J. Bradford DeLong's Grasping Reality with All Eight Tentacles

America Needs a New Constitutional Convention

Mark Schmitt blames Bob Dole for destroying America's system of government.

I think he is right.

What Are the Central Bankers Thinking?

Ryan Avent calls for Ben Bernanke's head:

The threatened Fed: There is ample reason to feel that the recovery might be weak and jobless. Fed projections basically reflect this. The Federal Open Market Committee generally expects growth for the American economy in the neighbourhood of 2.5% to 3.5% in 2010, with the unemployment rate holding between 9.3% and 9.7%. Expectations for growth in 2011 and 2012 are higher, ranging roughly from 3% to 5%, and the FOMC believes that the unemployment rate might possibly fall as low as 6.8% by the end of 2012. That's five years after the onset of the recession.... Core inflation is forecast to reach no higher than 1.7%, even into 2012.

But the minutes reflect no inclination to do anything more than what has already been put in motion. Indeed, participants remain very concerned about how they'll pull back on their various interventions.... [I]t's hard to know quite what to say. There was some interesting writing last week on the subject of Fed independence and whether or not the central bank could actually generate some inflation, if it wanted to.... [T]he FOMC believes that it probably could... yet it will not, despite its own forecasts indicating that full employment—the maintenance of which is one of the Fed's primary goals—isn't likely to return for at least the next three years.

I noted last week that political control of monetary policy would inevitably lead to accelerating inflation. Central bankers seem to have warped this truth into its mistaken corollary—that price stability means never doing what political actors want, even if what they want is actually what's best. But now the Fed finds itself in a real bind. If it continues ignoring unemployment, then it may face angry legislators determined to rein in the central bank. If it agrees that taking more steps to try and engineer some inflation is a good idea, it may well be perceived to have given in to political pressure.

Another way to put this is to note that there's no avoiding the threat to Fed independence here; there is no safe path to protection of the sanctity of monetary policymaking. Given that, the best thing for the politicians to do may well be to try and put the central bank in a position where it feels confident enough to do the job it's actually supposed to do. And I think that means new blood. Replacing Mr Bernanke with someone publicly committed to focusing on all aspects of the central bank's mission...

Me? I can't see anyone I trust to better analyze central banking issues than Ben Bernanke. I would settle for the Federal Reserve's adoption of a formal 3% per year GDP deflator inflation target. Just saying.

Debts and Deficits: Martin Wolf Is Right

In general, Martin Wolf is right. Paul Krugman too. And when they explicitly degree they are superright and you can take that to the bank.

Today Martin Wolf has, as usual, very smart things to say about the deficit and the debt:

Give us fiscal austerity, but not quite yet: While the increase in the debt ratio is very large in both [Britain and the U.S.], the levels expected to be reached by 2014 are not historically exceptional, particularly for the UK.... [T]hose past record levels did not create insuperable problems. In the 19th century, both countries grew out of their debt satisfactorily, with price stability. In the second half of the 20th century, they did so again, though inflation then helped.

This is not surprising. Assume that the real rate of interest is 2.5 per cent. Then the servicing costs, in real terms, of a debt burden of 100 per cent of GDP is just 2.5 per cent of GDP – almost a bagatelle. Assume, too, that the trend rate of growth equals the real interest rate (a not unreasonable assumption). Then the requirement for debt stability is a balanced primary budget (that is, before interest payments). Again, this is hardly crippling.

So what is the problem? It is that people may lose confidence that the governments will ultimately bring deficits under control.... [C]utting peacetime deficits is hard: every pound or dollar comes with a lobby group attached. Merely promising to cut deficits lacks plausibility....

Yet even if the fiscal rope is not infinitely long, slashing deficits now would be wrong. It is extremely likely this would tip economies back into recessions, as happened in Japan in the 1990s. Furthermore, the results would also probably include expansion of quantitative and credit easing by central banks. Yet those policies, too, risk undermining credibility....

So what should be done? I agree fully with the remark by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the IMF, in London this week that “it is still too early for a general exit” from accommodative policies.... What is needed, instead, are credible fiscal institutions and a road map for tightening that will be implemented, automatically, as and when (but only as and when) the private sector’s spending recovers.... There are losses to be shared, much of which will fall on public spending, taxation, or both. Once it becomes evident that neither of these countries can rise to the challenge, fiscal crises are inevitable. It would only be a question of when.

Britain is in slightly worse shape. But if the United States (a) sticks to PAYGO, and (b) successfully reforms health and bends the curve, it could spend as much as it wanted on fiscal stimulus without worries.

Did Ezra Klein Just Say that Tim Geithner Should Be Pitched Over the Side?

Ezra Klein:

Ezra Klein: Noam Scheiber defends Timothy Geithner against those demanding his resignation. Scheiber is right on the merits, I think, but the politics matter. Whether Geithner did his best against a bad hand, he created a public relations disaster by bailing out Wall Street and returning it to wild profitability without doing something, anything, to satiate the public's desire for retribution against the guys who almost ruined the economy. The downside of not denying the public a piece of Wall Street's scalp is that vulnerable members of Congress now have little chance but to demand Geithner's.

And this isn't just Geithner's problem, incidentally. It's true for the whole administration. The bailouts were necessary, but they were also understandably unpopular, and there's been virtually nothing done to balance the scales. No windfall profits tax, or transaction tax. No breaking up big banks, or capping salaries across the board. Financial regulation has been sold as a constructive discussion with the banks rather than a punitive measure to prevent future wrongdoing. The absurd result is that Republicans are playing the populist card (while quietly blocking financial regulation) and frustrated congresspeople are turning on the administration, because the administration has kept them from turning on the banks.

The right response to the financial crisis and to extremely high paychecks for actions of dubious social utility is:

• to bail bankers into the risks they make their firms assume--to mandate Silicon Valley compensation schemes.
• to impose high capital requirements--and to smoothly and swiftly shut down organizations that fail to meet them immediately.
• to establish progressive income and wealth taxes.

Delivering Tim Geithner's head to congress does none of those things. And it weakens the administration: Geithner is where he is because for thirty years everyone who has dealt with Tim (except when he is paying his self-employment taxes) has found that when Tim is on your side, you tend to win. He is very good at a huge number of dimensions of this, where "this" is the business of government.

The administration, the country, and the world face lots of challenges right now. And weakening it does not seem to me to be smart.

Department of "Huh?"

When you praise Idi Amin, you've gone beneath the bottom of the barrel and out into the earth...

Xeni Jardin::

Hugo Chavez, cannibalism apologist: Is Bruce Vilanch writing for Hugo Chavez now? 'Cause the Venezuelan leader's comedy material is pretty good lately: now he's a cannibalism apologist. In a recent speech, Chavez praised Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the late Ugandan dictator Idi "Butcher of Uganda" Amin. Said Chavez: "We thought he was a cannibal... I don't know, maybe he was a great nationalist, a patriot." (thanks Antinous)

The Biggest Entitlement Spending Cut in History--and "Deficit Hawks" Are Running Away from It - Health-care reform's grand bargain

It's buried in the health care bill. We think it has teeth--and the Congressional Budget Office agrees:

Ezra Klein - Health-care reform's grand bargain: This is how health-care reform controls costs. It is, at its base, a grand bargain: The coverage expansion gets liberals to agree to, and even advocate for, cost controls they would never otherwise consider. A 6 percent growth target? A super-MedPAC -- now called the Independent Medicare Advisory Board -- that reforms Medicare to save money and whose recommendations are fast-tracked and protected from the filibuster? Hundreds of pages of changes to payment rates and experiments in value-based purchasing and coordinated care efforts? This stuff is very, very real, and it goes into effect very quickly. You may think it's impossible for Congress to cut costs in Medicare and the government will just go bankrupt, but even you'd have to admit that this is what it would look like if the government was cutting costs in Medicare.

If this piece of the bill was passed on its own, it would be the most important cost control bill ever considered by the United States Congress. But you could never have passed it on its own. You needed the coverage to make the grand bargain work. Republicans like to call this bill a trillion-dollar experiment to expand the health-care system, and in some ways, it is. But it's also a multitrillion-dollar experiment to cut costs in the health-care system, and it deserves credit for that, and support from fiscal conservatives. It's easy to talk about cutting costs, but this is the chance for people to actually do it.

So why aren't the world's deficit hawks--the Blue Dogs, the (honest) Republican legislators who care about the country, the Concord Coalition, et cetera, et cetera--all out there hosanna-ing about the health care reform bill?

In the case of the (honest) Republican legislators who care about the country, they probably are--but it is hard to observe an empty set. But the rest? Where are they

What Should We Be Doing to the Federal Reserve?

Free Exchange muses on central bank independence.

I haven't done a nose count on the FOMC. But it is pretty clear that right now it has too many inflation hawks on it and not enough unemployment hawks. The only saving grace is that other central banks are worse--some much worse.

In the 1970s the American Congress learned that it did not want to exercise oversight over the Federal Reserve--that opining and trying to influence was a political loser, because mistakes would be made and if you had pushed for the policies that produced them you took part of the blame.

Now it looks as though the Congress may be shifting its ground...

Free Exchange:

A big Fed mess: ALAN BLINDER opens a new Washington Post column with what I believe is the conventional wisdom:

The Federal Reserve's performance in this long-running financial and economic crisis deserves separate grades. For the early crisis period, from the summer of 2007 until a few weeks after the Lehman Brothers failure in mid-September 2008, the Fed's response was uneven. I would question several decisions. But the Fed deserves extremely high marks for its work since then. It has hit the bull's-eye regularly under very trying circumstances.

In academia and in the financial markets, the overwhelming attitude is: Hurrah, and thank goodness, for Ben Bernanke, who gets kudos for his boldness, creativity and smarts.  This is what economists seem to believe—that the Fed totally blew it where the housing bubble and oversight of financial markets, pre-crisis, were concerned, but in terms of shepherding the financial system through the crisis, and the economy through recession, Mr Bernanke and company have done a bang up job. But that doesn't really seem to be true. Any world in which the Fed is twiddling its thumbs while prices are flat-to-falling and unemployment is above 10% is not one where Fed policy is "hit[ting] the bull's-eye"....

An independent central bank is crucial. Political control of monetary policy must inevitably lead to accelerating inflation and long-run economic instability. But at the moment, the American economy could use an increase in expected inflation. And a real threat to Fed independence would almost certainly deliver it, either because markets would anticipate increased political influence on monetary policy ever after, or because the Fed would seek to fend off pressure from Congress by easing further, which amounts to the same thing. But we don't actually want there to be a real threat to Fed independence, because that way uncontrolled inflation lies.

How does one try to influence the Fed while simultaneously keeping it independent?... [I]t does no good for prominent, respected economists to continue heaping praise on a Fed that failed in its mission before the crisis and which is failing in its mission now. Because as unpleasant as the prospect of Congressional intervention in monetary policy is, two more years of high unemployment might well lead to far worse.

Naughty, Naughty, Peter Orszag...

