Rove previews the attack on Obama

Karl Rove writing for the Wall Street Journal, offers an "analysis" of the results of the New Hampshire primary that contains elements of the pending attacks on Obama. Josh Marshall highlights the racial stereotyps that Karl deftly drops into what pretends to be analysis:

in the course of a single column Rove manages to flag Obama's "trash talking", "his days playing pickup basketball at Harvard", and the alleged fact that "he is often lazy."

Then Karl deftly attacks Obama, first describing what he tried to do, then explaining why he failed.

while Mr. Obama can draw on the deep doubts of many Democrats about Mrs. Clinton, he can't close out the argument. Mr. Obama is an inspiring figure playing a historical role, but that's not enough to push aside the former First Lady and senator from New York. She's an historic figure, too. When it comes to making the case against Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Obama comes across as a vitamin-starved Adlai Stevenson. His rhetoric, while eloquent and moving at times, has been too often light as air.

Mr. Obama began to find his voice at the Iowa Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner, when he took four deliberate swipes at the Clintons. He called for Democrats to tackle problems "that had festered long before" President Bush, "problems that we've talked about year after year after year after year."

He dismissed the Clinton style of campaigning and governing, saying "Triangulating and poll-driven positions . . . just won't do." He attacked Mrs. Clinton on Iraq, torture and her opposition to direct presidential talks with Syria and Iran. Then he rejected a new Clinton era by saying, "I don't want to spend the next year or the next four years re-fighting the same fights that we had in the 1990s." It deftly, if often indirectly, played on the deep concerns of Democrats who look at the Clinton era as a time of decline for their party and unfulfilled potential for their cause.

But rather than sharpen and build on this message of contrast and change, Mr. Obama chose soaring rhetoric and inspirational rallies. While his speeches galvanized true believers at his events, his words were neither filling nor sustaining for New Hampshire Democrats concerned about the Clintons and looking for a substantive alternative.

And Mr. Obama, in his own way, is often as calculating as Mrs. Clinton. For example, he was the only candidate, Democratic or Republican, to use a teleprompter to deliver his Iowa and New Hampshire election-night speeches. It gave his speeches a quality and clarity that other candidates, speaking from notes or the heart, failed to achieve. But what he gained in polish, he lost in connection.

Like all good propaganda, there is truth in what Karl says. But this also lays out the framework, at least in part, for the Republican attack on Obama should he win the Democratic nomination for President.

I had thought until the New Hampshire Primary that the nominations of each party would be clear after the massive primary fiesta that will happen February 5th, but listening to how the various candidate are having to triage which states they can win with little effort and don't need to spend money on, which states they cannot win and don't need to spend money on, and then planning the advertising spending for the ones that are left, I no longer think that the answers will be presented that soon. But they will be known by the middle of March. That's still only about ten weeks away.

After that the uncontrolled 527 organizations will know which Democrat to attack. And they will. The push polls by Huckabee supporters against Mitt Romney have already started in Michigan, (Republican primary in five days) and by Mitt Romney in South Carolina against Huckabee (or maybe vice versa), since the Republican primary there is only nine days from now. John McCain was apparently a target of push polls in New Hampshire. Mitt Romney has reported that he has been a target of push polls in South Carolina, allegedly from Huckabee supporters. Fred Thompson reports that pro-Huckabee push polling has occurred in South Carolina.

I haven't found anything in the first four Google pages about push polling in the Democratic races. This is a republican phenomenon, and so far all their targets are internal to the Party. When the primaries are resolved, all those Republican dirty tricks will be aimed at Democrats. Plan on it.

See my prior posts

• And while we are discussing nasty politics...
  January 04, 2008


• 2008 will be the nastiest election in memory
  January 01, 2008

Politico explains what is wrong with political news coverage

Apparently the political reporters aren't all narcissists (like Mr. Ego himself, Chris Matthews) and totally oblivious to their professional failings. But it took the reportorial disaster represented by the Press pile-on on Hillary Clinton just before she won New Hampshire and demonstrated the level of their incompetence for any of them to actually publish an article describing the problem. And even now, it is an on-line publication, not print or TV. From today's Politico:

By: John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei
January 10, 2008 04:15 PM EST

New Hampshire sealed it. The winner was Hillary Rodham Clinton, and the loser — not just of Tuesday's primary but of the 2008 campaign cycle so far — was us.

