PMC Commentary

Asterisk, please

After 12 years, the bad history still hurts. From today's Cillizza column:

In 2000, Bush won 271 electoral votes — one more than he needed to claim the presidency. In eking out that victory, Bush not only carried the South and Plains states with a near sweep but also claimed wins in swing states such as Nevada, Colorado, Missouri and the major electoral-vote prizes of Ohio and Florida.

Bush of course did not win 271 electoral votes, any more than he won the popular vote. His actual electoral count was 246, well below the victorious threshold of 270--and by some unexpired, journalistic statute of limitations, every political column that refers to Bush's 2000 "election" should come with an explanatory, as well as apologetic, asterisk.

As a student of history, I have often wondered how other students of history could rank George W. Bush merely among the five or 10 worst U.S. presidents. In infamy, James Buchanan usually outdoes W. in these ranking polls, as do other antebellum incompetents such as Franklin Pierce, Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore. Yet each of them faced a truly irrepressible conflict; Lincoln could do no better in averting it. Andrew Johnson? A racist drunk, little more, whom Congress crushed in rather short order. Warren Harding? Hell, the best looking president we've ever had, which was about all we wanted in 1920. And Rutherford B. Hayes, our other appointed president, was a veritable Pericles compared to George W. Bush.

Only W. single-handedly grasped a reasonably well-ordered nation by the throat and expended thousands of its lives needlessly, drained its public treasury, and choked all honor from it.

But given that he was unelected, all that deserves at least an asterisk, does it not?

Progressive-conservatism: easily the new majority

It's Monday morning pop quiz time.

Q. After comparing and contrasting Thomas Edsall's citation of exit polling of 2010's election turnout--in which "42 percent of voters identified themselves as conservative; 38 percent said they were moderate; and 20 percent said they were liberal"--with Gallup's 2011 polling of political ideology--which found "41% [of U.S. adults] self-identifying as conservative, 36% as moderate, and 21% as liberal"--what do you get?

(Possible A. Fear, trembling and loathing.)

Gallup's 2011 findings on self-identified ideology differed little--indeed, to a statistically insignificant degree--from previous years, hence one could logically venture that either Gallup's breakdown stood in close accord with actual voting patterns in 2010, or that 2010's actual voting patterns merely conformed to Gallup's traditional breakdown; in other and rather unnerving words, the conclusion might be drawn that the 2010 midterms were less a revolutionary aberration than a right/center-right confirmation.

I've always regarded American sociology as that of a vast, applicable rule complicated by roughly 300-million incorrigible exceptions--and so with political sociology. Naturally, as with any election, there were, in 2010, countless variables in motion: base motivation, candidate selection, special-interest money, the vulnerability of Democratic swing seats; one could go on. Yet there is in political sociology one constant, year after year, election after election, exit poll after exit poll and Gallup study after Gallup study: the average American voter fancies him/herself as fundamentally "conservative," be that really conservative, somewhat conservative (or moderate), slightly conservative (or moderate), you get the point. (Barack Obama certainly "gets it," which is why he is the extraordinarily successful politician he is.)

Whereas many on the left find this phenomenon spiritually depressing to the point of denial (hence the reason for this site's few, certified progressive readers), I find it to be both liberating and, perhaps, liberalism's greatest opportunity.

The Republican Party has abandoned conservatism--the principal, temperamental thread of Americans' political ideology--in favor of a cold, weird, atomistic reactionaryism with a political future about as bright as Know-Nothingism or Free Silver. The GOP, that is, has thrown conservatism up for grabs; and as long as liberalism--given budget constraints that are far from short-term--can do little more than preserve the sociopolitical gains it has made since domestic Wilsonianism, the New Deal and the Great Society, then liberalism might as well be honest with voters and with itself: It is the new, and what's more, authentic conservatism.

Thus with liberalism's reliable 20 percent of the vote would come a huge chunk of the moderate vote and, I'd wager, a sizable portion of the conservative vote from those authentic conservatives who still comprehend and appreciate authentic conservatism (but have nowhere else to go--think 2010--but to the one and only party that advertises itself as the conservative party).