Peter Orszag writes:

STATEMENT OF ADMINISTRATION POLICY: H.R. 3961 — Medicare Physician Payment Reform Act of 2009 (Rep. Dingell, D-Michigan, and 6 cosponsors):

The Administration strongly supports House passage of H.R. 3961, the Medicare Physician Payment Reform Act of 2009, and appreciates congressional efforts to ensure that Medicare beneficiaries and TRICARE patients continue to have access to care and their physician of choice. In his FY 2010 Budget, the President recognized the need for comprehensive reform for the Medicare physician payment system. The Administration believes Medicare and the country need to move toward a system in which doctors receive better incentives to provide their patients with higher quality and more efficient care.

H.R. 3961 takes additional steps to reform Medicare physician payments. The Administration is pleased that the bill would eliminate the steep payment cut scheduled for 2010. A cut of this magnitude could reduce access to physicians for Medicare beneficiaries throughout the country. The Administration also supports the provisions that provide a boost to primary care providers by increasing payments for evaluation and management services, such as office visits. H.R. 3961 would also create incentives for broader reforms for Medicare physician payments by encouraging the formation of accountable care organizations, in which groups of providers are jointly responsible for the quality and cost of health care services for beneficiaries with chronic conditions. The Administration remains committed to working with the Congress to achieve comprehensive reforms to Medicare physician payments that will enhance efficient and high-quality care for beneficiaries and protect their choice of physicians. H.R. 3961 is an important step forward in comprehensively reforming the way Medicare pays physicians to provide the very best care to the Nation’s Medicare beneficiaries and the Administration urges the Congress to pass this legislation.

The key, of course, is that although "the bill would eliminate the steep [Medicare physician] payment cut scheduled for 2010" it contains no provisions to pay for that elimination.

If Peter and company want me to use a baseline that assumes that PAYGO will hold, they need to at least whine and whimper at bills that break it.

Just saying...

We Write Letters on Health Care Cost Control to Ezekiel Emmanuel...

Ezekiel is doing the Lord's work on health care reform at OMB. His judgment is good. He is worth supporting--joggling his elbow is really not helpful given that he has the point on these sets of issues.

But I feel anxious--I don't think I can quite sign on with a good conscience to the whole thing. So I am signing on with a slightly, slightly bad conscience...

Dear Mr Emmanuel:

Any chance we could get "#1 Deficit Neutrality. Fiscally responsible health reform requires budget neutrality or deficit reduction over the coming years. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) must project that the bill be at least deficit neutral over the ten-year budget window, and deficit-reducing thereafter..." changed?

As it stands, it seems to me that this point is not true. Deficit neutrality as CBO scores it over the next ten years is not very important from a public policy standpoint. And what is important is that it be likely to actually be deficit-reducing and substantially deficit-reducing after 2030 by putting us on a sensible cost- and spending-control path--rather than that CBO score it as deficit-reducing after 2030.

And a tax on employer-sponsored health plans is only worth doing in the context of universal or near-universal coverage--in the absence of a mandate or near-equivalent, the risks of producing an adverse-selection meltdown make me nervous.

The rest is fine.

If it's too late to negotiate changes, I will, however, sign on anyway...

Yours,

Brad DeLong

The context is:

Apologies for the mass email, but we are operating on an extremely tight political timeline. Some key cost control measures are under threat and might very well not be included in the Senate’s health reform bill. We are asking the country’s leading economists to sign onto a letter to Sen. Reid endorsing 4 key measures as essential to a fiscally responsible health reform bill....

Deficit neutrality. Fiscally responsible health reform requires budget neutrality or deficit reduction over the coming years. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) must project that the bill be at least deficit neutral over the 10-year budget window, and deficit reducing thereafter. Of course, covering tens of millions of currently uninsured people will increase spending. But the draft health reform legislation contains offsetting savings sufficient to cover those costs and the seeds of further reforms that will lower the growth of spending. Deficit neutrality over the first decade means that, even during the start-up period, the legislation will not add to our deficits. In the second decade and beyond, the legislation should reduce deficits.

Excise tax on high-cost insurance plans. The Senate Finance Committee’s bill includes an excise tax on high-cost health insurance plans. Like any tax, the excise tax will raise federal revenues, but it has additional advantages that are essential. The excise tax will help curtail the growth of private health insurance premiums by creating incentives to limit the costs of plans to a tax-free amount. In addition, as employers and health plans redesign their benefits to reduce health care premiums, cash wages will increase. Analysis of the Senate Finance Committee’s proposal suggests that the excise tax on high-cost insurance plans would increase workers’ take-home pay by more than $300 billion over the next decade. This provision offers the most promising approach to reducing private-sector health care costs while also giving a much needed raise to the tens of millions of Americans who receive insurance through their employers.

Medicare Commission. Rising Medicare expenditures pose one of the most difficult fiscal challenges facing the federal government. Medicare is technically complex and the benefits it underwrites are of critical importance to tens of millions of elderly and disabled Americans. We believe that a commission of technical experts should be empowered to suggest changes in Medicare to improve the quality and value of services. In particular, such a commission should be charged with developing and suggesting to Congress plans to extend the solvency of the Medicare program and improve the quality of care delivered to Medicare beneficiaries. Creating such a commission will make sure that reforming the health care system does not end with this legislation, but continues in the future decades with new efforts to improve quality and contain costs.

Delivery system reforms. Successful reform will improve the care that individual patients receive by rewarding health care professionals for providing better care, not just more care. Studies have shown that hundreds of billions of dollars are spent on care that does nothing to improve health outcomes. This is largely a consequence of the distorted incentives associated with paying for volume rather than quality. Health care reform must take steps to change the way providers care for patients, to reward care that is better coordinated and meets the needs of each patient. In particular, the legislation should include additional funding for research into what tests and treatments work and which ones do not. It must also provide incentives for physicians and hospitals to focus on quality, such as bundled payments and accountable care organizations, as well as penalties for unnecessary re-admissions and health-facility acquired infections. Aggressive pilot projects should be rapidly introduced and evaluated, with the best strategies adopted quickly, and throughout the health care system...

"Criticizing the Health Care Bill for Not Doing Enough on Cost Control Is Like Criticizing the Yankees for Not Winning the Super Bowl..."

Ezra Klein talks to Jon Gruber:

Does health-care reform do enough on cost control?: My view is, even if the bill did no cost control it would be an incredible thing for this country. But politically, it sets the stage for cost control in two senses. First, it puts in place all the things we can do now. It does comparative effectiveness and pilots and all the rest. But second, once you get coverage off the table, the conversation gets more focused on cost control.... [I]n Massachusetts... Health Care for All... realized that they would lose all this coverage they'd gained if it didn't control costs. So they got behind real cost-control measures. A global budget, even. People say you can't do coverage without cost control. I think it's the opposite. You can't do cost control before coverage. We would do a huge amount for the cause of cost control just by covering people....

One of my frustrations with the cost-control discussion is that people set this up like a choice between this bill and a bill with more cost control. In reality, it seems more like a choice between this bill and nothing. And this bill does a lot more cost control than nothing.... Do you know Pascal's wager? Why not believe in God? I think of health-care reform similarly. We don't know if we'll really bend the cost curve. But if we do this and we don't do anything, we still go bankrupt in 100 years. We don't lose much. But if we do it and it works, then it's a savior.

It also moves the conversation on cost control.... It does real things... then it does real things to make cost control more politically viable.... To kill this bill for not doing enough on cost control would be like criticizing the Yankees for not winning the Super Bowl. They won the World Series! They did what they could do!

"Going Rouge": Jim McDonald Makes the Catch

He writes:

Making Light: Rouge Queen: It was the typo that had to happen. And happen it did, at CNN, just now today...

Duty, Honor, Country

I just don't understand why people think John McCain is in any sense a patriot. I just don't.

Ta-Nehisi Coates:

A Really Small Human Being - Ta-Nehisi Coates: Sarah Palin on why she's still in 10th grade, or rather gave Katie Couric an interview:

The A.P. says that in the book, Mrs. Palin also accuses the McCain campaign of keeping her away from reporters, which fed a perception that she was ignoring the media. She writes that she sat down with Katie Couric in part because she felt sorry for her, after Nicolle Wallace, a McCain aide, said Ms. Couric suffered from low self-esteem.

I still think the greatest charge against John McCain is that, in his world, Palin could have been president. A man who claims to put "Country First" was actually willing to put that country in Sarah Palin's hands. It's still incredibly shocking.

We Are No Longer as Ashamed of NPR as We Used to Be...

Heebee-Geebie reports:

Unfogged: I don't know when exactly it started, but NPR now uses the word "torture" without qualifications to describe the activities at Guantanamo. That is critically important in shaping the narrative we tell, as a society, about our actions post-9/11.

Politics and the Federal Deficit Mess

David Wessel reports:

The Federal Deficit Mess in a Single Sentence: Douglas Elmendorf, the director of the Congressional Budget Office, gave a speech the other day at the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management. In it, he nicely summarized the federal government’s long-term fiscal problem in one sentence:

The country faces a fundamental disconnect between the services the people expect the government to provide, particularly in the form of benefits for older Americans, and the tax revenues that people are willing to send to the government to finance those service...

Every thing else is detail.

One of the key details, I think, is that there are now three factions in American politics:

1. Democrats who think that spending should be higher than today's tax level affords--but who think that resolving the gap is the Republicans' problem.

2. Republicans who think that taxes should be lower than today's and projected future spending requires--but who think that resolving the gap is the Democrats' problem.

3. Democrats who think that spending should be higher than today's tax level affords and who think that resolving the gap is everybody's problem.

Missing are (4), the Republicans who think that taxes should be lower than today's and projected future spending requires, and who think that resolving the gap is everybody's problem. I used to think there were such Republicans--Bob Dole, Pete Domenici, Warren Rudman, Phil Gramm, Gregg Judd. But a Berkeley colleague put me straight:

Domenici talks a very good game about fiscal prudence and stability--boy does he talk a very good game--but when the chips are down he does what the Republican Senate leadership wants him to do, and he does it all the time.

You can watch Keith Hennessey freak out over this absence, spinning like mad in an extraordinarily unconvincing way, here:

The inherited deficits fallacy: Director Orszag is correct that neither the Medicare drug benefit nor the tax cuts were offset with other spending cuts or tax increases. He fails to tell you that in 2003 Congressional Democrats wanted to spend more on Medicare drugs.... He fails to tell you that President Obama did not propose means-testing the drug benefit.... He also fails to tell you that President Obama’s budget proposes to continue $3.2 trillion of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts and the AMT patches.... Director Orszag is picking and choosing particular policies to try to assign blame.  How much of future deficits are because future Medicare spending was not offset when Medicare was enacted in 1965? This is closely related to the PAYGO myth the Administration is trying to popularize....

Republicans, including President Bush, generally try to offset proposed mandatory spending increases with spending cuts.... This was violated for the Medicare drug benefit.... President Bush developed a proposal to package the Medicare drug benefit with dramatic changes to restructure fee-for-service Medicare and make it compete with private health plans on a level playing field. This proposal would have more than offset the increased spending from the drug benefit.  House Republican Leaders (in 2003) rejected these reforms and insisted on just doing the drug benefit because AARP and Congressional Democrats opposed the reforms...

