March 2009 Archives
Mar 31 2009, 11:18PM
NY-20: Too Close to Call, and Nothing to Extrapolate?
With 100 percent of precincts reporting Tuesday night, Democrat Scott Murphy led Republican Jim Tedisco by 65 votes, and, with thousands of absentee ballots yet to be counted, it could be days or weeks before we have a winner. A decision by the state board of elections last week to extend the absentee ballot deadline to April 13--to give overseas ballots sufficient time to reach the district--will likely prolong things even further, as The Hill's Aaron Blake points out. If the final count is close, possible legal challenges could drag the race out, well, almost forever, as Minnesota's 2008 Senate election showed.
Mar 31 2009, 5:50PM
Away With Him, Judge Says
Mar 31 2009, 5:40PM
Norm Coleman's Last 400 Shots
It looks like Sen. Norm Coleman's last shot at retaining his Minnesota Senate seat will be an appeal to the state Supreme Court. Al Franken (D) leads Coleman by 225 votes. Today, the judges overseeing the recount trial said they'll review a tiny number of absentee ballots -- just 400. Assuming that the judges decide to award those ballots to either candidate, Coleman would need to receive roughly 85 percent of them in order to come close to Franken, much less surpass him. Coleman's lawyers are already looking ahead to an appeal before the state supreme court. There, they'll be able to argue that Coleman was the victim of unspecified constitutional violations by various election authorites in the state. An appeal will take about six weeks. Then, Coleman will have to decide whether he wants to suffer the indignity of having the U.S. Supreme Court decide not to hear his case...
Mar 31 2009, 5:33PM
Star Trek: The Not-Divided Country
If the budget is a reflection of the Democratic Party's political priorities, what does it say about the GOP's star catch of the cycle, Joseph Cao, who is faithfully attempting to divine the wisdom of his district and just might vote "yay?" The new ABC/News Washington Post poll helps us figure out what's going on. The Democratic strategy revolves around President Obama and the expanse of his political penumbra. Trust us, Democrats say, we're on Obama's side. The Republican strategy revolves around the Democrats. They're too radical. They're running the country into the ground. They're bailing out everyone except for the taxpayer. Well, the Democratic argument, not being a policy argument, gets you about 60 percent of the country right now. The Republican argument is merely majoritarian. "There is now a pronounced divergence between Democratic and Republican perceptions of the economy," the Post tells us. Well, yes. Obama's economic plan, fairly broadly Democratic in its orientation, commands the support of Democrats and a slight majority of independents. Republicans and a slight minority of independents are very skeptical of its deficits. The Republican Party can do all it wants to solidy Republican opposition and even peel away some more independents, but they're bumping up against a ceiling. Independents are capable of being skeptical about Democratic economics and yet still give Obama the benefit of the doubt. That's why a full two-thirds of the country believes that Obama's economic proposals are the right way forward. And two-thirds of the country think that Obama is a "New" Democrat. And two thirds of the country commends Obama for his handling of international affairs. (What, precisely, has he done in this area?) Hint: folks are responding to the Obama part of the proposals, not the "economic" or "international" part. Clearly, the sum is greater than the parts.
Mar 31 2009, 4:40PM
What 'Highly Disciplined GOP Message Machine'?
President Barack Obama may or may not be able to save the U.S. auto industry, but his dramatic restricting plan is already having some effect: It's sent the highly disciplined GOP message machine careening out of control.
This isn't a knock at Politico..er...POLITICO, but since when has the GOP benefited from a "highly disciplined ... message machine?" When Congress debated the stimulus package, the party was united, but everything pretty much fell apart after that. Come to think of it, with the exception of the stimulus unity, the GOP message machine has been off-kilter since before the 2006 elections. I keep reading stories about how "Republican strategists" are on the verge of coming up with sparkling new strategies, but they never seem to materialize. The haggling over the wisdom of putting out an alternative budget is a symptom, and not a cause, of a party that lacks a leader and lacks even the patina of common cause among its various factions.
Mar 31 2009, 3:37PM
Waxman's Cap-And-Trade Throwdown
In releasing the draft of an energy policy overhaul today, Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, has put down a marker for the White House and the Senate. The prospects of passing a cap-and-trade emissions credit system this year are dim, mostly because too many Democratic Senators worry about the job cost and unequal distribution of renewable energy sources. Still, the administration faces domestic and international pressure to begin the process of substantially reducing Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions by the December Copenhagen conference, when it will try to convince China and India to follow the U.S.'s example. Waxman, along with Rep. Ed Markey, have set a deliberately ambitious goal of, 20 years hence, reducing carbon emissions in the United States by 20% of their 2005 levels. That's a far more dramatic reduction than Obama proposed during the presidential campaign.
Mar 31 2009, 1:55PM
Why The Left Thinks Obama Can't Govern
Jonathan Chait is smart and acerbic and he gets a lot of things right in his extensive
Mar 31 2009, 1:51PM
Star Gazing
Mar 31 2009, 1:16PM
Bibi Threatens To Bomb Iran
In an interview with the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg, the new Israeli Prime Minister challenges Barack Obama to prevent
Mar 31 2009, 1:05PM
The Russia Crouch
The Obama administration, which zealously polices the policy making corpus for leaks like a plastic surgeon, was surprised -- but not really surprised -- to read about a secret letter that President Obama sent to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev seven weeks ago. Obama's message was supposed to be about tone: the U.S. is serious about working with Russia to assuage their concerns about a missile defense system in Europe provided that Russia is serious about using its leverage against Iran to prevent the regime from taking the final proliferation step. Analysts on both sides of the Atlantic interpreted the letter, which the U.S. insists was leaked by the Russians, as Obama's laying the groundwork for a deal. After all, Obama and his foreign policy aides are missile defense skeptics. The reality, according to administration officials, was that Obama's message was deliberately open-ended. Let Russia decide what Obama meant to say; don't foreclose any possibility; don't counter saber-rattling with the type of rhetorical gestures that Dick Cheney was famous for, and which served to reinforce the Russian people's negative perception of the United States. As with his video message to Iran, the letter was intended as an indication that the door to a "reset" was open.
A few days after the 2008 election, Medvedev used his first speech to the Duma to rally public opinion against the United States. The world was celebrating Obama's election, and Russia remained in a defensive crouch after last summer's Georgian incursion. The new Russian President wanted to make a point about missile defense. He announced the deployment of yet-to-be built Iskander missiles to a part of Russia within range of the Czech Republic -- one of the countries that wants a new U.S.-built NATO missile battery to protect against threats from (Iran and) Russia. But it really was only a point, one meant to, in the words of Time's Russia correspondent, whip up "nostalgia and nationalism." Russia has not been immune to the effects of an economic downturn and will soon be forced to reconfigure the balance between its spending on guns and butter.
We're approaching the 20-year anniversary of the end of the Cold War, and yet it is tempting to interpret the U.S.-Russian relationship in the lingua franca of Reagan and Gorbachev. Neither side wants to "lose face." Russia, manly, bearish, nationalistic, wants to "assert itself." I'm no expert here, but it seems to me that the chief political conflict between Russia and the West is no longer about ideology; it's about resources, primarily energy. No major country is more intimately tied to the rise and fall of energy prices than Russia; no currency is more dependent on the status of gas reserves than the rouble.
Even as Russia's ability to provocate is waning, preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons remains the most acute foreign policy objective of the Obama administration, and Russia, given its close (albeit complicated) relationship with Iran, is the critical lever. In late February, Russia suddenly stopped shipment of new S-300 missiles to Iran, postponing delivery until Medvedev and Obama had the chance to talk in person. They'll do so tomorrow. Today, Medvedev took to the pages of The Washington Post. On the one hand, he doesn't mention Iran. On the other, he hints that mutual efforts in Afghanistan, along with other "influential players," may be the way to repair the U.S.-Russian relationship. On the one hand, he writes of trilateral cooperation with the U.S. and NATO on "issues of strategic stability and nuclear security." (Strategic stability is Russian shorthand for the perceived imbalance of the Bush administration and EU's plan to strengthen NATO's hand at the expense of Russia -- and more generally, the common cause it shares with Iran in wanting to circumscribe the influence of a single superpower in Eurasian affairs.)
Medvedev writes about the "toxic assets" on the diplomatic balance sheet. Getting rid of Iran will be as tough as valuing a tranche of Citigroup securities. The connective tissue between Russia and Iran is tough; Russia's support for the Iranian regime is based on leverage and mutual interest; it cannot be snipped until the benefits of the longstanding alliance (a market for Russian goods, non-interference by Iran in Muslim parts of the old Soviet empire, a counterbalance to U.S. hegemony) outweight the costs. What are the costs? A nuclear Iran may become less dependent on Russia. Others are harder to figure out. And so the truth is that Russia has a stronger hand here; Russia realizes this and Medvevev seems to be in an expansive mood, willing to concede that because his country's support for Iran is based on practical (material) concerns rather than ideology, Russia can use its influence productively. In this way, the "strategic stability" between the U.S. and Russia depends quite a bit on the markers the world's major economic powers lay down this week.
Mar 31 2009, 1:01PM
'Budget-ish': DNC Uses Urban Dictionary to Hit GOP
In the latest prong of a multi-pronged effort to hammer Republicans on their opposition to President Obama's budget proposal, the DNC has entered a new term in Urban Dictionary to describe the House GOP's 19-page budget blueprint: "budget-ish"--"of or resembling a budget. Lacks specificity such as numbers and/or ideas."--their point being that the GOP proposal wasn't much of a proposal at all.
The definition has received 57 thumbs up and three thumbs down so far, per the site's rating system. (Urban Dictionary accepts submissions from any reader and allows other readers to rate each entry.) The DNC says it has not encouraged supporters or staff to rate the new term. Full definition below:
Mar 31 2009, 11:05AM
Recession Depression: Nanny State or Mental Health Threat?
But the recession's mental health threat is real, according to this story published yesterday by the Fresno Bee, detailing the problems of unemployment-stricken Mendota, Californa: "With a 41 percent jobless rate, the town's social fabric is tearing at the seams. Alcoholism and crime are on the rise. To save money, some mothers wash and re-use disposable diapers. Unemployed men with nothing to do wander the streets and sit on benches," the Bee's Chris Collins writes.
Sadness/crying, indeed.
Mar 31 2009, 10:09AM
Election Day in New York
Mar 30 2009, 5:16PM
Quote of the Day: Economist Prescott on Rick Wagoner
Multimedia
Mar 30 2009, 4:58PM
Obama Talks Afghanistan
Mar 30 2009, 3:45PM
Canada's Contribution
As mentioned by President Obama in his auto industry remarks today, Canada will contribute to the interim financing of GM and Chrysler, in keeping with its share of that production. Canada will loan $3 billion to GM and $1 billion to Chrysler. Chrysler will receive $250 million by Wednesday and will be eligible for $500 million in early April and $250 million on May 1; timing for the GM loan has yet to be worked out.
Mar 30 2009, 2:22PM
Green Hope to Balance Auto Doom
But I'm confident that if each are willing to do their part, if all of us are doing our part, then this restructuring, as painful as it will be in the short term, will mark not an end, but a new beginning for a great American industry -- an auto industry that is once more out-competing the world; a 21st century auto industry that is creating new jobs, unleashing new prosperity, and manufacturing the fuel-efficient cars and trucks that will carry us towards an energy-independent future. I am absolutely committed to working with Congress and the auto companies to meet one goal: The United States of America will lead the world in building the next generation of clean cars.
Mar 30 2009, 12:05PM
New Hampshire Polling: What Went Wrong?
This roiled the political world, leaving everyone with the question: how could the pollsters have been so wrong?
The AAPOR report finds that the early primary date, underrepresentation of Clinton-supporting groups, an influx of first-time voters, and the race of survey interviewers could have caised the New Hampshire errors. From the report:
Mar 30 2009, 11:30AM
Your Government, Running The Auto Industry
A review of the government's explantion for why it deems GM and Chrysler "unviable" demonstrates precisely the sort of micro-level intervention in the two companies that the Obama administration had previously sought to avoid.
For example, although the administration disputed GM's contention that the global market conditions would arrest the rate of GM's market share decline, it also blamed the company for retaining "too many unprofitable nameplates" that "tarnish its brands" and "demand increasingly scare marketing dollars."
Further, GM is slammed for producing cheap cars and selling them too cheaply. "These lower price points are an important impediment to enhanced GM profitablility and need to be reversed over time in order for GM to bring its margins into line with its-best class peers." What that means, in essence, is that the government wants to see GM produce fewer, more expensive cars.
Legacy costs remain unresolved; the government estimates that GM would need to sell 900,000 more cars per year through 2014 in order to meet its obligation.
Elsewhere, the administration has called on GM to fundamentally change its culture. Better brains need to be brought in. Labor/management practices have to change.
All of this is fine. The government is telling GM to be like Toyota. But what if the industry's infection is just too widespread? No amount of patient self-care... "clean those wounds better! Eat your vitamins! Get exercise!" and no amount of antibiotics (the billions government's pouring in) can arrest the death spiral. Was it totally unrealistic to expect GM to find a way to satisfy the government's demand for positive cash flow by 2014?
Mar 30 2009, 11:01AM
DNC Keeps Hammering GOP on Budget
"Thirty-one days ago, the President put forward a plan to turn the economy around, make health care more affordable, reduce our dependence on foreign sources of oil and invest in our nation's schools. Since that time, the Republican party has offered a chorus of criticism and a bevy of excuses, but they have failed to offer a budget proposal of their own.This raises a semantic point: did the House GOP actually offer a budget proposal? It was a proposal, alright, but it was only 19 pages. Then again, if Republicans did offer something more, it's not as if Democrats would jump to adopt their plan.
The lack of urgency displayed by the Republican party at this time of national crisis is shocking. Republican leadership is, in a manner of speaking, watching Britney fiddle while the economy burns.
After a month of stalling and glossy but empty pamphlets, it's time for the Republican leadership to stop saying 'No' and start contributing. The American people can't afford any more Republican excuses."
Mar 30 2009, 10:38AM
Stocks Sink on GM/Chrysler News
Mar 30 2009, 8:55AM
The Liability Of Viability
1. What did Wagoner do? An administration official, speaking to reporters last night, said that the government views its approach to GM as "starting with clean sheet of paper, we want to start at beginning, start fresh." Which isn't helpful. Did Wagoner resist reforms that the government insisted?
2. What precedent is the administration setting? Banks taking TARP money cannot help but wonder if the administration will exercise the same implied/actual power to remove their CEOs. Will this (further) chill the spines of bankers and hedge fund managers whose cooperation is needed to get those toxic assets off the books?
3. If GM is 30 days away from a mandated restructuring (the government would appoint a "chief restructuring officer" or a "surgical bankruptcy," why the need to fire Wagoner now?
4. What additional "savings" does the government want from GM? What if it's really not possible, given the competitive global environment, for GM to be a standalone, viable company? Is the U.S. postponing the inevitable?
5. Even though, contra Chrysler, GM's "global brand" is supposed to be healthier, is the U.S. trying to lure a buyer?
Mar 27 2009, 5:29PM
Quote of the Day: Obama on Afghanistan, al Qaeda
Mar 27 2009, 4:45PM
Labor Helps Murphy Down the Stretch
Mar 27 2009, 4:22PM
The White House's Cap-and-Trade Trump Card
Let me get the caveats out of the way first. Though I know that some White House officials have toyed with the idea I'm sketching out below, there are by no means any plans to run with it. But for those who fret that the Congressional budget resolutions have taken all the arrows out of the executive quiver to deal with climate change, listen up. Very simply, the EPA could draft a rule on carbon dioxide that contains language allowing it to be superseded by Congress when it passes a cap-and-trade system or an outright tax on carbon emissions. EPA would therefore be able to regulate CO2 without delay; if Congress failed to act, the EPA rule would stay in effect. The regulations could be written in a way that they tighten over time, thereby giving Congress (and industry) a political and economic incentive to supercede them. If Congress doesn't act on climate change by, say, December of 2009, the Obama administration will face significant international pressure at Copenhagen to show its work. And at that point, the administration may well threaten to ask EPA to draft a rule, which could spur Congress into acting in 2010.
Mar 27 2009, 3:01PM
Legislating the Taboo
Mar 27 2009, 2:26PM
A Democratic Lead in NY-20?
Tedisco has led for the entire race up until this point, and Gillibrand's appointment had seemed to give Republicans a chance to take back one of the seats Democrats picked up in the 2006 wave that gave them the majority: Gillibrand was a Blue Dog, the upstate 20th district is conservative as Democratic districts go, and polls showed Tedisco with a healthy lead (Siena had him up 46% to 34% in late February). Politically, the race has pitted AIG outrage against the pro-stimulus arguments of the Democratic Party, and it has offered both parties a chance to test the waters of a swing district at the outset of the 2010 cycle.
It should be noted that Tedisco disputes the results of today's poll, which includes responses from 917 likely voters via telephone, conducted March 25-26, with a margin of error of +/- 3.2%.
Mar 27 2009, 1:30PM
The Angry Left
"It doesn't look like Obama is changing anything," said Kyle Quigley, an Iraq War veteran who had traveled from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to attend the rally. The president's decision to delay withdrawal from Iraq by three months is a sign, Quigley argued, of Obama's "backsliding" on his campaign promise to end the war. Quigley's frustration with the president was shared by many of the anti-war activists at the rally, which was sponsored by the group Act Now To Stop War and End Racism.
Cautious and pragmatic, Obama has always been more centrist than his supporters on the left. His 2008 pledge to raise troop levels in Afghanistan and his vow to be as "careful getting out" of Iraq "as we were careless going in" disappointed those looking for a swift rejection of George W. Bush's foreign policy. Now two months into his presidency, Obama's cautious centrism has provoked an inevitable rift with some of the most devoted interest groups that swept him to power.
