PMC Commentary

A Milbankrupted column

Dana Milbank's puzzling assessment: 

Reid’s remedy--calling a simple-majority vote to undo more than two centuries of custom--has created a situation in which the minority leader, Mitch McConnell (Ky.), is expected to use the minority’s remaining powers to gum up the works, and to get revenge when Republicans regain the majority.

Italics are mine, although they're probably unnecessary, for the word "created" fairly leaps out at the aware reader as a staggering incomprehensibility. What Reid & Co. did yesterday has created the expectation that McConnell will now "gum up the works"? Milbank covers Congress, does he not? But what Congress has he been covering? 

As for Republicans seeking "revenge" whenever they regain a Senate majority, I would put this to Milbank: What restraints, or customs, or fundamental civility or even slivers of human decency or political ethics have Republican pols demonstrated throughout the last several years? 

Would you, Mr. Milbank, not expect majority Senate Republicans to bend or break any Senate rule to repeal, for instance, Obamacare? Or further cut taxes? Or, simply, to screw Democrats just for the bullying fun of it? 

Let's face it. Republicans will exact revenge even when none is compelled. It's who they are. As to where you've been, Mr. Milbank, I have no idea.

 

A keeper

A splendidly truthful quip from Paul Krugman. He notes that the argument in favor of raising Social Security's retirement age to 67, because Americans' life expectancy is up--although their greater longevity is heavily skewed toward the "affluent [and] well-educated"--"amounts, in effect, to the notion that we can’t let janitors retire because lawyers are living longer."

 

Our ahistorical periodic tables

The NY Times' Sam Tanenhaus reflects on the nearly indelible American fable that "With this horrific, irrational deed" of President Kennedy's assassination 50 years ago today, "a curse was laid upon the land, and the people fell from grace." Until that day, or so Americans' mythopoeic memory goes, a kind of secular paradise was in the making, in which the president "beckon[ed] the country forth to the future," and soon we would conquer the iniquities of "totalitarianism, poverty, racial injustice." But an assassin's bullet ended the dream, and the hope of the '60s turned to despair.

All that, observes Tanenhaus, is very bad history. "America," he writes, "had already become a divided, dangerous place, with intimations of anarchic disorder," which he proceeds to survey. And all that, I would observe, is true enough, although it goes not nearly far enough.   

For there's another memorable American fable--that of the pacific, postwar, domestically blessed 1950s. In reality, how blessed? Many lived in unending terror of a thermonuclear holocaust, while, as the horrors of McCarthyism raged, the decade's intelligentsia brooded to the point of morbidity about the nation's suffocating cultural conformity. The decade before that? Global war and unimaginable desolation, even though many still living prefer to remember that decade as one of Glenn Miller and bugling boys and America's dazzling rise to international preeminence.

Retreating farther, the 1930s were, to most Americans then, precisely that decade in which "a curse was laid upon the land, and the people fell from grace." Still, to hear contemporaries recall that decadal era, it was a "simpler, happier time." 

The 1920s? The freewheeling, feminist-rising, speakeasy Jazz Age, right? Right, although it was also a time of ghastly wealth inequality, corporate hegemony, the stultifications of Elmer Gantryism and pre-McCarthyite red scares and persistent regret for having ruinously squandered the preceding decade on involvement in unworthy foreigners' affairs.  

Before which, in another "happier time," the nation gripped itself in the tumult of Progressive rage against the social indifference of the established order, which followed The Gay Nineties! in which America's theretofore greatest economic depression took place, along with agrarian revolt, labor rebellions, and the deeply divisive rise of American imperialism. And so on.

My point in this muddled reverie is that, notwithstanding our revisionist self-fables, each of our easily packaged eras of America's past suffered its own unique set of curses in which we somehow fell from a grace never granted, but, somehow as well, we muddled through. We always do, and that's what prevents my congenital cynicism from totally swamping my always-distressed optimism. 

 

Read it and grin

In reading Obamacare Watch: the House Republican Playbook--Eric Cantor's handy truth-mauling guide for his caucus's con artists--nothing abnormally inane struck me about the GOP's talking points--until, that is, I got to the last page of the final section in which the grisly horrors of Obamacare are itemized in some detail. 

There, in particular, sat the following monstrosity! slated for January 1, 2014, under the bold-faced listing of Decreased Access and a Weakened Safety Net:

Expansion of Medicaid coverage to 22 million childless adults up to 138 percent of the federal poverty line--diminishing resources for vulnerable populations. States will receive 100 percent of the FMAP 2014-2016, 95 percent in 2017, 94 percent in 2018, and 90 percent after.

