John Cassidy's Blog, page 61

What’s Happening in 2014? Twelve Questions Answered

With the snow piled up and the wind chill close to zero, it’s a good weekend to stay at home and engage in some stargazing. The year 2014 may already be a few days old, but it’s not too late to impress your friends with some predictions about domestic and world events. Just remember to follow the golden rules of punditry: keep it snappy, and pretend to know what you are talking about. In case you need a bit of help, here’s a quick bluffer’s guide.

1. Can Obama recover? Sure he can. After all the troubles of the past couple of months, his approval rating is already rebounding a bit. According to the Gallup daily tracking poll, he ended 2013 with a forty-four per cent approval rating. That’s not great, but it’s higher than his numbers throughout much of 2010 and 2011. Surprisingly enough, it’s also higher than his ratings in the summer of 2012, just before he waxed Mitt Romney in the general election. How high can Obama go? That depends upon the answers to the next two questions.

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Bill de Blasio and the Progressive Dilemma

We are called to put an end to economic and social inequalities that threaten to unravel the city we love. And so today, we commit to a new progressive direction in New York. And that same progressive impulse has written our city’s history. It’s in our DNA.…

When I said we would take dead aim at the Tale of Two Cities, I meant it. And we will do it. I will honor the faith and trust you have placed in me. And we will give life to the hope of so many in our city. We will succeed as One City.

That was Bill de Blasio talking in front of City Hall on Wednesday, during an uplifting inauguration ceremony that featured a former President (Bill Clinton), a girl who recently was the subject of a Times series about rising homelessness, and a crowd-pleasing d.j. with a playlist that ranged from the Commodores to Katy Perry. Now, though, the party is over. The roadblocks have been removed from Chambers Street, and the new occupants of Michael Bloomberg’s second-floor “bull pen,” whence he ran the city for twelve years, are faced with the same dilemma that confronts all progressive politicians these days: Rising inequality is easy to analyze and bemoan, but what do you do about it?

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Bloomberg’s Legacy: Plutocracy and Populism

When the ball drops in Times Square tonight, bringing to an end Michael Bloomberg’s twelve years in City Hall, there will be a conspicuous absentee: Bloomberg himself. Rather than seeing out his third term in the company of the chilled hordes, the Mayor has chosen to spend the evening with family and friends; instead, the organizers of the annual shindig drafted Sonia Sotomayor, the Bronx-born Supreme Court justice, to do the ceremonial duties.

Some will see Bloomberg’s decision to skip out as a snub to the city that elected him three times but that is conspicuously failing to mourn his political passing. So be it. Most relationships end badly, and, back in the fall of 2001, when, with the embers at Ground Zero still warm, Rudy Giuliani prevailed upon the city to embrace a short, charisma-challenged Wall Street billionaire as his successor, there was little reason to believe this shotgun marriage would prove to be an exception. But, in fact, things went rather better than might have been expected—for Bloomberg and for New York.

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Inside the White House N.S.A. Report: The Good and the Bad

On several occasions this year, I’ve criticized the Obama Administration for its obfuscations on intelligence matters and its overly defensive reaction to Edward Snowden’s revelations. At this stage, the President needs to fess up and say that the intelligence agencies went too far—a fact confirmed by Friday’s revelation, courtesy of Snowden’s documents, that the N.S.A. and C.G.H.Q., its British counterpart, have been snooping on international charities and aid groups, such as UNICEF, the United Nations’s children’s charity, and Médecins du Monde, a French humanitarian organization.

But a bit of credit where it is due. In commissioning an independent report on the National Security Agency’s activities, the White House didn’t follow the oft-used tactic of stuffing the outside review panel with yes men who could be relied upon to produce a whitewash—or, if it did, the ruse didn’t work. The report of the President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, which came out on Wednesday, is lengthy and thoughtful. Its forty-six recommendations are, in some ways, surprisingly far-reaching. If fully enacted, they wouldn’t put an end to domestic surveillance. Far from it. But they would change how the N.S.A. operates, and, especially, how its activities are overseen.

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Bernanke Takes Away the M&Ms, but Leaves the Snickers Bars

If you’re a bit confused about what the Federal Reserve did on Wednesday, don’t feel too bad about it—so are some of the experts. During a CNBC segment just after Chairman Ben Bernanke’s press conference (his last before handing the reins of the central bank to Janet Yellen), one panelist described the Fed’s decision to begin “tapering” as “hawkish,” while another said that it was “very dovish.” The two terms are ordinarily polar opposites: the former refers to policymakers whose primary worry is inflation, and who tend toward higher interest rates; the latter is applied to those who care primarily about unemployment, and who tend to support lower rates.

So which of the panelists was right? Why did Wall Street celebrate the Fed’s announcement by bidding the stock market up to another record close? And what the heck is “tapering” anyway?

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In Praise of Independent Judges, from Learned Hand to Richard J. Leon

In the American way of government, it often takes an independent-minded judge to tell truth to power. That’s the way the system works. The executive branch is almost always dominated by the exigencies of the day; the legislature—on matters of national security, especially—is often supine. Thanks to the Founding Fathers, federal judges are empowered with the job security and the leeway to think for themselves. And on occasion, thank the Lord, some of them exercise these freedoms.

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Ten Reasons I’m Not “Ready for Hillary”

1. It’s 2013, and the Obama Administration has more than three years left to run. We haven’t even had the midterms yet. Mark Halperin and John Heilemann just put out their tell-all about the 2012 campaign. Give us a break.

2. It’s only twelve months since Hillary stepped down as Secretary of State. At that point, she’d been in the public eye, pretty much constantly, for more than twenty years. Doubtless, she’s enjoying the hiatus. So are we.

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Mandela’s Mixed Economic Legacy

As is the custom these days when great figures die, the beatification of Nelson Mandela has been immediate, overwhelming, and, here in the United States, not a little ironic. Long regarded by the U.S. intelligence services as a seditious figure, and even a terrorist threat, he has been recast as a world-historic freedom fighter, the heir to George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King. Speaking at his memorial service on Tuesday, President Obama said to the crowd, “His triumph was your triumph. Your dignity and hope found expression in his life, and your freedom, your democracy is his cherished legacy.”

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Budget Deal Shows G.O.P. Holds the Whip

As the full details of the two-year deal between Democrats and Republicans on taxes and spending emerged on Wednesday, liberal and centrist budget experts held their noses, and, with their other hands, gave it a reluctant thumbs-up. “The budget agreement between Senate Budget Committee Chair Patty Murray and House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan represents an improvement over current law, albeit a modest one,” Robert Greenstein, the president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said in a statement. “Some unhappy compromises had to be struck to make it happen,” commented Harry Stein and Michael Linden, of the Center for American Progress, “but the Murray-Ryan deal is certainly a better choice than further damaging our economy with another full year of sequestration.”

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Two Cheers for the New Volcker Rule

Back in the spring and summer of 2010, I spent a bit of time with Paul Volcker, the grand old man of American finance, who was busy pushing Congress and the Obama Administration to severely restrict the risky trading activities of banks that enjoy government guarantees in the form of deposit insurance and access to emergency-lending resources at the Federal Reserve. Sitting in his reassuringly modest office in Rockefeller Center, the walls lined with books, papers, and mementoes of his fishing trips, the six-foot-seven former chairman of the Fed explained his reasoning in characteristically succinct and direct fashion: “If you are going to be a commercial bank, with all the protections that implies, you shouldn’t be doing this stuff. If you are doing this stuff, you shouldn’t be a commercial bank.”

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