Barack Obama

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Revising History’s First Draft: Debt Ceiling Edition

by Elias Isquith on May 18, 2013

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Journalism is the first draft of history. Or something.

OK, well, if that’s true — and despite the rather widespread antipathy most folks have toward The Media, I believe it is — then it’s pretty important that, as much as possible, we get that first draft right. This recent medium-picture piece from WaPo, on President Obama’s relationship to executive power, does not do that:

Some liberals were frustrated with Obama’s unwillingness to use his power in 2011 at the height of the showdown between the White House and GOP lawmakers over raising the debt ceiling. House Republicans were threatening to block the borrowing limit increase unless Obama agreed to major spending cuts to Medicare and Social Security.

Many Democrats believed Obama should have used his executive authority to lift the debt ceiling — a move advocates argued was legal under the 14th Amendment. Former president Bill Clinton said at the time he would have invoked that authority and “force the courts to stop me.”

Even the threat of invoking the 14th Amendment would have neutralized the GOP’s leverage, many felt. And yet Obama, believing such a move to be unconstitutional, ruled out the idea. White House aides said it was not only illegal, but also impractical for the president to take such a drastic step.

I’ve written about this before, and it’s something Digby also harps on, but it’s just not true, the idea that Obama’s timidity is the reason the summer of 2011 descended as it did. For it to be true, we’d have to believe that the president didn’t really want a Grand Bargain; and we’d have to do this in the face of basically all available evidence. Or the fact that he’s trying to get one still!

On the contrary, Obama made a conscious decision during that summer to enter into Grand Bargain negotiations, choosing to use the debt ceiling as a kind of motivator, the idea being that global financial chaos would put the Fear of God into recalcitrants on both sides. Why he wanted a Grand Bargain — whether it was out of political cravenness, principled deficit hysteria, or a combination of both — only he can really say.

But make no mistake: he wanted one. And he was fine with using the debt ceiling to get it.

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The Democratic Nays

by Elias Isquith on April 18, 2013

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I was upset when I wrote my last post, and I think it reflected as much. Blame the president; he ginned me up. But with some time to cool down and think about the situation from a slightly greater distance, it’s hard not to conclude that Jonathan Chait — who says he would’ve voted Nay if he were a red-state Democrat, too — is right:

You’re not going to win reelection in Arkansas by compiling a Chuck Schumer–esque voting record. You need to pick your battles. Red state Democrats need to cast votes against their party sometimes, or else they’ll be replaced by somebody who will vote against it all the time. That is a moral argument, and while it can be taken too far, the Senators in question are not taking a terribly unreasonable stance. As Politico reports, one Senator told the administration, “Guns, gays and immigration — it’s too much. I can be with you on one or two of them, but not all three.”

If you’re picking your battles, background checks are as good an issue as any to lay down. For one thing, as I’ve suggested, guns loom disproportionately large in the political world of red state Democrats. Guns are the way they signal home state cultural affinity, giving themselves a chance to get their economic message heard. TheirA rating from the National Rifle Association is powerful shorthand. And yes, the NRA is crazy and partisan, and was opposing a bill it used to support and that most Republicans support. But none of those facts overcomes the blunt reality of the A rating’s political value.

…

The background check law’s failure is maddening not because passing it would have made an enormous difference, but for the opposite reason: it is such a tiny, obviously sensible step. The tininess of the step, in comparison with its disproportionate political symbolism, is why it was a perfect case for red state Democrats to defect.

A key element of the whole brouhaha, the thing that alternately makes the failure of Manchin-Toomey trivial and significant, bearable and brutal, is the paltriness of the measures that were proposed. This was one of the themes of the president’s comments yesterday. And it’s the thrust of Gabby Giffords‘ op-ed in the Times today.

For gun safety’s supporters the experience is the worst of both worlds — it gets harder to argue the bill will help at the same time that the pressure increases to water it down even more. The result is a failure whose victory was already going to be primarily symbolic. And nothing sucks more in politics than a symbolic loss.