Wait. This is one of the horrors of "Decreased Access"?--an expansion in coverage by 22 million? And if by "vulnerable populations" the working poor shouldn't be included, just who the hell are the vulnerable? What's more, this memo from small-government Cantor appears to reproach the federal government for not funding state Medicaid programs 100 percent, in perpetuity.

Eric, you incoherent cad.

 

The filibuster, already gone in toto

I agree with Ezra:

The moment one party or the other filibusters a consequential and popular bill, that's likely the end of the filibuster, permanently.

And entirely. For Klein is undoubtedly correct that neither party would now "accept filibusters of qualified Supreme Court nominees," either. And, as noted, as a minority tool of legislative obstruction, it's as good as gone. For the moment there's no reason to eliminate filibusters of legislation, since all legislation dies in the GOP House anyway. Should the House swing Democratic in 2014, however, and Reid retains his Senate majority, then will come the entirety of the filibuster's death. Or, Majority Leader McConnell will finish it off in 2015.

It once would have been not only unreachably ironic, but downright unthinkable that conservatives--whose philosophical bedrock is tradition--could ever be responsible for killing this senatorial heritage. But that was when conservatives were actually conservatives, rather than the radical thugs they are today.

 

Just wild about Harry

For the last couple hours I've been battling a failing computer as Harry Reid has been fixing the Senate. So, taken together, my day has been a delightful aggravation.

Today's filibuster change has been long in coming, since obstruction is the only political program that Republicans have. Not to hear Minority Leader Mitch McConnell tell it, though. Why, Senate Republicans, according to McConnell, have been a veritable model of cooperation and agreeability, unlike those incorrigible Democrats, who wish only to "play politics" with the Senate's esteemed tradition. 

McConnell's oratory today had the honest ring of a besotted Huey Long. Tradition indeed.

From there the minority leader moved to another Republican virtuosity: vicious threats. "I say," he said, "to my friends on the other side of the aisle, you’ll regret this." Poor Mitch, his ire was way up but it had no place to go. Earlier today I referenced that 19th-century giant of the Senate, Missouri's Thomas Hart Benton, who, in 1850, in another context, had a pistol pulled on him by a Mississippi senator, at whom Benton bellowed while ripping open his shirt, Let the assassin fire!--and I swear I thought for a moment I'd hear the same from Mitch, poor thing, while fuming at Harry.

McConnell went on to threaten: "And you may regret it a lot sooner than you think." If by "sooner than you think" McConnell meant the next Republican president's appointees, then there's very, very little for Senate Dems to worry about. Socialist Bernie Sanders has as much chance of being elected to the White House as any in the GOP's stable of buffoons. But I imagine McConnell only meant that he and his party would redouble their efforts at being extraordinarily childish, as in today and tomorrow.

Meanwhile, John McCain hurled some of that quality level-headedness, for which Republicans are known, at the filibuster change: "Now there are no rules in the United States Senate."

Where do they get these guys?

 

"Assail at all points"

In the early 1830s Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton, a close ally of the Democratic president, Andrew Jackson, explained how his party would crush the Second Bank of the United States, and thus Henry Clay and his embryonic, progressive Whiggery: "attack incessantly, assail at all points, display the evil of the institution, rouse the people."

Benton-Jackson's political offensive against the "monstrous" Bank of the U.S. (originally, Alexander Hamilton's creation) was a brilliant archetype of inspired, backwater populism, a top-down mobilization of vast ignorance and acute paranoia--and it worked. It killed the Bank, along with young America's hopes of national "internal improvements" (what we call infrastructure) and more rapid economic development. Subdued rationality never stood a chance against incessant attacks, all-points assaults, creative displays of institutional evil, and the rabble roused. 

The Bank, as though you haven't surmised this by now, was the Obamacare of its time. To Jacksonian Democrats--American politics' early 19th-century version of Tea Partiers--the Bank was the reservoir of all governmental wickedness, a tyrannical abyss, a corrupter of republican souls. It was also offensive to states' rights, which lay at the base of Jacksonianism's populist paranoia; it was as well a marvelous foil to Democrats, who could play The People's protectors against a ravenous and elitist despotism.   

