PMC Commentary

Who's up, who's down, and who cares?

Little in today's politics is so utterly useless as our daily tremors over who's up and who's down in the GOP's presidential brawl, and then forecasting the political winds of November, 2012. The election is months, years, centuries, eons away. Current predictions may entertain and satisfy the journalistic compulsion to vacantly occupy vacant space, nonetheless there's not only a Heisenberg uncertainty principle in play, there are also tomorrow's unintended consequences of today, as well as dumb luck, random chance, international maybes and domestic contingencies and hazardous externals and ticklish internals.

In sum, nobody knows a damn thing, but everyone's guessing within oracular auras. That, or they're palsied with fear. This item, from perhaps the nation's most prominent political has-been and notorious largemouth, triggered my musings: 

Everything worries me in this environment [said James Carville in a radio interview]. Nobody’s gotten [re]elected with these kinds of numbers. So, I’m worried in the general election. I profoundly admit that.

I suppose that means that Carville is profoundly worried, which he admits. In either case, he then goes on, effectively, to eviscerate any real cause for worry about Obama's reelection. He dismisses Mitt Romney as a "windsock of a guy," he "trashes" (to quote Politico) Rick Perry, and, in harmonious accord with what's left of our rational universe, he rightly affirms that Herman Cain "is not going to be the president of anything."

So what's to worry? Put another way, What am I missing, James? We are justifiably anticipating a contest between an immensely competent incumbent and some draftee from the Cyclopean Losers Corps, and you're worried about ... everything?

What's more, Carville even more rightly previews the average GOP voter's enormous dilemma:

[I]f I had a conservative worldview and I was looking for our next election to have somebody to articulate that view, I would be unbelievably disappointed.

And that, I would say, is indeed the one certainty of 2012: Every pseudoconservative jackass will be disappointed with Romney, and every traditional conservative (all three or four of them) will be disappointed with virtually anyone else. From that stated certainty we move to the reasonable guesswork of probabilities: a third-party split or stay-at-home-ism of the anti-Obama vote.

But see? There I go, committing the very transgression that I scorned in the opening. Yet, what the hell, there are worse social sins -- and the real mother's milk of politics isn't so much money as it is hypocrisy.

Perry's presser

Rick Perry just completed the most incoherent, incomprehensible press conference I have ever heard. Ostensibly it was on his flat-tax plan, yet over and over again he hammered the idea that what Americans want most are jobs, and it is government regulation of private enterprise that is killing those jobs.

Why, then, this urgent need for a flat tax? Anyone's flat tax? According to Perry, all government need do is eradicate regulations and all would be economically well.

Needless to say, not one of the gagglers asked Perry about this enormous contradiction. One asked about the birther issue, on which Perry was even more incomprehensible (something about seeing his birth certificate being irrelevant to national needs). Another, to the reporter's credit, asked Perry how he can cut $1 trillion a year (required to achieve government spending at 18 percent of GDP) when Congress' supercommittee can't seem to locate $1 trillion to cut over 10 years. Perry's answer, in effect: Not to worry, the horrifying enormity of his economic plan wouldn't fully kick in until 2020.

The press conference was both laughable and immensely depressing. How anyone of Perry's minuscule virtues could be regarded as a legitimate prospect for the U.S. presidency is simply beyond me.

Perry's hilly flat tax

For a tax plan that extols simplicity, Rick Perry's essentially redefines the concept.

Good lord, what a mess. It's flat, but optional; it's more fair, but grossly advantageous to the wealthy; it's innovative, but as banal as Arthur Laffer; it's a federal-revenue pleaser, but it's a larger deficit-bomb; it's a serious thrust in the GOP debate, and it's an absolute fucking joke.

As WaPo's Dylan Matthews, of Wonkblog, points out, Perry's plan "eliminates two of the flat tax’s main selling points." Namely, it ain't simple at all -- indeed, it complicates nearly everyone's tax strategy (except mine, which consists of earning as little as possible, thus taxes aren't even an annoyance); and second, "By offering the choice not to pay the flat tax, Perry’s plan results in a more limited shift toward taxing consumption," which many economists tend to prefer, since consumption taxes "encourage investment and discourage consumption-based bubbles."

The better part of his plan, though, is still to come: that is, watching Rick Perry attempt to explain it -- extemporaneously -- to the press and during upcoming debates. Then we'll see true "simplicity," of the mind, re-redefined.

To peddle, or not to peddle, crazy

Dana Milbank:

[P]olitical professionals expect more from a mainstream candidate such as Perry. After Perry’s birther Parade, strategist Karl Rove lectured his one-time friend Monday in a Fox News appearance. "You associate yourself with a nutty view like that and you damage yourself," he said. Rove added that the pandering to Trump "starts to marginalize you in the minds of some of the people whom you need in order to get the election."

