It’s the Leaks

Perhaps we can get ahead of the “forget the impact of overturning Roe, it’s the leaking of the draft decision that matters” nonsense like this:

The release of the 98-page document is unprecedented in the court’s modern history: Early drafts of opinions have virtually never leaked before the final decision is announced, and never in such a consequential case. And early drafts of opinions often change by the time the decision from the court is announced.
Michael D. Shear and Adam Liptak writing in the Times of New York

if we actually bother to point out that this characterization is categorically false. Thirty seconds of Googling would net you this highly relevant bit of information that the Post somehow managed to find and print:

…it is not true that rulings have never been given to journalists before the announcement of the decision by the court. In fact, the result in Roe v. Wade itself was leaked by a Supreme Court clerk to a Time magazine reporter in January 1973. The issue of Time, with an article titled “The Sexes: Abortion on Demand,” appeared on newsstands hours before the decision was announced by Justice Harry Blackmun.
James B. Robenalt, Washington Post

We knew this decision was coming and we know that birth control is next. Codifying into law national bans on both would be planks in the GOP platform if they bothered with such documents anymore. This almost makes one think there’s a reason they don’t put out platforms anymore.

As it stands, the GOP is out there every day messaging against Griswold as being of a piece with Roe in the “wrongly decided” department of GOP jurisprudence i.e. “privacy for me but not for thee.” With a functioning Democrat party you might be able to message against that because, last time I checked, access to birth control both in and out of marriage is a pretty popular thing. Access to “safe, legal, and rare” style of regulated abortion is also a 70/30 “for” proposition. But our Establishment Democrat is still not sure they should do anything about being characterized daily as part of an organized pedophilia cult that likely drinks baby blood. This is why they fail.

The Current Crisis, Writ Small

The absolute absence of any urgency among establishment Democrats is evident all over the map today. Both are regional dust-ups that paint a much wider story, the first in Idaho where a Political Science professor by the name of Scott Yenor made some extremely dumb-assed comments:

Our culture is steeped with feminism. It teaches young boys and girls that they are motivated by much the same things and want much the same things. Thus, girls are told to become as independent as boys are said to be. […] They are more medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome than women need to be. […] Young men must be respectable and responsible to inspire young women to be secure with feminine goals of homemaking and having children. […] Every effort must be made not to recruit women into engineering, but rather to recruit and demand more of men who become engineers. Ditto for med school, and the law, and every trade.

So, a dumb-ass. Fine. Becca Savransky, author of the linked article, reached out to State Senator Melissa Wintrow, a Boise Democrat and the former director of the Boise State Women’s Center. She apparently called the remarks “dehumanizing,” which is a good start. Then she proceed to say:

We’re not going back to the 1950s, I don’t know what everybody is so afraid of. Let’s drop our weapons. Let people be who they want to be.

Unfortunately, she’s wrong about two things here and missed an opportunity. People like Scott Yenor, the current GOP leadership, and all the many Trump voting GOPers out there aren’t after a return to the 1950s. They want a return to the 1850s. Back when Black people and women knew their place and, when they didn’t, could be and were shown their place. That’s who everybody should be afraid of and it’s not an academic issue to mull over a good whiskey anymore. It’s facing us at the national political level right now and every day until the 2022 midterms. Problem is, most folks don’t even hear much about that because it’s not stated when the microphones are turned on for some “Democratic response” to absolute bile like Yenor all the way up the chain to the extremely similar bile coming from people in actual power or who, you know, were either planning or directly involved in attempting and/or abetting violent insurrection against these United States in January of this year.

Second example, this one from Georgia, where there may be some troubling lack of Democratic voter engagement. Yes, just a drawn out race for mayor of Atlanta, but buried in the story is this bombshell:

Next year, the [Democratic Party] machine is going to be up and running at the fullest extent of its power, and you are going to see all this money flowing into Georgia
Antonio Brown, Atlanta City Council member

Always “next year” with establishment Democrats. Instead of screaming about election access and voting rights, you can always hear them saying “We only need to show up and work when it’s the big election cycles for the top offices,” regardless of vast recent evidence to the contrary. Compare and contrast that attitude with the GOP, currently and aggressively taking control of county election boards in red states across the country (you’ll recall those as the election boards that refused to throw the election to Trump regardless of vote count in 2020), rewriting election laws in every state they can (to make it easier to disregard vote counts when the GOP candidate loses), limiting access to voting in every state they can (including Georgia, where we see in this article that turnout is down, at least in part due to restrictions placed on vote-by-mail and early voting), and blocking any attempts to reform any part of creating guarantees for voting access, controls for the drawing of equitable voting districts, and broad standards for state and local election certification at the federal level.

But it is, of course, perfectly fine for the Democrats to take a long rest and really only bother to wind that old machine up for the really big races. No trouble with that approach at all.

This is why they fail.

