PMC Commentary

From the gloom, a bright light

The darker the assessments, the brighter the future. That's about all I can fathom from David Brooks' column today, which careens from the keenly disputable ("Nationally, the events of 2009 and 2010 moved voters to the right") to the incontestably yawn-worthy ("Within the Republican Party, the rightward shift has been even more vehement") to the partially laughable ("yes, it is time to take Perry seriously as a Republican nominee and even as a potential president").

In brief, a colossal misreading of the 2012 American electorate, which you're as welcome to find as disputable, yawning or laughable as I find Brooks' assessments.

Voters moved to the right in 2010? No, although the election moved rightward. In classic, midterm voter-turnout style, older, energized, more conservative whites flocked to the polls while the Democratic coalition, such as it was, stayed home to watch cable-news reports on just how devastating the election would be for Democrats. That was no electoral "move"; in its magnitude, just an embarrassment.

As for the GOP's "rightward shift," well, true and obvious enough, although the party is running out of room.

And that's what makes Brooks' final contention -- "it is time to take Perry seriously as a Republican nominee and even as a potential president" -- laughable. Not the "nominee" part, since that eventuality lies well within the GOP's advancing dementia. But the presidential part? Here, even Brooks constructs a future escape hatch: "Potential -- I wrote potential president." Given a native-born status and physical age of 35, who the hell isn't?

Thus the brightness from all this gloom. Rick Perry is hopelessly captive of a far, far-right narrative that is hopelessly out of sync with the mainstream electorate's philosophical temperament. And in presidential elections, that electorate does tend to turn out, especially if it spies a hopelessly ideological madman or moron "potentially" at the helm.

I swear, I almost feel sorry for Mitt Romney, who reminds me of what early 19th-century pol John Randolph remarked of a colleague: "He is a man of splendid abilities, but utterly corrupt. Like rotten mackerel by moonlight, he shines and stinks." Romney's shining, splendid abilities, it seems to me, are that he's managed to retain -- through a kind of awe-inspiring, opportunistic corruption -- a relatively high ranking within the swirling stench of the rotting GOP. He's merely flipping as monumental flopping requires. Sure it's pathetic, but in its own, Darwinian way, rather admirable, too.    

And from it all, as Brooks notes, "Romney might be able to beat back the Perry surge." That I take seriously, because Romney is a man of bottomless resourcefulness and, like his opponent Perry, absolutely no scruples. But that "it’s time [for anyone but Romney] to take Perry seriously," I take seriously not at all.

Rove's gratifying speculation

"[I]t is a sign of enormous thin skin" -- and when I start agreeing with Karl Rove, possibly a seething, scalding sign of the End Times -- "that if we speculate about [Sarah Palin] she gets upset. And I suspect if we didn't speculate about her she'd be upset."

That, as you likely already know, is what the tridented Rove said (and just to savor pseudoconservatism's internal brawling a bit more, I wish point out that he said "thin skin" twice) on Fox News yesterday.

"How's she going to react if she does get into the campaign and gets the scrutiny that every presidential candidate does get? I mean, that's not going to be a pretty sight," added Rove. And he could never add too much.

Yet, regrettably, the thin-skinned Palin will not, of course, be joining her soulmated absurdities on the campaign trail. And the future loss of Rove's additional observations on this narcissistic harpy of unprecedented preposterousness only deepens our regret.

The Popguns of August

Care to know how home-district, town-hall pressure is influencing GOP congressmen?

Freshman Paul Gosar of Arizona says "They’re very angry. They want to get back to work and they feel government is in the way with rules and regulations." Jobs? Why, House Republicans have been "talking about jobs from Day One." How? Gosar "cit[ed] efforts to roll back regulations and lower deficits."

Rick Berg, another freshman, this one from North Dakota, says his state "lowered its unemployment rate to 3.2 percent by balancing its budget and creating a pro-business environment." No mention of North Dakota "enjoying an oil boom in the western part of the state," which "created a $1 billion state budget surplus"; nor did Berg note that "federal agriculture subsidies add nearly $1 billion a year."

You probably saw on the news the delicious town-hall atrocities experienced by Steve Chabot in Avondale, Ohio. His finger-on-democracy's-pulse reaction? "He said Think Progress ... organized the protest." So that, we should all dismiss. Rather, in classic Gosarian style, "he says most constituents are upset about federal regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration as well as new rules established by the healthcare reform and Wall Street reform legislation passed in 2010." (All italics mine.)

Sure, you've seen them, mostly the unemployed homeless, muttering indignantly about how the Occupational Safety and Health Administration was always out to get them.

