P.M. Carpenter

Wasted space, wasted advice

As I once heard a teacherly caller to right-wing talk-radio say, How stupid do they think we is?

They, in this case, being Ross Douthat and Peter Beinart, both men I respect enormously, but, again, in this case, both are merely stirring a quiet pot.

Here's Douthat, in "Playing the Mormon Card":

Hence the dilemma for the Obama White House. The president is entering a general election campaign in which his best chance of victory is to brand the Republican nominee as dangerously outside the mainstream, and in a sense Romney’s Mormon faith offers an ideal path to doing just that.... But it will be difficult for the White House to exploit [suspicions of Romney's Mormonism] directly.

And here's the tease for Beinart's piece in the Daily Beast, although Beinart judiciously focuses in his text on Democrats, and not specifically the Obama campaign:

There are votes in anti-Mormonism, but the Obama campaign must resist any temptation to play on it.

I find these overt admonitions offensive. Of course the Obama campaign should resist exploiting religious bigotry; but what's really offensive in these two pieces is the implication that that radiant superfluity has not yet completely dawned on Team Obama.

One suspects that Douthat and Beinart see themselves here as invaluable outside advisers, just as they might alternatively advise Romney's circular collection of loaded-for-bear amateurs, or at one time might have advised the stumblebum Santorum camp, or perhaps offered counsel to Gingrich's now-disbanding Schutzstaffel.

But this would be a poor assumption on the advisers' part: for whatever occurs to Douthat and Beinart on an issue as profoundly obvious as "don't play the bigotry game," occurred to Barack Obama & Crew months ago.

Gone where Romney would have us go

Krugman:

Now Britain is officially in double-dip recession....

Needless to say, [under Cameron's ideological leadership] they will not change course, which means that Britain will continue on a death spiral of self-defeating austerity.

Krugman links to an analysis by Brad DeLong and Larry Summers:

[I]t is a failure to engage in expansionary fiscal policy right now--a failure to speed recovery and so reduce the long-term shadow cast on future productivity by the downturn--that is the real threat to long-run fiscal stability.

DeLong and Summers literally do the math--that is, the econometrics--of their argument, which is beyond the comprehension of a poor, humble humanities major such as myself. But that's OK. Additional personnel serving the cause of social-scientific evidence and empirical data would have no effect whatsoever on pseudoconservative ideologues, anyway. They'll do whatever they wish to do, however they wish to do it, and to hell with proven reality.

Tales from the cryptic

After reporting that "A senior administration official [says] the U.S. transition from Afghanistan is the most important message the White House will be telegraphing as it moves into the general election," The Hill proceeds to fashion one of the most cryptic sentences it has ever been my bafflement to read:

Yet Obama’s message also carries risks, most notably that he has put his personal political goals ahead of ensuring a successful outcome in Afghanistan.

Ahem. What risks? Is one, perhaps, that in the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll "only 30 percent of respondents [say] it has been worth fighting"; or that "more Republicans and GOP-leaning independents oppose the war than support it, with 55 percent saying it has not been worth the costs"? Or is that even many Republican pols are praying for an easy escape and soft landing, as Senators Lindsey Graham and John Cornyn are vividly straightforward about, in their Hill quotes.

Naturally, those auditioning for GOP veepdom to the wretchedly clueless, neocon Mitt Romney are putting their "personal political goals" ahead of American lives and our national security interests, such as Marco Rubio, who feigns that he's "concerned that somehow this timeline is an artificial one and posed for political reasons more than for policy reasons." Good boy, Marco. Yet even he, cognizant of the aforementioned polling, adds: "But let’s see what’s in that [withdrawal] agreement."

Finally, The Hill makes reference to that most cosmic of indefinable obscurities--that President Obama (again, for spider-webbed reasons of political skulduggery, I guess) just might skimp on "ensuring a successful outcome in Afghanistan."

Is that supposed to be some kind of sick joke? A taunt? A blind reaffirmation of American triumphalism through exceptional firepower? Or perhaps it's merely a throwaway line. I really can't say. It's that cryptic.

Ode to a non sequitur

"With the primary basically over," as Politico, the mostmainstreamest publication of politics there is, put it, America's interest in the GOP side of the presidential contest would do well to be basically over, too.

The paper's coverage of Mitt Romney's big night last night was savagely catty:

Seeking to unify both Republicans and the country, Romney delivered a 15-minute address that was heavy on rhetoric and light on policy proposals. He offered familiar criticisms of President Barack Obama with signature syrupy paeans to Americana while offering the quadrennial challenger’s question: Are you better off now than you were four years ago?

