PMC Commentary

Bill Clinton is off to Wisconsin

It could make a difference.

I've written very little on the Wisconsin rebellions and subsequent recall battle, the reason having to do almost entirely with my immeasurable disgust with average Wisconsites. What the hell were they thinking when they voted in Republican Scott Walker to begin with? "Why, we didn't know he was a monstrous perfidy and wholly owned instrument of sinister special interests when we did that," they answer--although by 2010 it wasn't exactly a state secret that virtually every Republican pol was a monstrous perfidy and wholly owned instrument of sinister special interests.

That Walker entered office and thereupon instantly demonstrated what a sniveling worm he in fact was, was hardly surprising. Wisconsites quite literally got what they asked for. Shocking.

But their shocking opacity hasn't ended there. Not by a long shot. No, despite blockbuster revelation after blockbuster revelation, splattered all over their local and our national news, of Walker's exceptionally disgraceful unsuitability for the state's highest office, he's done no worse than run about even with Tom Barrett, and generally ahead. This is not only incomprehensible; it's inexcusable.

Perhaps they'll redeem themselves next week. If not, they'll forever stand--or rather crawl--as politics' poster boy for that swinish admixture of both democratic gullibility and unpardonable apathy.

And down ... goes ... DOMA

Breaking Duh! news:

[T]he 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston said the [Defense of Marriage Act] discriminates against gay couples by not giving them the same rights and privileges as heterosexual couples and is unconstitutional.

My intro was not meant to make light of this ruling. It was meant only as an indication of how utterly unintelligible and mindlessly prejudiced I find opposition to its kind. Why the precise sexual orientation of any loving couple, married or not, should grab the U.S. Congress's attention is--I'm sorry--simply beyond me.

For that matter, why Mitt Romney's religion's originalist position on marriage should be of any jurisprudential concern is beyond me, too. (True, even farther beyond me is why any sane woman would want to marry one of us insensitive brutes, let alone three or four of them wanting to marry and share the very same insensitive brute.)

What the hell. What business is it of ours?

I guess I'm possessed by the unalarmed demons of damn-the-torpedoes libertarianism, which, when it comes to its expression in civil liberties and human rights, is still struggling to find rationally unacceptable limits.

George Will in 'The Clouds'

As the saying goes, The more things change, the more they stay the same. Accordingly we can see George Will as one of Aristophanes's "bloviating ignoramuses"--a hair-splitting, eristic, lawyerly Sophist of the first rank; an unscrupulous Machiavelli devoted to the political alchemy of converting raw arguments into pure crap.

Will's inductive powers are really quite stunning. Did you know, for instance, that "Reasons for the Supreme Court to reconsider Citizens United are nonexistent"? I bet you didn't. (Not to be as fastidiously cranky as Will, but I think he means to argue that "good reasons" are nonexistent, since even bad reasons indisputably "exist.")

But we must further ask, How does George Will know this, and better yet, how does he choose to enlighten you about it? Why, through the happy abuse of argumentum ad verecundiam, of course. That is, Will actually cites as an authority the Citizens United-hugging Sen. Mitch McConnell--"Congress’s staunchest defender of the First Amendment"--who has "noted," in Will's words, that "Through March 31, the eight leading super PACs supporting Republican presidential candidates received contributions totaling $96,410,614. Of this, $83,220,167 (86.32 percent) came from individuals, only $13,190,447 (13.68 percent) from corporations."

Ergo, "These facts refute"--we're back to Will now--"such prophesied nightmares as The Post’s fear that corporate money 'may now overwhelm' individuals’ contributions." Does the "fact" that many of these generous chaps are corporate individuals who are using their amassed, corporate-derived income to bribe pols (and bamboozle the electorate) bother you? It shouldn't, says Will. Just "Disregard the unsupported smear that candidates are bought." And that's that.

But we haven't yet arrived at Will's principal thrust of sophistic snarkiness. That he saves for last: "The collapse of liberals’ confidence in their ability to persuade is apparent in their concentration on rigging the rules of political persuasion." 

