Category: Politics

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Barack Obama Criticism Domestic issues National Security Politics The Opinionsphere

The Populist Right Isn’t a Political Movement.

[digg-reddit-me]Last week, I wrote my response to the Tea Party: Government is Good! It’s one of those pieces that I wrote 10 separate drafts of, and if I had included them all, would have written some 10 pages on the subject.

So, I’ll be following up with some further thoughts on the subject periodically.

My first follow-up, the first point that made it into previous drafts, but was excised from the final one is the glaring discrepancy between:

  • the populist right’s rhetorical opposition to all domestic government action on the grounds that it is incompetent, ineffective, and a threat to liberty; and
  • the populist right’s support for apparently unlimited government power on national security and law enforcement matters on the grounds that it is highly competent, effective, and the defender of liberty.

What you get are many arguments asserting that the state is competent and effective enough to deprive some people of liberty without any check on its power, to trample on their every right and to strip away their sanity through torture, and to kill them — all in the name of protecting liberty; but — at the same time — government is so toxic to liberty, so ineffective, and markets are so fragile, that if taxes go up 1% for those making over $250,000, if corporations can’t give money directly to candidates, if Wall Street is forced to suffer more regulations, or if people are required to purchase health insurance to provide for medical care or suffer a small penalty – that if these things happen, we have descended into abject Socialism.

The common cop-out I’ve heard to explain this is that the government’s proper role is to provide for the common defense. But it is the government’s proper role to assess income taxes and to regulate interstate commerce as well.

The populist right simply isn’t ideologically coherent. Ron Paul may be, to his great credit — but it is precisely his coherence that makes him unpalatable to the rest of the populist right, the bulk of the Tea Party, and the Republican Party. The bulk of the populist right is in favor of the government’s curtailing of the civil liberties of resented minorities in the name of a War Against Terrorism. It favors wars abroad — or at least, doesn’t favor “retreat” or anything that doesn’t look tough enough. It is enamored of the war atmosphere, of the narrative of good versus evil, that permeated Fox News’s coverage of the Bush administration. It is enamored of the revolutionary atmosphere, of a nation under assault by a Hitler-wannabe, of another narrative of good versus evil, that permeates Fox News’s coverage of the Obama administration.

From a political perspective, it makes no sense to call the government too incompetent to provide postal service and yet still consider it competent enough to detain, torture and kill anyone it deems a terrorist.

The populist right, then, cannot be properly understood as a political movement. It is a cultural movement and a media phenomenon with political overtones.

[Image not subject to copyright.]

Categories
Criticism Economics Politics The Opinionsphere

Supply-side Theology

Jonathan Chait:

A perceptive student of the supply-side theology might wonder: if revenue from higher taxes will simply be spent, why wouldn’t revenue from higher growth also be spent? But this question has never been asked, because there are no perceptive students of the supply-side theology. It’s just a series of talking points.

In any case, it’s worth keeping in mind that the entire conservative apparatus is already cranked up to insist that no tax hikes are acceptable in the pursuit of deficit reduction. I see no way around this problem unless and until the country actually begins to undergo a deficit-created economic calamity.

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Barack Obama Criticism Economics Election 2012 Financial Crisis National Security New York City Palin Politics The Opinionsphere Videos

Must-Reads of the Week: Nukes, Inconsistencies, Graphing the Economic Crisis, Half-Hookers, Palin 2012, Mailer’s Wife, & Complex Business Models

1. Nukes. Jon Stewart and Andrew Sullivan both make the same point: Obama’s nuclear policy is the fulfillment of Ronald Reagan’s vision:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
The Big Bang Treaty
www.thedailyshow.com

2. Inconsistencies. Matt Yglesias:

The main difference between left and right with regard to property rights is simply that the right is invested in a lot of rhetoric about markets and property rights and the left is invested in different historical and rhetorical tropes.

… Formally, the right is committed to ideas about free markets and the left is committed to ideas about economic equality. But in practice, political conflict much more commonly breaks down around “some stuff some businessmen want to do” vs “some stuff businessmen hate” rather than anything about markets or property rights per se…

Or if you look at the energy sector, you’ll see that businessmen want to push property rights for the stuff that’s in the ground (coal, oil, whatever) and a commons model for the stuff (particulates, CO2) that’s in the air. You can call that “inconsistent” if you like, but obviously it’s perfectly consistent with what coal and oil executives want! And those industries are the most loyal supporters of “right” politics around.