Mar 27 2009, 12:07PM
A Target-Rich Environment
One of the reasons why Barack Obama's political team is so confident -- "arrogant," as Rove would say today, in their success is that even while some of Obama's signature policies are viewed with healthy skepticism, Republicans are still splashing around in a fetid wading pool. Obama has room to maneuver because Republicans are giving him room. And while Rove was a master at strategic communications, his lessons didn't seem to stick. Take the appearances in the public square of Dick Cheney and Rush Limbaugh. Cheney remains the principle exponent of Republican national security policy. A lot of Republicans now disagree with the Cheney Doctrine, but because President Bush left no real political heirs, and because no real independent, conservative foreign policy voice has emerged, Cheney's grumbles echo. (Sen. Dick Lugar is a voice, but he is not a partisan persuader. Rudy Giuliani has been fairly silent since the demise of his presidential campaign.) The Democratic National Committee could not be more delighted to treat Cheney as the primary political enemy and foil. Each time Cheney opens his mouth, the DNC -- or Robert Gibbs, if he's in the mood -- finds a way to reduce Republican opposition to President Obama's plans to the words of someone who is very unpopular with most Americans. (A side note: Cheney, smarter than the average elephant, understands this. He has his legacy to defend. He is worried not about criminal prosecution; rather, if the Obama mindset over next four-to-eight years sets in, Dick Cheney, a guy who most Americans don't like, will be the Dick Cheney that Andrew Sullivan knows: truly infamous and even wretched; someone who sanctioned torture; someone who abused executive power with relish. Obama's Justice Department may soon renounce the legal foundations upon which Cheney's policies were constructed and may even cite the former administration's lawyers for misconduct. If they do this -- once they do this -- the edifice will be nothing but dust.)
And since the GOP is a PINO -- a Party In Name Only at this point, other Republicans unwittingly pile on. When Rush Limbaugh told the Conservative Political Action Conference audience that he wanted Obama to fail, Republican Senators rebuked him, thus extending the story. The chairman of the Republican National Committee, Michael Steele, called Limbaugh "incendiary," later apologized, and later, in a trendy, post-modern way, said that he meant what he said all along. Limbaugh's ratings have surged since the White House made him the subject of their derision, which is exactly what the White House wanted. The more Republicans identify with Limbaugh, the better; the more Republicans apologize for Limbaugh, the better. To the Obama team, Limbaugh embodies Clinton-era conservatism to most Americans. I would bet that the DNC has polled on this, although I don't know for certain.
When Cheney insisted that Obama's policies were making America less safe, conservative House Republicans like Zach Wamp were frustrated that "the people who led us yesterday" still seemed to represent the Republican Party. But as Wamp knows, the bench is short and uncomfortable to sit on.
So as Democrats focus on Limbaugh, Cheney and Rove, the result is a twofer; remind independents of why they voted for change and continue to perpetuate the Republican identity crisis.
Mar 27 2009, 10:57AM
The White House's Afghanistan White Paper
Multimedia
Mar 27 2009, 10:52AM
Grassley: 'Your Wife Said the Same Thing'
Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND): Oh, you are good.Courtesy of the C-SPAN Video Library.
Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA): Your wife said the same thing.
Mar 27 2009, 10:23AM
Quantify 'Generational Theft' and Collect Winnings
Mar 27 2009, 8:22AM
Health Care: Obama Hints At Strategy
The first 100 days of the Obama administration will be and have been consumed with the economy and the budget; the second 100 days will feature, among other things, a significant and detailed negotiation with Congress on health care reform. To start the process, the White House has two major options. Either they could push for a significant expansion of government-run programs, or they could ask Congress to use money from the health care reserve fund to pay for the premiums of Americans who don't currently have insurance. The former would represent a departure from the employer-based system; the latter, which would include significant new restrictions on the insurance industry, would preserve, for the time being, the system's status quo. Politically, the target is moderate Democrats and independents. Legislatively, the goal is to get insurance companies and business lobbies on board, early.
Thursday, in response to a question about health care, President Obama outlined the principles first developed during his presidential campaign. But then he said this (emphasis is my own.)
Obama's plan will ultimately contain both elements. But my sense is that Obama has decided to start slowly.The problem is, is that we have what's called a legacy, a set of institutions that aren't that easily transformed.　 Let me just see a show of hands:　 How many people here have health insurance through your employer?　 Okay, so the majority of Americans, sort of -- partly for historical accident.　 I won't go into -- FDR had imposed wage controls during war time in World War II.　 People were -- companies were trying to figure out how to attract workers.　 And they said, well, maybe we'll provide health care as a benefit.　
And so what evolved in America was an employer-based system.　 It may not be the best system if we were designing it from scratch.　 But that's what everybody is accustomed to.　 That's what everybody is used to.　 It works for a lot of Americans.　 And so I don't think the best way to fix our health care system is to suddenly completely scrap what everybody is accustomed to and the vast majority of people already have.　 Rather, what I think we should do is to build on the system that we have and fill some of these gaps
Mar 26 2009, 6:53PM
Afghanistan: Counterinsurgency As Counterrorism
Mar 26 2009, 4:14PM
Schwarzennegger Says He Won't Run
Mar 26 2009, 4:00PM
A First Look At Obama's New Afghan Policy
According to people who have been briefed on the results of the policy review, Obama plans to emphasize results-driven cooperation with both countries. He will endorse a Senate bill, authored by Sens. John Kerry and Richard Lugar, that would condition a significant increase in aid to Pakistan on measurable improvements in Pakistan's internal efforts to combat terrorism. (President Obama and Vice President Biden were cosponsors of the bill in the Senate.)
In seeking to reassure Americans that help to Pakistan is contingent on internal reforms, he plans to stress that Americans will work with those in both countries who demonstratively seek peace and reconciliation.
This will be interpreted as a warning to both President Asif Ali Zardari in Pakistan and President Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan. Pointedly, the new Afpak policy does not express a preference for specific leaders, another difference from the previous administration, which had been accused of coddling and courting Karzai and former Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf at the expense of rooting out corruption and terrorism. Afghanistan holds elections later this year, and the U.S. hasn't found a candidate it likes.
The Americans will lean on Zardari to end his military's ongoing cooperation with the Taliban. Some analysts may interpret the new American policy to mean that the U.S. is open to working more closely with the leader of the main opposition party in Pakistan, Narwaz Sharif.
Mar 26 2009, 3:32PM
The GOP Alternative
Mar 26 2009, 3:28PM
Democrats Getting Pro-Budget Calls
"It seems like we hear from a lot of the folks who listen to and agree with Rush Limbaugh, who listen to and agree with Sean Hannity...Glenn Beck is very popular," Heyrend told me.
Democratic sources said that several other Democratic lawmakers have asked the White House to urge the DNC to stop the pressure campaign.
with reporting from Chris Good
Mar 26 2009, 2:03PM
Nicaragua Asks for a U.S. Bailout
Ortega said that the solution for Central America needs to come in the form of a U.S. bailout plan, similar to the ones being given to U.S. banking, financial services and other industrial sectors.Given the insertion of a "Buy American" provision in the stimulus, and opposition from the left to expanded free trade (e.g. the proposed Colombia agreement--although that case is more complicated), this would be a tough sell in Congress.
''We are part of the crisis and we are part of (CAFTA-DR), so it is their obligation to give resources to the region,'' Ortega said.
Ortega then ordered his deputy foreign minister Manuel Coronel Kauz to present the idea of the bailout to U.S. Vice President Joe Biden during next week's regional meeting in Costa Rica, which the Nicaraguan president said won't be attending [sic].
H/T The Corner
Mar 26 2009, 1:56PM
Should Obama Think Twice about Pot?
Mar 26 2009, 12:45PM
Assessing The Obama Online Town Hall Meeting
I've been critical of the White House New Media office before, but I think they deserve kudos today for instigating and executing the President's first online town hall meeting. (Macon Phillips, the new media director, and Jesse Lee, the online programs director, spent a long time putting this together.) One -- the White House says that Obama wasn't briefed about the questions in advance. Two -- several questions weren't softballs. Three -- the White House web servers had enough bandwith to accomodate the demand. (To test them, I pulled it up simultaneously on several computers without a program.) To the extent that the new media operation got off to a slow start -- not really their fault, for a variety of legal, structural and economic reasons, this event will go a long away toward building that team some institutional credibility within the White House. An administration offficial said that approximately 64,000 people tuned in -- not a huge amount, to be sure, but the multiplier effect of news coverage will expand the audience. MSNBC and Fox News broadcast part of it; CNN is sticking through the whole thing.
Mar 26 2009, 12:13PM
Obama Jokes About Pot-Brained Online Audience
"Can I just interrupt, Jared, before you ask the next question, just to say that, you know, we -- we took -- we took votes about which questions were going to be asked, and I think 3 million people voted or 3.5 million people voted. I have to say that there was one question that was voted on that ranked fairly high, and that was whether legalizing marijuana would improve the economy and job creation.
And I don't know what this says about the online audience... (laughter)
... but I just want -- I don't want people to think that -- this was a fairly popular question. We want to make sure that it was answered.
The answer is, no, I don't think that is a good strategy to grow our economy. So -- all right...
Mar 26 2009, 12:03PM
Why Obama Can't Satisfy The Left
As Democrats settle in to power, two distinct, and somewhat dissonant, lines of complaint are emerging from leaders on the left. One charges that Obama is deferring too much to Wall Street and its party allies in his response to the financial crisis. In just the past week, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has written that Obama's financial stabilization plan fills him with "despair"; his colleague, Frank Rich, has suggested that Obama's handling of the AIG bonuses might be his "Katrina moment" and Internet doyenne Arianna Huffington has urged Obama to strip authority for the financial rescue from Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. That's insufficient for liberal columnist and activist David Sirota: he wants Obama to fire Geithner because "he's either lying to the public or totally incompetent."
Mar 26 2009, 11:46AM
Pot On The Brain of WH Questioners
According to the White House,more than 90,000 people submitted more than 104,000 questions and cast 3.6 million votes on which to ask President Obama. The top-rated question under the category of "fiscal stability" is, you guessed it, about pot. "Would you support the bill currently going through the California legislation to legalize and tax marijuana, boosting the economy and reducing drug cartel related violence?" Top question in the budget category: "With over 1 out of 30 Americans controlled by the penal system, why not legalize, control, and tax marijuana to change the failed war on drugs into a money making, money saving boost to the economy? Do we really need that many victimless criminals?" Come on, small business category, bail the White House out. The top-rated question: "[What specifically can the federal govt do to lower the cost of providing quality health coverage for small business owners."
Mar 26 2009, 11:04AM
A Push for Prison Reform
Prison reform is a difficult thing to achieve, politically. Nearly every politician wants to be perceived as "tough on crime," and suggesting that too many Americans are being incarcerated can seem to run against that. (Webb has, in fact, pointed out that the U.S. has attained the highest incarceration rate in the world.) Add tough discussions of prison conditions, inmate crime, and abuse, and it's not an easy task for a politician to undertake.
Mar 26 2009, 9:38AM
Organizing for America Plugs Budget in TV Ad
Mar 25 2009, 6:52PM
Obama Has His Facts...
Mar 25 2009, 6:28PM
43 Gets Heel Heat On Raw?
Mar 25 2009, 5:09PM
Quote of the Day: Reid on Obama's Budget Pitch
Multimedia
Mar 25 2009, 5:02PM
Obama: We'll Continue to Monitor Border
Mar 25 2009, 3:46PM
Conservationists Heart Congress
Omnibus Public Lands Act Passes Congress: Hikers Rejoice!
To the 75 million Americans who hike each year, today is a day to celebrate!...
"Not since the National Park System was created in 1916 has a single action of Congress had a greater positive impact on our ability to enjoy, take pride in and benefit from America's incredible trails and natural resources," said Gregory Miller, American Hiking Society president. "Americans should give thanks that Congress has answered our needs with such leadership. Now, we should prepare to care for the trails that our families will enjoy for generations to come."
Mar 25 2009, 3:23PM
Clinton in the Mexican Papers
Headline, Reforma: "Hillary Arrives and Lands a Blow against Drug Trafficking"
Ana Maria Salazar, blogger for El Universal: "All of this is happening in light of some worrisome polls. A recent Gallup poll tells us that Americans' positive opinion of Mexico has fallen from 74% in 2006 to 51% in 2009, a 23% drop. At this point, Egypt and China are more popular than Mexico, just to put this visit in context."
Jorge Fernandez Menendez, columnist for Excelsior, on Clinton's arrival and the recently announced plan to beef up the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's operations along the border:
...a fundamental component: it will seek -- at least this is what Napolitano said in her presentation -- to close off the flow of arms and money from the United States to Mexico, and, in addition, to be attentive to the flow of drugs and violence from here toward the other side of the border.
I don't think that the increase in the number of American military or National Guard forces (or of any other security agency) will alone achieve any important success in this enterprise. But if the increase happens along with intelligence work and real exchange of information, it can advance a lot. It stands out, in accordance with the announced plan, that there must be a great emphasis on the interchange of information and intelligence between the armies of each country, because this subject has always found resistance from both sides of the border. One should also note the large presence of agents and units of the DEA, above all because on many occasions the DEA hasn't succeeded in maintaining a common strategy with its counterparts in Mexico.
Mar 25 2009, 1:30PM
Andrew Cuomo's Too-Tough Tactics?
Today's provocation: New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo was way out of line when he called AIG's bonus recipients and, as The New York Times reported, "persuaded" nine out of the top 10 to give their bonus money back. With national outrage setting a mandate for the money to be returned, Cuomo may have saved the day, and surely he deserves the gratitude of President Obama's supporters for singlehandedly rendering a House proposal obsolete and saving Obama from making a decision. We don't know what he said on the phone to those executives--perhaps the conversations were polite--but the whole thing reeks of coercion. Explicit or not, the possibility loomed that Cuomo would release the executives' names, and it seems inappropriate for the state's top law enforcement official to call people for the purpose of convincing them to act in a certain way, without any laws having been broken.
Mar 25 2009, 11:35AM
State Secrets Privilege Invoked Again
Mar 25 2009, 11:09AM
Obama and the Teleprompter
Mar 25 2009, 10:34AM
Obama Gets Political with Fundraisers, Endorsement
The DNC trailed the Republican National Committee (RNC) in February fundraising (taking in $3.2 million from individual donors compared to the RNC's $5 million), so it will look to use the president's star power to play catchup. The DNC won't publicize its haul from today's events until it files with the Federal Election Commission next month, so we'll have to wait to see whether Obama still has the touch.
Mar 25 2009, 10:22AM
The Great Big Budget Blowup Isn't.
Mar 25 2009, 10:09AM
Orszag: Where Are the GOP Alternatives?
Mar 25 2009, 9:42AM
Democrats v. Democrats, Gently
Mar 24 2009, 10:09PM
The Obama Presser: "Persistence"
Mar 24 2009, 7:10PM
Obama To Host E-Townhall Meeting Thursday
This experiment is about encouraging transparency and accountability, so ask the President exactly what it is you want to know - but let others do the same. It is a community-moderated system, but remember that even though you may not like the viewpoint behind someone's question, everyone has a right to their opinion. Also remember that Americans of all ages will be participating in this event, so be thoughtful about the words you choose. Participants are asked to follow some basic guidelines for submitting their own questions and flagging other questions as inappropriate.
Mar 24 2009, 5:19PM
Tonight: Selling Sacrifice, Long-term
Mar 24 2009, 4:51PM
Can You Cheat Geithner's Bank Plan?
--I become a "bidder" and "bid" on my own assets at [an inflated price]
--I am providing 5 or 10% of the money. The rest is covered by Treasury, The Fed and the FDIC via guaranteed bond issuance.
--The loan, ex my contribution, is non-recourse. That is, I can lose 5 or 10% of the total portfolio purchased, but nothing more.
But this probably won't work. The problem lies in step one: You can't bid on your own assets in the manner Denninger describes. The Treasury guidlines (pdf) aren't totally clear on this point, in part because the sentence restricting bidding on one's own assets looks like it as written by William Faulkner. But here is the restriction:
Mar 24 2009, 4:07PM
Does The Senate Need to Act On AIG Bonuses?
Mar 24 2009, 3:56PM
Meghan McCain, Youth Spokeswoman
Mar 24 2009, 3:53PM
Specter Doesn't Close Door on Card Check Forever
"The problems of the recession make this a particularly bad time to enact Employees Free Choice legislation. Employers understandably complain that adding a burden would result in further job losses. If efforts are unsuccessful to give Labor sufficient bargaining power through amendments to the NLRA, then I would be willing to reconsider Employees' Free Choice legislation when the economy returns to normalcy."By 2010, regardless of whether Specter is re-elected, Democrats will (probably) have another shot at card check, and here Specter is indicating a political compromise: give me the cover for two years, and I'll give you the 60th vote in 2010. Of course, if the economy IS in recovery by then, the urgency to pass pro-labor legislation might be less acute.
Mar 24 2009, 2:38PM
One Question I Might Ask Obama....
Are you concerned that your rhetoric about anger, and particularly, anger against Wall Street, helped enflame public anger and distract attention from the economy's real problems?
Mar 24 2009, 2:32PM
Life, Taken For Granted
Mar 24 2009, 2:16PM
A Rescue Plan for Newspapers
Mar 24 2009, 1:52PM
Report: Specter To Oppose Cloture On "Card Check"
CongressDaily reports in a breaking news e-mail that "Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., will vote against a cloture motion to limit debate on the Employee Free Choice Act, business groups said today." As CD notes, if true, this pretty much puts the kibosh on card check for this Congress, as Democrats can count on no more than 59 votes (assuming other Democrats didn't defect.)
Mar 24 2009, 1:09PM
Obama Relatively Free of AIG Worries
Perhaps this has something to do with the ultimate decision never reaching Obama's desk. A House proposal took the hard line, looking to tax the bonuses into oblivion. The Senate didn't weigh in to the idea decisively before the poll was taken. And New York Attorney Andrew Cuomo, out front on the issue from the start, persuaded most of the executives to return the money, exempting Obama from action.
