Jubilee

This is, by some distance, the best piece I’ve seen yet in the already voluminous genre of Who Is Obama and/or What Obama Means. It’s long and as Maude Lebowski would say, very thorough; but it’s an enjoyable read. Its winning for the usual grace and intelligence Fallows brings to his work, but, importantly, the article is especially nuanced in its conclusions about the 44th President (and the difficulty of doing an analysis of this kind in media res). Fallows does a great job synthesizing and building upon all the good work done already to flesh out Obama’s strengths and weaknesses. Both are significant.

Here’s something of a money quote:

Having seen a number of presidencies unfold, and some unravel, I am fully aware of how difficult it is to assess them in real time. What I feel I’ve learned about Obama is that he was unready for the presidency and temperamentally unsuited to it in many ways. Yet the conjunction of right-wing hostility to his programs and to his very presence in office, with left-wing disappointment in his economic record and despair about his apparent inability to fight Republicans on their own terms, led to an underappreciation of his skills and accomplishments—an underappreciation that is as pronounced as the overestimation in those heady early days. Unprepared, yes. Cool to the point of chilly, yes. For all his ability to inspire and motivate people en masse, for all his advertised emphasis on surrounding himself with a first-rate “team of rivals,” Obama appears to have been unsavvy in the FDR-like arts of getting the best from his immediate team and continuing to attract the best people to him.

Yet the test for presidents is not where they begin but how fast they learn and where they end up. Not even FDR was FDR at the start. The evidence is that Obama is learning, fast, to use the tools of office. Whether he is learning fast enough to have a chance to apply these skills in a second term—well, we’ll reconvene next year.

I’d recommend reading the thing in its entirety, but if you don’t have the time or inclination, the video posted above is a decent substitute.

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As you may already know, the long-running foreclosure fraud “accountability” negotiations between the White House and many of the Too Big To Fail-iest banks reached their conclusion today:

Federal and state officials on Thursday announced a landmark $25-billion agreement with the nation’s five largest mortgage servicers to settle investigations involving foreclosure abuses and try to stabilize the housing market.

The deal would give $17 billion in relief to current homeowners, mostly by reducing the amount of principal they owe on their mortgages.

An additional $5 billion would be paid in cash to California and more than 40 other states as restitution for foreclosure paperwork problems and other improprieties by the servicers in the foreclosure process. Officials said hundreds of thousands of homeowners would probably get $1,700 to $2,000 each under that part of the deal. About $1.5 billion of the $5 billion would be distributed directly to people whose homes were foreclosed on from 2008 through 2011.

In addition, the five servicers — Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Wells Fargo & Co., Citigroup Inc. and Ally Financial Inc. — agreed to spend about $3 billion to refinance about 1 million existing mortgages, most of those likely to be for homeowners whose properties are worth less than they owe on their loans.

Real estate and finance — not exactly my two primary areas of expertise. So I’ll farm the analysis out for this one to D-Day, who has been my primary source for translation and explication on this issue for years. As is often the case with D-Day posts on this topic, his take-away can be summed up in a word as “depressed”:

There will be plenty more to say about this once we get all of the facts of the claim. In addition, this will have to go before a federal judge to sign off on the settlement. And we won’t know for many years whether this promise on loan modifications, unlike all the others, will take. But it’s going forward. And now the only hope for accountability and justice for the crimes of the financial crisis lie in some scattered lawsuits grandfathered in and Schneiderman’s RMBS working group. One thing is clear – the banks relieved themselves of a significant portion of liability at a price they believe they can easily handle.

That NY AG Schneiderman’s lawsuit against MERS will continue is significant, however. All I know about MERS I learned from this fantastic Harper’s piece (not my link) but it was enough to understand that even if the pipe dream of full accountability for the banks is lost, there’s still a lot of wrong that can be put right, just by focusing on the fustercluck of MERS alone. And for whatever it’s worth, the NY AG — who made headlines last summer for resisting a deal much like this one — is, today at least, spouting the party line.

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It’d be nice if the Catholic Church could decide whether or not this issue is about women’s sexuality — because this doesn’t sound much to me like a reasonable critique of infringing upon religious liberty:

The White House is “all talk, no action” on moving toward compromise, said Anthony Picarello, general counsel for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. “There has been a lot of talk in the last couple days about compromise, but it sounds to us like a way to turn down the heat, to placate people without doing anything in particular,” Picarello said. “We’re not going to do anything until this is fixed.”

