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Articles We Never Finished Reading: The Myth Of Mr. Nice Guy

From the beginning, the president's reelection campaign has taken a brutal, no-holds-barred approach that's sharply at odds with the conciliatory image that was the central predicate of Obama's entire pre-presidential political career. Whether or not the specific issue of Bain Capital ought to be off limits -- Booker has taken pains to clarify he doesn't think it should be -- there's no denying that Obama's 2012 campaign has seized every opportunity to turn the campaign toward sharply personal attacks of a type that the 2008-vintage Obama would surely have recoiled from. From Romney's treatment of his onetime pet dog to his high-school pranks to his income-tax rate, from the "war on women" to the "war on caterpillars," from "I like being able to fire people" to "I'm not concerned about the very poor," no potential controversy has been too petty, too rhetorically overblown or too out-of-context to be exploited to the hilt.

None of this is shocking -- it's how the game is played. But Obama once ostentatiously refused to play it. In June 2007, for example, when Obama's primary campaign distributed a memo titled "Hillary Clinton (D-Punjab)" detailing Clinton's connections to India, Obama publicly upbraided his staff, calling it "a dumb mistake" and "unnecessarily caustic." As the New York Times put it at the time, "The memo...raised quesitons about Obama's claims that he is above attack politics, which are epitomized by secretly distributing opposition research about a rival."

 - Molly Ball "The New, Nasty Obama Campaign," at The Atlantic Online.

It may be nasty... but there's nothing "new" about the Obama campaign running vigorously against its opponents. If anything, Democrats are a bit relieved that a primary challenge never materialized, and that Mitt Romney is rising to every expectation of being the lousy campaigner we knew him to be.

This notion of that "hope and change" meant "nice and kind" is a fantasy that played mostly in the heads of Obama's most youthful, or most ardent, believers in 2008. The "can't we all just get along" arguments, the "he's the only one that can bring us together" notes of the pro-Obama hymn, were pretty (and about an inch deep), but they belied the reality that the Obama campaign's approach to beating Hillary Clinton was often brutal and desperate. And while his supporters moutheed words of Kumbayah and World Peace, privately they tended to gripe that Obama should be even rougher and tougher... hardly the notion of gentle niceness that was meant to be projected.

The "India memo" cited above (which is news to me, all these years later), is really more of a prime example of the hamhandedness and neophyte campaign mistakes of the Obama team, lessons they only seem to have partially learned and dealt with since. There is still the inordinate faith in his speeches, still the part where they get caught flat footed when news breaks that's out of their control, and still a kind of amateur quality to their attempts to go hard and mean against opponents. It's not that Mitt Romney's "Bain problem" should be off liits, it's that the message of that Bain problem needs to be spelled out correctly. As far as I can tell, the Obama people get it about half right (and then seem skittish when suggestions arise that they "go too far"). Still, they suffer from the liberal anxiety of being seen as actually believing the things they claim to find important.

The President would be in much rougher shape if Republicans had fielded a candidate - arguably Rick Santorum was closest - who actually appealed to a wide swath of voters who are actually indifferent to the President's record thus far. These are largely the sorts of people who found Hillary Clinton interesting as well - working class people, often white, but also many of color, as well as other distinct minorities, like gay men and lesbians. Instead, because he and Romney are fighting over a fairly narrow percentage of a small part of the overall electorate - educated, but non partisan voters in the middle and iupper middle class - things are bound to be ugly, and charges thrown around. 

It's worth remembering that the 2008 campaign, against McCain had an undercurrent of ugliness that never entirely went away; it's mainly that it was so clear, early in October, that McCain was doomed that the Obama team was much better positioned to stay on the high road, and did so most of the time. It's clear that many conservatives, still, think that they lost because McCain didn't go harder and uglier; but at the same time, they are also the ones who complain, still, that Sarah Palin was subjected to all kinds of ugliness, from the press and from the Obama team. True or not, both ideas miss the point that McCain failed mainly because he was a lousy candidate, and Sarah Palin's selection was Example A (or possibly B after McCain flopped on the economic meltdown in the fall of 2008) of the kind of bad decision making that did him in. The obama didn't so much "play nice" as they simply ignored him, for close to a month. And this year, they may indeed get a similarly luxury option towards the middle of October as well. That won't be a win for "niceness", merely an expression of the reality that Republicans remain in spectacular disarray. There's nothing "new" about the Obama team's "meanness"; and still, nastiness may not define his presidential victories. Either of them.

Articles We Never Finished Reading: Money Talks... Or Something

At its {Buckley v. Valeo, 1974] center is a distinction between expenditures and contributions. The Court said that, under the First Amendment, Congress could not restrict campaign expenditures. Spending money was like speech itself, because “every means of communicating ideas in today’s mass society requires the expenditure of money.” That included printing handbills, renting halls, and buying ads on television. It is a result of Buckley that wealthy candidates like Mayor Michael Bloomberg can spend as much as they want of their own money on their campaigns; it would be unconstitutional to limit their expenditures.

