Two interesting comments from Greg Sargent

Here are two interesting comments from Greg Sargent's Plum Line.

• GOP leaders to Fed: Don’t act on economy: GOP leaders send a letter to the Fed chairman, urging him not to adopt any further stimulus to help the economy — on the grounds that more action could hurt it by weakening the dollar, even though many economists think a weakened dollar would be good for the country.

  Ezra Klein sense a threat in the public pressure. Steve Benen suggests we’re seeing the latest sign of active GOP sabotage of the economy. And Matthew Yglesias says this should be the story of the day.

• Obama is tanking among independents: All that said, there’s no sugar-coating the fact that Obama’s overall numbers are terrible with indys. A new McClatchy-Marist poll finds that indys plan to vote against him by a whopping 53 to 28.

  This could be a referendum on the current economy, and Obama’s challenge is to change this by somehow leveraging the fact that indys approve of the actual fiscal policies he’s currently championing. Hence the newly aggressive approach.

So the Republicans, with nothing else to run on for 2012, are in the process of sabotaging the economy. Is there any doubt? They are doing it in public now. They aren't even trying to hide their efforts.

Well, apparently there is doubt among the independent voters. Remember that a major characteristic of "independent" voters is that they do not follow politics and have little in-depth information. They are probably reacting to the poor economy and blaming the President. Will they even hear of the letter from the Republican leadership to the Fed? If they do, will they understand what it means?

That reaction by the independent voters is exactly the one the Republican leadership is depending on.

A short summary of the economy that ended the Bush administration

Americans are ahistorical. They can't even remember what happened three years ago. [The failure of the so-called news media to honestly and accurately cover it doesn't help.] Here's an exception.

Rachel Maddow very clearly lays out the utter collapse of the American economy in the last two quarters of 2008 (the Bush administration) and shows the effects of the stimulus spending from Washington, D.C. in 2009. It's clear and it's short.

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The Republicans claim that the stimulus didn't work. It was not big enough to eliminate the Great Recession, but it stopped the collapse into Depression. Even as soon as December 2009 it was clear that more stimulus was needed - and Congress refused. Largely this was through the Republican use of the filibuster and threat of the filibuster in the Senate.

So remember, Obama knew in 2009 that more stimulus was needed and requested it in December 2009. The Republicans were already blocking it and the Republicans were guaranteeing that America would have more and worse recession. This is intentional. The Republicans are the party that is against any government action, and their calculation is that if they can cause the government to fail in dealing with the Great Recession, the Republicans will gain power and replace the Democrats.

Notice the end of the Maddow segment, though. The statistics from the Bush administration showed a half percent GDP decline in the third quarter of 2008 and a 3.8% decline in the fourth quarter. But those were preliminary statistics. When the final numbers came in it became clear that America had been headed for the Second Great Depression. [This starts at minute 4.0 in the clip] Instead of a 1/2 % shrinkage of the economy in the third quarter of 2008 it was actually 3.7% shrinkage. Instead of 3.7% shrinkage in the fourth quarter of 2008 the shrinkage was actually 8.9%. America was headed into the Second Great Depression very rapidly. Only the stimulus (which the lame duck Congress of 2008 failed to act on - no leadership from the vacationing George Bush) passed within a month of Obama's inauguration kept America in the world from falling into the most massive economic Depression the world had ever seen.

One other thing to remember is that both the Great Depression of the 1930's and the almost Second Great Depression which started in 2007 with the mortgage crisis were caused primarily by unregulated, ignorant, and corrupt self-dealing by the massive banks in Wall Street. By 2008 America's GDP consisted of 40% the economically unproductive banking activities. The banks were creating markets with massive risk in them and then selling insurance to investors and borrowers to protect them against that risk the banks had created. Only the unregulated insurance the banks were selling were not capable of protecting the overall banking system from the extreme risk the bankers were creating and taking on.

Banks, through their lending, create the money supply the productive economy requires in order to function. They had by 2008 slipped into what is called the Shadow Banking System (unregulated and unmeasured private banking) which dominated the world financial economy. No one in banking itself knew what was going on overall, and the bankers successfully forced the federal government to remove itself from the regulation business, allowing the creation of the Shadow Banking System.

That unregulated banking system created the economic collapse that everyone became suddenly aware of in September 2008.

America and the world are now struggling to recover from the financial collapse of 2008. Only the conservatives world-wide are using the methods of Herbert Hoover, methods clearly shown in the 1930's to make the economic problems worse.

In the 1930's the bankers did not understand what they were doing when they passed the Smoot-Hawley Tarrif Act. Today the Republican Party knows exactly what it is doing. It is exacerbating the set of American economic problems based on Republican political calculation that the public will blame Obama and the Democrats for the failure to get us out of the economic problems.

Obama to win in 2012

Allan Lichtman, professor at the American University, has a thirteen element formula which has successfully predicted which party would win the Presidency each election since 1984. US News has published his prediction for 2012. Obama will win, he says. Combine this with Steve Benen's report this morning that Obama is going to propose a big jobs initiative force the Republicans to continue to expose their anti-middle class agenda the 2012 election already seems rather easily predicted.

