Month: October 2010

It’s In My Raccoon Wounds

Paul Krugman clearly left his optimism behind when writing this column. I imagine the bolded part being read by Peter Griffin:

Barring a huge upset, Republicans will take control of at least one house of Congress next week. How worried should we be by that prospect?

Not very, say some pundits. After all, the last time Republicans controlled Congress while a Democrat lived in the White House was the period from the beginning of 1995 to the end of 2000. And people remember that era as a good time, a time of rapid job creation and responsible budgets. Can we hope for a similar experience now?

No, we can’t. This is going to be terrible. In fact, future historians will probably look back at the 2010 election as a catastrophe for America, one that condemned the nation to years of political chaos and economic weakness.

Sadly, I think Krugman is right. This is going to be terrible, especially for the economy.

The economy, weighed down by the debt that households ran up during the Bush-era bubble, is in dire straits; deflation, not inflation, is the clear and present danger. And it’s not at all clear that the Fed has the tools to head off this danger. Right now we very much need active policies on the part of the federal government to get us out of our economic trap.

But we won’t get those policies if Republicans control the House. In fact, if they get their way, we’ll get the worst of both worlds: They’ll refuse to do anything to boost the economy now, claiming to be worried about the deficit, while simultaneously increasing long-run deficits with irresponsible tax cuts — cuts they have already announced won’t have to be offset with spending cuts.

So if the elections go as expected next week, here’s my advice: Be afraid. Be very afraid.

I continue to hold out some hopes that Democrats hold the House, but I’m not too optimistic. I think it’s a near certainty that we hold the Senate.

Obama’s Filibuster Messaging

This is the most powerful messaging around the need for Senate rules reform that I have seen:

Q On that same issue, because a lot of progressives — and you said you’re not the king — well, a lot of progressives feel that senators, especially in the minority they think — we call them the House of Lords.

And are you in favor of any form of filibuster reform? Because there are several bills being talked about. And there is a unique time that — by the way, we’re also very happy that Vice President Biden went down to do a fundraiser for Alan Grayson. He’s the type of Democrat that speaks out and fights. And that’s what the progressive community really likes.

But he also might have the opportunity in January to be — to help out. And can we get — or are you for any of the bills that are out there to support — to change this rule that is paralyzing the administration?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I’ve got to be careful about not looking like I’m big-footing Congress. We’ve got separate branches of government. The House and the Senate have their own rules. And they are very protective of those prerogatives.

I will say that as just an observer of our political process that if we do not fix how the filibuster is used in the Senate, then it is going to be very difficult for us over the long term to compete in a very fast moving global environment.

What keeps me up at night is China, Germany, India, Brazil — they’re moving. They make decisions, we’re going to pursue clean energy, and the next thing you know they’ve cornered half the clean energy market; we’re going to develop high-speed rail in the span of five years — suddenly they’ve got high-speed rail lines going; we’re going to promote exports, here’s what we’re going to do — boom, they get going.

And if we can’t sort of execute on key issues that will determine our competitiveness over the long term, we’re going to fall behind — we are going to fall behind.

And the filibuster is not part of the Constitution. The filibuster, if you look at the history of it, may have arisen purely by accident because somebody didn’t properly apply Robert’s Rules of Procedure and forgot to get a provision in there about what was required to close debate. And folks figured out very early, this could be a powerful tool. It was used as a limited tool throughout its history. Sadly, the primary way it was used was to prevent African Americans from achieving civil rights.

But setting aside that sordid aspect of its history, it was used in a very limited fashion. The big debates, the big changes that we had historically around everything from establishing public schools to the moon launch to Social Security, they weren’t subject to the filibuster. And I’m sympathetic to why the minority wants to keep it. And in fairness, Democrats, when we were in the minority, used it on occasion to blunt actions that we didn’t think were appropriate by the Bush administration.

This really puts the framing back around Democrats are trying to make America better while Republicans are rooting for America to fail. Powerful stuff, especially when coming from the President.

Awful

Why is Alessandra Stanley still allowed to write about politics? Lines like this make me want to pull my hair out:

Mr. Stewart made other jokes on Wednesday, but it was actually more disconcerting to watch Mr. Stewart apply the standard liberal critique to Mr. Obama than it was to see the president of the United States bandy words with the host of a late night comedy show. Mr. Obama, after all, is more practiced, having set precedents with similar star turns when visiting David Letterman, Jay Leno and the women panelists of “The View.”