But, according to Buckley, limits on contributions were constitutionally permissible. The Court said that a campaign contribution served only as “a general expression of support for the candidate and his views, but does not communicate the underlying basis for the support.” In the Court’s view, limiting contributions did not significantly inhibit political expression by the person giving the money. This was why the Court concluded that it was permissible for the law to limit how much an individual could contribute to any particular campaign.

In the 1974 law, Congress had tried to set up a tightly controlled system for financing campaigns: the government would monitor and regulate both the inflows and the outflows of money. It is not clear that the proposal would have worked as intended, but at least it made holistic sense. Congress could essentially select a number for the over-all price of a congressional or Presidential campaign, and then force candidates to live within that number. Buckley ended that system before it even started, and imposed a different one, of the Justices’ own creation. The court declared that contributions could be limited but expenditures could not, and for two generations that distinction has been the central feature of the constitutional rules of campaign finance. The bottom line was that money is speech.

 - Jeffrey Toobin, "Money Unlimited," an analysis of the Citizens United case, in the May 21st issue of The New Yorker

The "bottom line", of course, is Toobin's; he himself has just written, in the prior two paragraphs that the "bottom line" is not nearly the bright (and in the paragraphs preceding it, he points out that Buckley v. Valeo is a contradictory, complicated, and extremely long decision that's hard to understand). But "bottom line'... Toobin's happy to shorthand it for you.

And shorthand that, and much else, Toobin does, for pages and pages in The New Yorker. Poorly written, sloppily fact checked - somewhere, the ghosts of the old New Yorker staff are spinning in mausolea - Toobin's exercise is mainly one of Supreme Court soap opera, full of (unverified, as far as I can tell) postulating on who does what to whom and how the Important Work of the Law gets injured in the process. Toobin's take is catnip for liberals, and blasphemy to conservatives, but both reactions give Toobin too much credit. Toobin's lazy assertions, like the breezy (and popular) sum-up of Buckley, tend to show that his investigation of campaign financing, never mind its "reform" are secondary to scoring political points and cheap shots (his disdain for Roberts, Alito, Scalia and especially Clarence Thomas are glaring). Though Toobin attempts - and he'd have to, because otherwise the article is little more than gossipy fluff - to ground his storytelling in a historical and theoretically detailed historical perspective, his retelling is slapdash, lazy, and lacking in useful specifics. For instance, he breezily sums up Watergate and the campaign reforms out of it - which led to the Buckley case - without really laying out why Congress approached the reforms as it did, or which aspects of Watergate were the real drivers for reform). This matters, I swear. He's equally lazy, and curiously vague, when describing the even earlier aspects of the Gilded Age-era practices that first led to some attempt to regulate campaigns; and he acts as if problematic campaigns, never mind questionable campaign spending, suddenly became an issue after 1870 (try looking up "Ma, Ma, who's my Paw?" for just one earlier example).

All of which makes soggy, slippery ground for Toobin to try and ground the discussion of Citizens United, though mostly Toobin can't be bothered to lay out the specifics of McCain Feingold, why they were seen as problematic from before the law even passed, and why the Supreme Court started looking askance at the law soon after it became law. And Toobin can't really avoid the fact that First Amendment issues were a concern for the Court well before the specifics of Citizens United were brought to it (a case called FEC vs. Wisconsin Right To Life in 2007 made clear that the Court was concerned about speech restrictions), but he insists that it's a "crusading" Court, led by John Roberts, that's trying to eviscerate Campaign Finance Reform. I'm at least pretty sure that's not how they would puit it; but you'll never know from Toobin, since he makes virtually no attempt to get perspectives from anyone who seemingly disagrees with his assessments.

I'm not trying to defend the Citizens United decision, or suggest that money equals speech is a great standard; if anything I don't need to, since Toobin's article, really, does most of that work itself. Though Toobin is incredulous about the path that set the Court towards overturning McCain Feingold, he does, in fact, backhandedly lay out why the decision's logic makes internal sense: trying to separate a biased, provocative, deliberately propagandistic film from other forms of political "advertising" is in many ways a distinction without a difference, and whie the Court is more willing to regulate advertising than other forms of speech, political advertising, because it is a form of speech so central to our Constitutional approach (elections, where people can freely debate ideas and assumptions), gets more than usual protectionunder the First Amendment. That's why "money=speech" is complicated, and difficult. The money Proctor and Gamble spends to sell Tide is not afforded special consititutional protections. But Mayor Bloomberg's ability to spend his own money to advocate for his own election is. And probably should be.

In any event, exploring this fascinating, difficult, and challenging subject would make for a great, thoughtful article one could chew over and debate with friends. The most frustrating thing is that Toobin hasn't written it. Which is reason enough not to bother reading it.