In this maneuver there is nothing devious or coy or Machiavellian; liberals would simply be acknowledging their foreseeable political future--that of conservers acting on behalf of what are, by now, traditional American institutions of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, as well as progressive taxation, T. Rooseveltian environmentalism, and so on.

This was all I meant in the concluding portion of my Saturday post, which reflected on Mann-Ornstein's thoughtful indictment of the GOP:

There is an altogether guilty party here; and it's not the conservative party, which in contrast to the GOP's radicalism just happens to be the Democratic Party, led by a Democratic president. And that's where responsible, conscientious political journalists should start: getting their labels right.

Liberals could start there, too.

Obama's "warrior presidency"

In the NY Times, the New America Foundation's Peter Bergen unfolds a three-page defense of this thesis:

From both the right and left, there has been a continuing, dramatic cognitive disconnect between Mr. Obama’s [foreign policy] record and the public perception of his leadership: despite his demonstrated willingness to use force, neither side regards him as the warrior president he is.

One complicating word in that passage is "the," just prior to "public," in the phrase "public perception." It contains the seed of the passage's own destruction. We must assume, given its context, that Bergen means to say "their" public perception (i.e., the left and right's) and not "the" public's perception, which is a vast difference within an entirely different meaning--the latter of which is never really established in Bergen's piece, hence there could be no "dramatic cognitive disconnect."

But here I perhaps quibble too much, which only suppresses my larger point. That being, one could also argue that Bergen misuses "public," in that he means to say "private"; for publicly, it seems to me, the left has indeed extolled Obama as a "warrior president," since the left is still trying to live down its rather unpleasant reputation for having carelessly misplaced China a few decades back, not to mention Korea and Vietnam, both North and South.  

So, although I grasp Bergen's point, I simply disagree with it.

As for the right's "perception" of Mr. Obama's foreign policy, well, what can one say, as contaminated as it is with hatred, bile, distortion, and above all, a monstrous dishonesty. The political right, which remains indistinguishable from the neocon right, has removed itself as a legitimate voice in what is a profoundly legitimate debate.

Mann-Ornstein's absolute must-read

In "Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem," the Brookings Institution's Thomas Mann and the American Enterprise Institute's Norman Ornstein let loose with a righteous fury that refreshes, mostly because their opening proposition--that Republicans are incontrovertibly "the problem"--ends with an admonitory and almost equally thematic swipe at the problem-children of mainstream journalism. "[A] balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon distorts reality," write Mann and Ornstein, hence journalism's "even-handed, unfiltered presentation of opposing views" only invites more destructive distortion.

Mann-Ornstein hypostatize 'The Republican Question' through the wretched personage of Allen West, whose latest imbecility, as we all well remember, arrived in his McCarthyization of Democrats' Progressive Caucus--which is like comparing a DAR quilting bee to a neoNazi cadre. Regarding West's "comment," Mann-Ornstein find it "striking" that "such extreme remarks and views are now taken for granted" by the GOP leadership; that West is less outlier than outrageously typical.

Which brings us back to the political press, which, as I recall, by and large treated West's obscenity as a soundbite of amusing puff, rather than as a monumental manifestation of a profound institutional problem that is reducing this country to a dysfunctional joke.

Indeed, it took the aggressively blunt Barney Frank to do political journalism's perfectly commonsensical job for it:

It's an indication of the significant deterioration of the Republican Party as a responsible entity that an ignorant, mean guy like Allen West is considered one of their stars.

I ask people, when you hear something so breathtakingly dumb and vicious as that, how do people expect us to be able to work out some compromise with him?

Nonetheless, everyday we are witness to an endless stream of disgust and exasperation from apparently intoxicated political commentators who are disgusted and exasperated with ... Barack Obama, who obstinately refuses, for instance, to embrace Simpson-Bowles and obstinately refuses, in another instance, to tackle tax reform--with the demented likes of a party-full of Allen Wests.

