P.M. Carpenter

Ineffable

"Ineffable" is one of those superlatives whose genuine meaning should prevent its casual use. But this passage, from The Caucus, begs for it:

Democratic lawmakers "agreed to changes [in the 9/11 responders bill] demanded by the conservative lawmakers, who raised concerns about the measure’s cost."

Six or seven billion dollars.

Conservative concerns.

The measure's cost.

After Iraq, after the Medicare Rx plan, throughout Afghanistan.

It just sort of leaves one speechless, does it not?

Post-analytical analysis

Chris Cillizza posits -- unastonishingly -- as one possibility that Haley Barbour's vastly revisionist remark about those civics-minded white citizens of Yazoo, Mississippi "hasn't done any long term damage in the eyes of the voters who will decide the identity of the 2012 [Republican] nominee."

I agree.

Then, however, and astonishing to the point of dropping this reader's jaw, Cillizza offers this singular explanation as to why: "Because chances are those voters are paying only the scantest attention to politics at the moment as the holidays rapidly approach."

Not a word about dog-whistle politics, about Barbour's possibly eye-winking intent -- not a word about those older, good ol' whitest-of-white ultraconservatives malevolently nostalgic for Margaret Mitchell's yesteryear, and who turn out for GOP primaries like Republicans flocking to a filibuster.  

Milquestoast analysis, likely because Cillizza was afraid of offending Barbour's diseased base. But for political journalism it was nothing less than astonishing. Just dreadfully astonishing.

Wile E. McConnell

Something else is afoot. This is just too weird, even for the minority leader.

Mitch McConnell is maneuvering through a rollout of open diplomacy: his notorious "one-term" remark and now the chortled quip, "If [Democrats] think it’s bad now, wait 'til next year." Yet McConnell, a professional faker, must know what Julian Assange amateurishly doesn't: that open, which is to say public, diplomacy is only a tactic to obscure private means.

Idealists, tea partiers and children may read Woodrow Wilson, but McConnell is reading Sun Tzu.

President Obama grasped the import of the electorate's midterm message -- however naively, voters expect Washington to pull together, to move the ball, whatever metaphor you like -- and consequently, to my mind, he also began to play the obscurantist, open diplomacy game.

Let us join hands and meld minds and advance together to splendid horizons of principled compromise -- that's the presidential chant in public -- while he privately concedes that his best shot at reelection and even larger Democratic majorities in 2013 is serial GOP obstructionism in 2011-12, all of which will seem very much like 1948.

So contrary to what Obama says, he expects something else, which he intends to exploit at the proper time.

True, his activist base still doesn't "get it" -- they want him out on the stump, now, counterproductively hissing and snarling, since for them that would be abundantly rewarding -- and that's partly because Obama has not spelled it out for them in strategic crayon.

Though they're supposed to understand this stuff all on their own, it's apparent the president takes the Kantian approach to pedagogy -- the really dumb ones are beyond hope, so why bother? 

Still, I can't help but think that McConnell indeed "gets it." Obama is staging a yawning gap of a trap which only the blinkered, fight, fight, fight Ed Schultzes of American politics can't perceive. For that very reason, though, McConnell is bound to see his party's abyss, and somehow avert it.

How? That's why I wrote "somehow." I haven't a clue. And perhaps McConnell doesn't have one yet, either. For the moment all he and the semantically inventive John Boehner can do is swaddle their anarchistic base in caressing assurances of idiotic entrenchments and mindless malgovernance.

A profound ambivalence

What are we to make of former senator Gary Hart's observation, which I heard yesterday on a cable news show, in response to a question about the U.S. Senate's frequent dysfunction?: "The caliber and quality of people serving," said Hart, "has gone down."

In those words there inheres a certain ambivalence, I think: an urge to frankly declare the modern GOP a reprehensible herd of anti-intellectual misfits and opportunistic nincompoops -- a partial roster, Jim Bunning, Jim DeMint, David Vitter, John Ensign, Jeff Sessions, Saxby Chambliss, Jim Inhofe, even Kit Bond (who I once witnessed, in person, meticulously combing his hair in preparation for a radio interview) -- restrained by a sophisticated desire to play ever so nicely, lest the opposition's visceral infantilism rub off on Hart and fester like the foul character flaw it is.

I know how he feels; his ambivalence snakes through me each time I sit down to write a thought or two about our political state of affairs, which wouldn't be what they are, absent said nincompoops. In the face of so much callous resistance to the kind of vigorous, far-sighted innovations this great nation so desperately needs these days, a great deal of restraint is required to internally enforce civility.

One wants, as they say, to simply scream.