The "Republicans, including President Bush, generally try to offset proposed mandatory spending increases with spending cuts..." is, as best as I can see, either a brazen lie, a sign that Keith Hennessey has lost all contact with our reality, or a sign that he is indeed a visitor from a parallel universe in which Larry Summers still has a beard.

Hennessey wishes that he lived in a world in which there were Republicans of group (4).

But that world isn't this one.

I urge him to (i) either come across the aisle and join us Democrats in group (3) (God knows we need help), or (ii) turn all his energies not to defending the really-existing Republicans of (2) by fighting with Peter Orszag but instead to trying to destroy them. Unless and until he limits their influence, the Republican ticket is simply not something that anybody who knows the federal budget numbers can with honor vote for...

The Paranoid Style in the Republican Party...

Josh Micah Marshall:

The Paranoid Style: There are many ways in which the political moment (hyper-polarizing) and the technological moment (Twitter, instant news cycles) creates a self-perpetuating arms race of hyperbole. On the other hand, some of these new publishing and communications systems do allow us to get a view into where the head of a big chunk of the country is at.

To that end, we've got the story of the Colorado state senator who represents the hyper-conservative Colorado Springs compared Obama to the al Qaeda terrorists who took over Flight 93 on 9/11 and real patriotic Republican Americans to the passengers who had to retake control of the plane.

On the one hand, this is textbook feverish, eliminationist incitement. On the other hand, I think back to how paranoid and in the thrall of their own victimization these folks were a few years ago when they ran the entire country. So I'm not sure we should be surprised that they go totally crazy when they're largely shut out of power in the country at the national level.

Warning! Godwin's Law Violation Ahead!!

Probably it's just that I have been reading too much about Mussolini's Italy.

But reading Paul Krugman this morning on the Republican Party's "sorcerer's apprentice" act made me think that we are a lot closer to Weimar America than I ever thought I would be...

At this point there are only two moral courses of action open to Republicans:

1. Abandon the party and try to marginalize it as a whole.
2. Split the party, and so try to lift the curse of Richard Nixon.

Paul:

What all this shows is that the G.O.P. has been taken over by the people it used to exploit.

The state of mind visible at recent right-wing demonstrations is nothing new. Back in 1964 the historian Richard Hofstadter published an essay titled, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” which reads as if it were based on today’s headlines: Americans on the far right, he wrote, feel that “America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion.” Sound familiar?

But while the paranoid style isn’t new, its role within the G.O.P. is.

When Hofstadter wrote, the right wing felt dispossessed because it was rejected by both major parties. That changed with the rise of Ronald Reagan: Republican politicians began to win elections in part by catering to the passions of the angry right.

Until recently, however, that catering mostly took the form of empty symbolism. Once elections were won, the issues that fired up the base almost always took a back seat to the economic concerns of the elite. Thus in 2004 George W. Bush ran on antiterrorism and “values,” only to announce, as soon as the election was behind him, that his first priority was changing Social Security.

But something snapped last year.

Conservatives had long believed that history was on their side, so the G.O.P. establishment could, in effect, urge hard-right activists to wait just a little longer: once the party consolidated its hold on power, they’d get what they wanted. After the Democratic sweep, however, extremists could no longer be fobbed off with promises of future glory.

Furthermore, the loss of both Congress and the White House left a power vacuum in a party accustomed to top-down management. At this point Newt Gingrich is what passes for a sober, reasonable elder statesman of the G.O.P. And he has no authority: Republican voters ignored his call to support a relatively moderate, electable candidate in New York’s special Congressional election.

Real power in the party rests, instead, with the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin (who at this point is more a media figure than a conventional politician). Because these people aren’t interested in actually governing, they feed the base’s frenzy instead of trying to curb or channel it. So all the old restraints are gone.

In the short run, this may help Democrats, as it did in that New York race. But maybe not: elections aren’t necessarily won by the candidate with the most rational argument. They’re often determined, instead, by events and economic conditions...

We Are Hiding in Our Burrows Right Now...

Andrew Samwick is shrill:

A Question for Peggy Noonan: When Did Our Callous Childhood Begin: A friend pointed me to this column by Peggy Noonan in last week's WSJ, "We're Governed by Callous Children." I think she is right in her main point about a disheartened leadership class in business and a mindless leadership class in government. 

But she makes the same mistake that other Republican commentators make when they criticize our current leadership.  Specifically, she does not come out forthrightly to identify the one characteristic that separates adults from children: children don't have to balance their budgets, but adults do.  As much as she may admire Reagan, it was his administration that began our 30-year fascination with outsized deficits.  (The deficit mentality nearly went away with Clinton but came back with a vengeance with his successor.)

We will not get out of our current predicament until we face up to the reality that we cannot continue to spend more than we earn (or in the government's case, tax), and that the limits on spending ought to come naturally precisely because we observe not just the benefits but the costs in real time. 

I think that what has people disheartened is that there is almost no one in Washington -- not even an identifiable faction of one of the two main parties -- who is willing to act on this fact.  So people expect the so-called solutions to make the underlying problems worse.  To suggest that callousness or mindlessness (her words) are features of only the current administration and Congressional leadership is ridiculous.

Hey, this is America.  If you don't like the current leaders, we can always get some new ones.  Is it too early to start the "Bruce Bartlett in 2012" campaign?

Let me assure Andrew that the Rubin wing of the Democratic Party is still out there. My view is that making a noise right now is highly counterproductive--that for the next two years or so we need bigger government deficits, not smaller ones.

But watch for us to come out of our burrows when the unemployment rate falls below 7.5%...

Not Disraeli's Two Nations, But Two Nations Nevertheless...

And the really scary one controls today's Republican Party: the curse of Richard Nixon (and Barry Goldwater) in action.

Matthew Yglesias writes:

Matthew Yglesias: White Men Are Not Very Progressive: A nice map from dreaminonempty at Open Left illustrates the vote share won among white men in the 2008 presidential election:

I would say that another message is that progressive politics is badly disadvantaged by a situation in which the overwhelming majorities of political leaders and prominent media figures are white men. There are plenty of white men with progressive views, but in general the majority of white men are not progressive and the majority of progressives are not white men. Drawing from the relatively small pool of white male progressives means drawing from a shallow talent pool.

The Republican Party on Now Republican House Candidate Doug Hoffman: He "Lacks the Integrity and Abilities Needed to Be Elected to Anything"

The Republican County Chairs of New York say: "Doug Hoffman lacks the integrity and qualities needed to be elected to anything -- let alone Congress."

Eric Kleefeld:

Flashback: GOP Used To Badmouth Hoffman, Said He Had No Integrity: Now that the national Republican Party has gotten behind Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman in the NY-23 special election -- following the withdrawal of moderate GOP candidate Dede Scozzafava -- it's fun to remember that the Republicans didn't always feel so fondly about Hoffman.

As The Hill reported a month ago, NRCC spokesman Paul Lindsay said that Scozzafava was the right candidate, who was picked by the local party leaders and had an appeal to the district's voters.... "Fortunately, the local Republican county chairs had the foresight to see that Doug Hoffman lacked the integrity and qualities needed to be elected to anything -- let alone Congress."

And the ex-Republican candidate Dede Scozzafava joins her county chairs in opposing Doug Hoffman:

Republican Scozzafava Endorses Democrat After Exiting N.Y. Congressional Race: Republican Dede Scozzafava endorsed her former Democratic opponent Sunday in the race for an upstate New York congressional seat, shaking up the contest for the second day in a row after exiting the race Saturday. 

Scozzafava dropped out after Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman experienced a late-in-the-game surge. The move was expected to consolidate GOP voters behind Hoffman on Tuesday. But on Sunday, Scozzafava backed Democrat Bill Owens -- the announcement was made in a statement sent out by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. 

"I am supporting Bill Owens for Congress and urge you to do the same," she said. "In Bill Owens, I see a sense of duty and integrity that will guide him beyond political partisanship. He will be an independent voice devoted to doing what is right for New York. Bill understands this district and its people, and when he represents us in Congress he will put our interests first." 

Can We Please Shut the Republican Party Down This Evening?

Henry Kissinger once said, people say: "It has the added advantage of being true." For today's Republican standard bearers like Meg Whitman, that is no longer the case: telling the truth never crosses their minds, and the idea that something being true might be an advantage for it is completely foreign to them.

Brian Leubitz watches Meg Whitman try to become governor:

Calitics:: Oh, It's Going to Be Like That?: George Skelton catches a few, ahem, tall tales in some of Meg Whitman's radio spots.  

"Did you know," Whitman asks radio listeners, "that in the last 10 years, state spending has gone up 80%?"

It doesn't take much digging to learn that general fund spending "in the last 10 years" has risen just 27%, according to finance department data. Adjusted for inflation and population growth, spending actually has decreased by 16.6%.

(LA Times 10/29/09)....

Meg Whitman has a story for the people of California. A story that bears no resemblance to the more complicated reality, but it's simple: California's state government spends too much. That somehow California is just tossing around money because the numbers are big. Yet, despite the numbers that Whitman would like to show you, here are the real numbers. California is 26th in per capita state spending with about $5,000 per capita. And that's from FY 2007, the high water mark where eMeg's ads were proclaiming out of control spending. (Data from Kaiser Foundation). Since that time, we've slashed and burned through our budget. We're spending substantially less money, and providing a lot fewer services. But, we can't all keep up with those spend happy states like Oklahoma (#18), Louisiana (#9), Alabama (#7) and Alaska (#1).

So, it's going to be more of the same crap. Lies, deceptions, and half-truths. Yup, a real change candidate, that Meg Whitman.

Mark Thoma on the Need for More Economic Stimulus

He writes:

Economist's View: "The Weakest Recovery in Modern Memory"?: Output is not expected to return to potential until well into 2012. Now recall the long delay between the end of the last two recessions and the peak in the unemployment rate.... To be fully effective, plans for additional stimulus should have been in place long ago. However, given how long the recovery is expected to take, it's not too late to do more if we get started right away. But the political climate makes it highly unlikely that labor markets and the economy will get the help that they need.

The New York Times Editorial Board Understands Macro

Unlike vote 60--or even vote 50--in the senate, and unlike every single congressional republican, they have a clue:

The Case for More Stimulus: Corporate profitability has been boosted by job cuts, pay cuts and a drive to restock depleted inventories. Immense federal stimulus has jolted the economy. But what happens when those measures run their course? The economy is going to need more government support, or it is bound to be very weak for a very long time — and vulnerable to a relapse into recession. Unemployment is expected to worsen well into next year, exceeding 10 percent. Foreclosures are expected to rise, which will push home values down further. Hundreds of small and midsize banks are likely to fail in coming years. State and local governments face budget shortfalls in 2010 that are as bad or worse than this year’s.

Yet Washington is not providing a coherent plan for effective stimulus.... Congressional Republicans say continued economic weakness is proof that February’s stimulus package failed. Lawmakers in both parties fret that large budget deficits preclude more stimulus.... Both arguments are wrong.... [T]he immediate need for stimulus trumps the longer-term need for deficit reduction....

Congress and the administration should agree on ways to ease the dire financial condition of the states. Most important is continued aid for state Medicaid programs, which would ensure vital services, support jobs and free up money for other needs. Governors will begin to prepare their new budgets in early 2010, and those budgets will be in effect for a year, starting in July....