I don't know from which distillery they get their pure goofjuice and from which Latin American country they get their prime goofweed, but both must be the tragic enablers of these commentators' "balanced treatment," as Mann-Ornstein put it, of a wickedly "unbalanced phenomenon." I just cannot think of any other explanation for their dissociative relationship with reality; that they can, with a schoolmarmish pedantry and superior aloofness, hold Obama in any way accountable for not advancing the political ball of moderation.

But addiction to intoxicated pomposity is no excuse. Political journalists who see themselves as the adults--because in their minds they are the fair, even-handed supervisors of a symmetrically immature political playground--are in reality as culpable as the Republican Party's juvenile delinquents.

There is an altogether guilty party here; and it's not the conservative party, which in contrast to the GOP's radicalism just happens to be the Democratic Party, led by a Democratic president. And that's where responsible, conscientious political journalists should start: getting their labels right.

What's $20K?

Mitt Romney, at Ohio's Otterbein University:

We've always encouraged young people: Take a shot, go for it. Take a risk. Get the education. Borrow money if you have to from your parents.

And indulging my love of understatements is CBS News:

The average cost of attending a four-year public university is about $20,000 a year, an amount exceeding the cash-on-hand of many American family budgets.

When I get it wrong, I go big

I'd like to think I don't crow when I'm proven right, thus in the same humble spirit, I'll happily confess having been fantastically wrong. From February 27:

Both Gingrich and Santorum can live off the land (and a couple of billionaires) till June; which is to say, for us they can make life a delightful hell for Mitt Romney. In time, the base may have to swallow the former governor, but till then, they don't have to savor him....

I still believe Newt Gingrich is "the story".... The base will remain in need of a Romney-alternative.... And who's first in line? Who, that is, will be left?

Yep, Newt.

I've been meaning to get around to that confession, somewhat unnecessarily perhaps, for some time now. I wasn't defensive; just forgetful. Sorry about that.

The Fehrnstrom Factor

The most telling paragraph in GQ's expansive profile of "Mitt Romney's Dark Knight," Eric Fehrnstrom:

Before he went into politics, Fehrnstrom was a reporter himself--and a notorious one at that. He worked for the Boston Herald--the tabloid rival to the more staid Boston Globe--which prided itself on its feisty, muckraking metro coverage. As a Rupert Murdoch!! owned paper, the Herald's political mission was simple: Make life miserable for Massachusetts Democrats. "The Herald was like the schoolyard bully," Howie Carr, the legendary Boston brawler who was the paper's top columnist and animating spirit, told me [reporter Jason Zengerle]. "We were all about finding people and kicking them when they were down. And then we'd laugh about it."

Whither hope?

One more note on Gerson's column today, which opens with a stunning reference to President Obama's "[pursuit of] Keynesian economics on a breathtaking scale" and closes with a re-stunning reference to "Obama’s surprisingly unreconstructed liberalism." 

One nearly despairs. I mean, if one cannot pound rather simple, unreconstructed reality into the brain of a conservative as manifestly intelligent as Gerson, what hope for contemporary conservatism is there?

New and improved 'Reform Conservatism': same old horseshit

Michael Gerson raves about 'Reform Conservatism,' the fresh, anti-Obama-inspired ideological school to which belongs Paul Ryan, whose "agenda ... has weaknesses," concedes Gerson, though "It is best on the fiscal crisis"--which it explains on the basis of First Premises:

[I]t asserts that America’s massive fiscal crisis is a result of public-sector inefficiency.

Like all First Premises, Reform Conservatism's and Ryan's (and by extension Gerson's) is unproved and unprovable, hence all that flows from it is logically tainted. Indeed, in Reform Conservatism's case, its First Premise is almost laughably disprovable: America's massive fiscal crisis is--and believe it or not, this has been in the news lately--a result two extraordinarily expensive, unfinanced wars and two extraordinarily expensive, unfinanced tax cuts. 

Reform Conservatism simply hopes that either no one notices; or that everyone has forgetten or will forget; or that most everybody is so easily bamboozled they'll swallow Reform Conservatism with a No-Questions-Asked chaser.

And who knows. Given the deplorable state of low-information democracy, Reform Conservatism might be onto something. We'll know in about six months.

