p m carpenter's commentary

Jon Huntsman's post-apocalypse thinking

Jon Huntsman is the Democratic National Committee's latest BFF, although that last "F" is likely to expire in a few short years.

As Politico reports, the DNC found itself, via email, praising the GOP candidate's sanity, so vividly demonstrated yesterday morning on ABC's "This Week." If you missed his appearance, you missed two exceedingly rare phenomena: 1) the aforementioned conservative sanity and 2) a complete campaign makeover, live, and on the air.

Huntsman was in full offensive mode, seriously joking that "If we were to talk about [Romney's] inconsistencies ... we'd be here all afternoon"; coldly warning that Rick Perry is "on the wrong side of science" -- a Neanderthalic side, which puts the party "in a losing position"; and, on Bachmann's $2 gasoline, he played the lighthearted psychiatrist in observing, "I don't know what world that comment would come from."

To be sure, while Huntsman's was a campaign makeover, it was scarcely a politics makeover. Asked about the Iowa debate's "10:1" hand-raising episode, Huntsman dismissed his positive participation as a response to a "nonsense" question. When then asked why he would vote affirmatively to a nonsense question, he merely repeated the "nonsense" line, which was of course nonsense. Had Huntsman wanted to refashion politics to the same extent he was remodeling his campaign, he would have answered, simply: Look, some friends in politics -- such as the occasional "pander" -- really are forever.

Will any of this help Huntsman in 2012? Absolutely not; nor is any such immediacy intended. As ensuing "This Week" guest Frank Luntz correctly noted, Huntsman is "mainstream America" but currently not "mainstream Republican." The former ambassador's idiosyncratic sanity may be salmon-like this year and next, but Huntsman is pre-apocalyptically staging a post-apocalypse coup. He is fervently praying for a Perry nomination -- a rock-bottom party madness whose inevitability is not inconceivable; to be followed, ineluctably, by a GOP fireball of historic proportions. Yet no Perrylike Phoenix will arise from the party's ashen breeds in 2013, for the insurgent Huntsman -- the 2016 frontrunner -- will have decisively proved his point.

Fighting the last war

David, uh, Axelrod just appeared on, uh, uh, ABC's "This Week" and he, uh, rehustled the political fiction that, uh, having congressional do-nothingers at home during the town-hall month of August would, uh, enlighten their minds and soften their hearts and open the door to big doings in September.

Moments later Axelrod conceded that a spokesman for Speaker Boehner has already announced that nothing beyond controversial trade deals and uninspiring patent reform will be welcomed by the GOP House upon its regularly scheduled return.

So the presidential "product" to be rolled out in September will be the squabbling and pettiness and intransigence and obstructionism and legislative inaction which the White House postponed in August -- at the interim, executive cost of appearing indecisive, indifferent, leaderless and planless.

And this benefits Team Obama ... how?

This is not the 2008 election, in which candidate Obama's "reserve" was an incontrovertible net plus. Until November, 2012, every month that expires in the absence of President Obama's energetic slamming of demonstrably do-nothing Republicans will be a month unexploited, to the GOP's benefit.

One senses that his political team is suffering from what military strategists deride as "legacy-thinking" -- idiomatically, fighting the last war.

Whose policy?

Speaking yesterday in South Carolina,

Perry didn’t back away from his statement that the Fed’s quantitative easing policy was nearly "treasonous," responding: "I’m passionate about the Obama administration’s monetary policy."

Texas-pol specialist James C. Moore recently opined that Gov. Perry "barely has a sixth grader's understanding of economics."

So here, in this contrast, we find an educational marker: Not until the seventh grade (at least in Texas) do pupils begin learning who directs monetary policy in the United States.

An astounding cavalierness

NY Times guest columnist Kurt Andersen is troubled:

[T]he most troubling thing about Perry (and Michele Bachmann and so many more), what’s new and strange and epidemic in mainstream politics, is the degree to which people inhabit their own Manichaean make-believe worlds. They totally believe their vivid fictions.

True enough, and troubling enough. When the governor isn't reinventing Texas history or refining the science of climatology in ways that only an ignorant racketeer could, the Minnesota congresswoman is shuffling and redealing decades of U.S. history and altering its Revolutionary geography.

All of that, however, is not what I find most troubling in mainstream politics. That superlative I reserve for what passes for professional analysis these days -- for those who are paid some pretty good dough to help us navigate the complexities of the national political scene.

For example a few days ago I watched Charlie Cook, of The Cook Political Report, dismiss on MSNBC one of Bachmann's whoppers (I forget which one) as merely popcorn for her base -- he wasn't the least bit interested in correcting what she had grossly misrepresented; and last night, on Hardball, "MSNBC analyst" Michael Steele delivered an encore Cook performance with respect to Rick Perry -- Oh, come on, Chris, said Steele, he's just playing to the base, his fictional facts are of no significance whatsoever.

Both "analysts" accepted, with an astounding cavalierness, the GOP norm of transcendent unreality. Both implicitly argued that abject fantasies are not only the defining platform of modern Republicanism -- as Landonian anti-New Dealism or Taftian isolationism once was -- but that they're so entirely central to contemporary conservatism, they're not even worthy of comment or correction.

