PMC Commentary

Will impeachment be back on the table?

Norm Ornstein:

I have talked off the record to some aides to tea-party Republicans in the House, who say that they are getting a lot of push from their activist voters to impeach the president. They, like their leaders, know how catastrophic that would be for Republicans heading into 2016 and will do what they can to head off any such move by hotheads. But if we assume that the president, determined to enhance and extend his legacy, implements major executive orders on immigration and climate change, there will be howls of outrage from the base and many lawmakers, and the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Erick Erickson, and Laura Ingraham will not be holding them back.

I'm no fan of presidential fiats. They gut the integrity of the check-and-balance system; they deprive the body politic of its representative voices in Congress (often deranged voices, to be sure, but legitimately elected all the same); and they expand the imperial presidency to responsible and reckless presidents both.

The countervailing argument for Obama's unilateral action on, say, immigration, is, in effect, What's the poor man to do? Reckless Congresses have held up his responsible agenda for four years, and another two years of inaction (if not more, under the next Democratic president) on such an urgent matter are simply intolerable. I appreciate this argument and it has its merits, still I'm of the belief that S.O.P. is, in the long run, always preferable, in that it lends to greater political stability.

Having said that, I would nonetheless love to see Obama stick it to a Republican-controlled Congress by shoveling executive orders out the White House door, just as fast as he can sign them. I wouldn't approve, but I'd love it. The GOP base's "howls of outrage" would be deafening and the "hotheads'" impeachment hand would be forced. If fact, Boehner's would be, too. Once again he'd be confronted with taking his party down a blind, ominous, and self-destructive alley.

Of course there is a way for all this to be avoided. Republicans could grow up and actually do their job of legislating ...

OK, you're right, strike that. It's unavoidable.

 

Scott Brown, your elocution lessons await you

Last night I caught a few minutes of the New Hampshire Shaheen-Brown debate on C-Span, and I must say, I never realized how rhetorically clumsy the challenger is.

It seems Sen. Shaheen once denounced the idea of another American "occupying force" in the Middle East, a comment that Scott Brown repeatedly assaulted in this way, or in some close variation of it: "We’re a liberating force, we’re not an occupying force, Senator, and I and every other person who has served in the military resents that you are calling us occupiers."

Though emotionally artificial and sentimentally contrived, that reads unrealistically smooth. Yet for all his rehearsal of that comeback, Brown barely got it out. He stammered, paused, and seemed to have trouble recalling his outrage--word for word, that is.

Brown aspires to good demagoguery, but he quite obviously lacks its first imperative: the ability to speak.

 

"It’s not hard to see how they get the six seats"--or more

Cook Political Report's "Bottom Line":

Given the national political environment and that the Senate race map favors Republicans, it’s not hard to see how they get the six seats they need to win the majority. At the same time, the known unknowns like run-offs and the Democrats’ ground game, make it easy to see how they could fall just short. Overall, we tend to believe that Republicans will get to 51 seats.

My guess is 52, even with Roberts being bumped by Orman. So, depending on Orman's caucusing decision, I'm guessing it could be 53. But of course we still won't know the outcome by next Wednesday, given the very high chance of a runoff or two.

 

And so the search for a Hillary-alternative begins

Last night, a Dish reader evinced the internal Democratic poison that is Hillary:

[Things] will only get worse with the prospect of Hillary vs. the GOP nut jobs looming on the horizon. I’m 49 years old and I’ve always been highly engaged politically, but I am perilously close to saying "fuck it' and not paying attention anymore. I will always vote but I feel my energy is better spent elsewhere.

Talk about a canary in a coal mine.

Presidentially, the GOP's doom is self-evident and unavoidable. But I've detected little enthusiasm for a Clinton candidacy. Even her supporters sigh rather than endorse, as though they're stuck with drudgery personified. They accept--but rarely embrace--Hillary, and at a resigned distance. They concede not only her infamous calculation, which, in a politician, is ordinarily a plus, but her calculating staleness, which isn't. They know her strategic unfoldings before she deploys them: mechanical mutterings of Warrenism at home, tough-sounding muscularism abroad, and characteristically ill-articulated and base-alienating potshots at President Obama.

Hillary will, early on, enlist her party's usual suspects and talking heads to celebrate the Second, Third--or is it Fourth?--Coming of the Clinton Dynasty, yet their ballyhooing will have all the appeal of beets for dinner. Few voters buy the stilted celebrations now, those already in progress, and even fewer will buy them six months from now, after repeated forced-feedings on cable news. No one can sell immutable drudgery. 

