The Carpentariat

Guilt-free gaffedom

Two points about Hillary's latest gaffe, "Don’t let anybody tell you that it’s corporations and businesses that create jobs." First, it wasn't a gaffe--not from an economic angle. Consumers create jobs; businesses merely expand their workforce to accommodate consumers' demand. Government can--and should--also create jobs, in the absence of demand. During economic downturns, it pumps cash (well, it's supposed to) into a new labor force's pockets (via infrastructure projects, for example). That cash the new labor force then spends. Businesses reap the rewards and then hire, as noted, to accommodate future demand; additional hiring brings more cash and demand into private markets, and recovery ensues. The essential point is that business is reactive, while consumers and government are (though I detest this word) proactive. It's all quite straightforward.

Why Hillary didn't just say that in her clean-up comments--"I short-handed this point the other day, so let me be absolutely clear about what I’ve been saying for a couple of decades. Our economy grows when businesses and entrepreneurs create good-paying jobs here in America and workers and families are empowered to build from the bottom up and the middle out"--is beyond me. But, that's Hillary.

The second point is that, barring some catastrophe, the presidential electoral map immunizes Hillary--or any other Democratic nominee (one hopes)--from most any political gaffe, which, admittedly, her "businesses [don't] create jobs" remark was. The Romney campaign and the right's usual media suspects pounded Obama in 2012 for his Hillary-like comment--taken out of context, of course--"You didn't build that." But the pounding had no effect. The president's polling remained stable and it was clear for weeks before the election that Obama would win--because the electoral map was, and is, 51 percent blue, and will probably be even bluer by 2016. What's a gaffe here and there compared to lopsided polarization?

 

Richard Cohen veers to the clueless, again

In a column that focuses on the miscellaneous inadequacies of 2016's presidential hopefuls, Richard Cohen drops this aside: "We have learned--have we not?--that the presidency requires some executive experience."

Cute.

Also dumb. With a superior wink, Cohen is merely indulging what is by now a political cliché, which, unlike many clichés, possesses no real discernible basis in reality.

I've made no secret that I find President Obama's second-term political operation to be amateurish at best; his executive competence, however, I've rarely questioned. True, the two are often hard to decouple--the practical, that is, from the political. But when one scrutinizes his overall management of economic recovery, foreign-policy resets and, currently, hysteria control, the exceptions prove the rule: rather steady executive leadership.

Obama can be criticized for not more forcefully countering Republicans' eccentric charges of executive drift (when they're not accusing him of steely-eyed, single-handed despotism), but he can't be criticized for Republicans' strategic decision, throughout the last six years, to go nuts in declaring the end of America as we once knew it. That's on them. Meanwhile, Obama has managed reasonably well the chaos that preceding Republicans handed him.

History, I suspect, will look back on Cohen & Co.'s cliché, and be mystified.

 

Chris Christie is oddly correct

Chris Christie, along with Andrew Cuomo, is taking intense heat for excessive gubernatorial exuberance. Both have tackled a purely public-health problem with infinite political zeal--in other words, utter incomprehension and immeasurable lay ineptitude--and now these men among men, these leaders among leaders and true visionaries among the blind have become targets of no little ridicule.

Because of his in-our-face presidential aspirations, Christie's predicament is the more interesting of the two. With characteristic brashness, he arbitrarily imprisoned a public-health angel of mercy, only to free her with equal suddenness under the mysteriously mutating and quite baffling conditions of his capricious rule. This, pretty much everyone acknowledges--his "apparent reversals ... only helped to fan public confusion," says the Times--yet the New Jersey governor insists he remains a model of autocratic consistency.

"I didn’t reverse my decision," Christie told a reporter yesterday while campaigning for an even bigger gubernatorial doofus, Florida's Rick Scott, than he is. "Why are you saying I reversed my decision?"

Indeed, Christie was, I'll argue in his defense, merely referencing his inherent infallibility as the Pope of Trenton. His reversals are never abrupt turnabouts; they are but clarifying exegeses. Still, I further think that Gov. Christie would have been better self-served had he reminded the throngs of his words from last November, uttered in his thrilling reelection victory speech: "When we came to office four years ago ... we promised we were going to go to Trenton and turn things upside down, and I think we’ve done just that."