In short, it is redundant -- if not rather "uncool" of hip professionals -- to bother noting that contemporary conservatism is delusional. Its self-aware lies, its insidious distortions, its amateur science, its counterfactual economics, its faith-based history -- most or all of it simply made up for the benefit of an ideologically coddled, otherworldly base. And utterly unremarkable.

Yeah ... so what? That, it seems -- what's really newest and strangest and most epidemic in mainstream politics -- is the political media's profoundly unserious attitude, as frivolous hacks and jaded gurus swamp all semblances of journalistic rigor.

'So what happens now?'

Ezra Klein interviewed Noble-laureate economist Michael Spence and says of the transcript, "If you read only one part of it, read the final question." One can see why.

E.K.: So what happens now?

M.S.: Some leader is going to have to stand up at some point and say we really need to spend money putting people back to work, period. And that’s going to mean sacrifices on the part of the people who are working. We’re trying right now to keep our lifestyles going, and it’s not really working, but the way we’re doing it is putting all the burden on the unemployed while trying to leave the employed untouched. Eventually, this is going to require a redistribution of that burden.

There ends the interview. I don't wish to put words in Prof. Spence's mouth, but I reasonably gather that by a redistribution of burdens he means not only the expiration of George W. Bush's upper-end tax cuts, but the expiration of them all. And I imagine the older, upper-end bracket will someday far exceed the roughly 40 percent range. Also to come, once political sanity is regained, will be a hefty estate tax, the termination of unearned-income taxes of only 15 percent, and a sweeping away of heaps of costly tax expenditures.

Permit my utopian side free rein for just a moment longer. In addition to the above, massive investments in education, K through grad school; and single-payer healthcare to end the extravagant madness of for-profit insurance. Defense cuts of at least 50 percent, which would still leave the United States with about three times what the People's Republic of China spends (no kidding). New Deal regulation of Wall Street. Near 100 percent unionization of workers. A Constitutional amendment banning outside money in politics, and the repeal of the 22nd Amendment (which would have barred FDR from a third term, as it now does a Barack Obama).

Finally, George Will ends his "This Week" appearances and goes into stand-up comedy. The intriguing part will come in seeing if anyone notices the change.

Huntsman's topper

I am not now, nor have I ever been, a tweeter. I do not tweet. I am temperamentally, philosophically and spiritually opposed to tweeting. I hate the tweet. I shall not tweet.

Plus, the best possible tweet has now been taken, by Jon Huntsman:

To be clear. I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy.

No one will ever top it.

Krauthammer's good advice

I see this morning that Charles Krauthammer has reentered a satori state of Orwellian indignation. On such blessed occasions he adopts the sputtering Limbaugh style, turning fragmentary truths into whole lies, and in general makes an ideal ass of himself. To wit:

[Obama] doesn’t even engage. That’s the point of these ugly accusations of bad faith. They are the equivalent of branding Republicans enemies of the people.

Yet the prevailing knock against Obama, of course, is that he has "engaged" the enemies of the people far too often. The media's narrative: he engages, gets his teeth kicked in, then with blackened eye he smiles and engages again.

However some of it -- a great deal, actually -- has been only for show; it's something with which to impress adrift independents, who reputedly melt with gooey admiration upon witnessing any attempts at compromise. And some of it has been both brilliant and necessary; last December's engagement enraged many on the left, even though the president clearly outfoxed the enemy (and momentarily earned aforementioned gooey admiration). Yet some of it also appears both genuine and profoundly ill advised; what many of us mistook for brilliant negotiating ploys against anti-Citizen Boehner in the debt-ceiling talks were, evidently, for real -- a real, steady retreat into the fabricated hysteria of debt-obsession, at precisely the wrong time, in precisely the wrong way, and in precise conflict with what Krauthammer loves to disparage as Obama's "European social democracy."

A residual few maintain that the debt calamity is now water under the political bridge. But it isn't. It set Obama back by months, and in the absence of a previous "Stand or Die" order he must now struggle to regain strategic territory. The calamity was also a watershed in the Obama presidency: he'll either learn from it and begin counterstriking with escalating intensity and precision bombing (against Republicans, not Congress), or in singular good faith he'll further attempt cooperation -- and watch his presidency be demolished.

Here, from Krauthammer, is the party line on Obama's preceding efforts to cooperate, to honorably credit the opposition with good faith in promoting the public good: He "give[s] not an iota of credit to the opposition for trying to promote the public good." Not even "an iota." Should you recall one of the many speeches or press conferences in which Obama went out of his way to treat the enemy with respect and honor, then your recall, according to Krauthammer, is delusional.

All those ad hominems hurled by the good, faithful opposition at Obama for three years? -- terrorist? unAmerican? socialist or fascist, take your pick? No, no, you imagined that, too. But wouldn't you know it? Obama is now deploying the ultimate political ad hominem -- "Charging [his] opponents with bad faith." Yes, that simple, downhome, graciously transparent and most loyal of oppositions is only presenting "argument, fact, logic, history ... not just on principle but on empirical grounds, as well — the economic and moral unraveling of Europe’s social-democratic experiment, on display today from Athens to the streets of London."

Thus the "Limbaugh style" I referenced in the opening: take every reality -- the modern GOP's utter vacancies of fact, logic, history, empiricism and good faith -- and turn it on its head.

Krauthammer wails that Obama is essentially "branding Republicans enemies of the people." For a former psychiatrist, how Freudian. Beyond that, however, Obama should embrace Krauthammer's condemnation and commence doing just that. Because "the people" are indeed facing a determined enemy of their general welfare.

