Some scattered links, as usual. But first, the quote of the week comes from Maureen Dowd (of all people):
Last time, Obama lifted up the base with his message of hope and change; this time the base lifted up Obama, with the hope he will change.
Also good that she quoted Karen Hughes (who had much more claim to having been Bush's Brain than Karl Rove ever did): "If another Republican man says anything about rape other than it is a horrific, violent crime, I want to personally cut out his tongue."
James K Galbraith: The Coming Debt Battle:
That the looming debt and deficit crisis is fake is something that, by now, even the most dim member of Congress must know. The combination of hysterical rhetoric, small armies of lobbyists and pundits, and the proliferation of billionaire-backed front groups with names like the"Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget" is not a novelty in Washington. It happens whenever Big Money wants something badly enough.
Big Money has been gunning for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid for decades -- since the beginning of Social Security in 1935. The motives are partly financial: As one scholar once put it to me, the payroll tax is the "Mississippi of cash flows." Anything that diverts part of it into private funds and insurance premiums is a meal ticket for the elite of the predator state.
And the campaign is also partly political. The fact is, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are the main way ordinary Americans connect to their federal government, except in wars and disasters. They have made a vast change in family life, unburdening the young of their parents and ensuring that every working person contributes whether they have parents, dependents, survivors or disabled of their own to look after. These programs do this work seamlessly, for next to nothing; their managers earn civil service salaries and the checks arrive on time. For the private competition, this is intolerable; the model is a threat to free markets and must be destroyed. [ . . . ]
Can a federal insurance program go bankrupt? Of course it can't. Bankruptcy is a legal process for private citizens seeking relief from unpayable debts. How can the obligations of Social Security or Medicare ever be unpayable? These are public programs, not private companies. All the federal government has to do is to write the checks, pursuant to law. As for the size of the checks, it will be whatever Congress prescribes at any given time. Bankruptcy as a concept does not apply. So what are they talking about? Lies and nonsense, nothing more. [ . . . ]
Do we have budget problems? Yes: We spend too much on military hardware and wars; the talent, materials and technologies that go into that are wasted and cannot be used, say, to protect New York from storm surge. Our rich build too many mansions, thanks to their CEO incomes and their low tax rates; letting the Bush tax cuts expire will usefully dent that purchasing power.
But Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid impose no such future burdens. They are transfers in current time. They meet today's commitments to seniors, survivors, dependents, the disabled and the ill -- commitments they have earned through work -- providing them with income and services at the expense of others also currently alive. This any community can always do, to the full extent of its will and resources. The future has nothing to do with it. Except that, from a moral point of view, it's useful for the young to learn that we are a community, in which working people take care of those who can't.
By the way, and I can't say this often enough, Galbraith's book,The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too, is the most important political book of the last decade.
Sally Kohn: How Obama Can Turn a Campaign Into a Movement:
More than 10 million Americans donated to the Obama campaign this election. At least a million volunteered to knock on doors and make phone calls. Now that the election is over, they can do more than click on a petition now and then and sign the president's Father's Day card. They can be organizing in House districts around sequestration or mounting state-by-state campaigns to pass a constitutional amendment getting money out of our politics. Converting the president's electoral base into a vibrant, independent progressive movement in America will help the president, the Democratic Party and, in the long term, our nation.
Could be done, although I've never seen any evidence that Obama wants to build up the Democratic Party for anything other than his own reëlection, and that's over.
Mattea Kramer/Chris Hellman: It's the Politics, Stupid: Co-authors of the book, A People's Guide to the Federal Budget, they explain the "fiscal cliff," finding it more an obstacle course, a set of political evasions timed to look like a crisis until they can be evaded again. Most items, including sequestration of spending cuts, they expect will be kicked down the road, while the middle class fraction of the Bush tax cuts can be repassed if the Republicans don't hold it hostage for the rich. That leaves:
Among all the spending and tax changes in the queue, and all the hype around the cliff, the great unknown is whether it's finally farewell to the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. And that's no perilous cliff. Letting those high-end tax cuts expire would amount to a blink-and-you-miss-it 0.003% contraction in the U.S. economy, according to Moody's, and it would raise tens of billions of dollars in desperately-needed tax revenue next year. That's no small thing when you consider that federal revenue has fallen to its lowest point in more than half a century. Ending these tax cuts for the wealthy would bring in cash to reduce deficits or increase funding for cash-starved priorities like higher education.