You will notice in that passage a subtle omission--"ability to persuade," as in, ability to raise money with which comes the ability to honestly persuade. That, anyway, is how those of intellectual integrity would naturally interpret "persuasion," which is not by nature a rhetorical art in which success is measured by the most effectively outrageous, unfounded and unverifiable claims.

That, it is almost needless to add, is mere demagoguery; which, left unbridled, soon creates a demagoguery gap, and before long we're in a galloping demagoguery race. And what did the framers fear above all other republican fears? Ultimately a gross imbalance of powerful factions, who could through sheer volume and repetition and accumulated might--super PACs, anyone?--befuddle and mislead the susceptible masses.

One would think that given George Will's aggressively self-advertised fidelity to intellectual honesty, he would find "honesty" in others' political debate and persuasion indispensible, too. But he can't be bothered to even mention it--because intellectually, he's either as blind or corrupt as Citizens United.

On being Mittwitted

Earlier today on MSNBC I heard the ineffably banal Michael Steele, former chairman of the ineffably hysterical RNC, remark that Mitt Romney's latest absurdity--Trumpism--would soon pass and then Romney could get on to more important things.

But that's the point, or rather Steele's typically missed point.

With Romney, these absurdities never end. Whether it is uttering a peculiar affection for firing people (and during a recession!), or characterizing $374,000 of income as chicken feed (and during a recession!), or casually mentioning his wife's dual Cadillacs (and during a recession!), or dismissing the poor as afterthoughts or humanizing ruthless corporations or attempting $10,000 bets on national television, Romney's dark absurdities just don't stop.

And they're not only mistakes--blunders that inevitably result from the relentless pressures of a six-year campaign. When Romney isn't committing serial gaffes he's executing some studied stupidity. To wit, the Trump affair, or the Grenell debacle, both of them premeditated, unforced errors that when taken alone are relatively harmless. Accumulated, however, and on top of the gaffes, they're lethal.

All of which is to say, the Trump absurdity won't stop here, today. Tomorrow it will be something else. It won't be the Trump thing, but it will be something--something just as lethal, just as absurd, just as Mittwitted.

Killing us fondly with her song

Is this a parody?

Mitt Romney's cosmic ineptitude

As I was saying, which was only what many others have said, and the NY Times says again this morning:

It was supposed to be a day of triumph for Mitt Romney [and so on, and so on]....

Instead, Tuesday was hijacked by Donald J. Trump. Inexplicably to many in his party, Mr. Romney had scheduled an appearance at a fund-raiser in Las Vegas on Tuesday night with Mr. Trump.

It's not really so inexplicable, though, to either the "many in his party" or to the far many others who so gratefully reside outside of it, when one simply accepts Mitt's singular oneness with cosmic ineptitude. Somewhere in the Tao Te Ching, I think it is, there is expressed the ancient wisdom of intensely pursued objects possessing the nasty habit of receding faster than one's eager grasp. Twenty-five hundred years ago the sages advised, "Chill"; 500 years later, Jesus advised, "Chill"; another fifteen-hundred years after that, Montaigne advised, "Chill"; and now, fresh on the philosophical heels of yet another 500 years, this nugget of enlightenment is ubiquitous--it leaps at us from the back of cereal boxes and fast-food fortune cookies and from shelves upon shelves of undigested self-help books: "Chill, you idiot."

But Mitt can't "chill." Mitt is a micromanager; his pockets are stuffed with unearned cash because his head is crammed with lifeless statistics. It makes no difference to Mitt that he's in organic politics now, as opposed to the necrotic business of what even the brain-dead Rick Perry had the wits to call "vulture capitalism." To Mitt, it's all the same-- this people and profits stuff--data, numbers, shifting numbers, calculated gambles, acceptable debits, huge rewards, balance sheets and delicately balanced negotiations.