 

Articles We - Yup - Never Finished Reading: Rich Man's Burden

If you want to appreciate what Barack Obama is up against in 2012, forget about the front man who is his nominal opponent and look instead at the Republican billionaires buying the ammunition for the battles ahead. A representative example is Harold Simmons, an 80-year-old Texan who dumped some $15 million into the campaign before primary season had ended. Reminiscing about 2008, when he bankrolled an ad blitz to tar the Democrats with the former radical Bill Ayers, Simmons told The Wall Street Journal, “If we had run more ads, we could have killed Obama.” It is not a mistake he intends to make a second time. The $15 million Simmons had spent by late February dwarfs the $2.8 million he allotted to the Ayers takedown and the $3 million he contributed to the Swift Boat Veterans demolition of John Kerry four years before that. Imagine the cash that will flow now that the GOP sideshows are over and the president is firmly in Simmons’s crosshairs.

 

- Frank Rich "Sugar Daddies," New York Magazine Apr 22

 

...Except that, if you check out the informative graphic attached as a sidebar to Rich's article, Simmons is hardly "representative": His 15.4 million in contributions is second only to Sheldon Adelson's 20 million plus, and the tqo of them are 10-15 times ahead of far more "representative" contributions that range from about 1-2 million, generally. That's not a huge discrepancy (though the dollar figures ought to count for something), but it's indicative Rich's generally bombastic approach to the whole topic. There are prefectly good reasons to be concerned about the role of a small, but significant, number of wealthy contributors to both political parties, but Rich's fashionable hair-raised (or as Lucianne used to put it "dress up over head") screed is more about repeating familiar tropes with little real insight, overstating both the rxtent of the problem and properly identifying its more troubling aspects.

Rich does concede that a number of donors to Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, the Karl Rove "Super PAC" that most liberals fixate on most, are secret and that, in part, there are another couple of "anonymous" $10 million donors yet to be identified. Fair enough; but even then, the number of truly "enoromous donors" over five million seems to number roughly less than ten. Moreover, Simmons is also a pretty "representative" example of throwing enormous amounts of money at a problem without seeing much in the way in the way of results. Simmons acknowledges having dumped similarly large sums into the 2008 election, to no particularly good end, and there's no real indication (despite Rich's panting and pointing) that his largesse this year will have any more effect; that doesn't make him "dangerous," that makes him a "patsy" to what I woud call some "unscrupulous" operators promising the moon and delivering a lot less. In just a few sentences, Rich goes a long way towards making Simmons seem like an old man frittering his fortune rather than a political genius - which is not exactly strengenthing Rich's point about fearing these people.

The thing which deserves far more examination than we've made in our society, is that, while "money equals speech" may be the Supreme Court's greatest error, it's not clear that "money equals success" in elections. The 2008 election - along with the two previous ones - are noted for the enormous sums raised, but the outcomes of the last few elections seem less determined by funds than by other factors about when to vote for change and when to affirm the status quo. John Kerry didn't just lose in 2004 over money issues; his failure to inspire voters, even (especially) those in his own party played an enormous role in his loss. Similarly, Obama's fundraising abilities were in many ways a subset of the real qualities that pushed him into the White House: charisma, personal appeal, and the promise of a fresh start. John McCain could have spent a small fortune - and in fact noth he and the GOP did - and still have lost as drmatically as he did.

A lot of this has to do with assumptions about the power of advertising that rarely get properly questioned, challenged or examined in more than a surface way. In a culture where we are bombarded by marketing messages from morning to night, we rarely consider what advertising really moves us to do, why, and how to realistically asses ts reach. We assume, because it is asserted repeatedly, that "negative" advertising on politicians will "ruin" candidates' electoral chances, even when, privately, many of us admit that we find these ads less than useful, often ignore tham, and seek out other, more useful information to make a choice. Yes, that's what separates "informed" voters from a group that probably is more easily swayed; even so, it's hard to know that the enormous sums spent by Crossroads is really buying any kind of real success for conservative ideas or candidates - the successes of 2010 for the GOP, surely, are a lot more about a national mood than a lot of negative ads, however Rove wants to dress up his power as a "mood alterer". Mostly, the millions backing Rove's organization seem meant, mostly, to prop up Rove as a political celebrity whose "power" as a broker is more assumed than proven (a role, I've observed, that traces back to his supposed "genius" in supporting George W. Bush, a similarly dubious proposition).

None of this is to dismiss legitimate concerns about the power of enormous wealth to buy political access, influence electoral outcomes, or suggest that I think "money equals speech" or support the current role of "Super PACs"... but I do think that a lot of the noise about the terror of "all this money" from the left is, well, just noise, mosty meant to try and lmit the actual success of the spending of conservatives, and try and ignore the large spending by groups (say, unions, anyone?) supporting the left. And, as always, I feel compelled to point out that many of these critics ought to clarify their arguments - if this is about simply being personally wealthy (and Rich is not one for distinctions), that's a different issue than the politics of spending said wealth. And as I keep trying to gently say... I think it's probably a waste of time to hate wealth. That's not going to go away. The political ads, hopefully, will.

