PMC Commentary

A gloomy Paul Krugman, BUT ...

Krugman's latest is jarring:

[I]f our economy has a persistent tendency toward depression [due to structurally inadequate demand], we’re going to be living under the looking-glass rules of depression economics--in which virtue is vice and prudence is folly, in which attempts to save more (including attempts to reduce budget deficits) make everyone worse off--for a long time.

As an economist he evades discussion of the unlikely politics of reversal--massive stimulus--which leaves the emphasis, depressingly, on a long time, in the wrong direction.

I am unconvinced, however, that the unlikely politics of a bold Keynesianism are tantamount to impossible politics. Such a necessary educational campaign--pounded as part of a bold resurrection of Obama's second term--could replace a whole lot of the electorate's lost confidence and missing hope.

It's something, anyway, but defense. 

 

The House GOP's "blank slate" is full up

Politico's headline reads, "House GOP 2014 agenda starts with blank slate," which might seem to suggest a fresh start.

"What we have done so far this year clearly hasn’t worked," said [a] GOP aide involved in the planning sessions. "Cantor wants to take us in a new direction, which is good. The problem is we don’t know where we are headed, and we don’t know what we can sell to our members."

Republicans are in their fourth decade of political dominance, and for the last two of those decades they have ruled--with only brief interruptions--the House. And yet they say they "don't know where [they] are headed."

The politically naive and sentimentally innocent might proffer the eminently sensible suggestion: Say, how about toward a program of authentic conservatism? But, alas, having spent the last several decades awash not in preservation but in destruction, our "conservative" auditors wouldn't know what that means.

Thus their starting "blank slate" is akin to their engrained nihilism; their slate is not the tabula rasa of Locke, in which empirical reality imprints the mind. Their discovered philosophy is, rather, of the ideologically a priori sort: they know in their gut they must oppose and then oppose again, they must tear it all down, destroy their foes, leave nothing intact. Or at least that's what our senses and empirical assessments tell us. There is no there there.

Their professed convictions are essentially barren. Consider, for instance, this piece of intelligence-gathering in the Politico story:

House Republicans have spent much of their nearly three-year old majority focusing on fixing the nation’s massive debt and deficit problems, in between futile votes to get rid of Obamacare. Republican aides say that fiscal focus is not disappearing, but there’s also an increasing recognition that most Americans don’t think the nation’s $17 trillion debt affects them on a day-to-day basis.

A rough translation: For years (under Presidents Obama and Clinton only) Republicans have condemned the horrors of increasing debt as America's greatest, and even existential, threat; yet now they suspect their warnings have lost much of their electoral punch. So to hell with it.

In other words, either their debt warnings were profoundly disingenuous all along, or, for mere political gain, Republicans are willing to largely dismiss what they have genuinely forewarned is the leading cause of America's ultimate doom--which, in anyone's book, would be a naked betrayal of the American people. No fiscal spectre so immensely threatening could ever be discounted or sidelined by a red-flag-waving party of real convictions.  

In releasing their strategic bits of intel to Politico, what Republicans don't say is what they do have: Obamacare. Out with the old, unfashionable, unappealing alerts about debt, which, it seems, they themselves never really believed anyway; however we're now to believe that they believe--and this time, they swear, they're really serious--that the Affordable Care Act is America's greatest, and even existential, threat.

Hence Republicans aren't actually working from a blank slate. "Obamacare" is scrawled all over it, and Republicans know just where they're headed with it: tear it all down, destroy its defenders, leave nothing intact.  

Quite the visionary program, isn't it?

 

Sarah Palin's "Good Tidings and Great Joy," or, "Mountains of casuistry heaped o'er her head!"

I was conflicted over which review of Palin's ghost-scrawled, happy holidays! monstrosity to bring you--Michelle Cottle's direct one, from yesterday; or Alexander Pope's Palin-glimpsed satire, from the 1700s--a conflict resolved by my heroic decision to bring you both, respectively: 

From the first chapter, it is clear that, whatever her concerns about "a Christ-less Christmas," Palin has found a convenient frame on which to hang her rage at pretty much everything: Obamacare, Obamaphones, Nancy Pelosi, the national debt, gay marriage, sexual sin, crony capitalism, the preferential treatment of Muslims (whoo-wee! does she get rolling on that one), the lamestream media, Chick-fil-A haters, abortion, Mitt Romney’s hair, and on and on.

 ...

Beneath her footstool, Science groans in chains,/And Wit dreads exile, penalties, and pains./There foamed rebellious Logic, gagged and bound,/There, stripped, fair Rhetoric languished on the ground;/His blunted arms by Sophistry are borne,/And shameless Billingsgate her robes adorn.

