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Feeling Romney's pain

Next time you find yourself wondering why Mitt Romney looks so pained and anguished on the campaign trail, just recall this recent observation by Quinnipiac's Peter Brown:

President Barack Obama has decent margins over Gov. Mitt Romney in Ohio and Pennsylvania and a smaller advantage in Florida. If he can keep those leads in all three of these key swing states through election day he would be virtually assured of re-election.

Brown added the customary caveat: "Of course the election is more than four months away, which is a lifetime in politics."

But that's where it gets interesting in a very novel kind of way.

Most politicians looking at a November defeat would be prone to an optimistic June: "Hey, the election is four months away; that's a lifetime in politics." In Romney's case, however, the candidate is thinking: "Good Lord, the election is still four months away; for me that's a lifetime of humiliating gaffes and spotlighted evasions and unaffordable base-attrition and yet more independent-alienation."

Realizing this as a presidential candidate, wouldn't you look pained and anguished?

God won't mind, will He?

The Associated Press:

Now that the politically potent National Rifle Association is keeping score, some Democrats are expected to join House Republicans in supporting the contempt of Congress vote against Holder.

One of those Democrats, Rep. Jim Matheson of Utah, said, "Sadly, it seems that it will take holding the attorney general in contempt to communicate that evasiveness is unacceptable. It is a vote I will support."

Come on, Jim. I'm sure we can all think of something far sadder about this unholy, cooked-up confrontation--like the mental image of your sorry ass being rabidly stalked by NRA attack ads.

But you know, Jim, I shan't be too harsh. I'd like to think that were I in your shoes--those of a U.S. congressman and devout Mormon--I would put country and God above my sorryass political career. Yet I cannot say with 100 percent certitude, given the government salary and the government benefits and the free government travel and the fawning government staff, that I wouldn't convince myself that the momentary sacrifice of personal honor and dutiful faith could somehow elevate both.

On the other hand, is the sacrifice really momentary? Do the dishonorable and apostate effects not linger and accumulate?

For answers to questions like these, Jim, you should seek the very highest authority--Mitt Romney. Because God knows he's been trimming God for years.

An unparalleled squalor

Sullivan weighs in on the Fallows "Coup" thesis--which I have previously and repeatedly endorsed--and concludes that "It's just the system at work."

No, there's something else at work here, something miasmic, and definitely malodorous.

I, too, cited Roosevelt's post-1935, post-SCOTUS smackdown as historical evidence of Obama's future possibilities. What I omitted from that argument, however, was this: In today's environment a reelected President Obama, given the U.S. Senate's hyperpartisan configuration, would be unable to see his nominees--those heralding a fresh start--through confirmation. Things are that needlessly rancorous, and the GOP is that mindlessly hostile.

Nor did the GOP of the New Deal era resort to extortion, hostage-taking, and lethal threats of all manner so that it could have its way--and the New Deal, and the nation, and Constitutional balance be damned. Congressional Republicans were indeed livid about many of Roosevelt's economic prescriptions, but they refused to take down the country, if necessary, to block those prescriptions from enactment.

One could go on, of course, with an almost endless list of fundamental, political differences between then and today--starting with the insufferably pernicious game-changer of Citizens United (with special emphasis on its piercing effect on the congressional make-up that Obama will confront in 2013). In the end, though, assuming one could reach it, one would find only a rather new and unparalleled squalor.

The greatest story on earth

I'm having difficulty following Richard Cohen's logic, or, perhaps I should say, I'm having difficulty following the logic of what he accepts as a logical situation. There's this:

For all the blather, there’s not all that much the White House can do about the economy. It can nudge and it can tug, but the economy goes its own way. A jobs program would help, but Congress won’t pass it. More deficit spending would help, but Congress won’t allow it. The government is tied up in knots.

And then there's this:

One network news executive says they’re seeing viewers flee politics.... When politics come up, the ratings show a real dip in viewership.