Perry knows this. Perry, almost assuredly, huddled with "political professionals" before tipping his certifiably lunatic hand to Parade magazine. Yet Perry himself is a professional, which qualifies his lunacy. He knows that birtherism is crazy, whereas the peculiar audience to which he's pandering doesn't know nuts from prime rib. 

But when one is a Republican presidential candidate and one is miserably down in tin-foiled, evangelical Iowa, one often does what one needs to do -- drool whole puddles of the wildly preposterous.

That doesn't mean, however, that one's drooling is inherently or necessarily enthusiastic (in some cases it does: see M. Bachmann). If Mitt Romney, for example, were abysmally down in polling, he might be tempted at the urging of political professionals to say that he possesses no "definitive answer" to, let's say, 9/11 Truthers, merely to pump up his lunatic-base numbers. As he premeditated it, Romney would resist every letter of that ambiguous wording, and again later, as he heard himself -- although this is profoundly unlikely -- uttering it.

Romney, however, would also be intelligent enough to know what Karl Rove knows: one is then stuck with one's own words in the far saner primary states, not to mention the general election. Kaboom.

Perry? He's simply not as bright as the ineffably elastic Romney -- and God knows he's more desperate. Yet that doesn't necessarily mean that Perry is enthusiastic about peddling crazy.

I offer this merely as a defense of common politics, which, like it or not, is all politics. 

Brooks, as vintage Limbaugh

David Brooks' latest scolding:

Obama, who sounded so fresh in 2008, now sometimes sounds a bit like Al Gore and Nancy Pelosi. Obama, who inspired the country, now threatens to run a campaign that is viciously negative. Obama, who is still widely admired because he is reasonable and calm, is in danger of squandering his best asset by pretending to be someone he is not. Obama, a natural unifier and conciliator, seems on the verge of running as a divisive populist while accusing Mitt Romney, his possible opponent, of being inauthentic.

I shadow Brooks more than other conservative scribes because he sets the pace for the kind of GOP Establishment critique that will soon be wallpapering hosannas to Mitt, the GOP's inevitable -- and, to the Establishment, inevitably disappointing -- nominee. It's cheap and easy intelligence gathering; no muss, little fuss. I've modified that cliche, however, because Brooks has entered an undisguised fussy stage, one in which he can't quite warm to the barren reality that Obama faces, brought to the president by Brooks' own, extraordinarily "vicious," "divisive," "inauthentic" party.

True enough, for two years of Obama's presidency he demonstrated all of the sophisticated qualities that Brooks notes: He graciously bowed to the minority party's concerns on the stimulus package and healthcare and taxation, far more than his base desired. But this summer -- at the 2.5-year mark -- with the minority party then the majority, in the House, it characteristically overreached; it bolted, it bounded, it utterly soared into the vast beyond of abject unreasonableness over the debt ceiling. And Obama got burned. Bad. Had the president refused to politically adjust in the debacle's aftermath, one could sensibly add "delusional" to his list of personal qualities.

Nonetheless, Brooks wishes to pretend that President Obama should proceed into 2012 as though all is pretty much well, except for Obama's mistakes: as though Obama's opponents are traditional, honest brokers of an honest conservatism; as though Obama is "viciously" pushing a false populist narrative of needed, fundamental reforms; as though Obama is somehow tragically transmogrifying into a frenzied, irrational demagogue who adores division and malice.

This is vintage Rush Limbaugh crap; a despicable op-ed playbook of table-turning offense designed for susceptible nitwits and rubes. It's hyperpartisan, it's tactical, it's deceptive and devious -- and it's unworthy of David Brooks, who generally has trended analytic. 

Cruel justice

One is led inexorably to ask: Has there ever been a more incompetent presidential campaign than Michele Bachmann's?

OK, so Rick Perry is already running a close second, but, come on, Bachmann appears headed, hands down, as the chief inductee into the Political Clusterfuck Hall of Infamy.

This is great, not that I'm "into" schadenfreude or anything like that, although I am, and quite pointedly so when it comes to the troubles of proto-theocratic fascists. Which is to say, I happily reconvey here the beauty of this report about her very erstwhile New Hampshire staff, which writes today to the general population:

The manner in which some in the national team conducted themselves towards Team-N.H. was rude, unprofessional, dishonest, and at times cruel ... [and] more concerning was how abrasive, discourteous, and dismissive some within the national team were towards many New Hampshire citizens.