That means removing the provision from the health care law altogether, he said, not simply changing it for Catholic employers and their insurers. He cited the problem that would create for “good Catholic business people who can’t in good conscience cooperate with this.”

“If I quit this job and opened a Taco Bell, I’d be covered by the mandate,” Picarello said.

Ed Kilgore is right when he says that this is an over-reach. As I rather artlessly attempted to express yesterday, people are pretty ambivalent about the idea that women should have a choice over whether or not to carry a pregnancy to term. And while I don’t agree with a lot of people on that issue, I understand their ambivalence; it’s not unreasonable to think that a fetus is, if perhaps not quite a human, still something more precious than any other mass of cells.

But the mainstream in society no longer finds the prospect of women being autonomous sexual beings nearly as bothersome as many in the Church’s hierarchy seem to. That’s not to say that American culture is enlightened on these issues (an understatement if ever there was one), but even people who wouldn’t consider themselves feminists are likely to find something viscerally distasteful about the kind of fanaticism Picarello represents.

What’s probably most salient in this situation is the brazen way in which the Church is, potentially, about to give up all pretense of this being a defensive struggle. What was too often being obscured to begin with — that there are real human beings who work in these Church-run institutions that have rights, too — will become patent, as the scope of their intended reaction grows ever-larger. The somewhat facile image of a big, mean, oppressive bureaucracy harassing the comparatively powerless and marginal minority then changes. Instead of the Church playing the role of the meek, it now assumes the stance of bedroom Big Brother, with women all over the country becoming the righteous resistants.

Recall, in politics, how the most damaging narratives tend to be those which confirm the public’s already-held notions. While the Church right now is playing the role of the besieged, it should be careful — it’s not as if the image of an arrogant, out-of-touch, and imperial Church hierarchy is one the people will struggle to perceive.

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From Mike Allen’s daily e-mail I find this, am profoundly amused (emphasis his):

OFFICIAL OBAMA 2012 PLAYLIST FOR CROWD EVENTS (rallies, ropelines, etc.), to be released today: “Different People” (No Doubt) … “Got to Get You in My Life” (Earth, Wind & Fire) … “Green Onions” (Booker T & The MG’s) … “I Got You” (Wilco) … “Keep on Pushing” (The Impressions) … “Keep Reachin’ Up” (Nicole Willis & the Soul Investigators) … “Love You I Do?” (Jennifer Hudson) … “No Nostalgia” (AgesAndAges) … “Raise Up” (Ledisi) … “Stand Up” (Sugarland) … “This” (Darius Rucker) … “We Used To Wait” (Arcade Fire) … “You’ve Got the Love” (Florence and the Machine” … “Your Smiling Face” (James Taylor) …

… “REO Speedwagon” (Roll with the Change) … “Everyday America” (Sugarland?) … “Learn to Live” (Darius Rucker) … “Let’s Stay Together” (Al Green) … “Mr. Blue Sky” (Electric Light Orchestra) … “My Town” (Montgomery Gentry) … “The Best Thing about Me Is You” (Ricky Martin, featuring Joss Stone) … “You are the Best Thing” (Ray Lamontagne) … “Keep Marchin’” (Raphael Saadiq) … “Tonight’s The Kind of Night” (Noah and the Whale) … “We Take Care of Our Own” (Bruce Springsteen) … “Keep Me In Mind” (Zac Brown Band) … “The Weight” Aretha Franklin … “Even Better Than The Real Thing” (U2) … “Home” (Dierks Bentley).

Clearly the Darius Rucker entry is a head nod to the Twitterverse and blogosphere; and it’s interesting that they went with Being There-era Wilco rather than something from then past 15 years. That particular Al Green choice was unavoidable, of course. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that Tom Petty’s “The Waiting” didn’t make the cut, ditto Big Star’s “You Get What You Deserve.” Maybe some disgruntled intern will feel especially rebellious during the dog days of summer and we’ll be treated to the spectacle of the President and Vice President galloping to the stage while “Won’t Get Fooled Again” blares from the speakers? Probably not.

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I loved this post from Jonathan Chait explaining why, on the intertubes, civility can be not only difficult but ill-advised:

[T]his is why I am forced to be so mean. There are just a lot of people out there exerting significant influence over the political debate who are totally unqualified. The dilemma is especially acute in the political economic field, where wealthy right-wingers have pumped so much money to subsidize the field of pro-rich people polemics that the demand for competent defenders of letting rich people keep as much of their money as possible vastly outstrips the supply. Hence the intellectual marketplace for arguments that we should tax rich people less is glutted with hackery.