Yes, just another campaign promise fulfilled--time and again.

 

Against ISIS, the greatest worry

For President Obama, not to mention some unfortunate American aircrew, this has always been a predictable catastrophe waiting to happen:

Islamic State fighters in Iraq are using advanced surface-to-air missile systems that pose a serious threat to aircraft flown by Iraq and the American-led coalition.

The region is awash in Russian- and Chinese-made antiaircraft weaponry, "with potentially serious consequences," remarks the NY Times, "for how the Iraqis and their coalition partners wage their war." One American military official calls ISIS' introduction of even low-altitude missiles a "game changer."

As the coalition situation stands, one downed Apache helicopter and any American survivors will be at the mercy of--egads--the Iraqi military's rescue efforts. This means the survivors would soon appear on worldwide video, just before their slaughter at ISIS' hands. No American president could possibly remain above the fray; there is currently a "lack of American search-and-rescue teams in Iraq that could respond to downed aircrews," reports the Times, but that wouldn't be the case for long. We would--or rather will--be in a whole new war, ground troops and all.

A "limited war" is a self-contradiction.

 

Landrieu is in big trouble

This, from a USA Today/Suffolk University poll, is what my big brother would call "ungood" for Mary Landrieu, perhaps even doubleplus so: 

The poll of 500 likely voters found 36% supporting Landrieu, 35% supporting Cassidy, 11% supporting Tea Party favorite Rob Maness and 18% undecided or backing other minor candidates.... But in a head-to-head matchup, Cassidy has a 48%-41% edge over Landrieu with 11% undecided.

Maness' supporters are expected to almost monolithically convert to Cassidy's camp, and, as I understand it, Democrats show up for midterm runoff elections even more sporadically than they do for regular midterms.

 

More on Douthat's tantrum

Sullivan appropriately rages that "the theo-conservative reaction to Francis [i.e., Ross Douthat's reaction] reminds me a little of the wing of the GOP that simply cannot tolerate the give and take of democratic life, and as soon as a president of the other party is handily elected, and actually dares to enact a clear campaign pledge, declares the end of the republic!" Inappropriately, he backs off: "But, of course, the Catholic church is not a democracy, so the analogy won’t work."

Like hell it won't work. It fact I was going to deploy the analogy myself yesterday, but I decided to give readers a Sunday rest from my chronic bitching about contemporary conservatives' anti-democratic, anti-pluralistic, crypto-fascistic political philosophy. Well, now it's Monday.

In the right's mind, the Republican Party is the one legitimate party; the opposition party is but an unAmerican nuisance that only inhibits the execution of inevitable righteousness--which, for starters, means nihilism. Cripple federal revenue, hack safety nets, gut social programs, obliterate regulations, narrow the electorate to angry white folk and simply unleash the laboratory wisdom of ALEC-bought states. To the right, these aren't policy choices to be debated, negotiated, or in any way modified. They are, rather, religious doctrine, with all of religion's zealous and pious resistance to compromise.

I do not use the phrase "crypto-fascistic" lightly. In authoritarianism there lies the assumption that there is absolute right and absolute wrong--indeed only those two--and legitimate authorities both know the difference and execute only the right, which, conveniently, is what makes them so profoundly legitimate and thus worthy of exclusive rule. And round and round political authoritarianism goes. Compare that with Sullivan's observation about Ross Douthat's column: "there is a clear assumption that his side of the debate owns the church, that any contrary views to his are an outrageous, treasonous and unprecedented attack on the institution itself."

Substitute government for "church" and "institution" and you've a rather precise statement of the right's political philosophy. Whether the right derives its political disposition from its religious fanaticism or its political fanaticism from its religious disposition, I can't say. That they're complementary as well as analogous, though, is undeniable.