(Also, much like "Worst Song Ever," I think I may need Ground Rules. But really, I don't hate all of Frank Rich's writing.)

Yet More Articles We Never Finished Reading: Supreme Obliviousness

As the Supreme Court lawyer Tom Goldstein puts it, “Paul has turned the health-care fight from kind of a conservative dream that’s untied to reality into a very serious threat to undo the president’s signature accomplishment.” This alone would be a landmark achievement—and, for most lawyers, would have required their complete attention. But health care is just one of seven cases that Clement will be arguing in front of the Supreme Court this term, a caseload previously unheard of for a private attorney. In fact, since leaving the position of solicitor general under Bush, he has become, in the Obama age, a sort of anti–solicitor general—the go-to lawyer for some of the Republican Party’s most significant, and polarizing, legal causes....

At the age of 45, Clement, who has thinning brown hair and the faintest trace of a midwestern accent left over from his Wisconsin childhood, is already in the upper echelon of the Supreme Court bar. It’s an elite group of lawyers who, much like the justices they routinely argue cases before, conceive of themselves as being Olympian in their detachment from politics. Almost all of them graduated from Harvard or Yale or Stanford law school; clerked for a Supreme Court justice; or worked in the solicitor general’s office. (In Clement’s case, he did all three.) Now, in their private practices, they pride themselves on handling only serious cases brought by serious people in a serious manner; even if their client doesn’t prevail—or, worse, turns out to be on the wrong side of history—that stigma doesn’t fall on the lawyer. John W. Davis, who argued the losing side in Brown v. Board of Education, is still held up as an exemplary Supreme Court advocate.

Nevertheless, despite these lawyers’ contention that they aren’t political animals, they are, of course—and their extrajudicial activities often reflect as much. Ted Olson, the man Clement has supplanted as the top conservative Supreme Court lawyer, was an outspoken critic of Bill Clinton, served on the board of directors of The American Spectator, and helped found the Federalist Society. His legal cases were always assumed to reflect his ideological convictions. (Even now that he is seeking to overturn Prop 8, Olson’s personal support for gay marriage is a major story line in the legal fight.) The unusual thing about Clement is that, while he’s undoubtedly a conservative and a Republican, he has managed to avoid this fate. His persona is rarely conflated with the case he’s arguing.

                Jason Zengerle, "The Paul Clement Court", also in New York's current issue.

Clement's political persona is "rarely conflated with the case he's arguing"... except, of course, that he's arguing the opposing side of Obamacare, the repeal of DOMA, arguing against race-based redistricting in Texas and defending South Carolina's attempt to impose voter ID. Clement is defending such a laundry list of right wing cases that Zengerle can barely keep a prose-bound straight face as he attempts to sell the notion that Clement represents a non-partisan ideal in Supreme Court advocacy. It's not the examination of Clement I object to, or the attempt to do a "let's see it from his side" presentation of Clement's views (that, at least, is moderately interesting). But seriously - the man is the former Solicitor General for George W Bush, currently serving as the go-to Supreme Court lawyer for Republican state Attorneys General. If that alone isn't a clear indication of the man's politics... then what, exactly, do political labels mean? It's not as if Clement can be mistaken as a Democrat, or that we can even find a liberal who'd take the depth and breadth of conservative causes on Clement's plate (and the example that proves that observation is Ted Olsen, the most noteworthy example in recent years of a lawyer crossing his usual political expectations to argue in favor of gay marriage rights). It would just be more honest, and more accurate to paint Clement as the kind of Republican that's all too hard to find these days: pleasant, respectful, willing to respect the rule of law, whatever the outcome, after making a well thought, full throated argument for his side. That's admirable enough, without pretending he's somehow nonpartisan.

Articles We Never Finished Skimming: And No, You're Not All Going To Die

James Fallows, opening up his long "think piece" on President Obama's first (and possibly only) term:

In the late 1990s, when his fellow University of Chicago professor Barack Obama had just run for the Illinois State Senate and long before a newly inaugurated President Obama named him to his Council of Economic Advisers, the economist Austan Goolsbee was on the most terrifying airplane trip of his life. He was traveling on Southwest Airlines from St. Louis back to Chicago’s Midway Airport. The plane got into a thunderstorm, and for a while many passengers thought they were doomed.

One jolt of turbulence was so strong that a flight attendant, not yet strapped in, hit her head on the airplane’s ceiling. After another sudden drop, the lights went out on one side of the cabin. The violent ups and downs kept getting worse. Two rows ahead of Goolsbee, a professional-looking woman in her 50s began wailing, “We’re going to die! We’re all going to die!” “Everyone was looking around and on the border of panic,” Goolsbee told me recently. “I was kind of wishing someone would start yelling, ‘No, we’re all not going to die!’”

