Monthly Archives: November 2008

Watching From the Sidelines

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Apparently there is a civil war going on between the progressive blogosphere and Democrats in Congress. I say “apparently” because I’m not paying that much attention to most of the progressive blogosphere any more. The sense of camaraderie that (I thought) most of us leftie bloggers enjoyed before the primaries seems pretty much gone for good.

Anyway, according to some, blogging Obama supporters are angry because we think we are being snubbed, somehow, by the Obama transition team. I don’t feel that myself, and I haven’t seen any of my fellow “in the tank for Obama” mates express that, but I don’t get around to reading everybody. Anyway, according to Brad Friedman and some others, I’m supposed to be disappointed already.

Whatever. If anyone wants to believe I’m an idiot, fine. If people want to assume I believed Barack Obama was liberal Jesus and am now bitterly sorry I supported him, OK. I’m done with trying to set people straight about what I think.

According to others, we Obama supporters are hoping there’s a “secret” Obama progressive agenda, and of course we’re stupid (I mean, no one but Hillary Clinton can win in November, right? Oh, wait …) , because Obama is a centrist who won’t do anything the Clintons wouldn’t have done. Matt Yglesias addresses this concern, as does the BooMan.

Most of what I hear about the Obama appointees is encouraging . E.J. Dionne writes,

President-elect Barack Obama has now made three things clear about his plans to bring the economy back: He wants his actions to be big and bold. He sees economic recovery as intimately linked with economic and social reform. And he is bringing in a gifted brain trust to get the job done.

Paul Krugman:

Seriously, isn’t it amazing just how impressive the people being named to key positions in the Obama administration seem? Bye-bye hacks and cronies, hello people who actually know what they’re doing. For a bunch of people who were written off as a permanent minority four years ago, the Democrats look remarkably like the natural governing party these days, with a deep bench of talent.

Ezra has a take on this that deserves some elaboration:

But the Bush administration started out with a fairly deep bench. Colin Powell as Secretary of State. Paul O’Neill –a former deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget and a past chairman of the RAND Corporation — as Secretary of the Treasury. Columbia’s Glenn Hubbard as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers. Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice providing foreign policy expertise. Indeed, the Bush team was lauded for being such a natural entity of governance: These were figures from the Nixon and Ford and Bush administrations, and they were backed by graybeards like Baker and Scowcroft and Greenspan. What could go wrong?

Quite a bit, as it turned out. Administration culture matters. And in the Bush administration, internal dissent was silenced. Colin Powell’s vaunted experience became an excuse for his rapid marginalization. O’Neill was driven from the administration. Cheney and Rumsfeld rapidly saw their reputations fall apart. It’s not that the Bush administration lacked plausibly competent appointees, it’s that it was actively hostile to competence, and utterly obsessed with loyalty. In that case, the president, not his personnel, turned out to be destiny.

By the same token, it will be Barack Obama setting the policies and standards in his own administration, and for that reason the team will either be better than the sum of its parts, or worse, as with Bush. Old Clinton hands will not be carrying out Clinton policies, but Obama policies. And now that Richard Cohen has decided the Obama Administration will be a third Clinton term, we can be sure that it won’t.

I’ve said many times — not that that it makes any difference — that I don’t expect Obama to be as progressive as I’d like, but I think he’ll be competent, and I think he’ll do more than tweak the status quo, which (I still believe) is all we would have gotten from a third Clinton term. But we’ll see. Many things can happen that could make or break the Obama Administration. Events often do more to effect policy changes than ideology.

I’ve made this analogy before, but I feel compelled to trot it out again — in the 1860 elections, abolitionists were opposed to Abraham Lincoln because he was too moderate on the slavery issue. When he took the oath of office in 1861, by all the evidence Lincoln had no plans whatsoever to try to end slavery in the slave states. It was events — not Lincoln, not the abolitionists — that forced the ending of slavery decades earlier than it would have ended on its own accord.

You see similar, if less visible, patterns in other administrations. Often what a president intends to do or wants to do when he takes office is very different from what he actually ends up doing, because of events beyond his control. Sometimes presidents rise above those events and become great, and sometimes they don’t.

So at this point only an idiot would predict with any certainty what President Obama will accomplish, just as only an idiot would predict with any certainty what a President Hillary Clinton might have accomplished, or what course the Bush II Administration was going to take. There are too many variables, too many “unknown unknowns.” I am assured by Obama’s steady nerves and keen intellect, but who can say what he’ll do before he does it? Not even he can say that.

Get This

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James Rosen and Steven Thomma write for McClatchy Newspapers:

Whether by design or necessity, Obama appeared to be using the deepening economic crisis to step to the forefront and seize the stage in order to reassure a nervous nation two months before he takes office.

One prominent Republican, former Secretary of Treasury James Baker, suggested that Obama and President George W. Bush take the almost unprecedented step of sitting down and trying to work together to address the crisis.

Let me guess — Baker lost a ton of money on the stock market. Well, you’re the one who got him into the White House, Jimbo.