Of Brooks, Socrates, and Keynes

I loved this summarizing tease for David Brooks's column this morning: "Government doesn’t profit from experience.... It should try learning the way businesses do."

You know, such as the way U.S. business learned from the Depression of 1807, the 1815-1821 Depression, the 1830s Depression, the 1870s Depression, the 1890s Depression, the Depression of 1920-21, the Great Depression of the 1930s, the 1970s recession, the 1980s recession, and now the Great Recession of 2008-?, which was propelled--as were preceding recessions/depressions and other assorted financial panics--almost entirely by business's limitless greed.

Yet Brooks's Great Befuddlement hardly stopped there. In the column's conclusion, Brooks advances the Socratic observation that "The first step to wisdom is admitting how little we know and constructing a trial-and-error process on the basis of our own ignorance." That's good advice. And it's a damn shame that Brooks doesn't follow it, as evidenced earlier in his column: "Nearly 80 years later, it’s hard to know if the New Deal did much to end the Great Depression."

No it is not. Heaps of empirical economic data demonstrate unequivocally that the Roosevelt administration's rather tepid Keynesian interventions at least alleviated the depression to the measurable extent of those interventions; later, it was the forced, massive Keynesianism of the Second World War that decisively ended the wretched thing.

This academic consensus is as solid among economic historians as global warming is among climatologists. Yet "nearly 80 years later," soft ideologues continue to advance the political agnosticism that "it’s hard to know if the New Deal did much to end the Great Depression." The hard ideologues deny Keynesianism's benefits altogether.

Again, it's instructive to note Brooks' Socratic underpinning: "The first step to wisdom is admitting how little we know ..." Why instructive? Because one might further note that in Plato's 'Dialogues,' most of Socrates's deliberations ended in an inconclusive fog, while the rest finished in a wholly predetermined fanfare. In Brooks's dialectical case, he feigns the former--"admitting how little we know"--but ends with the wholly predetermined latter--"it's hard to know."

Well, it is if one refuses to know.

Quick, get them rewrite!

From a 'Conservative Majority' email, warning me about President Obama's reelection organization:

[It's] structured to facilitate just about any violation of federal campaign laws they're high priced lawyers and strategists can think up.

Well, well, their pretty tricky, aren't they?

End the charade

In almost always referring to Paul Ryan, in one form or another, as "the intellectual leader of the congressional Republicans," is David Frum mocking him and the GOP's soi-disant intellectualism? Or is Frum attempting, however artificially, some level of respect?

My questions are genuine, for I really don't know the answer. What I do know is that Frum, although I don't read him every day, has become increasingly hostile to what he recognizes as Republicans' colossally phony intellectualism. They're dishonest about their premises, underhanded in their argumentation tactics, and downright fraudulent in their conclusions--per Frum's piece today--and to bundle all that as some common species of "intellectualism" is the ultimate insult.

Frum knows this. I've admired his libertarian lucidity ever since I first violently disagreed with his impressively written Dead Right. So why can't he take that final step to ultimate clarity and just call a spade a spade? To just say, openly and without false respect, in honor of some higher civility which Republicans abjure, that Paul Ryan is no more "the intellectual leader of the congressional Republicans" than was Soupy Sales.

The time has come for conservatism's authentic intellectuals to drop the charade--to stop pretending that "intellectual" and "Republicans," within contemporary political conservatism, can any longer find harmony or oneness in the same sentence.

Let me be clear. I'm not advocating an escalation of harsh rhetoric and polemics. It's just that this "gentlemanly" conservative routine from conservatism's actual thinkers has become so patently disingenuous, it is, in itself, quite unseemly.

President Obama's line of attack

E.J. Dionne picks up on the president's line of attack:

What Romney has going for him is a journalistic presumption that he is either a closet "moderate" or so opportunistic that he is altogether lacking in a coherent worldview. The first is wrong. The second is unfair to Romney. What he believes matters, and it is the biggest obstacle between him and the White House.