Mar 24 2009, 12:49PM
Napolitano Beefs Up Border
Mar 24 2009, 12:07PM
Economy: East Vs. West
Mar 24 2009, 11:28AM
Gore Looks to Rally Action with New Book
Mar 24 2009, 11:27AM
Make Haste, Slowly
The second is the need to consider not short term consequences or long-term consequences, but interim consequences. This point is often lost. The federal government, not Congress, will manage the aftermath of any action it takes. It can reliably project short-term consequences and probably can envision long-term consequences - they are only a few real possibilities. 2nd order effects of actions - what happens between the solution being implemented and the problem being solved - are notoriously, extraordinarily difficult to envision. Fixing the economic crisis is like playing three-dimensional dominoes.
The administration has heard shouts for nationalization, for firing the bums, for breaking the banks into pieces, for making them eat their losses, and believe you me, there are officials who are privately advocates of all of these positions. What's kept the administration from being as bold as its critics want is not a lack of imagination, or a lack of contact with the outside world, or an overreliance on the banks. (Speaking of questions about boldness: Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner has co-signed several trillion dollar loan facilities and is testifying today in support of the power for a government to take over a company it considers to be at-risk.)
It's a combination of the knowledge that Obama cannot do big things unless he remains a majority president, that he could make a hash of them if Congress perceives that the administration is pushing too close to the boundary of what's acceptable, and that the administration has accepted that it cannot allow Congress to be a partner in leading the American people towards a solution. The stimulus package debate in February was dispositive; the administration lost confidence in Congress's maturity fairly quickly;
Here are some interim concerns to which the administration has no answers - and neither does Congress.
What would happen if there bank runs at financial institutions that were nationalized?
What would happen if there were major stock sell-offs at financial institutions whose management has been sacked by the government?
What would happen if there were bank runs at financial institutions during any interim period between said management sack and the installation of new management?
What about the real possibility of small businesses collapsing when financial institutions are forced to call in their loans because they need capital to improve their balance sheets before nationalization? (Access to credit is already severely crimped.)
What would happen if most economic option for a bank would seem to be foreign bank purchases of American financial institutions?
Is Treasury's failure to do the big thing a failure of courage? You can argue that the administration should have the courage to propose a bold thing like nationalization and then force/convince/sway Congress and keep them on board. But there's no courage in proposing a bold thing that lacks 60 Senate votes.
My sense is that the administration is willing to go to Bigger Fixes if their piece-meal fixes fail. They've deliberately chosen the least-bumpy path - one that traverses the fewest rapids - the path that Congress finds acceptable.
Further options -- full public disclosure by the Treasury, deeper government intervention, drafts of what a reorganized financial sector would look like, estimates of the cost and scale and scope of nationalization of the behemoths - all should all be out there and batted around, even when (especially when) it's inconvenient to Treasury or the White House. The crisis is too important for everyone to avoid these questions.
But the crisis is too urgent for the administration to avoid asking themselves: 'And then what happens?'
Mar 24 2009, 10:14AM
Quote of the Day: Emanuel on Geithner's Plan
Mar 24 2009, 9:43AM
Housing Turnaround?
Mar 23 2009, 6:07PM
Quote of the Day: Geithner on Financial System
Multimedia
Mar 23 2009, 5:45PM
'Are You Punch Drunk?'
Mar 23 2009, 5:40PM
Tim Geithner's "Buy America"?
All countries need to sustain a commitment to open trade and investment policies which are essential to economic growth and prosperity.
From the fund manager application (pdf) for Treasury's new public-private investment fund:
Fund Managers will be pre-qualified based upon criteria that are anticipated to include [...] Headquarters in the United States.
Mar 23 2009, 4:04PM
How Geithner's Plan Leads to Nationalization
Mar 23 2009, 3:15PM
Republicans Concerned about Taxpayer Risk
House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA) became an economic spokesman for House Republicans earlier this year when he was tasked with leading the group that drafted a GOP counter-proposal to President Obama's stimulus. Today, he said the administration's toxic assets plan is "fundamentally flawed." His statement (excerpted):
This weekend, the details of Secretary Geithner's plan to remove toxic assets from the market emerged. Now that the plan has been released, I am increasingly concerned that it is fundamentally flawed. As described, the plan seems to offer little incentive for private investors to participate unless the subsidy is made so rich that it comes at the expense of the taxpayer. In its current form, Secretary Geithner's plan is a shell game that hides the true cost of the program from the taxpayers that will be asked to pay for it. Six months after Congress debated the first TARP, it is inexcusable that taxpayers still have not been told their true exposure.
Mar 23 2009, 2:58PM
Responding to Geithner: Reid
The Treasury Department plan is based on the sound principle that if we are to revive our economy, we must unfreeze the credit markets so people can get the loans they need to keep their small businesses open, buy a car or send their children to college. Like any investment, this plan carries the potential for both risk and reward. But above all, we must act - one risk we will not take is standing on the sidelines and doing nothing while a bad situation gets worse.Noticeably, this statement hedges against potential criticism of the risk. But it looks like the major point to be taken away from this--perhaps a point other Democrats will pick up on in discussing the plan--is something they've been saying since the stimulus: there may be risks, but we can't afford not to act.
Mar 23 2009, 2:01PM
Markets Like Geithner's Plan
Stock markets get rampantly overused as indicators of whether or not something is good, but today's gains are significant. Geithner's plan was not only designed to rally investor confidence, it depends largely on investor confidence--and the willingness of private investors to partner with the government in buying toxic assets as part of the Public-Private Investment Program, touted by Geithner as a main piece of the plan.
Mar 23 2009, 12:20PM
AIG Employees Must Decide Today
Mar 23 2009, 11:05AM
Gallows Humor
Here are some excerpts:
Mar 23 2009, 10:17AM
Geithner Lays Out His Bank Plan
Moving forward, we as a nation must work together to strike the right balance between our need to promote the public trust and using taxpayer money prudently to strengthen the financial system, while also ensuring the trust of those market participants who we need to do their part to get credit flowing to working families and businesses -- large and small -- across this nation.
This requires those in the private sector to remember that government assistance is a privilege, not a right. When financial institutions come to us for direct financial assistance, our government has a responsibility to ensure these funds are deployed to expand the flow of credit to the economy, not to enrich executives or shareholders. These provisions need to be designed and applied in a way that does not deter the participation by the private sector in generally available programs to stabilize the housing markets, jump-start the credit markets, and rid banks of legacy assets.
Mar 22 2009, 1:31PM
Geithner As Obama's Rumsfeld
Mar 21 2009, 5:18PM
The "Third Way" On Card Check
Mar 21 2009, 2:45PM
Obama Lashes Back At Cheney
Here's more from CBS:
Pressed by Kroft that some of the released prisoners have returned to terrorist groups, the president said, "There is no doubt that we have not done a particularly effective job in sorting through who are truly dangerous individuals...to make sure [they] are not a threat to us," he says. But he called the Bush administration's policy on detainees at Guantanamo -including long incarcerations with no trials - "unsustainable."
Mar 21 2009, 2:36PM
EFCA Compromise: An Update
Mar 20 2009, 8:53PM
Whispers Of A Card Check Compromise?
Mark Mix, president of National Right To Work Committee, said that "these huge companies are apparently willing to sell out hundreds of thousands of small ones under the guise of making some phony and misguided compromise with Big Labor."
Mar 20 2009, 3:47PM
Bonus Backlash: Dem Strategy
This has been the strategy for the NRCC across the board: tie Democrats to the stimulus and its bonuses provision and suggest that, in backing it, they also backed the AIG bonuses. Murphy, who supported the stimulus, has said the bonuses are disgraceful and now backs a House plan to tax them. He is facing the brunt of the GOP's stimulus/bonuses/AIG mode of attack right now.
Other Democratic House candidates don't have to deal with stimulus/AIG attacks too directly yet; their elections are a ways off. But Murphy's strategy can give us a window into how Democrats will respond to the GOP's AIG criticism.
Mar 20 2009, 1:48PM
CBO's Score Won't Deter Obama
Mar 20 2009, 1:10PM
Dems Choosing Health Care Over Cap-N-Trade?
This is big news: Democrats have mapped out their legislative strategy for passing health care reform this year. According to George Stephanopoulos, Democrats will work with Republicans to build consensus around a plan, and then, if that doesn't work, they'll write the revenue-generating-and-substracting provisions of whatever health care plan they come up with into the FY 2010 budget resolution. As important: the budget reconciliation process, which circumvents moderate Democratic and GOP discontent in the Senate, will NOT be used to set up a carbon emissions credit trading system. Cap-and-trade was always the tougher sell to Congress. Americans don't understand it; members of Congress from coal-producing states worry about job losses in their state (they call it a transfer of wealth); consumers would be forced to pay more in the short-term for energy. Why did Obama chose health care? Here's a good explanantion from the perspective of policy. Politically, health care reform is more easily swallowed than cap-and-trade and probably less expensive, especially if Obama endorses large-but-incremental incisions over massive surgery. Curiously, though, if, during the transition, you had asked (future) administration officials to predict whether, if a choice had to be made, health care or cap-n-trade would see more action this year, just as many would have placed a bet on cap-and-trade. "As part of our ongoing conversations with Democrats and Republicans on the Hill, senior aides met with Hill aides last night to discuss the budget, but no decisions were made," an administration official said.
Mar 20 2009, 12:55PM
Provocation of the Day: Blinded by Hysteria
No one should be outraged about the bonuses, Lewis says: they pale in comparison to the $173 billion in bailout money injected into AIG, these people probably didn't have much to do with AIG's failure, we shouldn't encourage them to leave, and the government would harm the company by proving its contracts are no good. But, more importantly AIG hysteria has obscured the moral of the financial crisis, Lewis says, namely that greedy individual borrowers were to blame:
As the financial crisis has evolved its moral has been simplified, grotesquely. In the beginning this crisis was messy. Wall Street financiers behaved horribly but so did ordinary Americans. Millions of people borrowed money they shouldn't have borrowed and, not, typically, because they were duped or defrauded but because they were covetous and greedy: they wanted to own stuff they hadn't earned the right to buy...
Mar 20 2009, 11:57AM
DNC Launches Major Campaign To Pass Budget
The Democratic National Committee's 50-state canvass this weekend in support of President Obama's budget proposals marks the beginning of a months-long election-style campaign and includes several elements not previously disclosed, including automated telephone calls.
The calls, from DNC chairman Tim Kaine, the governor of
Obama's political team hopes to use the budget process to pass hundreds of billions of dollars worth of downpayments on his two signature domestic policy priorities.
"What we're really saying," said a Democratic strategist involved in the campaign, "is that this is a budget here, but all of these pieces...they're so central to function the economy, and this budget is a downpayment on any substantive reform that the president seeks on those - in those areas. If President Obama doesn't get a significant placeholder for health care reform, what are the prospects that you're going to get that going forward?"
The same is true, the strategist said, of Obama's energy and education reform proposals.
Republicans and Moderate Democrats in Congress are balking at using budget rules to rush through significant changes to current policy.
But Brad Woodhouse, the DNC's communications director, said that the DNC's effort, operated by its Organizing for
Though the DNC is not currently sharing information about its efforts with outside liberal groups, Democratic officials do expect that, if individual members of Congress would benefit from a fathom of pressure, the outside groups will perform that function, allowing the DNC to avoid having to get into conflicts with Democratic members of Congress.
The canvasses - more than 1100 are scheduled -- are the first major national project of Organizing for
The messaging is fairly generic at this point; the DNC hasn't sent any urgent pleas to its membership, mostly because key votes in Congress are weeks, if not months away.
DNC officials have ways to measure whether their canvassing efforts translate into telephone calls and will be using the results to see whether Obama's campaign volunteer corps can be effectively mobilized to help Obama pass legislation. Pledge drives will be use as earned media hooks in local television markets; the DNC estimates that several hundred thousand Democrats will sign their names toward passage of the budget.
On the heels of the canvass, the DNC is expected to announce the deployment of new organizing staff into all 50 states; that will coincide with a ramping up of campaign-like activities throughout the spring.
Republicans are eager to join the battle.
"When the DNC has to launch a massive campaign to convince their own moderate Democrats to support the President's budget, it speaks volumes about how far outside the mainstream this agenda really is," said Brad Dayspring, a spokesperson for House Minority Whip Eric Cantor. "We hope that Republicans and moderate Democrats can convince the Administration to return to the political center so that we can work together on bipartisan solutions to help small businesses and middle class families overcome the economic challenges they face."
Mar 20 2009, 11:50AM
Special Olympics Bowler: Obama Couldn't Beat Me
We could be in luck: Obama suggested hosting Special Olympics athletes at the White House when he called to Special Olympics Chairman Tim Shriver yesterday to apologize for his bowling joke on The Tonight Show, according to Shriver: "He...said he was ready to have some of our athletes over to the White House to bowl or play basketball or help him improve his score," Shriver said. The White House wouldn't say whether a bowling showdown with McConiughey is in the cards, but the Michigan native could, no doubt, help Obama improve on round of 129 he claimed to have bowled during the Leno interview.
Multimedia
Mar 20 2009, 11:27AM
Obama's Video Message to Iran
Mar 20 2009, 11:11AM
Quote of the Day: Special Olympics Chairman Tim Shriver on Obama's Special Olympics Joke
Mar 20 2009, 10:50AM
Would Obama Sign The House Bonus Bill?
My informed guess is: no, he woud not. Though the President said last night that the vote "rightly reflects the outrage that so many feel over the lavish bonuses that AIG provided its employees at the expense of the taxpayers who have kept this failed company afloat," he said he looks forward to "receiving a final product that will serve as a strong signal to the executives who run these firms that such compensation will not be tolerated." Hardly a ringing endorsement of the bill, which would levy a 90% additional tax on bonuses doled by companies who've been given more than $5 billion from the public till. The administration worries that the bill is unconstitutional, overly punitive in some ways and too narrowly targeted in others (why companies couldn't simply figure out a non-bonus way to make up for the compensation loss is not evident), and that it does not advance the larger goal of reform. The other side of the argument is that Congress is going to do what it wants to do, the White House will have no choice (given the politics) but to agree, and the sooner this legislation gets signed into law, the sooner Congress can get back to the business of the nation.
Mar 20 2009, 10:29AM
The Bracket of Evil
Mar 20 2009, 9:21AM
Sigh. (Irony Alert.)
Later in the afternoon, the President and the First Lady will attend a reception with the National Newspaper Publisher Association in the State Dining Room, where they will be presented the Newsmaker of the Year award. This event is closed press.
Mar 20 2009, 9:18AM
Obama And The Fourfold Path
For the second time since the inauguration, Obama White House faces a real populist revolt directed at the apparatus of government it now controls. How quickly they can quell the controversy will determine whether its effects are lasting.
Mar 19 2009, 4:58PM
Obama 'Confident' House Dems Will Support Budget
The 51 Blue Dogs probably can't defeat the budget, but it's the arena in which Obama wants to advance health care reform and cap and trade--the two biggest domestic policy initiatives for his first term in office. As a result, he'd likely prefer to have his party united behind it.
Mar 19 2009, 4:44PM
Contest: Rename AIG
Yesterday, AIG CEO Edward Liddy told Congress that the name of his company was so tarnished that it would probably have to rename itself. Liddy has a lot on his mind these days, so let's help him out. How would YOU rename AIG?
Mar 19 2009, 4:40PM
Obama Brushes Off Coach K Criticism
Mar 19 2009, 4:30PM
Afghanistan Review Update
I'm hearing from the administraton that President Obama will publicly discuss the results of Bruce Riedel's interagency Afghanistan/Pakistan policy review within the week, as expected. Technically, the review is complete; it's now being circulated among policymakers, which is why details (like the endorsement of a huge expansion of the Afghan army) are beginning to leak out. Riedel, incidentally, is in the entourage of Obama's trip to California. Today, regarding the notion of a "civillian surge," a State Department spokesman told reporters that "the precise number of additional civilian employees at our Mission in Afghanistan has not yet been determined," although he noted that 80 had been added since September of 2008.
Mar 19 2009, 3:00PM
Whitman: No Comment on Town Hall
Mar 19 2009, 2:29PM
Oversight Still Getting Off the Ground
The status of the Board is what you might expect just 30 days after the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (the Recovery Act) was signed into law. Specifically, the Board is in the process of acquiring staff, equipment, and office space, essentially trying to keep our heads above water and ensure that the Board fulfills all of its responsibilities under the Recovery Act. Our first Board meeting will be held next week.Also interesting is that Devaney sees his first role as maintaining the Recovery.gov website. Devaney said:
Regarding the Board's purpose, I view the Board as having a dual mission. First, the Board is responsible for establishing and maintaining a website, the purpose of which is not only to foster historic levels of transparency of Recovery funds but also to do so in a user-friendly manner. Second, the Board will coordinate and conduct oversight of Recovery funds to prevent fraud, waste or abuse.That's not to say we should read too much into the order in which Devaney presented his board's two functions, but it hints at the significant role transparency, as an idea, is playing in how the Obama administration views its responsibilities of stimulus oversight.
Mar 19 2009, 1:14PM
Odds on Geithner
Mar 19 2009, 1:11PM
Obama Has Rahm; Hollywood Has Ari
Mar 19 2009, 11:22AM
Politics & Basketball in N.C.
Well, one Carolina native isn't happy: Duke's Coach K. Leading the Drudge Report this morning is a story about Mike Krzyzewski saying, "As much as I respect what he's [Obama is] doing, really, the economy is something that he should focus on, probably more than the brackets."
Mar 19 2009, 10:57AM
Toxic Asset Plan On Track
An administration offiicial says that the Department of Treasury is on track to roll out its plan to remove toxic assets off of distressed bank ledgers early next week. Originally, that plan was slated for a Friday roll-out; it's been postponed; it's not clear whether the news about AIG intervened here.
Mar 19 2009, 10:50AM
TARP Firms Have Unpaid Tax Bills
As quoted by CongressDaily, subcommittee Chairman John Lewis (D-GA) isn't happy about it, and he doesn't think the American people will be, either. We'll have to wait and see whether this fans the outrage over AIG, but if it does, it could mean more criticism for the Treasury in particular: TARP firms were required to be current on taxes in order to receive bailout funds, but the Treasury didn't ask them to turn over their tax info. Instead, the Treasury relied on signed statements from the firms. This may have been a Paulson issue more than a Geithner issue, but a lot of people aren't too interested in such details these days.
