PMC Commentary

Political tennis

Now who didn't anticipate this?

Speaker Boehner: "[I]t is my recommendation that your address be held on the following evening."

Such was Boehner's return of what I referred to earlier today as Obama's "pure, memorable gold of 'Up yours' American politics." So, Mr. President, the ball is back in your court. Ace it.

The president's guy's English

H.W. Fowler, author of The King's English and the magnificent Dictionary of Modern English Usage, will from the grave be sorting out this sentence from WH Press Secretary Jay Carney for all eternity. For the rest of us, though, it's pure, memorable gold of "Up yours" American politics. Here's Carney, on the timing of President Obama's speech, before Congress, next Wednesday, which just happens to land on the GOP debate: 

Once you want to do a speech to Congress and you have to deal with congressional schedules and there are many other factors here ... one debate of many that is on one channel of many was not enough reason not to have this speech at the time that we decided to have it.

Are we clear?

Even better, though, will be the howls of unpresidential protest from the little people -- the GOP's candidates. From all of them, that is, except Rick Perry, who is, as I write, most assuredly thanking Providence for Obama's timing. Perry is now safe from national exposure for at least another week.

Sorry, no refunds

From the WSJ's Washington Wire:

Sarah Palin’s Saturday appearance at a tea party rally in Indianola, Iowa, is [all italics mine] on hold, [said] a person close to the former Alaska governor.

The person said Ms. Palin’s appearance was "no longer confirmed" and cited "continual lying" from event organizers at Tea Party of America....

The former governor will now appear at a Friday event in Des Moines ... though the location will probably have to be changed, the person close to Ms. Palin said.

Ms. Palin is still scheduled to appear at a Tea Party Express tour stop Monday in New Hampshire.

Ms. Palin may still hold an event Saturday, the person said, though she has no firm plans.

It’s also possible she could still attend the Indianola tea party rally, the person said.

It was once true that the world's toughest job is that of president of the United States. No longer. It's now that of Sarah Palin's scheduler.

Romney's preview

The Romney campaign's first sortie against Rick Perry was to assure his supporters and financial backers -- and the major, schoolyard-brawl-starved media -- that he's suiting up. It's a bit like dropping warning leaflets on a civilian population before the bombing commences. Anyway, "You’ll see him take it up a notch," a Romney adviser informed Politico.

So how will Romney phrase his assaults? It's inconceivable that he'd need more bullet points -- quite literally -- than the NY Times has already provided. In last Sunday's edition the paper noted that Gov. Perry ...

*"proclaimed that gay marriage was an issue for individual states to decide, but backtracked in recent weeks and now says he supports a federal amendment banning gay marriage.

*"signaled support for various federal actions to restrict abortion rather than leaving the issue to states.

*"used $17 billion in federal stimulus money to balance the state’s last two budgets.

*"accepted a $1 million federal grant last October for planning to carry out one of ['Obamacare's'] key provisions.

*"[personally] received at least $83,000 in federal farm subsidies between 1987 and 1998.

*"[sought] additional federal aid that comes from a presidential disaster declaration.

*"rejected $556 million in federal stimulus dollars for the state’s unemployment insurance program ... [yet] requested that the federal government reimburse Texas $350 million — the estimated cost of incarcerating illegal immigrants in county jails and state prisons in 2009 and 2010.

*"accepted financing for [No Child Left Behind] as governor. This fiscal year, Texas received $2.03 billion.

and *"suggested that frustrated Texans might consider secession."

Finally, there's that mother of all political cretinism: Perry has "called Social Security a failure that was 'set up like an illegal Ponzi scheme.' "

Romney can hurl the points collectively or slice 'em and dice 'em. Either way, for a base whose most intense desideratum is to unseat Barack Obama, they add up to one overwhelming incontrovertibility: Rick Perry is unelectable.

Rick Perry and High Philosophy

Dana Milbank finds the fortitude to struggle through Rick Perry's 2008 book, On My Honor: A Personal Compendium of Contemporary Ignorance and Religious Bigotry. (OK, I invented the subtitle -- superfluously.) Notes Milbank:

Among the things Perry "deems" harmful: universities (students "have been taught that corporations are evil, religion is the opiate of the masses, and morality is relative"....

It is self-evident that some corporations are, and morality is, but I'd like to specially pause for Perry's conventional distortion of Karl Marx's observation -- "religion is the opiate of the masses" -- which habitually is loosely quoted, as well as quoted out of context. Here's the German philosopher's more complete, original version:

Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusion about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions.