Teh Brilliant

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I bow to the genius that is Gavin M.

This is the personality type that voted for Bush in 2000 to “stick it to the liberals,” and then voted for Bush in 2004 wetting their pants over the global foreign Islam terror jihad threat, but then recovered their senses in time to vote for McCain/Palin in 2008, to “stick it to the liberals.”

For in prosperous times when fortune smiles upon the Union, the abiding purpose of the spite caucus is to stick it to the liberals. In times of uncertainty, such as the great and encompassing uncertainty that we now find ourselves confronting, they find ways to blame the liberals for everything bad that happens and devise new solutions by punitively sticking it to them. In their imagined perfect world — i.e., without liberals to stick it to — they would stand around sticking it to them vicariously, while farms ran fallow and airplanes plummeted to the ground and cities fell awash under waves of seawater, as the dollar came to incite thin laughter in Asian bank moguls and as the very furniture was being carted out of their defaulted houses by sheriff’s officers. Others of their tribe would stand on the sidewalk as the tables and chairs filed sadly past, whisperingly accusing the defaulted homeowners of being liberals. The sheriff’s men would eye the liberals on the sidewalk with a mind toward sticking it to them.

58 Days

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Our economic house of cards continues to fall. Citigroup is next, they say.

Daniel Gross argues that we’re not reliving the Great Depression all over again:

Ironically, the differences between the two eras can be summed up in a few sound bites. The world of 1929-33 was one that lacked shock absorbers such as Social Security and deposit insurance to insulate people from economic disaster. In the 1930s, some of the world’s largest economies—Germany, the Soviet Union, Japan, and Italy—were run by leaders hostile to the very notion of market capitalism. Today, U.S.-style market capitalism is under assault from self-inflicted wounds, and Germany, Italy, and Japan (Russia, not so much) are working with the United States to cope with a common problem. Back then, we were cursed with a feckless Federal Reserve, and a wealthy Treasury secretary, Paul Mellon, saw the downturn as a force for good. “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate,” he said. “People will work harder, live more moral lives.” By contrast, today’s Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, is a student of the Great Depression, and the wealthy Treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, wants to provide liquidity to stocks, farmers, and real estate. A final difference: After the 1929 crash, the nation had to wait more than three years for a president who simply wasn’t up to the job to leave the scene. This time, we’ve got to wait only two more months.

Paul Krugman says Gross is missing the point.

The reason we’re making analogies with the Great Depression — and the reason I’ve come out with a new edition of The Return of Depression Economics — is the collapse of policy certainties. In particular, the Fed’s sudden impotence — its inability to cut rates any more, because they’re essentially zero — is a very real parallel with the Depression, and necessitates drastic responses.

Now, if all goes well the Obama stimulus plan will head off the worst. But that will be precisely because we understood that the current crisis is, indeed, like the Great Depression in important ways. Only those who learn from history can hope to avoid repeating it.

Barack Obama is doing what he can from the sidelines to keep the crisis from getting worse. Bubble Boy, on the other hand …

Bush, meeting with international leaders in Peru, warned against government intervention in free markets after weeks of overseeing one of the largest government financial interventions in U.S. history.

Many pundits argue that the nation can’t afford to keep Bush in office for three more months, because we need effective leadership now. Good luck with that. We’ll be lucky if he doesn’t chain himself to the Resolute desk on Inauguration Day, forcing the Secret Service to saw the priceless antique apart and carry him out of the White House.

So the ship of state will continue to float along aimlessly for the next, what, 58 days? Tom Friedman writes,

Right now there is something deeply dysfunctional, bordering on scandalously irresponsible, in the fractious way our political elite are behaving — with business as usual in the most unusual economic moment of our lifetimes. They don’t seem to understand: Our financial system is imperiled.

The Bushies haven’t shown any inclincation to govern responsibly lo these past seven years and ten months. And now Friedman is upset? I guess the loss of billions of dollars of his wife’s wealth got his attention.

Today, bloggers on the Right are hysterical about the impending Obama Administration, which will combine the worst elements of Franklin Roosevelt and George McGovern. Some bloggers on the Left are already certain that the Obama Administration will be the same old entrenched Washingtonian politics-as-usual Big Fat Zero, and maybe it will. I’m making no specific predictions about what he will or won’t do. Maybe he’ll surprise us. Maybe he won’t. We’ll see.

In the meantime, I see little else to do but keep breathing.

They Can’t Help It

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Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly. And racists will be racist.

Also — I had hoped to write a commentary on “How Tom Daschle Might Kill Conservatism,” but ran out of time. I’ll be busy most of today and won’t be back until this evening. Here’s Hilzoy’s comment.

In a nutshell, movement conservatives are terrified that President Obama will deliver government that works, particularly in the area of health care. Movement conservatism requires government that doesn’t work. Or, at least, doesn’t work as government. Instead, movement conservative government is a big clown show in Washington that ignores the real needs of citizens and the nation but does a bang-up job transferring tax money into the pockets of the wealthy elite and the politicians who maintain the movement conservatism status quo (there’s your “redistribution of wealth,” folks).