His latest negotiations are, however, unwinnable. He seems to think that if he slithers around with the clownishly malevolent racism of Trump, he'll make big and permanent gains with the reptilian base. And independents won't mind. Later, when he's playing nice with independents, and vaguely disavowing all things Trump, then the base won't mind.

But this is a base whose rugged ignorance is surpassed only by its deep-seated contemptuousness and bedouin vengeance. In other words, they don't forgive. And thinking independents won't forget.     

There is, of course, nothing universal or comprehensive about these observations. Much of the base will turn out for Romney on Election Day, as will many independents. But Romney's cosmic ineptitude and unsightly staggering from hither to yon should, from my empirical point of view, shave just enough Romney votes in essential swing states to swing the election to President Obama, and rather decisively.

Separating confidence from triumphalism

Andrew Sullivan:

It's clear enough by now that this election will be a nail-bitingly close one; and that any early triumphalism among the Obamaites is preposterous. Of course he can lose.

Of course "of course he can lose." The Kansas City Chiefs could play professional football next year. Vladimir Putin could join the Tiny Tim Fan Club. Newt Gingrich could shave some ego and Sarah Palin could read a book and Mitt Romney could force a personal acquisition of some human DNA. A bit more realistically, I could stop giving a rat's ass about the commentariat's admonitory prediction, en masse, that "of course he could lose."

For me, anyway, "Obamaitism" and "blind optimism" are not synonymous. For some they are, and from those folks I keep a safe and intellectually healthy distance. Such rabidly pro-Obama derangement is too spookily reminiscent of the wretched W. years. Yes, I'm pro-Obama, but I can also read an electoral map and I can read (positive) polling data from the critical half-dozen or so battleground states on that map and I can appreciate increasing demographic advantages for Obama as well. And most of all, I can recognize an epic loser--hello, Mitt--from a parsec away.

Could things change throughout the next five months?

Let's give that some deep thought ...

... I'm thinking ...

OK, I'm back. Of course they could. But for the moment, at least, to possess a vast confidence in Obama's reelection isn't "triumphalist" in a preposterously pollyannish, delusional, or quixotic sense. It's perfectly logical.

For Mitt and the Donald, it's 20 bucks, same as downtown

Unshakable idealists among both the left and right often question pragmatism's devotion to principle. Pragmatism, to the politically pure and philosophically pious, seems such a lady-of-the-evening kind of thing; the concerned parties may get some or even much of what they want, but damn it's tacky, tainted, and ultimately unrewarding. Because of these defects, "principle" is marooned. 

I'd argue that the more proper way to assess pragmatism is to instead acknowledge its chief virtue, which is that, merely, of incrementalism--little victories, one at a time, until the sum of your little victories in pursuit of a magnificently principled victory is large itself (think Social Security in the late 1930s, think Social Security today). On the other hand if you admire idealists' rigid piety and their stern devaluation of Pragmatism as the woefully Unprincipled, then Mitt Romney was there, yesterday, to help make your case:

I need to get 50.1% or more and I'm appreciative to have the help of a lot of good people.

By that he meant Donald "The Birther" Trump--from whom the taking of cash might technically be regarded as pragmatic, but from whom, as well, the cheaply perfumed stench of whoring opportunism smothers any principled motive by Mitt.

Republicans remain the problem

Everybody has a beef with one or another section of, or amendment to, the U.S. Constitution. And law professor Sanford Levinson, in his NY Times op-ed this morning, "Our Imbecilic Constitution," has a lot of them, from the Senate's disproportional representation to assorted gridlocks of institutional design to the Constitution's aggressive hurdles to amend itself.

My own snarling pet peeve of a beef is the 22nd Amendment, which, had it been in place in 1940, might have compelled embarrassed American histories of how President Willkie lost the Second World War. It's hard to imagine a more undemocratic Amendment to the U.S. Constitution than Republicans' anti-FDR temper tantrum embodied in the 1951 version. But give them time.