If one reads Marx widely, or merely skims his writings, the realization that he was a far better sociologist than economist rapidly sinks in. His insights into 19th-century Europe's social tumult are often stunning in their originality and brilliant in composition -- especially when juxtaposed with the sonorously dry economics of Das Kapital, which even Fidel Castro once confessed he was unable to finish. The above passage, though, beautifully mixes both disciplines. And in it, Marx is clearly sympathetic to religion as both an "expression" and "protest" of "real [economic] distress." His was no high-handed denunciation of the masses' ignorance; it was a recognition of real, material human needs, which were ignored by government authorities and complicitly sanctioned by finely robed sorcerers.    

Implicit -- to me -- in Marx's observation is that with socioeconomic justice could come a sensible return of, should we continue the metaphor, opium usage. His marvelous construct -- "The demand to give up the illusion about [the people's] condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions" -- can be read in a way in which "illusion" refers only to the illusory here and now; which is to say that Marx, in this passage, anyway, does not deny at least the possibility of the metaphysical there and later. He's merely saying that in conditions of vast socioeconomic inequality, the most fundamental precept of most organized religions (an afterlife) is a cruel co-conspirator of secular oppression.

Whatever. All I do know about a possible afterlife is this: If I ever slip into one and hear a "debate" between Karl Marx and Rick Perry, I'll know I'm in heaven.

Comically inept

From the NY Times, which I referenced on August 14 and just noticed is recited by Jonathan Chait, who, fishing for compromise, manages to get the other side of the argument wrong, too:

Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, David Plouffe, and his chief of staff, William M. Daley, want him to maintain a pragmatic strategy of appealing to independent voters by advocating ideas that can pass Congress, even if they may not have much economic impact.

This is almost comically inept advice. First, leaving the unemployment needle essentially pegged to "frightful" will scarcely appeal to independent voters, or anyone else. This "strategy" bolsters Obama's reelection prospects ... how? Second, nothing Obama proposes is going to pass the House. Come on, David and Bill, let's spell it together: n-o-t-h-i-n-g.

Which leads to observation Number Three. Some loyal Obamians are hustling the fallacy that a small, timid presidential proposal that can't pass the House is somehow more pragmatic than a big, bold proposal that can't the House. Here we surpass "almost" and unmistakably reach comical ineptitude's saturation point. The only political difference between the two -- the small and the big -- is that a weary, disgusted electorate would yawn at the first but greet the second with enthusiasm. Granted, the degree of public enthusiasm might be less than what's strategically anticipated, but, on any given day, any enthusiasm beats the hell out of a yawn.      

Plouffe and Daley are plotting a brilliant presidential campaign all right. For 2012, that of 2008's.

My advice to Obama? Take theirs at your own peril.

Chait's error? He neglects the enormous persuasive power of a stumping Barack Obama, which should be vastly differentiated from George W. Bush's.

Pragmatic audacity

Eugene Robinson joins the chorus:

President Obama’s promised jobs plan needs to be unrealistic and unreasonable, at the very least. If he can crank it all the way up to unimaginable, that would be even better.... The unemployment crisis is so deep and self-perpetuating that only a big, surprising, over-the-top jobs initiative could have real impact....

He needs to demand what’s right, not what the other side is willing to give.

Which in this instance would be supremely pragmatic.

In Obama's first two years his pragmatism dictated the realistic, the reasonable, the imaginable, the rather modest and unsurprising; his judicious balancing acts meant safe and successful arrivals on the other, legislative side. The discretion that marked his pragmatism and defined his victories put him on the road to presidential greatness.

Yet now an infantile House and filibuster-happy Senate have liberated Obama, even if liberation is not what he sought. The caution that once aided his presidency's progress is now a crippling agent of perceived befuddlement and trepidation -- reversible only through pronounced determination and boldness.

It makes little difference that the public's perception might be inaccurate. The pragmatic question is, Is it real? And the inescapable answer is in the affirmative.

Robinson concludes:

We know Obama can be rational, realistic and eminently reasonable. Right now, he needs to be anything but.

I'd quibble with those lines only in the sense that, pragmatically speaking, "right now" Obama must translate the rational, realistic and reasonable into the transcendently audacious, which itself is not necessarily irrational, unrealistic or unreasonable. On occasion, the most audacious maneuver is also the only practical one (short of surrender). This happens to be one of those occasions.