This is trite, but if I embraced with body and soul--as Sarah Palin claims to do--the Christian notion of eternal bliss, why in God's name would I ever consume so much as one minute of gut-wrenching anguish over the ephemeralities of the national debt, gay marriage, and "Obamaphones"? Why, hell, I'd be doing Daffy Duck handsprings every waking morn, and right on through the day, in anticipation of my everlasting paradise to come, as well as that of all my believing loved ones.

I also wouldn't be worried about making another U.S. dollar on this speck of planetary dust which drifts on the edge of one remote galaxy among Creation's billions of hurling splendors; in fact I'd probably be dumping the dollars I do have, as my Spiritual Guide once divinely suggested, on those less blessed than I--indeed on those in need, perhaps, of an Obamaphone.  

Or maybe not. Maybe I'd just shoot for the Billingsgate, and then pray for forgiveness.

 

Obama's blues

In titanic displays of journalistic folly, everywhere, it seems, there are comparisons being drawn between Obama's and GWB's second terms. The political effects from this president's busted Website and mangled promise from yesteryear, on the one hand, are breezily juxtaposed with that other president's overseas slaughterhouse and unholy mess of Katrina. Thus, or so goes the narrative's sensationalism, Obama now finds himself, almost helplessly, in Bushian-approval territory.

However since the above fundamentals are, to say the least, incommensurate--not to mention that Obama is highly intelligent, while Bush was mortifyingly dumb--any second-term comparisons are merely the stuff of which the right's wet dreams are made of. (No doubt today's crack-historiographic conservatives are recalling FDR's second-term woes--fallout from a Court never packed and a depression thoughtlessly recessed--which of course precluded his own political recovery; he was not to be heard from again.)

That said, Obama is in serious trouble. His approval ratings are in freefall, and the electorate's growing disapproval could devastate Democrats' congressional hopes next year--and with them, any hope on Obama's part of a second-term revival.

The circumstances he finds himself in--and that he helped to put himself in--are a bona-fide five-alarmer. I'm hardly unsettled upon reading, for instance, that "One senior administration official disputed the characterization that the White House was in 'hair on fire' mode,'" since no official in any administration would ever officially fess up to such intensely advisable pyrotechnics. But an "observer close to the West Wing" admitted to a "full triage mode" at the WH, and another official conceded "'a palpable sense of urgency' that is not typical of the way the no-drama-Obama West Wing works." I would be unsettled if such modified admissions of absolute panic were unforthcoming.

Still, it's worrisome that the WH's 2013 political team appears safely intact. A simmering implosion has been conspicuous all year--seconds of WH offense have been submerged in hours, days, weeks and months of face-palming defense against the most aggressive opposition since Lincoln suffered Southern Democrats--and now, at last, the bottom is falling out, per virtually every poll taken. 

But, who knows? Perhaps the wholly contemptible consequences of ever playing nice with the wholly contemptible opposition are finally registering with the WH's political operation. Maybe this, in all its relative horror, is what it took to wake them the hell up.  

 

One man, one unequal vote

Because Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS is merely a benevolent "social welfare advocacy organization," rather than a defamatory mud-slinger and vulgar corrupter of any vestigial political ethics, we may never know who singularly, anonymously, and legally wrote it a check last year for $22,500,000.

But someone did.

Which means my aggregate 2012 political contributions, if I recall the total correctly, stacked up to an amount worth 0.0000044% of just one of Mr. Rove's one-time contributions. And mine were somewhat painful, whereas Rove's contributor's was probably little more than petty cash.

American democracy.

 

Thanks, GOP, for all the ruckus

Yesterday, Wonkblog's Sarah Kliff surveyed professional reaction to President Obama's Care-full re-rigging of ACA regs, which ranged from the sublimely simple--"We will not be allowing insurance companies to extend their policies," said the state of Washington's insurance commissioner--to the frightfully tangled, such as this memo from an industry consultant:

[I]nsurance companies have 32 days to reprogram their computer systems for policies, rates, and eligibility, send notices to the policyholders via US Mail, send a very complex letter that describes just what the differences are between specific policies and Obamacare compliant plans, ask the consumer for their decision--and give them a reasonable time to make that decision--and then enter those decisions back into their systems without creating massive billing, claim payment, and provider eligibility list mistakes.

... which are but a few of the minor reasons why Washington's commissioner declined the president's option: "I have serious concerns about how President Obama’s proposal would be implemented." His major, long-term concern is risk-pool contamination, which could lead not just to rate creep, but rate explosions.