So here we have one of the world's leading economies and the most powerful government on earth and the oldest democracy in the cosmos, for all we know, being held hostage by a bunch of political terrorists in Congress--in short, all the elements of a best-selling Tom Clancy thriller, with a black Harrison Ford at the virtuous helm--and yet what are television viewers doing? They're "flee[ing] politics" (probably to watch a Clancy thriller) and "click[ing] off, stupefied by a campaign that has one overriding issue, the economy"--that is, the one issue that voters and viewers consistently say is of the greatest interest to them.

Something's amiss, and it's not terribly hard to identify at least a good chunk of the problem.

Granted, television executives should never treat news as part of the entertainment division, yet viewers may be missing the intense drama of current politics largely because network news executives habitually suck the legitimate intensity out of the drama. To repeat, America is being held hostage by a bunch of political terrorists in Congress, and that, just about any way you cut it, is a pretty big and very exciting story. These terrorists have been setting off bombs for nearly four years; they've extorted and bullied the nation, they've sabotaged the recovery, they've declared it's either their way or the apocalypse--and the network news executives know who they are.

This is no unidentified bunch of terrorists. It's not as though they emerge every few days in black hoods to issue cryptic demands, with dynamite strapped to their waists and a dagger at Harry Reid's throat and a twisting, squirming Nancy Pelosi trying to escape their dastardly grip. The news execs know who they are, the news execs know what they want, and it's no mystery how they're going about getting it: They are devastating the economy, even though we also know that "A jobs program would help ... [and] More deficit spending would help." In other words, the White House could do something to alleviate the crisis.

But there are these terrorists, you see.

Isn't that a pretty dramatic--even a spellbinding--story? If told honestly?

On the move

My daughter and I are moving at the end of the month and I must say that trying to pack while supervising this incorrigible Supreme Court and the nation's immigration laws and, next, its entire healthcare system, all the while keeping track of Mitt Romney's stunning ineptitude, is, well, a bit much.

We're moving only a few blocks away--going downmarket, I think they call it--and I've organized our coming, short migration with remarkable efficiency, if I don't say so myself. Nonetheless I feel much like G.K. Chesterton in his magnificent essay on the moving experience, in which he's in a chair, at a table, and all around him strange burly men are systematically emptying his environment of material familiarity until, finally, you got it, they remove the table and chair, too. I'm nearly there myself.

Alas, Mr. Chesterton was wittier in his animated description of this dreadful business of moving, and though he brooded mightily over the decline of Western Christendom, at least he didn't have the U.S. Supreme Court and his nation's very survival to fret about, now did he.

I must go. An empty 16"x16" cardboard box is summoning me.

In Montana, more shades of tomorrow

Antonin Scalia, writing for himself and on the temperamental behalf of Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr.:

Arizona has moved to protect its sovereignty — not in contradiction of federal law, but in complete compliance with it. If securing its territory in this fashion is not within the power of Arizona, we should cease referring to it as a sovereign state.

This, from the same Justices who today "effectively overturned a century-old Montana law that prohibited corporate spending on political races in the state."

We know where this Court would go, in terms of the Arizona law's stricken provisions, under one or two President Romney additions. Virtually no one of intellectual integrity any longer views this Court as broadly endowed with intellectual integrity itself; and under Romney's appointment power, the Court's contemptibly selective love of states rights would proceed with accelerating force--crushing those rights whenever favorable to a more egalitarian democracy (as it did to the Montana law), and upholding them whenever favorable to a top-down kind of generic brutality (as the dissenters wanted to do for Arizona).

Today, the media are emphatically concentrating on the Arizona decision--and understandably so, because of the ways in which it might affect the presidential race, as well as dozens of other states and millions of Latinos--yet the Montana decision was of at least equal import. Because in it, the Court demonstrated that it possesses no intention of backsliding on its determination to concentrate ever greater power in the hands of an ideologically friendly few.

Perhaps 'Coup' was right

I again repeat my conviction that our present decay goes back in a singularly identifiable way to the deeply corrupt Court of Bush v. Gore. It seems Fallows agrees.

On the upside it may be remembered that Franklin Roosevelt, too, had his "Four Horsemen," plus an Anthony Kennedy-doppleganger, all five of whom were hellbent on reshackling America to the Haves and Have-Mores of the unenlightened Gilded Age.