Compare this brief history with the NY Times top story, "G.O.P. Maps Out Waves of Attacks Over Health Law":

Republican strategists say that over the next several months, they intend to keep Democrats on their heels through a multilayered, sequenced assault. The idea is to gather stories of people affected by the health care law ... and use them to open a line of attack, keep it going until it enters the public discourse and forces a response, then quickly pivot to the next topic....

"Because of Obamacare, I Lost My Insurance." "Obamacare Increases Health Care Costs." "The Exchanges May Not Be Secure, Putting Personal Information at Risk." "Continue Collecting Constituent Stories".... Coming soon: a push to highlight people losing access to their longtime physicians and changes in Medicare Advantage programs for older people.... A new website, gop.gov/yourstory, is collecting anecdotes from each member.

In partial response the White House has "released a report showing that health care spending had grown by 1.3 percent since 2010 ... the lowest rate on record for any three-year period." Released a report. Oh my, that must have blown the opposition away.

What's more unsettling is that the WH indeed appreciates the power of the GOP's strategy. The Times quotes President Obama from earlier this month: "[I]t’s important for us to step back and take a look at what’s already been accomplished, because a lot of times it doesn’t make news. Controversies make news." Yes they do, yet the WH's appreciation of this enduring political reality seems to largely stop there, or, rather, at released reports.

The WH must create its own controversies. Because controversies make news. Responses to them do not. Hence the WH must assault Republicans as virtually unAmerican in opposing affordable and accessible healthcare, in opposing a jobs bill, in opposing immigration reform, in opposing presidential appointments and, again, and in general, in opposing America's success. Such lines of attack can't merely be mentioned every now and then; they must be jackhammered in a "multilayered, sequenced assault," which forces Republicans to defend against their Obama-highlighted unAmericanism.

For the moral to our little history lesson today is that Republicans can indeed win this Obamacare battle, just as the Whigs lost in incompetently confronting Jacksonian Democrats' ingenious demagoguery--a loss that kept them behind the philosophical eight ball for 30 years.

 

Marco Rubio: A cross between John Foster Dulles and Mahatma Gandhi

Want to know what the Rubio Doctrine would be, were we ever plagued by Marco as president? It's simple. Everything and nothing, with something in between; or, in even simpler terms, Rubio is contra to whatever both the isolationists (the Paul wing) and the interventionists (the McCain-Christie wing) tout.

For Jello lovers, his foreign policy doctrine is some tasty stuff, and today he molded a wobbly mountain of it at the American Enterprise Institute. The senator announced, as noted, that he rejects both "isolationism and reliance on military force"--that he is, in short, neither "dove" nor "hawk," although "Sometimes military engagement is our best option.”

Got it?

No? Well, how 'bout an example? You see, Rubio says that mucho time ago he "urged the President to exercise American influence at a time when we clearly had the ability to shape the outcome of the Syrian war."

I consulted The Gutless Politician's Glossary of Evasive Language, under "A," for "American influence," and found this definition: "'American influence' is an utterly meaningless phrase and thus perfect for the gutlessly slippery, who later can always assert s/he meant 'force" when dilomacy fails, or meant 'diplomacy' when force fails."

As for Rubio's "shap[ing of] the outcome" in Syria, we know not if he meant "sustain a bloodthirsty dictator" or "strengthen bloodthirsty rebels." But that's unimportant. Our "ability," you see, was clear, meaning if you don't know what that means, that's your problem.

Sen. Rubio did, however, take one firm position that's sure to please everyone on the right: As Politico put it, he "said the solution to replacing sequestration’s sweeping cuts to the military is finding some savings through entitlement reform to Social Security and Medicare, not through tax increases or new revenue."

Atta boy, Marco.

 

Which would you prefer?

Perhaps the best promotion of Obamacare's virtues comes from The New Yorker's John Cassidy, who notes that "a family of four in Sacramento, California, with two thirty-five-year-old adults" who together earn $50,000 annually would pay, under the ACA's Covered California Exchange, $208.00 a month for a "silver level" plan.

What would this family pay each month for a comparable policy under the Republican plan?

$1,188, for there would be no monthly federal subsidy to the tune of $980, for there would be no Obamacare. Indeed the family's premiums would probably be far higher than even $1,188 a month, for without Obamacare's spreading of risk, the GOP's rock-bottom rate of $1,188 wouldn't be feasible.

Thus for that Sacramento family of four, there would, realistically, be no health insurance. Period.