Without another round of effective stimulus, the worst recession in modern memory will likely become — at best — the weakest recovery in modern memory. Another boost to federal spending that is targeted and timely should not be too much for politicians to deliver.

In Which We Learn that the World Is a Much More Complex Place than David Brooks Can Imagine

Rick Perlstein emails--and says that I can broadcast if I fix his typos:

So I lectured at San Angelo State U today in West Texas. We repaired for the evening to "In Vino Veritas," a combination wine store/wine bar. We go in, and there are half a dozen men in cowboy hats enjoying the vintages--I learn they're in town for the "Roping Fiesta," in which, to quote the local paper:

top ropers from around the world converge in San Angelo for the San Angelo Stock Show and Rodea Association's Wrangler Roping Fiesta.... (New to this year's lineup is the double mugging competition, in which competitors work in teams of two to rope and tie down a steer.)

At the end of the bar, a VERY Texan dude with a burly beard--I'm not making any of this up--lectures me about how it's absurd to drink a decent claret unless it's aerated first. Then he tells me the criteria for what constitutes an authentic honkey tonk.

The owner's name is Steve. His store is filled with $100 vintages with their "Wine Spectator" scores marked on the bottle; and, some of them, tags reading "Steve's Picks." I remark how ironic it is that liberals from the East like me are always excoriated by Texas Republican types for being wine snipping snobs. His indelible response:

Most liberals have really shitty taste in wine...

I Just May Have to Readmit Andrew Sullivan into Polite Society

For this, which covers a great multitude of sins--perhaps even the sin against the Holy Ghost:

The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan: One does not quite know what to say about Pat Buchanan's latest. Is it too predictable to note? Or too ugly to record? Or too stupid to ignore? Upon reflection, I'll go with stupid. Take one simple point. Notice that for Buchanan in this column, it is axiomatic that America was once defined by its whiteness. This is what he means by "tradition." America - once uniformly white - is now, for him and those he speaks for, bewilderingly multicultural and multi-confessional. Hence the anxiety. Hence the panic. Hence, in some ways, the confluence of fear and paranoia among the 20 percent of Americans who seem to feel this way and see the federal government in some way as the enabler of this destruction.

But this axiom, while useful as a myth, has a problem. It is untrue. And this "country" that white Americans are allegedly losing is not, in fact, a country. It is merely a self-serving and solipsistic illusion of a country that some white Americans feel they are losing.

From its very beginning, after all, America was a profoundly black country as well.

This took a while for an Englishman to grasp upon arriving here, because it's so easy to carry with you all the subconscious cultural baggage you grew up with. England, after all, is deeply Anglo-Saxon. It makes some sense to refer to England's roots and ethnic identity as white, its language as English, its inheritance as a deep mixture of Northern European peoples - the Angles and the Saxons and the Normans and the Celts. And superficially, English-speaking white Americans might seem in the same cultural boat as white English people, dealing with a relatively new multiculturalism in an increasingly diverse and multi-racial society. And at first blush, you almost sink into that lazy and stupid assumption, especially if you arrive in Boston, as I did, and carried all the usual European prejudices, as I did.

The English, lulled by their marination in American pop culture from infancy, and beguiled by the same language, can live out their days in this country never actually noting that it is an alien land - stranger than you might have ever imagined, crueler than you realized, but somehow also more inspiring than you ever thought possible. This is the America I am trying to make my home, after 25 years. It is not the America of Pat Buchanan's or John Derbyshire's fantasies.

It struck me almost at once, if only in the music I heard all around me - and then in so many other linguistic, cultural, rhetorical, spiritual ways: white Americans do not realize how black they are. Even their whiteness is partly scavenged from the fear of - and attraction to - its opposite. Even something as stereotypically white as American Catholicism, I discovered to my amazement, was also black from the very start. (Yes, those Maryland slaves. If you've never been to a Gospel Mass in an ancient black Catholic parish, try it some time.)

From the beginning, in its very marrow, this country was forged out of that racial and cultural interaction. It fought a brutalizing, bloody, defining civil war over that interaction. Any European student of Tocqueville swiftly opens his eyes at the three races that defined America in the classic text. Has Buchanan read Tocqueville? And that's why it seems so odd to me that the election of the son of a white mother and a black father is seen as somehow a threat to American identity for some, when, in fact, Obama is the final iteration of the American identity - the oldest one and the deepest one. This newness is, in fact, ancient - or as ancient as America can be. The very names - Ann Dunham and Barack Obama. Is not their union in some ways a faint echo of the union that actually made this country what it is?

That some cannot see Buchanan's cartoon as a travesty of history remains America's tragedy of self-forgetting. It reminds me of the way in which Britain always defined itself as a Protestant country, even while, of course, it was deeply, deeply Catholic before it was ever Protestant - and for a much longer period of time. As a Catholic growing up in England, and having genealogical roots in both Catholic Ireland and in Domesday Book England, it took a while for me to appreciate the pied beauty of this identity. Tribalism is a powerful thing, especially for the Irish. I remember one day, as I was herded into the local Anglican church for my high school assembly, thinking: "This ancient building was once mine, ours." But that was before I realized that Anglicanism itself could not be understood without the profound inheritance of English Catholicism - and that Anglicanism was actually a hybrid of Protestant and Catholic Englishness. And that this was England - all of it. And to be truly English was to own it all.

Buchanan, of all people, should know better than these tedious recurring explosions of racial panic. And, of course, he does know better. He has read more history than most pundits. He is personally a civil and decent man. But he feels these things in such a profound and tribal way that what he knows is submerged by tribal fear and expressed as hateful hackery. But this much is true and deserves restating:

Black Americans have shed blood in every American war since the Revolution. This country, even the very Capitol building in which today's legislators now demand to see the birth certificate of the first black president, was built on the sweat and sinew of slaves. Before we were people in the eyes of the law, before we had the right to vote, before we had a black president, we were here, helping make this country as it is today. We are as American as it gets. And frankly, the time of people who think otherwise is passing. If that's the country Buchanan wants to hold onto, well, he's right, he is losing it.

And about time too.

---

But I am sure that Daniel Davies will have something to say about the claim that "England, after all, is deeply Anglo-Saxon..."

Oh, Please, Yes! A Different Opposition Party than the Republicans, Yes!!

Let the Curse of Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater finally wreak its vengeance to the end!!!!

Aimai:

No More Mister Nice Blog: Let the Witch Hunts Begin!

via digby:

To me, now more than ever, the conservative movement must purge itself of those in its “leadership” who are not worthy of the cause they claim to champion. Over the past year I have begun to suspect that David Keene, the head of the American Conservative Union and the Chairman of CPAC (the largest annual gathering of conservatives) may fit into this category.

This is starting to look like a repeat of the early chapters of Thomas Franks' What's the Matter With Kansas. That's the part where the rank and file Conservatives--the secretaries and the holy rollers--stopped taking marching orders from the upper class, corporatist, Republicans and took over the party from underneath. That was good for the Republican Party for a while since it gave them an energized base. But since party identification has fallen to its lowest level ever, and they are splitting off between social conservatives and small government conservatives its not clear that this will still be a winning strategy nationally. In fact, its not going to be until the social conservatives free themselves of the corporatists and reach out sucessfully to hispanics and blacks, or the corporatists free themselves of the social conservatives and reach out sucessfully to eve

Paul Krugman Goes Meta

And offers us three things to read:

(1) Joshua Gans identifies in Dubner and Levitt an odd inconsistency that I’ve identified more broadly: those who go on and on about how people respond to incentives when they’re making a pro-free-market argument suddenly seem to lose all faith in the power of incentives when the goal is to induce more environmentally friendly behavior:

But come on. Isn’t the whole point of the Freakonomics project that prices work and behaviour changes in response to incentives? Everywhere else, a few pennies will cause massive consumption changes while when it comes to a carbon price, it is all too hard.

(2) Ryan Avent makes a general point about people who dismiss cap-and-trade as too hard, then promote something else that only seems easier because you haven’t thought it through. I agree with him about the carbon tax issue; and while I hadn’t thought about applying the same principle to geoengineering, he’s completely right. Having somebody--who? The United States? The United Nations? The Coalition of the Willing?--pump sulfur into the atmosphere through an 18-mile tube, or cut off sunlight with a giant orbital mirror, would either (a) require many years of hard negotiations or (b) quite possibly set off World War III. If it’s (a), why is that so much easier than a global agreement on emissions? (Which, as Brad points out, really would only have to involve four big players.)

(3) Andrew Gelman poses a question:

The interesting question to me is why is it that “pissing off liberals” is delightfully transgressive and oh-so-fun, whereas “pissing off conservatives” is boring and earnest?

I have a theory here, although it may not be the whole story: it’s about careerism. Annoying conservatives is dangerous: they take names, hold grudges, and all too often find ways to take people who annoy them down. As a result, the Kewl Kids, as Digby calls them, tread very carefully when people on the right are concerned — and they snub anyone who breaks the unwritten rule and mocks those who must not be offended. Annoying liberals, on the other hand, feels transgressive but has historically been safe. The rules may be changing... but it’s been that way for a long time.

The Gotha Program of 1875

Full text of "Gotha Programme":

I. Labor is the source of all wealth and all culture, and since universal productive labor is possible only through society, therefore to society, that is to all its members, belongs the collective product of labor. With the universal obligation to labor, according to equal justice, each should have in proportion to his reasonable needs.

In the present society the means of labor are the monopoly of the capitalist class; the servitude of the laboring class, which is the outgrowth of this, is the cause of misery and of slavery in all forms.

The liberation of labor demands the transformation of the means of production into the common property of society and the associative regulation of the collective labor with general employment and just distribution of the proceeds of labor.

The emancipation of labor must be the work of the laboring class, opposed to which all other classes are only a reactionary body.

II. Proceeding from this principle the Socialist Labor party of Germany seeks through all legal means the free state and the socialist society, the destruction of the iron law of wages, the overthrow of exploitation in all forms and the abolition of all social and political inequality. The Socialist Labor party of Germany, though working chiefly in national boundaries, is conscious of the international character of the labor movement and is resolved to fulfill every duty which is laid on the workers in order to realize the brotherhood of humanity.

The Socialist Labor party of Germany demands as a step to the solution of the social question the erection, with the help of the state, of socialistic productive establishments under the democratic control of the laboring people. These productive establishments are to place industry and agriculture in such relations that out of them the socialist organization of the whole may arise.

The Socialist Labor party of Germany demands as the foundation of the state:

1. Universal, equal and direct suffrage, with secret, obligatory voting by all citizens at all elections in state or community.
2. Direct legislation by the people. Decision as to peace or war by the people.
3. Common right to bear arms. Militia instead of the standing army.
4. Abolition of all laws of exception, especially all laws restricting the freedom of the press, of association and assemblage; above all, all laws restricting the freedom of public opinion, thought and investigation.
5. Legal judgment through the people. Free administration of law.
6. Universal and equal popular education by the state. Universal compulsory education. Free instruction in all forms of art. Declaration that religion is a private matter.

