Category: Barack Obama

Democrats are the 3rd wing of the Republican Party

Drew Westen pulls no punches in describing what he sees as one of the three major factors in the Republican Party. The whole piece is worth a read, but this passage is important:

And that brings us to the third wing of the Republican Party, the Democrats. Their standard-bearer, President Obama, has proven himself perhaps the strongest potential challenger to Mitt Romney for the Republican nomination if he decides to join the debates, having established his conservative bona fides on a wide range of social and economic issues:

  • Deporting more immigrants and breaking up more families than George W. Bush (or to put it in more business-friendly language, increasing U.S. “exports” of poorly documented human capital).
  • Coming out in support of expanded off-shoring drilling just before the BP catastrophe in the Gulf; repeatedly touting production of a mythical substance (seen only, legend has it, by industry executives) as “clean coal” (widely believed to be found in the Fountain of Youth); and calling for the building of more nuclear plants, which the Japanese have shown to be a safe complement to offshore drilling (perhaps with the hope that water contaminated with radioactive materials discharged into the ocean might prove useful as a dispersant for oil).
  • Extending the “Hyde Amendment” to allow GOP lawmakers to exclude abortion coverage from even private health insurance.
  • Cutting 120 billion in taxes for the rich while proposing billions in cuts to “entitlements,” such as home heating subsidies to people who are poor or elderly.
  • Making sure the nation’s largest banks remained solvent so they could continue to foreclose on the homes of millions of Americans, whose tax dollars supported the multi-million-dollar bonuses of the executives who continue to refuse to renegotiate their mortgages.
  • Saying virtually nothing as Republican governors and state legislators around the country attack organized labor (e.g., remaining almost entirely mum on the Wisconsin law stripping workers of the right to negotiate their contracts).

But that’s just the president. We can’t blame the party whose name he never utters for the actions or inactions of its titular leader, who prefers to remain “post-partisan.”

Westen goes on:

Americans need a choice again between two parties, not between two strains of Hoover Republicanism. The more Democrats offer them the latter, the more they will both sink the economy and blur any distinctions left between the parties. Frankly, if the question is, “Who can do the better job slashing programs to finance tax breaks for the rich?” I would vote Republican. If you want trickle down, vote for people who really believe in it, not the ones who say they believe in it when they are too frightened to say what they really believe.

I don’t know that it’s true that Democrats – particularly the Obama administration and the Senate caucus and Blue Dogs in the House – aren’t doing what they believe. Granted, many ran on doing liberal things in 2008, but have consistently chosen to do Republican things while in office.  The DLC, Third Way, and the Blue Dogs have spent decades trying to move the Democratic Party to the right. The Obama administration is an exhibition of those efforts in many unfortunate ways. But Westen’s point is true – if given a choice between a Democrat acting like a Republican and a Republican, why wouldn’t voters choice the authentic Republican?

I’m at a presentation today with union organizers from around the world. A presenter from Spain’s Pirate Party just talked about the rise of apolitical resistance here in Spain. Rather than backing corrupt parties that care more about corporate (and foreign corporate) interests, they are focusing on putting forward good ideas and achieving those ideas. There’s a huge popular movement here behind this apolitical form of organizing around ideas. At least right now, it resonates for me far beyond the idea of finding less bashful liberals to run for Democratic offices.

A Night of Contrast

Jonathan Singer is right to say that last night’s State of the Union did the job for President Obama, in that it laid out clear contrast between him and the Republican Party.

If I was struck by anything, it was that Barack Obama set the stage to come off as unreasonable [sic] as his political adversaries look unreasonable. From healthcare to spending to education, the President appeared willing to deal with Republicans unwilling to deal. This not only makes it easier for the President to win reelection — generally, the reasonable candidate is going to win over the unreasonable one — it will also make it easier for him to win the political battles that are almost assured to arise over the next two years out of the Congress, starting with a government shutdown that many expect to occur.

I think this is right. While the speech didn’t do a whole lot to energize me as a progressive activist, I think it really helped make the President stand apart from what the Republicans are selling: divisiveness, conflict, obstruction. If the lame duck session was any indication, the President will be able to paint Republicans into a corner that they do not want to be in and move his agenda as a result. The drawback is that this agenda will be more determined by political optics than policy necessity or ideology. If the President’s primary goal is reelection, he’s well positioned to beat the midgets of the Republican Party. The question is, will political maneuvering result in enough getting done to make optics and posture instructive in voters minds? Or will the net result of this maneuvering have to be an improved economy with more jobs and lower unemployment, which will likely be even more palatable to voters than mere contrast? Drawing contrast is critical to winning elections, but I don’t know if it is enough in itself. Unless, that is, the GOP nominates someone like Sarah Palin.