Here are the thirteen elements with Lichtman's scoring:

• Party mandate: After the midterm elections, the incumbent party holds more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives than it did after the previous midterm elections. Says Lichtman, “Even back in January 2010 when I first released my predictions, I was already counting on a significant loss.” Obama loses this key.
• Contest: There is no serious contest for the incumbent party nomination. Says Lichtman on Obama’s unchallenged status, “I never thought there would be any serious contest against Barack Obama in the Democratic primary.” Obama wins this key.
• Incumbency: The incumbent party candidate is the sitting president. Easy win here for Obama.
• Third Party: There is no significant third party challenge. Obama wins this point.
• Short term economy: The economy is not in recession during the election campaign. Here Lichtman declares an “undecided.”
• Long-term economy: Real per capita economic growth during the term equals or exceeds mean growth during the previous two terms. Says Lichtman, “I discounted long term economy against Obama. Clearly we are in a recession.” Obama loses this key. [Read: Seven Ways Obama Can Gain Credibility on Jobs.]
• Policy change: The incumbent administration effects major changes in national policy. “There have been major policy changes in this administration. We’ve seen the biggest stimulus in history and an complete overhaul of the healthcare system so I gave him policy change,” says the scholar. Another win for Obama.
• Social unrest: There is no sustained social unrest during the term. Says Lichtman, “There wasn’t any social unrest when I made my predictions for 2012 and there still isn’t.” Obama wins a fifth key here.
• Scandal: The incumbent administration is untainted by major scandal. “This administration has been squeaky clean. There’s nothing on scandal,” says Lichtman. Another Obama win.
• Foreign/military failure: The incumbent administration suffers no major failure in foreign or military affairs. Says Lichtman, “We haven’t seen any major failure that resembles something like the Bay of Pigs and don’t foresee anything.” Obama wins again.
• Foreign/military success: The incumbent administration achieves a major success in foreign or military affairs. “Since Osama bin Laden was found and killed, I think Obama has achieved military success.” Obama wins his eighth key.
• Incumbent charisma: The incumbent party candidate is charismatic or a national hero. Explains Lichtman, “I did not give President Obama the incumbent charisma key. I counted it against him. He’s really led from behind. He didn’t really take the lead in the healthcare debate, he didn’t use his speaking ability to move the American people during the recession. He’s lost his ability to connect since the 2008 election.” Obama loses this key. [See political cartoons about President Obama.]
• Challenger charisma: The challenging party candidate is not charismatic or a national hero. Says Lichtman, “We haven’t seen any candidate in the GOP who meets this criteria and probably won’t.” Obama wins, bringing his total to nine keys, three more than needed to win reelection.

It's quite a way in advance of the election, of course, but the Republicans' only power is their conservative and socially conservative base who will not permit their politicians to even try to run on policies which might defeat Obama. While no election can really be predicted this far in advance, something really significant would have to change to make this prediction wrong.

2012 Election has started - Repubs working to paralyze government

The recent Pew poll clearly states two things - independents want Democrats to confront Republicans and Democrats are unhappy with Democratic leadership. The latest AP poll confirms this result, but also points to the fact that the public still blames the republicans for the Great Recession.

Essentially the Republicans are practicing a slow motion shutdown of the US government in order to prevent Obama from being able to claim any success as President. Yet even while holding the government hostage and shutting down as many government functions as they can get away with, the Republicans are trying to blame Obama for not getting things done.

The slow motion shutdown of government is an effort by the Republicans to conduct a political coup and retake the Presidency in 2012 even though the voters don't like them and disapprove of what they propose government does. Following the creation of a false crisis over the government debt that has damaged the financial markets worldwide while tying up the Congress and preventing it from acting to ameliorate the real jobs crisis. The Republicans will not permit the government they don't run to function. That is the message presented by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor When he told Brian Beutler that when Hurricane Irene hit his own Virginia Congressional District that he would hold the disaster relief that the government needs to provide hostage to force an equal amount of spending cuts from the rest of the federal budget.

So what does this have to do with the polls that show that the Republicans are unpopular but that Obama needs to lead? We know the Republicans are unpopular. THEY know they are unpopular. Why are they going out of their way to show why they are so unpopular? And why isn't Obama stepping up and leading America anyway?

It's a high-stakes gamble by the Republicans that the American voters will vote in 2012 based on the economic conditions in 2012 and blame Obama because he is the face of the federal government. The Republican leadership is betting that we voters will on average forget the crap the Republicans are pulling to prevent government from functioning and instead blame the guy who is in charge for the previous three years.

The Republicans can (possibly) make this work because the Constitution created a Presidential system with shared powers. The President can tell Congress what he wants to do, but nothing gets into the budget that does not have the approval of the leadership of House of Representatives - currently John Boehner (R - OH.) And John Boehner is currently be led by the nose by the extremist social conservatives who call themselves the tea party who were elected in the 2010 election. Hey! American voters can't blame the Republicans if they are being forced to cater to extremist crazies, can they? No, the Republicans are betting that the American voters in 2012 will blame the bad economic conditions (caused by Bush and the Republicans) on the man who cannot get the House of Representatives (under Republican leadership) to pass a budget that includes programs that will actually increase employment in America.

This Republican high-stakes gamble is based on the idea that the (illegitimate foreign-born Muslim Black) President Barak Obama has failed to make things better for the average Americans in spite of the total obstruction he faces from the Republican Party, FOX News, and Rush Limbaugh.

Why do I call it a high-stakes gamble for the Republicans? Because they are betting the future of their party on the ignorance, stupidity and short memory of the average American voter. The Republican Party is already at low levels of disapproval never before reached by an American national party in the history of approval/Disapproval polls. But they have 14 months until the 2012 election and they have control of an amazing propaganda machine here in America (centered on FOX and on the right-wing talk shows of the Limbaugh type.)

The Republicans are also depending on the fact that Obama's polls are not that great right now, either. Again, they think that their efforts to neuter the effectiveness of government between now and the election and their propaganda machine can together drive those polls much lower by the time of the election.