First, anyone who watched The Daily Show last night would know that Jon Stewart delivered pretty much the same critiques that he, uniquely from a television perspective, has been delivering throughout the Obama administration.

Second, this is just awful writing. What is “disconcerting” about Stewart’s delivery of “the standard liberal critique”? We don’t know because Stanley never tells us.

Update:

Adam Sewer has more at the Plum Line.

Momentum in Alaska

Over at Daily Kos Joan McCarter has a really exciting post about the momentum Scott McAdams is showing in the Alaska Senate race against Tea Partier Joe Miller and Lisa Murkowski, who is displaying a Lieberman-like surge for personal power. McCarter publishes these internal numbers from the McAdams campaign:

Scott will be close. The numbers in the last week for the two target areas have decreased on Lisa and increased on Scott. Our target was Anchorage/women. Anchorage is now 30/28/26 Miller/Murkowski/McAdams. Last week it was 31/36/23 Miller/Murkowski/McAdams. Undecideds in Anchorage are now 13%, up from 6%. 53% of remaining of the total undecided universe is in Anchorage. A week ago women were 65/29 Positive to Negative for Lisa; in the last week this has changed to 51/41. Clearly our targeting is working. We are pouring everything on at this point.

McCarter goes on:

Miller’s ethics problems have consumed all the oxygen in his campaign for two weeks, and he’s using that to remind Alaskans that Murkowski has been somewhat less than squeaky clean in her own tenure. That’ll serve to remind Alaskans, particularly Democrats, that they don’t really like Murkowski that much either. McAdams has emerged as serious candidate and valid contender.

Miller can’t go 48 hours without sparking a new scandal. In the last day, records from his tenure in Fairbanks North Star Borough show that he admitted to lies about his actions of using Borough computers for personal, political activities. This has been an ongoing scandal for the last week or two and is getting major play in Alaska. And last night, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC was told by Joe Miller that being gay was an individual’s decision. Oh and to get this interview, Maddow basically had to walk through a building at breakneck speed to get Miller to talk. Classy!

Tea Party Savagery

Creator of Fox News/Dick Morris-pushed ads suggests Media Matters employees be “curbstomped”, 9/2/10:

A Republican strategist behind conservative ad campaigns fundraised for on Fox News by “Fox News political analyst” Dick Morris recently asked why the Media Matters “boys don’t get curbstomped fortnightly.”

In a September 2 tweet, Rick Wilson, who owns the political consulting firm Intrepid Media, wrote: “Aside from the fact a gentleman doesn’t hit women, explain to me why the MMFA boys don’t get curbstomped fortnightly?” The top definition on Urban Dictionary for curb stomping is, “To place someone’s mouth on a cement curb, and then stomp on their head from behind to break out their teeth.”

Tea Party activist and Rand Paul supporters Tim Profitt and Mike Pezzano, 10/25/10:Amazingly, today the Paul campaign touted the endorsement of the curbstomper, Profitt, in a full page ad in the Lexington Herald.The victim of this vicious attack, Laura Valle, has been diagnosed with a concussion, a sprained arm and a sprained shoulder, which according to the Rand Paul campaign means she “was not injured.”Naturally, Pezzano, who held down Ms. Valle while Tim Profitt stomped on her head and neck, was wearing a “Don’t Tread on Me” button.Hopefully the gang of Tea Partiers who held down and beat this woman for disagreeing with her political views will be arrested and prosecuted. This is Tea Party leaders like Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Rand Paul, Sharron Angle, and Joe Miller reaping exactly what they have sown. Their supporters are crazed and violent and there is literally no space for this in American politics.

Berman: Boot the Blue Dogs

Over the weekend, journalist Ari Berman had an op-ed in the New York Times titled “Boot the Blue Dogs.” Berman writes:

Democrats would be in better shape, and would accomplish more, with a smaller and more ideologically cohesive caucus. It’s a sentiment that even Mr. Dean now echoes. “Having a big, open-tent Democratic Party is great, but not at the cost of getting nothing done,” he said. Since the passage of health care reform, few major bills have passed the Senate. Although the Democrats have a 59-vote majority, party leaders can barely find the votes for something as benign as extending unemployment benefits.