 

Morris, Dick; comedy of

It's hard to say what's becoming of Dick Morris. Having predicted, last year, the disappearance of president Obama, he's now predicting that ObamaCare "is disappearing," 45 days before it even kicks in and a good four-and-a-half months before open enrollment closes. That in itself--Morris' pixilation--bewilders me not. Par for his course. Yet his grim delight over ObamaCare's premature demise is weirdly immersed in liberal justifications of ObamaCare's ultimate success. 

What does that mean? For starters Morris performs a bit of his famous back-of-the-envelope computation and optimistically projects "a ridiculously low figure" of "fewer than 1.5 million enrollments nationally" throughout "the entire period" of enrollment. This, alone, is nothing but statistical gobbledygook, in that Morris fails to account for the rapid acceleration in sign-ups as we get nearer to thee, the end of ACA enrollment.

But that of course isn't the weirdly liberal part, which is this: Morris goes on to observe that "it’s hard to take seriously a program that has so limited an enrollment," whose comparative limitation he emphasizes in noting that "Medicaid [is] reaching more than 100 million with the new expansion"--which is a singular glory of ObamaCare, and, given political pressures, will in time become even more glorious.

Ah, but Dick's liberal heart was just warming up. ObamaCare's Independent Payment Advisory Board--you know, those "death panels"--is not "likely ever to meet," he prophesies. And you wanna know why? Because, write Morris, and I quote, the low rate of medical inflation is vitiating its purpose and "Health economists predict a continuing low rate of medical inflation." ObamaCare's ad agency thanks you, Dick.

As for the liberty-crushing Tyranny of health-insurance reform, Morris also has a splendid shout-out to Fox viewers and Limbaugh listeners and Beck mastubators. "The individual mandate has fines so token as to make a mockery of the idea that there even is a mandate," he preens--for propagandistic reasons so contradictory as to make a mockery of respectable propaganda.

Morris concludes--again, quite oddly--with a powerfully favorable assessment of ObamaCare's intent, which would be unachievable without ObamaCare's overall structure, whose successful erection Morris initially denied: "So all that will be left are some very good consumer protection insurance reforms requiring coverage of pre-existing conditions and a ban on cancellation or premium hikes in the event of illness."

Sign him up. Rarely have I read such a vigorous--albeit really weird--defense of the Affordable Care Act.

 

Erick Erickson defines himself, again

Erick Erickson blesses us today with another of his deeply thoughtful musings:

The President who wrapped himself in Lincoln’s legacy could not be bothered to adjust his schedule to honor the day in Gettysburg. But let’s be honest. Had he, he would have been physically incapable of speaking just 272 words. Likewise, he would not have been able to use just a piece of paper. He’d have to use a whole teleprompter.

Witty, too.

What trash.

Were I an ultraconservative commentator who valued historical fidelity, I would, on this sacred day of remembrance, probably just keep my lips and laptop shut. For I would know that in reflecting on Lincoln's presidential tenure, comparisons to Obama's, on the whole, would balance far more favorably than sarcastically: the 16th president's almost superhuman sufferance of rank fools, for example, or his quiet determination, or his dismissal of noisy guttersnipes, or his embrace of enemies, or his profound belief in government as a national good--all were characterological as well as philosophical hallmarks of the man who spoke on November 19, 1863. And, love him or not, Obama's similarities to that man are both striking and incontestable.

Or, as an ignorant ultraconservative commentator who cares not one whit about historical fidelity, I would open my laptop and spew puerilities on it, such as tee-heeing about Obama's use of "whole" teleprompters.

 

This is doable, so do it

For President Obama there is, it seems to me, a hopeful statistic nestled among the latest WaPo-ABC News poll's mass desolation. His disapproval is way up, to 55 percent, with 44 percent disapproving "strongly," and "Half or more now say he is not a strong leader, does not understand the problems of 'people like you,' and is not honest and trustworthy." With numbers like those, SNL's second-term Paxil skit wasn't far off base. Yet there's this, too:

The Post-ABC survey asked people whether they thought that he told the public what he believed to be true [about the ACA's provisions] or that he intentionally misled. By 52 percent to 44 percent, Americans say they think he told people what he thought was correct at the time.

That would seem to undercut the public's genuineness about Obamian dishonesty. A significant part of the preceding stats' registered hostility may reflect momentary ire, but no fundamental readjustment of opinion. That a majority believe Obama only said what he thought was correct suggests an enduring belief in Obama, though unquantifiable for now. In short, his political position is recoverable.  