The Hill story quotes Bachmann's bullshit artist spokeswoman, Alice Stewart, who earlier appeared on MSNBC: "[W]e had a few people that left, we still have some people there, we’re bringing more on." I happened to see that segment live, and this lady was a true virtuoso at the banishment of dark news. I rather admired her pluck, especially when she boldly reminded us, the audience, that Ste. Michele is "pro-family" and "pro-defense."

Unreal

It must be hell to be politically obligated to entire hordes of the paranoid schizophrenic. From Think Progress:

Perry stated that he doesn’t "have a definitive answer" on whether Obama was born in the United States or "any idea" if Obama’s birth certificate is real.

Ingratiating madness as political ritual. Good God, what's next with this bunch of lunatics?

An optionless president

Regardless of how cosmetic, political, self-aggrandizing or futile the president's unilateral maneuvers prove to be, they are but symptomatic of how utterly dysfunctional Congress has become. From the NY Times:

With his jobs plan stymied in Congress by Republican opposition, President Obama on Monday will begin a series of executive-branch actions to confront housing, education and other economic problems over the coming months, heralded by a new mantra: "We can’t wait" for lawmakers to act.

That heaving feeling in the pit of one's stomach is alternately inspired by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell or Speaker Boehner and sidekicks. Their sadistic indifference to the immense distress across working-class America provides Obama's propulsion toward the kind of benign, executive dictatorship which Republicans will, no doubt, now indignantly assail.

Here's McConnell, yesterday, on CNN's "State of the Union":

[The White House's] story line is that there must be some villain out there who’s keeping this administration from succeeding.

Earthworms crawl no deeper in the slime. It is perhaps a "story line" but certainly no fable that barring Republican intransigence in Congress, the nation's economy would be faring much better. The Times' story continues:

The "We can’t wait" campaign ... comes after unanimous votes by Senate Republicans in the past week to block the [president's jobs] plan; House Republican leaders have refused to put the measure to a vote.

And Senate and House Republicans have done this ... why? Because of their superior jobs plan? The Washington Post's 'Fact Checker,' Glenn Kessler, labels that little item "ludicrous"; "mostly a mish-mash of previous offered bills, such as that hardy perennial -- a balanced budget amendment to the constitution," which would throw the economy even farther in reverse. Because supply-side economics rendered the past 30 years so splendidly worthier for working Americans than its 30-year antecedent of Keynesianism? Check any graph of general economic performance, ca. 1950-2010; there's a million of them, each depicting a decided slide.  

Or maybe its only because of conservatives' noble adherence to some traditional ideology? Absolute rot. Contemporary conservatives haven't so much as even brushed against authentic conservatism for years. Today's crowd is hopelessly unimpressed by the political equivalent of the caring, protectively prudent oath: "First, do no harm."

No, conservatism today means only cheap shots, cheap politics, cheap obstructionism. Thus, out of frustration, Obama is forced into a strain of imperial presidentialism -- executive orders over congressional lawmaking -- that Republicanism, in its prototypical form of Whiggism, once rather democratically denounced. Doubtless, Republicans will make a grand show of repeating their principled outrage, notwithstanding that they've proffered Obama no choice. 

Ron Paul means it

Ron Paul is more than just a semi- or neo-isolationist, which describes the growing, opportunistic foreign policy mentality of most Republican presidential hopefuls. Paul is, rather, and always has been, a dependable paleo-isolationist of the America First or even the non-entangling-alliances variety, and that -- whether one subscribes to it or not -- is the singularly authentic worldview among the entire lot.

Paul means it, unlike Mitt Romney (who listens to Robert Kagan), or Rick Perry (who swoons over Donald Rumsfeld), or -- and this clown is difficult to even mention as a serious contender, which he isn't -- Herman Cain, who "has professed his admiration for the writings of John R. Bolton."

Thus writes the NYT Book Review editor and historian of contemporary conservatism Sam Tanenhaus, in what ultimately is a disappointing survey of the Republican field's encroaching, non-internationalist proclivities. He passes by Paul (for "warning that America has become an empire") in the first paragraph, only to bound to a superficial discussion of the remaining shallowists.  

Again, Paul means it ... while the others? In reality they haven't an honest foreign policy notion in their silly little heads. Romney, Perry et al cater to what Tanenhaus portrays as the Tea Partiers' rejection of "aggressive interventionism"; but of course the latter, like the former, merely, reflexively oppose whatever it is that President Obama happens to be engaged in -- foreign policy- or any other-wise -- at the moment. If Obama goes interventionist, they go isolationist; if Obama retracts his claws, theirs spring out. The formula is nimble, but an intellectual fraud.