But, Franklin Roosevelt won--that "socialist cripple" saved capitalism in spite of its ineducable self; he went on to three reelections; and the Court got handed a heart.

The alternative: lookin' pretty good

Today's Supreme Court decisions and their implications in brief, so to speak:

*"Show me your papers" is law.

*"Show me the money" remains law.

*Judicial activism is now a wholly owned reality of the right.

*If Latinos don't get out and vote for Obama and thus a more civilized Court of the future (today's Court was, admittedly, a sloppy, slop-over hybrid), even those living here legally may eventually want to self-deport. 

*If white men and white women and African Americans and the young and the old and the educated and the uneducated and the working poor and the middle class don't get out and vote for Obama and thus a more civilized nation of the future, eventually we may all want to self-deport.

The Ghosts of the Great Depression II

It's damn near Dickensian. The Ghost of the Great Depression past keeps haunting us with devastating lessons once thought learned, just a couple of which Krugman reminds us this morning--a seemingly insignificant, 1931 Austrian banking emergency turned global crisis; and six years later, here at home, a premature transition from "fiscal stimulus to austerity, plunging the recovering economy back into recession."

History fills Krugman with "a growing sense of dread," which unquestionably results from his acting the part of the Ghost of the Great Depression present. Economists may be undistinguished as political theorists, as Krugman is the first to admit of himself, but the better ones are the very best of empiricists. While the free-market fools and sap-headed supply-siders who got us into this mess are content to stagger through the apocalypse on more and more and yet more faith, the empiricist soberly insists that the proper analysis is right in front of us--in the past.

Which of course points to the future, whose greatly depressed Ghost is by now, I should think, deeply skeptical of that free will concept he once hawked. In more ways than one, we seem determined to repeat the past's mistakes.

But here's the really depressing part. In the past--for our purpose, especially the 1930s--the error-prone actors often acted in innocent ignorance. Keynesianism, then, was theoretical economics; there was not yet the successful history of Keynesianism to analyze empirically. Today we know better, much better; the historical evidence of effective fiscal stimulus over grinding austerity is virtually Himalayan. Yet on we grind, out of habitual stupidity and aggressive poltroonery and institutional paralysis.

As a triumvirate of enlightened despots, Obama, Krugman and Keynes would have us out of this stupidly protracted mess before the Ghost of Christmas 2013 could say "infrastructure." And yet here we sit, or rather lie, like Dickens' Ghosts tied to the ground by Swift.

For a "rational" species, it's all rather peculiar.

I'm so ashamed

I learned something BIG this morning, and I learned it in the shockingly tardy 21st paragraph of the NY Times' 25-paragraph story, "Wearing Brave Face, Obama Braces for Health Care Ruling." Had I been Jodi Kantor's editor, I would have made it the lede, because, well, like I said, this is BIG, as in Joe Biden Big--yes it's that fucking big, or at least damn close to it. To wit,

If the court strikes down the mandate and Mr. Obama wins in November, he could face one last version of his perpetual choice on health care: would he settle, learning to live with a sharply edited law? (Given that Republicans see the bill as a signature piece of big-government overreach, he might have no choice.)

I'm immensely thankful to Ms. Kantor for opening my delusional eyes. You see, it's been my impression, nay, my conviction, that Republicans plunged into palsied hysterics over President Obama's GOP-Hertitage Foundation-Mitt Romney Affordable Care Act because Republicans are obstructionist hooligans who wish Obama every possible political harm. I thought Republicans plunged into palsied hysterics because they're a treacherous pack hypocritical jackals. And I thought Republicans plunged into palsied hysterics because, simply, hysterics is what they do.

But now I learn that I'm wrong, dreadfully wrong, and that I've been wrong wrong wrong for some time. Because Republicans, according to Jodi Kantor and the inestimable New York Times, plunged into palsied hysterics only because they see the bill as a signature piece of big-government overreach.