Bai Hates the Internet

Matt Bai has always held a special hatred for the online left, from bloggers to the politicians who appeal to voters through blogs. As such, it’s not shocking that he writes a misleading and factually inaccurate column like the one today titled, “For Obama, Getting Message Out Online Is a Challenge.”

No, it’s not. Obama has maintained incredibly high approval ratings among Democrats through his ability to talk with them directly. His presidential campaign built a list of 13-15 million hardcore Democrats. Obama has been able to use this list to talk directly with them about his agenda, his successes, and what the opposition is saying about him. The email list – and to a lesser extent, friendly political blogs and WhiteHouse.gov – have enabled Obama to talk directly to Democrats, without having to rely on media filters like, say, Matt Bai. It’s no surprise that Bai is upset that he doesn’t get to be the first one to tell Democrats what they should think about Obama (note he still uses an opinion voice in his columns, so he clearly still tries to tell Dems what to think – he’s just irrelevant to the actual formation of opinions outside of the Beltway).

Take a look at Bai’s opening salvo against Obama:

Yet there’s also something oddly retro about the State of the Union address that President Obama will deliver on Tuesday — something that belongs to the last century, like compact discs and appointment television. While the speech will give Mr. Obama an opportunity to extol his record on health care and financial regulation, it may also serve to remind us of how surprisingly little he has accomplished when it comes to bringing presidential communication into the broadband age.

That’s not to say the White House isn’t trying. In fact, the president distributed a video preview of his speech to supporters over the weekend. And Mr. Obama’s advisers have scheduled a series of interactive online events for the days after the speech, his second State of the Union, highlighted by a presidential interview with questioners on YouTube.

As proof that Obama hasn’t accomplished anything online, Bai puts forward the actually new  and revolutionary use of the internet to augment the quality of presentation of the State of the Union. The White House presentation will include both additional graphics and information about the points President Obama is making in real time, as well as providing for a direct interaction between the President and the American people. How this proves Obama has “surprisingly little…accomplished” in online communication is a mystery.

Answering questions online, however, really just amounts to the same kind of televised town hall that presidents have been doing since the dawn of the broadcast era, except that now you watch it on a different kind of screen.

Both computers and TVs have screens, so obviously talking to people through a computer is just like a televised townhall.

Like his predecessors, Mr. Obama interacts from time to time with a few highly motivated voters at such events, but he has yet to find a new way to make himself accessible or compelling to the wider electorate online.

Sure, you might have only a couple hundred people in a televised townhall, but this post-SOTU broadcast online might only reach a few hundred thousand people. With both televised townhalls and internet Q&A sessions, hundreds of millions of Americans aren’t watching. Both fail in equal measures!

Bai goes on to make an assertion with absolutely zero basis in fact about the White House’s use of new media:

Even without creative steps by the White House to harness social media and other technology-driven changes in the way people receive and share information, Twitter and its ilk have come to occupy an important place in political communications.

Wrong. The White House has used Twitter to field questions from the public to be answered by the White House Press Secretary, Robert Gibbs, as well as used “Open for Questions” peer submission and voting to do the same with the President and other senior administration officials. Beyond that, the administration has used government websites like Healthcare.gov and Cars.gov to provide information to the American public in easy-to-digest ways that have received voluminous traffic.

Truly taking the presidency online would not only enable Mr. Obama to get his message to some voters without passing through the traditional news media, but it would also reinforce the idea of him as a generational bridge, a politician pulling American government toward modernity.

And yet, so far, Mr. Obama’s greatest online innovation as president has been to upload a lot of video (like clips of his delivering the weekly radio address, a custom that goes back to Ronald Reagan), as if the iPad were mostly just a television without the knobs.

In my work in internet politics, I’ve found that there are a lot of people who think that innovation means creating new means for humans to perceive the world. Blogging is based on the written word. Audio content can be relayed through podcasts and mp3s. Photo sites like Flickr are based on still pictures. YouTube and other web video sites are all about moving pictures. A relatively small portion of internet users even use avatar based sites like Second Life.  But short of some brilliant web developers coming up for a way for humans to interact on the web through ESP or mental telepathy, there actually isn’t some big avenue for interpersonal human communication that isn’t yet present online. Sorry Mr. Bai, but the President using web video, delivered through multiple platforms, in multiple formats, on a regular basis actually is innovative, even if Obama hasn’t beamed his weekly presidential address directly into our brains.