I'm sympathetic to Levinson's sweeping complaints; after all, for years I've harbored a rather subversive hankering for a parliamentary system, which would seem to offer a systemic compromise between anarchic direct democracy and the suffocating representational gridlock we now have. But of course American parliamentarianism won't happen, because 1) as Levinson notes, the Constitution is damn near impossible to amend, and 2) such an amendment to the Constitution would be its death-warranted last.

Still, I think Levinson misses the fundamental problem, which in his argument is structural, and to my mind, is temperamental.

What was truly admirable about the framers was their willingness to critique, indeed junk, the Articles of Confederation [writes Levinson]. One need not believe that the Constitution of 1787 should be discarded in quite the same way to accept that we are long overdue for a serious discussion about its own role in creating the depressed (and depressing) state of American politics.

Again, that may be true, and reasonable people will sensibly debate which structural changes should be made. Yet reasonable people today stand in near universal agreement--and I believe the framers would have concurred in profound abhorrence--that our fundamental problem is not, for instance, the institutional scandal of Mike Crapo's equal voice to Barbara Boxer's; rather, as Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein recently said it, Republicans are the problem.

The fundamental problem begins there; and for now, it ends there. There is no way around this sticking point. No matter which intelligent reform one attempts, Republicans will kill it. No matter what progress one suggests, Republicans will block it. No matter what compromise one extends, Republicans will, in return, Fed Ex a dead fish. If you were to try to think of a party that Tony Soprano, Ted Kaczynski, Ayn Rand and Mortimer Snerd could all enthusiastically support, you'd soon be thinking, "Republican."

Mann-Ornstein realistically concede that "in the short run," Republicans won't change, although "If our democracy is to regain its health and vitality, the culture and ideological center of the Republican Party must change" [my emphasis]. Their short-term recommendation, though? It's doable. Very doable. We must demand of the political press that it do its damn job: that it mustn't "seek professional safety through the even-handed, unfiltered presentation of opposing views."

And to do this, there's not a section, not a paragraph, not a word, not even a comma of the U.S. Constitution that would require a change.

The 'ignorance' that George Will should really worry about

Paul Krugman:

[T]he modern American right doesn’t care about deficits, and never did. All that talk about debt was just an excuse for attacking Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and food stamps.

It's worse than that, as Krugman knows, but he had to economize toward column's end.

The worst-kept, indeed impossible-to-keep "conservative" secret is that the American right, since Reagan, has cared very much about deficits. It has cared about, caused and coddled them. The American right loves deficits, which were so easy and fun to procreate: just demagogue a litany of unfunded tax cuts, and demagogue an unfunded defense sprawl, and demagogue some unfunded wars, and hell, for good measure, even demagogue a lavish and unfunded expansion of the preexisting welfare state; and then, finally--and here's the right's really fun part--blame the entire, red-inked fiscal mess on big-spending, big-government liberals, to which a grotesquely sizable portion of the electorate will nod in sorry agreement, because of its propagandistic familiarity.

All of this is well known, of course; or at least the extent of its public comprehension is proportionate to the "informed" slice of our democracy--a slice that every small-r republican citizen works to expand.

But there's a problem with that civic formula.

The indefatigably ignorant of the right, like the overworked poor of the left, will always be with us; and yet the ignorant, very unlike the poor, possess an outsized enthusiasm for voting, which, naturally, keeps in public office a disproportionate percentage of knowing, and utterly disingenuous, ignoramuses-- who will never, never concede their disingenuity.

And there, then, is the real problem. One cannot negotiate with elected officials whose existential justification is grounded entirely in scheming misrepresentation and nihilistic disingenuity. We all, every small-r republican one of us, are desperately hanging on until 2013, when suddenly--or so we hope--a resurrecting age of reason and passable compromise and political detente will dawn. I have every confidence that President Obama will still be President Obama. But no matter what the ideological makeup of Congress, its rules and traditions will favor the re-ascendance of the schemingly nihilistic, who will by nature persist in blowing everything up.