At lot of liberals/progressives/Democrats probably agree with the Republicans about how low Obama's polls are and will be at the time of the election. But what is happening is that the Obama White House is doing two things. First, they are not having Obama stand up, present major policies that he has to have passed, and draw the automatic fire that will come from the Republicans. Obama simply cannot champion any program because it will automatically be vetoed by the Republicans, even if it was one they previously championed themselves. Second, Obama is doing his job as President, especially in foreign policy. The death of Osama bin Laden (which Bush found so difficult that he publicly abandoned the effort) and the overthrow of Ghadaffi based on a NATO coalition that Obama put together have clearly demonstrated that Obama is doing his job extremely well when no obstructed by the Republicans.

There will be no jobs bills or anything else of significance getting through the Republicans in Congress before the 2102 election. The Republicans cannot afford to let Obama succeed in anything. As I have said, this is high-stakes for the Republicans. They are going to have to respond to Obama by getting even more extreme right-wing.

Obama's high-stakes gamble is that the voters will recognize that the Republicans are the source of American failure. Obama has been and continues to let them prove that.

So we see a pair of political high-stakes gambles being played out between now and the 2012 election. The Republicans are doing everything they can do both legislatively and propaganda-wise to stop Obama from succeeding as President and then blaming his for his failure, while Obama is doing everything he can do to govern effectively in spite of Republican obstruction and working to force the Republicans to expose their anti-American anti-governance policies to the voters.

If this were a high-stakes poker game being played on TV it would be fun to watch. As it is the results in 2012 may well determine if America continues as a major industrial and political power in the world in the 21st century or is reduced to a secondary nation run by self-centered wealthy corporate and banking thugs who finance a proto-fascist political system.

Obama's position on politics and political principle

Spend three minutes listening to this:

Interview with Obama on raid against bin Laden

CBS News has released the entire interview with the President on 60 Minutes about the attack on bin Laden. Here it is:



[ h/t to Steve Benen at Washington Monthly.]

Liberty means getting control of the climate away from the oil and coal companies

Van Jones tells 'the 10,000 youth climate activists at the Power Shift conference in Washington DC to “shift the power” and lead the clean power revolution. He argued that both parties need to be held accountable for their failures.' This is from Think Progress:

"Jones argued that President Obama is like the friend who has the potential to be an A-plus student, but is only getting C’s and D’s. Jones told the assembled youth from campuses around the nation they can be a “hero for making sure your friend gets an A-plus on his presidency.”

Van Jones described how we have a civilization “fueled by death” — fossil fuels from plants and animals that died millions of years ago:

We pull out of the ground death. We burn death in our power plants. Why do we get shocked when we get death in our sky as global warming, death in our oceans as oil spills, death in our children’s lungs as asthma and cancer?

The strongest moments of his speech came when he discussed America’s basic principles, in the context of arguing with “your uncle Joe” who watches Fox News at the Thanksgiving table. “Don’t you believe in liberty?” Van asked. “Shouldn’t we have the right as Americans to be energy producers?” he asked. “Shouldn’t we have the right and liberty to be free from energy companies who dictate how much we pay, what air we breathe?” Coal and oil companies try to divide us with cultural stereotypes and political ideology, when a green economy is actually the truly American economy:

The stereotype is that solar power is just hippie power. But it’s also cowboy power, farmer power, rancher power, and Appalachian mountain power!

Van Jones addressed the Tea Party movement that sees him as a “terrorist” and “communist.” “I’m glad our sisters and brothers in the Tea Party are talking about liberty,” he said. However, he said, they’re missing something important. The Pledge of Allegiance doesn’t just talk about liberty being integral to our nation:

The Pledge of Allegiance says liberty and justice for all!

With his voiced raised to the diverse crowd, Van Jones said “justice for all” includes justice for minorities, justice for women, justice for gays, and justice for the poor.

“Shift the power!” Van Jones concluded to thunderous applause.

Obama is way too center-right for America. The up-coming generation may well bring this to public view where it really should be.

We heard Obama's speech yesterday. Sounded good - but...

Let's start out with the very positive reaction from Rachel Maddow:

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Rachel is buying what Obama has to say. I do suggest that you read the speech as Rachel suggested. Here is the speech.

Really, it sounded great - if you believe Obama. Here's another view of Obama. This video comes from several months ago, but it really fits right here. This is an interview with liberal economist Michael Hudson..



Yeah, I liked Obama's speech. He said the right things and he made the right promises. Unfortunately he didn't go far enough. That's both sides of the budget issue. So now take a look at Paul Krugman's take on the speech:

Style: I liked the way Obama made a case for government at the beginning. I liked the way he accused Republicans of pessimism, of abandoning a hopeful vision of America. Good that he went after the Ryan plan — and good that he went after the cruelty of that plan. If you ask me, too many percentages. Oh, and whichever speechwriter came up with “win the future” should be sent to count yurts in Outer Mongolia.

Substance: Much better than many of us feared. Hardly any Bowles-Simpson — yay!

The actual plan relies on some discretionary spending cuts, this time including defense — good, although I think too much is being cut from domestic spending. It relies on letting the Bush tax cuts for the rich expire — finally! — plus unspecified reductions in tax expenditures.

The main thing, though, is the strengthened role of and target for the Independent Payment Advisory Board. This can sound like hocus-pocus — but it’s not.