Bai intermittently attacks Obama for not innovating, and deftly follows it with anger at the administration realizing new ways to reach people through the internet. We saw it above with the line, “as if the iPad were mostly just a television without the knobs,” but Bai continues on.

Perhaps, though, the president’s team is over-thinking the challenge, putting too much emphasis on how to use the trendiest applications or on how to interact with voters, when what really matters is creating an authentic narrative.

There’s a nice bit of moving the goal posts going on here. Bai doesn’t actually want Obama to “[bring] presidential communication into the broadband age,” as he first wrote. He instead wants “authentic narrative,” which undoubtedly would make for better fodder for political pundits like himself. While this, at first blush, seems like a ludicrous thing for the leader of the free world to be responsible for deciphering, Bai is helpful and tells us what it means:

You can easily imagine Mr. Obama sitting in front of a keyboard at the end of a long day, briefly reflecting on the oddity of a personal encounter or on the meaning of some overlooked event, or perhaps describing what it is like to stand in the well of Congress and deliver the State of the Union address. It could be that in order to expand the reach and persuasiveness of the modern presidency, Mr. Obama simply needs to be his online self — not so much a blogger as a memoirist in chief, walking us through history in real time.

As much as I am a denizen of the internet, notably one who came to politics through blogging first and foremost, I find it hard to believe there would be a less useful use of the President’s time than maintaining a personally written blog every night, for consumption by Matt Bai and the American public. Seriously, Bai’s great idea for “authentic narrative” is the President of the United States sitting at his laptop, live blogging how he used part of his day to solve America’s problem, and the other part to blog about it. I’m sorry, but I voted for Barack Obama so he could lead the country as our President, not so he could tell me in his own voice what it was like to have a 60 minute meeting with Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. For chrissakes, the man is the President of the United States and he has more important things to do than blog.

And it goes without saying, were Bai’s batshit insane vision for Presidential time allotment be realized, the moment the President was blogging while some natural disaster or terrorist attack took place, it would be fodder for both pundit and Republican assaults on the President and his irrelevant and dangerous blogging habit.

Matt Bai clearly is both unaware of what he actually thinks the President should be doing to reach Americans through the internet and unaware of what the White House is actually doing to reach Americans through the internet. If the coming bells and whistles stand out ahead of tonight’s State of the Union address, it’s because they are new and innovative, which at one point in this column was what Matt Bai said he wanted the President to be doing. In the end, beyond being an incredibly insulting assault on the hard work of the people who do new media at the White House and DNC, Bai’s piece is little more than a statement about how uncomfortable he is with the notion that powerful politicians, including the President, can talk to voters without going through pundits like Matt Bai.

Bai on an Obama Primary

The New York Times’ Matt Bai has long displayed an intense dislike of the American Left, particularly the online progressive movement. His column at the Times, “Political Times,” is an opinion column masked to look like straight news analysis. Almost everything he writes is filtered through his own normative prism. As such it’s no surprise that today’s piece, “Murmurs of Primary Challenger to Obama,” is laden with distortions. The most obvious is the notion that there are serious talks to run a primary challenger against President Obama. While there is discontent on the left and a small number of progressive writers have floated the idea, it’s hard to describe this as something that is moving towards reality, at least worthy of reporting by one of the Times top political, ahem, reporters.

Things get more interesting when Bai mentions the key issues which he sees liberals as raising when it comes to primarying Obama. He writes:

All of this would have seemed unthinkable in 2008, when Mr. Obama’s red-white-and-blue visage seemed omnipresent on campuses and along city streets, a symbol to many of liberalism reborn. That, of course, was before the abandonment of “card-check” legislation for unions and of the so-called public option in health care, the escalation in Afghanistan and the formation of the deficit-reduction commission.

Note Bai’s issue choice and tone. First, there hasn’t been a single labor union which has cited the lack of movement on the Employee Free Choice Act – or any other issue – as grounds for challenging the President. Yet Bai leads with labor reform, couched in scare quotes, as the first issue liberals are citing as grounds for a primary. Of the three published pieces Bai cites calling for a primary, neither Michael Lerner, nor Robert Kuttner, nor Clarence Jones mention labor reform broadly or Employee Free Choice specifically as reasons to primary the President.

Second, note the “so-called” part of his reference to the public option. It wasn’t so-called. That’s what it was. Again, though, while there is disappointment widely and outright anger in some places, I don’t see the particular presence or absence of the public option from health care reform legislation as a driving force in discussions on the left of a primary challenge.