One could almost sense that as the reporter reported, he was miserably careening from damn near nodding off to spitting incredulity.

While he touted conservative ideas like stripping labor unions of some organizing rights and expanding school choice programs, Romney never used the word — conservative — that identified the Republican voters with whom he struggled during the four grueling months of primaries and caucuses.

Politico's most telling declaration of disgust--delivered in the unaesthetic form of a symphonic crash--came, however, in the story's coda, that final moment in which Mitt was fully given the floor, to be Mitt.

There was a time — not so long ago — when each of us could walk a little taller and stand a little straighter because we had a gift that no one else in the world shared. We were Americans. That meant something different to each of us, but it meant something special to all of us. We knew it without question. And so did the world.

Those days are coming back. That’s our destiny. We believe in America. We believe in ourselves. Our greatest days are still ahead. We are, after all, Americans.

And our rivers are full of fish and our future lies ahead; and if Mitt would care to bring his particular piece of logic in for a fitting, we can have it shortened and cleaned by Monday.

A tribute to W.S.

Applause for the Post's Alexandra Petri, who, on this 448th celebration of the (speculative) date of Shakespeare's birth, pens an exquisite tribute to the Bard.

She nicely captures his enduring literary supremacy in this passage:

[His] are not plays we read and see together as a generation or a country. They’re works we enjoy as a species. Shakespeare offers a roadmap to the human.

Indeed, as Yale's inimitable Harold Bloom has argued--in the way of a personal and tireless campaign to revive good taste in all things literary--Shakespeare invented the human personality.

Steven Greenblatt, in Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, provides a fascinating and quite relevant contrast. To wit, after Machiavelli's Florentine defrocking, writes Greenblatt, this strategic genius would

put off the clothes sullied by the banalities of the daylight hours. Dressed in a rich gown, he would take down from his shelves his beloved authors--Cicero, Livy, Tacitus--and feel that at last he had companions fit for his intellect. Nothing could be further from Shakespeare's sensibility. He never showed signs of boredom at the small talk, trivial pursuits, and foolish games of ordinary people.

Still, in his dynastic plays (which happen to be my favorites), Shakespeare could analyze the wisdom or wickedness of high executive power with the best of the world's Machiavellis, be they ancient, contemporaneous, or future.

My only recommendation is this: If out of fear you've never read William Shakespeare, just dive in (OK, one more recommendation: I'd start with Richard III, for it is, as they say, a real hoot). And in no time at all, you'll be reading Will like you'd wear an old shoe. 

That Womney, oh he's a wily one

It's official. The Obama camp will strategically stalk the GOP's Mr. Default not for his Olympic flip-floppery, but for his avowed (which of course no one believes, because of his Olympic flip-flopping) reactionaryism.

It must be official, since I heard the "news" innumerable times just yesterday on MSNBC; it was indeed presented as a kind of developing news or breaking news or whatever network journalism is calling the Unnews these days--even though the Washington Post had caught up to the patently conspicuous no less than a week ago: 

Obama’s sharper, more personal dialogue with Romney comes after several weeks in which the president and his allies have been portraying the former Massachusetts governor as having a conservative core that is out of step with middle-class Americans [my emphasis]....

"During the primaries, Governor Romney labeled himself the 'ideal tea party candidate' and 'severely conservative' and committed to a series of policies that reflect those labels," said Ben LaBolt, Obama’s campaign spokesman.

This seems like a perfectly reasonable approach, although one should never underestimate the American electorate's jaw-dropping susceptibility to right-wing imbecilities dressed up as transcendent American values. Had the New Right and Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich and the Tea Party et al ever unveiled their sociopolitical program as what it actually was--an anarchistic game in which those starting on third plate and racing to home are allowed on the way to shoot the umpire--rather than what they advertised--a 'Leave It to Beaver' version of Atlas Shrugged--than Mitt Romney would scarcely be exalting the nostalgic wonders of "severe conservatism."  

There is however one aspect of Obama's strategy that promises Good Fun; that being, should the president's strategy begin registering negatively on Romney, the latter will no doubt then reassure us that he really is a flip-flopper--not an abidingly severe conservative at all.

Remember, as a Great White Hunter of wascally wabbits, he's a wily one.

The imperial presidency revisited

Rather than defying the Founders' designs, President Obama, through his accelerating use of executive orders, signing statements, recess appointments and, some would argue, war powers, is conforming to their expectations. Executive power begets executive power--this was less a founding fear than an acknowledgement of recorded history; thus, or so hoped the Founders, congressional checks on presidential overreach would fall like snowflakes from the people's representatives, the true guardians of republican virtue.