Would Hillary win? Almost certainly. The presidential map is, by now, unalterably blue. But she'd win in the absence of Democratic enthusiasm--meaning, most likely, some really nasty downticket ramifications. Worse, she'd enter the White House on a carpet of staleness just at a time when voters, such as the reader referenced above, are looking for inspiration, invigoration, and someone to tackle our national challenges head on.

Next Wednesday, the search begins.

 

A governing Republican majority does not mean governance

There's something quite telling about Charles Krauthammer's concluding line to a column otherwise cheerfully devoted to Democrats' gross incompetence, seething corruption, weak-sister failure to create a global utopia and, in general, their unspeakably wayward governance of the American arcadia handed to them in 2009:

The stage is set for a major Republican victory [next Tuesday]. If they cannot pull it off under conditions so politically favorable, perhaps they might consider looking for another line of work.

Krauthammer is, for once, profoundly correct, indeed far more correct than he meant to be. Republicans' proper "line of work" is politicking and only politicking--never governing. For six years they've countered good and even rudimentary governance with political stunts, shenanigans and showboats; they've grandstanded and howled and disrupted; they've sniped, obstructed and reduced the world's oldest democracy to the world's leading laughingstock.   

It's what they do, and they can do no other. Presently they howl that repealing and replacing Obamacare is their top legislative priority next year, should they control both houses of Congress. Repeal (merely more showboating, for repeal, as Republicans know, will suffer the inevitable veto), they no doubt will. Repeal is negation, it's nihilism, and it's raw, red meat for the base. Perfect. But replace? That would require a governing touch; thoughtful study groups and sober committee hearings and serious markups and no little negotiation and compromise. And that, congressional Republicans do not do.

What's more, any out-of-character attempt by some few Republicans to actually govern will be instantly nullified by fractured caucuses of mutual hostilities, adolescent resentment and ideological conflict. House tea partiers will be out for Boehner and McCarthy's semi-moderate hides, while Cruz, Lee & Co. will make life most unpleasant for purple-state senators up for 2016 reelection. Congress may now be a gaping black hole, but it's slated for reconstruction as a KinderCare center, with the toddlers in charge. 

Find "another line of work" other than dark and chaotic politics? Whether in the majority or not, what else, Charles, can congressional Republicans do?

 

It depends on the party

Chait gently ridicules David Brooks' lament over the scourge of "partyism," best summarized in the latter's closing, "To judge human beings on political labels is to deny and ignore what is most important about them.... If you’re judging a potential daughter-in-law on political grounds, your values are out of whack." Observes Chait:

It is certainly true that partyism--or "partisanship," as we used to call it in the old days--can drive the human brain into all manner of prejudicial thinking. There is too much name-calling, knee-jerking side-taking, hypocrisy, and mindless tribalism in politics. We should all endeavor to be dispassionate and fair. It’s only fair to try to understand Republicans’ thinking, engage with their arguments on their own terms, and concede when they have a fair point. I know Republicans, and some of them are lovely human beings. That doesn’t mean I want one of them to move in next door and marry my daughter.

There is, I think, integrity in Chait's analysis, most easily demonstrated by (admittedly) a reductio ad absurdum. Would Brooks say Chait's values are "out of whack" if he judged a potential son-in-law by the young man's fascistic sympathies?

It's just a matter of degrees.    

My daughter recently and sadistically asked me if I would vote for her if she ran for president as a Republican. I said I would not. I added that I would still love her and indeed I might even get religion and pray for her in such a deplorable and desperate circumstance, but I wouldn't vote for her. She seemed shocked by this confession until I elaborated, which began with my expressed concern about what in God's name could ever attract anyone of any human decency to join the party of Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Louie Gohmert and Ted Cruz?

Softening that, I further asked why anyone would join a political party that has so consistently acted against the interests of working Americans ... that has so consistently favored the unafflicted ... that is presently laboring to deprive certain Americans of their vote ... that has villainously thrived for a half-century by inflaming cultural backlashes ... that hucksters Hayekian nonsense and promotes macroeconomic fantasies ... that has engaged us in reckless foreign adventures, robbed us of trillions and thousands of lives ... that has arrogantly appropriated God, the flag, and Americanism itself ... that salivates over the thought of booting people from healthcare ... that is intent on gutting public education ... that has laid waste to the last four years ... and, as an unmistakable signal of their prepubescent unseriousness, refuses, even, to pronounce the name of the opposition party correctly.