The Socialist Labor party of Germany demands within the present society:

1. The widest possible expansion of political rights and freedom according to the foregoing demands.
2. A progressive income tax for state and municipality instead of all those existing, especially in place of the indirect tax which burdens the people.
3. Unrestrained right of combination.
4. Shortening of the working day according to the needs of society. Abolition of Sunday labor.
5. Abolition of child labor and all female labor injurious to health and morality.
6. Protective laws for the life and health of the worker. Sanitary control of the homes of the workers. Supervision of the mines, factories, workshops and hand industries by an officer elected by the people. An effectual law of enforcement.
7. Regulation of prison labor.
8. Full autonomy in the management of all laborers' fraternal and mutual benefit funds.

---

Source of English translation: Theodore S. Hamerow, ed., The Age of Bismarck: Documents and Interpretations. New York: Harper & Row, 1973, pp. 230-32.

Original German text printed in Protokoll des Vereinigungs-Kongresses der Sozialdemokraten Deutschlands, abgehalten zu Gotha vom 22. bis 27. Mai 1875 [Protocol of the Consolidation Congress of German Social Democrats, held at Gotha from May 22-27, 1875. Leipzig, 1875, pp. 78-79. Original German text reprinted in Hans Fenske, ed., Im Bismarckschen Reich 1871- 1890[ln the Bismarckian Reich 1871-1890]. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1978, pp. 141-42.

---

The first workers' association in Germany, the General German Workers' Association [Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein, or ADAV], was founded in 1863 by Ferdinand Lassalle (1825-1864). His idea of defeating capitalism through the establishment of producers' cooperatives was strongly opposed by several socialists who supported the teachings of Karl Marx (1818-1883). In August 1869, Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826-1900) and August Bebel (1840-1913) founded the Social Democratic Workers' Party [Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei, SDAP], sometimes referred to as the Eisenach wing of German Social Democracy. Together with their followers, they endorsed Marx's teachings and his commitment to class struggle and revolution. The ADAV and the SDAP differed markedly in their views on socialist theory, the First International, the role of the state, trade unions, and universal suffrage--and on Bismarck.

Despite these differences, members of both parties knew that unity meant strength. At the socialist congress held in the central German city of Gotha from May 22-27, 1875, the Lassallean and Marxist wings debated a new program and founded the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany [Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands, SAPD], which was renamed the Social Democratic Party of Germany [Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD] in 1890. The program contained some of Lassalle's controversial ideas, whereas socialist commitment to revolution did not appear in the text.

The State of Economics in the 2000s Analogized...

chunkyreesewitherspoonlookalike@gmail.com emails:

I've been watching the freshwater/saltwater economics wars with a kind of horrified fascination -- something like the way I feel on those rare occasions when I watch train wreck TV (Hoarders and the like.) One of the things I keep wondering is: how on earth did this happen? How did large chunk of the economics profession come so completely unmoored that Larry Summers could say "There are idiots", and have that be a useful response to anything? How did it come about that Richard Posner could write this:

The dominant conception of economics today, and one that has guided my own academic work in the economics of law, is that economics is the study of rational choice. People are assumed to make rational decisions across the entire range of human choice, including but not limited to market transactions, by employing a form (usually truncated and informal) of cost-benefit analysis. The older view was that economics is the study of the economy, employing whatever assumptions seem realistic and whatever analytical methods come to hand.

as though economics could just stop being "the study of the economy" using whatever methods seem useful and appropriate?

Plainly there has to be an intellectual explanation for this, which people like Paul Krugman have addressed. But I think there also has to be an explanation in terms of the sociology of academic disciplines. And in that light, it seems to me that if I were a journalist, I'd consider writing a piece comparing freshwater economics to the other major recent case in which an academic discipline went completely off the rails, namely English departments' swing into postmodernism in the '80s and early '90s. Offhand, there seem to be some real similarities, e.g.:

1. In both cases, the people involved maintained, credibly, that you couldn't really assess the work in question without putting a lot of effort into understanding it.
2. In both cases, that required mastering difficult stuff. (In econ, all the math and models; in pomo lit stuff, mastering the literally incomprehensible language in which a lot of that stuff was written.)
3. In both cases, that deterred a lot of people on the outside who were generally puzzled and skeptical, but didn't want to spend years getting into a position in which they could credibly say: yes, this is, in fact, nuts.
4. So in both cases practitioners were largely insulated from criticism they had to take seriously.

Relatedly, in both cases it took shocks from the outside to expose the problems in this (in the case of English, things like the Sokal hoax; in the case of econ, the near-collapse of the global economy.)

Both cases involved a lot of arrogance, and a generally dismissive attitude towards other approaches. Since, in both cases, practitioners were able to seize significant amounts of control over a discipline before their approach crashed and burned, this did real damage to the disciplines in question (leading to, e.g., large chunks of previous disciplinary history being forgotten.)

Both cases involved significant political motivation.

Of course, it's possible that I only think this would be fun to write, and/or read, because it would tweak the Chicago economists to be compared to pomo English professors. ;)

Former Republican Majority Leader Bob Dole Speaks on Health Care Reform

Sam Stein:

Bob Dole: Health Care Will Pass, GOP Should Get On Board: Former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kans.) told a group of local Kansas reporters on Wednesday, that opposition to the president's health care package had been driven by knee-jerk partisanship and urged Congressional Republicans to get on board a version of reform.

The 1996 Republican presidential candidate also predicted, following a speech at a health care reform summit in Kansas, that "there will be a signing ceremony" for a reform bill sometime this year or early in 2010.

But the comments that seem likely to create the most ripples were those that dealt with congressional opposition to the White House. Dole, according to reports, framed the pushback to Barack Obama's reform agenda as almost perfunctory in nature.

"Sometimes people fight you just to fight you," he said, according to The Kansas City Star. "They don't want Reagan to get it, they don't want Obama to get it, so we've got to kill it...

"Health care is one of those things," he added. "Now we've got to do something"...

What's with this "we"? He could have done something--fifteen years ago--all by himself...

What a sorry hollow shell of a human being...

Some Non-Crazy Non-America Hating Republicans...

Back in 1993, as we all know, Newt Gingrich convinced the Republican Party that hating America--trying above all to keep Democratic administration proposals to make America a better place from passing--was the road to political power.

Republican legislators are still followign his example.

Steve Benen and Karen Tumulty note the exitence of other Republicans:

The Washington Monthly: REPUBLICANS FOR REFORM.... It's an extremely small group, but Time's Karen Tumulty notes the GOP contingent that likes what Democrats are up to on health care reform.

Okay, maybe it's not enough to call a groundswell. But after former Majority Leader Bill Frist told me last Friday that he would end up voting for the bill were he still in Congress (with some caveats about the shortcomings of the legislative language as it now stands), we've heard from some other GOP voices in support of the basic contours of Barack Obama's health care reform effort: Bush Administration HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg (who ran as a Republican, but who is now an independent)* and Mark McClellan, who ran both the Food and Drug Administration and the Medicare and Medicaid programs under George W. Bush....

It's probably worth noting that former Republican Senate Majority Leaders Howard Baker and Bob Dole have also "endorsed the sorts of reforms President Obama and his allies are pushing."... It reminds me a bit of the presidential campaign when a wide variety of Republicans -- including Ronald Reagan's national security advisor, solicitor general, and White House chief of staff -- endorsed Obama. It undermined GOP arguments that the Democrat was some kind of dangerous radical -- if he were a liberal extremist, why were so many prominent Republicans supporting him? The same is true here. If health care reform is such a radical idea, why are relatively high profile non-Democrats endorsing the effort?

Update: As I was hitting "publish," an email arrived in my inbox: "Schwarzenegger Endorses Obama Health Care Effort." The list, in other words, is growing.

Why Do I Get the Feeling that Jacob Weisberg Never Read Much that the "Old" Irving Kristol Wrote?

He should. He really should before he writes again. I recommend:

• My Cold War (1993)
• American Conservatism, 1945-1995 (1995)

Jacob Weisberg:

Irving Kristol saved the right from intellectual bankruptcy in the '60s. Who will save it now?: A brilliant publicist, Kristol claimed the slur [neoconservatism] as a badge of honor and sought to define it as a political philosophy. "Neo-conservatism is not at all hostile to the idea of the welfare state, but it is critical of the Great Society version of the welfare state," Kristol wrote in Newsweek in 1976. His more famous formulation was that a neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged—sometimes softened with the grace note "by reality." But the goal of the neoconservatives—-who in those days were still principally focused on domestic rather than foreign policy—-remained better government, more mindful of tradition, and respectful of the values of the people.

How did this prudent outlook devolve into the spectacle of ostensibly intelligent people cheering on Sarah Palin? Through the 1980s, the neoconservatives became more focused on political power and less interested in policy. They developed their own corrupting welfare state, doling out sinecures and patronage subsidized by the Olin, Scaife, and Bradley foundations.... Over time, the two best qualities of the early neocons—their skepticism about government's ability to transform societies and their rigorous empiricism—-fell by the wayside. In later years, you might say Kristol and the neoconservatives got mugged by ideology. Actually, they were the muggers. "It becomes clear that, in our time, a non-ideological politics cannot survive the relentless onslaught of ideological politics," Kristol wrote in 1980. "For better or for worse, ideology is now the vital element of organized political action."...

Without a substantive challenge, liberals grow smug and lazy. They overreach and overspend. Conservatives need to return to civic responsibility, not just to check their opponents, but to offer the country a valid alternative. They need some new neoconservatives. They need the old Irving Kristol.

I would say that they need Nathan Glazer, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Daniel Bell rather than the "old" Irving Kristol.

The Late Richard Nixon on the Late William Safire: "An Exceptional Jew"

From Attaturk: Scene: The Oval Office:

PRESIDENT NIXON: All right. I want a look at any sensitive areas around where Jews are involved, Bob. See, the Jews are all through the government, and we have got to get in those areas. We're got to get a man in charge who is not Jewish to control the Jewish... do you understand?

CHIEF OF STAFF H.R. HALDEMAN: I sure do.

NIXON: The government is full of Jews.

HALDEMAN: I sure do.

NIXON: Second, most Jews are disloyal. You know what I mean? You have a--you have a Garment and a Kissinger and, frankly, a Safire, and, by God, they're exceptions. But, Bob, generally speaking, you can't trust the bastards. They turn on you. Correct? Am I wrong or right?

Let the record show that William Safire spent the last 35 years of his life being loyal to his longtime boss Richard Nixon: trying not so much to build Richard Nixon up but to tear everyone else he thought he could--Bert Lance, Jimmy Carter, Nancy Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton--down to Nixon's level...

Was Irving Kristol Skeptical of Evolution?

We will never know whether he was skeptical of evolution or merely thought that a world in which he claimed to be skeptical of evolution was one in which Republicans would have a greater chance of winning electoral victories.

Jeffrey Shallit:

Recursivity: Irving Kristol and Evolution: Kristol wrote a piece for the September 30 1986 New York Times about evolution. Here are a few excerpts:

Practically all biologists, when they engage in scientific discourse, assume that the earth's species were not created by divine command. As scientists, they could not make any other assumption. But they agree on little else - a fact which our textbooks are careful to ignore, lest it give encouragement to the religious. There is no doubt that most of our textbooks are still written as participants in the "warfare" between science and religion that is our heritage from the 19th century. And there is also little doubt that it is this pseudo-scientific dogmatism that has provoked the current religious reaction...