As I understand it, it would force the board to come up with ways to put Medicare on what amounts to a budget — growing no faster than GDP + 0.5 — and would force Congress to specifically overrule those proposed savings. That’s what cost-control looks like! You have people who actually know about health care and health costs setting priorities for spending, within a budget; in effect, you have an institutional setup which forces Medicare to find ways to say no.

And when people start screaming about death panels again, remember: you can always buy whatever health care you want; the question is what taxpayers should pay for. And compare this with a voucher system, in which you have insurance company executives, rather than health-care professionals, deciding which care won’t be paid for.

Overall, way better than the rumors and trial balloons. I can live with this. And whatever the pundits may say, it was much, much more serious than the Ryan “plan”.

Update: I should probably say, I could live with this as an end result. If this becomes the left pole, and the center is halfway between this and Ryan, then no — better to pursue the zero option of just doing nothing and letting the Bush tax cuts as a whole expire.

Update update: I don’t want to step too much on the administration’s selling point, but progressives upset by the claim that there are three dollars of spending cuts for every dollar of tax increases should be aware that there’s a bit of creative labeling going on. As I understand it, they’re counting both interest savings and reductions in “tax expenditures” — subsidies through the tax code — as spending cuts. It’s a much more balanced plan if you look at the balance between revenue increases and non-interest outlays.

Update update update: The Times has a good side-by-side comparison. A world of difference — and Obama made the moral as well as practical case for his version.

So I like the direction of the speech, though I don't think it went nearly far enough to present as the beginning of the negotiations from the liberal side. Krugman has that correct. This is where the negotiations should end up, not where they should start. The conservatives are flat out crazy extremists. The other problem, though, is how much can Obama be expected to live up to his promises?

Where is the national Democratic Party when it is needed to battle national Republican overreach?

Those of us who feel that the national Democratic Party seems unled and unmanaged in the face of the massive Republican attacks on the government and on unions probably have good reason to feel that way. We may have felt that with a Democratic President there should be some Democratic (if not progressive) push-back to the current Republican overreach at a national level. The New York Time has a good article today on the new management process in the White House since Rham Emmanuel and David Alexrod have been replaced by William M. Daley and Jay Carney. There's a lot interesting in the article about the different type of management style the White House feels in currently required, but the following provides a reason for me to feel the national Democratic Party is unled.

Frustrated Democratic lawmakers and interest groups have been railing to White House aides that Mr. Obama is forfeiting opportunities to draw the public’s attention to what the Republicans’ cuts would mean for programs popular with most voters, including the coveted independents. The aides respond that the time will come for Mr. Obama to join the attack, should Republicans press their agenda and refuse to compromise.

“One of the lessons of the last two years is that if the president weighs in all the time, it’s less impactful,” said Dan Pfeiffer, who remains as the communications director. “But if he weighs in at a moment of his choosing when the public is paying attention, it will be more influential.”

Similarly, the White House mostly has sought to stay out of the fray in Madison, Wis., and other state capitals where Republican governors are battling public employee unions and Democratic lawmakers over collective bargaining rights. When West Wing officials discovered that the Democratic National Committee had mobilized Mr. Obama’s national network to support the protests, they angrily reined in the staff at the party headquarters.

It is clear that the Obama White House sees its job as reelecting Obama in 2012, not leading the national democratic party -- and definitely not leading a progressive counterrevolution against the massive Republican overreach that is currently going on. The may be right to believe that.

The problem is that the White House squashed efforts by the DNC to join the fray. The White House sees the DNC as an institution that belongs to them to be used for Obama's reelection. The problem is, this leaves the Democratic Party with NO institutions that have the job of coordinating the national party in the clearly needed national response to the present current attacks on America and its workers.

This is a big problem. The Republicans seem to have national party coordinating institutions, the Democrats do not. An organized and led organization will almost always defeat a larger but unled force. I see no immediate solution to it.

Obama finds the ACA is a political positive for the Democrats.

Steve Benen has two interesting and fun posts up about the Affordable Care Act. First, he praised Mitt Romney for his work on health care policy as governor of Massachusetts. It's quite clear that Obama's health care plan was based largely on the system that Mitt Romney had previously installed in Massachusetts. Since Mitt is going to be running for President in the Republican Primaries, Obama's praise will create any number of right-wing attack ads against Romney.

The second post is also about Obama's efforts to implement the Affordable Care Act. Obama has announced that he is open to state-level changes in health care policy. The announcement says:

Seeking to appease disgruntled governors, President Obama announced Monday that he supported amending the 2010 health care law to allow states to opt out of its most burdensome requirements three years earlier than currently permitted.

In remarks to the National Governors Association, Mr. Obama said he backed legislation that would enable states to request federal permission to withdraw from the law's mandates in 2014 rather than in 2017 as long as they could prove that they could find other ways to cover as many people as the original law would and at the same cost. The earlier date is when many of the act's central provisions take effect, including requirements that most individuals obtain health insurance and that employers of a certain size offer coverage to workers or pay a penalty.

Steve Benen points out what this means: If the Governors can come up with an alternate system that provides health care to as many people as the ACA does without adding to the deficit and in such a way that costs are controlled as well as the federal ACA does, great! Obama will support them.

Interestingly, the only states that might develop an effective alternate that meets the requirements are Vermont and Oregon, two Democratic states, who might try to implement a single payer system.

Both of these White House initiatives put the Republicans into the position where they have to explain the value of the ACA or offer an alternative to it that is somehow better.

The Obama White House is really dissapointing progressives.

