John Cassidy's Blog, page 79

Bob Woodward Throws an Interception

By now, we all know, or should know, the strengths and weaknesses of Bob Woodward. As an old-fashioned beat reporter and player of the Washington access game, he has few, if any, equals. Woodward’s beat is the capital’s establishment. Ever since he and Carl Bernstein shot to fame with their Watergate reporting, he’s been trooping in and out of the offices of senior officials, writing down (and presumably taping) what they say, and using his notes as the basis for journalistic narratives that are, by turns, revelatory, informative, incomplete, infuriating, and downright misleading. But whatever you think of Woodward’s methods, his outpourings can rarely be ignored. That’s what makes him Woodward.

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Apple Versus Wall Street: Don’t Pity the Hedgies

A day after it emerged that Wall Street bonuses rose to twenty billion dollars last year, and that the typical financial-industry grunt received a payment on top of his salary that was more than twice the median household income, the latest corporate executive to run afoul of the Street was called to account.

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Bernanke’s Welcome Lecture on Austerity Economics

With about eighty-five billion dollars of across the board spending cuts due to take affect in a few days, Fed chairman and former Princeton prof Ben Bernanke was up on Capitol Hill this morning giving his fellow Republicans a much-needed lesson in austerity economics. Departing from his statutory duty of reporting to the Senate Banking Committee on the Fed’s monetary policy, Bernanke devoted much of his testimony to fiscal policy, warning his congressional class that letting the sequester go ahead would endanger the economic recovery and do little or nothing to reduce the country’s debt burden.

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Is It Rational to Watch the Oscars?

Last night, my wife and many other people I know spent hours and hours watching the Oscars and getting worked up about Seth MacFarlane’s off-color jokes. Why didn’t I? I don’t have anything against the ceremony, which is a useful marketing device for one of our biggest export industries. This year, though, I hadn’t seen many of the nominated movies—too busy banging out blog posts!—and there isn’t much of a point in watching a bunch of people receive awards for performances you haven’t witnessed.

Or is there? In viewing events such as the Oscars, the Super Bowl, and the quadrennial Presidential debates, the actual outcome—San Francisco fluffs a last-minute drive; Daniel Day-Lewis wins best actor for a third time; Obama comes back strong against Romney—is secondary to the process of taking part in a carefully orchestrated public ritual, which you can chew over subsequently (or simultaneously, via Twitter and Facebook) with your friends and acquaintances. Indeed, given the certainty that so many other people will be watching, it can be perfectly rational to tune in even if you don’t give a hoot about what film wins best picture.

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Economic Optimism vs. the Sequester

Most Americans haven’t realized it yet, but there’s a good deal of positive news about the economy. Four years after the nadir of the Great Depression, disposable income, consumer spending, and corporate investment are all expanding at a decent clip. Employers are hiring more workers, and, perhaps most importantly, the housing market, which has been the biggest drag on the recovery, is finally turning around. In some neighborhoods, such as the gentrifying neck of Brooklyn where I live, things are already going kind of nuts. But it’s more general than that. From Fort Lauderdale to Los Angeles, in areas where the crash was most intense, the number of sales is increasing, prices are rising, and there are even reports of shortages of available properties.

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The Minimum-Wage Debate in Charts

Over at our Daily Comment blog, I’ve posted a piece about President Obama’s proposal to raise the minimum wage from $7.25 to $9.00. (You won’t be surprised to find out that I’m in favor of it.) For anybody interested in the debate about the impact of minimum-wage laws, here are three of the charts I referred to.

The first one, courtesy of CNNMoney, shows the nominal and inflation-adjusted values of the minimum wage going back to 1938, when it came into effect at $0.25 an hour. The most notable thing about it is how the real value was raised sharply in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, then cut sharply in the seventies and eighties.

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Obama, Riding High, Overshadows the Water Boy

Don’t deny it. What you really want to read about is Marco Rubio’s instantly infamous water lunge, but first let’s start with the serious stuff: President Obama’s carefully plotted campaign speech, thinly disguised as a State of the Union address.

For a man who is said to chafe at some of the absurd rituals of his office, Obama seems to have come around to this one, at least. From the moment he walked into the packed House chamber, he looked like he was actually enjoying himself—hardly surprising, given his recent string of political victories and his rising approval ratings. There were handshakes for practically everybody in his path, a warm exchange with Chief Justice Roberts, who last year single-handedly saved his health-care reform, and a hug for Mark Kirk, a Republican senator from Illinois, who is recovering from a stroke. After an air kiss from his wife, Michelle, who was up in the gallery, and a quick grip-and-grin with Vice President Biden and Speaker Boehner, he was off: quoting J.F.K. on the need for bipartisan action; pledging his best efforts to restore a “rising, thriving middle class”; accusing the Republicans of seeking to balance the budget on the backs of the old and the sick; and unveiling a laundry list of government initiatives that must have kept the White House’s branding crew busy.

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The Disastrous Influence of Pope Benedict XVI

Spare me any more reverential coverage about Pope Benedict XVI and his decision to give up his office. On a personal level, I wish him well. At the age of eighty-five and increasingly infirm, he surely deserves a rest. But as far as his record goes, he can’t leave office a moment too soon. His lengthy tenure at the Vatican, which included more than twenty years as the Catholic Church’s chief theological enforcer before he became Pope, in 2005, has been little short of disastrous. By setting its face against the modern world in general, and by dragging its feet in response to one of the worst scandals since the Reformation, Benedict’s Vatican has called the Church’s future into question, needlessly alienating countless people around the world who were brought up in its teachings.

Not that it matters much, but you can count me among them. When I was a boy, in Leeds, West Yorkshire, the nuns at Sacred Heart Primary School taught my classmates and me the New Testament from slim paperbacks with embossed navy-blue covers. We each got four of them: “The Good News According to Luke,” The Good News According to Matthew,” “The Good News According to Mark,” and “The Good News According to John.” Of the four gospels, the most thumbed, by far, were those of Luke, which contains many of Jesus’s parables, and Matthew, which features the Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth…”

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A Bad Idea Returns: The Balanced-Budget Amendment

Who was it that said there were signs of sanity and moderation breaking out in the Grand Old Party? False alarm. Just weeks after backing away from their threat to force the U.S. Treasury to default on its debts, Congressional Republicans are about to endorse another damaging economic idea that should be consigned to the history books: a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution.

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Obama’s Drone Man Escapes the Senate Unscathed

With his broad shoulders, cauliflower ears, big nose, and hooded eyes, John Brennan looked a bit like a farmer or a burly priest, perhaps, from Roscommon, the county in central Ireland from which his father emigrated sixty-five years ago. When he spoke, though, it was in the rapid-fire diction of someone brought up in North Bergen, New Jersey, a few miles west of the Hudson. Several times, he said that he was known for speaking his mind regardless of the consequences. But this was not the occasion to exhibit such candor. For President Obama’s nominee to head the C.I.A., a veteran spy known principally for his role as the keeper of the White House’s “kill list,” It was a day for keeping his own head down and flattering his inquisitors.

He had barely been seated at the witness table when a group of protestors bearing signs with pictures of children killed by U.S. drones and slogans saying “BRENNAN = DRONE KILLING” and “BRENNAN: A NATIONAL SECURITY RISK,” started kicking up a rumpus. “When you kill people, you are a threat to democracy,” one woman shouted. Looking straight ahead, Brennan took a drink of water and tried his best to look unruffled. For a fifty-seven-year-old hardened by twenty-five years in the C.I.A. and four years in the White House heading the country’s counterterrorism efforts, it can’t have been too hard.

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