At last the plane made it safely to Midway. As passengers filed off, Goolsbee spoke with a strapping young man who had been sitting, ashen but stoic and silent, in a window seat next to the woman whose nerves had broken. He was a high-school football player coming to Chicago on a college recruiting trip. “Quite a flight,” Goolsbee said to him. “This is my first time on an airplane,” the young man replied. “Are they always like that? I can see why people don’t like to fly.”

Goolsbee’s punch line to the story is that during his two years in Washington, “I was that kid.” He and his colleagues were trying to devise policies to cope with the worst worldwide economic crisis in living memory, in the most contentious political environment in nearly as long a time. He would ask himself, Is it always like this? He could see why people didn’t like politics and government.

But when I heard the story, my thoughts turned immediately in another direction. Goolsbee may have felt like that kid, but to most of the world, the more obvious comparison would be to the man who hired Goolsbee, Barack Obama. Four years after being sworn in as a freshman senator, occupying a position of executive authority for the first time in his life, Obama was, at age 47, instantly responsible for guiding the world’s superpower and its allies through an emergency that had left far more experienced leaders wailing the political and financial equivalent of “We’re all going to die!”

Fallows uses the story as an analogy about the President, but I think the more telling line is in the second paragraph: "I was kind of wishing someone would start yelling 'now, we're all not going to die.'"

In other words, rather than actually offer up a contradictory opinion, Austan Goolsbee sits there and waits for someone else to do it.

And that, really, is a pretty good sum-up of why Goolsbee is about the last person one would probably want in a crisis.

And PS... what's this fascination with strapping young men?

The Failure Formerly Known As Our Last President

Of course the "Super Committee" - what a dopey name - "failed." It was designed to fail, set up to fail, populated with people for whom failure was the only option. When President Obama announced the deal to extend the debt ceiling, with its absurd conditions, including a committee which would generate $1.2 trillion in cuts... or else... the painful stench of failure was already there. 

And really, it just never went away.

It's easy to pin this failure as Example 376 of How Washington Is Not Working. I find the sight of the pundits, all weekend and through yesterday, earnestly insisting that the Comittee wasn't a foregone exercise in failure, but an earnest attempt to get it done, both sad and hilarious. Nobody thought there was a workable deal. And the people who thought This Time Would Be Different are especially foolish and gullible.

Of course, Washington isn't working...but simply blaming the current crop of politicians is too easy. This is failure that Americans actually voted for, and we, as voters and citizens ought to own up to our role in it. These people in DC fail because, in no small part, we want them to fail. We don't want to pay more taxes, we don't want to see government services cut, many people just want what we had before the economy fell apart.... or more precisely, the economy we had mostly under Bill Clinton.

We elect people who promise not to make the hard choices... and then wonder why they don't make them. 

So beyond the obvious failure, the one we knew was going to happen months ago, what else was at work here, and what happens now? Well, I'd argue that the real success here, the one that was set up months ago, is a long term success for Democrats, and it's success that builds on the real failure that we've been struggling with for close to ten years... the failed Presidency of George W. Bush.

Why are we in this "debt crisis"? Well, we're here for a couple of reasons. One is because of a set of tax cuts, passed during the Bush years, which have decimated the amount of revenue the government takes in by artificially cutting everyone's income tax rate. The other reason is the implosion of financial markets, driven by an explosion in mortgage bonds fueld by bad loans... and exacerbated, in no small part, by a President who insisted "everyone should own a home," and who pushed policies and programs that would do that, including pushing people into loans that many shouldn't have taken and couldn't afford.

Since 2006, Republicans have lost election after election because of the failures of George W' Bush. That includes his policy failures, and the campaign of deep divisiveness pursued by his advisors. It also includes a failure on the part of current Republicans to repudiate the Bush-era disasters, and to develop new strategies. It's why Republicans have "problems with their base" and "Tea Party" politics driven by anger and loyalty tests to failed, contradictory philosophies.

Democrats, too, struggle with the Bush-era failures; though we made steady progress back to elected majorities in Congress and elected a President, the hangover of failed Bush policies has made dealing with the aftermath difficult. President Obama has proven to be weakest on economic issues, putting a team in place whose connections to banking and finance and acceptance of the status quo added to our problems. With no significant reform of foreclosures, big banking, or the mortgage industry, we have few real options for solving our current economic crisis. And on tax cuts, President Obama and congressional Democrats have been afraid to speak plainly that the Bush tax cuts - all of them - simply must go.

