If supporting the "culture of life" in one case in Florida requires an emergency congressional session, then perhaps when John Bolton's nomination for ambassador to the U.N. comes up, Senators should ask him about his manifest contempt for human life outside out borders. After all, Bolton has consistently argued that the murder of innocents in strategically unimportant places like Bosnia, Kosova, and Africa, is not a concern of the United States, and should not be a concern of the U.N., either.
Sure, in every country the lives of their own are pre-eminent. But in an administration that trumpets its commitment to universal concepts of human rights, there should be something of a consistent policy towards the right to live of one person in Florida who subisides in a vegetative state, and the right to live of millions of fully living, thinking beings in places like Sudan.
In this particular case, there's no doubt what Jesus would do. And unless he eats crow and bends the knee, there's no doubt John Bolton has fatally defied the Culture of Life.
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Like Harry Shearer, I have been reluctant to wade into the Terri Schiavo case, given the comic-book biology and tabloid metaphysics that have dominated media treatment of this poor woman's fate.
But that was before Republicans called Congress into an emergency session this weekend to take jurisdiction over the case away from the Florida courts, and take control of Schiavo's body away from her husband.
During a long drive today, while trying to find a basketball broadcast on the boombox that provides radio in my very old car, I happened upon the voice of Tom DeLay pontificating on the Schiavo case, and it made me physically ill. His claim was that what's happening to Schiavo would be illegal if it happened to a dog.
The cynicism and hypocrisy of that line of reasoning is breathtaking, even coming from Tom DeLay. Untold tens of thousands of American families face the same agonizing decision--whether or not to continue mechanical life-support in terminal cases--every year. My own family faced it a few years ago. And very often, the issue is the same as in the Schiavo case: taking out the feeding tube, or continuing it indefinitely.
The only unique thing about this case, of course, is the extended legal battle between Shiavo's husband and parents, and the media notoriety that has made it so ripe for political opportunism.
Do DeLay, his supporters in Congress, and those Men of God so conspicuously on display down in Florida really propose to picket every intensive care unit, nursing home, and hospice in America to ensure that no family facing Schiavo's situation is allowed to let their loved one die? Is Congress really going to legislatively ban natural death so long as some theoretical means is available to continue it? Oh no, says James Sensenbrenner, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and DeLay's prime enabler in this weekend's grandstand play: the "emergency" legislation is "narrowly targeted" and not designed to set a precedent.
In other words, this is pure political exploitation of a private family conflict that's become a media sensation, even though it involves a very common, if, for the people involved, agonizing event.
As such, the GOP's Schiavo intervention is of a piece with other cynical efforts by Bush and his supporters to signal support for a "culture of life" without much regard for logic and consistency. It's a whole lot like the Bush position on human embryo research, as a matter of fact. Many thousands of human embryos are created each year in fertility clinics; it's only when it is proposed that these certain-to-be-discarded embryos be used for life-saving research that the Hammer comes down and Congress is asked to take a stand for life. Wouldn't want to inconvenience or embarass possible Republican voters utlilizing those fertility clinics, right?
But this time, I suspect the transparent cynicism of the we're-absolutists-on-life-if-it's-in-the-news posture of the GOP may backfire. It is very hard to pose as a pro-family, pro-states-rights, anti-Washington political party when you call Congress into an "emergency session" to interfere with the laws of Florida and the prerogatives of one poor husband trying to respect his wife's wishes. If, as we are told, George W. Bush is about to lend his authority and signature to this disgraceful exhibit of overweening government power, the persistant media idea that he's just a genial well-meaning man who happens to preside over a party of loony extremists and corrupt hacks needs to die a natural death.
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Sometimes you run across a presentation of conventional wisdom so pure, so well-framed, and so wrong, that you want to preserve it in amber and give it a special place in the Museum of Washington Folly. Today's David Brooks op-ed on what he calls the "Do-Nothing Conspiracy" in American politics is a real masterpiece of the genre.
Indeed, Brooks' offering today reflects a classic sub-genre: the Dover Beach column, wherein the writer, like a giant condor, soars above the grubby plain of politics and pronounces both sides ignorant armies clashing by night, even as the country (or in this case its fiscal condition) slips hellward.
For Brooks, the hellish reality is the rising cost of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security (which, tellingly, he bundles as "the entitlements") and the boorish surreality is the partisan polarization of politicians who won't deal with the crisis.
This is hardly a new way of approaching this set of issues; hell, I wrote pretty much the same thing myself back in 1982 in a National Governors' Association paper (portentously entitled "December of Decision") about the dire implications of entitlement spending. But what's interesting and invidious about it is the way it lends a lofty, bipartisan tone to what is essentially a partisan line of argument.
How so? First there is the bundling of "entitlements," as though they are indistinguishable elements of the same "crisis." Social Security, of course, has a dedicated revenue source and significant if impaired pay-as-you-go features; Medicare is partly financed by general revenues, partly by premiums, and partly by payroll taxes. Both programs are federally administered and essentially uniform in benefits. But then you have Medicaid, which is a joint federal-state program financed by federal and state general revenues; its eligibility, coverage, and administrative features vary significantly from place to place; and its focus--on low-income families as well as seniors and the disabled--is significantly different from the other two big "entitlements."
And in fact, the Republican Party that's fanning the flames of panic over "entitlements" treats them very, very differently. Their aim is to simultaneously expand Medicare; contract Medicaid; and as we all know, fundamentally change Social Security from a defined-benefit to a defined-contribution retirement system.
But treating them as a single beast called "entitlements" allows Brooks to use scary numbers about the overall growth of three different programs to support the current GOP line that Bush's approach to Social Security is a statesmanlike effort to head off a "crisis."
Second, there is Brooks' implicit claim that the "entitlement crisis" is the source of an impending (and very real) fiscal crisis, while one of the primary causes, the GOP's endless appetite for tax cuts, is treated as a future problem--a partisan habit, like Democrats' desire for expanded government services, that it will have to forego in the national interest. Thus, the dramatic change in the size and structure of federal taxation built into our revenue system by Bush and his allies over the last four years is somehow part of the natural landscape, not something that should be reconsidered. And that is exactly the twisted point of view the GOP has gone to extraordinary lengths to promote.
And third, and perhaps most misleading, is Brooks' treament of "partisan polarization" as a development that has become an obstacle to "doing something" on the "crisis" of entitlement spending. See how the distortions build on each other? Never mind that "polarization" has been the deliberate political and legislative strategy of the Bush administration, with few exceptions, since early 2001. Never mind that the failure of the federal government to "do something" is attributable to the party that controls it lock, stock and barrel. And never mind that Brooks is embracing a definition of government activism that is entirely limited to the administration's current agenda. Up there in the sky, wheeling above Dover Beach, he can be evenhanded in assessing the motives of the two parties, even as he embraces one ignorant army's take on the situation in all its essentials.
Look, I am definitely not one of those people who despises, or even dislikes, David Brooks. He remains one of the funniest, and on occasions, most acute observers of big trends in the political landscape, especially in terms of cultural trends--traits that cover a multitude of sins. I have always felt the kind of sleight-of-hand at the heart of this and other Brooks columns represents a degree of self-deception from a man who invariably struggles to reconcile partisan loyalties with an inability to forthrightly embrace "his side's" ideological shibboleths. And while I have no doubt the GOP is responsible for the current atmosphere of polarization in American politics, I also strongly believe Democrats need a strategy that goes beyond simple counter-polarization.