So much for the policy angles of Obama's forced move, tragically born of pure political necessity. Republicans are America's unparalleled grandmasters of the propaganda game; they instantly whisked away their damning shutdown debris and propelled a nation of more than 300 million--about 50 million of whom are uninsured, and thus in perpetual danger of bankruptcy or death--straight to the spectacularly wrongheaded conclusion that Obamacare is mostly about a comparatively few (and essentially worthless) cancelled health insurance policies.   

And for all of Republican pols' three-years worth of pounding hysteria already, this is just the beginning. They'll ride their fabricated Obamacare bugaboos and the law's vastly exaggerated flaws throughout 2014 and well into 2016. They'll panic the public, engage in rolling assaults and demolish whatever confidence in government the electorate has left. 

Unless Obama & Allies take up an aggressive offense--one that far transcends the relative meekness of telling friendly steelworkers in Cleveland that "those who say they are opposed to [Obamacare] and can’t offer a solution, we’ll push back."

No, no, not "we will push back"; we are pushing back, starting today; and in fact we're going to start pushing first. Let the other guys push back for a while; force them to defend against a coordinated, relentless bombardment of their malicious nihilism and propagandistic rot.

This is demonstrably doable as a top-down approach, in that Republicans have been doing it successfully for years. It does, however, also require bottom-up support, which is to say that Obama's base must stop using the lazy, "both-sides" press as an excuse to remain fetally positioned.

Obama has got to get motivated and mad--though, by virtue of personality, less publicly angry than his allied surrogates--and his base has got to get mad, too. Really mad. And I just don't see it. What I do see is an increasingly indifferent base that when complaining at all, its complaining is mostly whimpering about the unfairness of it all.

Fuck that. That's what conservatives did for years, before Nixon's aggressive offense against the "liberal media"--which, for decades to come, worked fabulously well for the right.  

 

Soft hardball

Michael Tomasky:

It’s a pretty good time for President Obama to crack the whip. Why he evidently didn’t earlier is still mystifying. Or maybe it’s not. He just isn’t a kick-ass-and-take-names kind of guy. But the success of his presidency may be on the line here in the next few weeks, so it’s not the worst idea for him to become one.

That's not going to happen. And perhaps Obama shouldn't make the attempt. I once worked for a pol who possessed a remarkably Obama-like temperament, but we staffers soon appreciated that efforts on our part to force unnatural changes on his part produced little but unpleasant effects.

Still, I don't see why Obama, without disturbing his essential personality, couldn't turn the political tables for a while and play the GOP's beloved game of victimization. After all, he is a victim, as we all are, of Republicans' withering malice and perpetual obstructionism.

Failure, failure, failure--the cornerstones of GOP ideology under President Obama. They root for failure, they strive for failure, they pray for it and celebrate it, they positively adore every hint, sign, or faintest evidence of it. That can be sold by Obama and Democrats as a profoundly unAmerican ideology, even if, albeit to lesser degrees, every party throughout the history of American politics has privately harbored the same hostilities.

But the connections must be explicitly made: only deeply unAmerican and indeed rather eerily foreign tactics suitable only to less exceptional nations could ever victimize a lofty American president; and those scurrilous, inscrutable tactics, the GOP has introduced here--a despicable act which has fundamentally altered America's political character, which had never ever of course rooted for America's failure. Until now.

Coolly put them on defense. Kill them softly. Lay into them with doleful, wounded recriminations. Yes it's a pity the GOP so hates America that it cheers for America's failure. Who are these people--these Others?--who indeed toil only to victimize America itself.

Hardball, played with softballs. It suits Obama's temperament.

 

What CNN says Obama will say

According to CNN, here--an "administrative" fix--is what the White House will offer: 

The plan will in part call for insurance policies to be renewed for one year for those who already have insurance policies in the individual market....

If an insurance company does renew a substandard plan, it would be required to do two things. First, it would have to notify the policy holder of alternative coverage options. Second, the company would have to disclose all of the benefits a policy holder will lose if she keeps an existing substandard plan.

Given a sufficiently aggressive consumer-education campaign, it would seem that this could stop a good part of the policy fallout, and much of the political bleeding. But congressional Dems will need to swing back, en masse, toward the WH--as well as take a rowdy counteroffensive against tomorrow's GOP contamination.

 

The difference

In pondering a specific, Democratic Rep. Bill Pascrell (NJ) inadvertently reveals the general difference between his party's attitude toward governance and that of the opposition's: 

We've worked too hard to get [Obamacare] passed, and in good conscience, we have to deliver to the American people. I don't want to hear about the Republicans exploiting this. They're going to exploit every chance that they have. They didn't cause this particular problem. And so what I'm saying is that we'd better come up with an option or an alternative to [more GOP sabotage].

