PMC Commentary

The Olbermann Factor

I once saw an interview with the actor James Cagney who, in relating his personal background and its influences, described his father as "a good man going downhill, fast." It seemed his dad waged a daily war with alcoholism, and every day, he lost. The quoted phrase is not from a transcript, just a faulty memory, so don't quote me on it.

At any rate, the accuracy of my memory is immaterial in this instance; the point being, the above phrase flashed relevantly to mind when I read of Keith Olbermann's latest firing-tamtrum-resignation-quarrel-banishment. When I would watch him on MSNBC, Olbermann seemed to be fighting a daily battle for humanity -- ours, and to an uncomfortably and increasingly noticeable extent, his. He had a passion for seeing that we received truth, justice and the real American Way in his broadcasts, even if he had to mangle the contours of good journalism to deliver them.

Like the Cagney quote, I can offer only from rough memory the sad escalation of Olbermann's editorial tabloidism, in which the actual story would often substantively depart from the program's sensationalist headline; and those "special comments" by Olbermann, staged as colorized imitations of Edward R. Murrow celluloids, were wretchedly histrionic and unprofessionally overwrought. In time, I found myself not only cringing at their promotional mention, but seeking refuge elsewhere, anywhere, upon their presentation.

Olbermann, I would think to myself, is better than this. He is manifestly a "good man," clearly in possession of good intentions, but his on-air persona appears to be approaching a kind of reverse-Oscar Wildean mutation: his core, internal goodness is there, plain to intuit, but his pursuit of 'the Cause' is rendering him hideously self-righteous.

In my view, the Cause's virtues speak for themselves when presented straightforwardly and undramatically; but whether out of a need for greater celebrity or a growing conviction that booming passion trumps quiet reason, Olbermann took the meretriciously theatrical route.

I guess it became a habit. A daily, downhill habit.

I don't know. Perhaps it is, in a way, self-righteous of me to point out others' self-righteousness. But if there's any one quality among contemporary progressives -- personified acutely by Keith Olbermann -- that turns me off with an excruciating thud, it's the immediately aforementioned one.

Biden on Biden

Byron York relates this Joe Biden vignette with an air of thumping disapproval (York almost laughably calls it Biden's "frank assessment of his career"), but it's the sort of thing I find endearing about the vice president:

"I never had an interest in being a mayor 'cause that's a real job. You have to produce," said Biden last night, in Chicago, at a Democratic fundraiser. "That's why I was able to be a senator for 36 years."

Now who wouldn't find that touchingly self-effacing and damn funny, as well as a rather suggestive evaluation of the United States Senate? Right-wing hacks, that's who.

Desperation defined

How can we know the economy is on an irreversible upswing? Must we really plow through mountains of data and reams of business journals and thousands of Wonkblog's words?  

No, no, no. Not at all. We only need know that Mitt Romney is now aiming his gaffe-loaded blunderbuss at President Obama's foreign policy -- the latter's real Achilles' heel.

Poor Mitt, for whom as things keep getting better, they only get worse.

Tom DeLay, liberal Republican

If any dispositive evidence of modern conservatism's flight into progressive madness was still needed, the Wall Street Journal's editorial on Paul Ryan's budget -- "the only serious governing document in town" -- should suffice. It seems, according to the Journal, that the GOP's Nihilist Revolution is but inches away, though, regrettably, inches away it still is:

One bad sign was a no vote from Denny Rehberg, who is running for Senate in Montana this year against Democrat Jon Tester. Mr. Rehberg thinks he's inoculating himself on Medicare, and he even issued a press release saying "I simply refuse to gamble with something as important as Medicare." The real gamble is to continue on the current path that will ruin Medicare, and Mr. Rehberg's vote suggests he's from the remaindered pile of the GOP's Tom DeLay status-quo wing.

Back in the day -- that of the Gingrich Revolution, father of the Nihilist Revolution and spawn of the Reagan Revolution -- Mr. DeLay was about as "status quo" as Newt himself. Indeed, DeLay was so ideologically committed to rolling back America's civilized odometer, he frothed and fulminated himself straight into a felony conviction. Now that's dedication.