3. Graphing the Economic Crisis. Ezra Klein puts out some interesting graphs about the economic crisis and nascent recovery including this one:

Klein explains:

This graph is a political problem for the Obama administration (if not, in the short-term, an economic problem). But it is also necessary for all the other graphs. The bank rescue, which added temporarily to the deficit, stabilized the stock market and set the stage for its recovery. The stimulus, which also added to the deficit, helped moderate the job losses and and has contributed to recent gains. You could’ve made the lines on this graph better, but only by letting the lines on the other graphs get worse.

4. Half-hookers. Lisa Taddeo for New York magazine writes about the burgeoning half-hooker culture which exists in a bizarre alternate reality existing so close to our own where celebrities and finance guys get their women:

The general-admission crowds dance, and the table crowds dance a little more woodenly, a little more entitledly, with their finger pads on their tables. The promoters are dancing with the models and the waitresses are dancing with the bottles and everybody finds a place on the floor.

The floor people, they are just to fill the place up. The celebrities and the athletes and the tycoons are the ones for whom this world is zealously designed. A rung below in after-work pinstripes are the money guys, the Deutsche guys and the Goldman guys and the no-name hedge-fund guys—the “whales”—guys like that one over there in a Boss suit and John Lobb shoes, standing beside the table that cost him $3,000. Standing very close to it, like a Little Leaguer who wants to steal second but has never done it before. This gentleman’s not dancing, but he’s thinking about it.

There’s quite a lot to the article. A fascinating piece of reporting.

5. Palin 2012. Chris Bowers makes the argument for why Sarah will win if she runs.

6. Mailer’s Wife. Alex Witchell profiles Norris Church Mailer, Norman Mailer’s final wife, whose story moved me as I read of it:

John Buffalo Mailer [stepson of Norris:] “People are their best selves and worst selves intermittently,” he told me, “and the best marriages navigate that ride over the hurt, which I believe they did right to the end. They both had options, and at the end of the day the life they created together won out over infidelity, illness and hard times…”

7. Complex Business Models. Clay Shirsky:

One of the interesting questions about Tainter’s thesis is whether markets and democracy, the core mechanisms of the modern world, will let us avoid complexity-driven collapse, by keeping any one group of elites from seizing unbroken control. This is, as Tainter notes in his book, an open question. There is, however, one element of complex society into which neither markets nor democracy reach—bureaucracy.

Bureaucracies temporarily reverse the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In a bureaucracy, it’s easier to make a process more complex than to make it simpler, and easier to create a new burden than kill an old one.

Read the rest.

[Image by me.]

Categories
Barack Obama Politics The Opinionsphere

Craziness in My Email

Some way, somehow, I’ve gotten on another interesting email list. A Tony Caputo wrote me an email this morning linking to this blog post from May of 2008 claiming some obvious falsehoods about Obama’s memoir, Dreams from My Father. For example, the piece states unequivocally an easily checkable claim: that his memoir makes “No mention of Harvard. ” A Google Book search reveals 14 explicit references to Harvard.

Later this morning, I receive this email linking – apparently favorably – to my blog:

from Tony Caputo <[email protected]>
to Americans Right to Know <[email protected]>
cc WORLD NET DAILY <[email protected]>,
STOP WELFARE <[email protected]>,
Stop the Democrats * <[email protected]>,
Stop Obama ** <[email protected]>,
“Nat. Tax Limitation Com*” <[email protected]>,
“Glenn Beck @ Fox **” <[email protected]>,
Give Me Liberty * <[email protected]>,
“Free Speech,1st Amend*” <[email protected]>,
Fox News ** <[email protected]>,
Conservative Truth ** <[email protected]>,
FIRE Pelosi <[email protected]>,
Fire OBAMA & Congress <[email protected]>,
Election Fraud <[email protected]>,
Don’t Trust Obama * <[email protected]>,
Don’t TRUST Democrats <[email protected]>,
“American Voters (C)” <[email protected]>,
American Thinker <[email protected]>,
American Patriot * <[email protected]>
date Wed, Apr 7, 2010 at 10:45 AM
subject Krauthammer believe Obama is trying to destroy America or not?
WHY IS AMERICA ALLOWING THIS RACIST, ANTI-AMERICAN LIAR DESTROY AMERICA?

Tony Caputo then included the full text of this blog post of mine questioning Charles Krauthammer’s authenticity.