Predictable humbug

The Pavlovian curs are yapping and snapping already:

In a memorandum to House Republicans on Wednesday, Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the majority leader, said their agenda must include "stopping the discussions of new stimulus spending with money that we simply do not have." He accused the president of waging "class warfare" — Republican code for Mr. Obama’s proposed tax increases on high incomes.

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican minority leader, criticized "job-killing tax increases" and said, "Continuing the spending spree on failed stimulus programs won’t shrink the deficit."

Should President Obama propose in September so much as one dilapidated school repaired, or one more fireman or policeman retained, or even one dollar of deficit reduction achieved through temporary spending hikes and more equitable taxation, he'll be ruthlessly assaulted by the usual Republican suspects and viciously barraged by their usual rhetorical humbug as though he's Chairman Mao proposing a Great Leap Forward. This much we do know.

Therefore his proposal might as well be Big; it might as well contain aggressive economic remedies of the most authentically Keynesian sort. Because ... see above paragraph.  

The irredeemable Tom Coburn

Since I imagine senatorial feelings are mutual with respect to Tom Coburn's extraordinarily careless statement yesterday -- "It’s just a good thing I can’t pack a gun on the Senate floor" -- let's consider that remark a wash.

That considered erasure, however, makes Coburn no less offensive -- or any less stupid. "You can’t tell me the [healthcare] system is better now than it was before Medicare," added Coburn, notwithstanding warehouses of contrary evidence of seniors' extended longevity and vastly reduced financial burdens.  

There was this, too:

Without specifying what he meant, Coburn said President Barack Obama has an "intent is to create dependency because it worked so well for him. As an African-American male," Coburn said, Obama received "tremendous advantage from a lot of these programs." The programs were not identified in the [news] report.

What a small, mean-spirited halfwit of a "moderate Republican," which is how the media insist on mischaracterizing this irredeemable jerk.

Some dreary reality

President Obama's steady, methodical long game is in need of an audible, something along the lines of the old razzle-dazzle. The latest from Gallup:

A new low of 26% of Americans approve of President Barack Obama's handling of the economy.

That dreary statistic reflects an 11 point plunge in 90 days. Only 29 percent approve of Obama's handling of job creation. And, after squandering months in a counterproductive contest with fiscal psychopaths over how much to cut spending, the president's approval rating on the deficit is a nearly invisible 24 percent.

These findings are not outliers, they are not statistical abnormalities, they aren't the freakish results of mad social science. They are a trend.

Worse, they were an avoidable trend. Had Obama stuck to his bigger, electorate-fortified guns in the debt-ceiling debacle, or had he demonstrated a crowd-pleasing jobs-creation intensity by calling this demonstrably corrupt Congress back into session, his public-opinion trajectory likely would be in ascendance, not freefall. Of that, I am convinced. To those who aren't, they might at least ask themselves: Could Gallup's latest look any drearier?

The president is receiving bum political advice, which is platitudinously orthodox, in dramatically unorthodox times: Pamper the independents, Mr. President, who invariably hew to the cautious side. That advice has been rewarded with this: 

In contrast to Democrats' majority approval of Obama on all seven issues tested [terrorism, foreign affairs, education, Afghanistan, jobs-creation, the economy, the deficit], fewer than half of independents approve of the president's handling of any of these.

On creating jobs, independents approve of Obama's performance by 24 percent. So what political-advisory word is circulating about the president's belated, upcoming jobs package? It'll be "modest."

Well right, sure, of course -- wouldn't want to scare the independents away.

Perhaps I'm hopelessly mired in some wrong-headed historical empiricism, but I observe that though FDR's actual economic policies were often modest -- through hindsight, at least -- FDR never gave the appearance of modesty. He projected boldness, uncanonical experimentation which thrust here and there, a liberated determination to do whatever it takes -- and to hell with the cowering voices of timidity and caution.      

Obama would do well to reread some of that history, because his political advisers have quite obviously forgotten it.

September's promise

Democratic strategist Paul Begala offers Obama some unimpressive advice:

Listen, Mr. President, Republicans have one objective, and it is not a stronger economy or bipartisanship — it’s destroying your presidency. If you believe anything else, you are deluding yourself.... It’s a faith-based myth that anything is going to force these people to behave in a bipartisan way.

I describe it as unimpressive since even Republicans don't deny it. In fact, they boast about it. Says, for example, Rob Collins, a former chief of staff to House Majority Leader Eric Cantor:

It’s hard for me to believe [the White House is] going to build a compelling case that they can pressure Republicans, that they have this grass-roots army to force us to do something.... It didn’t work in the past and it’s not going to work now.

Collins is of course right, which by comparative logic makes Obama's bus-tour admonitions of intransigent Republicans not so much wrong as rather useless. The GOP was already soaring in public disapproval, which renders this point more acute: for the White House, the only public ire to be tamed is that directed against government inaction on the jobs front.

Hence, this mystifies:

[T]he president ... will deliver a major policy address outlining his plan for deficit reduction and job creation in early September, a senior administration official told Politico. Obama has said his proposal will include a hybrid of deficit cuts, tax reform and modest job-creation initiatives.