Yet, though devotedly felonious he was, DeLay wasn't crazy -- or at least he wasn't crazy enough to advocate Medicare's demolition. That ideological tumor of inspired madness awaited Stage III, or the third generation (see above), of contemporary conservatism's metastasis: the ill-schooled, ill-mannered, ill-tempered tea party, a ghoulish phenomenon of ghastly ignorance triggered by the historic election of an altogether accomplished black man.

The resulting panic that rippled throughout the charmless herd of the old radical right -- i.e., the new tea party -- has in all probability yet to attain its outermost extremism. The WSJ's relegation of Tom DeLay to the derogatory status of liberal or moderate Republicanism is suggestive enough of the GOP's ideological ballooning process; yet implosion likely won't come until a collapse is forced through electoral puncture.

And God bless him, Paul Ryan is providing the pin.

Verrilli's struggle

Andrew Sullivan points to a delicious GQ article by former White House spokesman Reid Cherlin:

The consensus seems to be that we should crap on Solicitor General Don Verrilli for struggling to defend the individual mandate....

It would have been easy for Verrilli--or any of us--to explain single-payer health care. "Look," we could have said, "the government is paying for everyone to have coverage." End of story. But single-payer is not what our brilliant, world-leading political system gave us. What it gave us is essentially a halfsy--an extraordinarily confusing patchwork in which some novel legislative mechanisms are used to induce individuals, businesses, insurance companies, and states into doing things that add up to concrete good.

Why did it go down that way? In part because lawmakers are essentially shortsighted, self-serving, and scared of their own shadow. But there's a bigger problem: health care as a system is incredibly complicated, and also incredibly scary and off-putting for voters to think about--which is the reason most people never want to talk about it or learn about it in the first place.

And which, of course, is why Obamacare has such a narrow political base; "Which is why," notes Sullivan, "one possible end-result of all this would be a stronger argument for a simple, constitutional single-payer system."

It was old-school conservatives who once took the philosophical lead in warning of the bushwhacking law of unintended consequences. The contemporary crop may soon, and rather rudely, be reintroduced to the old wisdom.

I can't be a hamster in a wheel

I would launch a Romney gaffes watch, but I haven't the same amount of time and energy for commenting on them as Mitt seems to have for making them.

(This guy has run for office before, right? Or, like Ross Perot, did he just decide to start with the U.S. presidency?)

Go figure

This headline, from The Hill, is one of the more peculiar headlines I've ever seen: "Ryan budget plan poised to pass House, giving GOP needed boost."

"... demonstrating GOP unity," maybe, but giving the party a "needed boost"? Pray tell, what species of interpretive critter is that?

The headline pre-announces, or at least strongly suggests, the electorate's embrace, as Robert Reich notes elsewhere, of giving "the wealthiest Americans an average tax cut of at least $150,000 a year," of sparing defense spending, of doing little to cut the deficit, of gutting Medicare, of slashing the food stamp program and Pell grants and "scores of other programs that now help middle-income and the poor," and of "carv[ing] an additional $19 billion out of next year’s 'discretionary' spending over and above what Democrats agreed to last year."

Now, it may be that the electorate will embrace precisely that, if Reason takes another holiday, as it did in 2010. The virtuosity of Republican pols when it comes to crafting disinformation and befuddlement campaigns is, let's admit it, just downright, paradigmatically awe-inspiring. Since about 1980, immense swaths of the American electorate have possessed little idea of what they're actually voting for, thanks to the Machiavellian scheming of the GOP's Atwater, Luntz & Associates.

But, one never knows. President Obama is one helluva campaigner with a prodigious knack for selling otherwise commonly embraceable American pragmatism, and Democratic pols have on occasion of late evinced some detectable ability to speak plain English, on matters like House budgets that would kill off Medicare. These are, as I have noted repeatedly and perhaps too confidently, encouraging signposts to November's crucible.

All of which throws into real question any headline that marries the "Ryan budget plan" to a "boost."

Waiting for Götterdämmerung

Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress:

If this court overturns the individual mandate, it will galvanize Democrats to use the courts as a campaign issue. The idea that we would have gone through Bush v. Gore, Citizens United and now this.