But that emphatically doesn't mean accepting a conventional wisdom that treats every Republican-driven change in the policy or political playing field as immutable, and blasts Democrats for "doing nothing" when they fail to cooperate with the the next item on the GOP's extremist version of the national agenda. That way lies true ignorance, and endless clashes by night.
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With a big six months of blogging behind me, I'm in relative terms a real veteran at this stuff, but still, guesting Josh's site makes me feel like those kids in Hoosiers who are a bit in awe of their environs when they get to the State Finals. Adding to the intimidation is the ultimate Hard Act to Follow: previous guest-blogger Harry Shearer, one of my idols. I have long thought that every blogger should keep handy near the keyboard a copy of Derek Smalls' admonition to rock 'n' rollers in This is Spinal Tap: "There's a fine line between clever and stupid."
I'll get down to business shortly.
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This is just a brief note from Josh. Tomorrow is The Big Day. So you probably won't hear from me again until Tuesday. I wanted to take a moment to send a very big thanks to Jon Chait and Harry Shearer for manning the helm in my absence. I'm honored and gratified more than you can know that both of them agreed to take time from their busy schedules for this.
Let me also send a sincere note of appreciation to everyone who's sent in email best wishes in the last few days. Each and every one means a great deal to us.
Ed Kilgore will be signing on Saturday morning and sticking around through Monday.
--Josh Marshall
Back from the gig, and what a pleasant surprise to find at least two people there who came solely because of the side-of-the-mouth mention here. Josh, this thing has reach!
Still amazed that the most reaction to anything I posted came in response to my suggesting that Hunter S. Thompson was the model for the type of political rant now practiced by, among others, Ann Coulter. HST has a lot of supporters out there.
Don't think I will ever have a blog of my own, the burden seems too great for somebody who still wants to play, and watch, basketball for a good portion of the day. But I will be surfacing in a blog-related context fairly soon. Hmmm...mysterious. Thanks to you for reading, and thanks to Josh for getting married. Be well.
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Of course, as a couple of emailers reminded me, I misremembered the original title of "Smile". It was "Dumb Angel."
I'm off to perform with Judith Owen tonight in Austin (we perform tomorrow and Sunday, too, come on down), so maybe I'll make a farewell post in the midnight hour. Otherwise, I've thoroughly enjoyed this, especially the amazing torrent of feedback. If you want to check out my radio show, Le Show, and you don't know where to find it on the radio or the web, I recommend a wonderful resource: PublicRadioFan.com.
And, because of an emailed request, I turn the remainder of this post over to C. Montgomery Burns....
All right, you chair warts, stop reading TPM and get back to work, or I'll release the Hounds!!!
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Emailers have been advising me to weigh in on the Schiavo case, citing the surface absurdity of Congress subpoenaing a brain-dead witness. Ducks in a barrel, there, the brain-dead subpoenaing the--well, you get it. But beyond that I'm loath to go, despite the obvious cable-news-and-blogger code that you have to have an opinion about everything. Part of what's so dispiriting about this place at this time is the sense that, in a totally non-economic sense, the public sector is crowding out the private sector (almost a reverse of what the Administration is trying to do economically--see the BBC's report on the original plans for Iraq's oil, and try to find the good guys in that tussle between the neocons and the oil companies). Laci and Scott Peterson were private people having a private tragedy. Their lives were literally none of our business. Same with this family. I understand that in both cases, the stories were ginned up because they played into the social-conservative agenda, but that's no reason for everybody to jump in. So my lips are zipped.
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Away from the media for a while, watching music people at the South by Southwest Conference question Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks about the "Smile" project. My favorite Wilsonian answer, drily typical, came when he was asked why he changed the putative original title of the project, "Dark Angel." "We thought," Brian Wilson said, "that if we called it 'Smile', people would be more likely to buy it."
Re: risk and Social Security: a couple of emailers observed that removing the safety net would make most people more risk-averse and conservative, not less. Of course, they're talking about normal people. I sometimes think the right wing that Brooks was writing about, the right that wants to "create" a more dynamic economy through making more risk-takers out of people, is in fact taking on a project weirdly (I was almost going to say eerily, but I've used up my quota for that word) reminiscent of the New Soviet Man. If the twentieth century taught us anything, and it didn't, it was to be very cautious about large-scale social projects based on the way people "ought to" behave.
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Interesting reactions to Sudden Thought #2: one emailer said this thought had been thoroughly blogified within hours after Thompson's death. If so, I missed it. Most have been appalled that I would compare the sainted Hunter with the devilish Coulter. Ideological (if not teleological) blinders, anyone? I grew up believing Nixon was Satan. But it's undeniable that his domestic policy was to the left of Clinton's. (Yes, I know, Reagan succeeded in moving the perceived center). Hunter's work was better, these emailers suggest, because it was in the service of truth. Sounds like the right's defense of Fox News. Anyway, if the "dog was too fucked up not to eat my homework" style of Gonzo has had any influence on journalism except to have encouraged people like Coulter to ramp up the nastiness, I missed it.
Now, at last, to Social Security (see, Josh, I haven't totally trashed the place). An interesting juxtaposition of NYT op-eds this week, as, on the same page and the same day, Krugman and Brooks get to the heart of the matter. Not that I don't respect the wonkiness of those who can deal with the numbers. But ever since it became common knowledge that the original costing of the new Medicare bill was based on a ten year period, during the first two years of which the bill would not yet have taken effect, I've felt justified in letting my eyes glaze over. Krugman and Brooks, on the other hand, start to address the basic question: risk. Social insurance was meant, in the first place, to insulate people from the effects of a previous regime which assumed that, like it or not, all folks should be risk-takers. Brooks suggests that the right's real goal is a more dynamic society/economy, in which more people choose to be risk takers. Bush in his news conference this week, emphasizing (for the first time, to my ears) the voluntary nature of his plan/non-plan, seemed to be edging very tentatively toward this point. Still, the nagging sense (given the mendacious way the plan/nonplan is being sold) is that people will be compelled to choose to be risk takers. Although I have absolutely no inteest in polls and surveys, I would be interested in more open debate about the level of risk most people would actually like to assume.
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Eerie similarity between Mark McGwire at the baseball hearing--"I'm not here to discuss the past"--and Porter Goss before Senate Armed Services on whether interrogation techniques used since 2001 have complied with US anti-torture laws--"I am not able to tell you that".
Eerier still, to broaden the focus, is the refusal of American media (and bloggers too) to notice the similarities between what's been happening since the runup to the war in the US, UK and Australia. When we're isolated inside our American bubble, our problem seems as if it's only our problem. But, while "extraordinary rendition" worms its ugly way into the national consciousness here, Britain has simultaneously been having a wrenching debate on the government's proposed non-judicial orders for persons "under suspicion", including house arrest and electronic tagging. The debate, especially as it moved between the House of Commons and the House of Lords (recently reformed by Tony Blair to make it less hereditary and more nearly--attention, Pres. Bush--democratic) put the focus sharply on the conflict between the government's desire for security and the (unwritten) British constitution's insistence on protection of individual liberty. Almost makes you wish our discussion of rendition were so focused on the basic principles at issue. Almost makes you wonder why a written Constituion suddenly doesn't seem as robust as an unwritten one.
The other similarity rarely commented on here is the fact that three separate (and supposedly first-rate) intelligence agencies made exactly the same schoolboy errors (thin sourcing, neglecting to include caveats, stuff like that) in the pre-war intel on Saddam's WMD. And all three countries had wannabe whistleblowers (Greg Thielmann here, Dr. David Jones in the UK, Andrew Wilkie in Oz) saying, in effect, "this intel stinks". Which would suggest that David Kay was being disingenuous in his testimony to Congress last year: "we" were not "all wrong".
