesis that the riots were in part anti-austerity protests, as in Greece, was largely incorrect. The London riots were not political in nature. No chanting youth, linked arms, or raised banners. But the circumstances were: If the government hadn’t cut so many social services for young people, they literally wouldn’t have been on the streets.

The prime culprit in the riots is youth boredom and anomie that have been exacerbated by the austerity measures. Youth unemployment is higher now in Britain than it’s been in 20 years. And it’s summer, meaning kids aren’t in school, either. Admittedly, not many of last fall’s austerity cuts have been enacted yet—but the few that that have taken effect fell largely on the shoulders of poor, urban youth. As Sion Simon writes in The Daily Beast:

Youth clubs have already closed, youth workers have been sacked, and programs that in previous years have occupied urban youngsters in the long summer break are not running. As a result, many young people have “nothing to do.”

Cameron’s parliament has also shuttered the billion pound Future Jobs Fund, which helps unemployed and underemployed youth find work, and has eliminated subsidies often used for university tuition. Yet the Prime Minister blithely assures us that radical spending cuts had nothing to do with the riots. There is a sense, among conservatives in England, nicely captured by Polly Toynbee in The Guardian, that anything but the government is to blame: “The small-staters blame the collapse of moral values, school indiscipline and feral beasts without fathers or consciences, as if removing government allows morality to flourish.”

At least when Irving Kristol railed against America’s nihilistic “crisis of values” in the midst of urban and campus unrest in the mid-1960s, he understood that providing even less guidance to those in trouble would only breed more nihilism.

Not only do people not quite know what to believe about private and public properties; they don’t know where to turn for answers …. The value-creating and value-sustaining institutions in American life have traditionally been the family, the church, and the school. Events of the past decades have deprived these institutions of their authority over morals (and even over manners)—without, however, providing alternative authorities.

Kristol was making the same broad point as Cameron—that kids today have run amok. And, to be sure, he wasn’t arguing that government was the place to look for such guidance. But he also suggested that if the youth had lost their morals, they needed assistance finding them. By denying that the state has a responsibility to do that, Cameron is contributing to the problem.  

Chait on Paul Ryan's Potential Presidential Run

Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard is reporting that “Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan is strongly considering a run for president,” and that he has been discussing a possible run with strategists for three months. Hayes details Ryan’s public comments where he expressed agnosticism about the current field, his PAC’s fundraising for ads in Iowa “to counter attack ads run against Republicans by the Democratic National Committee,” and his turning down an offer to serve on the congressional deficit committee despite his status as the leading policy thinker in the Republican caucus.

That Paul Ryan is considering a run isn’t surprising, especially to readers of TNR. Jonathan Chait has, of course, been writing about a potential Paul Ryan campaign for months now, and even took time from his well-earned vacation to tweet “Bizarre how many reporters have ignored Ryan's hints.”

Here’s a look at what Chait has written so far:

“Here Comes The Paul Ryan Presidential Campaign” June 3

“Paul Ryan’s Norquistian-Churchillian Foreign Policy” June 3

“Paul Ryan’s Exceptionalism” June 6





“Is Paul Ryan Running?” June 7





“The GOP’s Missing Man” June 14

                                       

Think Progress: Leave Mitt Romney Alone!

[Guest post by Matthew Zeitlin] 

Last week, Think Progress caught Mitt Romney saying “corporations are people, my friend.” Jon Chait pointed out that Romney was clearly referring to the incidence of corporate taxes—which are ultimately borne by people—not the more-than-century old legal doctrine by which corporations have the some of the rights and protections as individuals. Romney committed a classic “Kinsley gaffe,” whereby a politician catches flack for saying something true. But that has not stopped Think Progress, which has started to flood the zone with “corporations are people” coverage. They posted a video yesterday entitled “Ron Paul Breaks With Mitt Romney.” They excerpt this exchange: 

KEYES: What did you make of Mitt Romney’s statement that “corporations are people” yesterday?

PAUL: Obviously they’re not. People are individuals, they’re not groups and they’re not companies. Individuals have rights, they’re not collective. You can’t duck that. So individuals should be responsible for corporations, but they shouldn’t be a new creature, so to speak. Rights and obligations should be always back to the individual.