There's always the potential of mere political gamesmanship in the administration's lowering of expectations; but any "modest" jobs proposal in the grips of the severest downturn since the Great Depression is likely to be greeted, among Democrats, by a deafening thud -- indeed so thuddish, the cost in party enthusiasm could offset any gains made among more conservative independents. 

By and large the electorate is primed for boldness. And Obama should give it to them.

Almost Rick Barely

Nate Silver rains on Rick Perry's much-ballyhooed popularity among some of the hardest of the nation's hard right:

[I]n 2006 ... he was re-elected with just 39 percent of the vote in a complicated, four-way race. Even if we ignore that and instead look at Mr. Perry’s nine-point margin of victory over his nearest rival ... it compares unfavorably to other Republicans on the ballot that year, who won by an average of 15 points.

Last year, Mr. Perry was re-elected to another term.... But his 13-point margin of victory is underwhelming for such a Republican state in such a Republican year. Other Republicans on the Texas ballot last year won by an average of 27 percentage points instead.

Be thankful, Congressman

Ron Paul conveyed to Fox News yesterday the familiar, "I'm just too gutsy" lament of every neglected, second- or third-tier presidential candidate:

[The media] don't want to discuss my views because I think they're frightened by me challenging the status quo and the establishment.

Yet Paul has excellent reason to be rather thankful for his relative anonymity, notes Politico's Maggie Haberman:

[A] more thorough vetting of the kind that mainstream candidates generally receive would invariably lead to some of the newsletters that bore his name (if not his byline or direct authorship) decades earlier.

Haberman points to the New Republic's examination of such, back in 2008:

They were published under a banner containing Paul’s name, and the articles ... seem designed to create the impression that they were written by him--and reflected his views. What they reveal are decades worth of obsession with conspiracies, sympathy for the right-wing militia movement, and deeply held bigotry against blacks, Jews, and gays. In short, they suggest that Ron Paul is not the plain-speaking antiwar activist his supporters believe they are backing--but rather a member in good standing of some of the oldest and ugliest traditions in American politics.

If Paul really wants to appreciate his obscurity, though, all he need do is just look around -- namely, at the media attention given to the accumulated imbecilities of Rick Perry, only because he's a genuine contender.

The Tea Party as far-right losers

To understand why Tea Party-propped pols such as Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry have no chance -- none -- of winning the White House, today's NY Times op-ed "Crashing the Tea Party," by David Campbell of Notre Dame and Harvard's Robert Putnam, is an excellent place to start.

The researchers compare this declining movement's increasing fanaticism to the left's Vietnam-era McGovernism. I assume they do so only to avoid the more obvious comparison so routinely made: the Goldwater debacle.

The Tea Party as a recent phenomenon pointedly born of busted government budgets and intense economic distress? Not really, write Campbell and Putnam. It's just the old right's familiar far right: nativist, bigoted whites who are "disproportionately social conservatives" of a pronounced theocratic bent. ("Yet it is precisely this infusion of religion into politics that most Americans increasingly oppose.")

Furthermore most Tea Partiers are not, as they love to propagandize and bamboozle, new to politics or political battle: they "were highly partisan" -- and active -- "Republicans long before the Tea Party was born."

The op-ed's most intriguing passage:

[I]n data we have recently collected, the Tea Party ranks lower than any of the 23 other groups we asked about — lower than both Republicans and Democrats. It is even less popular than much maligned groups like "atheists" and "Muslims." Interestingly, one group that approaches it in unpopularity is the Christian Right.

Bundle these snapshots and what you have is a Class of '64 GOP yearbook. Goldwater himself was no theocrat or even much of a social conservative; in fact, his libertarian skin crawled when he finally acceded to his advisers' demands that he demagogue mid-1960s "social morality." But the Puritans had been politically marooned for decades and they seemed ripe for exploitation -- so exploit, a very desperate Goldwater did (to his subsequent and much greater regret, when his Puritan liberation transmogrified into the rancidly un-libertarian New Right).

Today, however, the demographics of the far right's nativist, racist, socially conservative whites are leaner -- far leaner -- than they were in 1964, and the projection for outyears is, essentially, electoral doom. Sure, the Bachmanns and Perrys are gussying up their far-right appeal with mindless overtures to economic medievalism, which retains a certain and larger appeal to a fundamentally conservative nation, but their Christian fundamentalist trail is a long, ineradicable, and haunting one.

Enough to deprive them of the GOP's 2012 nomination? That's my guess, in that rabidly anti-Obama primary voters are especially keen on electability, unlike the anti-Great Society thumpers and ideologues of '64.

Don't get me wrong. I'm pulling for Perry -- I'd add Bachmann, but even God can't help her -- to go all the way in the nomination process. Regrettably, assuming Perry fails to self-immolate first, Mitt Romney seems pragmatically capable of maintaining a proper Tea-Partying distance and flaming Perry's evangelical ass but good, and rather soon.

Perry gaffe watch con't

Karl Rove on the vile Gov. Perry, on Fox:

You don't accuse the chairman of the Federal Reserve of being a traitor to his country and being guilty of treason and suggesting that we treat him pretty ugly in Texas — that's not, again, a presidential statement.

This, too, from a former speechwriter for W., Peter Wehner:

People shouldn’t throw around the words "almost treasonous" loosely; and certainly a person running for president shouldn’t do such a thing.

The Establishment guns of August, with months to go.