Sure, in playing it more conservatively Obama could still, odds are, eke by in 2012, especially given the opposition's seeming determination to run on a platform of near psychotic indifference to the nation's suffering. FDR faced a similar political choice in 1935. Although he wasn't burdened by Obama's Congress, he was hardly free of scathing critics and fierce opposition. Roosevelt's answer to them -- Roosevelt's choice -- was the Second New Deal, a legislative package (including Social Security) bigger than bolder than any before. He opted for presidential greatness.

Perry's S.S. problem

How could Rick Perry's ultrarightism on Social Security possibly hurt him in the GOP's ultraright primaries? The Romney organization, via the Post's Marc Thiessen, provides the answer:

Romney’s campaign will argue that Perry is against the very idea of Social Security and Medicare, and that he will use Perry’s book to scare seniors in early-primary states with large retiree populations, such as Florida and South Carolina.

It seems to me that Perry has overplayed his (right) hand. Of course Mitt Romney could be wrong, but so far, he's not panicking. I would think the polling on this would be devastating to Perry. Even W. got burned on it.

Did I miss something?

I can't help but think that some pusillanimous editor coerced Paul Krugman into penning today's two final sentences:

[T]he odds are that one of these years the world’s greatest nation will find itself ruled by a party that is aggressively anti-science, indeed anti-knowledge. And, in a time of severe challenges — environmental, economic, and more — that’s a terrifying prospect.

I have now reread those lines three, four, maybe five times, looking for the loophole: the one through which Krugman subtly acknowledges that that's no prospect -- just very recent history. But I can't find it.

The temptation is the unspecified "world's greatest nation." I suppose Krugman could always claim he didn't mean us. Yet that's way, way too much of a stretch. He'd never get away with it, since in the preceding line he references "we" and "next year’s presidential election."

We must be us, right? And that election -- ours?

Hence my suspicion: editorial pusillanimity.

Recidivist conservative blundering

Conservative columnists, in acrobatic service to The Cause, until recently extolled the budget-centric virtues of the Tea Party. Ah, now we're getting back to the real, old-time religion of conservatism, the right's intelligentsia insisted: smaller government, less taxes, the quasi-doctrine that's once again fit to print by unflinching Burkeans. No more of that far-right, Word-thumping, Christian-evangelicalism crap, which was a distracting, 30-year embarrassment. Sure, Tea Partiers are an embarrassment in their own freakish ways, but at least they intensely care only about government debits and credits.

So goodbye metaphysics, hello facts, figures, reason and empiricism. Conservatism could once again engage the left on rational ground.

Yet suddenly there cascaded some distressing sociopolitical research, crowned by Notre Dame's David Campbell and Harvard's Robert Putnam. Those far-right, budget-centric Tea Partiers, so many of whom claimed to be new to politics only because of excessively wet, excessively red ink? Well, not really. In fact, most were  -- are -- just far-right Republican partisans, still thumping the bejesus out of the evangelicalism crap.

Conservative columnists were, in an instant, deprived of their new and gloriously secular allies -- and retethered to the old embarrassments.

What to do? Whistle a bit and act as though nothing has changed. Those conservative columnists, you see, always understood who the Tea Partiers were, hence there's no need to vigorously, publicly sweep their crazy uncles under the carpet. Instead -- go superior: instruct in the most patronizing way those godless, excitable secularists of the left who just don't "get it"; in effect, reframe the debate by condescending to the genuine constitutionalists who merely insist on manning the creaking barricades of church-state separation.

In short, conservative columnists -- those, anyway, who know better -- are recommitting the same, expedient intellectual sins for which they kicked themselves for decades. Circa the dawn of the Reagan era, traditional conservative thinkers of the decidedly temporal bent nervously embraced the rise of the New Right's religionists. In conservatism's electoral reemergence, any allies were welcome. They soon regretted it; for soon they were debating not the virtues of smaller government, but what God thinks about abortion, gays, and some witless 10-year-old's deprivation of solemn prayer before long division.

Some conservatives remain resistant to the bewitching siren of Tea Partyism -- a nasty, far-right strain of ignorant quackery and profound religious bigotry -- most notably, I suppose, Brooks and Sullivan. Most others are again selling out, though, to what they once privately mourned.

Bachmann's bridge

Some critics are decrying Michele Bachmann's advocacy of a federally subsidized, $690-million four-lane bridge from Stillwater, Minn. -- population 20,000 -- to the unincorporated township of Houlton, Wisconsin -- with, and this is no typo, "a population density of 0.00 people per sq. mile" -- as hypocrisy. I must object. It's not hypocrisy. It's groundbreaking stupidity.