And in these ambivalent words of my own, the discerning reader will detect, I trust, a sincere apology -- for any screaming here committed.

A binky for the GOP

Let's pretend, like the NY Times, that the Republican leadership's opposition to the New Start treaty is in some way substantive. Let's Jedi-mind-trick ourselves into this elaborate deceit, since stripping the pretense might hurl them forever inescapably into a pouty, binky-deprived tantrum of disagreeable reality. In fact, let's call their sensitive prepubescence what it isn't, "skepticism": 

"The Senate moved closer on Monday to approving a new arms control treaty with Russia over the opposition of Republican leaders," writes the Times in its lede, "as lawmakers worked on a side deal to assure skeptics that the arms pact would not inhibit American plans to build missile defense systems."

There are of course no GOP skeptics, certainly not McConnell, not Kyl, not McCain. Had this precise treaty been up for Senate ratification four years ago, they would have hailed it as a Bushian triumph of Talleyrandian proportions; Reagan vindicated, Metternich invoked -- and Senate Democrats, en masse, and like adults, would have peeplessly ratified the necessary thing.

Yet the hardcore-base-pandering nakedness of the GOP leadership's breath-holding resistance to Start screams for no further clarity when one ponders this simple juxtaposition: on the pro-treaty side, there are former GOP Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and James Baker, as well as George H.W. Bush's former national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft; on the other, anti-treaty side, there are -- all alone -- the ... tea party types.

Yesterday, for example, TeaParty.org vomited this "news," from NewsMax, into my inbox, under the contemptibly laughable headline, "Lame Ducks to Disarm America?":

"Some Senate Republicans appear ready to cave in to the strong-arm tactics the Obama administration and Sen. Harry Reid are using in their effort to ram through a lame-duck Congress one of the most sweeping nuclear treaties the United States has ever signed, a treaty that has many problems that could jeopardize America's national security....

"Perhaps the most serious and immediate flaw is that the treaty ignores the vast imbalance between U.S. and Russian tactical nuclear forces."

Oh dear. These crackerjack foreign-policy adepts seem to have overlooked something of rather critical relevance. "START" stands for "STrategic Arms Reduction Treaty." That would be a treaty that treats strategic arms. Not tactical weaponry, the strategic stuff. If you want a TART, boys, that's fine, but this is a START, as all Russian-American nuclear weaponry treaties have been. Got it?

The tea party-gram then proceeded to the vastly conspiratorial: "The greatest reason to suspect the true motivations behind the treaty is the inexplicable, headlong rush to ratify it."

And there you have it. A suitably implied, paranoia-gratifying, McCarthyite-inspired explanation of the darkly "inexplicable": domestic wickedness, burrowed evil, Democratic betrayal, presidential treason, all in the monstrous service of "Soviet" hegemony.  

This brand of wingnutted delusion was once modestly distributed in plain brown wrappings in the U.S. mails only at the request of neurotic, palsied partisans. Now it's blasted via email to every at-risk paranoid with a voter-registration receipt -- who has become the unforgiving master of Mitch McConnell, Jon Kyl, and John McCain.

Self-promotion alert

In defiance of Dr. Samuel Johnson's wise vocational counsel -- that of "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money" -- I have contributed a piece to CNN.com/Opinion, which you can read here. It was requested and written before President Obama's historic civil rights victory over DADT, but is otherwise current and, I'm afraid, still sadly accurate with respect to the ideologically tormented.

Frank Rich and the politics of despair

The favorite whipping boy of every punditry guru is bipartisanship. The assaults on its elusive worth are themselves bipartisan; on this one and perhaps only matter, the media's universe of Rachel Maddows and Sean Hannitys are in complete and virtuous accord -- How silly, how naive, how utterly laughable, folks, to imagine, say, a Bernie Sanders-Jim DeMint coalition.

In other words, notional "bipartisanship" has matured from whipping boy to straw man. There is no monologue, no column, no air time that speaks or writes itself quite so easily as bipartisanship-bashing.

The underlying problem with all this alarmed ridicule is the deliberate distortion of what Barack Obama has urged and voters (brutally) encouraged. Both want -- and the latter inordinately expects -- Beltway pols to behave like grownups, to shave a demand here and there, to get a little something done on behalf of the multitudes. (The prevailing notion that Beltway pols haven't, over the long run, done just that -- yesterday's historic repeal of DADT? or near universal health care, anyone? -- is another matter, as is Obama's strategic re-emphasis on the two parties working together; that is, his partisan hammer will come down hard after Republicans throw cooperation in his face. It's just a matter of time.)