To all those who were BCCed on this email (as I was): I want to point out publicly that I’m not associated with this Tony Caputo who also seems to have – according to this forum – written emails previously to the “Ladies & Gentlemen of White Christian America.”

Categories
Barack Obama Conservativism Criticism Domestic issues Liberalism Libertarianism Political Philosophy Politics The Opinionsphere

Government Is Good!

[digg-reddit-me]Reagan’s deepest and most profound legacy to the right wing today, to the Tea Party, to the populist right is a selection of wry quips about the inefficacy and incompetence of government told with a grandfatherly charm. “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem!” he said. “Government is the problem!” the placards at populist right wing gatherings now read.

This grotesque anti-government view regularly embraced and advocated by the populist right is incoherent, ignorant, and idiotic. It is the intellectual equivalent of blaming “The Man” or “Them” for all problems. While a (sometimes even paranoid) distrust of centralized power has always been part of American politics, the populist right today has elevated this sentiment to their core principle. It’s great efficiency as a rallying cry is that it papers over differences between the few but influential libertarian-minded who oppose government power on principle and the more numerous right wingers who see liberal government as an attack on their culture. What they both agree on (while a Democrat is in charge at least) is that the government is the problem.

This political coalition is animated primarily by anti-government rhetoric. While on some level it is a mere ideological trope, fervently believed only by the ignorant, used to rally the base to a revolutionary fervor and to create party unity, it has taken on the patina of truth in the eyes of so many it must be challenged.

Government is not inherently bad, inefficient, incompetent, destructive of liberty, or even liberal. Instead government is probably the single most influential force for good in our daily lives, acting in ways barely noticed even as its absence and failures would be and are noticed.

Friedrich Hayek, that great right wing theorist, said in his speech accepting the Nobel prize for economics, that the government had erred in attempting to engineer society. The proper role of government, Hayek believed, was that of a gardener tending her garden rather than of an engineer creating a machine. The populist right has bastardized this critique of Hayek’s and taken to demonizing the gardener while praising the garden as the greatest great thing since great things began to get greater (as Sean Hannity often says.)

What is lost in the populist right wing view is that our society, our economy, our nation, this greatest great thing ever, would not exist without the government tending it. I have been challenged – with apparent seriousness – to name anything the government ever did that was worthwhile.

In fact, the greatest product of the government is America itself – which, though like a garden has many individual parts, is given coherence by the gardener. The government has 4 main roles in shaping our nation:

1. Government acts as a check on corporations. Corporations exist to make profits – and as such externalize as many costs as they can; history has demonstrated that given the choice between doing the moral thing and doing the profitable thing, corporations will do the profitable one. This isn’t to say they are evil – it is merely to acknowledge their nature. Thus, given a choice between polluting the communal air and taking expensive steps to reduce that pollution, corporations have chosen to pollute. The costs of their actions are diffused while the benefits and profits are concentrated. Given the vibrancy of America’s market economy and the growing power of corporations, this is perhaps government’s most important role: to ensure that corporations have the incentive to make the moral choice. Most often this is accomplished with regulation, which though demonized by the populist right, is essential to America’s vibrant society and free market. Regulation is what allows us to open a can of beans without finding a human finger, to buy a standard mortgage and know our rights are still protected to some basic degree, to eat poultry without worrying too much over food poisoning, to buy a car and know it has met certain safety requirements, to breathe fresh air and to drink clean water. We can do all of this because of government regulation acting as a check on corporate greed.

2. Government underwrites social order. While the government is not present at every moment in our lives, it underwrites a certain type of order and undertakes to ensure that certain elements of a partially unspoken social bargain are upheld. For example, the government provides courts of law to resolve disputes and employs people to prosecute crimes. It has undertaken various steps to prevent terrorist attacks. It maintains regulations as above. When there is a crisis, the government assumes greater powers and responsibilities to protect the status quo and restore order.

3. Government makes long-term investments in the nation. While corporations and individuals control most investments, the government has, since its inception, funded various long-term projects from investments in infrastructure to space travel to education to medicine to military technology. These investments have led to everything from sending men to the moon to creating the internet.

4. Government provides certain services. From subsidies for the elderly (Social Security) to disability and unemployment benefits to disaster relief to cheap postage, to – soon – a transparent and standardized marketplace for health insurance – the government provides a selection of valuable services that are important yet under-served by the marketplace dominated by corporations looking for large, quick profits and non-profits that are often underfunded.