Rick Perry: Gaffe watch

If throwing into asinine question the president of the United States' patriotism is an early indicator of Rick Perry's campaign artistry to come, then Rick Perry will be toast even sooner than I thought.

It's kids' stuff, juvenile beyond even the puerile Donald Trump and emotionally stunted primary voters. And Mitt Romney, if he's as clever at Perry-crushing as he is at issue-evading, will bury his freshest opponent in a flurry of forced apologies, course corrections and backpedaling.

Perry's too cutesy "You need to ask him" response to a reporter's inquiry about Obama's love of country is small-b bush league stuff of the swaggering sort that will wear real thin, real soon.

Far more than that, however, is that it shows that Perry isn't the disciplined campaigner he's purported to be. Only a reckless loudmouth would subsume his key electoral attraction -- jobs -- to an adolescent taunt about the president's patriotism.

Nocera's big idea

It's unsettling to recall that this guy was a business columnist for the NY Times before he metamorphosed as an op-ed columnist for the NY Times, which evidently has adopted an old Army motto as its corporate model: "Fuck up and move up."

In pronounced conflict with prevailing economic theory and virtually all available empirical facts, today Joe Nocera first asserts that corporate "investment" -- not consumer demand -- "is what will turn the economy around." He then exotically flames his column with this utterly pointless fantasy:

I am coming more and more to think that with the government essentially paralyzed for the foreseeable future, the only way we’re going to get jobs is by turning to actual job creators: business itself. With all their cash, companies shouldn’t be waiting for Congress to give them tax incentives to hire people. They should be trying to jump-start the economy — and fend off another recession — by making investments, and hiring workers, that will lead to renewed prosperity.

The only way that’s going to happen, however, is if our society implicitly makes the kind of compact that German society makes explicitly: We have to be willing to allow companies to sacrifice short-term profits for the long-term good of the country.

It's as though Nocera had this extraordinary idea -- We should be more like Germany -- so he simply restructures modern economic theory to fit his desired theme, and, what's worse, he wraps the entire invention in some notional humbug about patriotic capitalism.

Wile E. Perry

Regrettably, Rick Perry is just another Wile E. Coyote, with better hair. For now he's all the rage -- rather literally -- as he straps on his Acme, rocket-propelled roller skates and zooms past Mitt and Michele. But remember your physics: the sound of his rockets' explosion will arrive much later than the visuals.

Out of perhaps an excess of caution -- I've been hurt, so hurt, before -- I refuse to let myself dream the big dream: A cartoonish Texan Goldwater as the GOP's 2012 nominee, blundering his ideologically intoxicated way through the nation, belching about dismantling Social Security and hiccupping over the TVA's privatization or other such damn fool notions that will only frighten small children and aggravate old ladies.

Cut the background noise and listen closely and you can hear Perry ticking. In merely one day -- yesterday -- he managed to equate another expansion of the money supply during a potentially deflationary downturn as "almost treasonous"; he flippantly politicized such a monetary act and threatened the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board with "pretty ugly [treatment] down in Texas"; and when asked if the president of these United States loves his own country, he cravenly responded: "You need to ask him."

George W. is already gunning for Perry. Last night he unleashed a proxy to label his characterizations of Ben Bernanke as "inappropriate and unpresidential."

And Mitt Romney hasn't even warmed up. Yesterday Ross Douthat astutely observed that "the thinking person’s case for Romney ... amounts to this: Vote for Mitt, you know he doesn’t believe a word he says." True enough, till about now. Soon he will quite authentically be ripping Perry from limb to imbecilic limb.

What really distresses, though, is that many among the tea-partying base have in public polling expressed a pragmatic inclination to vote electability over ideology. By primary season they're likely to look at Perry and see a presidential campaign concluding with smashing success in Goldwater's Old Confederacy and Arizona, but nowhere else. They'll look at Perry and see four more years of President Barack Obama. They'll look at Romney and see a realistic chance.

'This last, worst 112th Congress'

From Harry Truman's July, 1948 Democratic Convention speech, regarding what he called "this last, worst 80th Congress":

The situation in 1932 was due to the policies of the Republican Party control of the Government of the United States. The Republican Party, as I said a while ago, favors the privileged few and not the common everyday man. Ever since its inception, that party has been under the control of special privilege; and they have completely proved it in the 80th Congress. They proved it by the things they did to the people, and not for them. They proved it by the things they failed to do....

I called a special session of the Congress in November 1947 ... and I set out a 10-point program for the welfare and benefit of this country, among other things standby controls. I got nothing. Congress has still done nothing....

My duty as President requires that I use every means within my power to get the laws the people need on matters of such importance and urgency.

I am therefore calling this Congress back into session July 26th....

I am going to call Congress back and ask them to pass laws [most of which they have said they support]....

Now, my friends, if there is any reality behind that Republican platform, we ought to get some action from a short session of the 80th Congress. They can do this job in 15 days, if they want to do it. They will still have time to go out and run for office.

They are going to try to dodge their responsibility. They are going to drag all the red herrings they can across this campaign, but I am here to say that Senator Barkley and I are not going to let them get away with it.

Now, what that worst 80th Congress does in this special session will be the test. The American people will not decide by listening to mere words, or by reading a mere platform. They will decide on the record, the record as it has been written. And in the record is the stark truth, that the battle lines of 1948 are the same as they were in 1932, when the Nation lay prostrate and helpless as a result of Republican misrule and inaction....