And veteran Republican Tim Johnson, to whom I've personally written to implore that he not vote with his party regarding barbaric cuts to cancer research (my wife suffers from the pancreatic form) -- and from whom I never received a response; Johnson barbarically voted right along with his party -- said "I’m trying to show people that I’m different, that I listen and don’t engage in a lot of partisanship."

Yes, no doubt September's gaggle of these swindling blackguards will be much, much different from July's.

Missing the mark

E.J. Dionne on the implacable GOP, the lessons of Libya, and presidential leadership:

[Obama] needs to learn the difference between middle-ground policies, which flow from his natural instincts, and soggy, incoherent compromises with opponents who will say he’s wrong no matter what happens....

[He] should remember that steady moderation is very different from continually looking around to see if he can accommodate opponents who won’t be happy until he’s back teaching law school.

Dionne makes an exquisite, but in my opinion flawed, distinction.

I'm deeply skeptical of the concept of an Obama who looks around to accommodate the unaccommodating among the GOP, which is to say, the GOP. If anyone appreciates the cynical depths of congressional Republicans, it is the serially battered target of their studied hostility.

My objection arises from a different presidential accommodation, one that is staggeringly manifest to all observers: There's simply nothing Obama won't do to attract independent voters.

Now that in itself is scarcely shocking; most every president hews to the middle in policy and then plants himself there for reelection, since it is muddled swing voters who typically decide the outcome. And, once again, no surprise, it will be swing voters who decide 2012. In this go-around, however, I think the White House is misreading independents' customary degree of muddlement.

In poll after poll, registered independents are virtually indistinguishable from Democrats (even the wicked, big-government, socialistic, post- and anti-colonial leftist ones) in their expressed disgust of what's become the rancid, political status quo -- from Washington's timidity in job creation to Washington's fear of enacting substantial revenue hikes to Washington's seeming readiness to puncture holes in social safety nets -- yet the White House persists in overtures to more center-right, independent conventionalities.

Again, I would challenge the interpretation that Obama is trying to "accommodate opponents." He is, however, trying to accommodate an imaginary middle -- a traditionally quasi-conservative middle that his political advisors cut their teeth on in the inexact science of electoral politics, yet currently is in philosophical transition, to the left.

In short, I would say that Obama is missing the mark.

The offensive senator from Florida

I gather Marco Rubio has read Newt's book.

The 20th century "was not a time of decline for America -- it was the American Century," said the senator in a speech at the Reagan Library. "We built here the richest, most prosperous nation in the history of the world."

Therefore, according to Rubio (and Gingrich et al), we destroyed ourselves. 

Except for the Reagan Administration, to be quite frank, both Republicans and Democrats established a role for government in America that said yes we will have a free economy, but we will also have a strong government, which through regulations and taxes will control the free economy, and through a series of government programs, will take care of those in our society who are falling behind....

These programs weakened us as a people. You see, almost forever, it was institutions in society that assumed the role of taking care of one another. If someone was sick in your family, you took care of them. If a neighbor met misfortune, you took care of them. You saved for your retirement and your future because you had to. We took these things upon ourselves in our communities, our families, and our homes, and our churches and our synagogues. But all that changed when the government began to assume those responsibilities. All of a sudden, for an increasing number of people in our nation, it was no longer necessary to worry about saving for security because that was the government's job.

This is offensive, in addition to being egregiously bad history.

Prior to the Great Crash and ensuing Great Depression, it's true that preexisting social institutions did indeed "[assume] the role of taking care of one another." Let's dismiss for a moment that it was capitalism's rapacity, in the absence of government oversight, that largely brought about the aforementioned crashing depression: aside from no one minding Wall Street, productive businesses squeezed the wages of workers so tight in the 1920s that inventories began swelling well before the crash; few workers earned the money it took to buy available goods. But it's also true that once the bad times arrived, those honored social institutions, which the ahistorical Floridian admires so much, quickly exhausted their resources in attempts to keep pace with the nation's collapse. Families, neighbors, religious and fraternal organizations, benefit societies -- all such financial accounts fast went as dry as Prohibition.

Had Roosevelt's New Deal not intervened to relieve the nation's suffering, in historical fact there existed a very real chance that the government of the United States would have been overthrown. People were that desperate, and any extremism that promised relief was that tempting. Roosevelt saved capitalism by regulating and taming it. And he saved the country by providing jobs and some measure of social security, when no others could.  

For far-right, tea-partying pols to simply reinvent history for ideological comfort and political bamboozlement is just plain offensive.