Though this theory [the neo-Darwinian synthesis] is usually taught as an established scientific truth, it is nothing of the sort. It has too many lacunae. Theological evidence does not provide us with the spectrum of intermediate species we would expect. Moreover, laboratory experiments reveal how close to impossible it is for one species to evolve into another, even allowing for selective breeding and some genetic mutation. There is unquestionably evolution within species: every animal breeder is engaged in exemplifying this enterprise. But the gradual transformation of the population of one species into another is a biological hypothesis, not a biological fact.

Moreover, today a significant minority of distinguished biologists and geneticists find this hypothesis incredible and insist that evolution must have proceeded by "quantum jumps," caused by radical genetic mutation. This copes with some of the problems generated by neo-Darwinist orthodoxy, but only to create others. We just don't know of any such "quantum jumps" that create new species, since most genetic mutations work against the survival of the individual. So this is another hypothesis - no less plausible than the orthodox view, but still speculative.

And there are other speculations about evolution, some by Nobel prize-winning geneticists, that border on the bizarre - for example, that life on earth was produced by spermatozoa from outer space. In addition, many younger biologists (the so-called "cladists") are persuaded that the differences among species - including those that seem to be closely related -are such as to make the very concept of evolution questionable.

So "evolution" is no simple established scientific orthodoxy, and to teach it as such is an exercise in dogmatism...

I imagine we'll be seeing some biographies of Kristol coming out. I can only hope that any honest biographer will make space to assess Kristol's ignorance of biology and his arrogance in thinking that he understood it better than professional biologists.

Why Health Care Reform Needs a Strong Public Plan: It Saves Lots of Money

Ezra Klein:

Ezra Klein - CBO: A Strong Public Plan Saves Lots of Money: According to Congress Daily, the CBO says attaching the public plan to Medicare rates will save even more money than originally thought:

In a bid to wrangle concessions from the Blue Dog Coalition on healthcare reform, House leaders Thursday released CBO estimates for liberals' preferred version of the public option that show $85 billion more in savings than for the version the Blue Dogs prefer. Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, D-S.D., a Blue Dog co-chair, said any possible new momentum toward a public option tethered to Medicare rates is, in part, "because of the cost issue" and the updated CBO score.

The original House bill required the public plan to pay providers 5 percent more than Medicare reimbursement rates. But as part of a package of concessions to Blue Dogs, the House Energy and Commerce Committee accepted an amendment that requires the HHS Secretary to negotiate rates with providers. That version of the plan will save only $25 billion. In total, a public plan based on Medicare rates would save $110 billion over 10 years. That is $20 billion more than earlier estimates, a spokesman for House Speaker Pelosi said.

In other words, the conservatives want to spend $85 billion more than the liberals do. Moreover, the CBO is estimating savings to the government. That is to say, the $85 billion reflects reduced federal spending on subsidies because premiums in the public plan will be lower. Savings to individuals and businesses paying lower premiums will be much larger than $85 billion, and politically, much more important. Meanwhile, a new New York Times poll shows that the public option is stil la god 20 percent more popular than health-care reform in general.

Republicans: To the Manor Born

Paul Campos:

CAMPOS: America, after all, is a meritocracy, not an aristocracy. We have no princes of the royal blood, and whatever position a person enjoys in life must be earned. This, indeed, is the basis for one of the most common criticisms of affirmative action.... On the other hand, you have the career of William Kristol. Kristol, the son of neo-conservative doyen Irving Kristol, was just fired by The New York Times.... Nothing illustrated Kristol's influence and importance better than the Times' decision to add him to their Op-Ed page. As his previous stint at Time magazine had already demonstrated, Kristol was a horrible columnist. His writing was boring, he made a lot of factual errors and his point of view was invariably about as surprising as that of a member of Stalin's Politburo. His work was, in the cruel but fair judgment of Salon's Glenn Greenwald, "sloppy, error-plagued and incomparably hackish."

So how did he end up with such a sweet gig? (Especially given that the Times already employed an incomparably more talented conservative columnist in the person of David Brooks.) The answer goes back to Farley's observation about the extreme nepotism of the contemporary right-wing media machine. Kristol may be an utter mediocrity, but he's an extraordinarily well-connected utter mediocrity.... Which brings me to this charming vignette, courtesy of blog commenter Harry Hopkins:

I remember back in the late 1990s, when Ira Katznelson, an eminent political scientist at Columbia, came to deliver a guest lecture. Prof. Katznelson described a lunch he had with Irving Kristol during the first Bush administration.

The talk turned to William Kristol, then Dan Quayle's chief of staff, and how he got his start in politics. Irving recalled how he talked to his friend Harvey Mansfield at Harvard, who secured William a place there as both an undergrad and graduate student; how he talked to Pat Moynihan, then Nixon's domestic policy adviser, and got William an internship at the White House; how he talked to friends at the RNC [Republican National Committee] and secured a job for William after he got his Harvard Ph.D.; and how he arranged with still more friends for William to teach at Penn and the Kennedy School of Government.

With that, Prof. Katznelson recalled, he then asked Irving what he thought of affirmative action. 'I oppose it,' Irving replied. 'It subverts meritocracy.'

Many Republicans today have a different take on the desirability of meritocracy.

Ross Douthat:

Great Power, Great Responsibility: The mistakes that our elites made... also have their roots in flaws that I think are somewhat more particular to this [meritocratic] elite... like an overweening faith in technology's capacity to master contingency, a widespread assumption that the future doesn't have much to learn from the past, and above all a peculiar combination of smartest-guys-in-the-room entitlement (don't worry, we deserve to be moving millions of dollars around on the basis of totally speculative models, because we got really high SAT scores) and ferocious, grasping competitiveness (because making ten million dollars isn't enough if somebody else from your Ivy League class is making more!). It's a combination, at its worst, that marries the kind of vaulting, religion-of-success ambitions (and attendant status anxieties) that you'd expect from a self-made man to the obnoxious entitlement you'd expect from a to-the-manor-born elite--without the sense of proportion and limits, of the possibility of tragedy and the inevitability of human fallibility, that a real self-made man would presumably gain from starting life at the bottom... and without, as well, the sense of history, duty, self-restraint, noblesse oblige and so forth that the old aristocrats were supposed to aspire to...

Noah Millman:

Re-Entering the Palin-Drome: Meritocracy, in practice, means the selection of the “best and the brightest”... by means of testing and scholastic hoop-jumping.... he big problems I have with meritocracy include: that it tells the chosen they are better than other people (in some objective sense), which is an anti-democratic ethos; that it very consciously separates our elite from the people, which isn’t healthy for democracy either; that it separates the elite from “real life” in a way that ill-prepares them for the reality that will inevitably smack them in the head one way or other; and that it selects for particular personality types that, while useful in an elite, need to be balanced with other personality types...

Republicans: Not Just the Stupid Party, the Really Stupid Party...

In the Senate this morning:

Twitter / The Wonk Room:

Kyl: "I don't need maternity care" in my benefits package.

Stabenow: "I think your mom probably did."

The Public Option in Health Care Reform, and a Little Senate Math

From Josh Micah Marshall:

So Off Message : From the new Times/CBS poll out this evening ...

Would you favor or oppose the government offering everyone a government administered health insurance plan -- something like the Medicare coverage that people 65 and older get -- that would compete with private health insurance plans?

Favor 65%... Oppose 26%...

Interestingly, according to the poll, support for a public option has jumped 5 points since late August and opposition to it has dropped 8 points.

And a little Senate math:

• The forty-two most Democratic Democrats--up through Bill Nelson, say--together represent 52.4% of the country...

• The fifty most Democratic Democrats--up through Claire McCaskill--account for 59.8%% of the country's population...

• If cloture required only that Senators representing 60% of the population vote to close off debate, then the Democrats could get votes with the fifty-one most Democratic senators--up through Baucus...

• The sixty Democrats represent 64.3% of the population...

If I were Barbara Boxer, I would get together with Kay Bailey Hutchinson, John Cornyn, Chuck Schumer, Kirsten Gillibrand, Bill Nelson, George LeMieux, and Dianne Feinstein and say that their Issue Number One was changing cloture so that the bar is senators representing 60% of the population rather than 60% of the senators.

Jes' sayin'...

The Torture Memos: A Very Good Catch by Marc Ambinder

Marc writes:

Another Justification For Holder's Torture Re-Examination: One of the main lines of argument cited by the seven former CIA directors in urging President Obama to reverse his attorney general's decision to review CIA interrogations is that career lawyers at the Department of Justice had already reviewed those same files.... But the Justice Department's response to these claims contains a buried piece of information: "Given the recommendation from the Office of Professional Responsibility as well as other available information, he believed the appropriate course of action was to ask John Durham to conduct a preliminary review..."

For the uninitiated, this means that the preliminary report sent to Holder by the Office of Professional Responsibility on the torture-related lawyering of the Bush-era DOJ political appointees--a report prepared by career prosecutors--recommended that the cases deemed closed during the Bush administration be re-examined.

Holder is following the advice of his in-house 'internal affairs' shop... and didn't simply make the decision after reviewing the files himself.

GOP Rep Who Suggested D.C. Metro Hurt 9/12 Turnout Voted Against Metro Funding

Yep: Greg Sargent

GOP Rep Who Suggested D.C. Metro Hurt 9/12 Turnout Voted Against Metro Funding | The Plum Line.

Todays Worst Politician: Mitt Romney

If the TARP and the stimulus package are eventually judged a failure, Mitt Romney supported them in the fall of 2008. If the TARP and the stimulus package are eventually judged a success, Mitt Romney opposed them in the fall of 2009.

Does anybody else think that this guy is just in the wrong line of business:

Matthew Yglesias:

Matthew Yglesias: Shocking News — A Mitt Romney Flip-Flop!: Dave Weigel points out that Mitt Romney is now slamming the TARP bill that he once favored. Shocking to see that guy change his position on something. But, Romney aside, it’s striking to see the number of conservatives who’ve decided that an initiative proposed by George W. Bush and Hank Paulson and endorsed by the GOP congressional leadership was and is secretly some socialist plot. Similarly with the idea that Ben Bernanke, former Bush administration official, is running some sort of rogue left-wing operation at the Fed. Obviously the economy’s still in a bad position today, but the evidence really does indicate that the whole suite of recovery measures (stimulus, TARP, Fed programs) are having the desired effect and things are turning around. I think this strategy of opportunistically pretending to have opposed this stuff could really come around to bite the right in the butt if things are looking better in 12 months, and I think it’s very likely that things will be looking better in 12 months.

Why Friends Don't Let Friends Vote Republican

Lee Fang on Texas Republican governor Rick Perry:

Think Progress: Gov. Perry laughs off recession: ‘We’re in one?’: Speaking to the Houston Chamber of Commerce on Thursday, Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) discounted the fact that Texas is in a deep economic downturn. In an anecdote to the assembled business leaders, Perry quipped that when he was approached with a report on recovering from the recession, he replied, “We’re in one?“:

PERRY: Why is Texas kind of recession-proof, if you will? As a matter of fact, just today I think, Michael, you said someone had put a report out that the first state that’s coming out of the recession is going to be the State of Texas. I told him, I said, ‘We’re in one?’

