Where is the evidence of the supposed partisan wrangling that we hear so much about? Just examine the question dispassionately. Look at every major Bush initiative, every controversial signature Bush policy over the last eight years, and one finds virtually nothing but massive bipartisan support for them — the Patriot Act (original enactment and its renewal); the invasion of Afghanistan; the attack on, and ongoing occupation of, Iraq; the Military Commissions Act (authorizing enhanced interrogation techniques, abolishing habeas corpus, and immunizing war criminals); expansions of warrantless eavesdropping and telecom immunity; declaring part of Iran’s government to be “terrorists”; our one-sided policy toward Israel; the $700 billion bailout; The No Child Left Behind Act, “bankruptcy reform,” and on and on.
Most of those were all enacted with virtually unanimous GOP support and substantial, sometimes overwhelming, Democratic support: the very definition of “bipartisanship.” That’s just a fact.
Moreover, Bush’s appointments of judges were barely ever impeded, resulting in a radical transformation of the federal courts. Other than John Bolton and Steven Bradbury, not a single significant Bush nominee was blocked. Those who implemented Bush’s NSA program (Michael Hayden) and authorized his torture program (Alberto Gonzales) were confirmed for promotions. The Bush administration committed war crimes, broke long-standing surveillance laws, politicized prosecutions, and explicitly claimed the right to break our laws, yet Congress did nothing about any of that except to authorize most of it, and investigated virtually none of it. With regard to many of those transgressions, key Democratic leaders were briefed at the time they were implemented and quietly acquiesced, did nothing to stop any of it. Both parties are in virtually unanimous agreement that our highest political leaders should be exempt from accountability under the rule of law even for the grave crimes that have been committed.
As The Washington Post‘s Dan Froomkin observed at the end of last year: “Historians looking back on the Bush presidency may well wonder if Congress actually existed.” How much more harmonious – “bipartisan” – can the two parties get?
Category: The Opinionsphere
John Dickerson of Slate magazine wrote a moving piece yesterday exploring Barack Obama’s brief return to normalcy before he enters the White House. He takes a number of Obama’s comments from his 60 Minutes interview with Michelle – comments that struck me at the time – and develops this sense of melancholy they conveyed.
What made the piece moving was how Dickerson was able to relate his constantly hectic life as a political reporter covering the campaigns for the past two years with Obama’s life making the news – and how both are now suddenly returned to their everyday lives – their families who they neglected and sorely missed, their homes, their mundane routines that now seem to wonderful – washing dishes!
A symptom of the campaign bends is the temporary view that even the life’s most mundane tasks are magical. Why? Because they are discrete, yield results, and require manual labor: characteristics not associated with most campaign duties…
Any professional who has been on the road for a long period of time can identify with the drift away from a normal life. Your cooking skills are replaced by room-service-ordering skills. Gradually, you forget which floor your office is on or whether you take a left or a right turn from home to get to church. A presidential candidate experiences this bubble-wrapped life completely. He lives in a world where his meals, movements, and laundry are all taken care of for him. This is necessary so that he can focus on NAFTA and Afghanistan. If he makes a wrong turn, there is a hand to direct him gently down the correct hallway.
This highly artificial life makes a body starve for the reality it used to know. It was clear that Obama was sensitive to the simple pleasures of returning to his home environment when he described hearing his wife move around the house when she wakes up before him. He’d been away from it so long, it probably rang like thunder.
[digg-reddit-me]This blog has a new favorite newspaper – the alternative weekly Boston Phoenix which I actually used to read while I went to college in Massachusetts.
Adam Reilly, media critic for the paper, recently fashioned an argument against the Fairness Doctrine – including the specter of it being used against Net Neutrality:
Regarding Net Neutrality, McDowell asked, “Will Web sites — will bloggers have to give equal time or equal space on their Web site to opposing views, rather than letting the marketplace of ideas determine that?”
This is a stupid question. The Fairness Doctrine involved government mandating, in certain cases, that specific content be added to a particular media entity. In contrast, Net Neutrality doesn’t involve intrusion into content; it only dictates absolute freedom of (virtual) movement. It’s the opposite of what McDowell seems to think.
But as Joe Campbell, author of the blog 2parse.com, recently noted in a post linking Thierer’s paper and McDowell’s remarks, this is about tactics, not logic. If conservative Net Neutrality supporters come to see it as the Fairness Doctrine 2.0 — something that’s more easily done if the Fairness Doctrine is already on everyone’s brain, as it is today — they might rethink their support. Given Democratic gains in Congress and Obama’s support for Net Neutrality, Campbell argues, “This is the big corporations’ only chance to squash Net Neutrality.”