But Chait is right about the raw politics of the matter. Senators in certain states simply aren’t as afraid of voters as they are of the NRA. And even if the bills put up for a vote are seemingly innocuous, as was the case for Manchin-Toomey, voters who’d support them don’t care nearly as much as those who’d oppose. Obama touched on this in his remarks yesterday, too.

This is why I say sometimes, despite the fact that it makes me feel uncomfortably like a libertarian (wink), that a broader cultural shift needs to happen before or alongside significant changes to US gun law. Until that happens, the incentives for politicians — especially those in red states — will remain fixed.

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The Grand Bargain’s Best Last Chance

by Elias Isquith on April 13, 2013

Obama talking Medicare Social Security cuts

I’ll be honest: when it comes to President Obama’s willingness to use Social Security as a bargaining chip, my outrage reserves are tapped. I understand why people are upset over the New York Times report that Obama’s budget will include cuts to Social Security; and I wouldn’t ask folks to be quiet since causing a ruckus is the essence of activism. I’m also on-record (a.k.a. the internet) in my belief that progressives should go total Tea Party-level obstructionist in the face of such a cut.

All the same, I related to Jonathan Chait’s response to the news, which was to call Barack Obama’s willingness to trade Social Security for higher taxes no news at all. Obama’s said as much for years. Examples are easy to find, and Digby has been tracking them since at least 2009. What they all show is that this news is not news. And it’s certainly not a reversal; or at least it’s not a reversal from the position taken at the beginning of the first term. As long as he’s been president, he’s been this way.

My take on the partisan politics is similar to Chait’s, too. There’s a flailing characteristic to the leak. For one thing, the proposal is a textbook case of lipstick on a pig politics; Republicans already turned this framework down during the fiscal cliff negotiations. As Chait puts it:

Mainly this appears to be a message strategy aimed at advocates of BipartisanThink, who have been blaming Obama for failing to offer the plan he has in fact been offering. The strategy is that, by converting their offer to Boehner from an “offer” to a “budget,” it will prove that Obama is Serious…

[T]his strikes me as completely ridiculous.

It is completely ridiculous. But if Republicans were to actually realize what’s within their reach — getting a Democratic president not only agree to cut but offer to cut Social Security — and took yes for an answer, the ridiculous would become the real all too quickly.

But a Grand Bargain can’t become law unless it gets through the House. And no bill that conservative Republicans regard as a sell-out to Obama would get out of the House without significant Democratic support. Without the Party’s Progressive Caucus’s support, the numbers even on the Democratic side don’t add up.

What it all means is that if third time’s the charm when it comes to Obama’s Grand Bargain, there will be an empire’s worth of pressure on Congressional liberals to get with the program — even if the program is cutting a sacred Democratic-created program. The logic will somewhat approximate that described so memorably by Heath Ledger as the Joker in The Dark Knight and his monologue about “the plan”:

On that score, Greg Sargent of the Washington Post reports progressive leader Raul Grijalva laying down a line in the sand, refusing to vote for a cut, full stop. But it unfortunately sounds like Grijalva is speaking very much for himself:

Asked if he would vote against any deal containing Chained CPI, Grijalva said: “I’ve made the commitment that if this is part of it, I will not vote for it. I can’t support it.”

However, asked if he thought a sizable bloc of liberals would vote No, Grijalva demurred, and — in something that will bring back bad memories for the left — cited the health care debate as an example. “At this point, I don’t know,” he said. “We’ve been through this before with the public option. The motivation will be there to close ranks and support the president.”

Oh, Tea Party Republicans, don’t fail us now…

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Forget About Undecided Voters

by Elias Isquith on April 26, 2012

Credit where it’s due — this, from the Weekly Standard‘s Jay Cost, is on-the-money:

I would say that 90 percent of the vote is pretty well set. And this is the biggest reason that I am skeptical of these predictive models — they usually fail to account for the fact that there were simply more gettable voters for Ike in 1956, LBJ in 1964, Nixon in 1972, or even Reagan in 1984. They assume that a president today can still win 60 percent of the two-party vote — even though this was a regular occurrence before 1988 but has never happened since. And it has not happened since because the two parties have finally, after years of struggle and back-and-forth, locked down roughly 45 percent apiece.