I just looked out the window. Yes, the sky is blue. I opened the window. I heard the birds chirping. And yes, yes, children are playing delightedly and the breeze is cool and refreshing and I see that all around me it's morning again in America--strike that, it has been morning in America all along, but I was too blind to see it, too deaf to hear it, too contemptuous of what I foolishly thought were villainously depraved and slitheringly decadent Republicans to appreciate it. And here they were, those honorable chaps, just sitting in genuine, good-faith, philosophical disagreement.

I'm so ashamed of myself. So terribly ashamed.

'(Pseudo)conservatism for Dummies'

Joseph Stiglitz:

[T]he austerity agenda advocated by conservatives will make [wealth inequality and the recession] worse....

The austerity advocated by some Republicans will lead to higher unemployment, which will lead to lower wages as workers compete for jobs....

[I]f we go down the path of austerity, we risk entering a double-dip recession.... But perhaps most important, our country will increasingly become divided, and we will pay a high economic price for our growing inequality and declining opportunity. The consequences will be even harder on our democracy, our identity as a nation of opportunity and fair play, and our society.

Stiglitz's fellow economist Paul Krugman would differ from this assessment only in noting that Republicans' austerity agenda is no vague, futuristic bogeyman. It is, rather, the here and now--the imbecility of government contraction exacerbating the preexisting contractions of business and consumerism; imbecilic, that is, if one cares about an improving economy.

Republicans don't. Worse, they're openly hostile to it. When they obstruct yet another jobs bill or extended unemployment relief or any legislation even remotely stimulative, they're not actually peddling some alternative, coherent, ideological doctrine of macroeconomic austerity, however. "Unleash the job creators" is no doctrine. It's a slogan. And--no doubt you've noticed--Republican pols have nothing to add after belching said slogan, because there is nothing to add, because the slogan is so stupendously dumb only its mindless, stand-alone repetition is articulatory.

As I write and as Republicans belch, "job creators" are already unfettered, and nothing but increased aggregate demand will in turn unfetter their personnel budgets. Hence the necessity of the government to spend, when others won't, or can't.

This macroeconomic concept is so elegantly simple and empirically verifiable, even a tea-partying GOPer could absorb it. Yet when pressed on the concept's incontrovertability, Republicans are naturally, dyspeptically left sputtering their platitudes about lovable small government and hideous big debt, which is less an admissible debate tactic than an intimidated change of subject. Even they comprehend the self-evident truth of how to achieve growth during downturns, but they're agin 'em--both the truth and the growth (under President Obama).

All of which leads to the unpleasant conclusion that Republicans, in their aggressive opposition to Stiglitz & Co.'s imposingly sober recommendations, are intoxicatedly pro-social division, pro-inequality, pro-declining opportunity and fundamentally hostile to democratic give and take, opportunity and fair play.

It's for those reasons, gentle readers, that I always resist calling Republicans "conservatives"; I opt for the more logically suitable, Hofstadterian "pseudoconservatives." I retain a loving fidelity to the importance of words and their enduring meanings--and for all we find in contemporary Republicans, there sure as hell is no authentic conservatism.

We find unmistakable anarchic impulses, unambiguous strains of nihilism, insurmountable heaps of obscurantism and all-too familiar lockstep authoritarianism. But conservatism? Real conservatism? The conservatism of empirical thought and prudent acts, of incremental progressive change?

Pshaw.

*

Editorial note: This post's title was meant not for my regular readers, but for those pseudoconservatives who on occasion stumble by on their way to convincing themselves that they're true conservatives. 

A delightful outage

My internet/cable has been out all day--a general outage, I'm told.

I'm fine with this, because it was a free-enterprise outage. Had my cable/internet service been a government-run service, I would have really been steamed, because, well, that's government for you. Government just isn't a problem; government is the problem.

Now it's true that the Post Office, that notorious offspring of incompetent GovThink, processes more than a half-billion pieces of mail each day, some of them mine. And it's also true that, for years, the Post Office has never lost or destroyed so much as one piece of my mail, which still costs less than a half-buck to send from where I am to a couple hundred or even a couple thousand miles away. This realization always makes me happy--until I recall that government or any government-related operation is the problem, our worst problem, a monstrously tyrannical problem.

So I've missed nearly one full day of free-enterprise cable/internet. So what? Its costly absence was a virtuous absence. So. No problem.