A smaller majority, minus the intraparty feuding, could benefit Democrats in two ways: first, it could enable them to devise cleaner pieces of legislation, without blatantly trading pork for votes as they did with the deals that helped sour the public on the health care bill. (As a corollary, the narrative of “Democratic infighting” would also diminish.)

Second, in the Senate, having a majority of 52 rather than 59 or 60 would force Democrats to confront the Republicans’ incessant misuse of the filibuster to require that any piece of legislation garner a minimum of 60 votes to become law. Since President Obama’s election, more than 420 bills have cleared the House but have sat dormant in the Senate. It’s easy to forget that George W. Bush passed his controversial 2003 tax cut legislation with only 50 votes, plus Vice President Dick Cheney’s. Eternal gridlock is not inevitable unless Democrats allow it to be.

Berman concludes:

Republicans have become obsessed with ideological purity, and as a consequence they will likely squander a few winnable races in places like Delaware. But Democrats aren’t ideological enough. Their conservative contingent has so blurred what it means to be a Democrat that the party itself can barely find its way. Polls show that, despite their best efforts to distance themselves from Speaker Pelosi and President Obama, a number of Blue Dog Democrats are likely to be defeated this November. Their conservative voting records have deflated Democratic activists but have done nothing to win Republican support.

Far from hastening the dawn of a post-partisan utopia, President Obama’s election has led to near-absolute polarization. If Democrats alter their political strategy accordingly, they’ll be more united and more productive.

I think this is really the right task. What’s been clear over the past two years is that the size of the caucus is not as important as its quality. A conservative bloc within the House and Senate has the ability to stop legislation that the overwhelming majority of Democrats wants from moving forward, or if it is allowed to move, it’s only after it has been made markedly worse. Democrats are left to negotiate with themselves while Republicans laugh at our ineffectiveness.

Having a big caucus with representatives from all parts of the country is great. I hope we continue to win elections in traditional Republican districts. But the Democrats who come from these places, a meaningful minority in the caucus, should not have their interests placed ahead of Democrats who actually believe in the Democratic agenda. The offer to Blue Dogs should be this: wear the D after your name and vote for a progressive Speaker or Majority Leader and you’ll get the added power that comes with serving in the majority. But you don’t get to undermine the ability of the party to hold onto the majority by sabotaging legislation. If that arrangement works, Blue Dogs should absolutely stay with the caucus. If not, the party infrastructure should cut them off from all support and seniority and this cohort should slowly wilt at the election booth.

Nightmare Scenario

New York Magazine has a truly horrific thought experiment about the 2012 presidential election and how Michael Bloomberg’s entry as a third party candidate could throw the election to the Republican nominee, presumably Sarah Palin.

The magazine supposes that were Palin to get the Republican nomination, Bloomberg would run as an independent. The problem I have with this supposition is that while it’s clearly likely that Bloomberg would not support the idea of Palin as the Republican alternative, there’s no real basis to suggest he is equally disgusted by the chances of Obama winning reelection. As the article notes, the administration has done a lot to keep Bloomberg in the fold, including lots of face time with the President, Vice President and Treasury Secretary. The administration clearly values his perspective. I find it hard to believe that he’d reward that with a course of action that is likely to throw the White House to Palin. A candidate doesn’t get into a race because he hates one outcome when getting into the race assures that outcome will come true. That is, while I do think gaming out the consequences of Bloomberg entering the 2012 race (throwing it to the GOP candidate) is interesting, it’s hard to believe that Bloomberg would enter the race out of a desire to stop Sarah Palin from being elected.

What’s really remarkable about the thought of Sarah Palin getting the Republican nomination is how important it makes the 2012 election. 2004 was the most important election of my lifetime, until 2008 was. And now, with the prospect of Palin as his opponent, 2012 might become the most important election. The stakes keep getting raised by the Republican Party through the militarism, demagoguery, and fundamentalism of their candidates.  Nothing would close any perceived Democratic enthusiasm gap in 2012 fast than a Palin nomination.