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Sudden thought #2: reflecting on the other loss to journalism widely subjected to elegaic remembrance in recent days, I couldn't help thinking: Didn't Ann Coulter learn everything she knows about toxic political rhetoric from Hunter S. Thompson?
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"The longer we wait, the more climate change we are committed to in the future." The formulation is eerily similar to Bush's Fram Oil Filter ("Pay me now or pay me later") trope on Social Security. So if it's not the logic he disputes, it must be the science. It would be nice, now that White House news conferences have been rescued from the "Where are they now?" pile, if someone asked the President whose scientific advice he relies upon in rejecting this line of reasoning. Of course, we all suspect that the virtual White House Science Advisor is Dr. James Dobson, but it wouldn't hurt to nail it down.
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Symmetry to the day: start with hair parts, end with other parts. A reader sends along this, which suggests that left-right dichotomies are possibly more significant than one might imagine just from watching Crossfire.
I've been posting from Austin, Texas, site of the South by Southwest Festival (if you're in town, come by the Saxon Pub Friday night at 8, all will be explained), but I did catch some of this afternoon's baseball hearing. Two thoughts: if Congresspeople used their allotted time for questions to ACTUALLY ASK QUESTIONS, more information just might be elicited. And, secondly, if baseball didn't specifically intend to piss people off, both about MLB and lawyers in general, they sure miscalculated with the selection of Bob Manfred as the mouthpiece-in-chief. I know baseball has earned a reputation for having the dumbest owners in pro sports, but didn't any of them, upon seeing Manfred's pre-hearing presentation, shout in dismay, "Oh, Christ, he's gonna make 'em hate our guts!"?
For those who've been jonesing, Social Security tomorrow.
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Sudden thought watching the baseball hearings: is the guy sitting to Canseco's right (our left) his lawyer? If so, Jose found the one lawyer in America with a bigger neck than his own. Can we schedule hearings about Lawyers on Steroids?
But seriously, it is de rigeur today to denigrate the Robert Blake jury. Like everyone else outside the courtroom, I found the "She was shot while I rushed into the restaurant to retrieve my gun" defense almost Twinkily shaky. But two things give me pause before deriding this or any jury. One, I was in the jury pool for the Robert Blake trial. True story. Me and Christina Applegate. Still not kidding. One very long day hanging around the courthouse--"Bring a book" is the mantra for jury duty, JD is probably the only thing keeping the publishing industry from going totally under--and the cognitive dissonance between the video assuring us what an important job we're doing and the nature of the treatment we're receiving (as the lowest-paid cogs of the criminal-justice machine) all incline me toward great respect for the people who actually end up serving.
The second thing that keeps me from knee-jerk juror derision was the memory of how cruel we all were toward the O.J. Simpson criminal trial jury. "They only took five hours to deliberate!" was the angry mantra of the time. (Hint: how many hours did the jury in the--pardon me for mentioning something truly trivial, given its prominence in the cable-news universe--Scott Peterson trial deliberate?) But my experience covering the subsequent civil trial brought me to another conclusion: both juries were right. We civilians sometimes forget, but jurors tend to take seriously, the weight of the burden that is wisely placed upon the prosecution to prove something--even something obvious, like OJ's guilt--beyond a reasonable doubt. Would that more highly-paid parts of our government took their legal and Constitutional responsibilities as seriously....
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Talking out of both sides? On the one hand, the Administration is being credited with--did I miss this memo?--nuance. Check out Robin Wright in Tuesday's WaPo. As many of us freedom-haters long suspected, one man's terrorist really is another man's newly-installed democratic leader. But adherence to the Other N-word only goes so far. There are also the thumb-in-the-eye appointments of Bolton to the UN and now, Wolfowitz to the World Bank (does your surname have to begin with "Wolf" to hold that job?). The French, masters of the cool riposte, have responded in a manner true to form. The rest of the world seems to get the message, as well. See the third paragraph here. Google includes headlines that say the appointment has world leaders "scratching their heads". At least it doesn't have them spit-combing.
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Now I know how Mary Mapes felt. Moments (apparently) after the Rather post appeared, here's feedback that includes this reference, to the Hair Part Theory (promulgated, at least in part, to sell a mirror that doesn't mirror--that is, that doesn't reverse left-to-right). If this site is to be believed, Jimmy Carter also toyed with the idea of a changed part. I thought I was being trivial, and still I lumbered into the land of a Theory.
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Josh Marshall, about to be wed, is making the biggest mistake of his life: entrusting TPM to me for the next couple of days. I’ll try to keep the damage to a respectable minimum, since I’m also a regular reader, but no guarantees about the furniture.
As a humor-type person, I reserve the right to bring the conversation right down to the trivial and superficial, where American media really dwell. And that’s where we’ll start. Having said my own farewell to Dan Rather with personally gathered highlights of his career here, here, here, here, and here, I hope at least some listeners gathered that the noise about his “bias” is so damned irrelevant to understanding what was wrong, not just at the end but straight on through. About half of it was Dan himself, as the clips may show (another one, really amazing, airs this Sunday), but the other half is the nature of the network anchor job itself: sitting in New York reading prompter and, as Ken Auletta showed in his recent profile, assuming the Managing Editor mantle for important visitors, then occasionally parachuting into a news hotspot for, at most, 24 hours of finding out the answer to the only question they have time to ask: what’s the mood here?
All that being said, I’m amazed that a salient fact about Dan’s last few years escaped notice during last week’s barrage of Rathermania and Ratherphobia. Namely, what other distinguished personage of such lengthy service in the public eye suddenly decides, in the last few years of his career, to change the side of his head on which he parts his hair? That, my friends, is plain weird. Sure, he changed the haircut, opting for the youthful short-and-semi-spiky look, and, after a lot of to-and-froing with the dye bottle, allowed himself to go gray, then white. But all that could have been consisten with the right-side part we’d come to know and....know. Somehow, Dan decided--and you’ll hear from the clips that these are decisions to which he gives long and thoughtful consideration--that all that was not enough, that the twilight of a long life on camera had to be
marked with a migratory part. And nobody asked why. Until now.
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My time is up. To summarize my main points:
Social Security privatization = bad.
Other than that, I hope (if you don't already) you'll consider reading and subscribing to the New Republic.
UPDATE: I've gotten several emails from readers who claim they won't read me, or won't read TNR, because of this or that disagreeable position we've taken. To be perfectly frank, if you think like this I pity you. Why on Earth should anybody confine their reading to those writers with whom they agree on everything? The best way to learn is to read arguments you disagree with. I voraciously consume analysis with which I disagree, both on the right and on the left.
TNR, more than any other magazine, publishes a range of dissenting views. Yes, we editorially criticized Howard Dean and supported the Iraq war. But we've also run plenty of pro-Dean and anti-war articles, including prominent cover stories. It's fine if TNR isn't your cup of tea. But if you spurn it or any other voice solely on ideological grounds, you're dooming yourself to small-mindedness.
Sorry to get preachy. I just find this mentality baffling.
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I’m not sure what exactly it will take for the conventional wisdom to the Washington press corps and the elite punditocracy to stop saying that President Bush has a plan to save Social Security from insolvency and the Democrats don’t. You’d think the absence of any such plan on Bush’s part would be enough, but clearly it’s not.