Paul Krugman: Let's Not Make a Deal:
Even though preliminary estimates suggest that Democrats received somewhat more votes than Republicans in Congressional elections, the G.O.P. retains solid control of the House thanks to extreme gerrymandering by courts and Republican-controlled state governments. And Representative John Boehner, the speaker of the House, wasted no time in declaring that his party remains as intransigent as ever, utterly opposed to any rise in tax rates even as it whines about the size of the deficit.
So President Obama has to make a decision, almost immediately, about how to deal with continuing Republican obstruction. How far should he go in accommodating the G.O.P.'s demands?
My answer is, not far at all. Mr. Obama should hang tough, declaring himself willing, if necessary, to hold his ground even at the cost of letting his opponents inflict damage on a still-shaky economy. And this is definitely no time to negotiate a "grand bargain" on the budget that snatches defeat from the jaws of victory.
Alex Pareene: Hey, Obama, Let's Actually Fix Elections: I'll spare you the link to Pareene's bizarre "Why I Voted for Mitt Romney" post, but this much is worth quoting:
The president should obviously be elected by national popular vote, and it's outrageous that Wyoming has two senators and D.C. has none, but short of junking the Constitution, we're stuck with those sad realities for the time being. It's bizarre that there's not more outrage over the fact that the House will be majority Republican (likely until 2022) despite more votes being cast for Democrats, but unlike the existence of the U.S. Senate, this can be fixed without altering or amending our nation's archaic founding document. While I'd obviously most prefer a larger House with proportional representation and instant-runoff or ranked voting (and, sure, multiple member districts -- let's dream big!), we should at the very least stop allowing district drawing to be a partisan-controlled affair. (And, again, an anti-gerrymandering crusade could be sold as bipartisan -- fighting back against the extremists in both parties!)
But back in reality, none of these things can be fixed as long as either side thinks it has an advantage in the status quo, and as long as either side has no commitment to the fundamental idea of democracy (the Republicans sure don't, and often one wonders about the Democrats). If you asked ordinary people there'd be a lot of support for getting rid of the system of bribery known as campaign fundraising, but everyone elected has more or less been selected by just that system. A few decades ago one might have looked to the courts for help in cleaning up partisan efforts to distort elections, but judges themselves are increasingly selected for their political allegiances, so they are increasingly part of the system.
Rick Perlstein: America Didn't Vote for a "Grand Bargain": Now that the Great Compromiser has been reëlected, the great fear is that he'll cut a deal with Republicans that trades long-term damage to Social Security and Medicare for a bit of short-term economic boost. Perlstein argues that that's not his mandate, and it certainly is true that the key to Obama's recovery and surge after his weak first debate came from his sudden will to stand up for principle. Still, politicians routinely walk away from their pre-election commitments, and he backed off from a bunch of them in 2009.
America's government is not too big. It is not "out of control." Measured by the number of public sector employees compared to the overall population, in fact, it is at its smallest size since 1968. The Democratic compulsion to take the lead in making it smaller, to "control" it, is in itself a serious historic problem -- and a perverse one at that. For it doesn't work. Bill Clinton tried it in the 1990s, working with Republicans in Congress both to obliterate the deficit caused by Republican budgetary mismanagement, and "end welfare as we know it."
What happened to the resulting budgetary surplus they created? Republican mismanagement and ideological extremism obliterated it [ . . . ]
A simple historical fact: There is no political payoff for Democrats in presiding over governmental austerity. The evidence goes far back to long before Bill Clinton. In the mid-1970s, the first superstar of the Democratic austerity movement, William Proxmire, a budgetary obsessive whose campaign bumper stickers read "Waste Will Bury Us," began awarding a monthly "Golden Fleece Award" to the government expenditure he judged the most wasteful -- a clown show that frequently had no more effect than making things difficult for scientists doing basic research that frequently led to revolutionary breakthroughs. Austerity was the ideology of Gov. Jerry Brown in California, too -- and also the man who beat Brown for the Democratic presidential nominee in 1976, Jimmy Carter, who announced, in his 1978 State of the Union address that "Government cannot eliminate poverty or provide a bountiful economy or reduce inflation or save our cities or provide energy."