And this morning, I was sorry to observe, came the inestimable Frank Rich to join the sarcastic Maddows and sneering Hannitys.

To blast the admittedly sentimental concept of clean bipartisanship, Rich's direct target is "No Labels," which harmlessly bills itself as an organization designed to foster "what's best for America." Sublimely naive, no doubt, but, as stated, perfectly harmless. And who knows? Absent the barrels of cyber-ink devoted to assaulting its "toothlessness," No Labels could grow a spine.

But there's no thought more horrifying than that to the hyperpartisans and anti-incrementalists who want it all -- now -- and with as much volume as we can just barely stand (which also happens to be good for the commentariat's business).

Rich's most damning indictment:

The notion that civility and nominal bipartisanship would accomplish any of the heavy lifting required to rebuild America is childish magical thinking, and, worse, a mindless distraction from the real work before the nation. Sure, it would be swell if rhetorical peace broke out in Washington — or on cable news networks — but given that American politics have been rancorous since Boston’s original Tea Party, wishing will not make it so.

That passage is elegantly reconciled with the "Conflict School" of American political history, whose cultural origins in the contentious 1960s consumed with remarkable speed the once-dominant "Consensus School," which, rather self-explanatorily, saw America's past as "exceptional" in the sense of its general stability and ideological harmony. I locate my own interpretation -- one deeply influenced by America's most preeminent political historian, Richard Hofstadter -- somewhere betwixt, but toward consensus.

Mr. Rich, no one I know of, especially myself, expects that civility "would accomplish" the necessary rebuilding of America. That indeed would be "childish magical thinking." But in reality it is only, as noted, a straw man. The inescapable point, Mr. Rich, is that "civility and nominal bipartisanship" -- attitudinally, the notion that America's problems can be overcome only through a political consensus to work the problems and not merely the politics -- is the inescapable starting point of rebuilding America.

What I find immensely ironic about this debate is that I -- a ruthless pragmatist who so often scoffs at progressives' boundless utopianism -- retain confidence that American politics can indeed regain a two-party civility indispensible to socioeconomic progress, while the Frank Riches -- ruthless utopians who so often scoff at others' boundless pragmatism -- have sunk into a bottomless despair.

John Boehner's star-crossed tears

"The House," according to its incoming Speaker, "is going to become the outpost in Washington for the American people and their desire for a smaller, less costly and more accountable government."

John Boehner's vow was of course the worst sort of sententious buncombe. The House's pending majority bears almost no representative relation to "the American people"; it reflects instead the tribalistic ignorance and ahistorical malevolence of a radical, tea-party miasma that is having its day but is soon to dissipate.

Insofar as the tea party crowd took the time and minuscule trouble to vote, I suppose one could pretend they spoke for the people, but that -- and I mean this in all seriousness -- is only a democratic technicality.

There is no polling evidence whatsoever that "the American people" themselves are hellbent on a "smaller, less costly" government. What they want is a government that works, a government that's competent, a government that spends wisely the tax dollars collected from the lowest tax burden since 1950.

Since then, the electorate has had no less than 30 Congressional elections to check or reverse the government's growth. It -- the electorate -- has instead thumbed up accumulating domestic goodies and a sprawling defense apparatus. The people have looked on these creations and have pronounced them Good. In another word, "wise."

I'm casting no judgment here on the essence of this wisdom; I'm only saying the American people conspicuously like the size of government they have, for which, just as conspicuously, they have repeatedly voted.

Nevertheless who dances not to the demagogue's song of "smaller, less costly" government? For heaven's sake even the left wing of the Democratic Party supports such a notional nothingness. If those big, expensive programs can be maintained for less, why the hell not?

Furthermore, here's a real mindbender. While it's true that the American electorate nests by and large in politically centrist to center-right sentiment -- Hey boys and girls, who's for smaller, less costly government? and the crowd goes wild -- it's just as unquestionably true that elected government's path has, for roughly 80 years, again, by and large, veered liberally.

We all tend to say we want mostly one or only one thing from government, yet that "one thing" differs in meaning and substance from special constituency to special constituency. The result, naturally, cannot defy the laws of political physics: government programs grow ... and grow. The enormous but unshakable paradox is invoked that our government's character, shaped by a vaguely center-right electorate, is in fact center-left.

All this will mock the new House's grandiose plans. But of course the tearful John Boehner already knows that; and he knows as well there's always the backstop of the Democratic Senate to mercifully euthanize his party's doddering tea partyism -- whose potential suicidal success would indeed be held "accountable" by a much broader electorate in 2012.

Profound questions about Palin

Journalistic pieces such as Chris Cillizza's "Why Sarah Palin could struggle in 2012" astound and even offend, beginning with the title.