I think my daughter got the idea. It's not "partyism" on my part, but a revulsion against certain, and extremist, brands of it.

 

I'm becoming one helluva sexist

From Quinnipiac University:

With strong support from men, U.S. Rep. Cory Gardner, the Republican challenger in the Colorado U.S. Senate race, leads U.S. Sen. Mark Udall, the Democratic incumbent, 46-39 percent among likely voters, with 7 percent for independent candidate Steve Shogan....

With Shogan out of the race, Gardner is up 49--41 percent.

I've said this before, but I don't say it often enough: I, a man, belong to a pack of morons--us men. Joni Ernst's surge in Iowa is also owed to our collective, knuckledragging stupidity, and I've lost count of other polls, in other races, revealing the same, asymmetric fatuity.

I've just about had it with me and mine; I propose stringent voter ID for us men, and multiple, unquestioned ballots for all women--who appear to be our only salvation.

 

Q: If Republicans have NOTHING, then ...?

From Politico Magazine's Haberman and Thrush, a tidy compendium of the coming GOP attacks on Hillary:

There’s her age (she’ll turn 69 just before election day 2016), her health, her loyalty to a diminished Obama, Benghazi, Bill, the vast sums collected by the family’s charitable foundation, the Islamic State and the mess in the Middle East, Obamacare/Hillarycare, unanswered questions about old Arkansas and White House scandals, her perceived habit of stretching the truth, her enormous personal wealth--and how she got it....

Plus, she's "too cautious, too calculating," too untrustworthy and too manifestly desperate for the presidency. She also reeks of "the politics of the past."

It's a former oppo-researcher for candidate Obama who relates perhaps Hillary's greatest vulnerability on the campaign trial: "You can get in her head." The staffer's Republican counterpart agrees: "She’s so easily rattled and taken off her game."

This quote, though, from a "longtime adviser" to Obama, is the most unintentionally biting of all: "She’s not perfect, but something beats nothing, and they’ve got nothing." Exactly. It's the GOP's bungling bench of nothingness that makes one wonder why the Dems wouldn't just go with "something" else--someone, that is, with far fewer vulnerabilities. Why would Dems put themselves through all this impending pain, when Republicans have ... nothing?

 

"The Maddow Problem" is being solved in Kansas

Paul Davis, Kansas' Democratic candidate for governor, is, as E.J. Dionne explains, exploiting the rift between his conservative state's conservatives and the nation's radicals in the most logical fashion possible, and so far it's translating into success. Most polls have shown Davis ahead of Sam Brownback, because ... 

The choice Davis is offering is not between liberalism and conservatism but rather between two kinds of conservatism: the deeply anti-government tea party kind, and an older variety that values prudence and fiscal restraint but also expects government to provide, as Davis put it, "the basic services that are essential to the state’s vitality."

Some of us on the left--including some, such as myself, who are farther leftward than Dionne--have urged this perfectly reasonable as well as arrestingly obvious strategy for years. It's deployment, however, has been exasperatingly meager.

If you're a Democrat running for office in a uniformly Republican state, you are, in reality, facing a deeply divided electorate: authentic Republican conservatives vs. Palinite Republican reactionaries. Ordinarily the two factions unite behind the Republican candidate (commonly a reactionary, since his faction disproportionately votes in primaries) in the general election because the conservative faction has nowhere else to go; the Democratic candidate may not openly be touting liberalism, but he or she sure isn't selling genuine conservatism--"prudence and fiscal restraint" admixed with responsible governance, as Dionne summarizes it--either.

Paul Davis has seen that reality, and smartly engaged it. He offers himself as the gubernatorial race's authentic conservative who's doing battle with modern Republicanism's decidedly anticonservative radicalism. He reminds just enough conservatives what conservatism once meant, fusing them and their traditionalist beliefs with his own centrist and center-left Democratic base into a pragmatic majority. And that, as they say, is the way it's done.

Yet leftward resistance has proved itself durable, encased as it is, metaphorically, in The Maddow Problem. Progressives are boldly and proudly idealistic and above all right, say the left's Maddows, and they should soil themselves not with ideological compromises. My most unforgettable (and less metaphorical) moment of the 2008 presidential campaign was that of the MSNBC host interviewing Sen. Obama--rather, lecturing Sen. Obama as to everything he was doing wrong; that is, he was coming up progressively short. After delivering her laundry list of disgruntlement, Obama simply replied, "But Rachel, we're winning."