The unemployment rate in Texas is up from 4.4% at the end of 2006 to 8.0% today.

Bruce Bartlett on Irving Kristol and the Public Interest

He writes:

Remembering Irving Kristol: I didn't know Irving Kristol well, but I knew him for a long time. There are many people who can say the same thing. He was the central figure in the post-Watergate revival of conservatism and the Republican Party. Sadly, the "movement" that he created, neoconservatism, is pretty well dead....

In the 1960s Kristol recognized that conservatism desperately needed to be grounded on serious social science if it hoped to influence public policy and, hence, politics. Kristol founded a small quasi-academic journal called The Public Interest to build the foundation of a social science-based conservatism. I say "quasi" because, annoyingly to me, it refused to have footnotes or references in its articles. One of Kristol's most important insights was that there were many academics who had generally liberal views, but came to conservative conclusions on some specific issues like crime, housing, race, labor, taxes and many others. He got them to write articles on these subjects, gradually building an impressive body of research that added depth and breadth to the conservative literature. At the time, conservatism was very narrowly focused on anti-communism and futile efforts to repeal the New Deal. Conservative publications only published the work of people who were part of the movement and held conservative views on every issue.... This led to the excommunication of libertarians, objectivists, atheists, isolationists and others that were part of the right, but held views on one or more issues that were inconsistent with the conservative positions of Bill Buckley and the rest of the National Review crowd. The extreme Catholicism of that crowd also tended to push Jews away from conservatism. Kristol embraced these conservative Jews who felt uncomfortable among the dogmatic Christian conservatives. Eventually, he was joined by Norman Podhoretz, the longtime editor of Commentary, who pushed that magazine well to the right of its traditional base among liberal Jews.

The first clips of Kristol's articles in the Wall Street Journal that I have in my files date from 1976, so that's probably when I first became aware of his work. I don't remember when I first met him, but it was probably the following year when I was working for Jack Kemp.... It's important for people to understand that in those days neoconservatism was almost exclusively devoted to domestic, especially urban, issues. There was nothing in The Public Interest on foreign policy.... What we call neoconservatism today, which more closely resembles imperialism than anything else, was nowhere in evidence.

As Kristol slowly built the foundation of neoconservatism on solid social science research, it became clear that it needed a political outlet.... Although many, perhaps most, early neocons were Democrats--Daniel Patrick Moynihan in particular--Kristol threw in with the Republicans. In the wake of Watergate they were more desperate and in need of intellectual firepower. This meant that there were many more opportunities for neocon ideas to advance.... To make a long story short, Kristol was extraordinarily successful; so successful, in fact, that The Public Interest ceased publication in 2005. He felt that the journal had pretty much achieved all it set out to do and was no longer necessary. Its subscribers received copies of Commentary to fill out their subscriptions.

In the years since, it became clear that Kristol's decision was wrong. There is still a need for serious conservative social science research that has no other publication outlet. Commentary is now just a highbrow version of National Review, which is just a glossy version of Human Events, which has become a slightly less hysterical version of nutty websites like WorldNetDaily. The Wall Street Journal editorial page and the Weekly Standard, founded by Kristol's son Bill, just parrot the Republican Party line of the day.

The intellectual bankruptcy of conservatism today is even greater than it was when Irving Kristol founded The Public Interest in 1965. What passes for a conservative movement these days wears its anti-intellectualism as a badge of honor. But as Kristol correctly understood, right-wing populism has no future and fundamental changes in the direction of government policy must be based on serious research and analysis that is grounded on hard data; that is to say, reality.

There is a now a new journal called National Affairs that aspires to fill the gap left by the demise of The Public Interest. It's too soon to say if it will do so, but it has done an enormous public service by making all of the archives of The Public Interest freely available on the Internet. I urge people to delve into them. I think they will be amazed that there were once a group of serious conservative scholars in this country who weren't crazy or completely in the pockets of the Republican Party or some corporate interest. The archive is available here:

The Curse of RIchard Nixon and Barry Goldwater, Part CCCLXIII

Boy, are we all in trouble. The Curse of Nixon and Goldwater does not just afflict the Republicans.

Silbey:

Worse « The Edge of the American West: This chart, gratuitously stolen from Steve Benen at The Washington Monthly, suggests strongly that political discourse in the United States is going to get worse rather than better. We have the perfect storm: an African-American President and an opposition party whose concerns, language, and obsessions is driven largely by the concerns, language, and obsessions of the American South. Those ideas–racial, cultural, martial–are what is going to drive the GOP until they escape their regional status. Jimmy Carter well knows this, and it is no coincidence that the current poster child for Republican obstructionism is South Carolina. We may date the finish of the Civil War to 1865, but the conflict has never really ended.

George W. Bush on Sarah Palin and John McCain

Matt Latimer http://men.style.com/gq/features/full?id=content_10957&pageNum=7:

On Sarah Palin:

[T]he president [George W. Bush], ever the skilled politician, had concerns about the choice of Palin, which he called “interesting.” That was the equivalent of calling a fireworks display “satisfactory.” “I’m trying to remember if I’ve met her before. I’m sure I must have.” His eyes twinkled, then he asked, “What is she, the governor of Guam?” Everyone in the room seemed to look at him in horror, their mouths agape. When Ed told him that conservatives were greeting the choice enthusiastically, he replied, “Look, I’m a team player, I’m on board.” He thought about it for a minute. “She’s interesting,” he said again. “You know, just wait a few days until the bloom is off the rose.” Then he made a very smart assessment. “This woman is being put into a position she is not even remotely prepared for,” he said. “She hasn’t spent one day on the national level. Neither has her family. Let’s wait and see how she looks five days out.” It was a rare dose of reality in a White House that liked to believe every decision was great, every Republican was a genius, and McCain was the hope of the world because, well, because he chose to be a member of our party...

On John McCain:

I was once in the Oval Office when the president was told a campaign event in Phoenix he was to attend with McCain suddenly had to be closed to the press. The president didn’t understand why when the whole purpose of holding the event had been to show Bush and McCain together so the press would stop asking why the two wouldn’t be seen together. If the event was closed to the press, the whole thing didn’t make sense. “If he doesn’t want me to go, fine,” the president said. “I’ve got better things to do.” Eventually, someone informed the president that the reason the event was closed was that McCain was having trouble getting a crowd. Bush was incredulous—and to the point. “He can’t get 500 people to show up for an event in his hometown?” he asked. No one said anything, and we went on to another topic. But the president couldn’t let the matter drop. “He couldn’t get 500 people? I could get that many people to turn out in Crawford.” He shook his head. “This is a five-spiral crash, boys.” We tried to move on to something else. But the president wouldn’t let go. He was stuck on the Phoenix event. At one point, he looked off into space and said to no one in particular, “What is this--a cruel hoax?”

New York Times Crashed-and-Burned-and-Smoking Watch (Ross Douthat "Thousand Points of Light" Edition)

Glenn Greenwald sends us to Ross Douthat:

The Ghosts of 1994: The health care push has opened up arguments about abortion, euthanasia and illegal immigration that the Democrats would rather avoid. At the same time, it’s become the vessel for a year’s worth of anxieties about bailouts, deficits and Beltway incompetence. This August’s town-hall fury... the anti-Obama protests... were about... middle-income Americans’ “playing by the rules,” as Luntz puts it, “and having someone else benefit.”...

The bad news for Democrats is that actually passing a health care bill could further enflame these anxieties. Clinton’s crime bill passed Congress by substantial margins, when all was said and done. But the anger that the debate had summoned up didn’t go away — and Gingrich’s Republicans were there to reap the benefits....

And he talks about how:

the crime bill became a lightning rod for populist outrage. The price tag made it seem fiscally irresponsible. (Back then, $30 billion was real money.) The billions it lavished on crime prevention — like the infamous funding of “midnight basketball” — looked liked ineffective welfare spending...

Somehow, he never manages to tell his readers that midnight basketball was one of George H.W. Bush's original "Thousand Points of Light".

I wonder why not?

It wouldn't hurt you, Ross, to tell it straight.

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

---

George H.W. Bush:

George Bush Presidential Library and Museum: Remarks on Signing the Points of Light National Celebration of Community Service Proclamation in Glenarden, Maryland: April 12, 1991:

Thank you, Van -- Mr. Standifer. And may I salute the sponsors and the parents and the city and county officials that are with us today. Single out the players, some of whom I just met with. And also say to the mayor, Marvin Wilson, and to the county executive, Mr. Glendening, Parris Glendening, that I'm just delighted to be here. And I saw earlier Marty Madden and John Morgan, the State delegates, and we're glad to have been greeted by them. All of us should thank the business leaders in the front row and other sponsors who made this day possible.

And I'm glad to be here; I really mean that. You know, when I told Barbara that I'd be visiting a great institution dedicated to keeping guys off the street and out of trouble, she said, "George, you spoke to Congress last month." [Laughter]

And then I told her, "No, as Commander in Chief I want to see firsthand some real American air power: dazzling nighttime shooting, skilled tactical wizardry, and the courageous airborne maneuvers Americans have become world-famous for." And she said, "Oh, you mean Midnight Basketball." [Laughter] And here we are...

But as long as the Republican Party is defined by its most juvenile ideologues (think Joe Wilson) and its most transparent panderers (think Michael Steele), it’s hard to see the party capitalizing on this angry centrism the way the Gingrich revolutionaries did...

The Bipartisan Center Looks on the Republican Party with Dismay...

Andrew Samwick:

Tea Parties: A First Step to What?: I have not been part of the "Tea Party" movement that has emerged this year.  I don't feel like that movement provides the basis for a way forward in governing this country until it comes to grips with its recent past; namely, its nonexistent or muted protests to the fiscal policies of the Bush administration when taxes were cut ahead of any concrete plans for spending reductions to maintain budget balance.  As I quoted in the spring, referring to the passage of Medicare Part D in 2003, "Where were the Medicare tea parties?" 

Finally, this weekend, we had protests in Washington against the expansion of government participation in health care markets.  As I have argued, we should more plainly describe the so-called "public option" as a buy-in to Medicare for all.  And it would be ridiculous for people who envision a smaller government than we currently have to think that the so-called public option is anything other than the first step toward a new health care entitlement.  There is just too clear a history of growth in entitlement programs after their inception and to little specificity in the President's speech about reforms like the risk adjustment mechanism for exchange-participating plans that are essential to preventing the public option from being the only option once it is established.  If that is the motivation for the protests, then count me in.  That the train is six years late in leaving the station is no reason not to get on board now that it is heading in the right direction.  Health care reform ought to be proceeding at a more deliberate pace with a better case being made by its proponents.

