P.M. Carpenter

Still experiencing some technical problems. I've had to remove some items for the time being.  

Virtue never sleeps

At the moment I was watching something far more engrossing -- Martin Scorsese’s intimate reflections on Elia Kazan’s brilliant career, in “A Letter to Elia” – so last night I missed the opening of the unfortunate Lawrence O’Donnell’s new show, “The Last Word.” It’s only his second (and counting?) week as an MSNBC host, but there he was, this time assisted by Gov. Ed Rendell, refighting the good “Fight” against nauseating goodness itself. I trust I missed none of the glory.

In the other corner were the philosophical hedgehogs, dug in firmly against all foxy, practical and strategic reason: Adam Green of Bold Progressives and Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake; bring up the angels, halos not much extra.

Mr. O’Donnell and Gov. Rendell’s argument was as manifestly sensible and straightforward as any argument can get: You folks – Green, Hamsher, et al, the insatiable agitators of “movement progressivism” – claim to be on Democrats’ side, so why not stop bashing them and President Obama during the final four weeks of this immensely important national campaign and culminating election?   

That’s all. For just four weeks. Call a truce. Shut the fuck up. And in the process you might, you just might help prevent a successful full-scale invasion of Congress by the barbaric knuckledraggers of the DeMinted right.

Just four little weeks, that’s all the grownups were asking.

Ah, but virtue, you see, never sleeps. Green and Hamsher talked around and behind and transcendentally over an equally straightforward answer and a stated commitment to play nicely. Unspoken was the fact that their face-time on network television and their Web site revenues and readership are predicated on sustained and uncompromising virtue, no matter how destructive to the greater good.

In other words, high-profile movement progressives may dispirit huge chunks of the rank and file to the point of stay-at-home apathy or anger and thus help to usher in a two-agonizing-year Boehner majority, or worse, but those high-profilers will do just fine, thank you very much.

In fact, they’ll likely do even better, since they’ll be braying “Told you so” from their navel-gazing mountaintops, omitting only that they helped bring about America’s return to the medieval splendor of Gingrichism.

Give up, Lawrence. I suspect that your tough-love, internal opponents actually want your Dems to lose – even if it means heightened misery for millions of Americans -- just so they can say they were virtuously right all along.  

Another new Angle

The Las Vegas Sun has posted leaked audio of a desperately Machiavellian Sharron Angle adjuring her Tea Party rival for the U.S Senate to quit the race: “I believe you [Scott Ashjian] can do some real harm, not to Harry Reid but to me,” she tells him. “I’m not sure you can win and I’m not sure I can win if you’re hurting my chance and that’s the part that scares me.”

So she hasn’t lost all contact with reality; Angle retains at least a sliver of rationality that is further confirmed by her expressed opinion of third-party bids for higher office: “The only thing that’s different between you [the Tea Party candidate] and I [sic] is I guess I was pragmatic enough to know because of other battles that third parties can’t get traction. So I said all right, I’ll work with it…. And the rules are there are Democrats, you got Republicans.” (Take note, ye ideological, disillusioned progressives who fantastically believe that the solution to disagreeable compromising in Washington is a break-off Progressive Party. Even Sharron Angle grasps the undynamite-able entrenchment of the two-party system in America.)

Those comments, however, marked the boundaries of Ms. Angle’s sense and sensibility. She went on to speculate, for instance, about the real possibility of a U.S. Senate housing both herself and Christine O’Donnell, at which even her Tea Party compatriot scoffed, “[O’Donnell] doesn’t have a chance.”

Angle also ventured that D.C. Establishment Republicans are less than wild about Sharron only “because they know I’ll shake this mess up.” Granted, there might have been a touch of the Machiavellian in this remark as well; Angle might merely have been assuring her Tea Party ally that she’ll be as insanely disruptive as he, as a U.S. senator, would be. But my guess is that Angle, being undisguisedly nuts, just cannot comprehend that Establishment Republicans see her, quite simply, as a potential embarrassment in need of endless party press releases of “clarification.”

It was this comment, however, one dripping with seeming sincerity, that revealed Sharron Angle as not of this world: “The Republicans have lost their standard, they’ve lost their principle. Really that’s why the machine in the Republican Party is fighting against me.... They have never really gone along with lower taxes and less government regulation.”

By “lower” and “less” Ms. Angle can only mean “no” and “none.”