Clearly, Paul is dealing with the legal question, which has next to nothing to do with the question of who ends up bearing the burden of corporate taxes. Think Progress also has another video called “Do Iowans Agree With Mitt Romney That Corporations Are People?” where Iowa state fair attendees clearly interpret the question in the legal and ontological sense and deliver some old-fashioned, Midwestern common sense that, of course, corporations aren’t people. Think Progress is simply taking comments made by the GOP frontrunner out of context in order to bolster the preexisting narrative that Mitt Romney is a tool of corporate interests; and just not a tool of corporate interests, but someone who has drunk so much of the corporate Kool-Aid that he takes the on-its-face absurd view that corporations are people!

A good way to understand what’s going on is to understand the longstanding liberal complaint that conservatives have a media and intellectual infrastructure entirely devoted to the cause of advancing conservative ideas and attacking those politicians and public figures who oppose conservative ideology. Liberals, on the other hand, have the mainstream media, which is largely composed of liberal-leaning individuals, but which is not entirely and solely dedicated to promoting the liberal political cause in the same way the interlocking web of conservative think tanks, advocacy groups, publications, radio shows, and televisions stations are.

Think Progress’s continued flogging of one video clip of Mitt Romney saying “corporations are people, my friend” is exactly the type of thing liberals complain about when conservatives do it to liberals. The clip was plucked by CSPAN, aggressively promoted by Think Progress, reported on by mainstream outlets, turned into an ad for the DNC, and then, on Monday, promoted by Think Progress again in an effort to keep the controversy alive and, through repetition, make Mitt Romney seem like the “corporations are people, my friends” guy.





This type of thing, despite its slippery relation to the reality of what happened, is the nascent progressive media infrastructure in action. Whether or not it’s successful depends on whether more mainstream, less partisan voices take this stuff seriously, or at least accept the progressive framing that Mitt Romney said something controversial. But the real question is whether the liberal thinkers lamenting the so-called “hack gap” between conservatives and liberals are comfortable with what the progressive counterpart to the conservative media infrastructure looks like.

&c

 -- To supply siders, every economic crisis is stagflation and every effective policy response is tax cuts.

-- Some Simpsons quotes for everyday use.

-- The singular political genius of Michele Bachmann.

-- Switzerland enters Alice in Wonderland territory. 





-- How Rick Perry pissed off everyone by mandating HPV vaccines. 


 

How the Deck Was Always Rigged Against Tim Pawlenty

[Guest post by Walter Shapiro]





Tim Pawlenty’s formal presidential campaign lasted less than 100 days—a stunning, scandal-free collapse for a man who, until recently, was considered a top-tier GOP contender. But even though Pawlenty flamed out with a weak third-place showing amid the vote-buying, corn-dog hokum of Saturday’s Iowa Straw Poll, there was a sense of inevitability to his political demise.

From the beginning, Pawlenty probably was doomed to see his presidential dreams die in the corn fields of Iowa. As the former two-term governor of neighboring Minnesota, he could not credibly pull a John McCain and skip the caucuses. But Pawlenty lacked personal wealth, a major-league fund-raising network, and intense ideological appeal. So to keep the money flowing until the 2012 caucuses, he needed a breakthrough moment, the stuff that news-magazine covers used to be made of.

Pawlenty was caught in a fund-raising Catch-22—running out of money, he had to squander it all on the Straw Poll. Sure, there were discussions inside the Pawlenty campaign about skipping the Straw Poll after Mitt Romney announced that he was not competing. But, in the end, going AWOL was never a serious option for a candidate desperate to survive 2011. As a result, Pawlenty was condemned to compete in Saturday’s rigged game by trying to win the hearts and minds of 17,000 Iowa Republican activists who considered Michele Bachmann, Ron Paul, and Herman Cain to be Oval Office material.

Even though he tried to position himself as a right-wing firebrand, Pawlenty was never going to win a competition as the Republican who shouts the loudest about breaking Barack Obama’s knee caps. Pawlenty, at his core, is a nice-guy conservative who wants to cut taxes rather than storm the barricades. His gubernatorial record, his blue-collar South St. Paul roots, and his Midwestern affability might have been an appealing mixture in other political years and with other GOP constituencies. But not in 2011 and certainly not in the hot-house cauldron of Iowa Republican politics.

Pawlenty, to be sure, also made his share of rookie mistakes. His failure to go after Mitt Romney in the June New Hampshire debate, after signaling that he was going to challenge him over “Obamneycare,” helped produce a press-pack narrative of Pawlenty the Wimp. His Iowa TV ads often made it seem that he was already running against Obama rather than scrapping for Straw Poll votes with Bachmann. His plan-everything-out-in-advance political style—the hard-working striver’s ethos—turned him into almost as synthetic a candidate as Romney. Pawlenty, who got his start in Minnesota as a political operative, was running a traditional presidential campaign (formal policy speeches, far-flung campaign aides) in an unpredictable year.