 

Kevin McCarthy: trying to bury incompetence

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy recently told a group of NY Republicans that if their party doesn't prove it can govern over the next two years, "there won’t be a Republican president in 2016." McCarthy's strategy, then, assuming the GOP takes the Senate, is to eliminate the government's extended funding as an internally contentious political issue by resolving it during the lame-duck session, and subsequently launch a "unified agenda [that] will bridge both chambers."

Yet while smart on the surface, the strategy itself actually betrays McCarthy's avowed confidence in his party's ability to govern. Which is to say, he knows that in the new congressional session his majority Republicans will squabble like schoolchildren over the even rudimentary matter of financing the federal government, so better to let the still-Democratic Senate bear the burden of basic governance.  

"If we are fortunate to have both majorities, take away any cliff you can have hanging out there," said McCarthy to Politico. "Why put cliffs up that hold us back from doing bigger policy?" he added. But funding the government shouldn't be a hair-raising precipice. It's fundamental governance, which McCarthy knows his party is incapable of. In fact, he sort of admits it.

 

Jeb Bush's top hat is, it seems, in the ring

Peter Baker's NYT press release from the Jeb Bush camp--that lone Republican outpost of sober futility--is as uncompelling as it is intriguing, and it's very intriguing. Baker has interviewed scores, perhaps thousands, of Bushes, and he reports the clan and its machine are "fired up," as Jeb Jr. puts it, for yet another Bush presidency. Yes Jeb, it seems, is stepping aboard the clown barge, now that his wife, his kids, his family elders and donors and "people who have been around the political process for a while" have stepped aboard. The only folks absent are Republican primary voters.

"At odds ..."; that's how Baker gently and passingly characterizes Bush's standing "with the prevailing orthodoxy of his party" on Common Core as well as the supreme issues of immigration and taxes. An alternative and more accurate characterization is one of collision. Among the GOP base, Common Core has become a political subject of reflexive abhorrence, while nativism and fiscal insanity have for some time been widely accepted articles of faith. And the base dictates; it is a buyer's market, not a seller's. The base does not welcome debate or the free exchange of ideas. It is not persuadable.

This fact of political life leaves Jeb with two undifferentiated options: He can persist in proposing reasonable policies, in which case he's doomed; or he can flip his positions (as he's already done, on occasion, with immigration), and doom himself just as efficiently. (Mitt Romney holds the exclusive Republican rights to phantasmagoric flip-floppery. Hell the base not only forgives Mitt his self-contradiction, they expect it of him.)     

Earlier this month, Rand Paul seized the helm of the barge and showed the other clowns how it's done. While Bush once favorably meditated on the trading of $1 in tax increases for $10 of spending cuts, Paul has "veered to the right of virtually all Republicans in Congress by declaring he does not support deficit-neutral tax reform." Tweeted Paul, "Reagan was FOR something. Cutting taxes for everyone." Now that's the magic formula: even further radicalization and an invocation of the Deity.  

Bush? He said at the time that his support of a "revenue-enhancing" fiscal deal "will prove I’m not running for anything." That may have been true--then--but what it really proves is, simply, that he won't be winning anything.

 

"Theological betrayal." In a way, Douthat is right.

"Theological betrayal." That, this morning, is what Ross Douthat calls the potential upshot of Pope Francis' struggling embrace of universal love, human understanding, acceptance and non-judgmentalism. (My thoughts on Francis' struggle, from last weekend.) Here and there, a cosmetic tweak of the non-doctrinal can be tolerably entertained toward the Church's divorced, the remarried and the homosexual, says Douthat, but doctrinal discrimination should remain just that.

Why? Why because the Church is grounded in centuries of "infallible" flapdoodle--unreasoning, irrational devotion to often hurtful tradition, that's why. Hence the Church, declares Douthat, ought not tamper with his and his fellow traditionalists' ancient prejudices and medieval superstitions. Notwithstanding Christ's highest and most vivid doctrine--the unconditional, unjudging love of one's neighbor, lest one be judged--the Church must hunker- and double-down on man-molded bigotry. Tradition is at stake, so reasoned latitudinarianism be damned.