A good conscience, a compulsion to deliver, a recognition of owning a self-caused problem, and a determination to get things right--political qualities universally lacking in today's GOP.

Sure, some congressional Dems--especially Blue Dogs in red districts or states--are running scared and looking for any cover, although the White House is expected to provide a more reasonable sort later this morning. Still, on whole, the proposition holds: While Democrats tend to own up to their mistakes, and thereupon set out to remedy them, Republicans are grinningly content with dropping all their vast blunders into someone else's lap--and thereupon declare their superiority.

Pascrell's pointed remarks say much more the words used, yet it's their unspoken meaning that deserves electoral applause.

  

Obamacare Soap Update

Erick cries It's a trap! while Josh finds himself shocked to admit that Erick, of all people!, understands this--this being, in part, that Republicans are "endorsing the bizarre idea that health reform should not lead to health plan changes"--just as Mike in the lower chamber is enchanted with the idea of supporting what he himself labels a terrible bill, but for heaven's sake he needs something "to vote for," no matter how dumb, "in order to keep our word to the American people," however Mary says Mike's terribleness will "gut" Obamacare, while her bill, which she insists is meant not to undermine but to strengthen Obamacare, would in reality more egregiously undermine it, which Jay, for utterly incomprehensible reasons, says "shares a similar goal to what the president has asked his team to explore"; meanwhile Ezra draws a long syringe of Ativan. 

Thus our political epic crawls to an uncertain close, more Swiftian or Waugh-like than Homeric, with a touch of Wilde: To lose one house may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.

The supremest irony? Charles Krauthammer may actually have been right about something after all, though of course not, like Erick Erickson, for the reasons he imagined. 

 

"Loosely Organized But Missing for Action"

From the Washington Post:

Software problems with the federal online health insurance marketplace ... are proving so stubborn that the system is unlikely to work fully by the end of the month as the White House has promised, according to an official with knowledge of the project....

Government workers and tech­nical contractors racing to repair the Web site have concluded, the official said, that the only way for large numbers of Americans to enroll in the health-care plans soon is by using other means so that the online system isn’t overburdened.

Why isn't Organizing for Action, along with other hastily organized League(s) to Pull Obamacare's Butt Out of the Fire (just a suggestion), running ads every 10 minutes on ESPN, Spike, Sunday Night Football, Big Bang Theory, Friends reruns, or whatever it is that America's youth watches these days, urging them to call a federal help center rather than try to access the ACA's godawful Website?

Every couple days I hear an administration official, if not the president himself, gently advise this enormously sensible alternative. But, come on, the message requires a whole lot of pounding, not an occasional mention.

 

What do you mean the right has no plan?

The right's alternative healthcare plan--which the left insidiously claims does not exist--per the right's Explainerette in Chief, the inimitable you-know-who:

The plan is to allow those things that had been proposed over many years to reform a health care system in America that certainly does need more help so that there's more competition, there's less tort reform threat, there's less trajectory of the cost increases. And those plans have been proposed over and over again. And what thwarts those plans? It's the far left. It's President Obama and his supporters who will not allow the Republicans to usher in free market, patient-centered, doctor-patient relationship links to reform health care.

And there you have it, you know, those things, proposed over and over.

Upon plowing through Ms. Palin's complex policy weeds, at first glance you may think that the right's pursuit of "less tort reform threat" conflicts with the right's unremitting threats of tort reform. But that would only reveal your skeptical shallowness. Palin works in mysterious ways. What she actually meant was ... well, uh ... well, oh, OK, my shallowness hasn't a goddamn clue.

 

Crappy computer program = "Collapse of American liberalism"

We have not just Obamacare unraveling, not just the Obama administration unraveling, not just the Democratic majority of the Senate [unraveling], but we could be looking at the collapse of American liberalism. Obamacare is the big thing for them. The biggest in a hundred years.

--Charles Krauthammer, in a somewhat premature ejaculation of devilish delight

One scarcely knows where to begin--or, rather, whether to even bother--with such muddled hyperbole.

Obamacare isn't "unraveling." Yes its Website sucks, but it's also true that the overall program's slow-going enrollment mirrors Massachusetts' experience under Romneycare. We are a nation of procrastinators, which in this embarrassing instance is probably a good thing. The Website will be fixed, which to some liberals is a bad thing, since Obamacare's success will only retard the inevitable arrival of single-payer--which is genuine liberalism, while unnecessarily complicated Obamacare leans far more toward Krauthammerism.