Which brings us back to old, head-scratching bugaboo: Why is Obama not doing more, now, on offense, to rehabilitate his standing?

The Post's Balz and Craighill report that White House aides "think that as the health-care Web site improves and as the economy grows, he will recover." But that's a shockingly passive way to think. Nobody feeds on the wounded more gleefully, aggressively and perpetually than the GOP. If the WH's strategy is to wait out the opposition's infinite frenzy--as the economy crawls to respectable growth--well, the proposition condemns itself.

 

Chris Christie diagnoses GOP, almost gets it completely right

[T]he better you do, the more voters you attract, the more diverse voters you attract, the more suspect you are. --Gov. Christie, in an interview yesterday, summarizing high-level GOP criticism of his broad, NJ appeal.

Then came Christie's diagnosis of that criticism--roughly, his party's frame of mind: "completely crazy."

They say we can always find common ground. I have finally found mine with Chris Christie. 

Yet there's something the governor pretends to be missing. While high-level criticism of diverse appeal (in this instance he was responding to rivals Rand Paul and Marco Rubio) is undeniably crazy through and through, the requisite pandering to the Republican base's bigotry underlying that criticism is utterly depraved, as is, of course, the bigotry itself.

So here, in relative terms, crazy, though thorough, isn't so bad--not when weighed against demagogic depravity, and a base that demands it.

In diagnostic fact I'd be suspicious of myself, had I, as a pol, retained membership in and loyalty to an idea-less party that has for so long thrived on pure malevolence: hatred of off-white colors, hatred of love's orientations, hatred of women's choices, hatred of the poor, hatred of science and sound history and expanded healthcare and modern economics and modernity itself.    

What in God's name am I doing with these crackpots? or so I'm pretty sure I would have asked myself, certainly by now. 

The GOP's excruciating circus of presidential primaries last year was revealing enough; yet the party at large came roaring back, not just crazier, but more psychotic, than ever. An absolutely pointless government shutdown and perhaps another to come and Benghazi! and a blood-curdling debt crisis and a non-scandalous IRS something-or-other and Obamacare-as-Slavery and, and, and ...    

... and there's Chris Christie, still a part of it all. Why is that, Governor?

 

We little people cannot comprehend Jeb's big problem

TNR's Isaac Chotiner has a priceless response to this priceless snippet from Double Down, in which those plucky investigative reporters, Halperin & Heilemann, unearth the titillating newsiness of Karl Rove's attempts to lure Jeb into the 2012 race. But ...  

You don't understand, Bush would say to the Republican poo-bahs begging him to run. I was in the real-estate development business in my state. There was a huge bubble, but I missed out because I was governor for eight years. So I'm starting from scratch. If, God forbid, I'm in an accident tomorrow—I'm in a wheelchair drooling, saliva coming from my mouth—who's going to take care of me? What are my wife and kids going to do? I've got to look after my family. This is my chance to do it.

Writes Chotiner: "Where to begin? I think my favorite part is the idea of a member of the Bush family 'starting from scratch.'"

Nonetheless there's your scratch, and then there's the scratch of the woebegone millionaire. Notes Chotiner:

As The Tampa Bay Times reported in 2008, when Bush came to office he appeared to be worth around $2 million. It's true that the Florida governor makes less than $150,000 per year, but it's also hard to imagine Bush blowing through all his cash while governing. (The paper reports: "He left Tallahassee in January 2007 reporting a net worth of $1.3 million.")

Now, although you might see a care-freeing bundle in that final figure, Jeb only sees that he dropped $700,000. Or, as Jeb would put it: "You don't understand."

 

Warren out, Sanders way out

There's this:

Elizabeth Warren’s former national finance chair, Paul Egerman, has told several inquiring donors this month that, despite runaway speculation and a burning desire from the party’s left wing, the freshman senator will not run for president in 2016.

But that's OK, because there was also this:

[Sen. Bernie] Sanders says he is willing to consider making a run if no one else with progressive views similar to his ends up taking the plunge.

On the other hand:

Sanders said if he does run, he would "probably" do so as an independent.

Now that's just not right. Somebody really should make Hillary's coast to the nomination a nudgingly uncomfortable one, although I doubt Bernie would have been that somebody.

Still, on any ticket it would be nice for us, the socialistically starved, to witness a Debs redux, no matter how doomed.