Hence it may be less precise to say that "the modern American right doesn’t care about deficits" than to say, simply, that the modern American right doesn't care about America.

Hold that praise for George Will

This morning, on ABC's "This Week," George Will professed consternation about why Mitt Romney pals around with that "bloviating ignoramus," Donald Trump. So National Journal's Ron Brownstein explained the facts of conservative life to George:

Mitt Romney throughout the entire primary season has shown very little willingness to confront the right. And there is a big portion of the conservative base of the party that does believe that Barack Obama was not born in the U.S. And Romney has just seemed to be spooked throughout the whole process at the thought that the right will mobilize against him.

What we'll see and hear for the next few news cycles is the commentariat's praise of George Will's conservative independence and high-minded criticism of his own party's presidential nominee. And it will all be horseshit, for George Will has yet to honestly reproach the millions of ignoramuses who comprise contemporary conservatism and have made it the absolute philosophical joke that it is.

If Mr. Will should ever get around to that level of honesty, then I'll gain respect for him. Till then, he's just another enabler of pseudoconservative madness.

They just can't help themselves

Rudy, of 2012, on Mitt, of 2008, this morning, on CNN:

He had a growth of jobs of about 40,000; we [in NYC] had a growth of jobs of about 500,000. So I was comparing what I thought was my far superior record to his otherwise decent record.

Now there's a campaign slogan Mitt will want to expropriate: "Vote Romney, the guy with a decent record."

Mitt Romney's 'Vision' deficit

Ronald Reagan's presidential idol, Calvin Coolidge, would have been appalled that Mitt Romney, as Politico reports, "has some Republicans worried he lacks the 'vision thing.' "

"Excellent," the former vice president to steady-as-she-goes President Normalcy would have said. " 'Vision' implies not only big and boat-rocking ideas, but even utopian aspirations, and those are things that no conservative leader would care to abide, let alone peddle."

On the other hand Coolidge's apostate worshipper, President Reagan, would have joined the chorus of Republican hand-wringers about Romney. Reagan went to the White House not to modestly conserve, but to aggressively lay waste to the problem-solving bloat of big government (that he instead bloated it even further is a different subject). He was endowed with a "vision"--it's all rather a blur now, but to voters it essentially entailed manly and highly individualistic cowpokes (still packin' Social Security cards) singin' by the campfire as futuristic space guns protected the whole idyllic scene.

For conservatives, "Vision" had arrived and was planning a lengthy stay. If one requires confirmation of that revolutionary turn, just recall the conservative trouble into which H.W. got for lacking the damn thing.

Yet Bush's lack was congenital: he was born a conservative and raised with authentically conservative ideas--pragmatism and empiricism and all that. Reagan, however, came to conservatism later in life and through its increasingly whacky filters of an unstoppable socialist Frankenstein monster intent, for instance, on forcing humble villagers into the Stalinist gulag of Medicare.

Things got so out of hand that Poppy had to swear to the base that he would never as president do the empirically right and pragmatically smart thing--raise taxes when taxes needed raising--which of course he later did, which of course cost him his job, and which of course then set conservatism's permanent course of fiscal lunacy.

And just what is this venomous lunacy called? You got it. "Vision." And Mitt, you best get yourself some of it, of an additionally lunatic sort, because your base is on a kind of Robespierrean-Bolshevik-Cultural-Revolutionary rampage which demands constant feedings of fresh lunacy.

Dionne, me, and the consensus school

I see that E.J. Dionne's embrace of what is known among American historiographers as the "consensus school" has become as fragile as mine:

[U]ntil recently conservatives operated within America’s long consensus that accepted a market economy as well as a robust role for a government that served the common good. American politics is now roiled because this consensus is under the fiercest attack it has faced in more than 100 years.