I somewhat differ with Dionne in that it seems to me there exists not even the remotest relationship between the politician "Mitt Romney" and actual "Beliefs." Romney is, hands down, the most ruthlessly cynical pol since Aaron Burr; he never believed what he claimed to believe when he ran for the Senate or served as a governor--offices that were but useful desiderata on his professional path of an idée fixe, which Romney is now trying to fulfill.

Yet I do, of course, quite agree that what Romney says he believes matters, which is President Obama's truer line of attack, as he sketched it out for Rolling Stone magazine:

I don't think that their nominee is going to be able to suddenly say, "Everything I've said for the last six months, I didn't mean." I'm assuming that he meant it.

What Team Obama has adopted here is what we might call the academic approach. To explain ...

When I was a grad student, my chief interest within the broader study of American political history was, specifically, the practice of demagoguery--an ancient virtuosity which rests mostly on bullshit. Not always, but usually. Anyway, a rhetorical studies professor offered some valuable advice in my pursuit of demagogic perspectives: The academic discipline of rhetorical studies doesn't care what a politician might have said, which at any rate a good spin artist can reinvent or on wiser reflection the pol can later "clarify"; it can only know what the pol actually said. So stay away as best you can, Carpenter, from the interdisciplinary voodoo of psychobabble and all that. Just concentrate on what the demagogue said--actually said.

And that, it goes without emphasizing, is how Obama has chosen to attack. Let us not agonize over the "true" Mitt Romney. All we can honestly do is go about "assuming that he meant" whatever he has already so precisely said.

'Ezra's Lunch with Android'

Ezra Klein:

A few days ago, I had lunch with a friend who is active in the Republican Party's economic-policy debates. The real difference between Republicans and Democrats, he held, was that Republicans believe a fiscal crisis is very near, and that the only reforms that the markets will accept are structural changes to Medicare and Medicaid.

Odd, is it not, that the only structural changes the markets will accept are the virtual destruction of two safety nets Republicans have always detested?

I wonder how the markets would accept the obliteration of the elderly's healthcare security--as substantially covered by Medicare and Medicaid--resulting in the collateral obliteration of their disposable income, which at the present is disposable on economy-boosting consumer items such as food, clothing, and transportation.

The obliteration effect would also seep downward; the elderly's children and grandchildren would find themselves necessarily subsidizing their parents' and grandparents' newly imposed, much higher medical expenses--as well as the cost of their food, clothing, and transportation--which means that the children and grandchildren would themselves be endowed with less disposable income for their own food, clothing, and transportation.

But of course Republicans don't need to think this thing out. They have their all-encompassing, all-answering ideology to do their thinking for them.

Mitt's Cafe

My feelings exactly:

We are now in for six months of Mitt Romney versus Barack Obama, and with the polls showing the race to be very close, you could argue that it is going to be really exciting. Except for the fact that it’s Mitt Romney versus Barack Obama.
--Gail Collins

It's becoming evident that it is easier to amass a quarter-billion dollars of personal wealth than we thought. In one manifestation or another, Mitt Romney has been running for the White House for about two decades now, and throughout those 20 years he has essentially worked part-time as a plant-closing, LBO-ing, company-slicing, pluto-corporacrat of Montgomery Burns charm. He is a man of numbers--coldly calculated and ruthlessly applied--whose impersonal disposition has yielded him the Sultan of Brunei's riches. All along, Romney really wanted to be president of the United States, but he wanted to be a fabulously well-off president of the United States, so first he got himself a CEO and governor as a father, and then his tickets to Harvard grad schools punched. The rest, as they say, was history. Pretty easy, huh?

Yet throughout all that time and all that training and planning and plotting for the one high office he really desired, Mitt Romney never learned, for instance, how to remember to mention at a news conference that he supports lower interest rates on student loans. How could he forget to comment on the hottest topic of the day? Because the meat of the topic means nothing to him--the White House is just another acquisition; he's so far removed from the everyday worries and quotidian scramble of life, it doesn't take much for Mitt to see that the problems of a few million students don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.

Someday we'll understand that. For now, here's to Mitt glaring at us, kid.