Is the bailout of Wall Street bankers really grating your progressive soul? Is the tame rhetoric and failure to support progressive causes really irritating to you? It sure is to me. There are many things the Obama White House has done that I don't like, but it really irritates me that they bailed out the Wall Street bankers who caused this current Great Depression and are not doing a damned thing to reign them in now that they appear to be back in control of the economy. But I really don't begrudge the White House their actions to bail out the Wall Street banks in 2008.

If the Wall Street bankers had not gotten the bailout we would currently be deep into Great Depression II. The Wall Street bankers are assholes who deserve nothing better than to choose which will they line up in front of as they face firing squads, but the money they move keeps our world-wide economies working. If they had not started moving money again the entire world would have been in deep shit. So they got a bailout, got protected, got richer, and the rest of us are only in mildly deep shit. Hell of a trade-off, but it was done in the right direction.

And yep. The working class - as well as most of the middle class - got the shaft. Just not as badly as it could have been.

No, I am not a salesman trying to sell someone a product. I just think that anyone who tells you that things would have worked better if the Wall Street bankers had gotten what they deserve is lying to you. The salesmen want the Wall Street Bailout to go away and for the Wall Street banker to get what they deserve. Sorry! It ain't going to happen. There was no better outcome than we got, and it is amazing that we got as good as we did get.

The Obama White House is getting what it can realistically get. They are not shooting for the fences because the price of losing is too damned high. They are not perfect, though.

They have a real tin ear for how what they say and do will be portrayed by the media and they are unwilling to (swinging for the fences) support the progressive causes. Nor are they willing to try to change the public perceptions. I don't think they believe they have that level of bully pulpit. They may be right, but again it goes back to the fact that the guy who has it all to lose is not ready to risk it all to win.

That's where I think those of us who supported Obama's election are sitting right now.

It's hard to take the Republicans in Congress seriously

President Obama was in full professor-mode last night, and the Republicans were simply angry destructive children playing at being adults and trying to get people to pay attention to them. No one showed that more than Eric Cantor who was the serious child playing dress up and trying to act adult but having no comprehension of what was actually happening around him. As if that were not enough childishness for one night, Cantor was followed by the Congressional Republican court jester, Michelle Bachmann. CNN decide the crazy children were so cute that they had to display her like a doting grandparent who shows off his grandchild acting silly and gushes "Oh, how sweet."

The best response from the grownups that I have seen this morning comes from Steven Pearlstein at the Washington Post. This is how he characterizes the best the Republicans had to offer last night:

Republicans, it turns out, have no public investment strategy, just as they have no health-care strategy and no agreed-upon blueprint for reducing federal spending. What they have are poll-tested talking points, economic delusions and an overwhelming partisan instinct to say "no" to anything Barack Obama proposes. In their response to the president's State of the Union message, they remind us once again that they are not serious about economic policy and not ready to govern.

In framing his retooled economic and political strategy, the president emphasized using public money to leverage private investment and innovation, once a popular Republican theme.

In the short term, administration officials expect the bigger boost to the economy is likely to come not from jobs directly funded but from additional private investments spurred by increased confidence and a renewed sense of national purpose - "our Sputnik moment," as Obama called it.

The Republicans owned the Federal Government from 2001 until their idiocy got so clear that Democrats were brought back in the Run Congress in 2006 and Obama was brought in to replace the failed George Bush in 2008.

Face it. What did the Republicans do for America? Two unnecessary wars, the destruction of the financial underpinning of the federal government after Clinton had set it on the way to fiscal surpluses, the destruction of the great city of New Orleans through mismanagement of the rescue and rebuild process after Katrina hit it and the greatest economic disaster since 1929 which was completely avoidable if the adults had been in charge in Washington and on Wall Street.

With the two wars still bleeding American taxpayers and killing American troops and the unemployment at close to 10% (a number that is carefully held down by conservative definitions) all the Republicans can offer as rebuttal to Obama's State of the Union speech last night was the sedate unrealistic ignorance expressed by Eric Cantor and the loud primal scream of frustration that Michelle Bachmann awkwardly displayed.

Why are the Republicans acting so idiotic in public when America is suffering so from the first decade of Republican mismanagement during the Bush administration? People with money (e.g. The Koch brothers, Howard Ahmanson, Jr. and Houston's Bob Perry. Then there is the Wall Street money, the insurance lobby money, the Military Industrial Complex money protecting its contracts, and many more.) are stirring up the American crazies and the Republican politicians need those crazies if they are to continue to hold their elected offices. Without those well-financed special interest groups, America could have a marginally sane opposition party. as it is we get Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Eric Cantor and Michelle Bachmann.

So last night as the serious adults tried to work out how America will deal with the most challenging period it has undergone since the Great Depression and WW II, the Republican Party responded by offering the rantings of self-centered ignorant children playing dress-up and keeping the adults from doing serious work.

The Republicans are not ready to govern, and they are doing everything they can do to stop the Democrats from governing, just as America needs its best minds working to determine how to deal with the disasters Republican government have left us with. Last night put it all on display.

Oh, and the media did not show that it has a serious purpose, either, as it catered to the crazy children running the Republican Party and released an advance copy of the SOTU speech early.

---

Addendum 1:25 PM
This, from Steve Benen comparing Michelle Bachmann's idiocy to the speech by the more polished Eric Cantor, is interesting. They spouted the same nonsense.

But here's the funny part: substantively, Bachmann's nonsense was roughly identical to the foolishness repeated by Paul Ryan in the official Republican SOTU response. Note Media Matters' fact-check of Ryan's speech and then check Media Matters' fact-check of Bachmann's speech. The similarities are striking -- with a few exceptions, they had the exact same message.

So who is handing them their talking points? This message is obviously centrally controlled.