This is a lesson not just for the wonky backwaters of predictive modeling, but a good lesson for moving forward through this presidential cycle. If the only real swath of persuable voters amounts to maybe 10 percent of the electorate, then we need to be careful in how we look at the horse race. After all, we are talking about a group of people that have virtually no partisan or ideological attachments, pay very little attention to politics, and often create the crazy swings we see in the horse race polls during the course of the cycle. They are at the least fickle and at the worst maddening, as they regularly tell pollsters they have settled opinions when in fact they do not!

That’s why I’m keeping an eye on the fundamentals – rather than the horse race polls – until relatively late in the cycle. My instinct is that this swath of 10 percent or thereabouts is going to “break” late, but they already have pretty well-formed opinions about Barack Obama, especially regarding how he’s handling the biggest issues of the day.

Where I’d disagree with Cost is his decision to focus (belatedly, but nonetheless) on these undecided voters. I agree with everything he says about them — in fact, they’re worse than he lets on — but I think there’s another piece: they tend to go with the side they think is winning. I don’t have proof of this at my command right now, so take it as the theory it is and with however much salt you think it deserves; but my sense is that these kind of tabula rasa voters are profoundly affected by how they perceive the political atmosphere.

What does that mean? It means that a candidate who has got his side really fired up and enthusiastic, á la Barack Obama in 2008, stands a good chance to reap the benefit of having undecideds break his way — especially if his opponent’s partisans are somewhat or significantly ambivalent (again,á la 2008 John McCain). Either Jonathan Chait or Matt Yglesias once put forward a similar theory about why Obamacare’s approval sunk: while the Right was uniform in its loathing, the Left was more divided, with some loving the bill, some acknowledging its flaws but deeming it better than nothing, and some absolutely hating it and urging for it to be voted down.*

Think about it: if you could choose between two restaurants, neither of which you had any opinions about whatsoever, and the patrons of Restaurant A were going on and on about its virtues while the patrons of Restaurant B were offering tepid endorsements, or asking you to focus on all the bad things about Restaurant A, don’t you think it’s likely that you’d be more inclined to give A your business?

I think it is. And that’s why I’m of the mind that, more than is usually the case with Presidential elections (with 2004 standing as something of an outlier), 2012 will be about which side can better mobilize its base. Undecided voters will matter in the end, of course, but they’ll vote for the candidate who does a better job of inspiring his base without alienating everyone else.

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Obama’s Hit Job

by Elias Isquith on April 10, 2012

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Flashback—remember 2009-2011, when President Obama primarily concerned himself with passing legislation, legislation that quite frequently struck wonky observers as either deeply compromised or downright bad? Remember how this was a period during which all anyone could talk about was how disenchanted liberals (note: not the same as Obama’s base) was the Left with the President? Remember how the vogue among many of these great disappointeds was to turn to systemic-bordering-on-fatalistic explanations for why 44 had fallen so short?

These were those dark days before the President shifted into election mode, before he spent most of his time making public speeches in favor of a vague, unspecific fair deal for the even more fuzzily defined middle class. This was before Obama could look good — damn good — by virtue of his not being Paul Ryan; when his goal wasn’t so much to get you to feel favorably towards him as it was to put his pen to parchment. Troubled times, indeed.

Well, they’re back—and according to Matt Taibbi, they’re back with a vengeance:

Boy, do I feel like an idiot. I’ve been out there on radio and TV in the last few months saying that I thought there was a chance Barack Obama was listening to the popular anger against Wall Street that drove the Occupy movement, that decisions like putting a for-real law enforcement guy like New York AG Eric Schneiderman in charge of a mortgage fraud task force meant he was at least willing to pay lip service to public outrage against the banks.

Then the JOBS Act happened.

The “Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act” (in addition to being a viciously stupid and dishonest law, the Act has an annoying, redundant title) will very nearly legalize fraud in the stock market.

Actually, that’s not putting things in strong enough language. In fact, one could say this law is not just a sweeping piece of deregulation that will have an increase in securities fraud as an accidental, ancillary consequence. No, this law actually appears to have been specifically written to encourage fraud in the stock markets.…

The finance world is buzzing over this bill. The reactions I’ve heard so far range from minutes-long guffaws of dark laughter to bloodcurdling, I-can’t-freaking-believe-they-went-this-far outrage. “I thought I had lost the ability to be shocked,” one friend of mine, a former regulator, told me this weekend, chuckling at the sheer stones it took to push the law. “But this thing is just inspired. They broke the mold with this one.”