"Us" is the community of reporters, pundits and prognosticators who so confidently — and so rashly — stake our reputations on the illusion that we understand politics and have special insight that allows us to predict the behavior of voters.

If journalists were candidates, there would be insurmountable pressure for us to leave the race. If the court of public opinion were a real court, the best a defense lawyer could do is plea bargain out of a charge that reporters are frauds in exchange for a signed confession that reporters are fools.

New Hampshire was jarring because it offered in highly concentrated form all the dysfunctions and maladies that have periodically afflicted political journalism for years.

Let’s look back at some of the bogus narratives of this election so far.

There was the “John McCain is dead” story line from last summer. Weak fundraising, poor polls, a backlash from conservatives and staff disarray had doomed his candidacy.

Never mind.

Then there was Iowa. The caucuses, we wrote, are all about organization. Except they were won on the Republican side by Mike Huckabee, who had only the barest-bones organization.

D’oh!

Or Barack Obama. The reason his candidacy was not taking flight, as the wisdom had it last fall, was that he was preaching a bland message of unity and civility in a year when Democrats were eager for a sharper, more confrontational and more partisan message.

Guess not.

These were only appetizers to the main course of humiliation. After a barrage of coverage that all but anointed Obama as the New Hampshire winner and declared him the clear front-runner for the nomination, that exercise in groupthink was stopped cold by the actual votes.

Whoops.

Looks like we have a trend here. Our own publication, Politico, did its part in promoting several of these flimsy story lines. We used predictive language in stories. We amplified certain trends and muffled the caveat, which perhaps should be printed with every story, like a surgeon general’s warning: “We don’t know what will happen until voters vote.”

The authors go on to describe what they see as the major trends that have caused the problem. Let me write just the titles and a little detail here:

1. Horse race frenzy "We cover polls we know to be statistically suspect, from firms we know use questionable methodology. Most of all, we treat even legitimate polls as holy writs, rather than simply snapshots of the general contours of a race. "


2. The echo chamber "you will see the same group of journalists and pols dining together almost every night. We go to events together, make travel plans together and read each other's work compulsively. We go to the same websites — the Drudge Report, Real Clear Politics, Time’s “The Page” — to see what each other is writing, and it’s only human nature to respond to it. "


3. Personal bias '... it has been tough to avoid a sense this week that some of the coverage has been shaped by journalists rooting for certain outcomes — either because they think it’s the better story or simply the one they’d prefer to see."
   
   
   • NBC’s Brian Williams stirred some controversy earlier in the week when he reported that his network’s correspondent covering Obama admitted it was hard to be objective covering the Illinois senator. Reporters are human, and some did seem swept up in the same emotions many voters experienced when they saw a black man win snow-white Iowa by preaching a gospel of change. Many are sympathetic to Obama’s argument that the culture of Washington politics is fundamentally broken.
   
   
   • McCain also benefits from the personal sentiments of reporters. Many journalists are enamored with McCain because of the access he gives and, above all, the belief that he is free of political artifice
   
   
   • Hillary Clinton, cautious and scripted, got the reverse treatment. She is carrying the burden of 16 years of contentious relations between the Clintons and the news media.

But here is the final line of Politico's article

"As far as what’s bad, there is generally one good answer to excesses and hype in political journalism: Respect the voters. That means waiting to find out what they really think."

Two questions. First, will any of the rest of the political Press even notice this article - at least officially? Second, will anyone in the Press, even if they take note of this article, actually act on it?

I don't count on it. Particularly on TV the Press is more about reportorial ego than any real explanation of what the facts are. I'm not especially confident that the answer to either of my questions will be positive. The point that has failed more than the reporters themselves has been the editors - assuming there are any. (Does anyone edit Chris Matthews? Obviously not.] But it's nice to know that a few journalists can actually be shocked by their own excesses into writing about themselves and their profession. The Press itself is one of the least reported businesses in America, and they resist outside criticism.