A computer sophisticated enough to calculate the infinitely unlikely odds of that happening has yet to be invented. The Court's striking down of the individual mandate would be exasperating, indeed infuriating, for Democrats. But to fashion, in whole or in part, an electoral campaign in a presidential year around a recondite anti-Court theme would be a colossal misstep, even for Democrats. No matter how infelicitous, comparisons inevitably would be made by Republicans to FDR's calamitous "Court packing" plan of '37 -- one of Roosevelt's relatively few but exceptionally ill-conceived political blunders.

At best, scattered reminders of a president's judicial-appointment power should come into play, but a resentment-dripping campaign by one branch (or two) of government against the federal judiciary would only compel a public reception imbued with boundless puzzlement, immeasurable indifference, or classically uninformed hostility. The American electorate's famed subliteracy has managed to interpret the individual mandate as monstrously unconstitutional; let's forbid all thought of what it could do with a public relitigation of "ObamaCare" or some byzantine debate over the legal concept of "judicial review."  

What President Obama & Democrats could make clear is that "judicial activism" apparently means -- Whatever the hell conservatives say it means. This morning, E.J. Dionne says it for them:

[If] conservative justices ... strike down or cripple the health-care law ... [then the] court that gave us Bush v. Gore and Citizens United will prove conclusively that it sees no limits on its power, no need to defer to those elected to make our laws. A Supreme Court that is supposed to give us justice will instead deliver ideology.

Implicit, perhaps, in Dionne's assessment is an even more painful sentiment, writ quite large: that the Court's ObamaCare decision, along the ideological lines of a Citizens United, looms as a mere epiphenomenon; that is, that our entire governmental system -- from a clueless electorate to once-unthinkable presidential war-making powers to a House overflowing with cretinous schmendricks to a Senate seized by seemingly incurable dysfunction to a judicial branch that legally rules only as it politically votes -- is locked into an inescapable state of doom.

Or, maybe not (insert happy face here). At least we have till the end of June to make that call.

It's all so clear now

"Chaos and fear on disrupted flight as [JetBlue] pilot has apparent breakdown."
--CBS News tease

"[Mitt Romney] likes to fly JetBlue."
--MSNBC's 'Powerwall'

I'll leave it to you to connect these two obviously connectable dots.

We're Number ... 22!

The Post's Harold Meyerson notes that "Research by Julia Isaacs of the Brookings Institution ... has shown that intergenerational mobility in the United States has fallen far below the levels in Germany, Finland, Denmark and other more social democratic nations of Northern Europe" (my emphasis). This reminded me of a poignancy I recently read in Atlantic magazine from book reviewer (of Fairness and Freedom: A History of Two Open Societies, New Zealand and the United States) Benjamin Schwartz. I quote extensively, because the essential point cannot be over-hammered:

New Zealand ... is a particularly successful polity and society. In some ways its achievements seem all the greater when compared with those of the United States. In 2010, its unemployment rate was nearly half of ours. Our economic inequality is the highest of any developed country’s; New Zealand’s hovers much lower on the list. New Zealand ranks first in Transparency International’s global survey of government honesty; the United States ranks 22nd--just ahead of Uruguay! And comparable divergences, Fischer shows, are found "in trends and measures of political partisanship, legislative stalemate, judicial dysfunction, infrastructure decay, home foreclosures, family distress, drug consumption, and social violence." Fischer’s rich cultural analysis leaves little doubt that New Zealand’s achievements are largely rooted in its "highly developed vernacular ideas of fairness," a complex set of values that Kiwis prize and pursue earnestly. The result: by virtually every measure, New Zealand has a more just and decent society than ours--while resorting far less readily to legalistic and legislative remedies.

The more time we spend ballyhooing American exceptionalism, rather than getting down to the yeomanly work of cultivating a society truly exceptional, the farther both slip from our grasp. The Sarah Palins and Mitt Romneys of our national politics would replace our creeping international image as a paper tiger with that of a raging, self-blinded Cyclops; but what's so extraordinary is that so many Americans fall for this self-destructive chest-thumping.