Did Cillizza actually commence this unimposing task in a probing frame of mind? Did he really first ask himself, Gee, would a witless, overtly malicious, quitter-of-a-small-state-governor with vastly stratospheric negatives encounter, maybe, a "struggle" for the White House?

I appreciate Cillizza's indentured servitude to Beltway "objectivity," but merely asking that question of such a whining political farce lends gratuitous credence to Her Preposterousness.

Ms. Palin is a mass-entertainment creation and chief lunatic of the lunatic fringe and nothing else. And by sober D.C. journalists who possess even the slightest concern for the future of American democracy and its political processes, she should be treated that way.   

Yet ponder for a moment the immense relevance Cillizza grants Palin: "[A]s she seeks to build a brand heading into the slow-starting 2012 presidential race, a major question looms: Can she win?"

Chris, a simple answer booms: No.

Why then proceed to analyze her potential candidacy with a journalistic solemnity worthy of a 1936 Alf Landon or 1964 Barry Goldwater or 1984 Walter Mondale? A 2012 Sarah Palin, Mr. Cillizza, is a joke. End of serious coverage.

Yet, intones Cillizza instead, "Palin would have a lot of work to do to re-shape the negative public image of her among a relatively broad swath [relative to what?] of the electorate." Nevertheless he ventures that "She still has plenty of time to do just ..." yada yada rimshot kaboom.

Well what about the ghost of Gus Hall? As a write-in candidate maybe?

The "why" of Why Sarah Palin could struggle in 2012 is, for every conceivable reason. Just leave it at that, Chris. Don't dignify the patently absurd, for it only demeans what little is left of a respectable democracy.

Challenger folderal

This shows just how slender is the real discontent among the base:

[I]n the early primary state of New Hampshire ... a Magellan poll ... tested Obama’s prospects against three hypothetical primary challengers: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former DNC Chairman Howard Dean and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. None of the match-ups is close to competitive: “Obama would beat former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean by a 78% to 10% margin. He would beat Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders by 79% to 8%.... The only Democrat in the survey who eats into Obama’s vote share in a significant way is Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Nevertheless, Obama would still beat Clinton handily, 59% to 28%.

Move along, folks, nothing to see here.

Strategic patience

[T]he president is concluding 2010 by directly confronting issues that have come to define the sweep of his presidency – the economy [the compromised stimulus], foreign engagement [New Start] and questions of social justice [DADT]....

[T]aken together, the scope of legislative activity has surprised many people in Washington who had last month expected little to be accomplished in the period between Republican victories in November and January, when scores of new conservative lawmakers arrive.

One incontrovertible lesson to be taken from Obama's roughly four years as candidate and president is that he not only rolls with the punches, he finesses them.

Some among his diverse base fly into violent rounds of denunciation at the drop of every apparently disappointing hat. Yet Obama, after often-aggravating but strategically reasoned reserve, comes roaring back to surprise.

These seeming disconnects in timing which later prove altogether connected would also seem, by now, to represent a brand of presidential leadership his base can believe in; and the almost laughable extent they don't, or can't, says more about that deferred-gratification-challenged segment than about the president himself.

It speaks as well to the 24/7 drubbing of strategic patience doled out mercilessly by the chattering asses of progressive media.

First things were first

White House officials and Senator Joseph I. Lieberman ... have suggested that some Republicans are threatening to block the New Start treaty if the military [DADT] repeal goes forward. Such a maneuver "takes us way back to an earlier day when people used to do things like that to stop civil rights laws from passing," Mr. Lieberman said.

This is the sort of despicable tactic we've come to expect from the GOP, but it nicely positions Obama for a campaign of aggressive pushback.

This repeated reminder to his base, however, is in order: President Obama first had to demonstrate, especially to independents, his willingness to engage Republicans in reasonable compromise -- that is, the tax compromise.

Their national nightmare of "uncertainty" is over

You no doubt recall this GOP chestnut: "Some Republican critics of the deal had said the Bush-era rates should be extended permanently, complaining that to do otherwise would create economic uncertainty."

By "Bush-era rates," those Republicans -- note to the NY Times: virtually all of them, not "some" -- were of course referring only to the upper-end tax cuts, whose economic effectiveness, according to all empirical data and every uninebriated economist, will essentially be squat.

But so much for that. Lathering plutocrats with unfunded booty is a Republican evangelical calling -- as peculiar an impulse, in this Christmas season, as Christ's was about rendering unto Caesar or unburdening camels' backs. And as for those hyperpatriotic Palinites out there who object that it's not the government's money with which to lather, I would direct them to the traditional concepts of "social contract" and "fair share"; if, that is, learning the fundamentals of civilized society, between halibut-bashings, isn't too much trouble for them.