Now my friends, with the help of God and the wholehearted push which you can put behind this campaign, we can save this country from a continuation of the 80th Congress, and from misrule from now on.

I must have your help. You must get in and push, and win this election. The country can't afford another Republican Congress.

Here and there, emphasis mine.

Loyal criticism

E.J. Dionne makes what for some is an uncomfortable point:

The president’s loyalists still have faith in him and still love to criticize media narratives they think underestimate him. But this time, both he and they are expressing a level of frustration that may be the healthiest thing happening to Obama in what is an otherwise dismal moment in his presidency.

I can think of nothing more weakening to a sitting president than an uncritical base.

The so-called "professional left" have, of course, since January 2009, gone overboard in their civic duties, often through a misunderstanding of the limits of presidential power or the immovability of oppositional determination. But that's old and all too familiar intellectual territory, not to mention negligible electoral territory. No need to rehash it here and now.

Those among Obama's base who do on occasion worry me, though, are those loyalists who are as blindly allegiant as Norquist-pledgers. Every Obamian utterance is received as Mosaic wisdom, every Obamian step as messianic perambulation, every Obamian tactic as brilliantly blessed: and let no man put asunder the absolute splendor of all that radiates from the divinely untouchable Barack Obama. He is not president but pope, Christ's political vicar, infallible. Criticize so much as one of his steps, one sliver of his wisdom, even one inch of tactical or strategic loss, and one is subjected to bloody inquisitional ferocity.

Care to know who appreciates such presidential defenses the least? Yep, you got it: Barack Obama. Obama's a thinker, not ego-flypaper. And thinkers dislike yes-men, because one learns nothing from them.

Obama will, in my opinion, emerge from this "dismal moment" stronger than ever. But he won't get there by reading praise for his old ways. He needs to shake things up, to break out of some previously effective molds, to venture onto newer and much bolder ground -- and that he is less likely to do, and therefore less likely to succeed, if his loyalists aren't loyal enough to criticize.

Buffett's broadside

Warren Buffett, in today's NY Times:

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, tax rates for the rich were far higher, and my percentage rate was in the middle of the pack. According to a theory I sometimes hear, I should have thrown a fit and refused to invest because of the elevated tax rates on capital gains and dividends.

I didn’t refuse, nor did others. I have worked with investors for 60 years and I have yet to see anyone — not even when capital gains rates were 39.9 percent in 1976-77 — shy away from a sensible investment because of the tax rate on the potential gain. People invest to make money, and potential taxes have never scared them off.

I have also read psychosocial studies that say "these" people invest not so much to make money (after all, how many lake homes can one genuinely cherish?) but to advance oneself in the intangible game of self-competition. They resemble poker or blackjack players who see their chips not as transmuted cash, but as near abstractions to be tabulated. (I can relate; not in income, but attitude. I used to count cards with the specific, exceedingly determined intent to make money -- because I had none. Laying out, say, $300 for fresh chips was a nervous proposition. Yet after amassing some winnings, I'd find myself wagering $75 or $100 on single hands and thinking nothing of it -- not in terms of actual money. The experience was otherworldly. The chips were just relative numbers on a small disk, and splitting and hitting both tens at say $50 a card in a late, high-value shoe was no more rewarding than successfully doubling down with five bucks. [In rather short order the experience -- for me at least -- was also emotionally wrenching in its intellectual emptiness, a vacuum I began overfilling with vast quantities of compensating alcohol. Not a good idea in gambling. I would strongly advise my fellow impoverished to find other lines of supplement.])

Goodness, how I digress from the other point I wish to make; that being the regrettable progressive inclination to descant in the highest of indignations that Republican pols love lower taxes mostly because they love to reward rich friends. Yet as Buffett surveys and notes: "Most wouldn’t mind being told to pay more in taxes." Indeed, as wealthy Democratic pols, such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, have also noted, they never asked for George W. Bush's lower taxes.

The progressive chant not only demeans itself in cheap demonization, but attenuates the more venomous truth: Republican pols love ever-lower taxes because they love starving government to death.

An 'inconsequential' job-creator

Yesterday Rick Perry said he wanted to make Washington "inconsequential" in our lives. Tonight, speaking in Waterloo, Iowa, he said we need a president who will create jobs.

This clown has the potential to make Mitt Romney look like a model of consistency.

My 2009 thoughts on T-Paw

Tim Pawlenty's early retirement caused me to look back. This I wrote in 1 August 2009:

If ... there is any credible threat to Barack Obama's reelection, it's Gov. Pawlenty.... What's scary about this guy is not only that he has a brain, but he advertises what's in it with a certain, natural pose and delivery that seem wholly alien to the tightly puckered, automated Mitt Romney.

And this, I wrote two months earlier:

Pawlenty is making it clear that they -- the moderates -- are his base, for whom he's also clearing a wider and less ideological path. He has learned the Obamian lessons of pragmatism, one vivid sign of which was, in Tuesday's virtual-candidacy press conference, his announcement that he'd certify for the U.S. Senate whoever the State Supreme Court declares. So much for favorably signaling the malcontented bomb-throwers.

More telling, however, was a Wednesday afternoon, national-television appearance in which he praised Sonia Sotomayor's "compelling life story," noted her "accomplished legal career," and advised that Republicans give her "the benefit of the doubt." Those who haven't and won't, he said, are only engaging in "overheated rhetoric."