That was the theory. And it began unraveling no later than during the administration of George Washington, who almost instantly determined that though the Senate's "consent" on treaties might be constitutionally inescapable, its advice was so useless and painful as to render it avoidable at all costs. Thus it has been ever since (excepting the latter 19th-century's presidential dead zone): a rather vigorous unfettering of the presidential Will to power.

Hence as today's NY Times' top story observes, Obama's primal scream of presidential power reflects historical continuity more than any contemporary, systemic shock. If anything, constitutional law professor Obama had, in his first two years as president, attempted something akin to the more traditional legislative approach of letting Congress be Congress--the president need not interfere--a quaint attitude for which he was savaged by both left and right.

Then in 2011 came the Obama-administration-altering congressional tea partiers, whose theory of American constitutionalism--no matter their innocent protests to the contrary--comes down to this: ultra-right-wing presidents should be free to do whatever they want; all others should be shackled into paralysis by an all-powerful tea-partying Congress. Their attitude, however, is only that of unruly, ill-schooled children, and should properly be dismissed for what it is: a historical temper tantrum.

Still, one must ask: Is Obama taking advantage of historical continuity? Here, I can't see future historians wallowing in much doubt. Of course he is. After all, look at his predecessor. Notice I don't ask you to look at the plural; all those preceding administrations which in times of true national crisis suspended habeas corpus or interned innocent civilians. I mean to highlight the singular abomination of George W. Bush, who in the service of presidential abuse of power outdid all the others combined: he lied to Congress, he lied to the populace, he committed federal felonies with Orwellian abandon and he incontrovertibly trashed domestic and international laws as an indictable war criminal.

And yet, in a way, I don't really blame Bush. As a beastly executive, he was true to his nature. Indeed, Bush only did what the Founders expected that a beastly Bush would do. Yet blame is to be laid, and, as I wrote throughout 2007-2008, it can and should be laid at the feet of that Congress' Democratic majority, who failed to impeach and convict Bush-Cheney for the many war crimes and constitutional atrocities they had committed. In sum, they failed to check Bush-Cheney, as the Founders intended.

In light of George W. Bush's extraordinary proofs of the proposition--that because contemporary Congresses are sick, dysfunctional animals of pure self-survivalist instincts, chief executives can get away with pretty much anything--President Obama, I'd say, has been remarkably restrained.

A.M.

This morning, more Sunday talk-show panels of blah after a week of blah, blah, blah: conventional minds disgorging somniferous banalities about insignificant commonplaces. It's unavoidable; events don't justify our 24/7 news cycles.

Nonetheless, my 'Dream Panel'? Mort Sahl, Lewis Black, P.J. O'Rourke, and H.L. Mencken.

Paranoia on parade

Here we go again.

Politico:

Romney is portraying himself as the victim of the liberal media and secular culture, and some social conservatives who opposed him in the GOP primary are rallying around him [italics mine].

Mitt Romney last week, to Fox News:

"I know the president likes to attack fellow Americans. He’s always looking for a scapegoat."

Romney, to Breitbart.com, again, last week:

"There will be an effort by the quote, vast left-wing conspiracy, to work together to put out their message and attack me."

Back to Politico:

Romney’s advisers privately admit that it’s helpful for their candidate to be seen, particularly by social conservatives, as a victim of the media and culture, but cautioned that it’s not the candidate’s personal style to be as overt in that way as Santorum and Gingrich.

Richard Hofstadter:

"Paranoid"--"no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy."

Poor Mitt. There's one exposure he has genuine cause to be paranoid about--his Mormon faith--yet he can't be overtly, heatedly, fantastically paranoid about it, because the actual bogeymen come from his own political ranks: right-wing Christian fundamentalists, who themselves are intensely paranoid about pretty much everything and everybody. 

Hence in the GOP presidential nomination we'll witness a deep paranoia operating inside an even deeper paranoia--the only question being, Whose is whose and which is which?

Shoddy

Steven Pearlstein's piece on the tragic wreckage of polarization hums right along on tracks of political reality until, in the end, he fades into the familiar, pixilated twilight of Beltway journalism's conventional farce:

Some may complain that this analysis falls into the trap of moral equivalency, failing to note that Republicans practice the politics of extremism and suppression of the moderate vote and that Democrats offer more moderation and compromise. But while it is true that the move away from the political center has been asymmetric and probably began with the Republicans, the success of that strategy has now forced everyone to play the same game.