[ h/t to Greg Sargent at TPM. ]

Ex-CIA Philip Agee dead at age 72

An interesting piece of American history has just been closed out with the death of ex-CIA agent Philip Agee in Cuba at age 72. Laura Rozen reports on his death, based on a New York Times article.

After he left the CIA, Philip Agee published the book Inside the Company: CIA Diary which described a series of CIA misdeeds, and included "a 22-page list of purported agency operatives." I had always heard that the list included the name and address of the CIA Station Chief in Athens (Richard S. Welch) and resulted in Welch's death, but apparently from the story in the New York Times Welch was not among those named by Agee.

Welch's name apparently was published by a Greek publication, and when Barbara Bush accused Agee of causing Welch's death, he sued her. This from the New York Times article:

She settled the issue by dropping the reference to Agee, who had not mentioned Welch in his book. Instead, she blamed a magazine Agee worked for that also named alleged CIA agents. Agee's defenders said that Welch's identity was already known.

While Agee's actions inspired the law against exposing covert U.S. operatives, he drew a distinction between what he did and the naming of CIA officer Valerie Plame, the wife of former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, who had raised questions about the basis of President Bush's Iraq policy.

''This is entirely different than what I was doing in the 1970s,'' Agee said at the time. ''This is purely dirty politics in my opinion.''

Agee said that he disclosed the identities of his former colleagues to ''weaken the instrument for carrying out the policy of supporting military dictatorships'' in Greece, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil.

Those regimes ''were supported by the CIA and the human cost was immense: torture, executions, death squads,'' he said.

I guess the story that Agee caused Welch's death is more agit-prop from the CIA aimed to sway American public opinion. (The story that Iranian patrol boats threatened American warship in the Persian Gulf is beginning to appear to be another such US government fiction designed to fool the American public. See this New York Times article by Mike Nizza.)

I had always considered Agee to be a traitor to the U.S., but after what the Bush administration has done by exposing Valerie Plame for purely internal political purposes, the lies about WMD's designed and used to justify the purposeless invasion of Iraq, and the realization that the Gulf of Tonkin incident was in fact a lie designed to justify a massively increased attack on North Vietnam, I find little reason to believe anything that comes from official Washington any more.

Is it possible that the narrative that we Americans have been fed about the Communist take-over of Cuba was simply spin to justify the efforts of the Mafia - CIA dominated brigade of Cuban adventurers who attempted to reverse the very justified revolution against Batista and the Mafia who dominated Post WW II Cuba and exploited the Cuban people? As Agee pointed out in his book, the CIA was supporting a bunch of extremely nasty dictatorships in South and Latin America all in the name of "anti-Communism."

Such speculations have been squashed by the American government, but the Bush administration has demonstrated thoroughly that the U.S. government is simply not a reliable source of information. Who do we trust more today in the story about the Iranian boats harassing the American Navy vessels in the Persian Gulf? The Americans have no more credibility than the Iranians.

That loss of credibility by the U.S.government should go back at least as far as WW II. Everything since then needs to be reevaluated, particularly the relations between Cuba and the U.S. Maybe we should look more closely at Philip Agee's writings.

What's next for the economy?

Here's Atrio's thought, and he is a real economist. (I agree with him in spite of his profession.)

I suspect we may be about to enter the "other shoe drops" phase, whether that's a severe labor market contraction, major financial institution going belly up, or commercial real estate market crash...

Another interesting point Atrios makes.

"This I didn't know.

Delinquent loans create huge liquidity problems for loan servicers like Countrywide because the servicer becomes a middleman between the borrowers and the people who bought their loans.

When the borrower misses payments, as a record number of Countrywide's borrowers are doing now, these contracts require that the company advance those missed payments to investors until it's clear that the amounts won't be recovered.

With Countrywide having a $1.5-trillion servicing portfolio, that puts tremendous strain on its cash flow, Cannon said.

There are a lot of weird incentives here. A company like Countrywide generally doesn't want to foreclose on underwater homes, on the other hand if they have cash-flow problems they'll need to push those foreclosures through so they can stop making payments.