What Carter said wasn't even true; for instance, he did deploy the power of government to reduce inflation, by appointing a Federal Reserve chairman, Paul Volcker, with a mandate to squeeze the money supply, an act of deliberate austerity that induced the recession that defeated him. Like I said, there was no political payoff: Ronald Reagan, depicting Carter on the campaign trail as just another Democratic spendthrift, defeated him, reappointed Volcker, then harvested the political credit when Volcker's governmental policies did slay inflation.
It should be telling that fiscal responsibility is always the prescription for Democrats, but for Republicans, as Dick Cheney famously said, "deficits don't matter." Obama makes us nervous because his commitment to fiscal balance does seem to be real. However, he must realize that the only way he can get there is to raise taxes, and primarily on the rich, and also that cuts and privatization deals on Social Security and/or Medicare don't save him anything -- they result in less effective less efficient programs that cost more in the long run. If he wants something that would actually work to bring deficits under control, he can't do anything that stupid. What he can shoot for is more tax revenues (both through higher rates on the rich and through growth), less wasteful discretionary spending (ending the war in Afghanistan, not starting any more, trimming the military budget back), and most important of all, controlling health care costs. And the key to the latter is the opposite of the privatization the Republicans demand.
By the way, I'm a big fan of William Proxmire, and he actually did benefit electorally for his efforts -- he was hugely popular, often running up 80% margins in Wisconsin. But he mostly attacked wasteful military spending, and he doesn't seem to have been all that effective at it, even though he scored lots of small wins.
Mat Stoller: Obama's Second Term: Can Liberals Trust the President?: Well, no: "My bet is that Obama will continue the policy framework he pursued in his first term." Stoller lists some "domestic flash points": Fiscal Cliff, Budget; Global Warming; Fannie/Freddie/Foreclosures; Dodd-Frank; Marijuana; Trade and Trans-Pacific Partnership; Immigration, Race to the Top, Strikes; The Post-Election Narrative. I think there is reason to think Obama will do some things better than four years ago. For one thing, he has some experience now about what doesn't work. He also faces smaller problems: even if he gets another dip into recession, it won't be like the freefall he inherited last time; he's out of Iraq, and he's given Afghanistan enough of a shot that he can unwind that. Too bad he didn't do anything useful on housing, but at least some of the urgency is off that. Too bad about global warming, but at least FEMA has been saved. He's going to be less cowed by his staff -- he's been president a while, he's gotten more used to throwing his weight around, and that whole "team of rivals" shtick is finished: Gates is gone, so are Summers and Emmanuel and Orszag, and Clinton and Geithner and probably Holder are leaving, and good riddance to all of them -- and especially to Petraeus. They won't necessarily be replaced by better people politically, but they'll give way to people who will owe Obama more and serve him better. None of this changes Obama's personal conservatism or political pragmatism -- he won't do anything radical because he's just not that sort of guy. What might nudge him to the left (or to the right) is grass roots political activism -- like Occupy, or the Tea Party (they do seem like a spent force, not that the money behind them is all spent).
Rich Yeselson: Rage Machine vs. Turnout Machine: Interesting contrast here to Canada's Conservative Party, which successfully appeals to immigrants, doesn't fret about gay marriage or abortion let alone Canada's hugely popular Medicare system.
In the US, any possibility of the GOP appealing to the economic interests of most white men, as opposed to massaging their beleaguered sense of identity, must be subsumed to the antithetical economic priorities of the GOP's plutocratic donor class. In short, Sheldon Adelson and the Koch brothers are ardent rent seekers from the federal government, union haters and tax avoiders, while promoting the demolition of social insurance for the 99.9%. They do not share most of the same economic goals as the guy wearing the "Put The White Back in the White House" t-shirt at a Romney rally. Yet rage and paranoia paradoxically bind these billionaires and white male small business owners and contractors: see, for example the Adelson owned newspaper in Israel's headline after Obama's victory,"Socialism Comes To America."