Mar 19 2009, 10:02AM
Rethinking The JournoList List
Mar 19 2009, 9:51AM
Dodd Expands On His Story
The Banking Committee chairman issued a statement yesterday reminding everyone that he was a leader in the fight to limit executive pay (the original clause about executive pay, after all, was his), and including language at the new administration's behest is not the same as pushing for the bonus protection clause on his own. But the RNC is already hammering Dodd over this, and no one, I think, will be surprised to see slow-motion, black-and-white footage of Dodd's CNN appearance in ads run in 2010 by the National Republican Senatorial Committee or Rob Simmons, Dodd's potential GOP opponent.
Mar 19 2009, 8:58AM
Toxic Assets And AIG
Mar 18 2009, 8:17PM
A Bracket You Can Believe In
Obama clearly knows his stuff. He's played pickup ball in Chicago for a number of years (with fellow Illinois politicos David Axelrod, Education Secretary Arne Duncan, and Illinois State Treasurer Alexi Giannoilias), and he scrimmaged last summer with the UNC squad. His no-looks are presidential; his jumper, commanderly. Sports Illustrated has praised his game.
So while the nation waits to see what kind of leader Obama will be, the answer is right before us. You can tell a lot about a president by looking at his bracket.
Mar 18 2009, 6:54PM
How's It Playing? The Country Internalizes AIG Anger
Mar 18 2009, 6:52PM
Obama: 'Complete Confidence' in Geithner
Mar 18 2009, 3:28PM
Reconciliation, Thy Name Is Democracy
There are two ways to look at the The White House / Democratic party noises about pushing health care and energy reform through the budget reconciliation process. One -- the White House is simply bluffing, hoping that the threat will help them bank at least 60 votes in the Senate for cloture on important measures. Two -- the White House and Democrats know (almost) exactly what they want to do on health care and energy, and they're not going to let procedure (especially Senate procedure) slow them down.
Mar 18 2009, 3:20PM
Pressuring the Blue Dogs
Liberal activist group USAction will air TV ads pressuring four Blue Dog Democrats on the House Budget Committee to support President Obama's budget, the group announced today. It also started robocalls targeting the members last week. The members are Reps. Marion Berry (AK), Allen Boyd (FL), Charlie Melancon (LA), and Chet Edwards (TX).
Mar 18 2009, 1:40PM
Economic Crisis: a Case for Finance Reform?
It is, according to Democracy 21 founder Fred Wertheimer, whose group seeks to fight the influence money enjoys in U.S. politics and policy. In a phone conversation today, Wertheimer suggested that money's influence helped create the crisis.
Mar 18 2009, 1:11PM
The Gloves Come Off
White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel just had to scratch that itch. Speaking for the President and to the New York Times yesterday, he called the contretemps over the AIG news a "distraction" from the "main priority of getting the financial system stabilized." It is worth unpacking these words. Emanuel did not mean to betray an ambivalence about the outrage of the bonuses. Remember: the chief is supposed to be the longest-term thinker in the White House. He knows that the White House either rolls back on its heels, becomes defensive, and yields to the diversion, or Obama uses AIG as an example to catalyze public support for significant regulatory reform.
Secretary Tim Geithner, his deputies and other administration officials have been working with corporations to craft these proposals. Indeed, Geithner's gotten a lot of guff for allegedly being too friendly with the banks; the administration has vacillated between tough anti-Wall Street rhetoric and prudence (or excessive caution) when it comes to asserting its domain. Today, Obama seemed to indicate the Era of Good Feeling is over. "Just as outrageous," he said, is the "culture that these bonuses are a symptom of a situation where excess greed, excess compensation, excess risk-taking have all made us vulnerable and left us holding the bag." He addressed Wall Street directly: "As we get out of this crisis, as we work towards getting ourselves out of this recession: I hope that Wall Street and the marketplace don't think we can return to business as usual."
This is more than tough rhetoric: I take this to mean that the administration will use the AIG crisis to take a more active role than it otherwise would have. Wall Street has been waiting for the Treasury Department's plan to mitigate the poison and the credit-market-locking effect of toxic assets held by major banks. The administration's economic commanders would prefer to create public-private partnerships to remove those assets from the books of especially troubled institutions; the government and corporations would share the risks. When Obama says explicitly - "My interest is not protecting the banks," he's scaring that capital away. Why would a hedge fund want to subject itself to the scrutiny that AIG is currently receiving?
One sign that Obama really means this: he called Tim Geithner the hardest-working Treasury Secretary since Alexander Hamilton and is standing by a man who is now thoroughly distrusted by the finance sector of the economy. Make no mistake: you can blame - or credit - CNBC with introducing the notion that, because Geithner doesn't inspire confidence, whatever that means, he might want to think about resigning.
I don't believe the administration is worried about rhetorical overkill, either; what they don't want is a singular focus on AIG. Democrats seem incapable of explaining why the bonus codicil was added to the stimulus package, and so there's a danger of backlash if the public decides to blame the party in power.
Several senior administration officials explain the reasoning this way: they believe that Wall Street and the financial industry have no credibility with the American people; every day, with every new revelation, Old Capitalism (my phrase) discredits itself. The public may be skeptical of particular solutions, but they have faith in Obama's ability to dictate the terms of the recovery.
Mar 18 2009, 12:16PM
GOP Looks to Capitalize on AIG Confusion
Mar 18 2009, 11:27AM
The AIG Retention Contract
Mar 18 2009, 10:14AM
Bush Vs. Cheney on Obama
Mar 18 2009, 8:17AM
Geithner's Not On The Block
"Obama never wanted to fire Geithner," the official said. "That was not contemplated."
And the same official insists that Geithner is riding through the storm.
Mar 17 2009, 7:20PM
AIG: What's Happening Now
A few things seem reasonably clear:
1. The administration can't force AIG to abrogate the bonus contracts; they're claiming their hands were tied by Congress (and Chris Dodd in particular); they're not going to claim or invent any new legal authority here.
2. The administration will subtract the bonus money from the latest $30 billion loan extended to AIG.
3. Congress will pass a law levying an excise tax; it will probably apply to a range of companies -- not just AIG; the law will be challenged in court.
4. The Fed and the Treasury did not -- could not -- review all of the employment contracts.
5. The singular focus on executive compensation restrictions after the fact obscures -- though does not excuse -- the atmosphere during the House/Senate/White House negotiations on the stimulus bill.
6. Watch for the Treasury and the Fed to begin a new review of contracts for top executives/performers/traders at major banks/financial institutions. It's not clear what the government can do, but they don't want to be surprised
Mar 17 2009, 6:10PM
Don't Blame Chris Dodd For The Bonuses
Sen. Chris Dodd, facing the lowest approval ratings of any Senate Democratic incumbent,is in political purgatory. But on the subject of AIG's bonuses, he doesn't deserve the bad rap. Dodd is being blamed for OKing a proviso in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act guaranteeing previously sanctioned employment contracts. He faces intense political pressure because of his long-standing friendship with bankers and lenders, which has made him a key player in the negotiations between financial institutions and the government. In a statement yesterday, Dodd called on AIG executives to voluntarily refuse their bonuses. The truth is that the codicil was added in conference by mutual agreement of House and Senate Democrats and the White House. At the time, the administration worried about both the perception and the reality of government's interfering in the decisions and internal operations of the banks. Backstopping employment contracts was controversial to critics, but to an administration that was trying to work with the banks, it was an easy call. The worry was that the banks would suffer immediate and disasterous brain drain if the govenment could abrogate (the world of the week!) employment contracts willy-nilly. Apparently, no one at the Treasury Department or the New York Federal Reserve Board bothered to check on what those contracts actually contained - therein was the sin of omission, if you can call it that. How many tens of thousands of employees does AIG have? And didn't Geithner recuse himself from dealing with AIG?
Multimedia
Mar 17 2009, 4:51PM
Santelli: AIG Bonuses Pale in Comparison to Bailouts
Mar 17 2009, 4:43PM
Laurence Tribe: Is Taxing AIG Legal?
I'm not a lawyer, so I asked Laurence Tribe of Harvard -- who, in addition to being one of President Obama's law professors, also argued one of the most important Bill of Attainder cases at the Appellate level: SBC Commnications v. FCC. (As far as I know the Supreme Court has not considered the attainder issue in reference to economic regulation.) I will have more to say about this issue later, but for now I've posted Professor Tribe's response to my inquiry, which is after the jump. I've also posted a short and helpful Harvard Law Note from Professor Thomas Lee of Fordham, which helped me clarify some of the attainder issues.
Mar 17 2009, 4:31PM
Quote of the Day: Shelby on Geithner
Mar 17 2009, 4:25PM
Taxing The Bonuses: An Update
Congress is trying to figure out if they have the authority to somehow block the AIG derivative traders from receiving their bonus money; some sort of legislative activity is expected this week. So far, the Democratic leadership has yet to sign on to Rep. Gary Peters's bill, which would levy a 60% surtax on bonuses over $10,000 for any company in which the government owns more than 79%. The thinking here is that only AIG meets that threshold, and that the 60% surtax, when added to the 35% income tax rate for the traders, would reduce the effective bonus to near zero. State and local taxes would account for the rest. Peters is a member of the House Financial Services Committee. Other options on the table include an unspecified "authorization" to the Attorney General to recover excess compensation.
Mar 17 2009, 3:00PM
Obama's New Organizing Tool
I'm a little underwhelmed. The new Obama for America organizing tool is designed to help Obama supporters and Democrats pressure members of Congress on the budget. Enter in your address and zip code and your members(s) of Congress's telephone number pops up along with a suggested call script. That's basically it. Kind of not very tricked out. Also: I'm sure I'm offending someone at the Democratic National Committee, but couldn't the author of the script have used more natural language?
Hello, my name is __________ and I'm calling you from __________ (city or town).
I'm calling today because we are in the grips of the worst economic crisis in generations -- and President Obama needs the support of every member of Congress to create jobs, fix our economy and rebuild and renew America.
The President has proposed a budget that is honest, responsible and invests in the priorities we need to get our economy moving again and create jobs now and in the future, including:
- Renewable energy to reduce our dependence on foreign sources of oil
- Making Health Care more affordable for every American by cutting costs
- Improving education so our children are prepared for the jobs of the 21st Century
Can I count on Rep./Sen._________ to support the President's plan?
Mar 17 2009, 1:44PM
Offshore Focus Shifts to Renewables
One potential source of renewable energy is the Outer Continental Shelf, previously a hotly debated source of oil drilling. Today, Salazar appeared before the Senate Energy Committee to discuss the future of offshore waters. And, for any casual observer who witnessed the Republicans' hammering of Democrats in the offshore drilling debate last year, today's topic of discussion--using offshore lands for wind and wave energy--was likely a surprise.
Salazar said at the hearing, according to his prepared testimony:
There is also significant wind and wave potential in our offshore waters. The National Renewable Energy Lab has identified more than 1,000 gigawatts of wind potential off the Atlantic coast, and more than 900 gigawatts of wind potential off the Pacific Coast.
Renewable energy companies are looking to partner with the government to develop this renewable energy potential. We should responsibly facilitate this development.
Mar 17 2009, 11:55AM
The Forgotten War
It wasn't so long ago that Iraq was, by far, the more unpopular war: many saw the invasion of Iraq as a frivolous power grab by the Bush administration, and criticisms of it ranged from "unwise" to "criminal." Throughout the 2008 presidential campaign, President Obama referred to Afghanistan as "the forgotten war"; a major foreign policy talking point that centered on the notion of Afghanistan, not Iraq, as the necessary, justified military campaign against a threat to the U.S., neglected by the Bush administration in its haste to topple Saddam Hussein.
Many, it seemed, agreed with him.
Mar 17 2009, 11:12AM
I'm Not A JournoList
Several of you have asked me; here's my answer: no -- I'm not one of the privileged reporters/commentators who were asked to join the semi-secret JournoList group. Had no idea it existed until today. Which either makes me clueless, sheltered, an outsider, or privileged, depending upon your point of view.
Mar 17 2009, 11:10AM
Just Asking....
Did the White House really think that, just by announcing their intention to avoid the judicial confirmation wars of the past two decades, that they'd bypass politics entirely? Well, not really. I think the White House just got lucky; they found an open appeals court seat and a goodly-and-centrist jurist to fill it -- and they've decided to make it their exemplar of future appointments. (Note, in the White House press release, the endorsement of Sen. Dick Lugar, which hearkens back to the tradition of giving Senators a say in these matters.) The left likes Judge David Hamilton and the right is trying to dredge up something to object to, which says more about the stakeholders in these battles than anything else. Hamilton seems like a stand-up guy with unpredictable legal tendencies which makes him suspect in the eyes of the right, in particular. I would wager that, if President Bush had nominated Hamilton, the left would find a lot to object to. Make no mistake, though... Obama will appoint plenty of liberals to the courts; after all, he ran on appointing liberals to the courts.
Mar 17 2009, 11:09AM
S.C.'s Stimulus Back-and-Forth
It's clear that the Obama administration wants the money spent--and not on debt--but it's all a matter of opinion as to whether South Carolina can do this, and the governor's office thinks the revised request is in keeping with the stimulus's goals.
Sanford writes, in a letter to President Obama today:
Mar 17 2009, 10:55AM
Backlash Nation
These are all examples of the performance of populist outrage in the theatres of the elite. Their targets aren't exactly straw men, but you could be forgiven for wondering why CNBC, employment contracts, earmarks and mortgage assistance for non-delinquent homeowners come in for so much approbation. To paraphrase Megan McArdle, earmarks didn't persuade China to invest its savings glut in U.S. Treasuries; Jim Cramer didn't invent leverage (or greed, or the desire to make money in the stock market) and AIG's derivative traders profited from the government's desire to secure homesteads for as many Americans as possible.
Anyway, these performances make for good television and for better politics. But if this populist backlash extends beyond the circle of the elite, then it is probably grounded in more fundamental causes. Income inequality has (basically) been growing for thirty years; Republicans paid no need to it, believing it to be an artifact of the miscarriage between statistics and modern standards of living, and Democrats failed to figure out how to stop it. The American political class failed to anticipate the negative effects of globalization and failed miserably to educate its citizenry about the tradeoff between low prices and wage stagnation. Government conflated the idea of growth in the financial services industry with the health of the economy. Add to that anxiety over health care, infrastructure, education, and the rest.
Have we reached a truly populist tipping point? One the one hand, Americans favor some redistribution of wealth. On the other, they fervently believe in the power of the individual to determine the course of his or her life; despite reams of social science proving the contrary, most Americans remain convinced that, through their sheer grit, they can change their stations in life. At the same time, Americans concur with the conclusion that political and economic elites try to rig the apparatus of government to benefit a narrow minority. The balance is key. Perception-wise, the gut/will/internal drive of the American ethic continues to outmaneuver, outrun, or outlast the efforts of the elites to thwart it.
Maybe the weight is finally beginning to shift. In the past, elites have used shame spectacles to satiate the public's desire for revenge. New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo wants all the names of the derivative traders and wants to figure out for himself whether they each deserved their bonuses. The usually staid Sen. Chuck Grassley kicked it up a notch, (facetiously, one presumes) suggesting that the traders, who themselves were really just following orders, committ seppuku. The White House -- the executive branch -- is looking for a way to break private business contracts they knew about. There will be (gasp) Congressional hearings.
I don't know whether these gestures will mollify the public. If they do, then there wasn't really a populist backlash to begin with. If they don't, and the well of anger is deep, then I think President Obama will be granted collective permission to change the economic structure of this country in ways that we can't yet comprehend.
Mar 17 2009, 10:54AM
Robert D. Kaplan on the New Geopolitics
In a wide-ranging essay for Foreign Affairs, Atlantic national correspondent Robert D. Kaplan argues that the Indian Ocean rim will take "center stage for the 21st century" as a site of commercial and military rivalries.
Mar 17 2009, 9:52AM
Not A Populist Backlash Against Obama (Yet)
Curious storyline in the national press: that the resurgence of populist sentiment is directed at Barack Obama's government and could complicate his political agenda. I don't think the evidence gets us there just yet. For one thing, my colleague Mark Blumenthal reminds us that displeasure with the banks and financial institutions is already fairly well determined, the public is already dissatisfied with how government is overseeing the bailout, and that the public channels that anger into increased support for tougher financial regulation and more oversight of the industry -- which just happens to be a big part of Obama's agenda. Pundits are leaning forward, assuming that the public's rage is unusually sulfurous, and that it will seep through the cracks at
Mar 17 2009, 9:43AM
AFL-CIO Tests Anti-Card Check Messages
The most pungent argument against the Employee Free Choice Act, or "card check," informs workers that the legislation would take away secret ballot elections AND warns them that union bosses could use coercion to collect the "yes" cards. The moment that argument reaches critical mass, the thinking goes, workers will reject card check. Getting over the "secret ballot" and "coercion" humps are tough. But labor officials have reason to believe that the poisonous economic atmosphere can influence the debate as much as the complex particulars of the bills. I've obtained internal polling from the AFL-CIO's contract surveyist, Peter Hart, which presents the anti-secret ballot and coercion arguments alongside the standard case for EFCA.
Mar 17 2009, 8:13AM
We Already Restricted AIG's Compensation
As far as I know, AIG has followed the letter of the compensation requirements. But will the administration follow them? The compensation restrictions preclude TARP recipients from "paying or accruing any bonus, retention award, or incentive compensation during the period in which any obligation arising from financial assistance provided under the TARP remains outstanding." But the restrictions also say that this clause
shall not be construed to prohibit any bonus payment required to be paid pursuant to a written employment contract executed on or before February 11, 2009, as such valid employment contracts are determined by the Secretary or the designee of the Secretary.My understanding is that AIG contracts in question were all executed before February 11. No one in the administration is claiming they aren't valid (even if the administration is claiming the contracts are an outrage). I suppose that doesn't prevent Geithner or a Geithner-designee from suddenly claiming they aren't valid in the future, but that would be pretty mendacious. At the very least this is evidence that Congress intended to avoid retrospective tinkering with compensation.