Innovation!!"

So homeowners are missing payments in record numbers, and since CountryWide sold their mortgage to investors as part of collateralized debt obligations, CountryWide has to continue making the regular payments to the investors until the home is foreclosed making it clear that the missed payments will not be recovered. Those payments come directly out of CountryWide's capital or retained earnings. CountryWide bleeds money until the home is foreclosed.

We know the Recession is here. The question now is who are the casualties going to be, and when they go, how much damage will their disappearance cause?

Dowd and Kristol - the opinion face of the NY Tmies

Eric Boehlert at Media Matters dissects the recent hiring of Bill Kristol as a political opinion writer by the New York Times, and compares his work to the founts of nasty fiction produced by Maureen Dowd.

Bill Kristol and Maureen Dowd deserve each other; they belong on the same team. As media critic Dan Kennedy noted last week, "Kristol has never shown much, if any, regard for the ethical conventions of journalism." And Joan Walsh at Salon added, "Kristol is anti-truth." One could say the same about Dowd.

The Times leadership has convinced itself that the duo will anchor some sort of opinion all-star squad, but I think more and more loyal readers and independent observers will come to the opposite conclusion: that Kristol and Dowd represent the troubling demise of the paper's commitment to serious, and entertaining, opinion journalism.

That the Times wants to view the crucial 2008 presidential campaign through the prism of Kristol and Dowd tells you all you need to know about the paper's priorities.[Snip]

There's simply no way that New York Times editors read Kristol's phoned-in agitprop in Time last year and turned to each other, and to publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., who OKs hirings on the opinion pages, and said, "We've got to get this guy!" And that's why the newspaper's decision to hire Kristol feels much more like a political appointment than it does a journalistic hire. Nobody has ever argued that the Times operates as a pure meritocracy, but elevating Kristol to the most prestigious perch in punditry and then pretending he earned the spot on the strength of his clips is, of course, preposterous.

And indeed, even more befuddling than tapping Kristol was the sad spectacle of Times leaders staging an embarrassing kabuki dance where they insisted they hired Kristol because he's a "serious, respected conservative intellectual," as editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal told Politico. [Snip]

how badly did Times big-wigs want to hire neo-con strategist Kristol? So badly they threw out their employee handbook in order to extend a sweetheart deal to Kristol.

Not only does the high-profile hiring of Kristol flout a recently announced hiring freeze inside the New York Times newsroom, but a Times spokeswoman confirmed to me that Kristol will become the first political columnist hired by the newspaper in the modern era who will be allowed to keep a full-time publishing job outside the Times. And in this case, as editor of Rupert Murdoch's Weekly Standard, Kristol will continue to draw a paycheck from a direct Times competitor, since Murdoch, as the new owner of the Wall Street Journal, has made it quite plain that he plans on using the business daily to directly compete against The New York Times, which Murdoch claims is elitist and liberal.

Oh yeah, Kristol will be given further exemption from the Times' employee guidelines and allowed to remain on the board of policy think tanks. Could the Times have found a more tangled set of conflicts if they tried?

So it's clear that the New York Times wants Bill Kristol badly. Why?

It's not his writing, which is klunky, boring, filled with factual errors and not even really good as right-wing propaganda. When Time magazine hired him early in 2007 as a 'star' opinion writer, they wound up only publishing four article that he wrote in the second half of the year.

It's time to plan the funeral for the New York Times. Their management has gone brain-dead, and the paper can't be far behind.

BBC: The US Recession has arrived

Merrill lynch is apparently speaking to BBC, but not to the American media. It must be Merrill lynch that is causing the blackout of news on the American Recession, because I'm sure that the competent newspersons in the American media would be all over the story if Merrill Lynch had also told them.

And what did Merrill Lynch tell BBC?

The feared recession in the US economy has already arrived, according to a report from Merrill Lynch.

It said that Friday's employment report, which sent shares tumbling worldwide, confirmed that the US is in the first month of a recession.

Its view is controversial, with banks such as Lehman Brothers disagreeing.