The internet itself is a great example of the role government plays in our lives. It was based on technology created by government scientists. It was enabled by government regulators who prevented AT&T from blocking access to their infrastructure which would have choked off the internet before it began. Access to the internet making it more widespread has been enabled by government programs as well as individual and corporate decisions. (For a neat list of how the government affects everyone on a daily basis, take a look at this article by Douglas J. Amy.)

This view of government is inherently liberal, even as the goods provided can be more broadly appreciated. Without government, there would be no rule of law, no free market, no corporations (which are government-created entities), no property, no freedom of speech or religion or assembly. Individuals without the protection of government have the freedom their power allows them to seize. With the careful use of government though, restrained and judicious, individuals can be empowered.

Liberalism, like the conservatism of William F. Buckley, Friedrich Hayek, Edmund Burke, Dwight Eisenhower, and even Ronald Reagan, is not about extending the role of government everywhere. It is the path between seizing the commanding heights of the economy and the anti-government hysteria of the populist right in which the government is used to empower individuals:

Liberalism in a market-state must exhibit a preference for the individual over the corporation and government and must empower individuals against bullying and coercive measures of these large institutions.

Sometimes that means the government must be constrained; and sometimes that means it must use its power to balance against other forces such as large corporations.

Government, used wisely, is good and the creator of free markets and the guardian of individual freedoms. This isn’t just a liberal idea or a conservative one. It is an American idea – indeed, the base of our American system.

[Image by Pittsford Patriot licensed under Creative Commons.]

*I have only been using the term, “government” here – but I mean, the federal government. I have used the terminology this way so it may better function as a response to the populist right which generally speaks of “the government” when they mean only the federal government.

Categories
Barack Obama Election 2012 Health care Politics Romney The Opinionsphere

Evaluating Mitt Romney’s 2012 Candidacy (cont.)

Jonathan Chait:

I really would like to see Romney explaining to Republican voters that his plan is different than Obama’s because his didn’t cut Medicare. It might even work. It would just be hilarious.

Categories
Barack Obama Criticism National Security Politics The Bush Legacy The Opinionsphere The War on Terrorism

Dammit, Reddit! You know I sorta love you, but sometimes…

[digg-reddit-me]Reddit, you know I sorta love you. You’re my source for news that doesn’t get covered enough in the American press, for pictures of cats doing cute things, for viral videos. You’re the main reason I’ve already seen every cool link on the internet before anyone else. In other words, I kinda love you.

But Easter morning, I woke up to see this:

Which reminded me of the side of reddit that pisses me off. The way uninformed but sufficiently cynical sentiments go unchallenged, complete with “facts” that aren’t facts. It reminds me that as great as you are at finding the holes in the mainstream media coverage, sometimes you too fall prey to group-think. And that not even facts can arrest the momentum of a rapidly rising story.

Because – you see, reddit, there are a few problems with that post.

1) It talks of “the wiretapping program” as if it were one thing. It isn’t. There have been a number of programs that have existed before 9/11 and that evolved in the years afterwards. (More on that in a minute.)

2) Most importantly, no ongoing wiretapping program is illegal. Or at least,  even as it’s hard to state something with certainty about classified programs whose operations are behind a veil of secrecy, the main part of Bush’s wiretapping program that was illegal was eventually authorized by Congress – first temporarily with the Protect America Act of 2007, and then permanently in the summer before the 2008 elections with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 Amendments Act.

This was the infamous bill that gave the telecoms immunity and was all over reddit at the time. It’s main purpose was to authorize certain changes to the FISA bill.

——–

That summarizes what I’m annoyed at. But for some history:

FISA had been proposed by Ted Kennedy to rein in the abuses of the CIA and the executive branch that the Watergate and Church Committee investigations uncovered. (These abuses were largely by the CIA which, though prohibited from operating within America, had abused it’s authority to spy on foreign agents within America to spy on Americans opposed to the Vietnam War and conduct operations on American soil.) FISA was an attempt to check presidential authority by restraining the surveillance capabilities in a few specific ways. (This was parallel to the checks on governmental power that the FBI and other domestic police organizations abided by requiring more proper warrants.)