How about the fact that Bush himself now admits it? According to Dan Froomkin’s White House Briefing at the Washington Post online, Bush told a roundtable of reporters yesterday that he has no plan:
But he expressed astonishment that people constantly refer to "Bush's plan": "I haven't laid out a plan," he said. "I've laid out some ideas that I think ought to be considered for a plan, and that's what's important for people to know."
And in his press conference today, Bush repeated, “I have not laid out a plan yet -- intentionally. I have laid out principles.” That really ought to settle the question.
Meanwhile, Bush also admitted that private accounts do not make Social Security solvent. “Personal accounts do not solve the issue,” he said.
Nonetheless, Bush insists on private accounts. From the roundtable discussion:
Q: Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid [D-Nev.] said if he could ask you one question, it would be, 'Why doesn't he take [Social Security account] privatization off the table, and let's talk about solvency for Social Security? What would you say to him?A: I would say, 'I'm willing to talk about solvency; please come to the table,' and I think it's very important for people to consider personal accounts. It's a concept that I think is very important to be discussed. . . .
Q: There was some confusion when you referred to personal investment accounts as an 'add-on' in a recent Social Security [promotional] appearance [in Westfield, N.J.]. Would you be open to add-on personal accounts, as opposed to a personal accounts carved out of payroll taxes?
A: No, I think the 'carve-out' is the way to go. What I was referring to in my speech, I was explaining to people that the capital in the personal account would yield a certain amount of interest, and that interest -- the monies would be in addition to a Social Security check you were receiving.
Q: So you would rule out add-on accounts?
A: In my judgment, the best way to go forward is to allow a personal account to be created out of the payroll taxes being paid into the system."
So let’s be clear where things stand. This is fundamentally an ideological fight. Democrats want to keep Social Security as a form of social insurance, and Bush wants to transform it into something else. Democrats are not willing to make a deal on solvency if it means giving up social insurance. And Bush is not willing to make a deal on solvency unless they do.
Given all this, how on earth can so many people continue to claim that Bush wants to save Social Security while the Democrats have their heads in the sand? How can this almost universally-accepted aphorism be said to have any basis in reality?
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The political press, and websites like this one, have been obsessing for weeks over the politics of privatizing Social Security. I think we may all have missed the single key development: Lindsey Graham has switched sides.
Graham was always the center of the action. A champion of privatization, he's been holding closed-door meetings with moderate Democrats in the hopes of forging a compromise. The main worry of the pro-Social Security crowd all along has been that Graham would co-opt the Democrats into some form of privatization.
That's why what Graham told the Washington Post last week is so crucial. In the interview, he called private accounts a "sideshow." There was also this:
"Let's have a conversation along these lines: Let's make a commitment to permanently find solvency, and see where we go," he said. "Set the accounts aside for a moment. Let's see if we can find solvency."
That position is known as "the Democratic position." Democrats are willing to discuss Social Security's solvency, but not privatization. In the same article, Treasury Secretary John Snow said, "the administration is saying that the solvency issue, if it's going to be dealt with in a way that's fair to younger people, has to make available to them this opportunity to build a nest egg through the personal accounts." Which is in keeping with the conservative line. For privatizers, solvency is the pretext for transforming Social Security from social insurance into a system where individuals take care of themselves. If they address solvency withot adding private accounts, they lose their pretext.
And yesterday, Graham voted with the Democrats on a sense of the Senate resolution rejecting large benefit cuts or increases in the national debt.
So how or why did Graham switch sides? My guess is this. Graham is an earnest guy, and he sat down with Democrats thinking he could win them over to his point of view. But as they hashed it out, and they brought up the inherent problems with establishing private accounts, he instead came around to their point of view. Instead of Graham coopting the Democrats, the Democrats coopted Graham.
Anyway, that's my theory.
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From the Guardian: "Russia's secret services are shielding Bosnian Serbs wanted by the war crimes tribunal in The Hague for atrocities committed during the Bosnian war, including the massacre at Srebrenica, where more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys were slaughtered."
--Josh Marshall
There's a gag in one episode of Arrested Development (the greatest television show in the history of the world) in which a character sees a bag in his freezer labelled, "Dead Dove. Do Not Eat." Curious, he opens the bag, looks grossed out, pauses, and says, "I don't know what I expected."
I had a similar experience this morning. National Review Online posted a link to a Jonah Goldberg column entitled "Kill the cats!" Intrigued, I clicked on it, figuring it had to be a metaphor of some kind. It's not.
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Yesterday, Josh argued here that "One of the Democrats' greatest problems -- far more insidious than many realize -- is their desire to gain the approval and approbation of establishment Washington and its A-list pundits."
Interestingly, a reporter friend of mine came across some evidence of this proposition that very night. As he told me:
I was talking yesterday with a very influential Democratic congressman who firmly defended the current Democratic position of not having a specific Social Security 'plan' on the table. Yet at the same time he was a little defensive about it. Why? "Because I keep hearing from you guys" -- i.e., Washington reporters -- "that we're going to be in trouble for not having a plan," he said. "And it makes me nervous."
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The stench of death is everywhere around Social Security privatization. Today the Washington Post publishes an analysis of its poll showing support for Bush on Social Security is falling yet again. Meanwhile, in the New York Times, David Brooks writes a “A Requiem for Reform,” in which he blames GOP miscalculation, Democratic partisanship, and the selfishness of the voters for killing privatization. (A departure from his usual sunny populism, wouldn’t you say?)
Actually, if reform dies, it wasn’t selfishness that killed privatization. It was precisely the opposite.
The irony of Brooks’ complaint, which we’re sure to see repeated elsewhere, is that selfishness has always been at the core of Bush’s economic agenda. He passed tax cuts by dismissing Democratic worries that it would burden future generations with debt. Remember him waving dollar bills and promising, “it’s your money”? He organized lobbies representing the affluent to push for the tax cuts that would benefit them disproportionately. Karl Rove’s re-election strategy was built on appealing to the narrow self-interest of a series of groups. Farmers got lavish crop payments. The steel, shrimp, textile and lumber industry got tariffs. HMOs and pharmaceuticals got lavish subsidies. Etc.
Unsurprisingly, Bush approached Social Security privatization in the same spirit. The strategy was to divide up the electorate and appeal to each segment in very self-interested terms. They would neutralize seniors with the assurance that their benefits wouldn’t be touched. The young would be lured in with promises of amassing great fortunes in private accounts. Blacks would be peeled off from the Democratic coalition with bogus claims that Social Security harms them disproportionately. And Wall Street and other businesses, who smelled large profits down the road, would pony up tens of millions of dollars to fund the whole campaign.
But it hasn’t worked. And the main reason is that the public is not quite as selfish as the conservatives thought.
The privatizers’ weakest assumption turned out to be their belief that the elderly would support privatization if they knew they wouldn’t be affected. For weeks, as polls have shown rising hostility to privatization, GOP pollsters and strategists have conceded that they need to do more to reassure seniors on this point. Bush has obligingly harped on it at every stop.
Yet senior citizens overwhelmingly oppose Bush’s approach. And it’s not because they think their benefits will be cut – polls show they overwhelmingly they buy his reassurances. As today’s Post reports:
By and large, the elderly do understand the president has promised not to touch their Social Security checks, according to polling.But that is not relevant to their political opposition, Smorodin said, noting that older people also worry that pension benefit cuts will hurt their children and grandchildren.