Paul, however, means what he says -- and what he says is reliable, genuine, and altogether independent of political fads. Somewhat credulously, Tanenhaus quotes an emailed statement by Lawrence Kaplan (a William Kristol co-author) that the Tea Party movement is "proof positive of the rise of isolationism on the right.... My bet is they have the federal government, not far-away Islamists, in mind." Horseshit. They have Barack Obama in mind -- rather, in their hypercritical sites. If Obama were a prophet of Paulism, Tea Partiers would be avowed Kissingerian invaders -- and Paul wouldn't bother disguising disgust with them, either.

Because, unlike the rest of this cycle's vulgar crop, Ron Paul means it.

So vapid, it's fun

Joe Nocera, the NY Times' former business columnist and now word-slinging desperado in all manner of punditocratic enterprises, writes this morning perhaps the most vapid column it has ever been my pleasure to read. Yes, pleasure, not displeasure, for it's like one of those inexpressibly bad movies we've all seen that is so bad, it is downright good; so bad, it's irresistible; so bad, it almost instantly achieves a kind of cult status.

Nocera's cult-like thesis? That Democrats -- not Republicans -- are chiefly responsible for the primal nastiness in contemporary politics, said nastiness having been launched by said Democrats back, quite precisely, in 1987, the annus horribilis of the Robert Bork battle for the Supreme Court. I kid you not. Here's Nocera, in full delusional flower:

[O]ur poisoned politics is not just about Republicans behaving badly, as many Democrats and their liberal allies have convinced themselves. Democrats can be — and have been — every bit as obstructionist, mean-spirited and unfair.

I’ll take it one step further. The Bork fight, in some ways, was the beginning of the end of civil discourse in politics.

In order to subscribe to that wretchedly bad history, one must first summarily execute a lot of one's knowledge about the political 20th century (or, for that matter, the 19th, or even the 18th). For today's political knife fights are but an extension of past partisan rumbling over the New Deal, as well as its sisterly progression, the Great Society.

Pseudoconservative Republicans -- virtually the only GOP species left -- still want to kill them both, and their immeasurable hatred of all things New Dealing today tends to overshadow their profound hatred of yesteryear. You want vitriol and vituperation? Forget the clownish likes of a Michele Bachmann or Rush Limbaugh; check out instead the 1930s' venom of a Westbrook Pegler or Father Charles Coughlin. In addition to these vermin, FDR's tenure was marked by miscellaneous right-wing charges of a "dictatorship" being dispensed by a "crippled" socialist in an unAmerican White House.

From there, one can draw a straight line to the right's indulgent, postwar hysteria over disloyal Democrats having "lost" China, having bungled Korea, having installed herds of pro-Stalinist subversives in assorted high places, having corrupted our sacred institutions and having sold our powerful secrets. For sure, we liked Ike, but it was Joe McCarthy who set the conversational tone -- right up to his admiring Barry Goldwater, in defense of heated extremism.

The rest is more familiar: the 1970s rise of the malignant, racially coded and theocratically inclined New Right; the 1980s erosions of New Deal-Great Society social protections; Gingrichism and the attempted political assassination of a democratically elected president; more charges of Democratic disloyalty -- this time, Iraq; and now, the right's entire Obama-derangement-syndrome thing.

The record positively screams the GOP's immense culpability for the "mean-spirited and unfair ... end of civil discourse in politics." Yet just about all the NY Times' Joe Nocera can see is ... poor Robert Bork. It's so vapid, it's fun.

Herman's 0-9-4.5 plan

Reports the Associated Press, via USA Today, via Herman Cain's astonishingly nimble mind, the latter's 9-9-9 thingamajig now "include[s] exemptions from zoning and building codes in areas that need economic boosts and new tax brackets for different income levels," rendering it something akin to this post's title. The last "9" standing, however, remains in some doubt.

Meanwhile, reports The Hill, "The paid New Hampshire staff for Rep. Michele Bachmann's presidential campaign have all quit."

Please send both campaigns a check today. GOP insanity cannot afford to do without them.

'Technocratic arrogance'?

Andrew Sullivan:

[T]he Obama administration ... shares some of the blame [for its growing unpopularity].

Many of them have been too focused on governing to explain what the fuck they're doing. There's a technocratic arrogance to them at times that is too blind to winning and sustaining arguments and narratives. And this is kinda mind-blowing because the record is so remarkable in retrospect.

I sympathize with Sullivan's exasperation over the pronounced a-political strains of the Obama presidency. Although it's in office principally to govern, the administration embodies an almost weird aversion to self-praise. And in the annals of American chief executives, that's as unheard-of as Rick Perry's cognitive fluidity.