Really. Who is it that controls this idiocy? I have hinted at a few of the culprits above. With the Citizen's United decision from the corporate-owned U.S. Supreme Court, though, tracking that information down soon enough to make a difference politically is going to be almost impossible.

Obama? Battered wife syndrome or Stockholm syndrome?

Paul Rosenberg offers some interesting speculations about why Barack Obama gives the Republicans whatever they want, often before they demand it, then lashes out at those on the left who helped elect him President.

The problem with Obama has never been what he's portrayed it as. It's not that people are purists, turning up their noses at less-than-perfect results. It's not that they scorn any sort of compromise. It's not that they insist on "making the perfect the enemy of the good" or any of the other cliched Versailles rationalizations. The problem with Obama has always been that he won't fight for what he says he believes in. But he will at least lash out at those who are frustrated, disappointed, or angry with him, when he capitulates without a real fight. Which raises an increasingly troubling question: Is that the one thing he really believes in? Attacking those who want him to actually stand for something?

Or is it just simply a case of displacement? Republicans beat up on Obama, so he turns around and beats up on us? Last week, in "All the President's Captors" Frank Rich shrewdly noted how Republican's treatment of Obama reflects the most sophisticated strategy of hostage-takers working the psychological dynamics of Stockholm Syndrome, playing Obama like a violin:

THOSE desperate to decipher the baffling Obama presidency could do worse than consult an article titled "Understanding Stockholm Syndrome" in the online archive of The F.B.I. Law Enforcement Bulletin. It explains that hostage takers are most successful at winning a victim's loyalty if they temper their brutality with a bogus show of kindness. Soon enough, the hostage will start concentrating on his captors' "good side" and develop psychological characteristics to please them - "dependency; lack of initiative; and an inability to act, decide or think."

This dynamic was acted out - yet again - in President Obama's latest and perhaps most humiliating attempt to placate his Republican captors in Washington. No sooner did he invite the G.O.P.'s Congressional leaders to a post-election White House summit meeting than they countered his hospitality with a slap - postponing the date for two weeks because of "scheduling conflicts." But they were kind enough to reschedule, and that was enough to get Obama to concentrate once more on his captors' "good side."

And so, as the big bipartisan event finally arrived last week, he handed them an unexpected gift, a freeze on federal salaries. Then he made a hostage video hailing the White House meeting as "a sincere effort on the part of everybody involved to actually commit to work together." Hardly had this staged effusion of happy talk been disseminated than we learned of Mitch McConnell's letter vowing to hold not just the president but the entire government hostage by blocking all legislation until the Bush-era tax cuts were extended for the top 2 percent of American households.

The captors will win this battle, if they haven't already by the time you read this, because Obama has seemingly surrendered his once-considerable abilities to act, decide or think.

If we want to understand Obama's hostility towards progressives, though, we need to switch reference frames from political hostage-takers to personal ones. Think wife-batterers. Anyone who's ever known a battered wife knows a similar dynamic well: the batterer always has a "good side", just like the hostage's captors do. "You don't understand, he's really sweet." "You don't understand, he really loves me." "You don't understand, he says it will be different.... And this time he means it!" "You don't understand...." "You don't understand...." "You don't understand...."

Except, of course, the only one who doesn't understand in these scenarios is always the battered wife. And the longer she spends lecturing others on their lack of understanding, the longer the battering continues. And the more she knows how fruitless her hope of change is, the more desperately she denies it.

Evidence means nothing. Or rather, it means something quite opposite to what anyone else expects. A constant transvaluation takes place: Each new beating only proves how much he needs her. All the previous beatings will have been for nought if she leaves him now. It would be unspeakably cruel for her to leave. He's too helpless. She can't be that heartless. Each beating is an act of love.

I think it's time we stop pleading with Obama to adopt better policies and stick with them. I think it's time for Democratic Clubs, County Committees and the like to start adopting resolutions calling for him to seek therapy

Obviously this is speculation, but speculation based on a great deal of close and detailed observation of Obama's behavior. And he won't like this speculation.

In my experience, people with psychological problems on the order of Battered Wife Syndrome or Stockholm Syndrome, often someone with clear problems, and claim "I don't have a problem! That person has a problem!"

Of course it might just be that Obama is in the underdog position for the first time in his life and hates to lose, so he'll give away the store to try to get an accomplishment he can pass off as winning. Or he might just have a real tin ear for the national public mood from outside the beltway.

Whatever. He damned sure isn't getting his Presidency right. He's not as bad as George Bush, but he is sure trying to get close to the guy. And the American middle class and working class is the loser in this fight.

Tuesday's election will not be pretty

This statement by Mike Lux gets at the heart of what has gone wrong with the Obama Presidency.

The biggest problem with the Third Way argument, though, connects to the fascinating back and forth between Obama and progressive interviewers in recent weeks: the palpable frustration expressed by, say, Jon Stewart in his interview is far less about having to make compromises to get things done, and far more with the insider-y ways deals were cut and decisions were made re what to compromise on. This is what Third Way and other pundits who argue for moderation never seem to understand: their version of centrism and the rest of the country's are very different.>

Exactly right. The Washington Insiders have consistently gotten things badly wrong, even when there have been people who told them they were not getting the nature of the problems right and not solving them. That has been especially true with economics, where Krugman was right that the stimulus was too small to work adequately but Obama was neither willing to fight for a larger one nor was he willing to explain to the voters what he was actually doing and enlist their help to get Congress to act!