'Elite failure,' courtesy the non-elite

From Krugman's "Conscience of a Liberal" we grasp the unconscionableness of a few technocrats:

[T]his looks like pure concession to political intimidation — a Fed refusing to do anything that would let Republicans accuse it of helping Obama. And for the sake of its own political comfort, the Fed is essentially betraying the unemployed.

All in all, the degree of elite failure in this crisis is just stunning.

I heard part of Ben Bernanke's press conference this week, and what I heard made me wonder if it was Bernanke speaking, or Lewis Carroll. Although we're doing very little today, said the chairman, the economy isn't as robust as we once thought; indeed one could say it's downright sluggish and likely to remain that way for some time to come. And should the economy remain sluggish for some time to come we at the Fed can always do more.

Come again?

Or, just to extend our literary theme, Bernanke sounded more like Sancho Panza than the gentleman we really needed, Don Quixote. The latter, too, left a life of relative comfort and specialized erudition to brave cutthroats and counterfeits--and he didn't give up so easily. The Don may have been, well, quixotic, but in the face of vulgar treachery his nobility of conscience was almost inexhaustible; it took far more than a rowdy band of megalomaniacal Eric Cantors in doublets to subdue his chivalrous sense of duty.

Ezra Klein sees a pandemic of pusillanimity:

The Federal Reserve can act — or, at the least, it says it can act — but it doesn’t want to. The president would like to act, but can’t do it without Congress. Democrats in Congress would like to act, but can’t do it without Republicans in Congress. Republicans in Congress can act, but they won’t.

Broadly, is pusillanimity the right word? I guess not--it definitely applies to the Fed, yet in Republicans one finds only the boldest of crackpotted nihilism. But for sure neither pusillanimous nor quixotic applies to the president or his party. They know, as does anyone who's ever read an Intro to Macroeconomics text, precisely and realistically what should be done to boost the recovery.

And in Klein's list of "institutional actors" responsible for this mess of prolonged sluggishness and inaction, he omits only one--the most critical one: the electorate.

The Bloomberg poll

I was underwhelmed to read Greg Sargent on Twitter correcting GOP hatchetman Brad Dayspring, who, characteristically, was caught in the act of twisting a distortion of a misrepresentation of the almost instantly infamous Bloomberg poll. Dayspring's very existence on Earth--which once served Eric Cantor as an aide and before that Texan Jeb Hensarling--proves only that political slime runs uphill. I once regrettably engaged Mr. Dayspring in a testy email exchange which, I noticed within minutes, was reducing my IQ by the minute; his personality truly made Thomas Hobbes' brutish nastiness seem short. I fled His CyberMalignancy as quickly as possible and with as much human dignity as I could muster.

But as to the Bloomberg thing, yes, it was absurdly overcovered and it positively screamed "Outlier." What was missing from all the coverage, though, was even a peep from the punditocracy, which knows better, about the pointlessness of national polling of a presidential race--unless one of the contenders consistently holds, say, a 10-point lead, which arithmetically means it's all over. Once one shaves a few points from the dubious 13-point lead that Bloomberg showed Obama holding, clearly that isn't the case, nor could it be, since this poll was, as mentioned, a rather singular outlier. 

Yet the paradox of the Bloomberg poll was that its signaling of a substantial Obama lead might as well be true; if, that is, one tracks presidential contests through the electoral college, which is what happens to elect presidents. Obama has, consistently, held a collective lead over Romney in the battleground states, and when bundled with his reasonably secure 240 or thereabouts electoral-college count, he's sitting quite pretty.

Another platitude bombing raid

That was quite the platitude bombing raid.

The most interesting thing one can say about Mitt Romney is that there's nothing interesting about him. He's that much of a blank, a cipher, an indifferent policy guy playing a professional politician.

Now mind you, this professional pol has actually achieved second-rank success--he is, after all, the near nominee of one of the two major parties--and yet there is nothing to recommend him, nothing interesting about him, nothing whatsoever that could ever enliven or enlighten.

Thomas Dewey was a William Jennings Bryan compared to this dude.