FISA permitted two types of surveillance:

  • Without a court order, but with the Attorney General’s certification, the president could authorize the surveillance of a communications between foreign powers and their agents so long as “there is no substantial likelihood that the surveillance will acquire the contents of any communication to which a United States person is a party.” These would include non-American citizens operating overseas.
  • The president could authorize the surveillance of the communications between foreign powers and their agents so long as “proposed minimization procedures” for the interception of communications to which a United States person is a party if they applied for a warrant from a special FISA court within 72 hours after surveillance began. These would include foreign agents operating in America – or later, international terrorists.

After September 11, NSA Director Michael Hayden expanded surveillance to some (undetermined) degree, but believed he lacked the authority to go further. Under the FISA system, a judge for the FISA Court who was driving by the Pentagon when it was attacked, issued a number of emergency warrants from his phone in his car. But Hayden believed he could be more effective if he were authorized to expand “surveillance of what would be classified as ‘international communications’ — because one end of the communication is outside the United States even though one end is here.”  Hayden reportedly pushed back against requests from Dick Cheney to spy on purely domestic targets, but the program continued to broaden. Bush asserted the authority to act outside of the FISA Court and the NSA began to analyze call and email metadata as well without authorization from Congress or the FISA Court. Some unknown program – likely related to metadata analysis – triggered the infamous hospital room standoff that nearly sparked the resignations of the Attorney General and the top levels of the Justice Department, the Director of the FBI, and possibly the top lawyers in the CIA, State Department, and Pentagon.

Congress, under Democratic control after 2006, pushed back with Amendments to FISA in 2008 which conceded to Bush in giving immunity for the telecom companies who cooperated with him and authorized most of the surveillance that he had asserted the authority to do without legislation. What the bill did do was specifically restrain the executive branch from overriding it by invoking war powers and legislate specific rules for how surveillance could be conducted. The new legislation:

  • Increased the time allowed for warrantless surveillance to continue from 48 hours to 7 days. (This includes pen registers and trap & trace surveillance.)
  • Required FISA court permission to wiretap Americans who are overseas.
  • Required government agencies to cease warranted surveillance of an American who is abroad if said person enters the United States. (However, said surveillance may resume if it is reasonably believed that the person has left the States.)
  • Prohibited targeting a foreigner to eavesdrop on an American’s calls or e-mails without court approval.
  • Allowed the FISA court 30 days to review existing but expiring surveillance orders before renewing them.
  • Allowed eavesdropping in emergencies without court approval, provided the government files required papers within a week.

As far as we know, the surveillance currently being conducted by the Obama administration follows these rules and is thus legal, though subject to Constitutional challenge and of course challenges on policy grounds.

On policy grounds, there are two main arguments I’m sympathetic with. First, that collecting too much untargeted data leads to information overload.  And second, that it creates the apparatus that could be used for – as Shane Harris, author of The Watchers: The Rise of America’s Surveillance State, warned in a Cato Institute event:

The government is already collecting so much information…especially in the meta-space where you’re talking about …transactional logs and phone records and emails and that sort of thing…

There are very few technological and legal impediments anymore to the government getting information one way or another.

That’s not 100% the case but information is sort of there and it will be obtained.

I think that right now, generally speaking, their interest does lie in monitoring for foreign threats and for foreign terrorists and their connections in the United States. My concern is that we’re developing a capability and a capacity that in a different environment, with a different mindset, that that could be turned in very targeted ways on individuals or groups of individuals…

The government is really good at – once someone is in the sights …and they know a target – they’re pretty good at finding out a lot of information about that person and diagramming his network. The hard part is these threats that are existing out there beyond the sights, beyond the crosshairs, and this book is largely about people who exist in that space.

I guess the alarm call that I’m raising is if the government ever want to take that and target it very selectively for reasons that we might find appalling right now and unthinkable, they could in fact know a lot. [my emphasis]

Categories
National Security Politics The Bush Legacy The War on Terrorism

Surveillance In the Bush Administration

Shane Harris, author of The Watchers: The Rise of America’s Surveillance State, had a good rundown of changes in surveillance under the Bush administration in a talk for CATO:

What my reporting showed in terms of the evolution…of what was probably called the Terrorist Surveillance Program — or the President’s Surveillance Program or Stellar Wind or The Bag or whatever you know you wanna call it — was that the germ of the idea begins not long after 9/11 when NSA finds itself in need of broadening the aperture of the surveillance that it wants to do — and Mike Hayden who is the director NSA at the time concludes that he has existing authority to do that under an executive order actually fashioned in the Reagan administration coincidentally called Executive Order Twelve Triple Three.