Mar 16 2009, 5:35PM
The Limits of AIG Outrage
Mar 16 2009, 4:46PM
Treasury Considers Bailout Reduction For AIG
I'm hearing that....The Department of the Treasury is looking at ways to simply reduce the amount of money it's lending to AIG; they'd start with the latest $30 billion line of credit and subtract the value of the bonuses paid. And that's the question: to how much, precisely, do the bonuses add up? Published values range from $165 million to $1.2 billion. Another problem: the Treasury wants to set a uniform standard for companies taking bailout money, and it may not be possible simply to punish just one.
(b) Speaking of punishing AIG: Rep. Gary Peters (D-MI) plans to introduce a bill to tax AIG bonuses at a high rate this year. A spokesman for Peters says that details are still being worked out. Targeting legislation at one company is tantamount to the Congress's passing a bill of attainder against AIG. But these are extraordinary times.
Mar 16 2009, 4:37PM
The S.C. Stimulus Standoff?
Mar 16 2009, 3:11PM
What Congress Can Do To Stop The AIG Bonuses
Mar 16 2009, 2:51PM
AIG And The Rule Of Law
Here's a different way of looking at the AIG bonus shame: do we want the United States government to make it a practice to breech legal contracts just because.... well, because of populist outrage? Put another way, do we want to live under the rule of a legal system where emotional pressure can abrogate contracts?
If it's so important not to pay this money out -- and indeed, that might be a political imperative -- then the executive branch of the government has two real options. One, it can force AIG into bankruptcy, which it's not prepared to do. My sense is that the government believes that the consequences of an AIG bankruptcy would be far more parlous for the economy than the consequences of paying the derivitative traders their ill-gotten bonuses. Or two, it can open the shame spigot.
Earlier, I wrote that AIG might want to force the traders to sue for their bonuses. That ought to be an internal company decision; the government shouldn't force people to sue to enforce their rights when those rights are unpopular.
Mar 16 2009, 1:05PM
Palin Keynotes Major Fundraiser
Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK) will keynote the Republican campaign committees' top fundraiser in June, a sign of her enduring popularity with the Republican base and a signal that she has not foreclosed on the possibility of a run for president. The annual "Senate-House" dinner is scheduled for June 8 at the Washington Convention Center. A joint release calls Palin "a breath of fresh air from the business-as-usual crowd."
Mar 16 2009, 12:52PM
Violence & Juxtaposition in Iraq Headlines
Mar 16 2009, 12:41PM
The Return Of King Mob
The emotional core of American populism is political resentment. During the major populist frissons of American history - Jacksonian-era democracy, the Grange movement against railroad monopolies, the urban social reform movements, the type of resentment has swayed between two poles; at times, large segments of society arrayed themselves the moneyed interests who had access to capital and political power. At other times, they seemed to resent the fact that these interests used their privileged means and positions to manipulate government to their advantage. (There is a third variant -- conservative pseudo-populism, which takes aim at the country's cultural elite - but which is not important for the sake of this discussion.)
Today's Financial Collapse Populism is fairly easy to define: Americans, believing as always in their ability to get ahead by virtue of their talent and effort, are angry that the culprits of the economic downturn refuse to accept responsibility for their actions and more importantly, refuse to share the pain, both financially and symbolically. What worries the Obama administration is that the public will blame the government for failing to ameliorate this political inequality; indeed, how naked were the emperors this weekend as they admitted that there's really nothing they can do to prevent AIG from fulfilling its legal obligations to the derivative traders?
Modern populists--think David Sirota, Robert Reich, John Edwards - even Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul--disagree about the wisdom of wealth distribution, but they agree that the fundamental moral disparity at the heart of the American political system is that wealthy interests have unequal access to power and use that access to gain at the expense of everything else.
Barack Obama heads a government that Americans find to be totally inadequate to the challenge of shaming and spreading out the pain. First, he's working on the shame: though he promised today to use every "legal avenue" available to prevent AIG from fulfilling its bonus contracts, and though the Treasury might indeed find some legal loophole, the power of Obama's words - the choice of his attention - will probably force AIG to reconsider its position. The sunburst effect of presidential shame works when it is judiciously applied.
Then comes government reform. Obama will never be confused for a populist, but he certainly came to understand the appeal of that emotion during his campaign. Like other presidential candidates, he noticed that Americans simply didn't believe that government could tackle systematic sources of stress, like health care; restoring faith in American government became a core part of his platform.
Fortunately for him, the Bush administration had done everything in its power to discredit government over the past eight years, so the bar is set low. Most obviously, Bush failed to govern competently; less obviously, he communicated a disdain for government intervention in the economic sphere but applied this principle schizophrenically -- dramatically expanding (with no appreciable results) government's role in education, signing into law a huge new Medicare entitlement, and more. Aside from a prosaic attempt to have it both ways on campaign finance legislation and his hand being forced by the collapse of Enron, Bush had no taste for systematic reform.
If Obama succeeds in restoring Americans' faith in government, will it be because he was able to pass his health care form or change the way Americans get their energy? Or is it more important that Americans come to believe that government can get the small things right, like making sure that derivative traders don' get rewarded for jeopardizing the economy. The tough part, ironically, is that the smaller stuff requires more government intervention than even Obama is willing to countenance.
Mar 16 2009, 12:38PM
Border Consensus
(Rasmussen surveyed 1,000 voters nationwide march 12-13 for the poll; margin of error was +/- 3%.)
Mar 16 2009, 12:30PM
A Modest Proposal For AIG
AIG claims that it promised bonuses to its derivative traders and that it can't break its contracts. Sounds like AIG is using legal formalism to avoid a messy court fight. Contracts, like promises, are often broken when premises change. Financial products brought the firm down; why hasn't AIG informed the people in that unit that if they want their bonuses, they're going to have to sue to get them?
In other words, if the collapse of the company is an insufficient condition on which to base the breaking of a contract, then the contracts themselves aren't worth anything to the company.
What's the worst that could happen? The "bad guys" -- the derivative traders -- would take AIG to court. But forcing the traders to sue for the money they don't deserve turns them into the villians here, as they'd be named plaintiffs. In all likelihood, AIG would, at some point in the future, settle many of these lawsuits, but not until a good number of the plaintiffs were shamed to the point of dropping a chunk of them.
Mar 16 2009, 12:18PM
Low Pressure on Steele -- Moneywise, at Least
So, while critics call for Steele to be quiet and raise money, rather than sitting for high-profile interviews that can lead to (and, in fact, have led to) gaffes, it should be noted that Steele has a head start in the cash arena. In other words, things could be much worse for him if the party's coffers were empty.
Mar 16 2009, 12:02PM
A Trend for the GOP?
Multimedia
Mar 16 2009, 11:24AM
Bernanke's "60 Minutes" Interview
Mar 16 2009, 11:21AM
Quote of the Day: Cheney on Obama's Intelligence/Homeland Security Policies
Mar 16 2009, 11:00AM
Quote of the Day: Bernanke on AIG
Mar 13 2009, 6:00PM
Did Obama Change The National Security Paradigm Today?
In the annals of the Obama administration's reinterpretation of national security law, how important were today's two pronouncements?
Mar 13 2009, 5:11PM
Accountability for State Use of Stimulus Funds, ctd
The rules are on how federal money is spent by the states. Put another way, the rules concern what sort of state and local projects we will fund under the Recovery Act. The enforcement is that we won't fund projects that don't meet the standard.
This is obviously possible for a huge amount of grant money (though I'd like some more details), but I'm not sure it's the same as what Obama and Biden were talking about yesterday. POTUS and VPOTUS implied that there would be retroactive consequences for the misuse of funds -- that is, once the money had been handed out, the administration would hold state and local governments up to a high bar on its use. But this answer implies that a bar will only apply to how the money is handed out.
Mar 13 2009, 5:03PM
Obama's Happy Talk On The Economy
I'm not one to traffic in arguments that Republicans would get excoriated for saying things that Democrats are allowed to say and vice-versa, but there are times when playing the language game can be illuminating. Isn't it true that, if there was such a thing as a prominent Republican these days, said Republican pronounced as sound the fundamentals of the economy and commented that things didn't seem to be as bad as they appeared... isn't it true that that Republican would be pilloried? (Maybe even by the Republican's own party-mates?)
Maybe there's some truth to the New Administration Happy Talk (NAHT), but it's a little jarring. To be fair, the NAHT is always accompanied by caveats -- the recovery hasn't begun, there are still major problems, things might get worse before they get better. Or -- maybe the administration really believes that the six-month Bush-Obama monetary and fiscal policy interventions haven't just kept things from getting worse... they've made things demonstratively, empirically, better. In fact, in order for their rosy economic growth projections to kick on, they'd better ratchet up the NAHT talk...
When is happy talk cosmetic? When is it useful? When is it dubious?
Mar 13 2009, 4:00PM
Illinois 2010: Burris, Sexy Lexi, or the Daley Machine?
The former U.S. Commerce secretary and current Midwest chairman of J.P. Morgan Chase has started telling those close to him that he has his eyes on the Senate seat now held by Roland Burris, and, with the current tenant dragged down by scandals that have all but discounted him from reelection in 2010, there appears to be a power vacuum in Illinois. While the Daleys have dominated Chicago politics for much of the last 50 years, none has ever run for statewide office.
Leering at the 2010 Senate race from The Atlantic's office in Washington, DC, a Daley bid would appear to be game over, wrapping up the 2010 contest for what has become the most controversial Senate seat in the county--the one formerly held by the president of the United States--in one fell swoop. But if there's one thing the nation has learned about Illinois politics in the last several months, as if it didn't know before, it's that the game is always more complicated than it first appears.
Mar 13 2009, 3:37PM
Obama Admin Claws Back Exec Power
Congress's 2001 resolution authorizing military force against Al Qaeda and the Taliban grants the President power to detain prisoners currently held at Guantanamo Bay, Attorney General Eric Holder said today, stripping away claims by the Bush Administration that the president's exexutive authority inherently provided for such detentions.
Bates Revised Det Auth FINAL.pdf
Holder's assertions, contained in a federal court filing, drops the phrase phrase "enemy combatant" from the government's lexicon and stresses that the detention authority is only limited to the current conflict.
The Justice Department told the court that the new standard is subject to an almost certain future revision and does not include the authority to continue to hold prisoners unless they provided "significant and substantial" support to Al Qaeda or the Taliban; those who provided "insignificant and insubstantial" support, the government implied today, might soon be freed. The government admits that it is no closer to having a definition of what "significant" or "substanatial" support actually entails, and the filing does not say what type of evidence the government would rely on in making the determination.
The Obama administration was responding to a March 13 deadline ordering them to provide a legal justification for continuing to hold detainees at Guantanmo.
More...
Mar 13 2009, 3:30PM
Summers Defends Geithner, Warns Against "Illusion of Specificity" and "Rush to Action"
I think Secretary Geithner has handled this in a difficult and courageous way. The easy thing to do would be -- and anybody who's worked in Washington knows how to do it -- would be to lay out a nine-point plan with the illusion of specificity and a sense of certainty about what the future would bring. We actually saw this -- it's so easy that we actually saw half a dozen of them -- from the previous administration. It's just that they were different each month.
Multimedia
Mar 13 2009, 3:20PM
The Stewart/Cramer Interview
Mar 13 2009, 3:00PM
On AfPak, The Riedel Review Nears Completion
A review of American policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan is nearly finished, according to officials and published reports, and internal drafts should begin to circulate among policymakers as early as next week. The review, overseen by former CIA official Bruce Riedel, will be translated into actionable policy by April. Riedel's team will present the administration with a range of options, none of them overly dramatic, but many of them newsworthy, and some which are at odds with current American policy. The Obama administration, for example, has hinted that it intends to invite Iran to attend a regional diplomacy conference. "This is a very difficult challenge, no other way to describe it, and the policy options remaining are very restricted," an official said.
Mar 13 2009, 1:50PM
What The EFCA?
A well-informed reader writes: "Are you honestly suggesting that because Obama/Biden/Solis spoke in favor of EFCA at an AFL-CIO meeting that this signals it's a priority?" Am I?
Mar 13 2009, 12:15PM
The Mark Sanford Revolution?
The American Conservative, founded by Patrick Buchanan to serve as a voice for anti-war, anti-immigration conservative nationalists, plays an interesting role in conservative politics. Though not as widely read as National Review, which aims to set the tone for the movement conservative mainstream, TAC has gained a devoted following as a sharp critic of the conservative mainstream, a stance reflected in its ardent embrace of Ron Paul's quixotic yet very impressive presidential campaign.
And so Michael Brendan Dougherty's mostly admiring profile of South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford in TAC is worthy of note.
Mar 13 2009, 7:52AM
Obama and Biden Will Shame You
If this counts as accountability, color me unimpressed. "Accountability" surely implies the likelihood or possibility of real consequences. The governor of Arkansas is accountable to the people of Arkansas. The managers of a company are accountable to the shareholders and the board. (Or at least to Carl Icahn.) But the managers of Pfizer aren't accountable to the shareholders of Microsoft, and Bobby Jindal isn't accountable to the moral indignation of Barack Obama. So when Obama and Biden start talking about holding states accountable for their stimulus spending, I'm left a little confused about what they mean.
Mar 13 2009, 6:45AM
America, The (Jacksonian) Meritocracy
The survey, jointly conducted by the Democratic polling firm of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner and the Republican firm of Public Opinion Strategies, studied public attitudes about whether it's possible to get ahead in America and what it takes to do so. The poll (which surveyed 2,119 adults from January 27 through February 8) didn't directly address the immediate political debate; but it charted, with unusual scope, the backdrop of underlying attitudes against which the argument between the parties is playing out. And it offered warning flares for both sides.
Overall, the survey found that most Americans-across class lines-still believe that the most important factor in whether people get ahead is their own talent and effort, not broad social and economic conditions. By a decisive 71% to 21%, those polled said upward mobility depended more on the "individual person and things like hard work and drive" than "outside factors and things like the economy and their economic circumstances growing up." At least three-fifths of those surveyed at every income level picked individual effort as the key to success.
"People still think that individuals matter a great deal in this country, more so than government in determining their fate and what happens to them," says Glen Bolger, the POS pollster who worked on the survey and accompanying focus groups.
In a separate question, hard work, having ambition, and staying healthy -- all personal traits largely under individual control-ranked one-two-three when respondents were asked what factors determined whether people advanced in life. Similarly when asked why people slip down the income ladder, the top picks were "poor life choices" and "too much debt"-personal decisions again.
As the pollsters wrote in a memo summarizing the results, "Despite the economic downturn...the notion that America is a meritocracy where individuals can apply themselves and move ahead continues to endure. Most Americans, including those on the bottom rung of the income ladder, believe their own economic mobility is within their control and remain optimistic about their ability...to get ahead."
That inclination to look toward individual initiative as the key factor in success tilted most of those polled toward Republican perspectives on two key questions. While many Democrats from Obama on down argue that the rewards of economic growth have been unfairly tilted toward the affluent for roughly the past quarter-century, ensuring "fairness" was less of a priority for most of those surveyed than expanding opportunity. Asked whether it was "more important...to reduce inequality in America or to ensure everyone has a fair chance of improving their economic standing" just 21% picked reducing inequality, while a resounding 71% put greater priority on ensuring opportunity. Those results were virtually unchanged at every rung along the income ladder, and suggest the limits of a Democratic message that sells redistributive tax policy primarily on the grounds of economic fairness.
David Walker, a senior associate at Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, says the results point to an important dividing line in public attitudes about the affluent. While voters "don't resent the rich," he says, they do grow resentful "when they believe the rich are getting advantages at their expense." So while a broad message of economic equity might not resonate, he argues, there is more public support for government policies targeted at specific actions viewed as unfair-such as excessive executive compensation in companies receiving public aid. In many ways, that's an updated version of the arguments Andrew Jackson rode to the White House
in 1828.
The survey identifies another potential obstacle for Obama: in one of the poll's most striking findings, a 46% to 36% plurality believe the government now does more to hurt than to help people get ahead. While a 48% to 33% plurality of Democrats thought government did more to help than hurt, Republicans (26-62) and independents (26-55) overwhelmingly disagreed. At every income level, more respondents thought government hurt than helped their ability to get ahead.
Those findings suggest an entrenched skepticism confronts Obama's effort to portray government as a critical tool in expanding opportunity for average families.
And yet the door doesn't seem completely closed on that sale either. Like many surveys, this poll found more support for specific government actions than for government intervention as a broad principle. Despite the overall skepticism about government's contribution to economic advancement, a quality education ranked just behind hard work, ambition and health when people were asked what factors contributed most to personal economic success. Even more telling, the poll found substantial majorities believed an assortment of discrete government policies could widen opportunity. Fully 81% of those polled, for instance, said policies to keep American jobs at home could be "very effective" in improving economic mobility; 75% said making college more affordable would also be very effective. Majorities of at least 60% said the same thing about reducing health care costs, expanding pre-school, widening job training, helping small business, and facilitating retirement saving-all Obama priorities. Cutting taxes, the main Republican alternative, ranked a clear step behind with just over 50% calling it very effective.
Mar 12 2009, 6:35PM
Urging Loyalty To Steele
Mar 12 2009, 5:21PM
When A Vetting Problem Isn't
Today, a leading candidate to be Timothy Geithner's deputy at the Department of the Treasury withdrew his name from consideration. Another leading candidate, that is. We don't even know the identities of potential candidates for 18 of 20 major open Treasury positions. What's going on? The official word from the administration is that these potential nominees had "vetting problems." That obscures, I believe, what's really happening. A vetting problem implies some deep secret or shame, like having a second family in Nebraska. But the reality is that, in a lot of cases, the potential nominee decides that the requirements foisted upon them by the vetting process are just too much to bear. Remember, a lot of these nominees are upper middle class folks, and they've seen their retirement accounts dwindle. They have families, send their kids to private schools, and have some equity in their homes. They, like everyone else, have reason to worry about having a solid financial nest-egg. Anything that would rock the boat...anything that could hurt their families....would be something they'd think twice before agreeing to go through. The standards, especially for Treasury officials, are incredibly high -- maybe too high.