To appreciate Douthat's theological position, one must climb into a time machine and race backward and beyond all we now know of human genetics, psychology, social evolution, historical forces of change, indeed the Age of Enlightenment and even the Renaissance. One must huddle in obscurantism and bow to the hierarchical tyranny of Because we say so. One must genuflect before cloistered voices of authority whose absurd Catch-22ism is classic Heller: "the doctrine of papal infallibility," observes Douthat, "places profound effective limits on his power ... [because of] the binding power of existing teaching, which a pope cannot reverse or contradict without proving his own office, well, fallible."

In short, what was and is must always be--pretty much all of it. As self-interpreted, the Book is cooked and the game is rigged. And as Catch-22s go, no surprise there. What's astonishing is that Douthat--a public intellectual--seems to take pride in this intellectual imprisonment, which, pragmatically speaking, serves nothing more than unreasoned discrimination and spiritual impoverishment. I can see that and I'm an agnostic. Frankly I would think a religious conservative interested in the Church's survival and growth would be looking for reasonable loopholes rather than defending injurious dogma.

 

From Krauthammer, a truly exemplary piece of propagandistic hooey

In his latest, "Barack Obama, bewildered bystander," Charles Krauthammer does a beautiful job of conflating authentic scandals and partisanly hyped non-scandals--the VA, lapses in Secret Service professionalism, the IRS, Obamacare's bungled rollout--with a "sense of disorder growing" in America, namely around "the summer border crisis, Ferguson, the rise of the Islamic State, Ebola." In confronting these "crises" (the latter of which has, to date, affected all of three Americans; the former of which vanished from national attention as swiftly as it arose), the country, says Krauthammer, "expects from the White House not miracles but competence."

The beauty of Krauthammer's thesis, from any admiring student of propaganda's point of view, is both multifold and rather obvious. He deftly equates past non-scandals (e.g., the IRS) with genuine abominations (e.g., the VA), so that a history of administrative corruption and incompetence takes subtle root in the mind of the reader prior to the reader encountering Krauthammer's noted "crises" (again, both real and fabricated). Thus the reader is primed to confuse crises with scandals, as well as to confuse the administration's often perfectly adept responses with a kind of characteristic incompetence.

Moreover, there is always a "sense of disorder growing" within the mental boundaries of a global superpower's multitudes, since the world is a messy place. The hostile propagandist's challenge is to convert unavoidable disorder into a president's personal responsibility. And this, Krauthammer does brilliantly. He mixes and mismatches, sorts and contorts, and in general conjures a horrifyingly messy hallucination from an inherently disorderly planet and often unruly bureaucracy--all of which, somehow, is Obama's fault; the result, one gathers without really realizing it, of this loathsome president's lack of superhuman clairvoyance.             

"Obama reflexively insists on playing the shocked outsider when something goes wrong within his own administration," charges Krauthammer. "When it ... turns out that vast, faceless bureaucracies tend to be incapable, inadequate, hopelessly inefficient and often corrupt, Obama resorts to expressions of angry surprise."

Some might say that Obama reacts with expressions of angry surprise, but where's the propagandistic fun in that? Others might note that Lincoln was repeatedly surprised and indeed appalled at the incompetence of his generals; that Polk had a major treaty negotiated by a diplomat he had fired; that JFK constantly worried from agonized experience that there is "always some son of a bitch" in government who doesn't get the memo and balls up carefully laid plans; that both Grant and Harding were forever at the cruel mercy of their unhelpful "friends"; or that Truman, in late '52, observed of the incoming president, "He'll sit there all day saying do this, do that, and nothing will happen. Poor Ike, it won't be a bit like the military. He'll find it very frustrating."

The essential point here is that in the hands of an accomplished--meaning subtle--propagandist, even Abraham Lincoln's unexampled presidency can be convincingly portrayed, to the unsophisticated, as a nightmare of executive incompetence (and even heartless immorality, given--without historical elucidation--his postponements of emancipation and his planned, postwar leniency toward murderous traitors). The trick lies in lots of fast-shuffling, and Krauthammer's shuffling is a blur.

