Tag: obama

What, me worry?

In which Krugman and I disagree:

Republicans, by the way, seem less susceptible to this delusion. Since Mr. Obama took office, they have engaged in relentless obstruction, obviously unworried about how their actions would look or be reported. And it’s working: by blocking Democratic efforts to alleviate the economy’s woes, the G.O.P. is helping its chances of a big victory in November.

I think Krugman is being too kind by half. The GOP is unworried because they know their actions will not be reported; they therefore needn’t worry about appearances at all. There is, outside the blogoshpere, precisely zero coverage of across-the-board GOP obstruction. And, why should there be? The Democrat won’t mention it either. Obama is, even still, apparently heralding in a wonderful new day in which everyone works together.

And don’t for a second entertain the thought that, should the GOP capture the House in November, things will change because (why) they’ll have to start taking positions on policy. They certainly will take positions, but it will all be:

  1. The Tax elimination act of 2011
  2. The forced birth bill of 2011
  3. The immigration cessation bill of 2011
  4. The drill everywhere bill of 2011
  5. The Social Security “Personalization” and Welfare Elimination Act of 2011

And etc… That, of course, is ignoring (for now) all the weekly impeachment proceedings. Each of these will, of course, die a quick death in the do-nothing Senate. Well, except for that last one. Democrats will likely take it up in hopes of creating the appearance of bipartisanship. That and, we’ll see a high-minded compromise on #1; there we’ll raise taxes on the bottom 15% in exchange for deep cuts in social programs and an across the board tax decrease on the top 10% as well as elimination of capital gains and estate taxes. It’s win/win!

How do you stop it? Well, you know about it. You thus start talking about it. Now. Repeatedly. Every time a microphone is switched on and several times when one isn’t yet.

That, however, would be shrill.

Goldilocks Triangulation

Digby utterly nails it; do yourself a favor and read the whole thing:

[Obama’s political advisers] should have realized that a health care bill that nobody in their right minds would have designed from scratch, the worst aspects of which liberals will be asked to defend for years to come, would be met with dampened enthusiasm by those who watched the process devolve from a sense of progressive purpose to an exhausting farce. They are expected to be able to predict that financial reform without accountability for what’s gone before, combined with the administration’s unwillingness to confront the civil liberties abuse of the last administration – indeed expanding on them in some cases – would show a lack of fundamental concern for justice among those who care about such things.

Goldilocks Triangulation

Where’s My Belt?

John Boehner, March 2009: It’s time for government to tighten their belts and show the American people that we ‘get’ it

Barack Obama, yesterday: “At a time when so many families are tightening their belts, he’s going to make sure that the government continues to tighten its own,” Obama said.

Paul Krugman, today: We’ll never know how differently the politics would have played if Obama, instead of systematically echoing and giving credibility to all the arguments of the people who want to destroy him, had actually stood up for a different economic philosophy. But we do know how his actual strategy has worked, and it hasn’t been a success.

The other side said no.
They said no to laws that we passed to stop insurance companies from denying coverage to people with preexisting conditions. They said no to requiring women to get equal pay for equal work. They said no to extended unemployment insurance for folks who desperately needed help. They said no to holding oil companies accountable when they bring on catastrophe.

Barack Obama, speaking in Vegas.
This is all well and good, and I’m glad to (finally) hear it. But The Democrat needs to be out there, every day in front of every microphone that is switched on repeating this sort of mantra over and over again, day after day, week after week, year after year. Then and only then it might start to seep in.
They choose not to. They choose to ignore the glaring truth that the facts do not matter. They think they have the high ground of those facts which do not matter. They do not. The facts do not matter, and often don’t even enter into the calculus. This is why they fail.

Now it can be told. The story about [McChrystal] voting for Obama is not contrived. He is a political liberal. He is a social liberal. He banned Fox News from the television sets in his headquarters. Yes, really.

Marc Ambinder. What?
Wait, WHAT?

…military rules and traditions [allow] very little public criticism of civilian leadership in order to ensure that political and strategic disagreement doesn’t curdle into a culture of opposition among the people with all the weapons. McChrystal was clearly lax on policing criticism within his command, but when the system was made aware of that failure, the system worked. You did not see politically disgruntled generals rallying around McChrystal.
Instead, what you saw was David Petraeus taking a command that amounts to a demotion from his current post and could destroy his reputation as a miracle worker. Petraeus’s successes in Iraq gave him a tremendous reputation and credibility as a big, strategic thinker. He could rest on that, retire on that, run for office on that. Instead, Petraeus is going to put that reputation back on the line in service of a war effort that may well be doomed. Why? Well, the civilian who leads the military asked him to, and a soldier obeys.

Ezra Klein, nailing it.
Also interesting to me that the Petraeus move politically neutralizes any credible GOP opposition while also effectively neutralizing Petraeus relative to any vague 2012-based thinking that may have been going on while simultaneously giving the endlessly imbecilic chattering class a bone re: Presidential “toughness.” Masterful.

I’m relieved to see that [Bill] Kristol draws the line somewhere –I would have thought his line would be “leading an armed coup,” and even then I wouldn’t be totally confident Kristol would side with Obama over the offending general.

Jonathan Chait on the Stan McChrystal rhubarb.

…belief that government has little or no role to play in helping this nation meet our collective challenges. It’s an agenda that basically offers two answers to every problem we face: more tax breaks for the wealthy and fewer rules for corporations.

The last administration called this recycled idea “the Ownership Society.” But what it essentially means is that everyone is on their own. No matter how hard you work, if your paycheck isn’t enough to pay for college or health care or childcare, well, [go die in the streets]. If misfortune causes you to lose your job or your home, [go die in the streets]. And if you’re a Wall Street bank or an insurance company or an oil company, you pretty much get to play by your own rules, regardless of the consequences for everybody else [; anyone that gets in their way can kindly go die in the streets].

Barack Obama as heard by Lemkin.

On the national level, bipartisanship usually means Democrats ignore the needs of the poor and abandon the idea that government can play a role in issues of poverty, race discrimination, sex discrimination or environmental protection

Barack Obama… in 1996