No doubt the zeitgeist in liberal spheres is one of disappointment and anger. It’s also evident that the President is angry with the progressive left for raising their criticisms, as yesterday’s White House press conference clearly demonstrated. There’s been more tension between the administration and the base than I would hope for, but Bai doesn’t do anyone a service by elevating what are at best tangential policy differences in the quiet conversations about a Democratic primary. Of course, that’s Bai’s point. He’s seeking to exaggerate the volume of these conversations and frame them in such a way as to make it really simple for Village elites to punch the left.

I don’t doubt that more progressives will float the idea of primarying the President. It’s a natural part of the conversation when a sitting President is headed to a re-election campaign. But there isn’t a single organization who has moved towards a primary. There isn’t a single Democratic politician who has expressed interest or willingness in running, let alone a draft movement directed at any individual to run against Obama from the left. Maybe these things will change in the future. For now, there is obviously dissatisfaction but nothing near the level of formative campaigning that Bai implies, making me think the sole purpose of Bai’s piece is to be a vehicle for his intense dislike of the left.

The Cost of Tax Cuts

Separate from the partisan ideological debate over what should be done in response to the pending scheduled expiration of Bush’s tax cuts, there’s a real argument to be had about how expensive these cuts would be if they were extended. Paul Krugman, in a column where he goes somewhat from critic to coach of the President, writes this about the short-term costs of a blanket extension of these tax cuts.

But while raising taxes when unemployment is high is a bad thing, there are worse things. And a cold, hard look at the consequences of giving in to the G.O.P. now suggests that saying no, and letting the Bush tax cuts expire on schedule, is the lesser of two evils.

Bear in mind that Republicans want to make those tax cuts permanent. They might agree to a two- or three-year extension — but only because they believe that this would set up the conditions for a permanent extension later. And they may well be right: if tax-cut blackmail works now, why shouldn’t it work again later?

America, however, cannot afford to make those cuts permanent. We’re talking about almost $4 trillion in lost revenue just over the next decade; over the next 75 years, the revenue loss would be more than three times the entire projected Social Security shortfall. So giving in to Republican demands would mean risking a major fiscal crisis — a crisis that could be resolved only by making savage cuts in federal spending.

And we’re not talking about government programs nobody cares about: the only way to cut spending enough to pay for the Bush tax cuts in the long run would be to dismantle large parts of Social Security and Medicare.

Keeping the tax cut expiration debate squarely in the realm of the political is a mistake. There’s no way to win this argument without talking about the actual economic impact these cuts will have down the road. At a time where there is a mania about deficit reduction, what the Republicans are pushing for truly represents a break with fiscal reality. As Krugman points out, the only way to pay for what the Republicans want is to thoroughly crush the social safety network…to pay for tax cuts for millionaires.

What’s most frustrating about how this debate has played out, again as Krugman notes, is that the GOP is blackmailing the President and Democrats in Congress. No more, no less. The response should come on multiple levels: as I said above, laying out the case for the fiscal irresponsibility of extending tax cuts to millionaires, a partisan assault framing for 2012 (which is where it has mostly been done so far), and a moral argument about pushing for handouts to Paris Hilton at a time when millions are about to lose their unemployment benefits.

Unfortunately, it’s late in the game. Though there is still nearly a full month before the cuts expire on schedule, there doesn’t seem to be a desire to have the fight that needs to be had. Maybe there really is too much at stake to deal in the details now, but I’m just hard pressed to believe that neither economics nor ideology have anything to play in the resolution of this legislative fight.

Pulling No Punches

I was recently visiting with my grandmother, who is an avid consumer of political news. She watches Ed Schultz and other MSNBC shows, reads some political blogs (mostly what I link to), and is highly frustrated by the lack of progress on the economy and the continued beating Democrats are taking at the hands of Republicans. One question she asked me was, “Does President Obama read Paul Krugman’s column?” While I assume Krugman’s pieces are in the daily news clips the President receives, I can’t state with any certainty that Krugman’s increasingly critical columns are really on the President’s radar.

But pieces like Krugman’s column today must surely set off alarm bells in the White House. The NY Times columnist pulls no punches, taking on the President’s decision to freeze the pay of federal workers and extent an olive branch to Republicans, which they return by pledging not to let anything move in the Senate until taxes are voted on (last night they subsequently blocked even tax cuts from moving forward). Krugman writes:

It’s hard to escape the impression that Republicans have taken Mr. Obama’s measure — that they’re calling his bluff in the belief that he can be counted on to fold. And it’s also hard to escape the impression that they’re right.