Taibbi concludes, “…let’s just say this is a dramatic step taken by Barack Obama. Nobody should have any illusions about where he stands on Wall Street corruption after this thing. Boss Tweed himself couldn’t have done any worse.”

What a great example of what Lawrence Lessig calls legalized corruption, or the “economy of influence.” As The Huffington Post has reported, JOBS is little more than a gift from an Administration hoping to mend fences with the big pockets of Palo Alto after the lover’s row that was SOPA. That’s its purpose, despite what the asinine acronym might imply:

[F]or all of the maneuvering, the JOBS Act is unlikely to deliver much in the way of job growth, according to economists and consumer advocates, who warn that the bill opens the door to a new wave of conflicts of interest and possible financial fraud on Wall Street.

Tech companies and their venture capital backers, angered by a bipartisan push for Internet anti-piracy legislation known as SOPA, are key beneficiaries of the JOBS Act — a fact not lost on Democratic leaders. Rapid-fire public stock offerings and free-wheeling funding are the lifeblood of the Silicon Valley landscape, and the JOBS Act promises to make it easier for financiers and their clients in the technology industry to raise money for their companies’ operations.

“What happened coming out of the SOPA fight is, people in Washington and Congress really sat up and took notice and said, ‘There is actually work to be done here. This is not just kids in T-shirts running around Palo Alto on skateboards. This really is a community looking to create the next wave of businesses that will jumpstart the American economy,’” says Michael McGeary, a strategist with the venture capital firm Hattery, based in San Francisco. “And Congress is very opportunistic this way. They saw there was this community that was very engaged … And we would like to say thank you to them.”

Congress and the White House will no doubt soon be returning a thank you of their own.

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Tricky Mitt?

by Elias Isquith on April 3, 2012

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Ed Kilgore thinks Romney’s consummate phoniness — and the hard-edged cynicism it seems to belie — makes him this era’s version of our 37th President:

For all the differences in personality and background… I’ve always thought of Mitt as the New Nixon. He may succeed politically because people with money figure he’ll do what it takes for him–and them–to win, because he’s a safer bet than his opponents, and even because people are cynical enough about him to assume he won’t let principles get in the way of doing things the country obviously needs. But (with the obvious exception of LDS folk) he’s not going to inspire much of anybody, and can ascend to a victory over Barack Obama only on the dark wings of an exceptionally nasty negative campaign reinforced by disheartening external events.

It’s a funny comparison. While I buy that Romney is Nixonian in his being a ostensibly highly successful politician who it just so happens no one (save a few curious outliers) likes; and while it makes sense to compare Romney’s clear intelligence and seeming lack of any substantial ideological fervor to Nixon’s fundamentally colorless vision of domestic policy — Nixon only cared about the Great Game of the Cold War while Romney seems to only truly believe in the bloodless dogma of laissez faire neoliberalism — I’d still argue that what separates them is more conspicuous than their various similarities.

After all, it’s generally a very particular kind of person who runs for President, and an even more particular type who is able to succeed (or at least come close). What separates George’s Conqueror and George’s Son, then, is another facet of how we perceive of them. And in this regard they’re polar opposites.

On the one hand, Nixon was continuously underestimated throughout his career. Whether it was because his opponents did not take into account the depths to which he would sink in order to claim or maintain power (a willingness he displayed most brazenly — prior to Watergate, of course — in the infamous “Checkers speech“); or because they saw his schlubby appearance, noted his profound awkwardness, and assumed he could thus never succeed in a contest largely decided by likability… whatever the reason, time and again, people didn’t give Milhouse the respect he deserved. He’s remembered for the losses but more often than not, he won.