This is Obama's leadership failure. He has been a backroom deal maker and a manager, but he has utterly failed to lead the country. He makes his deals, then he submits his view to the tender mercies of the Congress and he accepts the results they chew up and spit out. But he has never submitted his judgment directly to the public to convince the public what direction America should take.

The result is that America is getting the inadequate and lobbyist-mangled beltway wisdom out of Washington along with being chastised for not supporting the "superior" wisdom of the Washington insiders.

Obama may have had to go the backroom inside the beltway route to get health care passed. I personally think he did. But even there had he engaged better with the public, the result would have been better. That is what happened with the financial overhaul bill.

Now, a week before the election, Obama is on the hustings trying to get out the base vote so that he can get a Congress back that he can still work with. But the Conservatives and the multimillionaire oligarchs and the foreign-owned fascist FOX TV has gotten to the public before Obama did. Obama is playing defensive politics from a deep hole, and whether much can be done this late date is really questionable. Had Obama offered leadership to America for the last two years it still wouldn't be very good, but since he has not done that it will be worse.

Now America has thrown the structure of Congress in Washington to the tender mercies of a badly misinformed public. It is a dangerous experiment to see whether democracy can be abused and misinformed and still show wisdom on election day.

Rick Perlstein on Why Obama will not be a transformational President

This is about a one hour lecture with half an hour of questions and answers. The sound focuses on Rick so the questions are faint at best.

That said, it is an extremely insightful analysis of the Obama Presidency and the current times.

Rick Perlstein at Vanderbilt, March 22, 2010.

It's nice to have a competent President who tells the Repubs they are liars - to their faces!

Jon Stewart gets this one very well. Well, so does Barack Obama. He had something to do with the success of the moment also.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Q & O
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

FOX, in the meantime, fails as both a news organization and as a right-wing propaganda outlet. They knew it and abandoned the field to competent news organizations. Wouldn't want to contaminate the minds of their audience with facts - or with the additional fact that Barack Obama can do something that Bush never could. Deal with questions successfully while speaking competent English.

The National Democrats have to get their act together - Now!

The time for improving the health care reform bill is over. The Democrats have to pass what they have spent all of last year squabbling over as the Republicans have sat on the side trying to destroy the bill (and President Obama) totally. Steve Benen describes the political imperatives now facing the national Democratic Party.

"President Obama is still the most popular political figure in Washington, and enjoys more support than either political party and either congressional delegation.

For Republicans, this creates a strong incentive to block any and all progress -- the more they can destroy American politics, the more the president appears ineffective. Undermining Obama's presidency improves their chances of winning additional power.

For Democrats, this should create the opposite incentive -- the more successful Obama is, the better off they'll be. The more they argue amongst themselves, or delay (or deliberately kill) key parts of the party's agenda, the more they drag Obama's support down.

Dems' success is inextricably tied to Obama's standing. As Ezra noted last week, this should point Democratic lawmakers in the right direction on health care, though the message isn't getting through.

If health-care reform dies, the media will try and explain the Democrats' failure. That means they'll spend a lot of time talking about what Obama has done wrong. If Democrats had simply refused to freak out and moved quickly to pass the Senate bill, there would be endless stories on what Obama did right, and how the Democrats finally passed this longtime priority.

Even putting aside all the moral arguments for passing this bill -- all the lives and homes it will save -- a crassly political calculation should have left Democrats rushing towards passage."

Right now it doesn't look like the federal government works any more. At the same time, the problems facing America - including the health care insurance crisis - are building up and in the great Neo-Hoover non-action and incompetence tradition of the Republican Bush administration are not being addressed.

The trouble is, the Democrats are an undisciplined and selfish lot who would rather squabble and run to give interviews to the media (to demonstrate how important each of the leakers is) than actually get any legislation accomplished. They are in their little Washington D.C. bubble where their status is determined by how many times they appear on the TV talk shows rather than what legislation they join the herd to vote for and pass.

Out here in the hinterlands the politicians really don't matter, but the legislation does. It's too late now to make any changes in the bill that is the only possible one to pass both houses - the Senate bill. So it's time.

Pass.The.Damned.Bill!

A prediction for 2010

Jon Taplin offers an interesting prediction for the election in 2010. It's based on what FDR did in 1934.

Since Obama prides himself on taking the long view I'll bet he has had similar advice. Go read it.

Health care reform: Maybe it'll look better in hindsight

I am very dissatisfied with the compromise piece of garbage the Senate has created and tried to call health care reform. I am also highly dissatisfied with the behavior of the White House and President Obama during the last six months. Howard Dean's recent announcement that the bill has gotten so bad that we should just kill it and come back for another try frankly resonates strongly with me.

Only, I recall the effort in 1993, and now 2009 is the next try. Sixteen years delay. That's a lot of insurance company unearned profits and quite a few Americans dead, sicker than they should be for much longer than they should be and many, many unnecessary bankruptcies.

I've got a list of some of the flaws in the Senate HCR bill as it was last night which I won't even bother to post. But the big one that I hear is the problem of the mandates demanding that people pay up to 17% of their annual income to private insurers for health insurance that will still stick them with annual and lifetime caps and shift a lot of the expense from the insurance to the sick people. But of the 47 million estimated uninsured, this bill still insured 31 million more.

It's a step. A big one. And while is has a lot of flaws, it moves the correct direction in a large jump and in a reasonable (if slow) period of time. This needs to be done regardless of how bad the bill is. Get this done now, and then fix what doesn't work, because this is still fixing a whole lot of what does not work today. Except for the piece of crap that was Part D of Medicare (the unfinanced drug bill with the doughnut hole to save money) there has been no major positive improvement in the health care system since the Medicare bill in 1965.