Now that’s a scary prospect. The Web is the future of news media. (It’s also a battleground where, at the moment, Democrats are totally dominating Republicans.) Bringing back the Fairness Doctrine is a dubious proposition, period. But if doing so could jeopardize the success of Net Neutrality, it’s downright reckless.
Categories
Lieberman
Everyone seems to have very strongly held positions as to whether Joe Lieberman should be allowed to keep his committee positions in the next Senate. I don’t have a strong position.
It’s clear that Lieberman went further than any Democrat should have in attacking the nominee of his party on a personal level – saying he would be afraid for America if Obama won as late as the day before the election. (TPIP has an excellent video from Rachel Maddow’s show over at his site explaining some of the various reasons Joe the Lieberman shouldn’t be allowed to keep his position.)
Yglesias points out that Lieberman – in trying to make the case to keep himself as head of his various committees – seemed to be threatening to vote against the positions he has held for years if he is removed:
As it stands, Lieberman seems to be saying that he deserves to stay in charge of the committee in virtue of his moderately progressive domestic views, but that continuing to hold those views is contingent on him getting favors from the Democratic leadership.
As Rachel Maddow pointed out, Lieberman’s position has more than a mere symbolic relevance – as he held off various investigations of the Bush administration since 2006 with his committee chair position. As long as Lieberman is considered a Democrat, his criticisms of the Democrats will carry extra weight.
But at the same time – by removing him the Democrats would risk alienating moderate Republicans, who they will likely need to get past filibusters. Without Lieberman the Democrats would have no chance at the 60 votes needed to override filibusters. Plus, Lieberman’s demotion and the accompanying commotion would not send the message of bipartisan cooperation Obama is trying to cultivate as he readies to take on the many challenges ahead.
Either option has it’s negatives. The best approach would be for Obama to step in; for Lieberman to apologize to Obama; for Obama to indicate that he would be willing to consider doing what he could to prevent Lieberman from having his committee chairmanships removed; and for whoever the enforcer is in the party – Rahm Emanuel – or whoever else – to extract from Lieberman a promise to vote with the Democrats on any potential filibuster issue. He can vote his conscience or politics or whatever on the issue when it comes to the floor – but he would make a public statement that he would not support any filibuster to block the agenda of the president of the United States of America.
That’s the only thing the Democrats need Joe Lieberman’s vote for – to prevent the filibuster. At almost every other point, with decent party unity, and most likely some Republican cross-overs, they win with ease.
Joe Lieberman’s public statement that President Obama’s agenda deserves an up or down vote could make a significant difference in what can be accomplished in the first 100 days.
[T]he North Carolina county where Palin expressed her delight at being in the “real America” went for Obama by more than 18 percentage points.
The actual real America is everywhere. It is the America that has been in shell shock since the aftermath of 9/11, when our government wielded a brutal attack by terrorists as a club to ratchet up our fears, betray our deepest constitutional values and turn Americans against one another in the name of “patriotism.” What we started to remember the morning after Election Day was what we had forgotten over the past eight years, as our abusive relationship with the Bush administration and its press enablers dragged on: That’s not who we are.
So even as we celebrated our first black president, we looked around and rediscovered the nation that had elected him. “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” Obama said in February, and indeed millions of such Americans were here all along, waiting for a leader. This was the week that they reclaimed their country.
Aside from the schlocky sentence, “The actual real America is everyone,” an excellent column.
I’ve just gotten around to reading this Sunday’s news columns – the ones I normally read on either Sunday or Monday. Tom Friedman’s column impressed me a great deal – even though it started out as the saccharine sales pitch I am so used to hearing from him – it ended with this tough talk:
So to everyone overseas I say: thanks for your applause for our new president. I’m glad you all feel that America “is back.” If you want Obama to succeed, though, don’t just show us the love, show us the money. Show us the troops. Show us the diplomatic effort. Show us the economic partnership. Show us something more than a fresh smile. Because freedom is not free and your excuse for doing less than you could is leaving town in January. [my emphasis added]
That last line is the one that gets me. It gets to the heart at much of the more reasonable conservative frustrations with the “international community” and Europe. (The less reasonable frustrations are another story.) But more important – Friedman identifies one of the arguments Obama will need to make in order to translate the goodwill generated by his election to motivate worldwide leaders to help him take on the global challenges we will are facing.
Also – I’ve decided to start linking to the regular version of New York Times articles rather than to the printable format which I prefer. As the Times will likely be facing some financial problems in the near future, I figure it’s the least I can do.
Anyone who uses social bookmarking sites like reddit or Digg can appreciate this blogger’s frustration.