On the other hand, there’s Mitt. And Mitt, though a very accomplished man in his private life, has been overestimated throughout the entirety of his political career. It’s because of the name, the hair, the jaw, the shoulders, the money. It’s because he seems like a reasonable enough guy, and political observers often make the mistake of exaggerating how much that matters (and how subjective is their conception of “reasonable”). It’s because he can afford to put forth supremely well-funded campaigns, with all the trappings and accoutrements of a professional, proven, and potent campaign apparatus.

But the record is clear: he’s 1-for-three, likely soon two-for-four, when it comes to elections he’s decided to actually participate in (there were prior contests he was rumored to be considering joining, but opted not to after determining he couldn’t win). But his money-spent to votes-won ratio is far more telling — and discouraging. Since we’re judging these men as politicians, first and foremost, the difference strikes me as pretty damn important. Where it really counts, Romney’s no Nixon; he’s much, much worse.

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The Promises of Barack Obama

by Elias Isquith on March 30, 2012

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Theo Anderson of In These Times does a run-down of how Obama’s fared in keeping his campaign promises since assuming office. (Warning: he uses the now-controversial Politifact as his guide.) He doesn’t offer a grade, but it sounds to me like he’d give 44 something like a B-minus:

His record is fairly impressive overall. The website PolitiFact tracks the promises made by politicians and assigns them one of five labels: promise kept, promise broken, compromise, stalled, and in the works. According to this formula, Obama has kept 174 promises, broken 63, compromised on 54, and stalled on 67. Another 148 are still in the works.

Many of these promises have to do with issues that are important to progressives. By that measure, Obama’s record in office is less inspiring. He kept or at least achieved a compromise on many of his key promises—most notably, healthcare reform. But he broke many of them as well.

Here’s a question: say the Supreme Court kills Obamacare entirely. Is that a promise kept?

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Rick Santorum Presents: Obamaville

by Elias Isquith on March 26, 2012

Here’s what Jonathan Bernstein has to say about the new, bat shit crazy Rick Santorum ad, “Obamaville”:

[M]y favorite part of the ad is that the horror-story “Obamaville” is set…two years into Obama’s second term.

And that, to me, fully sums up the Republican case against Barack Obama, or at least one weird variety of it. Obama is about to do all sorts of horrible things: bankrupt the nation, induce hyperinflation, confiscate guns, revoke the Fairness Doctrine. About to do them.

Now, if you absolutely hate the president — and to be fair Santorum is of course a failing nomination candidate who at this time presumably is only interested in partisan Republican voters — that kind of pitch might well be effective. But to undecided voters? The problem with Santorum’s horror video is that it doesn’t bother telling you what Obama has done wrong so far. And for most voters, that’s what it should be doing.

Put it another way: Republicans are pretty good at running against challengers in presidential races, where a logical message is to not trust the untried candidate. Run that same message against an incumbent, and you’re basically saying: ignore what you see, and believe us that you can’t trust this president. That’s a very, very hard message to sell, or at least so it seems to me.

Bernstein’s absolutely right, but the problem he identifies — the inability or unwillingness of the contemporary Republican Party to make political arguments based off of something at least vaguely resembling reality — permeates way beyond GOP voters’ conception of Obama. The whole unreality of the wing-nut worldview is what makes men like Mitt Romney have to say patently absurdities and insincere nonsense, while men like Jon Huntsman have to simply bow out. It’s at its most intense when it comes to the President (and it was the same way with Bill “Murdered Vince Foster” Clinton) but if you think about the tenets of faith a Republican standard-bearer must uphold, from supply side voodoo to global warming denial, from the belief that Reagan won the Cold War to the faith that Adam’n'Eve shared the splendors of the Garden with dinosaurs…

And they do believe this stuff, too. They don’t all believe all of it. But there’s plenty of cross-over, especially as the Party has become ever more homogenous and insular.

So what’s on my mind when I watch “Obamaville” is a kind of awe that, fundamentally, Rick Santorum and those true believers on his staff (skeletal though it may be) believe this hysterical claptrap. I think there’s definitely a self-consciously campy element to the ad, but I don’t think it’s meant to be satirical or somehow tongue-in-cheek. The silliness is more a send-up of the form than the ideas within. Rick Santorum really does believe that an Obama reelection would signal, in some permanent, irrevocable way, the End of America As We Know It. The Left has its similar actors, of course; but Naomi Wolf isn’t running second to be one of two choices for who will hold the nuclear codes on January 20, 2013.