Had Ron Paul won the Straw Poll (he finished only 152 votes behind Bachmann) or had Rick Perry entered the presidential scrum early enough to actively compete in Ames, Pawlenty might have been able to soldier on in Iowa. But short of rescuing a child from a burning building on national television, Pawlenty never would have been able to raise enough money to be a serious contender. Pawlenty’s decision to pull the plug the morning after the Straw Poll was both a realistic assessment of his chances and a dignified refusal to go through all the motions of a dying candidacy. It also allowed his staffers to get on with their lives—and it is telling that none of them are publicly bad-mouthing Pawlenty in defeat.

The Republican field right now is divided into two camps—pragmatists pretending to be wing-nuts and genuine ideologues. Pawlenty, even as he mouthed the far-right malarkey about the debt-ceiling vote, is a pragmatist with fewer policy reversals than Romney. He seemed like a plausible Republican nominee—in theory. The problem is that, in reality, Pawlenty had to survive that candidate-killer known as the Iowa Straw Poll.

Walter Shapiro is a special correspondent for The New Republic. Follow him on Twitter (lucky you). 

WALTER SHAPIRO >>

The Sesquicentennial Disaster

[Guest post by Nathan Pippenger]

I just want to add to Matt’s smart post below that the timing could hardly be worse for a campaign against Obama’s patriotism. I can hardly think of a more disheartening presidential campaign than one in which the GOP picks a white Southerner who enjoys toying with secession and pits his patriotism against that of our first black president, a man whose professed idol is Lincoln. All during the sesquicentennial of the Civil War.

Perry evidently thinks there’s something funny about the idea of secession. But I don’t think it’s humorless to suggest that secession jokes—particularly coming from the governor of Texas—are, at best, unbecoming. Especially in a climate where other Republican governors celebrate Confederate history while deciding to leave out the reason why the Confederacy formed in the first place. Or where still other Republican governors (with a troubling tendency to mangle the history of racist organizations) rush to the defense, arguing that praising the Confederacy while omitting the history of slavery is no big deal.

Maybe, if he has a free minute sometime soon, Perry can take some time to brush up on the slaughter of the Civil War, the murder of Lincoln, and the history (and legacy) of American slavery. And then I’d like to hear him explain why he still thinks jokes about secession are so funny. 

Rick Perry and the Campaign That Never Happened

 [Guest post by Matthew Zeitlin]

While a big part of Rick Perry’s campaign pitch is comparing the job growth in Texas to that of the rest of the nation, it seems likely that another aspect will be implying that Rick Perry—a conservative, white Southerner from Texas—is more American than Barack Hussein Obama. A good insight to how this line of attack might develop is in Perry’s recent comments about the military “respecting” the commander-in-chief:

One of the reasons that I’m running for president is I want to make sure that every young man and woman who puts on the uniform of the United States respects highly the president of the United States.

This is interesting for two reasons. First, it’s another example of Republican politicians who, especially when a Democrat is president, think that the president has to earn the military’s respect, usually by doing what the generals say when it comes to policy disputes. A classic example of this tendency is Lindsay Graham’s reaction to Obama’s most recent Afghanistan speech, where he announced a mild lowering of troop levels, to which Graham responded, “Biden won, Petraeus lost.”

Second, it’s also interesting that John McCain, a genuine war hero who literally sacrificed his body for the country, largely shied away from attacks on Obama for his supposed lack of, in Kathleen Parker’s words, “blood equity, heritage and commitment to hard-won American values.” McCain continually hedged on whether or not to bring up Obama’s connection with Jeremiah Wright, and when he finally did, it was hardly a full-throated attack. Instead, the campaign that at least thought the most deeply about attacking Obama for not being “American” enough was the Hillary campaign, which brought up Jeremiah Wright repeatedly and whose senior strategist, Mark Penn, wanted to argue that Obama’s “roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited.”

Of course, conservatives, writ large, have been busy arguing that Obama is fundamentally disconnected from core American values—that, as Norman Podhoretz put it, Obama is an “anti-American leftist” with a “reprehensible cast of mind” or, as Ramesh Ponnuru and Rich Lowry wrote in a National Review cover story, “Obama’s first year in office should be seen in the context of contemporary liberalism’s discomfort with American exceptionalism.”

If Rick Perry is nominated, in other words, we will probably finally see the campaign that conservatives have been wanting since the day Obama got the Democratic nomination. And it’s sure to be ugly.