At 69, Gene Wallace knows the White House's proposal would have no impact on his Social Security check, but if Bush believes that will silence the Republican mayor of Coldwater, Mich., Wallace grumbled, "he's all wet."
"I'm a parent as well as a grandparent. Somewhere along the line, they are going to be eligible for retirement assistance," he said, with all the energy he could muster three weeks after open-heart surgery. "It's everybody's concern what happens to this country."
I find this pretty heartwarming. Who wouldn’t? I’ll tell you who: an economic libertarian who sees concepts like social insurance or collective interest as fundamentally alien. Which is to say, the sentiment that has driven privatization from the very beginning. As usual, this sentiment was voiced in its most naked way by GOP strategist, business lobbyist and Rove confidante Grover Norquist. Last year, speaking to a Mexican newspaper, Norquist chortled over the demise of the World War II generation:
This is an age cohort that voted for a draft before the war started, and allowed the draft to continue for 25 years after the war was over. Their idea of the legitimate role of the state is radically different than anything previous generations knew, or subsequent generations."Before that generation, whenever you put a draft in, there were draft riots. After that generation, there were draft riots. This generation? No problem. Why not? Of course the government moves people around like pawns on a chessboard. One side spits off labor law, one side spits off Social Security. We will all work until we're 65 and have the same pension. You know, some Bismark, German thing, okay? Very un-American.
Brooks writes today about how privatization opponents used “familiar scare tactics designed to frighten the elderly,” using one of the most hackneyed clichés favored by critics of Social Security. Here’s what I’d like to see them explain: What’s wrong with being frightened about a future in which your children and grandchildren live in an every-man-for-himself society?
--
Marshall Wittmann, the Democratic Leadership Council thinker who writes the Bull Moose blog, is a terrific guy. But in his zeal to defend Joe Lieberman he’s backed himself into a corner.
There’s a larger debate about Lieberman and his role in the party, but I’ll set that aside for now. Marshall defended the Senator’s honor by citing his vote against the bankruptcy bill, which Marshall praised a as “a strong stand against this flawed legislation.” Indeed Marshall throws this strong stance in the face of all the liberals who see Lieberman as a shill for business.
Fair enough. But since then several other bloggers have pointed out that the best chance to stop the bankruptcy bill was not on the final vote. The decisive vote was an earlier cloture vote. And Lieberman voted yes on that. Probably, after passage was inevitable, he switched from yes to no in order to spare himself more criticism from the left.
So Marshall responded by launching a counterattack on “dogmatic idealogues” and “hyperspace lefties” who gang up on Lieberman. That's fine as far as it goes. I actually agree with Marshall and the DLC on the suicidal purity of the Democratic party’s left wing, embodied by the Howard Dean movement and its fanatical internet contingent, even if I disagree with his support for Lieberman in particular. (I think Lieberman's zeal to be seen as bipartisan, apologetics for torture, history of supporting capital gains tax cuts and fighting sensible regulations on Wall Street allow party liberals to tarnish the whole moderate wing as sell-outs.)
Be that as it may, there’s a specific issue here. Marshall claimed Lieberman opposed the bankruptcy bill, but it turned out he really didn’t. Shouldn’t he, you know, admit that? He could still argue why he supports Lieberman despite this one bad vote. But clearly he was caught praising Lieberman for a particular stance and then, when it was pointed out that Lieberman actually did the opposite, lashed out at his critics without acknowledging the contradiction.
Marshall is in many ways a Scoop Jackson Democrat. Jackson was a foreign policy hawk and a domestic New Deal liberal. Lieberman isn't quite that. He's a hawk and a pro-business moderate. It's fine for Marshall to decide he cares most about foreign policy and support Lieberman despite some domestic disagreements. Pretending Lieberman is something other than what he actually is simply undermines the case.
--
Okay, why does everybody say that President Bush has a plan to close Social Security’s deficit? The Bush plan is to allow workers to divert some percentage of their payroll taxes into private accounts. This is essentially a tax cut: instead of sending your money to the government to be spent on current Social Security recipients, you get to keep it, albeit for an earmarked purpose. Tax cuts don’t make deficits smaller, they make them larger.
To the extent that the press has recognized this, it’s to say that “private accounts by themselves do nothing to fill the deficit.” But this is a massive understatement. Private accounts by themselves make the deficit larger. Imagine Bush’s “plan” to fix Social Security consisted of building immense gold statues of himself through the country. Would one say that this plan by itself does not solve the problem? Obviously, that would be far too kind.
Now, it’s a little more complicated than that, but not much. Here are the caveats. First, conservatives have a theory that private accounts will be a “sweetener” to make benefit cuts easier. If people have private accounts, they’ll more likely accept cuts in the guaranteed benefit. But this strikes me as highly implausible. Taking away a guaranteed benefit is politically hard. Polls show the public overwhelmingly opposes replacing part of a guaranteed benefit with a private account. Basically, privatization means packaging whatever cuts are going to have to happen in order to make the program solvent with even more cuts needed to radically transform the system. The more money that’s diverted into private accounts, the more that has to be cut from the guaranteed benefit.
You could argue that the gold statue plan would make benefit cuts easier also. Maybe the gold statues would make Bush into a more prestigious, even God-like, figure in the public mind, and therefore more people would be willing to accept benefit cuts he proposed. But that’s not a very convincing argument either.
The second caveat is that Bush now proposes to have those who open private accounts accept in return cuts in their guaranteed benefit when they retire years later. Fiscally, this is better than proposing private accounts without explaining how you would pay for them. Yet it would still lead to huge increases in the national debt. Conservatives dismiss that debt as a down payment on reform. The government is going to get its money back eventually, they argue, so why worry?
The answer is that the government may not get its money back. By letting workers keep their payroll taxes, the government will owe lots of actual currency. In return for this, those workers promise to take lower benefits one day. But those promises can be revoked by future Congresses. If the market tanks and some workers do worse than those who retired a few years before them, the pressure for bailouts will be intense. In all likelihood, the government will get back somewhere less than 100% of the payroll taxes it agreed to forego.
All in all, the most optimistic thing you can say about Bush is that his plan would do no harm. The more accurate thing to say is that his current plan would exacerbate the problem in the guise of solving it. What’s completely unsupportable is to say that Bush has a plan to save Social Security and the Democrats don’t.
--
Josh writes below about Sebastian Mallaby’s column in the Washington Post today. Josh mostly addresses Mallaby’s political argument, that the Democrats are hurting themselves by opposing privatization. I thought I’d touch on the other half of Mallaby’s argument, which is that Democrats are making a substantive mistake opposing privatization. Mallaby is a truly interesting writer who researches his columns thoroughly and argues them in innovative ways. That’s why it’s so disappointing that his column today simply recycles a Republican talking point that has become ensconced as mindless conventional wisdom. I’m sorry this site is devoting so much space to beating up on a normally astute writer. But his view is so influential, at least among elite circles, that it’s worth dissecting.
The first thing to say here is that Bush does not have a plan to save Social Security from insolvency. I’m actually going to develop this point in the next post. (Let the anticipation build!)
Meanwhile, on to point number two. Mallaby insists that “the Democrats have no proposal of their own. They sound negative and irresponsible.” In fact, the Democrats have a proposal that’s every bit as substantive as Bush’s: put aside privatization, and come to the bargaining table to hash out a 1983-style fix mixing benefit cuts and tax hikes. Senate Democrats actually called a press conference to announce this position. It’s Republicans who are inveighing against this kind of non-ideological solution. (See this editorial in the Weekly Standard.)