And he tells lawmakers that NSA is broadening its scope of collection and that we have existing authorities to do that. There’s some back and forth between him and the House Intelligence Committee in particular on this question. Nancy Pelosi somewhat famously I think writes this letter that says I’m not sure I quite understand what you’re talking about here. And I’m not quite sure whether or not you can do this or whether you need to have a new order. As it was described to me by people who were familiar with that … that was actually going up on targeted — what they called — hot numbers…They were people that NSA wanted to go after that they thought were tied or connected to the 9/11 attacks.

It is also the case that the FISA court issued a number of warrants immediately after the [attack]. I think Judge Lambert actually was…actually issuing them, or released preliminary orders I think from his phone at one point. He was driving by the Pentagon when the planes hit and people came to get him to issue [unintelligible] orders…[Then] around October of 2001, when George Tenet, then the director of Central Intelligence [Agency], begins making the rounds with the intelligence chiefs and says, “…[A]re you doing everything that you can right now to prevent another 9/11?…Do you’ve got everything that you need?” And Hayden’s response — he’s testified to this — is, “Not within my current authority.” So, Hayden goes down, briefs administration officials, the president, the vice president are there, and essentially lays out a plan by which they could do expanded surveillance of what would be classified as “international communications” — because one end of the communication is outside the United States even though one end is here. And so thus begins the sort of first stage of the Terrorist Surveillance Program.

There was reportedly some desire by Cheney and David Addington to do pure domestic warrantless surveillance — and the reporting I’ve seen on this… — is that Hayden pushed back on that. But he did want to construct a system that whereby they could do what he later called, “hot pursuit of terrorist communications,” without having to go through the FISA warrant process. It’s after that that NSA starts also going to telecommunications companies and wanting access to the metadata as well. I always sort of imagine the program — to sort of make sense of it in my mind — is that in the perfect world if this thing worked, you [would] have all this metadata that would tell you where all the patterns of communications were and as soon as one of them… hit the trip wire of suspicious activity over here, NSA now has the authorities to go zap right down and find that particular communication and pull it out and look at it.

So there were layers to it… It evolved from the initial stage after 9/11 — “We have the authority to do some expanded surveillance” [to] “We need more authority to do more expanded surveillance” [to] “Now we want to go even beyond that as well.” It was my understanding from talking to people who were involved — and people the White House — that it was the expanded metadata surveillance part that triggered the standoff in the hospital room. We’re still I think not entirely sure what part of it it was but — it revolved around that data and the collection and use of that information. [my emphases]

Categories
Barack Obama Criticism Domestic issues Health care Politics The Opinionsphere

Evaluating Mitt Romney’s 2012 Candidacy

[digg-reddit-me]The blogs discuss whether or not Mitt Romney’s 2012 prospects have been passed by the health care reform so similar to his own in Massachusetts:

Marc Ambinder makes the case that the conventional wisdom on the left that health care reform’s passage has killed Romney’s 2012 candidacy is a reflection of “anchor bias — the same type of bias that consigned the Democratic majority to history the day after Scott Brown won Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in Massachusetts.” Ambinder continues:

Romney is a serious, sober guy. Just read his book. It’s half a cliche campaign book, and half a really learned and well-thought-out disquisition on the problems facing American today. If the fundamental divide in the party is between the lambs being led to slaughter wing — the bleating, noisy wing — and the wing that seeks a solutions-oriented leader, Romney has a case to make.

Jonathan Chait responds to Ambinder:

Actually, I think Ambinder has this backwards. Right now, Romney looks fine — he has money, name recognition, decent polling, and the like. What you have to do is project how the current dynamic is going to play in 2012. At the moment, Republican leaders are trying to demonize the Affordable Care Act, so they have little incentive to point out that it’s basically Romneycare plus cost controls. But in the context of the 2012 race, with the Affordable Care Act settled into law and a contested GOP primary going on, there will be lots of Republicans playing up the comparisons between Romneycare and Obamacare. Romney appears political viable right now because most Republican voters have not been exposed to the Romneycare-Obamacare comparison — or if they have, it’s been made by advocates of the latter, rather than by Republicans who they trust. When the attacks come, Romney just has no convincing reply…

[But] I’d like to see Romney win the nomination, because he’s intelligent, competent, and has some decent moral instincts buried somewhere beneath a thick coat of pandering demagoguery. I just don’t see it happening.