He’s thwacking Veronique de Rugy, specifically, but it’s a principle with broad applicability. I’ve often noticed, too, how easy it is to secure a career in the DC journo-hack sphere as long as one’s willing to repeat the platitudes most comforting to the asset-rich and civic-minded poor. The quality of argument put forth from many high-profile righties can so often be just amazingly poor. (Case-in-point: Niall Ferguson.)

Anyway, I couldn’t help but think some very mean thoughts when reading the following this morning, from Rick Santorum:

He told the audience at the raucous rally that Obama is restricting religious freedoms in this country, and even that a situation like the French Revolution could happen in America. As he spoke supporters yelled, “We want Rick!” and “We want you!” throughout the speech.

“They are taking faith and crushing it. Why? Why? When you marginalize faith in America, when you remove the pillar of God given rights then what’s left?” Santorum asked and an audience member offered, “Communism!”

“The French Revolution,” Santorum answered. “What’s left is a government that gives you rights. What’s left are no unalienable rights. What’s left is a government that will tell you who you are, what you’ll do and when you’ll do it. What’s left in France became the guillotine. Ladies and gentlemen, we are a long way from that, but if we do follow the path of President Obama and his overt hostility to faith in America, then we are headed down that road.”

Remember back in the days when (I was a teenager) this weaselly, fanatical dullard was one of the 5 most powerful people in the United States Senate? That this country still stands today is perhaps the greatest testament to Manifest Destiny yet seen.

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Sarah Kliff brings some welcome data into the conversation over the White House’s new contraception mandate, lending evidence toward one of my initial conclusions on the matter that, contrary to what many male pundits are saying, this is a fight Obama wants to have:

[A] lot of this likely isn’t about Catholic voters at all.

Rather, it may well be about the demographics that are most supportive of this particular health reform provision: young voters and women. In the PRRI poll, both groups register support above 60 percent for the provision.

Those two demographics are important here for a key reason: they were crucial to Obama’s victory in 2008. Third Way crunched the numbers earlier this month and found that the “Obama Independents” — the swing group that proved crucial to his 2008 victory — are, as Ryan Lizza put it, “disproportionately young, female and secular.”

“In 2012, Independents are likely to comprise the highest proportion of the electorate since 1976, and winning them will be crucial to victory,” write Third Way’s Michelle Diggles and Lanae Erickson. “If President Obama woos the vast majority [of his independent voters] back, he can be reelected.”

These voters have tended to be difficult for abortion rights supporters to engage on reproductive health issues like abortion. Research from NARAL Pro-Choice America, which I wrote about last weekend, found a significant “intensity gap” there, with abortion rights supporters much less likely to see it as a crucial voting issue than their anti-abortion counterparts.

But when the conversation moves away from abortion to contraceptives – as it has this week – the intensity gap flips: A much larger segment of voters are willing to penalize a legislator who votes to defund family planning. That became apparent in polling that Democratic firm Lake Research Partners did earlier this year, which found that 40 percent of voters would be less likely to support a member of Congress who votes to defund family-planning programs. Just 22 percent would be more likely to support such a lawmaker.

That people can be ambivalent about their support for abortion but strident in their opposition to anti-contraception measures isn’t surprising. The former stems mostly from thorny and overwhelming questions of ontology; but as the recent ballot initiative in Mississippi showed, convincing people that their, shall we say, precious bodily fluids are de facto human beings is a losing proposition.

I’ve been told the latest research done by Democratic Party message gurus indicated framing these issues around “choice” rather than “health” is a mistake for pro-choice activists (they’ll need a name change, I suppose) but until reading Kliff, it hadn’t occurred to me that this was what the White House was doing with this squabble. But it makes sense.

The cynical side of me (there are others, I insist) notices that for all of our society’s self-congratulatory talk about how less sexist things are now than they were as recently as a generation ago, the vehicle for this burgeoning equality has often been, perhaps inevitably, sexuality. Thus there might be a sad logic to the idea that people — not just men; women are quite capable of internalizing sexist tropes — are unmoved by arguments of female self-soveriengty, yet at the same time react like regular militant libertines when the prospect consequence-free sex is threatened.