Mar 12 2009, 5:15PM
Quote of the Day: Obama on Wasteful Stimulus Spending
Multimedia
Mar 12 2009, 5:05PM
Meghan McCain on the State of the GOP
Mar 12 2009, 4:26PM
Flunking Card Check Politics
A major development during my short medical leave was the introduction in the House and Senate of the Employee Free Choice Act, or "card check" for union organizing. So rapidly has this issue matured, in fact, that I have cause to re-examine whether my approach to the politics of card check underweights some fundamental realities.
Mar 12 2009, 3:26PM
How Steele Can Get His Groove Back
If, in their fit of determination this January, Republican Party members elected Michael Steele to be the taut new face on a corpulent vessel of a political party, to be the brand-changer that would remake the party's image - well, Steele has turned out not to be that guy. Voluble, unselfconscious, ambitious, and too eager to please, Steele can't seem to open up his mouth without getting in trouble. He's become clownish. And that judgment could endure until the end of his tenure.
But it probably won't. While Steele's stock is lower than Citigroup's right now, his legacy will be most likely determined by whether he can help Republicans begin to win elections again.
Republicans close to Steele worry about an enormous perception gap between what's happening inside the building and what's happening in public.
In public, says a Steele ally, "[w]hat everybody thought was Steele's appeal was that he was going to be a great spokesman, a good face for the party, comfortable with the media. Well, that's true...but comfortable with it, didn't mean he was going to be good at it."
In private, for the past month, Steele, a bevy of consultants and ten RNC members have been scrutinizing every aspect of the party's operations - structure, function, budget, staffing, liaison, fundraising; the end result of this fairly unprecedented review will be a fairly radically transformed Republican National Committee. That Steele fired all the legacy staff has been criticized, but that was the point: the party is hemorrhaging cash without getting any results; Forget about the balance between institutional knowledge and a fresh approach; Steele has basically gutted the Republican Party. Starting from scratch, he put together teams and tasked them to give him new ideas; those teams will formally report to Steele next week.
Among the ideas circulating: the creation of a well-staffed Blue-to-Red state task force, an RNC in-house best practices shop to help state parties, a new transparent system of accountability for state parties and a young voter organizing department.
If Steele comes up with ways to help Republicans win elections, he'll be seen as a success. To be sure, he's made some management mistakes. He did not appoint a chief of staff until...well, hours ago, relying instead on outside consultants. He hasn't been especially sensitive to the internal politics of RNC fundraising, either; to his credit, however, he seems to learn quickly: for the first time in a long-time, the RNC is actually conducting a competitive bidding process for finance contracts.
So what can Steele do in the near-term?
His advisers say he's going to shut up for a while. (They note that the GQ interview took place two weeks ago.) Steele is very confident, and he treats on-the-record interviews as if he were speaking off the record... or as if he were speaking as a Fox News commentator. The truth is that the only relevant people listening to Steele's GQ-type interviews are pro-life activists who want to find something to object to. I am told that Steele understands this now.
He's also going to focus on the party itself; watch for a series of announcements about team members over the next few days.
And he's going to focus on fundraising. He's yet to name a finance director; perhaps more pressing is a finance chairman - the person who can get other major donors to Steele's side.
Mar 12 2009, 2:08PM
Socialism, American-Style
"Our Socialist Future," reads the cover line on the March 23, 2009, issue of the National Review. Echoing a flurry of warnings from other conservatives, author Mark Steyn says that those who liken President Obama's program to FDR's New Deal, LBJ's Great Society, or Jimmy Carter's unnamed nationalizations are making "nickel 'n'dime comparisons. It's all those multiplied a gazillion-fold and nuclearized -- or Europeanized, which is less dramatic but ultimately more lethal."
Will this alarm -- and other expressions of concern by prominent Republicans including John Boehner, Jim DeMint, Mike Pence, Mike Huckabee and Michelle Bachmann -- resonate with the American public? Are Americans, the majority of whom still appear to support the Obama program, likely to quail at the prospect of a "Europeanization" of the land of the free that transforms it into a clone of, say, France? That depends upon which side of the American psyche you examine. For within the American soul lurks a constant tension between distaste for the government sector and suspicions about the motives and practices of the business sector, between appreciation for the benefits of free markets and desire for basic societal protections and services.
Mar 12 2009, 12:12PM
Making Nice With Steele
I'll have more on what Michael Steele is doing, and what he might want to be doing, a little bit later, but know for now that his campaign rival, South Carolina GOP chair Katon Dawson, is meeting with the RNC chairman today in private to make nice....
Mar 12 2009, 11:21AM
The Dire State of the Lobbying Industry
Some portion of this decline should not come as a surprise. With charming understatement, the Journal notes that "Two financial-services lobbying titans, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, saw their lobbying offices disbanded by the federal government." (It does seem slightly redundant to lobby the federal government when you are the federal government, doesn't it?) But the Journal nonetheless assures readers that lobbyists "in every major sector" have seen cutbacks.
Still, there is good reason to fight back the tears over the state of lobbying, if you can.
Mar 12 2009, 10:40AM
Biden: No Swimming Pools
"Just because it may be legal, it may not be acceptable, some of it," Biden said, implying that the White House would place tighter restrictions on the money than those set out in the bill.
If there are any problems, Biden told the officials to have their governors call him directly: "I'm used to being accessible. I really mean it. Have your governors call me, and we'll get it straightened out because we've got to get it right."
With Republican governors floating the idea of turning down stimulus cash, and with many conservatives opposed to the stimulus in the first place, statements like these signal to the right that the White House is serious about the stimulus and isn't just throwing money at the economic crisis blindly--a major point of criticism from those philosophically opposed to Keynesian economics. And it's probably worth risking Obama's favorables among swimming pool contractors in order to make that point.
Mar 11 2009, 8:19PM
Congress to Look at Mexican Drug War
Multimedia
Mar 11 2009, 4:27PM
Jindal On Taking Stimulus Money
Mar 11 2009, 4:15PM
Obama Issues Omnibus Signing Statement
In his statment, Obama was sure to point out that on Monday he said signing statements are "a legitimate constitutional function"; perhaps foreseeing today's statement on Monday, Obama's memo earlier this week made specific mention of omnibus legislation as a reason why signing statements can be useful.
Mar 11 2009, 4:03PM
Quote of the Day: McCain on Earmark Reform
Mar 11 2009, 3:10PM
Ross Douthat's New Perch
Ross is a late-twenties-year-old public intellectual with the sensibility of a 60-year eminence grise, the range of a Hitchens, the pitch of a conservative AJP Taylor, the conscience of a Neibuhr and the intellectual honesty of his frequent sparring partner, Andrew Sullivan.
It's heretic for a new media pioneer to say this, I guess, but The New York Times remains the most influential journalistic force in the modern world, and its opinion columnists consistently shape policy, government and public opinion. True, the Gray Lady doesn't seem to get orthodox conservatives very well, and in randier precincts of the Right, the suspicion that the op-ed editors recruit reverse-Alan Colmeses to counter their lefty-Sean Hannities is pervasive. I personally don't think this is the case; not being able to predict where David Brooks is going to come down on an issue is the reason why I like to read him. Bill Kristol was just a mistake, but boy, talk about the rebound: I think Ross is the sharpest, most innovative heterodox thinker of his generation, left or right.
The Atlantic has been a fabulous perch for Ross, but the Times offers a vantage point that is irresistible. Ross's motive force, whether it be as an editor, as a friend, as a bouncing board for ideas, as a writer, is irrepressible. As the chairman of the Atlantic would say, Ross is in his vertical hour. And now, one of the greatest minds in the country has one of the world's best megaphones.
How great is that?
By the way: it's pronounced dow-that -- with a soft "th."
Mar 11 2009, 2:50PM
Karma (and Charles Freeman) on the Bus
I now know that Karma does not work in subtle ways. A few stops after I got on the 42 bus this morning, Charles Freeman plunked down across from me. He was reading an old paperback copy of Colleen McCullough's The Thorn Birds, and looking more like a high school English teacher than an existential threat to the state of Israel.
I introduced myself and told him I was sorry that he resigned. He recoiled only slightly when I mentioned I worked for the Atlantic, then smiled broadly. "Shit happens." He added a little wistfully: "I wasn't so eager to go back to the government, anyway."
Mar 11 2009, 2:41PM
The Changing Politics of Incarceration?
Florida Governor Charlie Crist, once known as "Chain Gang Charlie" for his tough-on-crime stance, surprised many when he embraced the cause of restoring voting rights for ex-convicts, not least because this was a move that in theory cut against the political interests of Crist's Republican allies. Yet this was of a piece with Crist's broader shift to the political center, which has proven politically advantageous given rising anti-GOP sentiment in Florida and nationwide. Other Republicans, most of them evangelical conservatives, have also called for a less punitive approach to incarceration. Meanwhile, New York Governor David Paterson is pressing for a reform of the state's controversial Rockefeller drug laws, a step that would have been considered politically suicidal for a liberal Democrat in years past. So what comes next?
Mar 11 2009, 2:26PM
An EFCA Compromise?
In describing the Employee Free Choice Act, Chris writes:
The bill would eliminate employer-mandated secret-ballot elections in the union organizing process, allowing workers to potentially form unions via petition.
And that's absolutely right. But as T.A. Frank has argued in The Washington Monthly, this is not necessarily the most essential part of the bill from the perspective of organized labor or, for that matter, those who hope to limit labor's influence.
Mar 11 2009, 12:30PM
Obama's Grand Education Plan: Can It Really Work?
"Maybe we should go back to teaching," a friend and fellow former D.C. public school teacher quipped, passing along a link to the transcript of President Obama's address yesterday to the Hispanic Chamber of Congress, his first major speech on education since taking office. I don't think my friend was serious. But reading the remarks, it was hard not to be moved by Obama's sweeping vision for public education in the U.S. He gave shout-outs to all of the right reforms--merit pay, charter schools, national standards--tied knowledge to the economy, and criticized American public schools and politicians without apology:
... despite resources that are unmatched anywhere in the world, we've let our grades slip, our schools crumble, our teacher quality fall short, and other nations outpace us... It's time to expect more from our students. It's time to start rewarding good teachers, stop making excuses for bad ones. It's time to demand results from government at every level. It's time to prepare every child, everywhere in America, to out-compete any worker, anywhere in the world.However, reading through Obama's address, I wondered how the proposals he makes and the initiatives he promises sound to educators who remain in the exhausting, unglamorous trenches of our public schools. And I realized that if I had read this while still teaching, I might have been pleased that someone was paying attention, but not about to hold my breath. It's not as though we haven't heard all of this before.
Mar 11 2009, 11:13AM
Activists Laud Justice Dept. for Investigating Sheriff
Coincidentally, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) and Immigration Subcommittee Chairwoman Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), along with the leaders of several activist groups and a member of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, were scheduled to hold a rally today at the Capitol calling for Arpaio to be investigated (they were to present a petition to that effect that had gathered over 35,000 signatures). They'll still hold the rally, intending to demonstrate community support for the investigation.
Mar 11 2009, 10:08AM
DeParle: All Sides Ready for Health Reform
As a participant in the 1993-'94 health reform effort, I can say that this time, it feels different already.
Thursday's forum participants came from all sides of the debate. They were Democrats and Republicans; members of Congress and constituents; businesses and labor unions; hospitals, doctors, patients, and insurance companies. People who worked to pass healthcare reform a decade ago strategized with those who worked to defeat it. And while they certainly didn't all agree on every aspect of how to fix the system, they all agreed that the one thing we cannot do is continue on the current course.
Mar 10 2009, 7:32PM
Green Giant
Mar 10 2009, 2:47PM
Employee Free Choice Act Fight Is On
The current crisis has shown us the dangers of an economy that leaves working families behind. The people who work in our factories, build our roads, and care for our children are the backbone of this great nation. The Employee Free Choice Act will give these hardworking men and women a greater voice in the decisions that affect their families and their futures. It's a critical step toward putting our economy back on track, and I hope that we can act quickly to send it to the President's desk.And here's Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, an ardent opponent of the bill:
The right to a secret ballot is one which has been protected in America for hundreds of years because we know the value of political expression without fear of coercion. The attempt by some Democrats to take away this fundamental right goes against the ideals of political freedom upon which our nation was founded.
Not only will this legislation invite harassment and intimidation into the work place, it could also cost America even more jobs...
Mar 10 2009, 2:09PM
Bunning: None of Your Business
The Louisville Courier-Journal reports:
"Let's say I did the polling," the senator told reporters on a conference call this morning.
What does that mean?
"That means it's none of your g--d--- business," Bunning said, who then followed up with a laugh. "If you paid the 20 grand for the poll, you can get some information out of it."
Mar 10 2009, 12:01PM
Warren Mum on Stem Cell Order
Mar 10 2009, 11:43AM
Gregg Still Doesn't Like Obama's Budget
Update: See video of Gregg's comment and Tuesday's budget debate here, courtesy of the C-SPAN video library.
Mar 10 2009, 10:14AM
Biden: Taliban Outreach Must Be Done By Afghans
To state the obvious, as you know, the Taliban, most of whom are Pashtun -- you have 60 percent of the Pashtun population in Pakistan; only 40 percent live in Afghanistan. The objectives that flow from Kandahar may be different than Quetta, may be different than the FATA. So it's worth exploring.
The idea of what concessions would be made is well beyond the scope of my being able to answer, except to say that whatever is initiated will have to be ultimately initiated by the Afghan government, and will have to be such that it would not undermine a legitimate Afghan government. But I do think it is worth engaging and determining whether or not there are those who are willing to participate in a secure and stable Afghan state...
Mar 10 2009, 9:33AM
The GOP in 2012
Given the staggering sums it now takes to run a serious campaign for a major party's presidential nomination, it's hard to imagine any candidate waiting until late December of 2011 to decide whether or not for president in 2012. Barack Obama announced his candidacy 21 months before election day, and he began gearing up his campaign organization months before. Other contenders, like Hillary Clinton, started even earlier.
With the essential caveat that it is still very, very early, and the added wrinkle that fundraising in the Internet era could give late entrants a better shot at running for the presidency, it's worth noting how gun-shy various Republican heavies have been about their plans for 2012. After stinging defeats in 2006 and 2008, Republicans face a serious enthusiasm gap, and the Democratic advantage in party identification is, according to Gallup, the largest it has been since 1983. That number actually underestimates the extent of the Democratic advantage, as there are far fewer Reagan-voting conservative Democrats in the ranks.
Multimedia
Mar 9 2009, 6:27PM
Obama Lifts Stem Cell Funding Restrictions
Mar 9 2009, 4:58PM
Republicans and the Obama Foreign Policy
Congressional Republicans are all but united in their opposition to President Obama's domestic program. But on foreign policy, where the Obama White House has taken a number of dramatic steps, Republicans have said virtually nothing, as Spencer Ackerman reports in The Washington Independent.
Mar 9 2009, 4:23PM
Stem Cell Opposition
Which stands in stark contrast to the political good will some projected after Obama solidified his ties to Rev. Rick Warren by inviting him to deliver the invocation on Jan. 20.
Mar 9 2009, 2:27PM
Barack Obama and the New Center-Left
You don't hear that theme much among conservatives nowadays. Instead, we're back to the Obama-as-radical chatter that predominated among right-wingers in the waning days of the Presidential election. As with the Ayers-mania of that unhappy period, some of this talk is miles over-the-top--for instance, the absurdist speculation about the President's "Leninist" plans to bring the U.S. economy to its knees, the better to advance the power of Leviathan. But some of it is justified: Obama is proposing the most thoroughgoing transformation of domestic policy offered by any President since Reagan, and possibly since LBJ. Which raises the question--what happened to the cautious Clintonism that Obama's appointments seemed to promise?
Mar 9 2009, 2:15PM
Two More on Chas Freeman and China
But anyone who has seen a Washington scandal get rolling understands the almost unstoppable momentum when one "revelation" follows another and you wait breathlessly to see what the next one will be -- and when the "embattled" victim will finally give in. That is very much how it looked for Freeman when -- on top of the original complaints about his views on Israel -- apparently-damaging new information about his views on China popped up.
To put a brake on the momentum, and to give a chance for deliberation about a man's reputation and a president's ability to get the range of advice he wants, I think it is worth reinforcing the idea that the people who know Freeman and China policy best think the complaints about him on this front are a crock. That was the point of the previous post with the views of Sidney Rittenberg and Jerome A. Cohen. Here, the views of the China scholar John Frankenstein of Brooklyn College, and the Beijing-based blogger and writer (and rock musician) Kaiser Kuo:
Mar 9 2009, 1:19PM
The End of the American Exception?
My column in the current National Journal discusses some of the lessons that Europe has for the Obama administration [the link expires in two weeks].
During PBS's NewsHour With Jim Lehrer last Friday, the program's resident pundits, David Brooks and Mark Shields, had an interesting exchange about President Obama's first budget. They agreed that the administration aimed to be "transformative" -- and Brooks conceded, "I think we all want that." The real question, he said, is how transformative.
Brooks: "The debate will be over the nature of it. If it's a transformative relationship that basically keeps the American model with repair, you'll get a lot of people in the center for it. If it's a transformative relationship that turns us into France, with a consumption tax and a much bigger federal government, you will not."
Shields: "That's a straw man, turning it into France. That's not the case."
Mar 9 2009, 1:15PM
Chas Freeman and China
- I don't think anyone seriously contends that Freeman's views on China are the central reason for the opposition to him. As Andrew Sullivan convincingly (IHMO) demonstrated, the real argument, for better or worse, concerns his views on Israel.
- On the other hand, his most often-quoted view about China -- that the regime erred mainly in waiting too long to crack down on the Tiananmen Square demonstrations -- has added to the argument that he is a doctrinaire "realist" who has no time for ideals of any sort.