If President Obama is able to reform government and make it do things that people actually need it to do, there goes the neighborhood, so to speak.

The Obama Administration: No Reruns

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In the almost nine years I’ve lived in southern Westchester County, New York, the number of conservatives I’ve met who live here could be counted on one hand. This has now changed. For some reason, the place where I’ve been receiving physical therapy for my back problem is a nest of, well, not liberals. I’m talking about both the staff and the other patients. They aren’t Freepers, certainly, but they weren’t happy about the election, either. I mostly just listen because (a) I’m outnumbered, and (b) it’s a chance for me to hear what people who are not five-alarm politics nerds think.

So, this morning they were talking about how so many of Barack Obama’s cabinet choices are old Clinton hands. It’s going to be the Clinton Administration all over again, one patient said, gloomily.

I let that comment swish around in my mind awhile, wondering if this individual has noticed that the past eight years have been a lot worse than the Clinton Administration. But since then I’ve heard a couple of bobbleheads on television say the same thing. Tweety Matthews in particular seems certain that alleged Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will take over the administration and run the world from her office in the State Department.

I doubt this will happen. I think if there’s one thing we’ve seen about Barack Obama during his campaign, is that he’s the guy in charge. And Obama appears to be a guy who can get everyone on his team moving as a team toward a common goal. No hotdogging. I think he’s picking strong people for cabinet positions with the expectation that they will be effective agents of his policies. Secretary of State Clinton will not be a free agent.

I could be wrong, but I’m betting that by June no one will be talking about a rerun of the Clinton Administration.

Will Rush Go Down Too?

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A couple of weeks ago, Steve Elman and Alan Tolz wrote in the Boston Globe that the influence of rightie talk radio is in major decline:

Consider some of the major stumbles this year by the medium’s 800-pound gorilla. Rush Limbaugh vigorously promoted three separate political objectives over the past year, all of which failed: derailing John McCain’s quest for the Republican nomination, sabotaging Barack Obama’s drive for the Democratic nomination by fomenting Republican crossover votes for Hillary Clinton, and ultimately stopping Obama’s march to victory in the general election. Contrast this with the impact talk radio once had on local taxes, the impeachment of Bill Clinton, congressional pay raises, a mandatory seat belt law, etc.

Elman and Tolz cite these factors as reasons for the decline:

  • The radio medium is in decline generally. Younger people in particular prefer their iPods to radio. The radio audience is aging.
  • “New ears” are essential if radio talk show hosts are to have any impact on public opinion. If they are just talking to a core audience of people who already agree with them, they won’t be changing any minds.
  • Cable television news programs have moved into and taken over talk radio’s opinion-venting niche.
  • Talk radio hosts in general have earned a reputation for being irrational and rabid promoters of one-note opinions.

  • Talk radio programs have moved away from taking calls from listeners expressing diverse opinions.

Today everyone’s favorite nerd, Nate Silver, has more good insight as to why talk radio, and the Right in general, is going down. You need to read Nate’s entire post to get all the nuances of his argument. But he makes these key observations:

  • “There are a certain segment of conservatives who literally cannot believe that anybody would see the world differently than the way they do. They have not just forgotten how to persuade; they have forgotten about the necessity of persuasion.”

A correlation to that observation is that many conservatives think anyone who sees the world differently from the way they do is motivated by evil. This is another reason why they don’t think it’s worth trying to persuade us of anything. (Example.)

  • “…the distinguishing feature of radio is that it exists in a sort of perpetual amnesiac state.”
  • “Moreover, almost uniquely to radio, most of the audience is not even paying attention to you, because most people listen to radio when they’re in the process of doing something else.”

Therefore, Nate says, the radio host’s job isn’t so much to present interesting ideas as it is to keep the listeners emotionally stimulated. Talk radio is like aural caffeine.

  • “The McCain campaign was all about stimulation. The Britney Spears ads weren’t persuasive, but they sure were stimulating! ‘Drill, baby, drill’ wasn’t persuasive, but it sure was stimulating! Sarah Palin wasn’t persuasive, but she sure was (literally, in Rich Lowry’s case) stimulating!”

I never watch Faux News, so I wouldn’t know if this is true:

  • “FOX News is unusual television, really, in that almost all the stimulation is verbal, and almost all of it occurs at the same staccato pacing as radio. You could take tonight’s broadcast of Hannity & Colmes or the Factor and put it directly on radio and you’d lose almost nothing (not coincidentally, Hannity and O’Reilly also have highly-rated radio programs).”
  • “Conservatives listen to significantly more talk radio than other market segments; 28 percent of conservative Republicans listen to talk radio regularly, as opposed to 17 percent of the public as a whole.”

I take it that for much of the conservative base, conservatism is less an ideology than it is an emotional addiction.