Kevin Drum: It’s inevitable that more details are going to emerge about all this—about both the hacking itself and Republican complicity in making use of the Russian material. This is not something that can be forgiven quickly or easily. Republicans may or may not care about this, but they’re going to have live with a smoldering, bitter anger from their Democratic colleagues for a very long time.
18 U.S. Code § 2381 – Treason: Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.(June 25, 1948, ch. 645, 62 Stat. 807; Pub. L. 103–322, title XXXIII, § 330016(2)(J), Sept. 13, 1994, 108 Stat. 2148.)
Lemkin: If we ever have a Democrat in power and/or position to do something about investigating and seeking legal redress, that person will say “I think it’s time to let bygones be bygones. Let’s just keep walking.”

I’m a PC

A long piece by Ta-Nehesi Coates on Obama (and, basically, race in America) that is predictably excellent, but this little scene really sticks out to me:

The [systematic and complete GOP] obstruction [throughout Obama’s presidency] grew out of narrow political incentives. “If Republicans didn’t cooperate,” Obama told me, “and there was not a portrait of bipartisan cooperation and a functional federal government, then the party in power would pay the price and they could win back the Senate and/or the House. That wasn’t an inaccurate political calculation.”

Obama is not sure of the degree to which individual racism played into this calculation. “I do remember watching Bill Clinton get impeached and Hillary Clinton being accused of killing Vince Foster,” he said. “And if you ask them, I’m sure they would say, ‘No, actually what you’re experiencing is not because you’re black, it’s because you’re a Democrat.’ ”

This is a genuinely and deeply important perception by Obama. It is undeniable that racism figures into much of the baseline Obama hatred/denial (“not my President!” “not a citizen!” and so forth), but baseline crazy is baked right into the mix for any Democrat that holds high office. Period. And an over-reliance on just characterizing this stuff over the last eight years as racism in blanket fashion is definitively of a piece with the “PC run wild” attacks that Trump used to great effect.

Even more importantly, though, is the fact that it’s all too easy to forget what the ground rules are for Democrats as candidates or office-holders. Expect this kind of shit. Run against it. Point it out in off years any time you are near a live microphone. You can never just “move forward,” unilaterally disarm, and take what you perceive to be the high road. Use your foreknowledge and expectation of these asinine talking points to preemptively mock and aggressively belittle your opponents based on the predictability of their spew as opposed to the far easier shortcut “oh, that’s just racist.” Because once you throw those qualifiers in, people on the convincible peripheries just stop listening. It is far easier to show them the crystal clear pattern of noise and falsehood, especially if you’re the one bringing it up and preemptively bludgeoning your opponent with it, than it is to get them to stare into the maw of decades and centuries of systematic privilege from which they have likely benefited…and but also magically admit to that, accept your point, change their worldview, and march right down to vote “D” for the rest of their natural lives.

But, alas, Serious Democrats are against this sort of thing; my dears that simply isn’t done. And this is why they fail.

Yglesisas Answers it All

Matt Yglesias asks:

There’s no mystery as to why the National Republican Campaign Committee hates Nancy Pelosi, but their dislike for San Francisco is a bit puzzling.

Almost directly, and seemingly without realizing it, Matt Yglesias also provides the answer:

[San Francisco is] an enormous economic success story. The San Francisco metropolitan area has the fourth-highest median household income in the country, with its Bay Area partner San Jose coming in at number three. Metro San Francisco is in a tie for having the third-highest-pay for low-wage workers, its fourth in median wages, and third in 90th percentile wages.

GOP orthodoxy requires “government” of any kind to be an abject and self-evident failure. Few citizens of the US would dispute the sense that San Francisco is the liberal bastion of the United States. Therefore it must be an urban hellhole and not be visited by any kind of success. Where success exists, it must be ignored. Similarly, old Taxachusetts must be forever suffering under the yoke of ludicrously high taxes (and one must never acknowledge the reality: that MA’s effective tax rates and collective tax burden generally trend lower than those of old Live Free or Die itself, that glibertarian heaven called New Hampshire).

Much like the Post Office and many other examples, any functioning example of government, large or small, must be (at a minimum) denigrated. If possible, it must also be actively undermined such that it may then be pointed to as an example of the impossibility of government intervention, large or small. All evidence to the contrary must be marginalized. And that is why the GOP “hates” San Francisco and largely assumes it to be barely survivable smoking ruin.

The lesson here is simple. At a deep ideological level, Republicans believe that federal bureaucracies are inherently inept, so when Republicans occupy the White House they have no interest in making the federal bureaucracy work. And it doesn’t.

Kevin Drum, making a point that I’d take even further: The GOP not only has no interest in “making it work,” they have a vested interest in the federal bureaucracy looking as ineffective as possible. That’s the only way to feed the larger narrative that government is bad in every instance, in every venture, and must never be tried as a potential solution for anything. Thus Mitt’s “just let industry clean it up” blather; he knows there will be no challenge, there will be no “so what’s the business model there, exactly and in detail?” question from an ever-pliant media. He can say it with impunity because the GOP has been peddling versions of this line for 20 years now and people have essentially stopped thinking about or even really hearing it.
This is also why the Post Office is being run into the ground with malice aforethought; no program major, minor, or indispensable can be seen to work. At best, government programs can only be tolerated. This is why there’s no interest in actually managing defense procurement (which would seem to be a GOP darling on its face). The GOP does want the weapons the better to kill people with; but any overruns are just excellent evidence as to the inability of government to do anything. So why bother actually reigning anything in? Forget those damnable statistics showing the decline in bureaucrats in military procurement exactly tracks the explosion in cost overruns and delays. That’s just numbers. They lie. Follow your gut and most of all your basest fears: government can do nothing and must be eliminated wherever possible. Therefore, more in sadness than in anger, the time has come to eliminate Medicare and Social Security.