The "Super Failure" though, may offer some glimmers of solutions down the road - if the automatic cuts are adhered to, then some progress on spending will happen... and it will happen to the Defense Department, where it is long overdue. But more importantly, it now seems likely that the Bush tax cuts may well expire fully at the end of 2012. It seems clear that Congressional Democrats will not be blackmailed into bad deals over making the Bush cuts permanent, and the will to extend them past 2012 weakens every day. Further, the Super Committee debates, which rehashed familiar arguments on all sides, led more than a few pundits to a natural conclusion - we can talk about the Bush tax cuts ending, because more people are realizing that a main reaosn our deficits are so enormous is because tax policy makes no sense.

Republicans are, clearly, pinning a lot of their hopes to the elections next year, that dissatisfaction with President Obama - and managing to shift blame for much of the Bush hangover on to him - will give them the Presidency and greater control of Congress. There may be a scenario where Mitt Romney can become President... but it's still pretty unlikely, and no one, really can say what Romney's approach to economic policy would be with certainty (that's the underlying concern about his all over the place previous positions). But it doesn't matter when we're talking Bush tax cuts; those expire after the general election before the next President takes orfice. If Obama loses the eection... who thinks he'll sign off on a further extension of the Bush cuts? His best mischief would be to let them expire... and forc Romney to try and argue that recreating them makes sound budgetary sense. That won't happen, either.

Allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire will force us to move forward on other discussions - how to really tackle health care costs, reexamining the problems with banks and foreclosures, and probably having some sensible discussions about separating what's essential in governmetn spending from what can, and should, get cut. We could reform payroll taxes by raising the income ceiling. We could do tax reform that reduces deductions and resets tax rates in a smarter way than the Bush approach. There's a lot of options, and if the Bush cuts expire, we could start to figure out what they are.

Republicans need to lose next year because the Bush Presidency needs, still, to be fully and complretely repudiated. Our media avoids mentioning the failed Bush Presidency, partly because it's divisive, and partly because we don't like to talk about our past, especially our recent past. And the silence over the failed Bush presidency has alowed Republicans to pretend both that it never happened and that if it did happen, let's remember the parts we like. The failure of the Super Committee - whether we're talking the failures of deep political divisions that squashed meaningful debate, or the practical failures of deep debt and a wrecked economy, all stem directly, and pointedly, from the failures we lived through under George W. Bush. Thank goodness, really, that the Super Committee failed rather than giving us yet another way to paper over the Bush Administration's failures without directly naming them. The stench of failure you smell... that's the lingering smell of that failed President we had last time. Let's not go there again.

Austan's Powers

I'm a fervent enough Clinton supporter from 2008 to have never quite warmed to Austan Goolsbee, one of then candidate Obama's key economic advisors. And not much, since, has changed my opinion of him, or his economic views.

So it's been hard for me to get too worked up, either way, with the announcement of his resignation to return to his tenured position at University of Chicago, one of those prized posts you don't just give up permanently.

Still, Golsbee's exit is as good a time as any to point out that I tend to agree with the generally dim view of many lefties of the President and his economic team. It is indeed telling, as many have observed, that pretty much all of the President's incoming economic team - his budget director, the head of his economic council and the council of economic advisors, just for starters - have all been replaced. It's probably even more indicative of the problems this Administration still has on economic policy that the most senior person in the room, now, is Tim Geithner, who - still -  seems terribly grim and unpleasant in nearly all his television interviews, and an apologist for the banking sector.

If there's a reason to wonder if the President can survive the 2012 elections, it's all about failures of economic policy. The failure to rein in banks. The failure to squarely address the foreclosure mess. The failure to make sure the have-nots in our society are adequately protected and helped, over the haves.And, yes, the failure to the combination of government revenues and spending which have allowed deficits to spin further out of control, making much of our bad economic situation in this country that much worse.

It's not that Austan Goolsbee somehow, magically, had the way to address these issues; no one has those powers. The real problem which Goolsbee always embodied, for me, was the sense that Obama, as an executive, was not necessarily temperamentally that different from George W. Bush, in that he seems especially dependent on a small group of close friends and advisors, mainly from Chicago who tend to treat him with a kind of deference and loyalty that seems especially damaging. There's no one, even now, who seems both close to the President and able to challenge the prevailing worldview of a set of well educated, well off, like minded intellectuals. If Goolsbee was, as I suspect, the closest thing there was to that in the room, then his leaving is somehow as bad as it seems - the pool of close loyalists shrinks, and anything like a dissenting voice is even further away.

There's just no way, at this late date, to dress up this President's economic policies as better than miserable failures. The only saving grace, really, is that the alternatives, as embodied in Republicans and the right, are pretty much worse to nonexistent. No President in modern times may have survived economic conditions as bad as this President might... but the previous examples do have stark choices that this round seems to lack. Jimmy Carter looked much better than Gerald Ford. Ronald Reagan was more appealing to many than Carter. Bill Clinton was clearly superior to continuing with George HW Bush. I don't think you get the same feel from, say, Tim Pawlenty or MItt Romney, never mind Michelle Bachmann. Or Herman Cain.