The historian Steven Fraser has called the modern Right's proprietary and gendered authority over both the workplace and the family unit,"family capitalism." Family capitalism is a shared value system of both the billionaires and the base. [ . . . ] Bridging the gap between the rich and the ranks is the professional activist class that puts forth lunatic politicians like Steve King and Michelle Bachmann, and the conservative entertainment complex of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and Matt Drudge.
The three rings of this circus -- the paranoid billionaires, the activist and media crackpots, and the resentful elderly and white men (and, frequently, their spouses) -- are tied so tightly that it would destroy the party if the links were broken.
I suppose I could inaugurate a section on truly stupid ideas, like Kevin Drum's nomination of Mitt Romney for Treasury Secretary:"How much friendler toward banks could he be than Tim Geithner?" Is that the standard to look for? And I thought Erskine Bowles was a bad idea.
Haven't found anything useful yet on the Petraeus-Broadwell affair, but it strikes me as something of more than prurient interest: no general since MacArthur has worked so assiduously and successfully at courting the press than Petraeus (unless it was Colin Powell, who if he did managed the feat much less conspicuously) but did you really expect him to stoop this low? At this point, Broadwell's motives are less clear, especially with all the innuendo, but the least one can say is that she went well beyond professionalism to get the story -- or a story, the one that promoted her source's career.
Reading Chandrasekaran's recent book on Afghanistan makes it clear that Petraeus threw his COIN strategy under the bus as soon as he was dropped into his protégé McChrystal's command post, then he hastened his exit before he could get excessively tarred with the war's utter failure. It was only a matter of time before history caught up with one of the great frauds of our time. Still, surprise that the tabloids got him first.
Also, a few links for further study:
Charles Duhigg/Steve Lohr: The Patent, Used as a Sword: Long piece on the evils of patents, especially software and design patents used in smart phones. I'm personally much more negative about patents than the authors. I'd get rid of them even if the result is that nothing new ever gets invented. But, of course, that wouldn't be the result. The result would be that no one ever gets sued for inventing something that someone else has some vague legal claim to. And another result would be that companies couldn't extort rents from customers, especially in health care where patented products are claimed to be lifesaving.
Mark Lilla: The Great Disconnect: Review of Charles R. Kesler's book, I Am the Change, what Lilla calls "a cheap inflationary takedown" of Obama, contrasting the book to the more "deflationary" takedowns typical of right-wingers like Dinesh D'Souza. Kesler accuses Obama of Hegelianism and finds the missing link in Woodrow Wilson, while Lilla is so desperate to find a rational conservative counter to his centrism that he follows him down the rat hole. Lilla even starts out with an attempt to paint Nixon as the socialist Obama isn't, an amusing little bit of bullshit. No need to quote this stuff -- I'm bookmarking it because I'm morbidly fascinated with right-wing books on Obama. But what I will quote is Denis Clifford's letter:
"The level of political discourse has dropped," Mark Lilla says (Up Front, Sept. 30), and his review contributes mightily to diminishing it. He claims that "the Great Society's liberal architects vastly overreached and overpromised," without mentioning that the Vietnam War, so vehemently pursued by many of President Lyndon Johnson's "liberal architects," ruined the hopes of the Great Society domestic policies. We'll never know what might have happened in America if those "best and brightest" hadn't made their first priority the insanity of the Vietnam War.
Nate Silver: As Nation and Parties Change, Republicans Are at an Electoral College Disadvantage: Seems like it's long been the other way, what with the Republican domination of the small mountain states and their disproportionate power in the Senate. Plus you hate to give Republicans even a whiff of a notion that they're victimized by something structural. But I have to admire how artfully Silver puts his chart together. The other thing this shows is while Democrats are effective where they bother to compete, they don't have a lot of obvious options for growth -- with Missouri and Indiana sunk, and the deep south still locked in the white column, maybe Arizona or Montana?
Drew Westen: America's Leftward Tilt?: From before the election, argues that both candidates became more popular when they moved toward the left.