Of course, sites and communities like reddit have a Matt Drudge-like appreciation for self-referenential material (I refer here to Drudge’s penchant for placing stories about himself and his vast influence next to breaking news as if both merited equal attention). This allowed the blogger in question to do much better with his post about his posts than with either of those posts themselves.
I think it would be interesting if someone with some expertise in sociology or some related discipline would do an analysis of the sense of community on social bookmarking sites.
Not being an economist, I find it a lot harder to argue with Paul Krugman now that he has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics. That makes him a certified top expect – and I am a mere amateur. And while the other Nobel prizes have made some real boners (Yassir Arafat and the Nobel Peace Prize?), the economics prize doesn’t have the same reputation. (Although the award given to Myron Scholes and Robert Merton, the inventors of the “financial weapons of mass destruction” – derivatives – in 1997, the same year the hedge fund they had helped create went spectacularly bankrupt – seems quite the bad decision today.)
Regardless of prizes though, Krugman’s piece today makes some important counter-points I had not heard regarding the lack of efficacy of FDR’s New Deal. Certainly, my reading of history made it clear that the New Deal had not lifted America out of the Great Depression – but I had never found convincing the traditional conservative explanation that the problem was FDR’s expansion of government. After all, Hoover’s refusal to expand the government had not reigned in the Depression – and it was the massive government expansion called World War II that finally broke America out of the Depression. I’m willing to concede the conservative point that some of FDR’s government interventions may have backfired – such as interference in wages and prices – but as Krugman points out in his column, many of FDR’s reforms have lasted to this day and helped mitigate the effects of the current financial crisis – from Social Security to federal deposit insurance.
Krugman posits that FDR failed to get us out of the Depression because he did too little rather than too much. He points out that overall government spending did not increase as much as is commonly understood:
The effects of federal public works spending were largely offset by other factors, notably a large tax increase, enacted by Herbert Hoover, whose full effects weren’t felt until his successor took office. Also, expansionary policy at the federal level was undercut by spending cuts and tax increases at the state and local level.
Which leads Krugman to the conclusion that:
The economic lesson is the importance of doing enough. F.D.R. thought he was being prudent by reining in his spending plans; in reality, he was taking big risks with the economy and with his legacy. My advice to the Obama people is to figure out how much help they think the economy needs, then add 50 percent. It’s much better, in a depressed economy, to err on the side of too much stimulus than on the side of too little.
Krugman has me convinced of his thesis for now. It certainly makes more sense than the alternative explanations I have heard about the New Deal and the Great Depression. But the last word – and the final prescription – should come from Franklin Delano Roosevelt himself:
It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.
This is my hope for an Obama presidency – one that I saw as far back as December when I posted this quote – and one that his campaign has born out.
Andrew Sullivan makes the case for Obama’s candidacy in the shadow of September 11 and the War on Terrorism:
It will not be easy. The world will soon remember why it resents America as well as loves it. But until this unlikely fellow with the funny ears and strange name and exotic biography emerged on the scene, I had begun to wonder if it was possible at all. I had almost given up hope, and he helped restore it. That is what is stirring out there; and although you are welcome to mock me for it, I remain unashamed. As someone once said, in the unlikely story of America, there is never anything false about hope. Obama, moreover, seems to bring out the best in people, and the calmest, and the sanest. He seems to me to have a blend of Midwestern good sense, an intuitive understanding of the developing world that is as much our future now as theirs’, an analyst’s mind and a poet’s tongue. He is human. He is flawed. He will make mistakes. His passivity and ambiguity are sometimes weaknesses as well as strengths.
But there is something about his rise that is also supremely American, a reminder of why so many of us love this country so passionately and are filled with such grief at what has been done to it and in its name. I endorse Barack Obama because I will not give up on America, because I believe in America, and in her constitution and decency and character and strength.
Rod Dreher, The Crunchy Conservative:
In other words, for this blogger [the Cunning Realist], a vote for Obama is a vote against the possibility of true and destabilizing political radicalism emerging out of the economic tsunami breaking upon us. Interesting. I see where he’s coming from. At the request of a publication I contribute to, I was asked to prepare a piece to run if Obama wins, and one to run if McCain wins. Writing the McCain piece, I was kind of surprised by how depressed I was by the thought of a McCain victory. Depressed in the sense of seeing nothing good coming from it. It’s a strange position to be in – I don’t think a president as liberal as Obama would be good for the country, but four years of McCain, coming into power just as the economy is falling off a cliff and the conservatives are falling to pieces, would be as angry and as rotten as any since Nixon’s time.