But, as already conceded, so much for that. Someday, having a valid base of 2 percent of the electorate will catch up to the GOP.

No, this morning what triggered my memory banks was the Republicans' pounding use of the word "uncertainty." Businesses, they insisted (as though personal tax rates had something to do with corporate rates), simply wouldn't start hiring again until all this "uncertainty" about upper-end tax cuts was put aside, in favor, naturally, of the upper-end booty-grabbers.

Really? A couple of nights ago I was watching an interview, on "PBS Newshour," with the CEOs of Honeywell and Motorola. And sure enough, in the course of discussing their business woes both of them pounded the Republican word "uncertainty" -- but of demand. Not tax rates. Demand. Not a whisper of complaint about a 35 percent rate being marginally shifted to 30-something-else. Not a word. Just uncertainty of demand. That's what worried and troubled them most. Give us demand, they said, and we'll hire folks to meet it.

Which, prima facie, is the best case for direct government stimulus. But let's not go there again, since that is not, and never was, in this Congress or next, a realistic possibility.

At any rate, this morning we and the corporate crowd are certain. And Republicans now own the economy, every bit as much as Barack Obama, who can take credit if the economy upswings, or blame Republicans if it doesn't. Smart politics. And given this often-dysfunctional Congress, the smartest economics allowable.

Piece of cake

The assessment of President Obama's war strategy "cited some signs that the United States and its allies have halted or reversed inroads by the Taliban in Afghanistan and strengthened the ability of Afghan forces to secure their country, but acknowledged that the gains are fragile and could be easily undone unless more progress is made towards hunting down insurgents operating from havens in neighboring Pakistan."

And unless youthful Talibaners fail to grow to Taliban maturity; and unless the tactical effectiveness of the Taliban's village-intimidation program suddenly ceases; and unless this artificial nation of endless tribal warfare doesn't also implode in a fiery abyss of "governmental" incompetence and corruption; and, not least, unless Afghanistan fails to bolt from the 13th to 21st century.

Other than that, not to worry. Everything's proceeding nicely.

No Labels, plenty options

I thought I knew where E.J. Dionne was going this morning in his "No Labels" column -- roughly the same place I was vaguely, indirectly headed yesterday: The No Labels group might well be authentic conservatism's primal scream; we could be witnessing a political embryo preparing to organizationally grow and mature and ultimately supplant its Mad King Ludwig of a GOP ancestor.

But while I stopped short, Dionne took a sudden turn. He concluded, "The No Labelers can yet be a constructive force if they remind us of how extreme the right has become and help broker an alliance between the center and the left, the only coalition that can realistically stop an ever more zealous brand of conservatism."

But Mr. Dionne, American politics already has an alliance between the center and the left. It's called the Democratic Party. What it needs is an alliance between the center and the old rational right, because, as Dionne also noted with near understatement, "The truth is that the [contemporary] American right is much farther from anything that can fairly be described as 'the center' than is the left."

The "right" in America has transcended mere conservatism, as I wrote yesterday. It has bullied and bluffed and demagogued its way into a depraved pathology of politically radical gangsterism. The essential truth of that statement is affirmed not only by the lack of objections one would expect to hear from the floor, but by the actual pride taken in it by the right's various consiglieres and button men.

No Labels is a refugee camp, or, if you will, more accurately a witness protection program. It's overflowing with reasonable folk on the mostly non-ideological lam -- David Frum, Mike Castle, Bob Inglis, Charlie Crist, Mike Bloomberg, Tom Davis, as Dionne itemizes them, just some of the escapees or exiles who are looking for a sane alternative.

Yet these are sentimental voices of some authentic conservatism -- voices indeed willing to work and compromise with the left, but scarcely to create "an alliance" with it. The fate of that marriage would be doomed; one less of non-ideology than just plain mush.

My general impression of No Labels, as is, is similar to Dionne's whimsical and ingenious riff: "moderately supportive and moderately critical - accented by a moderate touch of cynicism." Who (besides the aforementioned gangsters) doesn't yearn, for example, for the setting aside of "petty partisanship" and wholly faith-based humbug and the like? The No Labels guys have a long way to go before achieving a coherence of some practical use.

Parenthetically, I would also observe that the Keith Olbermann brand of childish ridicule of No Labels, which I heard last night, is immensely unhelpful in meeting the very goal of a reasonable American politics, which in fact the Keith Olbermanns of the progressive airwaves so doggedly insist they desire.