John Cassidy's Blog, page 74

Roll Up! Roll Up! The I.R.S. Non-Scandal Moves to Capitol Hill

I hope you had better things to do with your Friday morning that watch the members of the House Ways and Means Committee berating Steven Miller, the acting head of the Internal Revenue Agency, who was recently forced to resign. Even if the unfortunate Miller hadn’t been on the way out the door, the hearing would have largely been a charade—an opportunity for Republicans and Democrats to try and outdo each other in expressing their outrage at an institution that, even in normal times, is roundly loathed. But with President Obama having just fired Miller on Wednesday evening, there wasn’t anyone else in authority for the elected representatives to rail at.

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The I.R.S. and the Tea Party: Where Is the Scandal?

Five days into the I.R.S. brouhaha, and things are proceeding on two distinct tracks. On the political track, hysteria has taken hold, as evidenced by President Obama’s decision to force the tax agency’s acting head, Steven Miller, to resign. On the substantive front, we now have preliminary answers to two key questions: What did the agency do wrong? And who ordered it to target conservative groups? Notwithstanding Miller’s resignation, which the President himself announced on Tuesday evening, the answers appear to be: not nearly as much as recent headlines suggest; and, nobody in the Obama Administration.

On Monday afternoon, the office of the Inspector General for Tax Administration, which spent months interviewing employees of the I.R.S. department that deals with tax-exempt organizations, and going through its records, released a fifty-four-page report. With President Obama denouncing the tax agency’s targeting of conservative groups as “outrageous” in advance of the report’s publication, and with Republicans trying to cast this as the new Watergate—“My question is, Who’s going to jail?” John Boehner said—it seemed reasonable to expect that there would be one or two bombshells. And there were. They just weren’t of the type that George Will and Mitch McConnell had been hoping for.

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A.P. Scandal Raises Spectre of Big Brother

If the three-strikes rule were in effect, President Obama would be heading for the dugout, bat in hand. First the alleged Benghazi cover-up, then the kerfuffle about the I.R.S. targeting conservative groups, and now the revelation that earlier this year the Justice Department secretly seized two months of phone records involving editors and reporters at the Associated Press.

Among the many questions that the phone-records story raises are these two very basic ones: What were they thinking? And who, precisely, were they?

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Between the I.R.S. and Benghazi, Mr. Cool Gets Hot

A couple of weeks ago, I was complaining to my editor that writing about President Obama’s second term was getting a little dull, and what we needed was a good scandal. Hey, presto! According to the Tweeps, the talking heads, and Matt Drudge, we now have not one but two of them: Benghazi redux, involving an alleged coverup, and the discovery of a purported I.R.S. “enemies list” that brings to mind our old friend Tricky Dick. Small wonder the White House moved Monday morning’s scheduled press conference with British Prime Minister David Cameron from the Rose Garden, where space is limited, to the East Room.

As the two leaders’ talks overran a bit, the excitement was almost too much to bear, and so were the clichés. “We are on pins and needles waiting for them,” Jake Tapper said on CNN. Over on Fox, where Christmas had arrived early, Brett Baier intoned, “The question is how high did it go? Who knew what when?” Baier was talking about the I.R.S. supposedly targeting conservative groups, which even Lawrence O’Donnell, who was doing an early shift on MSNBC, deemed a story with “legs.” His guest, David Corn, of Mother Jones, a magazine that sides with the President’s Republican critics about as often as Haley’s Comet comes around, agreed. “No weasel words should be the motto of the White House today,” he said.

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Are We Heading for Bubble Trouble?

With the Dow topping fifteen thousand and long lines forming down my block to inspect a two-bedroom apartment that is going for the shockingly low price of under a million dollars, it’s hard not to think of the “b” word: bubble. Whatever else, the Fed’s policy of “quantitative easing” may have accomplished, or not accomplished, it’s certainly given a bit more juice to the Brooklyn real-estate boom.

Should we be worried? In a typically feisty column today, Paul Krugman dismisses those who are concerned as “babbling barons of bubbleism.” It’s a nice piece of alliteration, and I’m largely with Krugman on the specifics, but l think he goes a bit far. On the past two occasions we dismissed talk of bubbles, we ended up with the dot-com bubble of 1998-2000, which was epic but didn’t have too many lasting effects, and the housing bubble of 2003-2007, which was simply disastrous.