These days, congressional Democrats and Obama campaign strategists make no secret of their belief that previous attempts at moderation and compromise have not been to their benefit and that they have no choice but to energize their base with a tougher, more left-leaning campaign.

Leaving aside the understated silliness of saying the president's and Democrats' "attempts at moderation and compromise" have been unbeneficial--brief translation: they've been filibustered, blocked, demagogued, distorted, abused, slapped in the face and damn near shot at--just how, one must ask, is President Obama as party leader taking his partisan allies into a "more left-leaning campaign"?

A "tougher" campaign, true enough, because, well, it's a campaign and campaigns are tough and thus escalation is the norm. But what's the "more" of Democrats' more "left-leaning" essence? What did I miss? Have Obama and Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi been calling for the collectivization of farms? A Five-Year Industrial Plan? Postcard divorces? Churches and synagogues to be commandeered and replaced by gay bars and lesbian bathhouses?

OK, so let's not be silly ourselves; let's not reduce this to pointless exaggeration. Would not, in reality, a "more left-leaning" party and consequent campaign entail perhaps a call for single-payer health insurance? At least a modest government works project? Maybe a return to Eisenhower era (now there was a lefty radical for you) tax rates? An abrupt end to our Afghanistan adventure and a hastened beginning of substantial Pentagon-downsizing? Something along those lines?

But of course we hear none of this. Instead what we hear is a call for "fairness." Fairness. Simple fairness. At most, a four-point bump in the highest marginal tax rate for the wealthiest Americans or a rather gimmicky Buffetting nudge (My God, they mustn't risk the confiscatory Communist charge!) against multimillions of income. Plain, simple, perfectly reasonable centrist policies.

Yet such moderation gets farcically labelled by Beltway journalists such as Pearlstein as a more left-leaning campaign--which renders the moderates in the electorate's mind just as polarizingly culpable as authentically radical Republicans, who indeed overtly, unabashedly seek to blast nearly 100 years of hard-won social security to smithereens.

Shoddy. Journalism's whole "mainstream" analytical thing, just plain shoddy.

Sorta open for business

It's come to this. About 20 years of Republican ascendency and roughly 10 more years of Republican dominance (it still dominates, effectively) have produced this not-so-whimsical definition, by Ezra Klein, of modern American government: one that is "almost functional."

In its latest manifestation, our almost functional government's success can be gauged by the possibility that that government maybe, just maybe, won't shut down. Again.

At the hair-raising rate that Republicans are forcing us into Third World, banana-republic status, it won't be long before we're receiving development aid and greeting economic advisers and accepting goo-goo counseling from Romania, Ghana, and Belize.

Romney's ineffable bungling

More incisive, and more indicative, than any presidential polling at the moment is that which lurks in this opening from Politico's Jonathan Martin:

Poll after poll indicates the presidential campaign is a dead heat, but you wouldn’t know it from talking to many Republican professionals. If you gave them truth serum, they would tell you they think Mitt Romney will lose.

Yet as Martin's story proceeds, it's evident that the ministration of truth serum wasn't necessary. Their gloom is palpable, specific, and volunteered, and it emerges from a conspiracy of Obama's incumbency, an improving economy, factional resentment toward Romney, and dread of the latter's underlying moderation, which will never fly among hardcore fanatics.

To me, that last semi-causation of Romney's total doom is the eminent one. Yet GOP professionals fear something else--something more than anything else--and one must admit that this something else is also eminently destructive, as well as "not fixable," as Martin characterizes it, for Romney:

[H]is string of gaffes demonstrated how difficult it will be for him to connect to the general electorate.

For Obama, of course, Romney's ineffable bungling is a string of pearls--a priceless intangible that all the president's men could never invent. It's a gift, a subsidy, a bounty of blessed fortune that in presidential politics occurs maybe once every hundred years; and in Romney's case it is so bizarre, it can only be the product of Obama's deep prayer.

As his friends and family must repeatedly assure the nation, Romney is in reality a relaxed, cuddly, carefree, good-natured, prank-playing, devil-may-care, happy-go-lucky plutocrat whom everyone who knows him just loves to pieces. And for all we know, he is all those things. But that's not how the game is played; our suspicion that he couldn't possibly be even half as clumsy, as witless, as mildly sinister and immensely awkward as he actually appears doesn't count for much. In politics, a candidate is what he appears to be.

Perhaps most reassuring is the human psychology in play here--that the harder Romney tries to seem relaxed, cuddly, etc., etc., the more awkward his efforts will be.