Point goes to Charles on "the Obama administration [is] unraveling." On the other hand every administration episodically unravels, although Obama's has hardly sunk to the abominations of Nixon's Watergate, Reagan's Iran-Contra, or Bush II's Iraq. And Charles, your rhetorical serve is late. I've been bemoaning the Obama administration's political unraveling for the last eleven months. The president needs a fresh team, and in time, I suspect, he'll wake up and get himself one.

As for Senate Democrats' unraveling, what's of far greater historic noteworthiness was their fleeting unity during the Krauthammer party's stupendously idiotic government shutdown. Senate Dems are now merely back to normal--bickering, cowering, and splintering.

Charles' final muddle--"we could be looking at the collapse of American liberalism. Obamacare is the big thing for them. The biggest in a hundred years"--I should best treat collectively, and swiftly: Are you fucking joking, Charles?

Authentic American liberalism began collapsing about a half-century ago under the later Johnson administration, the oppression of Vietnam, and immense waves of white backwash. It has since reigned tyrannically only in the diseased, paranoid, propagandistic minds of Krauthammer Inc. Liberalism's mirage feeds the far right, which, being programless, can thrive only in the face of an imaginatively monstrous foe.

By now, in the 21st century, liberalism is the new conservatism. It's already clicheish to note that Obamacare is profoundly conservative in its conception, that deficit reduction has sadly displaced massive Keynesian pump-priming, and that liberalism's overriding mission these days is simply to preserve our traditional social safety nets of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

None of this is to argue that Krauthammer Inc. doesn't believe its delusions. It has hated so intensely and its ideological star chamber has echoed so thunderingly, and for so long, it eagerly interprets every Obamian hiccup as a historic, bunkered collapse. 

 

Richard Cohen's retro-acuity

From the delightful Thomas Frank's Facebook page, some exasperation extraordinaire:

Can this be? Do my eyes function properly? In today's Washington Post, under the byline "Richard Cohen," I read the following statement about Bill de Blasio:

"People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York--a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children."

The buffoon means it, too. I remember how careful I used to be when writing op-eds for the WSJ--careful about tiny facts and slight grammar issues. And this guy just vomits onto the page. How can this be happening? Great journalists are losing their jobs everywhere and this guy meanders blithely, idiotically on. They PAY him to write this stuff.

And no, I'm not taking it out of context--read it for yourself. Or don't.

I did. And diagnostically, I'd go with creeping senility or profound confusion or, maybe, a brain tumor.

By "people with conventional views," Cohen clearly meant incurable bigots. Why he didn't just say that, I don't know. But here was the passage that rocked me even more than Cohen's rather delicate touch about the maliciously ignorant: "Today’s GOP is not racist, as Harry Belafonte alleged about the tea party."

Cohen goes on to say the party is indeed "deeply troubled" (that is, rather than racist) about its perception of expanding government, immigration and so on. But for him to to aver that at the critical bottom of the GOP's troubles is an absence of racism is akin to asserting that the Civil War was about states' rights or sectional cultural divides--but not slavery, even though slavery was the indispensable linchpin of any alternative causes. It's an endlessly looping nonsensical argument.

But hey, as long as someone is willing to "PAY him to write this [unexamined] stuff," why not write it? It's easier than having to think.

 

Who the hell knows

Whatever the actual, ethical merit of Bill Clinton's stated position--"I personally believe, even if it takes a change to the law, the president should honor the commitment the federal government made to those people and let them keep [the insurance] they got"--that merit is hopelessly undercut by his political motive.

In rhetorical studies one finds the ready admonition against discounting an argument merely because of the speaker's self-interest in making it. But that's academics, and this is the real world. Clinton has seldom let slip an admission against interest, the flipside of which is that the former president is relentlessly calculating in what he does say. And, sorry to say, these days that means cheap-shooting for Hillary.

Hence Bill Clinton's stated position is likely as much opportunistic bombast as an ethical bugaboo. Perhaps our sitting president should contaminate the ACA's risk pool and permit tens of thousands of worthless insurance policies to remain intact because he failed to read every pertinent page of the Affordable Care Act in every speech, for which an apology, at least, was owed--and delivered. But does Bill C. really believe that? Who the hell knows.

Which goes to the agony of the Clintons' three-year presidential campaign that we inescapably now find ourselves in. As to believability, every word of their speechifying and interviews will be a coin toss; maybe they mean it, and maybe they don't. Who the hell knows.

Such ambiguity and artful dodging are hardly unique to the ever-political Clintons. It's just that having experienced eight years of it already, the thought of another eleven, all told, is borderline horrifying.