Unexceptional Newt

Real historian Michael Kazin on 'historian' Newt Gingrich:

I have just completed his latest book of history: A Nation Like No Other: Why American Exceptionalism Matters. And I can say, with absolute confidence, that it may be the most inaccurate, least intellectual book about our nation’s past I have ever read.

I myself possess no such stamina.

The sadder part is that Gingrich will continue to be hailed as a conservative intellectual -- and no mass of Newtonian drivel can or will destroy that.

Choosing between two realities

Vice-President Biden's former chief economist, Jared Bernstein, on what President Obama should offer up in September, beginning with the known knowns:

[An] extension of the payroll tax holiday and unemployment benefits. Those are already in the system, but they expire at the end of this year, and to let them do so would create a dangerous air pocket that we must avoid at all costs....

Then, he should roll out a campaign for a national infrastructure program to repair, retrofit, and modernize the nation’s public schools called FAST!—Fix America’s Schools Today. It’s got important advantages over the president’s infrastructure bank idea; it’s highly visible, can be stood up faster, and it’s more labor intensive, too. Finally, he should tout clean energy investments, as he did recently in Michigan, stressing the opportunities these investments create by replacing contracting industries with new, expanding ones.

I would urge more. Bernstein is merely trying to be realistic, but the other and quite grim reality is that one-third of our national government is controlled by ruthless political cutthroats who give not one damn for the welfare of the American worker. Bernstein estimates the odds of "the renewal of the payroll tax cut at above 50 percent, and the unemployment insurance extension only slightly below half," and here he's being a generous handicapper. I'd put the odds of any House movement on any Obama proposal at roughly equivalent to those of Sarah Palin reading a briefing book.

So why not go genuinely big? The House can just as mindlessly reject (and the Senate can just as mindlessly filibuster) large-scale improvements to roads, bridges, sewer systems and dams, as well as a massive rescue of states to retain teachers and cops and firefighters, as it can mindlessly reject school repairs. And the more rejections, the greater the contrast between a bold, visionary president and horse-and-buggy barbarians. 

Obama could also go populist and propose an earlier repeal of Bush's madly unpopular upper-end tax cuts. He could propose a one-time, emergency surcharge on obscene incomes. He could propose a sizable trimming of the nation's healthcare costs through a lowering of the Medicare eligibility age. He could declare victory in Afghanistan.

All of which congressional Republicans would loudly denounce with charateristically lunatic abandon, just as they will even the most modest of proposals. The only difference is that one set of proposals -- Bernstein's set -- says footnote to history, while the second set has "historic" written all over it. And decisive reelection.

It's the demographics, stupid

Rick Perry may be wowing the Fed-haters and science-loathers and soaring to the top of the pseudoconservative madness charts, but he's underimpressing and flatlining elsewhere. That's the finding, anyway, from Public Policy Polling, which shows him losing nationally to Obama by 6 points (roughly commensurate with McCain's 2008 loss). Even more delicious: "independents view [Perry] negatively already by an almost 2:1 margin, 29/55." Ouch.

Against Romney, it's a tie. Yes, yes, it's way early and all that, but considering the 9-percent-plus unemployment rate, to find a sitting black Democratic president evenly matched with the opposition's nominal frontrunner -- a (or rather another) self-professed job-creator extraordinaire -- is rather astonishing.

What's more, one sees beyond the GOP's present predicaments and beholds its gloomy future:

One big reason Obama's doing pretty well in these match ups is the Hispanic vote. Exit polls in 2008 showed him winning it by a 36 point margin over McCain but he builds on that in all of these match ups with a 37 point advantage over Romney at 66-29, a 46 point one over Perry at 72-26.... This is a good example of what Republican strategist Mike Murphy has described as the economics vs. demographics tension for next year's election. The economy could sink Obama but at the same time an ever growing expanding Hispanic vote that he wins by a huge margin could be enough to let him eek out a second term.

The goddamn nerve

Brian Hook, a former special assistant to President George W. Bush and adviser to Tim Pawlenty’s campaign(!), previews the universal party line on Libya and President Obama:

We need to hold Obama responsible for a Libya policy that not only weakened NATO but prolonged the war and the bloodshed.

Anyone who knows anything about the history of the greatest alliance ever conceived -- WWII's Allied command -- also knows it was a hornet's nest of petty jealousies, enormous egos and persistently competing national demands, some of which may even have prolonged the war and its bloodshed; all of which Dwight D. Eisenhower somehow held together for the ultimate and greater good. 

It wasn't perfect. Oh, and scarcely a Republican pol of that era had the goddamn nerve to publicly criticize any of it.