So for anyone who thinks that Howard Dean's call to kill the bill and start over, take a look at the history of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation as presented by TPM Reader PT.

This health care reform bill is massively significant for the nation. It can be moved towards right now, or it can be killed now, to someday in the far future be again resurrected - at massive cost to the nation. The really big flaws in the current bill and feeding the massive egos of Senators Nelson and Lieberman notwithstanding, it is still time to pass the damned bill they allow us. It will be fixed afterwards. It will have to be. But that will be much easier than this initial restructuring of the system.

A murkey view of the coming 12 months in politics

When Obama was elected in November 2008 I was thinking that we had been saved from the Bush/Cheney administration. And we had. Just not as dramatically as I had hoped. But now Obama is facing the perennial political question "What have you done for me lately?" 2010 is not going to be a pretty year politically.

It's a year after the 2008 Presidential election. Even Al Franken has finally been sworn in as Senator. Yet we aren't out of Iraq and Afghanistan (unrealistic dream, but not close to being true yet.) Don't Ask Don't Tell is still law in the military. The military budget has gone up, not down. And health care reform which was promised to be on Obama's desk by August is still bouncing around through the Senate and being cut down to something only the conservatives can love.

Recently the London Review of Books published Obama's Delusion by David Bromwich in which David takes Obama to task for having misled the voters in order to get elected, but now has gone back on everything he promised in the campaign. For a number of critics on the left, Obama is already a failed President and those who defend him are as irrational as the defenders of George Bush as he pushed his incompetence onto the American people. Glenn Greenwald provides a somewhat nuanced description of how critics of Obama from the left should be basing their criticism on his failures to enact left wing policies, not on his defenders who simply assume that his personality is so outstanding that nothing he can do is going to be wrong. Glenn is right that the hard left Obama defenders are no better than the Republicans who attack everything Obama does simply because he isn't their man. But for all his nuance, Glenn does not get down to the core of what liberals and progressives need to do to prepare for the 2010 election.

Josh Marshall this morning addressed the threat that 2010 is going to be another 1994 in which the Republicans take back the House and begin another ascent back to power. It's a good article, well worth reading, but in essence it says that 1994 was a direct result of the slow loss of the Solid South to the Republicans beginning with Nixon's Southern Strategy, and delayed only because the incumbent Democrats in the South were able to play off the 12 years of Republican Presidency after 1980 to hold onto their offices, but with the accession of a Democratic President in 1992 they lost that lever. Mostly the incumbent Southern Democrats retired or were defeated in 1994, but the problem was a structural one. It was not a fact that somehow Clinton lost the House to the Republicans in 1994. Those structural weaknesses do not exist in 2010. But Josh does point out that if his theory is correct "2010 is fundamentally different. The key problem for Dems isn't unpopularity. It's a highly apathetic Democratic electorate facing an extremely energized Tea Party GOP" Also, he says "Two factors -- whether Health Care passes and whether there's significant improvement in the economy by next summer -- will decide things, not any amount of strategery and messaging."

I think that is the core of the problem presented by the 2010 election. The core problem that I see is the Democratic apathy. So Steve Benen, riffing off a discussion by Matt Yglesias of the problems of institutional responsibilities faced by Obama explains why the Democrats are currently so apathetic.

Post-election governing tends to feature a familiar pattern. Presidents take office with high hopes, governing proves difficult, the policymaking process gets bogged down, and supporters get discouraged and start to walk away. It can be pretty disheartening.

Invariably, the new president gets blamed for failing to deliver. Matt Yglesias offers a helpful reminder about the nature of institutional responsibilities.

Matt adds to that Democrats thought that when Bush was replaced by Obama, then the Democratic agenda would be pushed through Congress. But all that happened was that the previous roadblock to getting progressive election - the Bush veto - was removed. It was replaced by the new roadblocks of a unified 40 member Republican Party of the Senate able to use the veto to block legislation. This has made the new roadblocks Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman.

...need to correctly identify the obstacles to change. If members of Congress are replaced by less-liberal members in the midterms, then the prospects for changing the status quo will be diminished. By contrast, if members are replaced by more-liberal members (either via primaries or general elections) the prospects for changing the status will be improved. Back before the 2008 election, it would frequently happen that good bills passed Congress and got vetoed by the president. Since Obama got elected, that doesn't happen anymore. Now instead Obama proposes things that get watered down or killed in Congress. That means focus needs to shift.

It seems to me that the apathy that is currently afflicting the Democratic electorate will be somewhat alleviated by passing health care. Something will have to pass. The future of the Democratic Party rides on it, and the two real threats (Nelson and Lieberman) will not want to be blamed for the total failure of the bill. They cannot now escape blame if it fails. But they are both demanding a very high price for whatever they finally permit. I am concerned that the banker-oriented Obama Treasury Department will do too much to fight the deficit before the 2010 election, though, resulting in a second dip in the economy. The resulting job loss is the real electoral threat. If the administration can actually do something about jobs, that will remove that threat from the election. Naturally, that means that the Republicans will fight hard against every possible job bill.

In any case, though, I do not expect the Republicans to take back the House in 2010. This next 12 months will continue to be very politically interesting.

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Addendum 7:55 pm
Well, well. Steve Benen Reports that this morning Larry Summers said that the White House is shifting its goals from deficit reduction to job creation and economic growth. No surprise, actually. They are bright people and see the same things I do. The difference is that they see more than I do and that they don't have to tell the media what they are planning. So the surprise that this morning's announcement contains is that they decided to let the media in on their planning.