But a reserve member of the committee that sets US rates warned that it could do little about the below-trend growth expected in the next six months.

"I am concerned that developments on the inflation front will make the Fed's policy decisions more difficult in 2008," Charles Plosser, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia said.

He was referring to the problems faced by the US Federal Reserve, which might want to cut interest rates to avoid a recession, but is worried about inflationary factors such as $100-a-barrel oil. [Snip]

Merrill Lynch said that the figures showing the jobless rate hitting 5% in December were the final piece in that puzzle.

"According to our analysis, this isn't even a forecast any more but is a present day reality," the report said.
[Highlighting mine - Editor WTF-o]

There are disagreements, of course. The consensus view is that, while a recession is possible, we aren't there yet. Merrill has a response to that also:

Merrill said that the current consensus view on Wall Street that there is a good chance of avoiding a recession is "in denial".

The consensus opinion is that of financial market makers who earn a living by selling stocks and bonds. That selling activity will drop sharply when the customers for their services realize that the economy isn't going to bail out bad investment decisions, but the salesperson they are talking to will get the commission as soon as the deal is made. The salesperson doesn't want his customers thinking that the economy is going bad. Thus the consensus opinion is that "We aren't in a recession now, and if there is one later it will be short and mild."

The surprise is that Merrill Lynch dares speak of it.

Chris Matthews hates Hillary Clinton

Matthews detests Hillary, yet continually denies it. That's clear just from listening to him. But it's nice to get some numbers to support that impression, and Media Matters has done a study of his opinions on his show, MSNBC's Hardball, during the months of September, October, and November. MM compared his opinions on Hillary to his opinions on Rudy Giuliani.

The results demonstrate that Matthews has been particularly friendly to Rudy Giuliani in recent months, and extremely hostile toward Hillary Clinton. Not only is there a qualitative difference between the kinds of praise and criticism he offers these two candidates, but a quantitative difference, as well: Matthews made 10 negative remarks about Clinton for every negative remark he made about Giuliani, and nearly three times as many positive remarks about the former New York City mayor as about Clinton. The ratio of positive to negative remarks was 3.5-to-1 for Giuliani, but 1-to-8.2 for Clinton.

• Matthews made 10 positive remarks about Hillary Clinton in the past three months, most of which were evaluations of her campaign performance. But six of these 10 remarks also contained some criticism, as when he said, "She has been charming but cold and absolutely flawless," or when he described a debate as "a highly scripted, brilliant performance by Hillary Clinton." Others -- for instance, his praise of Clinton's success in getting support from "every interest area in the Democratic Party" -- could also plausibly be interpreted as backhanded compliments.
• Matthews made 82 negative remarks about Clinton during this period. They cover a wide range of topics, but most have to do with character issues -- that Clinton is overly calculating, disingenuous, or unethical.
• Matthews made 28 positive remarks about Rudy Giuliani, most concerning how much of a leader and how tough Giuliani is.
• Matthews made eight negative remarks about Giuliani, most about his stance on immigration.

The complete list of positive and negative remarks is available at the end of this report.[2]

The picture painted by this list is clear. Indeed, the Philadelphia Inquirer magazine reported in June 2001 that Matthews told an MSNBC colleague, "I hate her. I hate her. All that she stands for."

Why does this matter? Well, here is Rachel Maddow discussing the fact that women voted for Hillary in New Hampshire because they are angry that the media is piling on Hillary because she is a woman.



Chris' anger at being questioned comes through this clip clearly. Apparently he can't accept that others have the temerity to disagree with his self-image as a competent, fair-minded and balanced journalist.

Chris clearly doesn't understand just how many people in the TV viewing audience recognize his misogyny and find it disgusting, so that when the differences between the candidates are not of major import, those people just might vote in a way so as to demonstrate their disgust with him.

That's an interesting, if unprovable, explanation of Hillary's vote from women. Whatever - I don't like Chris at all, and I'm glad to see him getting flack. He has set himself up for the flack, and it is good to see it going his way. The media matters study certainly justifies it.

---

Addendum 5:01 PM CST
Here is a great example of Chris Matthews expressing his personal loathing for Hillary Clinton.