The secularists are being mean again

Michael Gerson, the WaPo columnist who was President W.'s chief fiction writer, is acutely distressed to find that the new, religious, far right of the Republican Party -- the Tea Party -- is nothing more than the old, religious, far right of the Republican Party. He's distressed because the immense embarrassment of those evangelical crackpots of political yesteryear had largely been swept from the public arena by the rise of the fiscally obsessed -- again, the Tea Party. But alas, that rise was no ideological divergence; only a mutation. Or a ruse, if you will.

Gerson does his speechwriting best to obfuscate (Lordy lord, how that must take him back to his creative days in the Bush White House). He scoffs: "Now the heroes of the Tea Party movement, it turns out, are also closet theocrats." Then he scoffs some more, principally noting the fiery, ungodly, unquestionably biased findings of Newsweek's Michelle Goldberg and Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker (the mere mention of that publication should explain all for the True Believers, on both sides).

What Gerson neglects to reference, however, is the solid, social science research of David Campbell and Robert Putnam, published recently in the NY Times:

Next to being a Republican, the strongest predictor of being a Tea Party supporter today was a desire, back in 2006, to see religion play a prominent role in politics. And Tea Partiers continue to hold these views: they seek "deeply religious" elected officials, approve of religious leaders’ engaging in politics and want religion brought into political debates. The Tea Party’s generals may say their overriding concern is a smaller government, but not their rank and file, who are more concerned about putting God in government.

Gerson's final scoff is at secularists, those poor intellectuals who dare to deploy only their known intellects.

[S]ecularism shows a remarkable lack of self-consciousness. Like any ideology, this one has philosophic roots that are subject to argument. Yet secularists often assume their view is the definition of neutrality and thus deserves a privileged public place. The argument that religion is fundamentally illiberal thus provides an excuse to treat it illiberally.

We are first rather shocked to learn that secularism is an "ideology." But no matter, the shock doesn't last, because the label is little more than table-table humbug. We then learn that we not only "assume [our] view is the definition of neutrality," but that it "deserves a privileged public place." Now that, I confess, upsets me. It upsets because here I sit, the very model of neutrality, snug in a privileged place, and I don't even know what in hell Gerson is talking about. What a waste of privilege.

Finally we come to what really bugs Gerson: Because we -- the secular enemy -- dismiss ancient mythologies as guidebooks to good governance, we are snobs and cruel elitists and insufferable asses. In short, we're constitutional republicans, just as the U.S. Constitution advises.

Gerson himself concedes that "religion is fundamentally illiberal." Yet that we're glad to suffer and suffer silently as long as religion remains fundamentally private.

As for Gerson's charge that secularists treat religionists "illiberally," I would point him to law professor Paul Horwitz's 5 August op-ed. In effect what Gerson demands is a double standard, and, writes Horwitz, it "needs to end. If religion can’t be forbidden in our public debates, even for elected officials, neither should it be immune from public criticism."

And public criticism, I would add, gets rough. Just ask the secularists, who since the Age of McCarthy have been vilified and denounced by quaint religionists as godless, unAmerican garbage. 

Gobsmacking

One would think these grapes would be so sour they'd choke on them. But it ain't the case. Aside from -- but sitting with -- the Senate twins, here, in the National Review, is the laughable Elliott Abrams:

Had the White House acted sooner and more resolutely Qaddafi could have been brought down sooner, and with fewer Libyan deaths. Moreover, the lingering damage to NATO could have been avoided.

Hence the necessary invention of the word, "gobsmacking."

Another weakly standard glorification

The Weekly Standard does its saccharine best at portraying a rail-splitting, tail-gunning Paul Ryan as the Man Who Won't Be King, because he's just too blindingly virtuous.

Before proceeding, grab a barf bag ... Got it? OK. Now read on:

For Ryan, being president has never been a lifelong ambition. His consideration of a presidential bid came not because of any desire to be president and, in many respects, came in spite of his inclinations against one....

In the end, Paul Ryan is a conviction politician. Although he’s known for being cerebral, he makes most of his decisions by listening to his gut. The same instincts that told him to push forward with entitlement reform in the House Republican budget last spring are telling him to take a pass on the presidential race.

So in his deficit-increasing deficit-reduction plan, it wasn't really Ryan's half-baked cerebellum or cockamamie ideology that told him to further liberate plutocrats and exacerbate seniors' burdens. It was his "conviction" talking -- in this case, a distinction from entrenched, inexorable ideology that escapes me. Yet it's comforting, is it not, to learn that the House Budget Committee chairman suppresses his intellect when dealing with all those fussy numbers and just goes with his gut. (True, yesterday I referenced the use of instinct in political campaigning -- but on budgets?)