I won’t squander my time and yours by delineating here the GOP’s extraordinary recklessness over the past several decades in both gutting federal revenues and unleashing the monstrousness of untrammeled corporate power. Only subliterate fools, pixy-dusted crackpots and implacable right-wing ideologues would contend otherwise – in short, the threefold marvel of Sharron Angle.

The herd shifts

It may be that the herd is sensing a wind change.

Vulnerable Senate Democrats are now “suggest[ing] that recent victories by Tea Party-backed Senate candidates,” writes the NY Times this morning, “had caught the attention of some Democratic and independent voters, raising the prospect of a new crop of archconservatives in Congress.”

The same applies to House races: “[E]ven as spending from outside groups is threatening to swamp many Democratic candidates, Republican strategists estimated that only half of the 39 seats they need to win control of the House were definitively in hand,” which indicates at least a Republican deacceleration, if not full stop.

Perhaps we’re still having trouble with our terminology – ultraradicalism in the virulent form of hyperreactionaryism remains almost inexplicably confused with “archconservatism” – but if Dems can sell the concept that the national mood has swung in their favor, more than half their battle will be won.

For Alexis de Tocqueville’s fundamental insight into our democratic mentality still holds: The American voter dislikes being the odd man out; ease, comfort and safety inhere in traveling with majority opinion, however tyrannical.

For months, one could stand poised by the watercooler and confirm the wisdom of throwing the majority rascals out. Now, with the generic-ballot gap narrowing (from double to single digits on the low end), one can just as easily cite the demotic wisdom of keeping the rascals in. To keep the newcomer rascals out. One harpy dabbled in witchcraft! for heaven’s sake.

There’s little doubt that it was Congressional Republicans themselves who shifted the nation’s generic-ballot preference – just give them enough rope, whether braided by the denial of unemployment benefits or the extension of middle-class tax cuts through extortion – but now that the shift is underway, it should be far less trouble for Democrats to manage. Herds, you know – the slightest pressure from this side or that.

The TARP fable

It’s official. TARP was an unimaginable success. “Even as voters rage and candidates put up ads against government bailouts,” reports the NY Times, “the reviled mother of them all -- the $700 billion lifeline to banks, insurance and auto companies -- will expire after Sunday at a fraction of that cost, and could conceivably earn taxpayers a profit.”

Wildly successful, but still an orphaned success – orphaned not only by its lawmaking parents, but by its beneficiaries on both the right (government is always the problem) and the left (first, let’s kill all the bankers); but, above all, orphaned by Reason.

“It was probably the only effective method available to us to keep from having a financial meltdown much worse than we actually had,” said the Brookings Institution’s Douglas Elliott to the Times. “Had that happened, unemployment would be substantially higher than it is now, the deficit would have gone up even more than it has. But it really cuts against the grain for a public that is so angry at banks to think that something that so plainly helped the banks could also be good for the public.”

Elliott’s last comment seemed directed more at the left than the right. The right is efficient in its anger; it simply hates everything that has worked well under the Obama administration. The doctrinaire left’s anger is nearly as virulent, but a trifle more refined and much more focused; the left resents, more than hates, TARP’s success, since the latter has proved correct Obama’s emphasis on financial stability first.

Yet, clearly, both sides of the political spectrum have benefited – the economy slogs on, but rarely do we read of “The Great (or growing) Recession” these days -- as has the vast middle, where practical Reason above Doctrine has traditionally, collectively resided. The middle, however, is rammed and battered by the extremes so often in this loud, extremist age, clarity suffers.

Soon-to-be-former Utah Senator Bob Bennett described his encounters with right-wing TARP-haters this way: They “scream[ed] at me -- and screaming was the operative word -- ‘You’ve just saddled our children and grandchildren with $700 billion.’ I said, ‘No, I haven’t.’ ” And of course he hadn’t.

Those folks, as stated, were on the right. But one can easily imagine centrists among the crowd, in spirit. The facts of TARP say one thing, but virtually everyone knows the real story: TARP was an uncollectible, irredeemable, $700 billion boondoggle for Wall Street.

In brief, facts no longer matter. Not in this midterm election. History may record TARP as a galloping success, a financial-markets marvel as executed by Wunderkind Geithner, but today’s balloting judges have scorned its very existence.

Frankly I just don’t know how Obama can get through to an electorate like that: one so conspicuously oblivious to straight, rather than spun, news -- which is becoming collectively habitual.