Say it ain't so, Newt

Tragedy has befallen We the People, as well as us the people, the dazzled media, the bedazzled Republican Party, and the would-be dazzling future of orbital colonization. Newt Gingrich is folding his tent, one flap at a time (double entendre intended), reducing both his staff and communion with commoners so as to focus "exclusively," says his communications director, Joe DeSantis, "on what it’ll take to win what we’re going to be calling a big-choice convention in August."

Politico has provided a handy translation, of sorts, of DeSantis' Newtspeak:

There is no real reason to believe that these drastic measures to turn around a flailing campaign can save the former House speaker’s candidacy for a third time.

Here's the profoundly, frankly ffffundamental and deeply grotesque problem: Less Newt = More Mitt. Days, weeks, months more of more Mitt and nothing but Mitt; more Mittling pedestrianism that just can't compete with Newt's come-hither Mephistophelianism; more ... blah. While Newt at least delivered an often entertaining, Thomas Nast caricature of the bloated demagogue, Rick Santorum provides nothing but a graceless piety that wickedly depresses. With the latter being shoved to the sidelines as well, we'll soon be left with absolutely nothing but the mediocrity that is Mitt.

Yesterday the Times' Frank Bruni let loose a professional primal scream, a cry psychologically embedded by the bogeyman Gingrich:

[T]he profusion of cable channels, Web outlets, other news platforms and commentary of all kinds (including this column) rewards flamboyance, histrionics and a crowded field. A brash candidate is never more than a bellow away from three minutes of air time or two paragraphs somewhere. The beast is ravenous, and I don’t mean Newt.

This is of course as true as it is sad. Yet if extenuating circumstances can be pled, they would surely be that the Republican Party gave everyone -- including Republicans -- so little to work with.

We were to witness a primary season of dramatic competition; such was the advertised plan. What we got was a permanent frontrunner and inevitable nominee, even when he was badly trailing the assorted, interchangeable, hebdomadal frontrunners. So, with remarkable assists by Cain, Bachmann et al, we kinda threw our own party. Now the humdinger of our hangover comes: we're waking up, turning over, and gawking straight into the mechanical eyes of Mitt Romney. Yikes!

Shocker: Jen Rubin likes the looks of this, for Romney

Jennifer Rubin can't really be as transcendently simple-minded as she seems to be, but every day she makes another gallant stab at proving that proposition wrong. Today, for example, she argues that "Obamacare" -- brace for intensely ominous dependent clause: the door that opens the barn to any and every exercise of federal power -- would, for the Obama reelection team, be better off laid to rest by the Supreme Court. An administration victory there, writes Rubin, would only electrify Republicans as well as the hostile independent vote, they of unsurpassed Constitutional expertise.

[B]ecause Obamacare is such a political loser, the Republicans are now in an enviable position: If they lose at the court, they win with the public, and if they win at the court, the left is demoralized. So conservatives can just sit back and enjoy the arguments. It’s the ultimate "heads I win, tails you lose" sort of case.

Why liberals would be "demoralized" by Obamacare's legal collapse is a matter left unilluminated by Rubin, and probably for good reason. HHS v. Florida would likely emerge for progressives in many of the same ways as Roe v. Wade emerged as a politically motivating power on the right; it would also open the political door for a speedier transition to Medicare for all, a movement which would of course absolutely delight the liberal collectivity.

And if Obama wins the case? Well, a win is a win. And other than the greatest obviousness -- that chief executives prefer winning to losing -- a win would, as well, drive a stake at least partially through the heart of the right's otherwise interminable chant about unConstitutional Obamacare.

But, opposite these arguments are also the potential realities of an erasure of Obama's signature achievement as president, in addition perhaps to not a few liberals declaring their permanent state of despair against the unending ascendence of right-wing fanaticism. 

In other words, one simply cannot know how this will play out, either way. But to Jennifer Rubin? Not a problem. She has as her guide her stack of mimeographed talking points from the Romney campaign; and what's more, for Jennifer things always seem to play out in a knowing flash of immeasurable, pseudoconservative cleverness -- which comes across, yep, as pathetically simple-minded.