Was that, however, what Ryan was really doing when, as the Weekly Standard concedes, he "consulted with top Republicans, including Karl Rove and Frank Luntz, as he contemplated his political future"?

Something a trifle more than professional instinct was in play here, I imagine. Rove, no doubt, told Ryan he's out of his reactionary mind if he thinks his attempted assassination of Medicare is a resplendent rap sheet for the White House, and Luntz let him know that assorted focus groups have uniformly cast him as the Second Coming of Beelzebub.

Yet the Weekly Standard's deification of Ryan and its ideological distortion of all known facts proceed. Because that's what the Weekly Standard does.

Magical phenomena

Major world events such as the Libyan development just sort of happen; they're kinda disembodied happenings -- when Obama's involved:

"It is my hope that Libya will now move toward a representative form of government that supports freedom, human rights, and the rule of law," said Mitt Romney, not mentioning the president.

"The crumbling of Muammar Ghadafi’s reign, a violent, repressive dictatorship with a history of terrorism, is cause for cautious celebration," said Rick Perry, not mentioning the president.

And I liked this: "[O]ther candidates have been more muted."

Now they're for it

From June 3:

The House rebuked President Obama's decision to intervene in Libya in March without consent from Congress ... in a 268-145 vote [of whom 223 were Republicans].

Today, well ...

Rep. Ben Quayle (R-Ariz.): "The fall of the Gaddafi regime would be a victory for freedom."

Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.): "Libyan rebels control green square. Let us pray for a peaceful formation of a representative government."

More supportive "tweets" -- assuredly another majority -- to follow.

President Obama's successful intervention in Libya really does give cause to wonder if Congress will ever again be relevant in foreign affairs.

Going big and nasty

E.J. Dionne rightly, I think, superimposes another meaning of "options":

President Obama has only one option as he ponders a world economy teetering on the edge: He needs to go big, go long and go global.... Neither history nor the voters will be kind to him if he lets caution and political calculation get in the way.

Dionne's final, conditional phrase introduces the vast and essential difference between 2008 and 2012. Then, Obamian caution was a pragmatic plus in the pursuit of independent voters weary of eight disastrously radical years; now -- especially in the aftermaths of the debt-ceiling humiliation and Washington's late-summer vacations, contrasted with millions languishing in involuntary idleness -- presidential caution could be an electoral killer.

Were I to differ with Dionne's analysis, it would be in separating "caution and political calculation," both of which he sees as "getting in the way" of doing the singularly smart thing: i.e., going big. In my view, political calculation actually militates against caution: i.e., in 2012 independent voters -- not to mention the Democratic base -- will be neither enchanted nor enticed by half-way measures in either policy or rhetoric.

I confess, much of my opinion is founded on intestinal instinct -- on the kind of visceral antennae one grows from immersions in reading American political history. That's scarcely unique, of course. Dionne does the same, as do Obama and his political advisers, as the latter struggle to see the bigger picture while sitting amidst mounds of polling snapshots. And my instinct says this: Should they choose caution through calculation they'll live to regret it, and be forced to change strategic course at the eleventh hour.

The precise timing of that hour is, for now, unforeseeable; one often doesn't perceive lateness until it's too late. But I can tell you what it will look like: higher and higher negatives, which at some vague point will become irreversible. In politics there's no maneuver more difficult than reversing negative perceptions (just ask Sarah Palin). Indeed, it's virtually impossible.

And such potential negativity on Obama's side will arrive only through ... caution. The electorate is primed for an immense brawl -- a brawl over big ideas, over big plans, over the broadest nation-defining courses possible. Whoever punches first and hardest will win, because the negatives landed against the opposition will not only wound but scar -- and entrench.

Thus Obama's wisest strategic course seems doubly dictated: Go big in September, as Dionne advises, but in addition he must shift and redirect his rhetorical firepower against Republicans pointedly, not Congress in general. In '48 Harry Truman could smartly and ruthlessly molest the universality of a "do-nothing Congress," only because both houses were enemy-occupied. By 1949, still-President Truman possessed a 10-seat Senate majority and a 92-seat advantage in the House, only because, by late '48, in the electorate's mind the "enemy" was anyone whose name was preceded by an "R."

I appreciate that Obama resists -- intellectually and temperamentally -- this manner of old-style politics. In 2009 and 2010 he gave his updated version a try, with smashing success. But in 2011, it's eating him alive. Later this year and next, he'd be well advised to go traditional, meaning FDR big and Truman nasty -- really nasty. 

Will he? My mental jury is still out on the "big" thing, but we'll see soon enough. Yet that ultimately he'll go nasty I have no doubt whatsoever. Because his enemies won't give him a choice.