Mar 9 2009, 12:20PM
Warren Buffett: Republicans Should Stand Behind Obama
One solution he offered: for Republicans to fall in line. "I think that the Republicans have an obligation to regard this as an economic war and to realize need one leader and in general support of that," Buffett said. The tradeoff: Obama and his party should not use the crisis to "roll" the Republicans and pass contentious measures.
"In the interim, until we get this resolved, I would not be pushing a lot of things that you know are contentious," Buffett said.
Mar 9 2009, 10:43AM
Stem Cell Polling: Support Has Steadily Grown
Mar 7 2009, 12:16PM
A Promising Convergence on Health
Mar 6 2009, 9:16PM
Limbaugh and the Kennedy 'Memorial' Health Bill
Multimedia
Mar 6 2009, 5:33PM
Clinton: 'Never Waste a Good Crisis'
Mar 6 2009, 4:51PM
Census Controversy
Reports released yesterday by the Government Accountability Office show critical preparations for the 2010 census are behind schedule and the Bureau lacks a clear strategy for improving outreach to undercounted minorities. The GAO concludes that the Bureau has insufficient policies and procedures and inadequately trained staff for conducting the decennial count.
In response, Sen. Tom Carper (D) of Delaware used a subcommittee hearing Thursday to call attention to what he believes is an approaching "state of emergency":
Mar 6 2009, 3:19PM
Quote of the Day: Gibbs Paraphrases Sun Tzu
Mar 6 2009, 3:19PM
Should Geithner go?
Mar 6 2009, 2:52PM
Crisis and Opportunity
Mar 6 2009, 2:19PM
Obama Calls for Courage
Obama's recent public remarks have consistently focused on the money being spent to save and create jobs amid the current economic crisis, and today's address to the graduating class of the Columbus Police Academy was no different. But also worth noting was this Churchill-esque call for courage, in which Obama said the whole country needs to be more like the new officers:
The job you signed up for is not easy...But you knew all that when you joined the academy. You knew the risks involved, you knew the sacrifices required, and yet you stood up and said, "I'll take that risk. I'll make that sacrifice. I will do that job."
And that, Columbus, is the very essence of responsibility. That's the spirit we need in this country right now, no matter what our role is or what our profession that we've chosen. It's a spirit that asks us to look beyond our own individual ambitions to the wider obligations we have as the good citizens of a great nation; a spirit that calls on us to say, "I'll make that sacrifice. I'll do that job."
Mar 6 2009, 11:52AM
A fight I didn't intend to get into: Chas Freeman
But very recently I met with a friend who had worked years ago with Freeman -- on China, not the Middle East -- and was upset about what he called the "self-lobotimization" of US foreign policy that the campaign to discredit Freeman represented. As I've looked into it, I've come to agree.
His first point was that Freeman was being proposed for a post within the president's discretionary appointment power, like one of his White House aides, and therefore didn't have to reflect the Senate's sense of who should be in the job. The more important point, he said, was that Freeman's longstanding contrarian inclination to challenge conventional wisdom of any sort, far from being an embarrassing liability, was exactly what a president needed from the person in this job.
A president's Secretary of State had to represent the country's policies soberly and predictably around the world. His National Security Advisor had to coordinate and evenhandedly present the views of the various agencies. His White House press secretary had to take great care in expressing the official line to the world's media each day. His Director of National Intelligence had to give him the most sober and responsible precis of what was known and unknown about potential threats.
For any of those roles, a man like Freeman might not be the prudent choice. But as head of the National Intelligence Council, my friend said, he would be exactly right. While he would have no line-operational responsibilities or powers, he would be able to raise provocative questions, to ask "What if everybody's wrong?", to force attention to the doubts, possibilities, and alternatives that normally get sanded out of the deliberative process through the magic known as "groupthink." As Dan Froomkin of NiemanWatch wrote in an item that called Freeman "A One-Man Destroyer of Groupthink,"
He has... spent a goodly part of the last 10 years raising questions that otherwise might never get answered -- or even asked -- because they're too embarrassing, awkward, or difficult.Again, I don't know Freeman personally. I don't know whether the Saudi funding for his organization has been entirely seemly (like that for most Presidential libraries), which is now the subject of inspector-general investigation. If there's a problem there, there's a problem.
For him to be put in charge of what [Laura Rozen of Foreign Policy] calls "the intelligence community's primary big-think shop and the lead body in producing national intelligence estimates" is about the most emphatic statement the Obama Administration could possibly make that it won't succumb to the kind of submissive intelligence-community groupthink that preceded the war in Iraq.
But I do know something about the role of contrarians in organizational life. I have hired such people, have worked alongside them, have often been annoyed at them, but ultimately have viewed them as indispensable. Sometimes the annoying people, who will occasionally say "irresponsible" things, are the only ones who will point out problems that everyone else is trying to ignore. A president needs as many such inconvenient boat-rockers as he can find -- as long as they're not in the main operational jobs. Seriously: anyone who has worked in an organization knows how hard it is, but how vital, to find intelligent people who genuinely are willing to say inconvenient things even when everyone around them is getting impatient or annoyed. The truth is, you don't like them when they do that. You may not like them much at all. But without them, you're cooked.
So to the extent this argument is shaping up as a banishment of Freeman for rash or unorthodox views, I instinctively take Freeman's side -- even when I disagree with him on specifics. This job calls for originality, and originality brings risks. Chas Freeman is not going to have his finger on any button. He is going to help raise all the questions that the person with his finger on the button should be aware of.
Read carefully this NiemanWatch Q-and-A with Freeman from 2006 (or read any of Freeman's recent policy articles here) and ask yourself two questions: do these sound like the views of an unacceptable kook? And, would you rather have had more of this sensibility, or less, applied to U.S. policy in recent years?
Mar 6 2009, 11:43AM
Toomey Tells Friends He'll Run
Mar 6 2009, 10:38AM
Speaker Cantor? Gingrich Thinks So.
Cantor has taken a prominent role in the House GOP, not only as minority whip, but as the leader of Republicans' economic task force charged with offering a counter-proposal to President Obama's stimulus package. In doing so, he became a voice for conservative economic policy. For Cantor to become Speaker, though, the GOP will have to regain the majority in the House--a different issue altogether from his own rising stardom.
Mar 6 2009, 10:23AM
Unemployment Odds
Mar 6 2009, 9:27AM
Treasury Takes Its Time
Tim's work will begin at once. We can't waste a day.
Can we waste days now?
Mar 5 2009, 5:02PM
CIA to Get Investigated
Which seems like good news for those seeking a harder look back at the Bush years--but although the investigation is the second into Bush-era policy (the Department of Justice is conducting its own at President Obama's request, to be completed within 180 days), it may not be enough to satisfy some on the left, and the push for aggressive, punitive review of the Bush days is likely to continue.
Mar 5 2009, 4:19PM
Competition Stepping Up for Burris?
Mar 5 2009, 2:11PM
AFL-CIO: Gov't Should Acquire Controlling Shares of Banks (at Least for a While)
The resolution reads:
The AFL-CIO calls on the Obama administration to get fair value for any more public money put into the banks. In the case of distressed banks, this means the government will end up with a controlling share of common stock. The government should use that stake to force a cleanup of the banks' balance sheets. The result should be banks that can either be turned over to bondholders in exchange for bondholder concessions or sold back into the public markets. We believe the debate over nationalization is delaying the inevitable bank restructuring, which is something our economy cannot afford.Many have hesitated to call for such a plan--last week, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) specifically said no one in the House of Representatives, in his estimation, is proposing that the government "nationalize" banks--and, while there's still a question of whether "nationalize" always applies to acquiring controlling shares for a time, the risk of being associated with socialism looms. (Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, it should be noted, was far less bashful about calling for the idea.) Now the AFL-CIO has joined the ranks of Paul Krugman and Alan Greenspan in saying, definitively, it's the way to go.
Mar 5 2009, 1:50PM
Barack Obama, Deficit-Cutter?
In the most important sense, this is completely wrong. Obama's budget is not a net spender. It would reduce the deficit by some $2 trillion over the next decade (big PDF link; see page 115) compared to continuing current policy. (You can quibble about the "current policy" baseline -- some of the Iraq expenditures would probably have declined under even a Republican administration -- but the basic fact that Obama's policies reduce the deficit on the whole is hard to dispute.) By contrast, all of Bush's major deficit-increasing initiatives -- the tax cuts, the war in Iraq, the Medicare benefit -- came without any attempt at all to pay for them. And, by the way, most of the people who are complaining about Obama's fiscal irresponsibility today uttered not a peep of complaint about Bush.
Mar 5 2009, 1:32PM
Jon Stewart: Just Listen to CNBC
Mar 5 2009, 1:14PM
For Sebelius, More Opposition from KC's Archbishop
In many ways, I can understand why President Obama selected Governor Sebelius. As I have acknowledged on several other occasions, she is a very bright and gifted leader. In many important areas, she represents well Catholic social teaching. She has advocated for more affordable housing for the poor, she has worked to expand access to health care for economically disadvantaged children, and she has supported incentives encouraging adoption.
Yet, on the fundamental moral issue of protecting innocent human life, Governor Sebelius, throughout her career, has been an outspoken advocate for legalized abortion. For this reason, her appointment to HHS is particularly troubling.
Mar 5 2009, 11:18AM
Republicans and Universal Coverage
Republicans are coming to the understanding that their opposition to universal coverage is misplaced...Let's understand that when we say we cover everybody...that is not a step toward a single-payer government-run system.Bennett said that this morning in a panel discussion with SEIU President Andy Stern, America's Health Insurance Plans President and CEO Karen Ignani, and Liz Fowler, senior counsel to Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) (who has put forth a major health reform proposal in the Senate). The idea of expanding access is certainly mainstream in the GOP--Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and other Republicans, in fact, sent a letter to President Obama yesterday that stressed their desire to make that happen--but it was interesting to hear Bennett addressed Republican's relationship with "universal coverage," which we heard so frequently in the Democratic primary last year.
Bennett, as a partner on health legislation with Oregon's Ron Wyden (D), could be seen as a moderate on the issue, and, to be sure, he stressed that the GOP still stands firmly opposed to "universal coverage" when it is used to describe a sizeable expansion of government control, but his comment today seemed to indicate, if nothing else, a development in the language of Washington's debate over health reform.
Mar 5 2009, 10:38AM
Boehner: Pay No Attention to the Sideshow
...in a carefully calculated campaign, operatives and allies of the Obama administration are seeking to divert attention toward radio host Rush Limbaugh, and away from a debate about our alternative solutions on the economy and the irresponsible spending binge they are presiding over. This diversionary tactic will not create a single job or help a single family struggling in today's economic crisis. And that is where our focus should be.
Mar 4 2009, 7:29PM
Empire Falls?
Though Hillary Clinton never made it to the White House, this should be a good moment for Democrats in the Empire State. The Democrats appear to have a lock on Congress, thanks in no small part to Chuck Schumer, the state's senior senator. President Obama's cabinet is full of New Yorkers, and his first budget promises to be much friendlier to New York than any we've seen during the long era of Republican dominance. So why is it that New York Democrats seem to be in such terrible shape?
Multimedia
Mar 4 2009, 5:16PM
Clinton Arrives in Egypt
Mar 4 2009, 4:43PM
The Lion of the Senate, and Now a Knight
"Northern Ireland today is at peace, more Americans have health care, children around the world are going to school," Brown said. "And for all these things, we owe a great debt to the life, and courage, of Senator Edward Kennedy." With this honor, the "Lion of the Senate" is entering elite company. Less than 100 Americans have received honorary knighthood since Queen Elizabeth II was coronated in 1953.
Notable Americans who have achieved knighthood include Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, Generals Norman Schwarzkopf and Tommy Franks, Rudolph Giuliani, Henry Kissinger, Bob Hope, Steven Spielberg and Bill Gates. Last month, the British Embassy announced that former senator John Warner of Virginia would also be named a "Knight of the British Empire."
Mar 4 2009, 4:00PM
Starving the Beast, or Feeding the Beast?
In an excellent post on Barack Obama's fiscal policy, one that builds on arguments recently made by Matt Yglesias and Clive Crook, The Atlantic's Ross Douthat suggests that Barack Obama is offering his own version of "starve-the-beast."
What you see in [Obama's] budgeting proposals, I think, is the liberal equivalent of the conservative attempt to "starve the beast." In both the Reagan and Bush eras, Republicans passed tax cuts and ran up large deficits while hoping that by starving the federal government of revenue they would curb its long-run growth. Obama's spending proposals would effectively reverse that dynamic -- they would create new spending commitments and run up large deficits, in the hopes that the dollars poured into health care and education will create a new baseline for government's obligations, which in turn will create the political space for tax increases on the middle class.
Mar 4 2009, 3:55PM
Keeping Tabs on Clinton
Mar 4 2009, 1:50PM
The Pursuit of Social Democracy
What Obama does have, though, is an atmosphere of crisis and a massively unpopular opposition party, which grants him an unparalleled political opportunity to pass whatever spending the Democratic Party likes, and damn the short-term cost. And what you see in his budgeting proposals, I think, is the liberal equivalent of the conservative attempt to "starve the beast." In both the Reagan and Bush eras, Republicans passed tax cuts and ran up large deficits while hoping that by starving the federal government of revenue they would curb its long-run growth. Obama's spending proposals would effectively reverse that dynamic - they would create new spending commitments and run up large deficits, in the hopes that the dollars poured into health care and education will create a new baseline for government's obligations, which in turn will create the political space for tax increases on the middle class. Like the starve-the-beast approach, the Obama strategy puts off the hard part till tomorrow: Give them tax cuts today, conservatives said, and they'll swallow spending cuts tomorrow; give them universal health care, universal pre-K, subsidies for green industry and all the rest of it today, liberals seem to be thinking, and they'll be willing to pay for it tomorrow.
The fact that starve-the-beast didn't work out as well as small-governmenteers hoped doesn't make the Obama strategy misguided. Both political parties are living in the shadow of the hard choices that are going to be imposed by the insolvency of America's entitlements: At some point soon, liberals are going to have to accept somewhat less spending than they'd like, and conservatives are going to have to accept somewhat higher taxes. And if you can change the baseline of social spending that Americans expect from their government before that day of hard choices arrive - and once created, government programs are awfully hard to get rid of, whether they're actually effective or not - then you've tilted the landscape of negotiation in liberalism's favor, and ensured that a post-Obama entitlement compromise will look a lot more like social democracy than a pre-Obama compromise would have.
But of course none of this will work if the American economy doesn't escape its current downward spiral. If you're running enormous deficits and don't have any economic growth to show for it, it doesn't matter how popular your social-spending programs are in the short run, as more than a few ex-Latin American leaders will be happy to attest. And what does make the Obama strategy misguided is that it looks increasingly like a substitute for a depression-fighting strategy - and what's worse, a substitute that has the potential to actually make matters worse, when Obama, liberalism, and America all desperately need things to get better.
Mar 4 2009, 1:17PM
Obama's FEMA Nominee to Appear in NOLA: Political?
For several years, President Bush's critics have cited Hurricane Katrina as a main charge to be leveled at Bush's presidency--a point many will likely recall in New Orleans and elsewhere when Fugate appears tomorrow. Obama has repudiated Bush aggressively and repeatedly during his first month and a half in office, as Ron Brownstein noted earlier this week; tomorrow's event may have the impact of yet another repudiation, regardless of whether it's a political event per se.
Mar 4 2009, 11:16AM
Rush as GOP's Leader? 81 % of Republicans Don't Think So.
Mar 4 2009, 10:55AM
Bayh: Veto the Omnibus
Mar 3 2009, 6:55PM
Quote of the Day
Mar 3 2009, 6:06PM
Reviewing the Bush Administration
In a statement on The Department of Justice website, Attorney General Eric Holder said the memorandums were being released in response to "legitimate and substantial public interest." While Holder's insistence that "Americans deserve a government that operates with transparency and openness" will likely play well among human rights activists and congressional Democrats, the new batch of opinions does not include the most controversial memos these groups have been demanding over the past few years. "Dozens of other OLC memos, including memos that provided the basis for the Bush administration's torture and warrantless wiretapping policies, are still being withheld," said Jameer Jaffer, Director of the ACLU National Security Project, in a release issued Monday night. According to DoJ spokesman Matthew Miller, the guidelines proposed by the Attorney General during his confirmation hearing are still in place for these additional policies: a full review will not occur until an assistant attorney general to head the Office of Legal Counsel is confirmed.
Arriving on the heels of reports that the CIA destroyed ninety-two videotapes of interrogations, Monday's revelations underline the challenges that face President Obama and Congress in addressing the controversial legacy of the Bush administration. Senator Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary committee, has called for a nonpartisan "truth commission" to investigate the use of torture, illegal wiretapping, and other alleged abuses of power during the Bush years. Tomorrow's hearing on the proposal, to be held by Leahy's committee, could represent the first concrete step toward a broad review of civil liberties violations under the War on Terror.
With a similar proposal having been offered by House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, the idea of examining Bush has gained some traction among prominent Democrats. Some, however, have called for a more aggressive approach.
A number of liberal advocacy groups argue that a truth commission is meaningless without the threat of criminal prosecution. On February 24, over 20 organizations issued a joint statement calling on Holder to directly appoint a special prosecutor to investigate former Bush administration officials. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has called the truth commission "a good idea," but has also expressed concerns that Leahy's proposal will offer "immunity" for Bush administration officials. "I think that some of the issues involved here, like politicizing of the Justice Department, and the rest, may have criminal ramifications," she told MSNBC on February 25.
Nothing in President Obama's executive orders thus far suggests that he intends to review the previous administration's actions for possible criminal sanctions. The partisan rancor that might be sparked by any domestic or international prosecution is a significant disincentive for prosecution, especially as Obama seeks to build good will among the GOP's ranks and promote his administration as an open, bipartisan regime. But the arrival of Monday's memos and Wednesday's hearing could represent the best chance yet for those favoring prosecution to legitimize their cause. A USA Today/Gallup Poll conducted in February found that 62 percent of Americans favor a criminal investigation or an independent panel. Wednesday's discussions and testimony may have an outsized influence in determining whether consensus coalesces around one or both of these options.