That, in itself, is comparatively fresh and even courageously strategic thinking for a GOP presidential-candidate wannabe: to stand athwart that frightful phalanx of GOP primary voters and proclaim a new standard of Reason. That takes guts, but it also indicates that Pawlenty suspects ... that there exists a sufficient supply of fellow pragmatists and realists among the GOP base to launch a pragmatic, reality-based candidacy.

But he lost his way. Pawlenty became too eager, too ambitious entirely too soon. He began believing, I gather, that he was running in 2012, unlike the keener Jon Huntsman, who has sense enough to understand that he's running to, for, and in, 2016.

An ideological dialysis

To say that Jake Tapper's "This Week" interview of Michele Bachmann was a journalistic abomination would be to understate its abomination. Question asked; scripted, unrelated answer given. Next question. On "State of the Union" Bachmann asserted that raising the debt ceiling meant handing President Obama "an additional $2.4 trillion," which impelled Candy Crowley not to a clarifying follow-up, but to a political question. To his credit, David Gregory valiantly tried to adjust the focus on Bachmann's torrential blur on the debt-ceiling issue, but all too soon he segued to her neolunacy on homosexuals in appointed office.

Hence another Sunday morning of public affairs sounded indistinguishable from my post-coffee bathroom visit just now, although the latter was more rewarding.

On the other hand, my bathroom visits have failed to be amusing since I was about 13, whereas the morning shows were infinitely so. In listening to them -- and them alone -- one might gather that Ms. Bachmann possesses some reasonable shot at the GOP nomination, which is about as likely as Rick Perry sweeping the primaries, which is to say, both odds stand rather firmly in frozen Hell territory.

And that, as they say, is a damn shame. Nothing could be better for the GOP's long-term interests -- and the nation's -- than a raving, tea-partyesque Republican presidential nominee, whose subsequent Goldwateresque implosion would force the Genies of Crazy back in their bottle for years -- perhaps forever. The party needs such an ideological dialysis.

My much greater fear is that Republicans will nominate another John McCain -- see Mitt run -- after whose (probable) loss in the general election the ideologues will bark louder than ever: See? We didn't nominate a true conservative, and that's why we miscarried. In short, the madness will likely roll over.

The Romney-nomination upside? The certifiable crazies would split from the party by 2014 and form their own.

Pragmatism doesn't mean just the possible

Some inside the the White House are confusing political pragmatism with (narrow) possibilities. From the NY Times:

Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, David Plouffe, and his chief of staff, William M. Daley, want him to maintain a pragmatic strategy of appealing to independent voters by advocating ideas that can pass Congress, even if they may not have much economic impact....

But some others "get it":

[O]thers, including Gene Sperling, Mr. Obama’s chief economic adviser, say public anger over the debt ceiling debate has weakened Republicans and created an opening for bigger ideas.... Even if the ideas cannot pass Congress, they say, the president would gain a campaign issue by pushing for them.

Mr. President: Please take Plouffe and Daley by the ears and show them the door.

Normally I'd have much more to say on a philosphical topic so dear to my earnest sentiments, but at the moment I must pause to watch Michele Bachmann serially evade questions on the Sunday shows. 

Perry's kitchen-sink announcement

I was downright misty eyed listening to Rick Perry's opening just now: his obscure, humble roots; his all-American-boyish heterosexual pursuit and its beaming progeny; his youthful "thrift" and industry; his love of freedom; his growing and keen awareness of American exceptionalism -- all contrasted with his pious loathing of wicked, European socialism.

Yet my eyes stopped misting and my belly started laughing as Mr. Perry moved on to a bit more specific analysis. Mostly there came from Perry some rather interesting economic history, such as that regarding President Obama's unique accumulation of debt. And looking forward, Perry declared us righteously unwilling to accept "four more years of rising taxes."

Into this muddle he threw some GOP-customary, anti-labor demagoguery, and later, thinking globally -- as Rick Perry is wont to do -- he added the obligatory observation that Obama has "encouraged our enemies."

My belly laugh erupted, though, when it seemed rather clear that Perry would omit from all this his special thanks to our "spendthrift" president for having balanced Texas' budget with his sinister, European-socialist stimulus funds. 

Finally, the two sane residents of my house -- the two stationed safely, sanely away from the television, that is -- must have thought me mad, mad I tell you, when my laughing volcanically launched into uproariousness as Perry broke into a downhome, poetic musing about real change being on its way from the "wind-swept prairies."

Oh, sure, from hardworking, overtaxed farms and factories, too, but that "wind-swept" jazz was what really did it for me.

Like all common folk, I often wonder if there is a God. Today, my wondering was answered, for unquestionably some much higher power with an even higher sense of humor has given unto us perhaps 15 months of this yapping circus dog.

Anti-intellectualism's mission creep

Here's what Politico pronounces as an "at-length" description of an ideal presidential campaign, straight from an ideal non-candidate:

They are sick and tired of hearing and suffering through. We want new; we want conviction and passion and candidness.

Riveting. Incoherent, too, of course -- "they" are "hearing through"? -- as well as clicheish, which oddly enough is the rhetorical launch for demanding something "new." Any politico who again bemoans our existential sickness and tiredness should be compelled by the platitude police to roll up his or her sleeves and promptly throw him- or herself under the bus, any bus.