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With Enemies Like These…

by Elias Isquith on March 5, 2012

Obamasmiles

The number 1 reason Barack Obama’s poll numbers and chances of reelection have been increasing lately is the improving economy. Full stop. Good employment numbers, rising auto sales, increasing consumer confidence: this is the stuff of which grooves are made. A smarter political strategy, sharper tactical parries and responses, better speeches; each one probably helps along the margins. But it’s the economy, stupid.

What doesn’t hurt, however, is Americans being reminded of just what the contemporary GOP is and, not incidentally, how much they do not like it. And, just to be clear — they really, really don’t like it. Here’s the latest NBC/WSJ poll, winning the morning:

As another round of voting takes place this week in the Republican presidential race – with 11 states holding Super Tuesday contests – a new national NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll shows that the combative and heavily scrutinized primary season so far has damaged the party and its candidates.

Four in 10 of all adults say the GOP nominating process has given them a less favorable impression of the Republican Party, versus just slightly more than one in 10 with a more favorable opinion.

Additionally, when asked to describe the GOP nominating battle in a word or phrase, nearly 70 percent of respondents – including six in 10 independents and even more than half of Republicans – answered with a negative comment.

Some examples of these negative comments from Republicans: “Unenthusiastic,” “discouraged,” “lesser of two evils,” “painful,” “disappointed,” “poor choices,” “concerned,” “underwhelmed,” “uninspiring” and “depressed.”

Mark Murray wrote the above, and he’s of the opinion that the supposed ugliness and negativity of the Republican primary is to blame for these figures. I don’t think that’s true.

I’m sure the constant bickering, Mitt Romney’s gushing fire hydrant of opposition research, and the continued presence of Newt Gingrich on the national stage isn’t helping Republicans. But it’s not the tenor of the primary but rather the contemporary GOP’s very ideology itself that’s sinking the party. With a Tea Party-approved platform founded on undoing the first term of the Obama Presidency (or perhaps the entire 20th century itself) the Republican Party of 2012 is fundamentally reactionary. And reactionaries don’t play nice.

Honestly, if you’re not a pissed-off and wealthy white guy (being over 45-years-old is recommended, though not required), what do Republicans have to say to you? Trust us, Ronald Reagan was super-duper awesome. OK. What else? Barack Obama is a Kenyan anti-colonialist who wants to destroy your freedom and cut off your head and turn the crumbs left in its wake into food-stamps which he will give to his radical Islamist minority friends. Well, no, that doesn’t sound quite right…but do go on, I guess? If you’re a woman, it would be “inappropriate” to call you a slut even if you are basically acting like a slut; and if you’re Latino? GTFO! What about if I’m a white guy, but I’m kinda sorta not wealthy (and I don’t mean in the Ann Romney sense of the word)? Well, you might want me to tell you I have a solution — I’m not going to do that. Go join the army or something. Whatever.

Quite understandably, the response of the non-pissed-off-wealthy-old-white-dudes has been, “Thanks — but no thanks,” with varying degrees of emphasis. Meanwhile, Obama, a President who in many ways has been a disappointment, all too willing to entrench the worst of the status quo when he’s not pushing its limits ever-further, is getting a pass. Plenty of politicians have won before by being the lesser of two evils; but it’s been a long, long time since it looked quite this easy.

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Obama On Church And State

by Elias Isquith on February 2, 2012

Obama jesus

Ed Kilgore says that those who claim Obama’s comments today at the National Prayer Breakfast were evidence of his own hypocritical theocratic inclinations are wrong, and that Obama’s comments emphasized his belief in an unbridgeable divide between what Yahweh wants and what we’re capable of delivering:

This has been a central theme of virtually every major utterance by Barack Obama on the subject of religion and politics, most notably in his famous 2009 commencement address at Notre Dame: a warning against the arrogance of those who presume to speak for the Almighty in pursuit of their highly secular political agendas. It’s an idea that used to be called “the fear of God,” though it is almost entirely lacking among the noisy ranks of Christian Right leaders.

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