Perhaps the healthiest result of letting this economic debacle play out - as bad as it is, and as worse as it could get - is that we may, in the long run see some discrediting of the current orthodoxy, especially on the left, that we can only trust the views of an educated, professional elite. Not, as the right would have it, to enshrine a kind of Luddite, anti-intellectual populism... but to begin to look to a wider range of education, experience, and ideas. It's too bad we may have to blow up the Democratic Party along the way... but that's what we probably deserve for putting too much faith in Austan's powers.

The Tea Party Sags, Labor's Resurgent... But Anger Is Probably Still Not Enough.

On the eve of a possible federal shutdown, there's plenty of reason for liberals and lefties to feel confident - not least of which is the fact that Glenn Beck has apparently been canned by Fox.

Beck is going the way of John Gibson (who held his 5pm slot before Beck got it), and maybe Fox will realize that wild-eyed demagogues don't work long term... but I wouldn't bet on it. Either way, Glenn Beck's fall from (Nancy) grace, and high ratings built on easy controversies, is as good a place as any to start talking about the Tea Party's diminishment.

No TV personality rode the wave of Tea Party anger like Beck; even if all of Fox News benefitted from stiking the rage on the right, it was Beck who gave the right wing Tea Partiers the credibility of actually featuring them - and their ideas - prominently, and giving voice to the inchoate rage that defined the last election cycle.

However one slices the numbers - from Beck's 40% ratings decline this year to the shrinking Tea Party base of support - it's clear that much of the rage has dissipated on the right. In part, that's the natural result of winning so many Congressional elections, much the way the post-Obama election glow faded quickly as Obama attempted to govern; in our current phase of "winning is all" approach to political campaigns, once the victory glow fades, reality sets in, and the new guys turn out to be not much better, or different, from what's come before.

In the case of Tea Party victors, that's meant a return to the reality that Republicans, as a party, have been bereft of fresh ideas and a governing approach for some time; as much as Paul Ryan's lousy budget proposal was eagerly awaited and dressed up in impressive seriousness, Ryan's proposals amount to a compilation of contradictory, unpopular and likely to fail plans that cut vital services and finance further tax breaks for the well off.

And other than Ryan, the most bracing Republican plan across the nation is to eliminate the rights of unionized workers to collectively bargain.

And that's another story that's turned out to be a disaster for the GOP.

That Was Then, And This Is...

I have some end of year/beginning of new year thoughts to come on politics and the Presidency and all the Big Ideas... but I got sidetracked, just now, clearing up some e-mail from 2 years ago(!!!) and tripped over some old pro-Hillary posts of mine that led me round to old pro-Obama posts of Ezra's before he fled to WaPo and conventional wisdom stardom. Suffice to say... for now... What a long, strange trip it's been, for these two years. More on that later. But, for those who appreciate irony, let's reprint one of Ezra's better moments from the primary season, in its entirety:

I really, really hope the Democratic primary doesn't come down to superdelegates -- the privileged class of delegate that gets to vote however they want, and were created to ensure that party elites didn't lose too much control over the process. The Democrats have agreed to 796 superdelegates this yea, a group which includes every Democratic member of Congress, governor, and various other dignitaries besides. Some of these superdelegates, like California's Barbara Boxer, have pledged to go with the majority decision in their state. Others have already made their endorsements. Others are waiting to see what they'll be promised. But it would be a real shame if the end result of overwhelming voter participation and a contested primary was to throw the election to unaccountable party elites.

Apparently, any port in a storm.

As I look to the new year, checking back a bit on how we got here, I tend to think about what's been squandered. All those hopes and dreams of young Obama supporters who got mugged by reality and failed by a President they helped to elect who, as it turned out, was closer to his critics' assessments than his supporters'. Democrats may find a way to get back to voter popularity, and Barack Obama, still, looks like the likely bet for reelection in 2012, at least for now. But think back to all that singing and hand holding and crying back in 2008... I mean, even if you were on the other side and not all that into it... doesn't the fact that we're just so not there now seem a little, well, sad?

And to me sadder still, because, well, I thought they were getting their hopes up too high. And still, it sucks to have been on the clearer eyed side of things. I wouldn't mind having been proven wrong, either. But that was then, and this is... what we're stuck with. And, I'm just sayin'... it just all seems so... unnecessary.

Barack Obama And The Enigma Variations

I have to say the last few days have been a fascinating unraveling of the left; it's one thing to expect people to be dismayed at the way the tax cut story devolved, but another entirely to see Obama's remaining base more or less fall apart.

I don't think dwelling on the "Bush Tax Cut" story just now is worth the time; we'll see if "the deal" that was negotiated succeeds or not (my hunch is that Democratic fears of retribution for ending the Bush rates will trump the outrage), but I think the lasting effect of this week's events is to bring into the open the two realities that will define lefty politics in the comingmonths: the reality that Democrats lost in November in a significant way, and that tensions within the left are making it impossible to move forward towards a shared goal.