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The Meaning of Sir Alex Ferguson

When was the last time a picture of a soccer coach appeared on the front of the Financial Times and the New York Times on the same day? The answer is never, I would guess. But on Thursday morning, staring out from the front pages of the two newspapers I get delivered, there were the ruddy features of Sir Alex Ferguson, who, until his retirement on Wednesday, had been the manager of Manchester United, one of the most successful sports teams in the world. In a league where most managers last a year or two, Ferguson’s twenty-seven-year tenure was remarkable and unique. In modern American sports, there’s no real comparison, either. Bill Belichick’s thirteen-year run at the New England Patriots probably comes closest.

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How Can We Defeat the N.R.A.?

The National Rifle Association, as I pointed out in my previous post, is on the offensive. Not content with its recent victory in Congress, it is already looking forward to the 2014 midterm elections, when it hopes to sink the prospect of effective gun control for another decade or more. So what, if anything, can be done? How can supporters of sensible measures to prevent the proliferation of deadly firearms—a group that includes the majority of Americans—hope to defeat the gun lobby?

In seeking answers to this question, I’ve been conversing with some folks in the gun-control movement, and the conversations were more encouraging than I had expected. Having spent a few weeks getting over their setback in the Senate, the N.R.A.’s opponents are taking President Obama at his word that it was merely the “first round” in a lengthy fight. Realistically, they can’t hope to knock out Wayne LaPierre and his four-million-plus members (the precise number of N.R.A. members is hotly disputed) anytime soon, but they are looking to defeat them on points. And they see signs of encouragement. Indeed, some of them believe that the N.R.A.’s historic victory could end up being viewed as a historic blunder.

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The N.R.A.’s Challenge to America

In case you missed the news—and I can’t really blame you for tuning it out—the National Rifle Association has gotten itself a new president. He’s a charming tub of a man by the name of Jim Porter, and Monday was officially his first day in his new job. But even before taking over at the N.R.A.’s headquarters, in Fairfax, Virginia, Porter clearly signalled his intentions.

Addressing the N.R.A.’s annual convention in Houston over the weekend, the sixty-four year-old Porter told the assembled firearms enthusiasts, survivalists, and Republican hangers-on that they were engaged in a “culture war” with the President, media élitists, Mayor Bloomberg, and anyone else who questioned the right of God-fearing Americans to arm themselves like members of an infantry battalion without a proper system of background checks on purchases. “This is not a battle about gun rights,” Porter declared at a breakfast meeting. “[You] here in this room are fighters for freedom. We are the protectors.”

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The Economy Is Creating Jobs. Will It Continue?

Friday’s employment report for April was generally positive, and, at least for now, it has alleviated fears that the economy is stuttering. On Wall Street, traders cheered the numbers. The Dow flirted with 15,000, and the S. & P. 500 topped 1,600.

Both surveys from the Labor Department—of firms and of households—showed solid job growth. According to the survey of firms, the economy created a 165,000 jobs last month; according to households, it created 293,000 jobs. The unemployment rate edged down another tenth of a per cent, to 7.5 per cent. And the job figures for February and March were revised up substantially, presenting a much more buoyant picture of the labor market. After the revisions, the payroll survey shows job growth averaging almost two hundred thousand per month—196,000 to be precise—since the start of the year.

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Obama’s Bad Pick: A Former Lobbyist at the F.C.C.

Memo to a President who said, in November, 2007, “I am in this race to tell the corporate lobbyists in Washington that their days of setting the agenda are over”: If you are going to name a former lobbyist for big cable and wireless companies as head of the federal agency that regulates the cable and wireless industries, you had better find a public-interest-group advocate to say something positive about him (or her) before you make the announcement.

Job done.

By Wednesday, when the White House confirmed that it was nominating Tom Wheeler, a veteran Washington insider who has headed not one powerful industry association but two, as the next chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, the nomination had already secured the support of Public Knowledge, an advocacy group that promotes open and unlimited access to the Internet. “Certainly we will have disagreements with the new Chairman (assuming Wheeler is confirmed), but we expect that Wheeler will actively work to promote competition and protect consumers,” Harold Feld, a senior vice-president at Public Knowledge, wrote in a blog post.

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