David Brooks' 'Big Sweep'

David Brooks scripts the 'Big Sweep,' and its ideological subplots:

American history can be seen as a series of centralizing events — the Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Progressive Era, the New Deal and the Great Society.

Many liberals have tended to look at this centralizing process as synonymous with modernization — as inevitable and proper. As problems like inequality get bigger, government has to become more centralized to deal with them....

Many conservatives have looked at these inexorable steps toward centralization with growing alarm. Complicated problems, many have argued, are best addressed by local people on the ground.

In general, that's a pretty fair characterization. But we should take deeper note of Brooks' internal reconstruction of history, i.e., his progression of history as a "series of centralizing events" to liberals' view of these events as a "centralizing process" to conservatives' dismay of "these inexorable steps toward centralization."

In liberals, we find a pragmatic acceptance of, essentially, "it is what it is"; there is virtually no daylight between Brooks' designations of American history as "centralizing events" or as a liberally accepted "centralizing process." The Civil War, for instance, was irrepressible, as were larger and (ideally) more efficient central authorities to fight it. The same held true for our global belligerencies, as well as domestic struggles to overcome the socioeconomic injustices of corporate hegemony, the Great Depression, structural poverty and Jim Crow.

My point is that all these "events" and their internal, "centralizing" processes were, as Brooks concedes, inevitable -- which throws his additional characterization of "proper" (as exclusive "liberal" territory) into some question, since inevitability has a way of rendering propriety moot. Mighty is the task of casting Abraham Lincoln as a modern-day liberal: he was, rather, a pragmatic conservative who saw what needed to be done, and did it -- yet that is roughly but strikingly true of the pragmatically liberal FDR, LBJ and Barack Obama, too. (Progressives, that is, those of the Progressive Era, careened all over the ideological road: they were an admixture of millenarianism and pragmatism, which, predictably, produced admixed results.)

Hence what has tied American history together isn't so much centralization or the enduring competition between liberalism and conservatism as the triumph of pragmatism -- which was once a hallmark of conservatism and, since the New Deal, has in general typified liberal thought. It's true that "many conservatives" viewed "inexorable steps toward centralization with growing alarm," but authentic conservatives subordinated their alarm to the inexorabilities.

Within the healthcare debate, Brooks attempts a synthesis: "there has always been a Hamiltonian alternative: centralize the goals, but decentralize the means people take to get there." In short, heave the immense complexities of achieving a less expensive, more efficient healthcare system on a "decentralized premium support model" -- in other words, think RyanCare, which has been critically butchered by just about every conscientious healthcare economist.

Brooks rather dejectedly labels Obama's truer synthesis (near-universality meshed with private health insurance and once-Republican individual mandates) of "ObamaCare," however, as yet "another crucial moment in the move toward centralization." I should hope so, since the challenge of providing every American quality, affordable healthcare is indeed a national challenge -- one sufficiently along the necessary lines of centralized offensives against disunion, depressions, and inequality. In time, it is to be further hoped, Obama's synthesis will morph into the higher synthesis of single-payer.

All that, though, is something of a digression from the larger point to be reinforced: The Rooseveltian-Johnsonian-Obamian liberal is a proud pragmatist, which authentic conservatives once were; and should the two temperamental schools ever join forces, there are -- short of perfecting human nature -- no national challenges we couldn't responsibly meet.

"Obamacare"

Rhetorically I have been using "Obamacare" all along as a GOP political gift, certainly not a pejorative. I never did understand why the White House, until recently, shunned its embrace.

'After my election ...'

In President Obama's overheard comment to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev about missile-defense negotiations -- "After my election, I have more flexibility" -- it is of no small significance that he so casually forwent the subjunctive tense. I should think this was no mental slip on Obama's part; he is, simply, as confident of his own reelection as I am.

Every bloody day on the brutal GOP campaign trail brings Mitt Romney one day closer to a Goldwater-like calamity -- a concreting political reality with which Obama can now reassure foreign leaders. And if I were Mitt? Obama's private confidence would rattle the hell out of me.