Now, it would be one thing if Mallaby, like most conservatives, fervently wanted to privatize Social Security and saw closing its deficit as a secondary goal. But he explicitly argues the opposite. So it’s downright weird that he blames the Democrats here.
Third, he conflates Social Security’s projected deficit with other entitlement deficits. This is a standard trick employed by Bush and his allies: if you have to make the Social Security deficit look big, lump it together with other entitlement deficits. Mallaby concedes that the revenue lost from Bush’s tax cuts is three times the size of Social Security’s projected deficit. But, he writes, “the coming baby-bust budget crisis is bigger than $11 trillion.” By that he means that Medicare and Medicaid face a huge crisis, which is true. But why is this an argument to address Social Security first? Given that other problems are much larger, why should we devote scarce revenue and political capital to solving a relatively minor Social Security crisis?
As for the argument that privatization is an opening wedge designed to phase out Social Security as we know it, Mallaby flicks it away. “Democrats who say that any personal accounts are a first step to dismantling the system,” he writes, “should recall their own fury at equivalent Republican claims -- that Hillarycare, for example, promised ‘socialized medicine.’” But what Democrats are saying is true. Conservatives themselves have long argued that private accounts are a way to transform Social Security into something fundamentally different. They’ve admitted that privatization is the closest they could come to total abolition, and they’ve admitted that private accounts are intended to grow over time. Sure, out of political expedience, they’ve changed their tune. But the very fact that conservatives rule out a fix that doesn’t involve “carve-out accounts” – the device that is intended to phase out the system – shows that phase-out, rather than solvency, is their goal.
Finally, Mallaby repeats the dogma that “a party whose senators unanimously refuse to contemplate carve-out accounts is a party that's closed its collective mind.” Here again is this strangely common belief that it’s wrong to rule out a really bad idea. Doesn’t the substance matter at all? Would Mallaby rule out a plan for fighting terrorism that involves invading and annexing France? Or would he wait to hear the details? I won’t go on any more, but my last L.A. Times column dealt with what I called “militant open-mindedness.”
I understand the power that group thinking has – its ability to make sensible people believe absurd things. I find it depressing that somebody as astute as Mallaby would fall prey to that.
--
Jonathan Chait here, filling in while Josh and the future Mrs. Talking Points Memo prepare for their upcoming nuptials. A brief introduction is in order. I’m a senior editor (which actually means staff writer) for the New Republic. I also write an op-ed column for the Los Angeles Times which appears every Friday.
Josh previously expressed his hope that my TNR cover story on the need to defeat privatization could be made free to non-subscribers. Well, here’s a free link. I hope those of you who don’t read TNR will consider doing so. Electronic subscriptions cost a mere $29.95 a year, print subscriptions a bit more.
My one previous blogging experience came in late 2003/early 2004, when I spent a few months writing an anti-Howard Dean blog (Diary of a Dean-o-phobe) for the TNR website. Perhaps some who hold this view were among those who wrote in urging that the blog – or, in some cases, I personally -- meet an untimely demise.
I should let you know upfront that some of you may consider me one of those annoying pseudo-liberal sellouts. I did passionately argue in favor of the Iraq War. It seemed like a stronger case at the time, before we knew that Saddam Hussein was enduring international isolation, crippling sanctions, and ultimately full-out invasion by the strongest military power in world history all for the purpose of concealing non-existent weapons programs. (Come to think of it, my jihad against Howard Dean also seemed stronger before I knew that the alternative would be John Kerry. I still say Dean would have been worse.)
Anyway, it so happens that I’m also obsessed with Social Security privatization. So those of you who feel you haven’t gotten enough of that topic from this site, there will be more. Much more! If I get intoxicated with power, or hard up for material, I may even splinter the Fainthearted Faction and the Conscience Caucus into new sub-factions of my own creation. Hopefully it won’t come to that.
--
Alright, I'm off. As I said, I'll pop in now and again over the next week. If you need to contact me, do so through the regular comments email. To contact Jon Chait, who'll be holding down the fort over the next couple days, use the email above.
(Note: For those of you who've kindly asked, no, I won't be posting from my honeymoon. We're taking that later this spring.)
--Josh Marshall
One of the Democrats' greatest problems -- far more insidious than many realize -- is their desire to gain the approval and approbation of establishment Washington and its A-list pundits. The habit or inclination is rooted in a political world that ceased to exist 20 or 30 years ago, and even then was wrong-headed. Republicans, on the other hand, have long seen the relationship as fundamentally antagonistic (if not necessarily unfriendly) and have acted accordingly. On balance, that's led to better press treatment because, though they are loathe to admit it, the mix of editors and pundits and talk show hosts respect the treatment.
Democrats, from top to bottom, would do themselves no end of good if they simply acted on the assumption that the Washington establishment is not a constituency they are trying to appeal to or cultivate.
That doesn't mean they should ignore the Washington press. Far from it. They should state their views and demand they be fairly covered. But they should not act on the ingrained assumption that these people are basically like-minded people of shared assumptions and beliefs who can be appealed to on that basis.
All of that is another way of saying they should act like Republicans.
Now, let's take an example: Sebastian Mallaby's column this morning in the Washington Post. As you might expect, it's another entrant in 'Dems will do badly not putting forth their own plan' contest.
Mallaby says Democrats will find themselves in a similar spot to that which they did over Iraq. And though Mallaby puts himself down as a supporter of add-on accounts he says nevertheless that a party that refuses even "to contemplate carve-out accounts is a party that's closed its collective mind."
An implicit thread that runs through Mallaby's article becomes explicit when he says that "progressive Democrats should also admit the truth about Republican proposals: They're a heck of a lot better than leaving Social Security's deficit to get worse."
It does not seem to occur to Mallaby that the people who he is arguing against certainly do not believe this is so and furthermore that they have very strong and principled reasons for believing that -- many of which up-coming guest-blogger Jon Chait will no doubt discuss.
On balance I would class Mallaby's piece (along with a recent column by Matt Miller, for whom I have great respect) as another in a rash of recent examples of what we might call convulsive neoliberalism (a topic to be discussed later). But let's take a moment to think through Mallaby's point on the substance.
Democrats believe that private accounts destroy Social Security. That isn't rhetoric. It's the basis of their entire opposition. A private accounts system removes the guarantees and sharing of risk that are at the heart of social insurance. Agree with that or disagree with that. That's what Democrats believe. And yet to Mallaby ruling out private accounts makes them unserious, negative and irresponsible.
In the old days, keeping an open mind about voting for laws which you believe to be fundamentally wrong or misguiding was called cynicism. But I guess times change.
Mallaby presumably also buys into what is now the consensus assumption that private accounts at a minimum do nothing to improve solvency. On top of that, private accounts intentionally push the financing of Social Security as a defined-benefit program toward dissolution -- though not everyone yet admits this. (One might even add to the equation that in the most similarly-situated country where this change has been attempted, it has been judged so spectacularly unsuccessful more or less across the political spectrum that they are now attempting to go back to a system like ours. Mallaby may have heard of the place: Britain.) But again, opposing private accounts means you're not being serious.
Now, on the politics. The president has yet to introduce any plan. He only says he wants private accounts. That's his one bottom line. He won't come forward with a plan, even though he clearly has one, because he wants to make it more difficult for his opponents to attack him. The president has just been reelected. He has majorities in both houses of congress. He has, on this issue, especially, a favorable media. And in the three months he has been pushing this plan, public support for it has gone from luke-warm to flat cold. This is apparently a bad situation for the Democrats.