 

Room for more, plenty more

Interesting tidbits from Maggie Haberman:

"I am so pleased to be here with your senior senator, the passionate champion for working people and middle class families, Elizabeth Warren!" [Hillary] Clinton exclaimed, going on to sound one of her most populist messages since she hit the campaign trail two weeks ago.

The [Boston] rally was energized but the ballroom was not full, and there were no more than 400 people on hand.

Gov. Deval Patrick praised Warren repeatedly as a fighter. Patrick, who has said he won’t run for president in 2016 but who has expressed concern about Clinton being anointed as the inevitable Democratic nominee, did not mention Clinton in his speech.

I guess the sound of "Veep" appeals not to Patrick. As for his presidential aspirations, though, he might want to reconsider. Any presumed next president of the United States who can't draw more than 400 people to a partisan rally is likely less "inevitable" than the current presumption holds.

 

David Brooks: "Would you believe ...?"

This morning I passed on another serving of David Brooks' syrupy political wholesomeness, and I'm glad I did, because as Paul Krugman points out, Brooks wrote this:

The federal government should borrow money at current interest rates to build infrastructure.... The fact that the federal government has not passed major infrastructure legislation is mind-boggling, considering how much support there is from both parties.

As Krugman further points out, what's truly mind-boggling is that a prominent pundit could actually write such trumpery. Brooks is boggled that major infrastructure projects have not gone forward despite "how much support there is from both parties," which is a quantitative conclusion deriving from absolutely nowhere.

In fact it's such a stunningly counterfactual claim, I just now violated my day's Brooks-abstinence and checked his column to see if it was taken out of context by Krugman. It was, in a way. Here's how Brooks led into his befuddlement over the federal government's infrastructure inaction: "If you get outside the partisan boxes, there’s a completely obvious agenda to create more middle-class, satisfying jobs." If you get outside the partisan boxes....

In other words, if one altogether ignores the ruthless, relentless, existing Republican partisanship that is obstructing infrastructure projects, then one's mind is boggled at the lack of such projects which otherwise enjoy tremendous bipartisan support!

In precisely what sort of Maxwell Smart Cone of Silence walled off from reality does David Brooks write?

 

Averting the morass of ISIS is Job One, domestically

If President Obama's coalition battle plan was to hand off the transnational ISIS mess to his successor--to dabble but not engage, to lead but not advance, to fight but not really wage war for two temporizing years--then events are disrupting that plan by being their famously uncooperative selves. 

Those events have thrown even Pulitzer Prize-winning friends of the administration into a circumstantial funk, from which it's hard to immunize oneself. Broods Eugene Robinson this morning: "I don’t see how deeper involvement will be avoided. This has morass written all over it. And morasses, as Obama knows, are dumb."

Indeed everyone knows morasses are dumb, which is what makes them so inviting to the neoconservatively inclined. They're both bottomless and, in time, inescapable. And vague as morasses can be, this one is rather vivid.

Notwithstanding escalated U.S. airstrikes, notes Robinson, ISIS militants are still on offense in Anbar province and "are once again besieging the Yazidi minority in the north." Our strikes against ISIS have freed the villain Assad to reconcentrate his strikes--in the air and on the ground--against rebel moderates; what's more, those moderates (a term that should be preceded by a question mark) are subject to the empirical, near-inexorable laws of U.S. aid's ineffectiveness. And "This week, The Post reported that Syrian rebel forces will not even be trained to seize back territory from the Islamic State."

Now this, this morning, also from the Washington Post:

Dizzy, vomiting and struggling to breathe, 11 Iraqi police officers were rushed to a government hospital 50 miles north of the capital last month. The diagnosis: poisoning by chlorine gas. The perpetrators, according to the officers: Islamic State extremists. The chlorine attack appears to be the first confirmed use of chemical weapons by the Islamic State on the battlefield.

How long before such attacks are unleashed on Iraqi civilians? This and other reports emphasize the inherent difficulties of deployment, still they "all raise concerns that the militants are attempting to hone their chemical weapons capabilities." And that, it should go without saying, would be yet another "event" that could force Obama's hand.