Krugman might be describing these things in his column, but the Republicans in Congress are doing it out in public, through the legislative process. So while there is inevitably going to be frustration at the public criticism Krugman is leveling against the President, it’s just words in a column. The real offense comes from Republicans, who will continue to treat this administration and the legislative priorities of Congress – priorities which are driven by the needs of a country in economic crisis.

I would hope that people in the administration put this in front of the President. I would hope it makes him mad. But I hope that his anger gets directed at the real target, Republicans, and not at Krugman, who is merely holding up a mirror to the administration.

Interesting Discussion on Obama Administration

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32545640

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

This is from last week, but I just got around to watching it. With Chris Hayes guest hosting on MSNBC for Lawrence O’Donnell, he and guests Adam Green, Ari Berman, and Roger Hodge engage in one of the most substantive discussions of the Obama administration I’ve seen on television. They talk extensively about the administration’s negotiating tactics and how they’ve failed to produce results, as well as how they’ve failed to keep his Democratic base enthusiastic. There aren’t any great morals waiting in this clip, which starts about 3 minutes in, but it’s a remarkable discussion, more likely to have occurred under normal circumstances at a political conference or coffee house book talk.

Via Digby.

Krugman’s Pre-Mortem

Paul Krugman’s Pre-Mortem to today’s election is pretty brutal. The short version is his closing sentence:

So again: it was mainly the economy, with the effects of a bad economy reinforced by Obama’s consistent policy of undercutting both messages and movements that might have helped Democrats weather the economic storm.

We’ll find out tonight, though Krugman is certainly offering some hardcore pessimism early. Except it isn’t pessimism. It’s designed to offer a rebuttal to the inevitable talking points uttered by GOP talking heads and repeated by cable news hosts that Obama and the Democrats suffered losses because they were too liberal and overreached. That’s just not what happened. I do agree with Krugman that the economy was and is the main driving problem and the administration’s failure to aggressively tackle this with strong Democratic policy ideas and clear messaging about them is a major problem. That is, I don’t substantively disagree with Krugman’s assessment, I just shudder to read it on election morning.

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.

Daou & Attributing Blame to Liberal Bloggers

Peter Daou has a follow-up to his piece on Obama and the blogs yesterday. He makes a couple points that I really don’t think stand up on their own any more.

First, he continues to cite the critical writings of liberal bloggers like Glenn Greenwald, Marcy Wheeler and Jane Hamsher as contributing to a drop in the President’s approval rating:

The title of my post (“How a handful of liberal bloggers are bringing down the Obama presidency“) was largely interpreted as a slam on the bloggers themselves. It certainly wasn’t meant as one, which I hope was clear from the body of the post. Rather, it was intended as a literal observation that a small group with disproportionate influence was contributing to President Obama’s depressed approval ratings by holding him accountable whenever he appeared to undermine core Democratic and progressive principles. [Emphasis added]

It may be true that some people disapprove of the President because of what they’ve read about him on prominent liberal blogs. But I don’t know of a single national poll which has asked this question and certainly not with the degree of specificity Daou is attributing to people like Greenwald, Hamsher and Wheeler. I just don’t buy the notion that a handful of liberal bloggers are significantly or even measurably contributing to a drop in Obama’s approval rating.

Second, he cites blogs and social networks as the source of negative headlines that damage the administration in the public’s eyes:

I’ve argued that the cauldron of opinion that churns incessantly on blogs, Twitter, social networks, and in the elite media generates the storylines that filter across the national and local press, providing the fodder for public opinion and ultimately determining conventional wisdom.

Blogs and social networks are responsive. They notice what the administration or Congress or right wing activists are doing and highlight these activities. They do not create the stories of, say, the President ordering to have a US-born American citizen to be killed without trial. The responsibility for generating news lies with the agents, not the people watching what is happening.

Daou worries that problems for the administration really happen when “left and right come to agree that a political leader is on the wrong track.” But I don’t know of a single notable instance (excepting the audit the Fed efforts) where prominent voices on the left and right have a negative opinion of what the President is doing for the same reasons. For example, the right wing pretty universally opposes health care reform, but a plurality of Americans (and a lot of prominent liberal bloggers) are disappointed with health care reform because it did not go far enough. These are not the same thing! More to the point, the President still has a 78% approval rating among Democrats (PDF) as of last week. The extent that liberal blog readers are being influenced towards not approving of the President seems too small to note.

I think things would be pretty great if the words of Glenn Greenwald, Jane Hamsher and Marcy Wheeler had the power to move public opinion on a national scale. But I think attributing falling approval ratings to the writings of a handful of bloggers not clapping louder is wrong. Sure there are problems beyond the economy, but elevating blog critiques this high is excessive.