Even the premise of Mallaby's logic is flawed. Democrats have a plan for solvency. And everyone has a fairly clear idea what it would be. It'd be something along the lines of Bob Ball's or the Orszag/Diamond plan, a mix of tax increases and benefit cuts to bring the numbers into line -- something that would not require particularly drastic moves on either side.
What the Democrats haven't done is to formally get behind a concrete proposal, which is to say that they haven't done exactly what the president hasn't done.
And why should they? Every pol with a brain knows there is no point putting up a detailed plan which makes for a ready target when your opponents are in the midst of getting mauled over their idea. That may not go over well in civics class or at the Post editorial board. But it is straight politics as it is always played and for which no apologies are necessary. But in Mallaby's view, despite the extremely disadvantaged position Democrats find themselves in in Washington today, having a hand on not one lever of power: they should nonetheless sacrifice what they believe in order to be entirely indifferent to which political strategy will be advance their principles.
What that advice makes clear comes out in other parts of his piece --his relative indifference to the issues under consideration. You'll note that in various parts of his piece he lauds President Bush and congressional Republicans for selflessly putting themselves out there to raise the cry about the coming disasters to face Security Security. The president, he says, is "out there touring the country, trying to open people's minds to the necessity of reform; meanwhile, Republican members of Congress are sticking their necks out with detailed overhaul proposals."
Though he says he supports add-on accounts, it is also clear that he buys into most if not all of the essential premises of the privatization argument, even down to a few of the bogus statistics. To him, having private accounts inside or outside Social Security is basically an organizational matter on the order of deciding whether one might raise the retirement age one year or shave a bit off indexing of benefits to improve the program's solvency. In other words, an important question but hardly a matter of transcendent consequence of principle.
At the end of the day, the fundamental issue, at least as the Democrats see it (and as we're learning, much of the public) is simply invisible to Mallaby. He can't get his head around the notion that people really see private accounts as that big a deal. And that shapes his view of the entire matter. Because of that he can't see that the debate we're having isn't about solvency but about whether the country will make the historic decision to get rid of the Social Security system and replace it with something very different. In that debate, Democrats have a position that is straightforward, on the table, and emphatically clear. It's Social Security. Period. Democrats want to keep the current system. That's very clear.
Mallaby is living in a mental world of premises and assumptions (both political and in policy terms) which no Democrat should even remotely be a part of.
Any Democrat who would be rattled by Mallaby's reasoning would have to be one who is petrified of the idea of suffering some political setback somewhere, somehow, for some reason, even though all available evidence points in the opposite direction.
Mallaby's political advice strikes me as silly. But if it could be shown to me that defending Social Security was a risky proposition politically, it wouldn't affect my thinking at all. Some things are so important they're worth losing over. And when political parties realize that is generally when they start winning. A political party that is scared to run risks over matters of grand importance even when the public volubly says it has their backs is a party that scarcely deserves to exist.
--Josh Marshall
Wow! Roll Call says Kweisi Mfume is going to run for retiring-Senator Paul Sarbanes senate seat in Maryland in 2006.
--Josh Marshall
Yep, the Dems have a problem on their hands. According to the just-released ABC/WaPo poll, President Bush's approval rating on Social Security has fallen to 35%, the lowest of his presidency. And 58% say that the more they learn about his plan, the less they like it. On the other hand, no Republican has yet moved to impeach the president over private accounts nor does there appear to be significant support among House Republicans for tarring and feathering him. So the Democrats may have overreached.
--Josh Marshall
I'm going to be stepping away from the site this week; but I'll be leaving it in the hands of an eclectic trio of guest bloggers that I think you'll really enjoy. I'll pop in here and there with a post. But I am taking a week away from the site to ... well, it sounds so matter-of-fact and prosaic to just say it, but to get married. If all goes according to plan I'll be back fulltime next Monday or Tuesday.
Starting Monday, Jon Chait of The New Republic will take over for a couple days. He has a new article out this week on the Dems and just why they should do everything in their power to stop Bush in his tracks on phasing out Social Security. (I'm hoping the TNR Internet gods will choose to make his piece available to non-subscribers, given its inherent newsworthiness and the fact that I imagine he'll be referring to it with some frequency. No need on the companion piece by Gregory Mankiw, for reasons noted here.)
Signing on for the last couple days of the week will be Harry Shearer, actor, political wit, voice on The Simpsons, Derek Smalls of Spinal Tap, creator of Le Show and so much more. Notwithstanding the fact that I'll be in my last couple days of bachelorhood I'll definitely be stopping by a lot to see what on earth Harry chooses to write about.
Then over the weekend and through Monday, Ed Kilgore of NewDonkey.com and the Democratic Leadership Council will return for more excellent posting and probably a bit more of what will hopefully be fruitful antagonism with parts of our readership. (Among other benign qualities, blogs can, I think, be a wonderful venue for group or perhaps couples therapy for squabbling national political parties.)
So, my deep thanks to each of them for minding the fort while I'm away.
I'll be around till early afternoon today.
--Josh Marshall
Bless their hearts. The In This Together campaign, the New York state pro-Social Security coalition, already has up a spoof of the Bamboozlepalooza Tour website put up by the Treasury Dept. and noted below. And unlike a lot of these parodies, this one's actually straightforward and dead-pan enough to be pretty funny. Take a look.
--Josh Marshall
We've fielded a bunch of questions of late about just who's paying the expenses for the Bamboozlepalooza Tour. And the question is raised again now by the fact that the administration has set up a Bamboozlepalooza website. (I kid you not.) In case you didn't know, it's strengtheningsocialsecurity.gov. Take a look. After all, you paid for it.
Now, about that question of who pays for this stuff ...
Certainly, as the government has expanded onto the Internet, it is taken as a given (and rightly so, I think) that office-holders in different branches of government will use their government websites to advocate their views. The folks on the Hill on the both sides of the aisle do it. The White House website certainly presses the White House's case. At the same time, there are strict rules about those sites not being used in political -- or more specifically, electoral -- campaigns.
It seems to me that there is some question about whether the White House can or should be able to set up a site for its own propaganda using a .gov extension. But that doesn't seem to me to be the issue most worthy of discussion.
What about the Bamboozlepalooza Tour itself? Who pays? Yes, no doubt, presidents can go on tours of the country pressing their legislative agenda. You can go back to the ill-fated example of Woodrow Wilson to find precedents for that.
It is also true that presidents and cabinet secretaries make all sorts of appearances before private organizations where the public is not allowed or appearances where attendance is restricted on various bases. It is even true that tickets for presidential events are often doled out (under both parties) as a sort of minor patronage for local political supporters and bigwigs. And no one would deny that a White House can take practical steps to manage attendence at presidential events.
But it has become quite clear in this case -- almost old-hat, you might say -- that all the events the president is holding on Bamboozlepalooza are restricted to people who support his agenda. Sometimes disagree-ers (or should we call them dissidents?) slip through. But the White House takes affirmative and fairly successful steps to exclude those who are not supporters.
We got used to this during the campaign. But that's different: Campaigns are private organizations. They have their own money. They can do pretty much what they want in this regard and are only limited by the constraints of public ridicule.
Taken altogether, though, something seems qualitatively different to me about what's happening here -- specifically, the nexus of taxpayer funding and ideological litmus tests for inclusion. Nobody would imagine that the president would or could restrict public White House tours to political supporters. Yet here the administration has undertaken what is quite publicly a taxpayer-funded public advocacy campaign. And yet only those who pass a political test are allowed to attend.