But that train... only stops the other side from making things worse.  It does nothing to build the foundations of good governance beyond the first election where it may be exhibited next year.  Andrew Sullivan says it very well in response to his "Dissent of the Day" post:

Sure, Obama isn't ideal. I'd like a carbon tax rather than cap and trade, drastic 1986-style tax reform, and an end to the government subsidizing employer-based insurance plans. I'd also like marriage equality in every state and a flat tax and an immediate end to the military's gay ban. But unlike so many of these tea-partiers, I also realize that in real politics, you have to construct a solid coalition for all this and make arguments for it consistently (as Reagan did for decades) and have some credibility. But the GOP has been doing he opposite, fighting wars - cultural and military - instead of attending to basic fiscal responsibility and limited government. You cannot just pivot on a dime without some accounting of the recent past. Well, you can, but you look so partisan and so two-faced you'll only persuade people by ratcheting up fear and hysteria to drown out the actual issues.

His whole post is worth a read.  See also this post from Diane Lim Rogers at EconomistMom, "What Exactly Are They Protesting?"

Diane Lim Rogers:

What Exactly Are They Protesting?: On Saturday the “Tea Party” movement’s “Taxpayer March on Washington” was held.  According to the Washington Post....

Saturday’s throng appeared to number in the many tens of thousands. A sea of people surrounded the Capitol reflecting pool, spilling across Third Street and along the Mall. The sound system did not reach far enough for people at the edges of the rally to hear the speakers onstage. “You will not spend the money of our children and our grandchildren to feed an overstuffed government,” Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.) said of the Obama administration, drawing raucous applause. “Our history is decorated by those who endured the burden of defending freedom,” Price said. “Now a new generation of patriots has emerged. You are those patriots.”

The group’s sponsors included FreedomWorks, a Washington-based group headed by former House majority leader Richard Armey (R-Tex.), and the groups Tea Party Patriots and ResistNet. They and others involved in the rally comprise a loose coalition of conservative groups that helped organize the health-care and anti-tax demonstrations in the spring and summer…

Which leads me to wonder if most of these protesters really understand what they’re protesting.  I doubt these folks would object to expanded health care coverage if they didn’t have to pay higher taxes (which the Obama Administration is proposing as at least part of the way they’ll accomplish deficit-neutral health-care reform).  And if these protesters are not willing to pay higher taxes and yet don’t want their existing health benefits cut, then how can they possibly argue that they’re the “fiscal conservatives” and that it’s the other side who is spending “the money of our children and our grandchildren”?... What’s really troubling to me is that these protesters seem especially delusional when it comes to what their “no new taxes” and (yet) “no cutting my (government) benefits” position means for the burden that’s passed on to future generations.  And when you use a child as a “prop” to argue the anti-tax position that’s exactly the mentality that jeopardizes that child’s economic future–well, I think that probably qualifies as child abuse.

Worst Republican Governor Ever: Tim Pawlenty

Todd Gitlin:

Nullification (complete with bonus Wilson-Thurmond update): Michael Tomasky nails it: Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty's latest excursus into the Republican Dixie suck-up, as he "urged fellow governors on Thursday to more frequently assert state sovereignty over the federal government and suggested that the country may increasingly see states suing the federal government," has a fabulous lineage--the nullification movement of 1832, led (surprise!) by South Carolina, which set forth the doctrine that the states had the right to nullify Federal law. In the run-up to South Carolina's declaration that it was not bound by Federal tariffs, the state had in 1822 passed a Negro Seamen Act, requiring that sheriffs arrest all free black seamen while their ships were docked, lest they join slave rebellions.

This is the proud tradition that today's moderate, nonfanatical northern Republicans embrace...

Ah. The Carolina nullification crisis: wshen Andrew Jackson threatened to hang his own vice president on the South Lawn of the White House if he did what Tim Pawlenty is advocating...

Barack Obama Does Something Really Stupid: Tire Tariffs

Why oh why can't we have better Democratic presidents?

Barack Obama does something stupid. So does Harold Meyerson, who writes an op-ed on the tire tariff that clouds the issues.

Meyerson:

A Trade Test for Obama: ometime before Sept. 17, President Obama has to make a decision that will tell us a lot about his commitment to American manufacturing. By that date, Obama has to accept, reject or modify a recommendation from the International Trade Commission (ITC) to impose tariffs on the Chinese-made tires that are swamping the U.S. market. The importance of this battle goes well beyond its impact on the tire industry. Much of Americans' skepticism toward free trade comes from their empirically verifiable sense that their government has been reluctant to enforce its own trade laws -- an issue that candidate Obama tackled head-on last year by his repeated pledges to enforce those laws.

Between 2004 and 2008, tire imports from China increased 215 percent, while imports from other nations decreased 5 percent and U.S. tire production declined 27 percent...

Harold: you need to provide people with the right numbers--which are that Chinese tires rose from 6 to 20 percent of U.S. purchases. You don't.

Meyerson goes on:

[T]he ITC's staff analysis forecast an increase of only $3.50 per tire -- not nothing, to be sure, but a cost that has to be measured against the possibility of tens of thousands of job losses in U.S. tire factories (where more than 5,000 jobs already have been lost because of Chinese imports)...

Let's see... 250 million cars in America... need 4 tires per car... need new tires every 2.5 years. 400 million tires a year... $1.4 billion dollars a year... 10,000 worker jobs saved... $140,000 dollars per worker-job per year.

Looks like we could (a) let the Chinese sell us tires, (b) tax each tire by $2.50, (c) pay each tire worker who loses his or her job $100K a year, and we come out ahead: American households have more money to spend on other things, China has more jobs to help what is still a very poor country grow, and tire workers have higher incomes and more leisure as well.

But, you say, it would be stupid to impose a $2 a tire tax and use the money to pay each laid-off tire worker $100K a year.

That's the point: when the policy you are adopting is worse for everybody than a policy you agree is stupid, the policy you are adopting is best characterized as really stupid.

But, Meyerson says, not to impose the tariff would violate the rule of law:

The ITC found this a clear violation of a provision in the Trade Act (Section 421), added with Beijing's consent during the negotiations preceding Congress's 2000 enactment of Permanent Normalized Trade Relations with China...

China isn't doing anything wrong. For Chinese manufactures to sell us tires is not against the law. To say that China has committed a "clear violation" of the law is to badly misstate the case.

What is the case is that:

Section 421... allowed the U.S. government to levy tariffs on surging Chinese imports that were eviscerating an American industry... [and it] was a key argument in persuading Congress to permanently normalize trade relations...

§421 gives the U.S. the right to impose tariffs in response to a surge. It doesn't make the surge a crime, or a violation. And it doesn't require the U.S. to impose tariffs--especially if imposing them would be a really bad idea for U.S. consumers.

But, Meyerson says, we can't do the right thing now because imposing tariffs might be the right thing to do at some pointi in the future:

The implications of Obama's decision go well beyond tires. Section 421 was created to provide some protection for American workers while allowing China entry to our markets. If Obama opts not to enforce it, why would anyone concerned about American jobs believe such provisions in future trade agreements? Why would U.S. manufacturers maintain their domestic production if they know that none of the legal protections they've been promised will ever be invoked?... Endorsing the ITC's recommendation would not only honor his campaign promises and fulfill the mandates of our trade laws, but would also allow him to rescue the very Americans who, rightly or wrongly, have felt left out of his efforts to save the nation's economy.

I have a proposal. The president should, in each case, do the right thing. When there are net benefits to the United States from exercising its §421 rights, it should exercise them. When there are net costs to the United States from exercising its §421 rights, it should not exercise them.

That would be real change we could believe in.

Worst Member of Congress? Joe Wilson of South Carolina

The Curse of Richard Nixon lies very heavily indeed on the Republican Party.

Joe Wilson seems to spend a lot of time calling Black people "liars."

Justin Elliott:

Flashback: Last night, Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) issued an apology -- "I let my emotions get the best of me when listening to the President's remarks."... [I]t's not, it turns out, the first time Wilson's emotions got the best of him and he was forced to apologize. Flashback to mid-December 2003, when Essie Mae Washington-Williams came forward with the bombshell that she was the illegitimate daughter of the recently-deceased patriarch of South Carolina politics, Sen. Strom Thurmond.

Rep. Wilson, a former page of Thurmond's, immediately told The State newspaper that he didn't believe Williams. He deemed the revelation "unseemly." And he added that even if she was telling the truth, she should have kept the inconvenient facts to herself:

"It's a smear on the image that [Thurmond] has as a person of high integrity who has been so loyal to the people of South Carolina," Wilson said.

Of course, Williams' story was entirely true -- and never really in doubt.... The State story continued with Wilson wondering aloud how anyone could dare "diminish" one of his personal heroes.... Six days and several furious letters to the editor later, Wilson was forced to apologize. But, amazingly, he maintained that Williams should not have gone public...

Health Care Reform and Institutional Dysfunction

Steve Pearlstein has, as usual, smart things to say:

It's Time for Obama to Rise Above the Partisan Health-Care Debate: What makes reform such a difficult puzzle is that the fundamental policy goals of universal coverage and cost containment are inconsistent with the political instincts to assure Americans who already have health insurance that they will be able to keep everything they already have, to assure that nobody will get a tax or cost increase and to assure those in the health-care industry that there will be no reduction in their income....

Deals negotiated with doctors, hospitals, health insurers and drug companies represented a good running start on the path of shared sacrifice, but the president failed to follow through with other key players. From a business community that wants to preserve the employer-based system, he failed to get a commitment that all employers should participate. He kowtowed to organized labor by backing away from a reasonable cap on the favorable tax treatment of health benefits. And he folded like a cheap suit when right-wing attack dogs scared the elderly with talk of euthanasia and death panels rather than aggressively defending the logic of living wills and evidence-based medicine.

By signaling that he was willing to stand up to some interests but not others, Obama gave up the moral and political high ground that would have made the opponents of reform look "small" by contrast.

The president's approach needs to be simple and direct: The health-care system we now have is wasteful and expensive and leaves the United States... the only rich country to ration medical care on the basis of income. Runaway health spending is the main reason the average American worker hasn't gotten a real pay raise in a decade. And it is the big reason the government is looking at huge budget deficits for years to come....

If reform doesn't "bend the cost curve," as the budgeteers like to say, then it's not worth doing. And if it does, then there is no need to scale back the program and compromise on universal coverage just so the annual subsidies can be reduced from $110 billion a year to $70 billion.

An equally silly compromise comes from the Senate's "Gang of Six."... Aside from creating an administrative nightmare, this provision would have the perverse effect of encouraging employers to fire, or not to hire, low-wage workers with children or spouses who are unemployed. Republican Olympia Snowe is said to be particularly enamored of this idea. I'd bet a two-pound lobster and bowl of Maine's best chowder that she can't find a labor economist back home who thinks this is a good policy....

What the president needs from Congress is succinct legislation that guarantees that every American will have a basic health insurance policy and sets reasonable caps on the growth of government health-care spending. The details should be left to the regional exchanges and a new board of independent health experts.... Their recommendations could be subject to an up-or-down vote from Congress, as advocates of entitlement reform have long suggested...

Steve Pearlstein is essentially calling for a Federal Reserve for health care reform, and claiming that congress as we know it is irremediably broken--broken by partisans and by lobbyists. I have a different perspective: in my view it is the Senate that is broken--the House of Representatives is running like a normal legislature.