That, for Rachel, wasn't good enough. In her implicit view, voters should be beaten, berated, and dragged to progressivism's ideological rectitude. If they still resist, then fuck 'em. Someday they'll see the light, but till then, ideologically unflinching defeats trump strategically pragmatic victories.

Sound familiar? It should. It's precisely what's bringing down Sam Brownback's Republicanism.

 

From Fournier, a stunning misinterpretation

Fournier's latest is one of his more disingenuous pieces, and that's saying a lot. My alternative assessment is that he simply doesn't know how to read statistics, and he has passed the fruit of his ignorance on as a revolutionary fact. I'm not sure which is worse.

At any rate, he opens his National Journal column thus:

In a stunning turnaround, likely voters in the so-called millennial generation prefer a Republican-led Congress after next week's elections, and young Hispanics are turning sharply against President Obama.

A new national poll of 18-to-29-year-olds by Harvard's Institute of Politics shows that young Americans are leaving the new Democratic coalition that twice elected Obama.

Fournier's subtle glee is crudely deafening, but before we join him in declaring the Millennial generation a dead zone for Democrats, it's wise to read directly what the Institute actually says:

A new national poll of America’s 18- to 29-year-olds by Harvard’s Institute of Politics ... finds slightly more than half (51%) of young Americans who say they will "definitely be voting" in November prefer a Republican-run Congress with 47 percent favoring Democrat control....

[Only] 26% ... report they will "definitely" vote in the midterms [emphases mine].

So the "stunning turnaround," as Fournier characterizes it, excludes 74% of the generational "cohort," and it's only among this 26% that a very slight Republican advantage is detected--for a midterm election, in which Democratic voters only haphazardly show up.

In short, there's not much to see in the Institute's polling, but you'd never know it by reading Ron Fournier's column on it.

***

In fairness I should add that there has been a "turnaround" in the cohort's preferences compared to 2010 (which was 55 percent to 43 percent in Democrats' favor). For an 8-point drop (much of which could be attributed to margin of error), the modifier "stunning" is scarcely warranted, however.

 

House conservatives' strategy, as fraudulently outlined to Politico

South Carolina's Rep. Mick Mulvaney tells Politico: "One of our frustrations is that we’ve never told folks what we stand for. We’ve told them that we’re not Obama, but we’ve never told them what conservatives stand for."

So what legislation do these House conservatives say should be voted on first in the new congressional session? You got it: "a full repeal of Obamacare."

They also want a stand-alone border-security bill (meaning border security, just border security, and nothing but border security), the Keystone pipeline, and "work-for-welfare" requirements. Each of these, however, must be "pure" bills, as the conservatives put it. Translation: they'll refuse to work with Democrats in the crafting of legislation.

This will ensure the president's veto of any bills that make it through, presumably, a Republican Senate. But those bills will be few, since although Sens. Cruz, Lee and Paul will also be agitating hard-right in the manner of House conservatives, Republican senators up for reelection in 2016 (in less than bright red states) will be swimming midstream. The result? A Senate bottlenecked by Republicans rather than Democrats, but bottlenecked just the same.

What's most fraudulent about House conservatives' strategy--as outlined for public consumption--is that it assumes the electorate's unawareness of conservative support for, say, "pure" border security. Does any such unawareness exist among actual voters? Of course not. In reality what House conservatives want, and what their strategy entails, is a string of red-meat votes--purely for their own reelection benefit.

Put another way, House conservatives don't really give a damn if they destroy whatever miniscule chance their party has of retaining the Senate or retaking the White House in 2016. They're happy to settle for their own jobs.

 

538 isn't buying "momentum"

FiveThirtyEight dismisses "A lot of what looks like momentum in the polls" toward Republicans (previously, toward Democrats) as "just random noise" and, oddly, mentions only in passing the election's "fundamentals" (which are atmospherics, such as a president's popularity).

I'm going with fundamentals and that sense of Republican momentum, as my earlier post--this morning--probably already suggested to you. It just feels creepy out there. When Joni Ernst can gain ground despite her gun-totin' lunacy, for example, then to me, the fundamentals swamp the statistical "noise."