I know we all sort of already know that. But if it doesn't violate a law (and perhaps it does), it should certainly violate public sensibilities more than it seems to be and provoke more than mere eye-rolling. Along with phony-baloney news, doctored government statistics and paid-off pundits, it is yet another sign -- if now, admittedly, only on the margins -- of the Pravdafication of civic discourse under this administration.
--Josh Marshall
A note from TPM Reader <$NoAd$> PC ...
Back around the time of the Clinton health care debate William Kristol drafted an influential memo suggesting that the best course for the GOP was "principled"/ideological opposition to ANY compromise on a universal health care plan. Beyond his ideological opposition to further government intervention in this area, he argued that politically, setting up a grand new entitlement (which would no doubt be tinkered with and expanded over the years) would redound to the Democrats long term poltical interests. He was very wrong on the substance of the issue - but very right on the politics of it. The Republicans paid no price, indeed prospered from their derailing of national health care.Now we face the mirror image of the Clinton health care debate and it's instructrive to see how both the media and the opposition party play their hands. I don't recall any hue and cry from the Beltway pundit class that the GOP needed to come up with an alternative to Clinton's plan. In fact the media focus was exclusively on Clinton and the trouble he was having crafting a plan and rounding up votes. By the way Clinton had much more support in Congress (and in the country) on the health care issue than Bush does now on Soc Sec; yet the Beltway pundits are putting the heat on Dems to come up with their own plan.
As for the Dems, it's a dispiriting commentary on the weakness and cowardice of the national party that people like Carville are falling for the "we can't be seen to be just obstructionists" line. Beltway Dems are so inured [to] the Russert/Cokie/Judy/Matthews Conventional Wisdom axis that their political radar is way off target. What they don't seem to understand is that standing firm against the destruction of Social Security IS an agenda and a statement of values. As Chait wrote in the TNR - the notion that Democrats will pay a political price for stopping an unpopular program is utter lunacy - but the GOP with the help of the Beltway pundit class are pushing this line. Could people like Harry Reid and Joe Biden really believe this?
Here's hoping that like Kristol's Memo more than a decade ago, Chait's piece becomes the Dem playbook.
He makes some very good points.
--Josh Marshall
Another follow-up on the Greenberg/Carville memo. And before proceeding, let me again stipulate that I think the thrust of what they say in it has been mistaken in some cases and tendentiously distorted in others.
That said, take this passage from the front of the memo, in which they ask why there has not been more fallout for the president from the public's very negative response to phase-out ...
This ought to be the Democrats’ moment, as the president’s Social Security proposal crashes against the wall of the public’s deep doubts. Support for the president’s proposal has fallen to 36 percent and perhaps even lower, depending on question wording. 1 Worse for the president, 40 percent of voters strongly oppose his plan, rising to 63 percent among seniors. Congressional Democrats are now winning voters over 45 years by 12 points, according to the NPR survey, after faltering badly among aging voters just 4 months earlier. But Bush’s plan is not that popular with younger voters who divide evenly on it.So, we ask progressives to consider, why have the Republicans not crashed and burned? Why has the public not taken out their anger on the Congressional Republicans and the president? We think the answer lies with voters’ deeper feelings about the Democrats who appear to lack direction, conviction, values, advocacy or a larger public purpose.
So does this mean the Democrats <$Ad$>are being punished for not having their own 'plan'? For only saying 'no'? That can't possibly be what the authors' mean. And to know that you need only look at your calendar. The president is less than eight weeks into his second term as president. And over that period his approval on Social Security has collapsed. To imagine that what we should expect is that his presidency would now be mired in some crisis of legitimacy is ridiculous.
Believe me, give it time. If the Democrats handle this right, the political suffering of the president and his party has scarcely begun. And they should suffer mightily for pressing a policy that would carve a path of devastation through the American middle class.
The grafs above only make sense if what the two are talking about is a much longer-term problem of public fuzziness over just what Democrats stand-for. And that very much is a problem -- one that had no little to do with their losing the presidential contest in November. But this is why Democrats need to take the opportunity of the Social Security debate to outline their values, their vision of where the country should be going on Social Security and related issues. Flatly opposing phase-out is not the problem; it's the first step to the solution.
--Josh Marshall
Should the Democrats come forward with their own 'plan' on Social Security? That's certainly what Republicans are saying. And it's a cry taken up now by many establishment pundits. Indeed, the strategy memo put out last week by Stan Greenberg and James Carville was widely seen as buying into that line of reasoning, though I think that's a misinterpretation (which I'll discuss later.)
The shortest version of an answer is simply 'no.' But I think there are really two questions here. And it's worth taking the time to distinguish them.
Not only do I think you could find very few Democratic politicians or strategists who think it's time for the Dems to step forward with a concrete counter-proposal on Social Security; if you were armed with truth serum, I'm certain you'd find no Republican strategists or pols who believe it is in the Democrats' interests to do so.
You needn't go any further to figure this out than the fact that the president has yet to step up and put a concrete proposal on the table. Until he does, Republicans who make this argument deserve nothing more than laughter. The White House has rather preferred to elaborate the president's proposal through a series of leaks so that he will always have some level of deniability when anyone tries to point out how bad a deal his plan would be for most Americans. When the president's plan is sinking like an anvil only a fool would think it was a wise course to put forward a more detailed proposal to distract from the collapse of the president's plan.
Another reason it makes no sense is that it buys into the essential dishonesty of the president's political argument -- namely, that we're now debating how to 'save' Social Security: He has a plan. So the Dems should have one too.
But, as we've argued repeatedly here, that's not what we're debating. As press commentary has belatedly but increasingly awakened to, what we're now debating is whether to keep Social Security or to replace it with private accounts. There's no sense -- as the Senate Dems have now rightly made clear --to getting into a debate over the details of how to strengthen the current program while we're still debating whether it should be preserved. Indeed, no debate over solvency is possible until an unequivocal agreement is made that the program will be preserved.
But there's another part of this 'have a plan' argument that I think was what the Greenberg/Carville memo was trying to get at. That is this: For the medium-term and long-term, this debate on Social Security provides Democrats with an opportunity far richer and more important than whatever political rewards may be reaped in 2006. It provides them with an opportunity -- perhaps best to say, a pivot point -- to begin explaining their larger and entirely distinct vision for where the country should go in the coming years. For years, for a host of reasons, Democrats have been afraid to do that. Now they should. This isn't a right-left issue within the Democratic party. It's more to do with the relative freedom of being an opposition party and how much President Bush has no exposed the GOP real values.
Now, I know I've dealt here in a lot of generalities. And I want to push the site in the direction of an expanded discussion of these questions in the coming weeks. But for the moment, just on the question of Social Security, let's say this: People who oppose the president's plan to phase-out Social Security should keep hammering on his proposal non-stop, from now until the ballot boxes close in California on election day in 2006. They should press the members of Congress who are defending it and yet don't have the guts to actually endorse it (folks like the Count and Rep. Ferguson in New Jersey). But while it would be foolish in the extreme to get baited into putting forth their own solvency plan, hammering the president for wanting to phase-out Social Security should go hand and hand with a discussion (amongst Democrats themselves, as much as anything) of what the broader Democratic vision for retirement security is. That goes beyond Social Security. It involves explaining just why it is Democrats are so determined to keep Social Security intact. It involves explaining how we can help middle class families save more for retirement. It means putting on the tab