On the other hand, I find Sullivan's adjectival pejorative (or at least I think it was meant as a pejorative) -- technocratic arrogance -- mystifying. There is, true enough, rarely cause to admire arrogance, but the Obama administration's marked inclination to a technocratic competence (somewhat redundantly) is, to my way of thinking, a most admirable presidential trait -- especially subsequent to the truly "mind-blowing," ideological incompetence of the Bush administration.  

Technocracy is just another word for pragmatism: rule by experts denuded of any doctrinaire prejudices. Can some technocrats be arrogant? One might as well ask if they're human. Any personality foibles are exceeded, however, by their rather quiet diligence in just getting the job done, which the Obama administration's pragmatic technocrats have accomplished, as Sullivan offers, "so remarkabl[y]."

Having said that, it also remains unquestionable that Obama must now escalate his political rhetoric -- which, pragmatically, he appears to be in the process of doing.

Uh-huh, right, got it

With a stimulating touch of Reiner-esque envy -- or delusion -- I'll have what the Post's Jonathan Capehart is having.

He muses that the CNN/Heritage Foundation/American Enterprise Institute foreign policy debate among GOP presidential hopefuls, on 15 November, may "provide [Jon Huntsman] with an opportunity to break through."

Insert readership-laughter here.

Virtual treason

The only way to beat these bastards is to out-vilify them. Phase III.

Phase I was President Obama's generic assaults on a do-nothing, dysfunctional, irresponsible Congress. Phase II was Obama's targeted assaults on do-nothing, dysfunctional, irresponsible Republicans. He now says the latter's obstruction last night, "for the second time in two weeks," of a "bill that would create jobs" is "unacceptable."

Considering the probabilities of a recession-reentry, such gentle criticism represents, perhaps, Phase II.5 in Obama's inescapable partisan war. But he'll have to do better than that; he'll have to go wholly offensive. He must label it for what it is: despicable.

The Hill finds uncertainty where there is none:

The staunchly unified GOP opposition calls into question whether the Democratic strategy has been able to exert the intended pressure on centrist Republicans.

Right. A real puzzler -- one we'll continue to ponder as the staunchly unified GOP opposition proceeds to shoot down, as well, Obama's proposals for infrastructure spending and extensions of the payroll tax holiday and unemployment insurance.

Obama recently said he'd like to see an independent analysis of the GOP's jobs plan. Hence incorporated into his Phase III rhetoric could be the findings of Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post's 'Fact Checker,' who has characterized the Republican plan in one simple, straightforward word: "ludicrous."

I'm tempted to also recommend an escalated Phase IV in the immediate afterwash of a presidential Phase III's vilification campaign against Republican despicability and ludicrousness: a nearly unprecedented but rhetorically justifiable, Perry-like Phase IV of "treasonous." What else should one call what congressional Republicans have wrought? Their obstructionism has exemplified a prodigious betrayal of trust; for 10 months the House has dithered on cultural warring rather than even a singular jobs bill, while the Senate minority-as-effective-majority has blocked bill after helpful bill for reasons purely political -- and deliberately destructive to the nation's welfare.

Of course this recommended Phase IV hasn't been a presidential style since the intensely personal, extraordinarily raucous campaign eras of Adams-Jefferson or Quincy Adams-Jackson, and perhaps that's a judicious development. Such an Obamian charge of virtual treason would, however, embody the charming attribute of utter truthfulness.

Permanent stagnation?

E.J. Dionne draws some historical parallels between Lincoln and Obama from Eric Foner's "magnificent book," The Fiery Trial, which is indeed magnificent (I read it last spring), coming, as it does, from a magnificent historian.

Dionne wisely submits that "comparing anything [or anybody] with Lincoln and the Civil War requires a paragraph full of caveats," which Dionne promptly provides. Still, I think the parallels run deeper than Dionne is willing to argue.

America's geopolitics are becoming more ideologically and idiosyncratically sectionalized with every national election; but worse, the fire-eating, radical sectionalists stand on the verge of permanently paralyzing this, the world's lone superpower. Just 41 of their votes (here, more ideological than sectional) in the upper chamber -- no majority required, not even an accompanying majority in the lower chamber -- guarantees gridlock and stagnation on even the most indispensable of legislation.

Hell, not even 41 partisan Senate "No's" are needed, for there's always a Democratic Ben Nelson or Joe Manchin to add his own assbackward obstructionism to the works.

And a house so divided ...

True, we likely won't ever see another bloody civil war. Yet the ultimate anti-fruition, if you will, of permanent national paralysis would render internal, armed conflict superfluous. We can always just putrefy ourselves to oblivion -- and we know just the people who can do it.