Ezra Klein:

The passage of Obamacare is going to make life harder for Mitt Romney in 2012. Which makes the White House pretty happy. Romney isn’t the world’s most skilled politician, but he’s one of the more credible challengers Republicans can muster. If the passage of health-care reform wounds his candidacy without killing it off entirely, that’s a big win for the Obama administration: It means Romney takes up some, but not enough, of the sensible Republican vote, making it even likelier that someone totally unelectable wins the nomination…

The White House thinks that 2012 is where they can deal a serious blow to the Fox Newsification of the Republican Party. But that only works if someone from the Fox News wings of the party wins the nomination (and, of course, if Obama really trounces that person)

Jonathan Chait responds to Klein:

From Obama’s perspective, the crazier the Republican nominee, the better. Better Tim Pawlenty than Mitt Romney, and better Sarah Palin than Tim Pawlenty.

The broader liberal calculation is different. It’s almost certainly true that liberals will want Obama to win reelection. But we have to balance that desire against minimizing the downside in case he doesn’t.

Andrew Sullivan:

I’m sorry but he says he’s running against an all-powerful central government, but he backed the indefinite, open-ended, unlimited, “Double Gitmo!” executive powers seized by Bush and Cheney? He set up a mini-version of Obamacare and now wants to lead a party that wants to repeal Obamacare? Worse for him, Obama is now shrewdly embracing Romney…

And how do you get past the problem that no one likes him and no one rightly trusts him? And that he’s a Mormon running for the nomination of a Southern evangelical organization?

Palin is the one to beat. She’s the real identity of the current GOP – and as fake as the rest of them (though nowhere near as fake as Romney, but, then, who is?).

Meanwhile, David Harsanyi chips in from the Denver Post in a piece being promoted by the National Review (which has been notably quiet on this issue):

“Overall, ours is a model that works,” Romney explained. “We solved our problem at the state level. Like it or not, it was a state solution. Why is it that President Obama is stepping in and saying ‘one size fits all’ “?

Federalism is a good argument that has nothing to do with health care reform models, as Romney knows well. Here’s what he should have said years ago:

“Everyone makes mistakes. Heck, I made a huge one. My plan, first hijacked by state liberals and now copied by Barack Obama, has created a fiscal nightmare in my state… I am here to extract my name from that botched experiment by repealing its ugly stepson Obamacare so Americans work together to pass genuine, common sense, market-based reform.”

Then again, it is entirely possible Romney genuinely believes his health care model works.

In which case, his position just doesn’t cut it.

My two cents: Projections are inherently flawed – and long-term political projections are akin to predicting the weather in a particular days several years away: Sometimes, rules of thumb work (“March goes in like a lion and out like a lamb” to “Opposition parties do well in the first mid-terms after a presidential election.”), but you can’t count on them. Looking at the fundamentals is more important than looking at current trends. (“November is usually cold,” does better than “It’s gotten hotter in 5 successive days this April!”) But even projections based on the fundamentals don’t always hold.

As I read the fundamentals: Whether the Obama administration embraces Romney or not, I don’t see how he can win the Republican nomination for the reasons that Chait raised (when his Republicans opponents tar him with supporting Obamacare, it will stick) – added to the complications that Sullivan harps on (a Mormon running to lead an evangelical party). If Romney wins the Republican nomination, his flip-flopping on health care would only solidify the image of him as a pandering demagogue with no real principles. Still, he’s the Republican I’d most like to see win the nomination on the off-chance the Republicans are able to win in 2012. The fundamentals there look very weak for any Republican though unless unemployment is rising in 2012.

[Image by Paul Chenowith licensed under Creative Commons.]

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Senator Lindsey Graham: Fiscal Chickenhawk

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As I wrote earlier, Republicans are clearly rooting for a fiscal catastrophe. How else would a plan like Rep. Paul Ryan’s which increases taxes on 90% of Americans, cuts services for most Americans (while excluding the elderly and military, who happen to be 2 of the main Republican interests groups and beneficiaries of the status quo), and cuts taxes on the richest (who happen to be the 3rd main Republican interest group) have a chance of getting through?

It’s not clear the Graham himself – or any particular Republican – buys into this plan. But it is the clear result of the Republican strategy.

What is clear is that Graham – for all his talk of fiscal responsibility – proposes amending Obama’s health care plan to take out every revenue-generator, leaving a massive hole in the deficit.