Doubtless you've discerned the speaker -- Sarah Palin -- who throughout this campaign season has been, as you also know, an impeccable model of political "candidness." Some might read that as snark. But it's not. She has absolutely nothing to say of any insightful value about any subject, and no one is more aware of this than the infinitely shallow Sarah Palin: she's never cracked a briefing book, never retained a thoughtful adviser, never boned up on anything but Todd. Yet she does know that each time she lifts her skirt in a crowd, the media come running. Hence a bit more gas money for SarahPAC and another contractual month with Fox -- all of it accomplished with forthright openness.

What's more, she thrives on "elitist" criticisms such as those contained in the third paragraph. Palin is just un-shallow enough to intellectually appreciate that George W. Bush proved that no pol can ever be too inarticulate or trite for the unschooled, bromide-prone American electorate. Thus her black hole of banality feeds on all that resists it; what tries to banish her from the public arena only makes her stronger.

There's little politically scientific doubt that Palin's candid anti-intellectualism is but phase two of a linear progression. There was, as noted, in the contemporary beginning, George W., who easily could have been the one to utter what Palin uttered yesterday in Des Moines: "That [ideal presidential] candidate’s not fearing so much what the interpretation is going to be when it comes to the comments and positions you are articulating, but just speaking from the heart." Which tells us -- you got it -- absolutely nothing. Palin, however, has ramped up W.'s inarticulate nothingness to once-unthinkable heights; and since 2008 hers has gone on to blight virtually the entire GOP field. As sputtering automatons of rhetorical emptiness, as robotic poster-children of the empirically disprovable, as proud purveyors of supremely untainted buncombe -- they're all ideal candidates, anti-intellectual to their core.

Michele Bachmann & Co-candidates are now phase three of Palin's candidly cancerous ignorance. And as of this afternoon, the GOP presidential field enters phase four, in boots and Italian suits. Nothing new, really, just a lot more of it.

Tabloid gibberish

Nestled in their coverage of last night's GOP debate was this unimpeachably ignorant paragraph from the NY Times' Jeff Zeleny and Ashley Parker:

Even as the Republicans debated here, Sarah Palin, who has yet to rule out a presidential bid, arrived in Iowa and planned to visit the fair on Friday. Her visit was being carefully watched for signals of her intentions.

Carefully watched? By whom? Has the Times' readership really dipped to such a desperate low that the old grey lady must resort to this dreadful level of tabloid gibberish?

Worried about G. Will

Altogether reassuring is George Will's immutable vision, posted today from London, of a Cameronian Britain under an Egbert-sized government. But what shocks and worries me sick, just sick I tell you, is his radically apostate opinion that its National Health Service "is sometimes adequate regarding medicine."

True, there follows a "but," but, come on, I mean, no one among the contemporary right is ever to concede so much as a singular pathogen of right-wing rabidity.

Come back, George. Quick, come back from Albion before those insidious socialists liberate you any further.

Another necessary course correction

As already noted, the White House has taken the first of two, indispensable steps to regain its frittered mojo: through some severe but necessary whiplash, it's now punctuating the need for targeted increases in federal spending; next, notwithstanding yesterday's shotgun indictment of Congress, President Obama will, one presumes, narrow his rhetorical aim to the actual culprits of economy-stalling obstructionism -- the Grand Old Party-Poopers.

Meanwhile, opinion remains divided on the issue of a presidential call for an emergency congressional session. Combatants on both sides of the argument have presented sound and reasonable cases: Personally I think such a session would manifest not Congress' seriousness, obviously, but Obama's -- and at this perilous moment any vigorous shaking of the status quo would be a political plus. But, that's academic. It's not going to happen.

The reason I mention it, however, is Obama's stated reasoning in not calling for it:

The last thing we need is Congress spending more time arguing in D.C.

What I figure is, they need to spend more time out here, listening to you, and hearing how fed up you are.

That prompted an urge on my part to wring the president's speechwriters' necks -- an assault that any fair-minded American jury would rule justifiable. Because in the same speech the president underscored the urgency of passing several recovery bills -- today. Literally, today. The oratorical incongruity was jarring; also noticeable, in that his audience responded moderately, in what sounded like immoderate confusion.

It should go without saying that Congress would not, of course, pass any such bills. Yet I fail to understand how Republican obstructionism can be poignantly showcased in the absence of actual, on-the-floor ... well, obstructionism. Force these Hayekian goons to deny federal money and private jobs for road construction and to filibuster bridge projects. Not next month -- today. Make them stand there, collectively, and bark No! we will not put Americans back to work.

What's more, as many already know as well as the back of their unemployed or underpaid hands, and as the NY Times confirms, Republicans "spend[ing] more time out here, listening to you, and hearing how fed up you are" was and remains destined to gain little to no useful traction. They're worried about their primary flanks -- not your sorry socioeconomic butt -- and most within those civic-minded herds convening in ungovernable town halls are just the fanatical cattle. 

As lawmakers meet with voters back home in their districts, the message is often not "Can’t we all just get along?" but rather a push to get back into the ring and fight harder....

While meetings draw plenty of local constituents, they are also a magnet for activists, as Democrats and Republicans have learned the importance of packing the halls with supporters.

Hence some practical observations behind my objections: Obama won't be calling Congress back into session, so he should cease with the pointless Today! talk, as well as subdue any rising expectations of reasonable Republicans tomorrow.