Lots of people are recasting familiar arguments about a two way divide in the left - "realists" or "pragmatists" versus "idealists" or "hardcore lefties", that sort of thing - but I think the divide is in threes and not about ideology per se. I think the three way divide comes down to this:

1. the vast number of Hillary Clinton supporters who never particularly came around to supporting Barack Obama.
2. the Clinton supporters and others who came around to supporting Obama, but were never especially convinced by the "hope/change" rhetoric or notions that Obama was especially exceptional.
3. the diehard Obama supporters who embraced the whole Obama Movement and used support for Obama as a litmus test for whether one was a "good Democrat."

Perhaps the biggest problem that the Democratic Party and the Obama Administration has faced is that they never - and still don't, in most ways - take seriously the fact that the first group has never supported Obama, disagrees with most of his policies, and is now actively looking for alternatives in future elections. That's the real seed of the divides that currently roil the party, and have everything to do with the failure , in 2008, of the Obama team to do the work of treally uniting the party not behind Barack Obama, but behind a notion of Democratic principles  that brought the party together around shared goals. The only goal, really, was electing Obama. And PUMA power was born.

Over time, the second group - never fully invested in the Obama storyline - has drifted away in various ways. Many were put off by the heathcare debate, whether over "public option" debates, the generally messy process, or, as I did, with a variety of specific objections to policy choices. Others were dismayed by environmental policy, or other issues. And the tax cut debate was, for many, a final straw... and one can't ignore that a variety of economic factors - the unemployment picture, the foreclosuremess, the continued poor performance of the economy overall - have also driven many away.

And so it is that Obama's remaining support comes, mainly, from the diehards - a mix of establishment bloggers and journalists close to the DC whirl, and the still dominant contingent of educated, elite, liberal professionals who made up the core of Obama support. Loyal to a fault, they have accepted every compromise, every muddled argument, every tetchy defense (hence the distinction, often, that they represent a "pragmatic" or "realistic" notion of politics).

It's odd, in some ways, that the Bush tax cut extension may, for many of these diehards, be a last straw. Of all the President's decisions and compromises, this is one where, all things considered, Obama probably is right that he had no choice: havingf made no argument for letting the cuts expire, and having no way to force Reoublicans to back an arbutrary line of $250,000, Obama made a deal that combined some preferred liberal options (unemployment benefits extension, a modest return to the estate tax) and a temporry extnsion of all the Bush rates, and decided to go with it. Frankly, it's not his worst moment.

But I think the "last straw" quality - underlined, no doubt, by yesterday's self-defeating press conference - comes from some diehard Obama supporters beginning to arrive at conclusions anti-Obama liberals and disaffected Democrats reached months ago: the problem with Obama has to do with unknowability. And what we don't know, and can't define... is ruining his Presidency.

Some call it the "what does he believe" argument; I'd say the problem is that President Obama is what he was all along: essentially unknowable, a lofty thinker unable to deal in specifics, who is little interested in the kind of personality driven politics that have come to define our modern age. It is a Presidency of abstractions lacking in focus.

The armchair psychologizing of Obama is striking not because it tells us anything about him, but because no one, really, knows where the real answers lie: he is considered imperious, superior, unwilling to be questioned. He is touted as a corporate apologist and an unrepentant socialist, a radical "community activist" and a shill for the interests of millionaires. Often all of these accusations are made at once. He is all of these things... and none of them.

Mostly, he is not especially well known, or understood.

I've given up on trying to figure him out; I have no use for speculation, no interest in piling on more speculative notions of what he might believe or what he might do. I honestly don't know what Obama's "Democratic ideals" are or what specific policies he envisions as way to achieve his goals. At this late date... I don't care, and knowing more won't change all that much. I think the Obama Presidency will be viewed, ultimately, as a one term mistake, proof that when the appeal of an unknown quantity lies in what you don't know, there's a problem.

The fallout of the failure of Obama's Presidency is hardest, of course, on those most invested in his success; aside from the pains his most ardent supporters are feeling, I suspect the lasting damage of the Obama Enigma will be, naturally, to the black community. That the first actually black President turned out to be mediocre at best, and bad news for African Americans on many levels will be enormously disconcerting. And in some ways, it will change the historic links between the Civil Rights era black and white activists who have, for a long time, shared a sense of a common liberal purpose.

I don't think it's at all surprising that we have reached such a moment of crisis for the left, driven by the combination of the Democratic Establishment's decisions to win at all costs coupled with Obama's essential unknowability. The sense of what it means to be a Democratic - to espouse specific plans and polices to achieve specific, concrete goals - has been utterly lost in pursuit of charismatic leaders and maintenance of a broken machine badly in need of fresh ideas and new blood. I don't know what Barack Obama can possibly do next to reverse the quickening downward spiral of his presidency.

But then, not knowing is really what this Presidency is all about.