Choosing depression: both kinds

Even David Frum "worries" over this--"Depression is a choice"--from the blog Interfluidity:

We are in a depression, but not because we don’t know how to remedy the problem. We are in a depression because it is our revealed preference, as a polity, not to remedy the problem. We are choosing continued depression because we prefer it to the alternatives.

Defining "we" may be a bit problematic, but there's no question that the writer is correct in saying our economic funk is a choice. President Obama knows it, you and I know it, every Keynesian economist knows it: we could have spent our way out of this Hooverian nightmare long ago, and we still could--if only this country were absent its organized obstructionists and malevolent Party-Firsters, the Republicans.

That would seem to be the principal distinction between this Great Recession and FDR's Great Depression. Keynesianism was little known during, and of course never tried before, the 1930s; pumping massive amounts of government dollars into the economy to cure a depression essentially constituted a leap of faith by Franklin Roosevelt, whose faith was limited by an obsession with balanced budgets and whose leap, accordingly, was reserved. To the extent Roosevelt did exercise Keynesian pump-priming with considerable political support, it worked. The extent can be measured, verified, and best of all, duplicated in a more expansive manner.

In brief, we know how to short-circuit recessions. Even Republican President Dwight Eisenhower embraced the federal interstate highway program in large part as a federal works project to short-circuit his recession. He never doubted its effectiveness. By then, there was no economic reason to doubt it and even less reason to politically fear trying; his party's Allen Wests and Joe Walshes did not yet comprise its majority.

But they sure as hell do now. And because of them, here we are, barely crawling our way out of this GOP-induced mess. I can't imagine Obama's frustration, knowing as he does that the mess is indeed fixable, and we don't need to imagine our own.

Klein drops the R-bomb

Ezra Klein drops a righteous reality bomb on all those insanely rational voices in the middle who've deplored President Obama's refusal to adopt Simpson-Bowles:

[O]n Wednesday, [Sen. Kent] Conrad tried to do what so many in Washington said was necessary: Move to Simpson-Bowles. Make this debate bipartisan. Instead, Simpson-Bowles got trashed by Republicans and jammed into a protected, partisan process by Democrats. And the GOP provided more evidence that they want to undercut the Budget Control Act, which means we're headed to a showdown over appropriations, and soon.

The irony of Obama's so-called cravenness, as it is commonly characterized by centrists, is that in this instance the liberal ideologues have been pragmatically right all along: one simply cannot negotiate with Ribbentrop Republicans. You try, you die. And this, Obama has learned, while the centrists have not; the latter instead adhere to idealistic fantasies.

Boehner-Ryan's War on Religion

Judge ye not, lest ye be judged, Messrs. Boehner and Ryan, which is how the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops could frame the former's infinitely discrete (the rowdies would call it hypocritical) politico-theology.

Having scored mucho altar-boy points with the bishops for condemning the Obama administration's sulfurous war on religion--which amounted to costing the Church nothing to violate none of its principles--Speaker Boehner and Rep. Ryan now find themselves in a line of fast and furious fire from the same high priests for having launched, well, a war on religion.

For example in one of their four recent letters to Congress that excoriates the House budget for its devilish indifference toward the poor, the bishops

singled out food-stamp programs, urging lawmakers to reject "unacceptable cuts to hunger and nutrition" programs for "moral and human reasons....

"Cuts to nutrition programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) will hurt hungry children, poor families, vulnerable seniors and workers who cannot find employment," said the letter, signed by Bishop Stephen Blaire. "These cuts are unjustified and wrong."

Paul Ryan's response? The usual. He's got a puppy's head squeezed firmly in an elbow's crease, while softly cautioning that it's the profligate Obama who dictates his miserly, itchy finger; simultaneously he grips a village-destroying torch that he swears will save the villagers.

Meanwhile, John Boehner? His reaction is fascinating, it being along the lines of, "If you don't plug that whining then by God I'll really give you troublesome priests something to cry about -- and don't make me stop this car." You think I'm exaggerating? Here's Boehner, yesterday: "I want them to take a bigger look. And the bigger look is, if we don't make decisions, these programs won't exist, and then they'll really have something to worry about."

Correct me, O hermeneutical ones, if I'm wrong here, but isn't Boehner lecturing the bishops on the preeminence of secular considerations over pious obligations? Some conservatives might reasonably argue the fiscal virtue of a kind of buttoned-down Babbittry, but "values" conservatives surely cannot -- especially those who just finished arguing that any trespassers into the Church's self-declared territory are but warmongering antireligionists.