Can the president forestall decisive action--meaning you-know-who-and-what on the ground--for two more years? In war time, real time and political time, that's an eternity, one agonized by unforeseeable, or worse, ghoulishly foreseeable, events.

But what worries me even more is what I've written before. Let's say Obama contains this morass. Nevertheless in two years he'll be handing it over--and as presidential preferences now stand, there's really no question about this, one way or the other, one party or the other--to a freshly elected neoconservative inclination. Next up, not a contained, but a calamitous morass.

And therein lies the nation's greatest domestic challenge: finding an alternative to destined quicksand. Jim Webb perhaps?

 

Chuck Todd's rough start

Chuck Todd's MTP career could be shorter, as well as more brutal, than David Gregory's.

His comment on "Morning Joe" last week--that "I really think [Alison Grimes] disqualified herself" in refusing to answer if she had voted for Obama--has been characterized by Grimes as male "bullying," which, I should think, won't help Todd's female demographics.

Todd has issued (via Media Matters) one of those classic non-apology apologies, saying his immersion in Grimes' campaign was thoughtless and "sloppy"--"I don't like being part of a political campaign.... It makes me, you know, literally physically ill." On the other hand, "I don't take back the analysis," said Todd. "She's been running a poor campaign."

In Todd's defense, any critical journalistic comment about a political campaign could be construed as self-immersion and attacked as bullying. I honestly don't know how that can be avoided, aside from every journalist acting as a cardboard cutout who mechanically runs through questions, accepts any and all bullshit offered in response, and never ever ventures an opinion. Indeed that, too often, has been the behavior of MTP hosts that has encountered the greatest criticism from viewers, including myself.

But back to the original observation about Todd's possibly (though certainly not probably) endangered tenure. What happens if Grimes loses? And more to the point, what happens if Republicans win a 51-seat Senate majority, which a lot of Democrats might attribute in good part to Todd's interference in one decisive campaign? The host's network employer could have a partisan revolt on its hands.

One can see why Todd becomes "physically ill" just thinking about it.

 

On foreign policy, Rand Paul is boxing himself in

Speaking tonight at the Nixon-founded Center for the National Interest, Rand Paul will once again attempt to "position" his foreign-policy views in contrast to those of virtually all his upcoming opponents. Based on these prereleased excerpts, though, one suspects he will, in the future, need to be a bit more ingenious in his marketing: 

We need a foreign policy that recognizes our limits and preserves our might, a common-sense conservative realism of strength and action....

America shouldn’t fight wars where the best outcome is stalemate. America shouldn’t fight wars when there is no plan for victory. America shouldn’t fight wars that aren’t authorized by the American people, by Congress. America should and will fight wars when the consequences--intended and unintended--are worth the sacrifice....

After the tragedies of Iraq and Libya, Americans are right to expect more from their country when we go to war.

It's hard to imagine Mitt Romney or Chris Christie or even Rick Perry disagreeing with one word of this on some Iowa stage. Who among them will denounce "realism," advocate fighting for "stalemates," urge plan-less wars destined for defeat, deny that "the people" and Congress should have a say, or contradict Paul by hailing Iraq or Libya as a magnificent victory? If Paul's opponents are smart (and, one never knows, a few of them might actually be smart), they'll smother him in love, harmony and philosophical agreement and thereby neutralize Paul's neo-isolationist appeal.

But that's the point, you say. Paul would happily welcome their love. He can read his party's regression to the mean and stupid; even he knows the growing popularity of his heartfelt neo-isolationism was a one-day wonder, and now he must bury himself in ambiguities, platitudes and other meaningless pronouncements. In short, he must become one of the boys.

True. But there's his problem, and it's a big one. In becoming just one of the boys, Paul also erases his unique positioning that holds deep political appeal to the young and even antiwar Democrats. He's no longer the scrappy renegade taking on his party's foreign-policy Establishment; he becomes instead just another "realist": "When we fight, we must fight to win," "We must project strength and action"--bland, boilerplate stuff.

And it's a problem he'll have to resolve--soon. Without his foreign-policy positioning, Paul hasn't much of a program with any political potential.