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Biggest story of the day was not the unceremonious ousting of Karen Handel over at SGK (schadenfreude-tastic as it was) but rather the judgment from the Ninth Circuit ruling Proposition 8 unconstitutional:

A federal appeals court panel ruled on Tuesday that a voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage in California violated the Constitution, all but ensuring that the case will proceed to the United States Supreme Court.

The three-judge panel issued its ruling Tuesday morning in San Francisco, upholding a decision by Judge Vaughn R. Walker, who had been the chief judge of the Federal District Court of the Northern District of California but has since retired. Like Judge Walker, the panel found that Proposition 8 – passed by California voters in November 2008 by a margin of 52 percent to 48 percent — violated the equal protection rights of two same-sex couples that brought he suit. The proposition placed a specific prohibition in the State Constitution against marriage between two people of the same sex.

The court ruled that Proposition 8 violated the 14th Amendment of the Constitution by discriminating against a group of people, gay men and lesbians.

“Although the Constitution permits communities to enact most laws they believe to be desirable, it requires that there be at least a legitimate reason for the passage of a law that treats different people differently,” Judge Stephen Reinhardt wrote in the decision. “There was no such reason that Proposition 8 could have been enacted.”

“All that Proposition 8 accomplished was to take away from same sex-couples the right to be granted marriage licenses and thus legally to use the designation ‘marriage,” the judge wrote, adding: “Proposition 8 serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gay men and lesbians in California.”

Over at Volokh, Orin Kerr offers a bit of analysis of the ruling, which could reasonably be condensed into two words — Anthony Kennedy:

Based on a quick skim, Reinhardt decided that the Supreme Court wasn’t ready yet to embrace a full right to same-sex marriage, and that it was wiser to offer [Justice Kennedy] a narrow rationale based on Romer rather than a broad rationale based on Lawrence or Loving. So Reinhardt’s reasoning seems to be California-specific: He argues that Prop 8 took away rights provided by the California Supreme Court’s Marriage Cases, and that those who voted for Prop 8 acted out of animus towards or disapproval of gays, making Prop 8 unconstitutional under a Romer rationale regardless of whether same-sex marriage is constitutional in the general case. I assume Reinhardt is figuring that this either will work or at the worst might buy some time: If the Supreme Court grants cert and reverses on the merits, on remand the case presumably goes back to the same panel. On remand, Reinhardt can then strike down Prop 8 again, but this time under a broader theory along the lines of Judge Walker’s opinion below. That would take a few years, though, keeping the issue alive in the meantime — giving the social attitudes more time to develop, more states time to change their laws, and possibly more time for a change in personnel at the Court.

The fact that the ruling relies so heavily on Romer has very likely got Antonin Scalia feeling even more assured of his admittedly significant intelligence than usual. Why? Well, when Scalia penned his somewhat infamous — and absolutely scathing — dissent to Romer, he argued that the majority’s reasoning would effectively ban what he considered legislation intended to “preserve traditional American moral values.” No doubt he had a moment such as this in mind.

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Not a big surprise considering the waterfall of money the other side’s Super PACs are bringing in:

The White House’s position on Citizens United and the big money Super PACs it created has been the same from the start: they hate it. But in a new turn, the Obama campaign has decided it needs to start raising cash for Democratic groups in order to compete in the 2012 race.

“With so much at stake, we can’t allow for two sets of rules in this election whereby the Republican nominee is the beneficiary of unlimited spending and Democrats unilaterally disarm,” Obama campaign manager Jim Messina wrote in an e-mail to supporters announcing the move.”Therefore, the campaign has decided to do what we can, consistent with the law, to support Priorities USA in its effort to counter the weight of the GOP Super PACs. We will do so only in the knowledge and with the expectation that all of its donations will be fully disclosed as required by law to the Federal Election Commission.”

The decision was handed out after new FEC filings revealed conservative groups outraised their Democratic counterparts by a four to one ratio. In recent weeks one Republican donor alone, Sheldon Adelson, has given over $10 million to a Super PAC supporting Newt Gingrich. Mitt Romney’s Super PAC raised $30 million in 2011. By contrast, a Democratic Super PAC founded by former Obama aide Bill Burton, Priorities USA, raised only $19 million.

There will come a time when we look back upon the financial-electoral complex that defined America during the years immediately prior to McCain-Feingold as a halcyon era of transparency, integrity, and public-spiritedness.

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Oh, it’s so boring and predictable and cynical it’s as if it negates all thought:

Gotta say, though, that this episode is valuable in one sense: it’s a great example of the famous Atwater Doctrine:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it.

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