 

Was Taibbi's take taboo?

From First Look Media's billionaire founder Pierre Omidyar, an "Important Announcement"--of garbled nothingness:

I regret to announce that after several weeks of discussions, Matt Taibbi has left First Look. We wish him well. Our differences were never about editorial independence. We have never wavered from our pledge that journalistic content is for the journalists to decide, period.

The brief press release goes on, but there is no mention as to what the "differences" were.

NYMag.com has more, which, while still vague, is rather suggestive:

Omidyar originally conceived of First Look as a network of interlinking sites run by "independent" journalists.... Over the last year, however, the center of gravity of the organization has shifted, as Omidyar and his Silicon Valley braintrust have exerted control over budgets and vacillated over the journalistic mission.... The confrontational approach that made Taibbi's name at Rolling Stone ... appears to have contributed to internal trouble at First Look.

"Vacillated over the journalistic mission." Perhaps Omidyar's "period" should have come with a question mark? That, anyway, will be the widespread assumption out there, since Omidyar's classic corporate gobbledygook failed to elucidate a damn thing.

 

Ernst "inches ahead" and Reason collapses

Hagan-Tillis has narrowed, Shaheen-Brown has narrowed, Roberts-Orman has narrowed, Tom Cotton has sustained his lead and Mary Landrieu is molded toast. Now, from Quinnipiac, comes news that "Iowa Republican State Sen. Joni Ernst is inching ahead among likely voters in the U.S. Senate race," 49 percent to 45 percent for U.S. Rep. Bruce Braley (or, as Michelle Obama has called him, Bruce Bailey, a mythical creature who, as the White House once believed and promptly announced to the nation, was running for the governor's seat, not the Senate).

What's so shocking unsurprising about this news of Ernst's "momentum," as Quinnipiac's pollster labeled it, is that it comes in the revelatory wake of her deranged Sharron Angleism--which is to say, Ernst's publicly declared conviction that she has the right to use her "beautiful little Smith & Wesson 9 millimeter" against the very government she wishes to join. In its own right, this is clearly insane; but that a banana-republic mentality of the lowest anarchic order would (having doomed Angle four years ago) seemingly benefit Ernst is just frightening.

Meanwhile, Thom Tillis, Scott Brown and Pat Roberts have all reaped the electoral emoluments of unmitigated fearmongering, whether in the form of diseased Africans wading 'cross Obama's unsecured Rio or swarthy, dagger-clenching Middle East terrorists being sprung on innocent America, via Guantanamo, by the Koran-clenching, African Obama. Even the inebriate Joe McCarthy might have paused and asked our little trio, Are you sure you want to do this? But the old-school demagogues are gone, and in the GOP, all restraints have been lifted. As for Cotton, he's settled for the old-school reliability of mere hypocrisy, protecting big farm money while screwing food-stamp recipients in the name of fiscal prudence.

At least the midterm's drift can't get any absurder.

 

The midterm election: a study in national psychosis

How deep does the nation's pathology run? This deep, according to the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll: "a majority now says the government’s ability to deal with big problems has declined in the past few years. Among those who say this, more--by 3 to 1--blame Obama and the Democrats rather than Republicans in Congress."

The finding's first segment is objectively grounded. Any way one looks at it, the government's ability to deal with big problems has declined in the past few years. The last person to dispute that would be President Obama himself, no doubt. He's confronted with the government's disability every day. It's the perceived causation of that disability, however, that leaves one gaping in wonder. It shouldn't, given the electorate's famed inattentiveness, but the 3:1 ratio of Democratic blame within majority sentiment still staggers.

Inept as they often are, congressional Democrats have over "the past few years" nonetheless pursued immigration reform, national rebuilding projects, an actual jobs program, a minimum wage hike--one could go on--only to be blocked by Republicans, who now receive implicit credit for their ability to deal with big problems.

Added to that mind-bender is that the electorate, by and large, dislikes the GOP marginally more than they dislike Democrats, because Republicans have repeatedly proved they can't govern. So, naturally, "When asked whether they will vote for the Democrat or the Republican for the House in their districts, 50 percent of likely voters say Republican and 44 percent say Democrat." What's more, in "nine states with competitive Senate races, voters express a preference for voting for the Republican in the House election by a margin of 57 percent to 39 percent," says the WaPo poll.

This midterm can't be over soon enough. It's less an exercise in psephological analysis than a study in national psychosis.