Government can do nothing. Go die in the streets. This is who they are.

Krugman Nails It

New York City Romney Donor in Land Cruiser: “We’ve got the message. But my college kid, the baby sitters, the nails ladies — everybody who’s got the right to vote — they don’t understand what’s going on. I just think if you’re lower income — one, you’re not as educated, two, they don’t understand how it works, they don’t understand how the systems work, they don’t understand the impact.”

Krugman: “So I was curious: what do “nails ladies” earn? The answer, according to the BLS Occupational Employment Statistics, is that in 2010 the mean annual wage of Manicurists and Pedicurists was $21,760. Among other things, this means that nails ladies probably face a higher marginal effective tax rate than Romney donors.”

Lemkin: A truly agile messaging arm in a tight election year would have had Krugman responding to this linkage, not making it. This is why we fail.

Why They Fail

Mitt Romney:

“What’s the effective rate I’ve been paying? It’s probably closer to the 15 percent rate than anything,” Romney, a GOP presidential candidate, said. “My last 10 years, I’ve — my income comes overwhelmingly from investments made in the past rather than ordinary income or rather than earned annual income. I got a little bit of income from my book, but I gave that all away. And then I get speaker’s fees from time to time, but not very much.”

According to his most recent financial disclosure statement, he earned nearly $375,000 for nine speaking engagements in 2010 and early 2011.

Well, now, this would seem to be a rather rich potential political line of attack. In one simple, straightforward stroke you have a narrative that both weakens Romney and advances important information in the broader sense relative to what’s really been going wrong in America these past ~40 years. Not only does Mitt (unsurprisingly) pay the preposterously low 15% rate on his largely-investment-based income, a rate dramatically lower than most Americans pay on far less income and but also Mitt reveals that this is aside from the entirely trivial, “not very much” money he made doing speaking engagements, itself a value fully 10 times the median income in these United States.

Naturally, The Democrat thinks it’s high time to leave Mitt alone on such issues:

At least one top Obama surrogate is pushing for the party to shift the balance of its attacks on Mitt Romney away from his days in private equity and on to his time in the public sector. […] “Bain is a little complicated for people to follow.”

Of course, of course. Who among us can possibly understand that Mitt pays a fraction of the taxes you do on wealth so fucking inexhaustibly vast that he considers income in excess of 10 times what you probably make in a year to be “not very much.” There’s just no way to play that information such that people can follow it.

Do nothing, Congress. Ezra Klein and EJ Dionne both write today about the benefits of simply letting various existing policies expire…doing so would net $7.1 TRILLION in deficit savings over the same decade that the “Super-committee” can’t find a way to reliably extract $1T. This path requires no votes, it requires no legislation, it requires no GOP assistance of any kind. Gridlock is all that’s required to make it happen.
So why is it no Serious Person (to whom deficits are, always have been, and always will be the preeminent policy question come-what-may) ever talks about the biggest deficit reduction plan currently out there, a plan that outstrips all other extant deficit plans by several orders of magnitude? Because they don’t actually care about deficits. None of them do. Because deficit reduction is not the goal. The GOP and their media enablers do not care about deficits. They care about eliminating social spending in this country to lower taxes on the richest 1%. Period. Everything and anything else that happens is collateral damage to that desired policy outcome.

Gridlock works. Gridlock will help America. Relying on gridlock is the best possible negotiating tool for Democrats. Period. Be prepared to end the Bush tax cuts. All of them. Be prepared to end the “doc fix.” All of it. Be prepared to end it all. Then you begin to drive policy decisions and have actual governing authority to get jobs bills and other things done.

Instead, they will, of course, continue to negotiate with themselves and parrot right-wing talking points. This is why they fail.
Just sit there quietly and let it all expire. Whenever the GOP talks about deficits, you bring up the $7T you are cutting deficits by over the next decade.
When the GOP gets tired of that, realizes you are serious about this, and is ready to talk, they’ll come to you. Then you set the terms. Then you begin to govern. This is how politics works. The Democrat seems to have largely forgotten this. Again: this is why they fail.

On the domestic side, both Democrats and Republicans have really made it very difficult for the president to be anything like a chief executive. This has led to a kind of frustration.

Bill Daley, White House Chief of Staff. This is why they fail.
Anyone, and I mean anyone who holds this opinion, much less speaks of it to a journalist of any stripe, should resign immediately or have been fired long ago. You think this is frustrating Bill? You think “your” side is equally to blame? Then go the fuck home. You are part of the problem and we’ll get nothing truly worthwhile done until everyone who thinks like you has long since left the scene.

Source: tnr.com