For my money (which it is, as well as yours), the project itself is defensible, literally a mere 1/1,000th of Minnesota's bridge construction/repair needs. Build away. Minnesota's Democratic Senators Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken support it, as does Wisconsin's Senator Herb Kohl, and his Republican colleague, Ron Johnson. They, along with Michele Bachmann, are only doing their jobs: gunning for as many federal quail as a sorryass federal budget will release. Hypocrisy? Merely another word for "politics."

Bachmann's timing, however, leaves much to amusement. To be scurrying from Iowa to South Carolina to Iowa to South Carolina -- the four corners of real America -- in a denunciation-tour of the dystopian evils of, say, new or passable bridges, courtesy federal tax dollars, is inexpressibly imbecilic. Even for Michele Bachmann.

Irene Perry

Q: How can a rabble-rousing, unibrow populist take a hurricane-force surge in the polls and almost instantly sap its power?

A: By talking like Rick Perry. 

First a few brief, and, if one is a right-wing populist, annoying facts, as cited in 2009 testimony before Congress by the Economic Policy Institute's John Irons:

Due to growing income inequality, the share of earnings above the [Social Security tax] cap has risen from 10 percent in 1982 to over 16 percent in 2006. This is because incomes have grown strongly at the top while middle incomes have stagnated.

This trend is expected to continue, meaning that a growing share of earnings will remain outside the tax base....

[F]ully eliminating the cap on taxable earnings would be sufficient to fully close the projected shortfall.

Now for the decidedly unfolksy, tornadic stupidity of Gov. Perry, as repeated last week in Iowa:

It is a Ponzi scheme for these young people. The idea that they're working and paying into Social Security today, that the current program is going to be there for them, is a lie. It is a monstrous lie on this generation, and we can't do that to them.

All that Perry omitted was, "And your little dog, too."

Sorry for mixing my meteorological metaphors. But, especially this weekend, when pondering the politically self-destructive likes of a Rick Perry, all manner of quickly exhaustible storms leap helplessly to mind.

This guy is dumber than we thought.

There they go again

That damn meddling federal government. One of its apparatchiks just appeared on MSNBC to announce that a federal phone bank would be up and running to inform concerned family members about the welfare of those meteorologically targeted.

Is there no end to such oppression?

Ideological revanchism

You can do one of two things to experience the sheer imbecility of the GOP's weekly address. You can read it, or you can jump in your time machine and set course for ca. 1928.

Here's Sen. Dean Heller of Nevada, loyal partisan of the Hoover-McConnell administration:

Let’s pass a balanced budget amendment to force the federal government to live within its means, repeal the president’s small business killing Health Care law, open up our country to energy exploration, and reverse the regulations that are tying the hands of entrepreneurs across America.

That's their platform, folks: ideological revanchism. And why not? It worked out so well before.

Continuing fallout

The ignominious Munich debt-ceiling accord is proving relentless in its fallout. From Pew Research:

There ... has been a substantial erosion of Obama’s leadership image. Since May ... the percentage viewing Obama as a strong leader has declined from 58% to 49%.

That's the overall picture, but neither have independents -- those mushy middlers who reportedly prefer virtually any compromise over rational governance -- been impressed:

Today, more say Obama is not a strong leader than say he is (51% vs. 44%); in May, that balance was reversed (52% strong leader, 41% not strong).

The undeniable variable in these downward shifts was of course the debt deal, or rather the White House's steady retreats and incremental surrenders leading up to the debt deal. They took a devastating toll on the all-important intangibility of presidential image.

We'd all like to forget the whole wretched, bloody affair; the problem is, the electorate hasn't. The debt negotiations have left an ugly and noticeable scar.

All of which reinforces the political thesis that in next month's economic proposals, President Obama -- in what you might call Watershed II, the sequel -- should go big. He simply will not erode or erase the ill-destined numbers above by serving up a platter of weak remedies and half measures. No American electorate will ever uniformly agree on the wisdom of any set of bold economic proposals, yet a significant -- and what's better, an expanding -- proportion will recognize and duly admire that inestimable quality of presidential leadership that went into it.

Immediately to follow, naturally, would be a marketing blitzkrieg of press conferences and national touring, which just as naturally would sell nothing to do-nothing congressional Republicans. Whether Obama's proposals are big and bold, or small and meek, they'll go nowhere. So be it. Of that, too, voters will take note. Yet they might as well take note of presidential boldness -- not presidential meekness -- denied.