The Atlantic Politics Channel: Provocation of the Day Archives

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May 29 2009, 10:05AM

SotoSkirmish: Kinsley: Her Race and Gender Are Assets

A provocation of the day, courtesy of Michael Kinsley, who contends that liberals and conservatives aren't being intellectually honest -- nor are they being honest with themselves -- about race, gender and Sonia Sotomayor.

Listening, via the media, to the debate inside the Republican Party, you also have to wonder about the party's commitment to a colorblind society. The Democrats' too, but Democrats don't carry on about colorblindness the way Republicans do. It's clear that the one paralyzing fact about Sonia Sotomayor, to Republicans, is the color of her skin. If she weren't Latino, they would be in full revenge-for-Clarence-Thomas mode. Instead, they are in an agony of indecision, with GOP strategists openly warning: Support the Latina or die. If the 40 remaining Republican senators end up voting for Sotomayor, her race will be the reason. Democrats, meanwhile, can enjoy supporting her for her impressive intellectual qualifications. They don't even need to mention the obvious: that these qualifications aren't the main reason President Obama picked her.
Yes, of course, ethnicity in politics is different from ethnic job quotas, and a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court is a special kind of job. Nowhere is a bit of diversity more obviously desirable. Nowhere is the case stronger for taking race, ethnicity and gender into account. And conservatives apparently agree. If only they could bring themselves to say so.

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Apr 9 2009, 4:07PM

The East Wing President

by Marc Ambinder

President Obama, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and a passel of regular people participated in a messaging event in the East Room of the White House this morning. Mortgage rates are lower, and the White House wants folks to take advantage of that stimulative news. The communications skeptic in me, however, wonders about the wisdom of messaging events inside the White House that deal with bread and butter issues. Granted, the White House couldn't schedule a domestic trip so soon -- though Obama could always go to Annandale, VA -- and this White House does like to use the bully pulpit to educate. But there's a risk of both overexposure -- too many small East Room events and the sense that the president is playing Suze Orman -- and underexposure -- why isn't he standing in front of a house somewhere?

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Mar 25 2009, 1:30PM

Andrew Cuomo's Too-Tough Tactics?

by Chris Good

Note: the original headline wondered whether Cuomo was an "extortionist" in the colloquial sense. That wasn' the best choice of words. Cuomo's not breaking any laws here. Whether his tactics are appropriate is, well, a very appropriate question.

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.

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Mar 24 2009, 2:32PM

Life, Taken For Granted

by Marc Ambinder

Given that President Obama went out of his way to give pro-life pastors a prominent place at his inauguration, aren't the demands of those who want Notre Dame to rescind its commencement invitation to Obama a little.... well... of course they're predictable...but mostly... uncivil? Also: aren't both side of the abortion debate more mature than this now? Shouldn't pro-lifers want as much contact with Obama as possible?

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Mar 20 2009, 12:55PM

Provocation of the Day: Blinded by Hysteria

by Chris Good

Politicians can't deal with the fact that ordinary Americans were to blame for the financial crisis, "Moneyball" author Michael Lewis tells us in a Bloomberg op-ed. His point: hysteria over the AIG bonuses makes no sense, has caused the entire political system to go nuts, and proves to that all big numbers look the same to the American people, whether or not it makes sense to be outraged about them.

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 13 2009, 5:03PM

Obama's Happy Talk On The Economy

by Marc Ambinder

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?

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Feb 25 2009, 8:17PM

Get Out Of Your D$*#( Shells

by Marc Ambinder

Here's a simple way to increase intellectual cross-pollination on the web: honest bloggers of the left and the right should try to interview at least one author/historian/politician from the other side of the aisle at least one a month. So -- Media Matters shouldn't just criticize Bernard Goldberg; they should interview him. Glenn Greenwald should, I don't know, see if Jack Goldsmith from Harvard would chat with him online. Bill Kristol should interview Jane Mayer. Pajamas Media needs to interview Democrats and Democratic experts, and not just each other, or Joe the Plumber, or Sen. Jim DeMint. Righties interviewing righties has gotten so boring and repetitive; lefties fawning over lefties is lazy. Who's going to be brave enough to reach out to an ideological or intellectual opponent, promote their new book, or interview them?

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Feb 25 2009, 1:43PM

Jindal Didn't Damage His Presidential Aspirations

by Marc Ambinder

A good number of folks who've been talking up Gov. Bobby Jindal's presidential chances are now defending his anodyne performance last night by pointing out, correctly, that Jindal is smart, serious and talented, and that there's no evidence that a panned SOTU (or budget speech) response will make or break a career. (Come to think of it, Bill Clinton wasn't punished for his famously long-winded 1988 Democratic convention speech.) They're just too artificial -- a man or woman, standing in an empty, artificially lit room, trying to tie several knots at once. Fine. Jindal's buzz shouldn't really go down much among Beltway insiders. As I noted yesterday, he is not charistmatic, and this format is not his best. Formal speech responses are quaint in an era of instantaneous communication.

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Feb 19 2009, 2:35PM

The Market Mover Fallacy

by Marc Ambinder

Added to the list of political fallacies I've started...well.. I am starting, right now: the market mover fallacy. Check out this rant by CNBC's Rick Santelli, who is outraged at President Obama's mortgage subsidization plan. That's perfectly reasonable. But the context surrounding his discontent, at least as posted by Matt Drudge, seems to be the news that the equity markets hated the plan. (Check out the reaction of his live audience). Therefore, the plan must be bad.

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Feb 13 2009, 11:00AM

Are Dems Secretly Gutting Welfare Reform?

by Marc Ambinder

Is this the return of welfare wars?

The final compromise of the economic stimulus bill includes $5 billion for states that anticipate a larger than expected increase in welfare claims. But to give states maximum flexibility, Democrats have written in a provision that would allow states to increase the number of welfare caseloads while holding steady the percentage people getting Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) benefits that would be required to work or look for jobs. Before we get into the details, a word about the politics: a number of conservatives and even liberals have written to me wondering why the GOP isn't making more of a fuss about this. The answers are fairly simple: they want to avoid being seen as poor-people bashers, they know that Americans still associate welfare with minorities, and there are different sensitivities they must consider when making political claims about the priorities of the first black president.