Wednesday's hearing will be the first open, public discussion by leglisators of both parties geared toward crafting a potential review of Bush. With Obama's new Department of Justice having taken its own step toward making the Bush years more available for review, human rights groups and Bush protesters will be eagerly awaiting what comes out of Wednesday's discussion.
Mar 3 2009, 5:20PM
A 'Rush Is the Leader' TV Ad
Not only is Rush the leader of the Republican Party, according to the ad, Sarah Palin, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, RNC Chairman Michael Steele, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell are specifically NOT the party's leaders, at least as indicated by the raucous applause Limbaugh received at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in DC over the weekend. (Limbaugh, it should be noted, is no stranger to Americans United for Change ads--the group has used his "fail" comment since early February to blast Republicans for opposing President Obama's stimulus.) The ad will air in DC and on national cable as early as Thursday through the end of next week, the group says.
Mar 3 2009, 3:02PM
Scientists, Conservationists Cheer Obama at Interior Dept.
In brief remarks at the Interior Department today, Obama said his intention was to "help restore the scientific process to its rightful place at the heart of the Endangered Species Act, a process undermined by past administrations" by reinstating Interior Dept. reviews of new federal construction projects to study potential impact on endangered species, pending further review of the policy.
"In the past, as all of you know, we've seen lapses that have damaged the reputation of this department, despite the integrity and faithful service of the vast majority of people who work here. In just these first five weeks, Secretary Salazar has helped bring about a new era of responsibility and accountability," Obama said, alluding to the department's 2008 ethics scandal that included allegations of financial improprieties, accepting gifts from energy companies, cocaine use and sexual misconduct.
Mar 3 2009, 2:07PM
Paterson's Free Fall
The NY Times' explanation makes sense on its face: Paterson has been dealt a terrible hand with the economy; the stock market has been collapsing since he stepped into office; he's had some internal scandals (including the Caroline Kennedy snafu); and he's obviously run out of money to do things, so he's suggesting all sorts of extravagant spending strategies and conservative media is trashing him wherever they can. So, obviously, it makes sense that his approval rating is at 26%.
On the other hand, consider Obama. He's been dealt a terrible hand with the economy; the stock market has has been collapsing since he stepped into office and fallen another 20% or so since his stimulus plan passed; he's had all sorts of internal scandals (Daschle, Geithner, Gregg, who needs to count them?); and he's obviously run out of money to do things, so he's suggesting all sorts of extravagant spending strategies and conservative media is trashing him wherever they can. So, obviously, his approval rating is at 62% - eerily the exact palindromic opposite!
Mar 3 2009, 12:16PM
Specter Named 'Comrade of the Month' by Club for Growth
"While Senators Specter, Collins, and Snowe tout the stimulus bill as a compromise, it was more of a capitulation to the Democrats than anything else. Had these three senators voted with the rest of their party, President Obama would have been forced to engage the Republicans in a genuine compromise. Instead, American taxpayers are saddled with an $800 billion bill that will do little to stimulate the economy," Club for Growth Executive Director David Keating said in the group's press release.
86 percent of the Club's members voted to give the award to Specter, Collins, and Snowe; at least we know how they would vote if Toomey did, indeed, run.
Mar 3 2009, 11:53AM
White House Releases $28 Billion for Highway Projects; Biden Is a 'Sheriff'
According to the White House, state highway departments have already identified $750 billion worth of work that can start this month.
Additionally, we learned that Vice President Joe Biden well serve as waste, fraud, and abuse "sheriff" in overseeing how the dollars are spent: at today's press conference, Obama said, "as part of his duty, Joe will keep an eye on how precious tax dollars are being spent. To you, he's Mr. Vice President, but around the White House, we call him the sheriff -- because if you're misusing taxpayer money, you'll have to answer to him."
After initial concerns about his lack of a defined role, and after appointing Biden to a concrete role as leader of the White House's middle class economic task force, in one week Obama has quickly defined Biden is a "sheriff" whom "nobody messes with." Not bad.
Mar 3 2009, 9:42AM
Limbaugh as Leader? Dems Love It.
Last night, after Steele told Politico that he hadn't meant to slight Limbaugh by calling him an "entertainer" whose rhetoric could be "incendiary" and "ugly," Kaine issued a statement that Limbaugh is, in fact, the GOP's leader--a notion Steele has had to refute publicly twice in the past three days.
"Chairman Steele's reversal this evening and his apology to Limbaugh proves the unfortunate point that Limbaugh is the leading force behind the Republican Party, its politics and its obstruction of President Obama's agenda in Washington," Kaine said, in a statement issued by the DNC press office last night.
Mar 2 2009, 11:26PM
New hope for Bobby Jindal
One way to think of this is: It's been a mixed week for the Rhodes Scholar tribe. Nancy-Ann Min DeParle, known in RS parlance as being of "Tennessee and Balliol College," has just been named the new White House health-reform czar(ina?), and Dominic Barton ("British Columbia and Brasenose College") was chosen capo di tutti capi of McKinsey & Co. Congratulations! On the other hand, we have .... that speech, by Gov. Jindal ("Louisiana and New College.") Maybe they can revoke these things for excessive public embarrassment? This could be called the Mel Reynolds provision? ("Illinois and Lincoln College, plus federal prison.")
Mar 2 2009, 7:11PM
Steele on 'Fail' Sentiment
Mar 2 2009, 7:10PM
Nice work, if you can get it
"The governor chose to go with a large independent company because he wanted to tell his story without any restrictions over content that might've come with a major publishing house," says the former governor's publicist.
Mar 2 2009, 7:09PM
Quote of the Day
Mar 2 2009, 6:28PM
Rush vs. Steele--For Real
Incendiary? You bet. As I noted earlier, Steele actually defended the thinking behind Rush's desire for President Obama to "fail" during the interview in question--but from Limbaugh's corner, the fight is on.
Mar 2 2009, 5:05PM
PA Senate Race Shakes Up: Toomey Could Oppose Specter
Mar 2 2009, 4:14PM
Odds on Joe's Political Future
Odds on Joe to run are 3.5-1; odds on Joe to win are 8-1.
Mar 2 2009, 3:45PM
Correction: Iseman Speaks
Mar 2 2009, 3:03PM
Annals Of Secrecy: Jordan
Mar 2 2009, 2:46PM
A Secretary, but Not a Czar
Sebelius has a background in health reform dating back to her pre-governor days, having served for eight years as state insurance commissioner. If confirmed as HHS secretary, she will be the primary spokeswoman for Obama's ambitious health reform initiative--for which $634 billion has been set aside over the next decade in Obama's recent budget proposal.
The Kansas governor "knows health care inside and out," Obama said today as he announced her appointement, promoting his new pick. "She's won praise for her expertise from stakeholders across the spectrum, from consumer groups to insurers. Over eight years as state insurance commissioner, she refused campaign contributions from insurance companies and protected the people of Kansas from increases to their premiums by blocking a takeover of the state's largest insurer."
Her role in the post, however, likely won't be as sweeping as that advertised for Obama's first choice to lead HHS, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.). And, while we will have to wait and see what Sebelius does in the new job, the tag of "health czar" that was quickly applied to Daschle may not fit so accurately with Obama's new nominee.
The reasons are twofold.
First, a major selling point for Daschle's broad authority over health reform was his massive rolodex of friends and working acquaintances in Congress. As former Senate majority leader, personally liked both by Democrats and Republicans, his relationships in the Capitol were supposed to be integral in shepherding ambitious reform through Congress, to Obama's desk. As a governor, Sebelius doesn't have those relationships--at least not to the extent Daschle does.
Second, Daschle was supposed to occupy two offices with authority over health reform: HHS secretary and director of the White House Office for Health Reform--a new office created by Obama's transition team in December. Sebelius won't occupy the latter post; instead, Obama named Tennessee Department of Human Services Commissioner Nancy DeParle today to fill the slot. Insofar as the term "czar" applied to Daschle's mandate to lead more than one office, Sebelius' appointment is undeniably less Russian.
So Daschle's absence has been filled by two replacements, not just by Sebelius--even if HHS secretary is the most high profile health job in the nation, and even if it will place the health reform crusade in her hands.
It's unclear who, between Sebelius and DeParle, will figure more prominently in shepherding Obama's massive health care reforms through Congress: "Sebelius is going to have a broad range of responsibilities," an administration official told me on background. "I'm not sure at this point we would rank who's going to have more impact."
As he announced Sebelius' nomination today, Obama also announced a health care reform summit to be held at the White House this Thursday. If last week's fiscal responsibility summit serves as any indicator, Obama and his team will ask Democrats and Republicans alike for ideas to help shape the health policy initiative and will try to foster good will by building rapport with the GOP. In short, it will kick off Sebelius's and DeParle's new responsibilities as policy specialists and health lobbyists for the Obama administration.
Let the health games begin.
Mar 2 2009, 12:45PM
Burris In It to Win It
Scandal didn't stop Burris from traveling to Washington to claim his seat in the first place, and, for now, it looks like it won't stop him the second time around, either. Make no mistake: SupportBurris.com is open for business.
Mar 2 2009, 11:46AM
Steele vs. Rush--Sort Of
Conservative and liberal blogs alike Monday picked up on Steele's response, some blasting Steele and others promoting a fight between the two GOP heavyweights. But Steele's answer to Limbaugh, and its political implications, were a bit more complicated.
Mar 2 2009, 10:44AM
Repudiating Bush
In a classic 1997 book called The Politics Presidents Make and a 2008 follow-up called Presidential Leadership in Political Time, Skowronek noted that the presidents who most successfully constructed lasting electoral majorities all followed presidents widely viewed as failures. These repeated couplings between "manifest incapacity and towering success" have included John Adams and Thomas Jefferson in 1800; John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson in 1828; James Buchanan and Abraham Lincoln in 1860; Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932; and, most recently, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan in 1980.
Skowronek argues that these dynamic presidents--who he dubs "reconstructive leaders"--have succeeded not only because of their own skills. Their impact is so great because they arrived at a moment when the dominant party over the previous generation has been discredited by failure or corruption, or both, and large voting blocs are open to something new. Skowronek has described the process this way: "The presidents who traditionally appear on lists of America's most effective political leaders-Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln and FDR-were, like Reagan, opposition leaders standing steadfast against already discredited political regimes. These were men of very different background, character, and political skill....What they shared was a moment in a political sequence in which presidential authority is at its most compelling, a moment when opponents stand indicted in the court of public opinion...."
Key to the success of the reconstructive or realigning presidents has been the ability to justify their direction and expand their support by indicting the failures of the old order. "The great communicators in presidential history all tend to be great repudiators," Skowronek said in an interview. "The presidents who are the most successful in redefining the terms and conditions of legitimate national government, the ones who are most successful in setting a new course...are ones who have had this authority to repudiate."
Obama and his advisers intuitively seem to recognize that. Literally from the first moments of his presidency, Obama has repudiated Bush in unusually pointed terms. The process started in Obama's inaugural address, when he declared, in an unmistakable reference to Bush's security policies, "As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." Obama was equally unsparing about Bush's economic policies in his address to Congress last week: "A surplus became an excuse to transfer wealth to the wealthy instead of an opportunity to invest in our future. Regulations were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market."
The White House took its indictment to a new level in the budget blueprint it released last Thursday. In a relentless 11 pages, the first chapter offers a withering point-by-point critique of Bush's economic record and governing performance, from anemic job creation and income growth (the median income among working-age families fell by nearly $2,000 from 2000 through 2007) to rising poverty (up by 5.7 million from 2000 through 2007). It denounces Bush as overly secretive ("It is no coincidence that the policy failures of the past eight years have been accompanied by unprecedented Governmental secrecy"), incompetent, fiscally irresponsible, short-sighted, ideologically rigid (pursuing "a dogmatic deregulatory approach") and favoring the rich over all others. The White House sums up the previous occupant's record this way: "This is the legacy that we inherit--a legacy of mismanagement and misplaced priorities, of missed opportunities and of deep, structural problems ignored for too long."
Other than that, what did you really think?
David Axelrod, Obama's senior White House political adviser, said in an interview that the detailed critique and tough language was necessary to establish a "baseline" from which the public can assess Obama's progress. "We inherited [federal] deficits over one trillion; the worst economy since World War II," Axelrod said. "This is the canvass on which we have to paint, and I think it's important to set that baseline."
In the most immediate sense, reminding voters of the hole Bush left behind may buy Obama more time to help the country climb out. And, by linking today's economic storms to his predecessor's policies--"This crisis is neither the result of a normal turn of the business cycle nor an accident of history," Obama wrote in his budget message--he makes it tougher for congressional Republicans to offer alternatives that largely track Bush's approach in their emphasis on tax cuts. Indeed, Obama, while campaigning for the stimulus plan, pointedly argued that while he was open to good ideas from any source, Republicans should not "come to the table with the same tired arguments and worn ideas that helped to create this crisis."
But the payoff for Obama in a strategy of repudiation could be much larger than these tactical advantages. Skowronek notes that it is precisely at the moments when the old approaches have been most thoroughly discredited that presidents have most lastingly reshaped both the electoral alignment and the governing agenda. And they have done so, he maintains, largely because the broad public rejection of the previously dominant political ideas creates an unusually large opening to redirect government's priorities and approaches. That's what Roosevelt did in 1932 when he laid the foundation of the modern welfare state on the ruins of Hoover's largely laissez-faire ideology and what Reagan did in 1980, when his insistence that "government is the problem" interred Roosevelt's New Deal coalition and redrew the boundaries of political debate for the next 28 years.
Could this be another such hinge in political history--one that tilts the scales toward a lasting Democratic advantage and an era of more activist government than was possible in the first decades after Reagan? One of the predicates is undeniably present. The country rejected Bush in his second term as profoundly as a president can be rejected: on Election Day last year, an incredible 71% of voters in the exit poll disapproved of his performance.
The real question is whether that verdict was simply a personal rejection of Bush, or a more fundamental recoil from the underlying anti-tax, anti-regulation philosophy that has held the upper hand in Washington since Reagan. It's too early to say for sure, of course, but the scale of Obama's proposals on every front suggests he believes it is the latter. Axelrod says as much. "I think there's no question that a verdict has been rendered on the policies of the past eight years and in many ways extending back to the governing philosophy that we've had for 30 years," he said.
The White House's operating theory is that negative "verdict" provides Obama much more latitude than Bill Clinton to advance programs that expand government's role. "There's a cyclical nature to American politics and there are epochs," Axelrod said. "And in 1980, the New Deal-Great Society epoch came to end and it launched another [conservative] era that I think history will say lasted 28 years." While the Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon presidencies were "wedged into" the New Deal epoch, and Clinton's into the conservative era, Axelrod continued, each were constrained by "the governing theory" set by Roosevelt and Reagan respectively.
So is 2009 the beginning of another epoch that will enshrine a new governing theory for the next generation? Axelrod is aware how many other presidential political gurus have been mesmerized by that light in the distance. And yet Axelrod can't help but think that prospect may be flickering more brightly than usual now. "I know others who have sat in the office I'm sitting in have talked about realignment," he said. "I think its premature to talk about that. But I think this is not an ordinary time. I think this is potentially one of those transitional moments."
Presidents who believe they are governing in "transitional moments" take greater risks to impose bigger changes. When the country embraces those changes (as in the case of Skowronek's reconstructive presidents) the policy and political payoff is enormous. But Bush and his political guru Karl Rove also believed they could reshape the electorate with bold change to establish a lasting majority for their party. Instead they governed in a polarizing manner that lost the country's confidence and eventually decimated the Republican electoral coalition. That's a cold testament to the risks facing ambitious presidents who reach beyond their electoral mandate--and a reminder to Obama that in repudiating Bush, he needs to be careful not to emulate him.
Mar 2 2009, 10:39AM
The Santelli Conspiracy?*
Was Rick Santelli's "Chicago Tea Party" a spontaneous expression of populist outrage? Or was it a carefully orchestrated media campaign that was planned long before Santelli's now-famous socialist-bashing CNBC rant? Mark Ames and Yasha Levine suggest that Santelli's mini-movement was in fact bought and paid for by a network of right-of-center moguls led by the Koch family, best known for their outsized backing of libertarian causes.
Mar 2 2009, 10:28AM
Iseman Speaks
Video
Mar 2 2009, 10:03AM
Rush at CPAC: I Do Want Obama to Fail
Mar 1 2009, 11:04AM
Outrages of the Week
A regular feature wherein symbolic outrages, contrived outrages, real outrages, and outrageous outrages are recounted. Below, a Sunday edition.
Conservative Jewish leaders are OUTRAGED that Hillary Clinton warned Israel to speed up humanitarian aid to Gaza.
England is OUTRAGED that former Royal Bank of Scotland CEO Fred Goodwin will be receiving a $933,000 pension.
Everyone else is OUTRAGED at the Octomom.
Germans are OUTRAGED at the economy--enough to burn nice cars.
Colorado Democrats were allegedly OUTRAGED at Republican state Sen. Dave Schultheis for saying he would vote against a bill requiring HIV tests for pregnant women because the disease "stems from sexual promiscuity." If they weren't actually OUTRAGED, liberal bloggers certainly were.
Gay Oscar viewers in Asia were OUTRAGED that a pan-Asian satellite TV network redacted the words "gay" and "lesbian" from Oscar acceptance speeches. Which is pretty outrageous.
Lou Dobbs is mildly OUTRAGED that Obama has signed an executive order encouraging the use of union contractors & workers on large federal construction projects.
A group of African American ministers in Illinois was OUTRAGED at public attacks on Sen. Roland Burris, but now they may be OUTRAGED at the senator for his scandals.
Sarah Palin documentarian John Ziegler was OUTRAGED at Matt Lauer for being "the A-Rod of the media," while recounting his OUTRAGE at the media as a whole for its campaign coverage.
Copyright © 2009 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.