Such things cause shifts in historical perspective. The relatively peaceful and prosperous postwar era--that in which the consensus school thrived, and to which I have always been intellectually if not anachronistically wedded--helped to instill in the chroniclers of American history their view of American history. Think of it as classically Eisenhoweresque: we were, and always had been, one big family of millions, replete with every family's heated squabbles and bubbling discontents; but by and large we got along--we compromised, we cooperated, we all, in our own little ways, accepted the realization of the American Dream as a worthwhile hope to pursue. The consensus school was far from unimpeachable, but that was OK. Reconciling its flaws kept a lot of historians employed--and published.

At any rate, it is obvious that this is also the school out of which came Dionne. And he has a question:

So why has this consensus unraveled?

To which he answers:

Modern conservatism’s rejection of its communal roots [once grounded in the American consensus] is a relatively recent development. It can be traced to a simultaneous reaction against Bush’s failures and Barack Obama’s rise.

But (and historians, like lawyers, love to say "But") here we encounter the additionally tricky question of periodization. That is, can conservatism's wholesale philosophical collapse really be compartmented into such a narrowly recent slice of history?--that pre-Bush and even throughout Bush there was "conservatism," yet post-Bush, there wasn't?

I'm skeptical of Dionne's op-ed tidiness, which I won't pursue critically, since I'm also sure that in his book on the subject (Our Divided Political Heart--which I haven't yet read), he has taken advantage of greater explanatory room to run in. Which is my way of saying I'm confident that Dionne would not disagree: there's something about today's misnomered "conservatism" that is creepily similar to the far right of the New Deal era, the far right of the postwar era, the far right of the Goldwater era and the far right of the 1970s New Right, and beyond.

Conservatism today is, in brief, the far right of consensus-historian Richard Hofstadter's "paranoid style," a well-known political neologism that sprang from his still-circulating work but is tied thematically to another of his less-read works today--his New Deal chapter in The Age of Reform, in which Hofstadter brilliantly reduces conservatism's anti-New Dealism to a frothing, hysterical reaction rooted in an ideological shift to essential indifference to human tribulation and remedial, pragmatic experimentation.      

Conservatism's principal difference today from that of its anti-New Deal manifestation is that, as the cliche roughly goes, its paranoid psychotics are running the asylum. However there is continuity, which is elemental to the consensus school of historical thought. So take heart, E.J. Our old-school perspective isn't toast yet.

DAMN it's exciting, zzzz

I confess. I didn't read it. I didn't bother. Because 1) Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei's "Obama stumbles out of the gate" will soon be followed in all probability by something along the Politico lines of, "Obama scores a bit later out of the gate," and 2) as Joe Klein forensically notes: "The evidence for this [headline assertion]? Well, uh, there isn’t very much, really."

But damn it's exciting. It's the "meme of the day in journo-world," continues Klein, it's the latest in this edge-of-your-seat horse race, it's a dramatic sign of how far the politically mighty have fallen (insert exclamation point here).

It's also an indispensable precursor to the story taking unexpected and just as exciting turns--QED. Which is to say, it isn't really that exciting. In truth, it's rather boring. Because it's predictable--less like a horse race than like basketball games, in which nothing determinative ever seems to happen until the last two minutes.

Indeed, the last two minutes--two months--of this presidential contest would seem to be as foreseeable as the currently running hype of a vast unpredictability. Assuming the U.S. economy doesn't tank, as every Republican is praying it will, then it's the prodigiously inept Mitt Romney who'll continue to stumble out of the gate and into the gate and stagger repeatedly somewhere in the gate's vicinity. And Obama will continue to pulverize Mitt's tormented operation into an unsightly rubble.

I don't say this as a stage-one exercise in mere wish-fulfillment. I say it simply because the fundamentals are intact. Romney has yet revealed his abject unsuitability for his party's nomination, and Obama has yet begun to really unload. There are many, many stumbles to come, by both sides, that's for sure, that's politics. But most of them, by far, will be Romney's, because Romney is an anxiety-ridden gaffe machine that hasn't a clue as to how to get the winning ball in the basket.