I got this from a really excellent post by Tristero over at Hullabaloo. Tristero and Bob Somerby of the Howler are completely correct. The problem for Democrats like Hillary isn't just that the right-wing Wurlitzer and their propaganda outlet, FOX News, don't like Democrats. It's that the entire national Press corps detests Democrats. Ask Al Gore and John Kerry.

But don't ask Chris Matthews. He'll just tell you that he is an even-handed unbiased journalist selling his opinion on TV, and that he has no influence at all on how people think about the people they have never seen in person, but know only by the way the media (like Chris) portrays them.

Business reacts to the populism from Huckabee and Edwards

We have heard from both John Edwards and Mike Huckabee how the corporations are making life more difficult for average Americans, and the corporations are reacting. They are going to sit down with the populist candidates and work with individuals who are having problems to make life better for the average Americans who are facing problems caused by Corporate mistakes and malfeasance.

And now that you have reacted by asking what Universe I'm living in, here is the Los Angeles Times news report on what the real reaction from the business community is.

Washington - Alarmed at the increasingly populist tone of the 2008 political campaign, the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is set to issue a fiery promise to spend millions of dollars to defeat candidates deemed to be anti-business.

"We plan to build a grass-roots business organization so strong that when it bites you in the butt, you bleed," chamber President Tom Donohue said.

The warning from the nation's largest trade association came against a background of mounting popular concern over the condition of the economy. A weak record of job creation, the sub-prime mortgage crisis, declining home values and other problems have all helped make the economy a major campaign issue.

Presidential candidates in particular have responded to the public concern. Former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina has been the bluntest populist voice, but other front-running Democrats, including Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, have also called for change on behalf of middle-class voters.

On the Republican side, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee - emerging as an unexpected front-runner after winning the Iowa caucuses - has used populist themes in his effort to woo independent voters, blasting bonus pay for corporate chief executives and the effect of unfettered globalization on workers.

Reacting to what it sees as a potentially hostile political climate, Donohue said, the chamber will seek to punish candidates who target business interests with their rhetoric or policy proposals, including congressional and state-level candidates.

Although Donohue shied away from precise figures, he indicated that his organization would spend in excess of the approximately $60 million it spent in the last presidential cycle. That approaches the spending levels planned by the largest labor unions.

Chamber President Tom Donohue understands who owns America, and he is going to spend as much money as he needs in order to make that clear to mere uppity voters and politicians!

Did you really expect a bipartisan reaction from our corporate masters? Really?

How do you think that the members of the yesterday's "Bloomberg for President with a bipartisan cabinet" meeting or the master pundit of Bipartisanship, David Broder will deal with this?

Maybe they'll ask Donohue to compromise and only spend $30 million to defeat populists. Hey! Donohue might even deign to take their phone calls.

The nature of the Republican coalition

Ari, over at The Edge of the West, provides a thumbnail sketch of the events that have demonstrated the depths reached by the Republican coalition made up mostly of fundamentalists, imperialists, nativists, racists, extremist Libertarians like Grover Norquist, and other assorted mostly antisocial weirdos. He also points out that the Republican coalition is currently falling apart. First, here is his description of the recent Republican actions, then I want to give my opinion of why it has happened and where it is going.

...the fall is unfolding as I write this post.** So I’m just guessing when I suggest that scholars will one day point to 9/11 (the taproot of overreach), the road to the Iraq War (hubris and deception run amok), or Katrina (the byproduct of incompetence and limited-government ideology) as the moment when the slide began.

Let me offer an alternative reading: on this day in 1999, Chief Justice William Rehnquist began presiding over Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial. The details are relatively well known. Or, if not, you can go here or here. Regardless, Clinton’s impeachment revealed the depths of the Republican Party’s depravity. It wasn’t that Clinton was an innocent; he was a cad and a serial liar. But the idea that Congress would approve articles of impeachment because of the “facts” contained in the Starr Report seemed absurd. Especially when placed in historical context.

In 1866, Andrew Johnson, who had taken office after Lincoln’s assassination the previous year, vetoed the Civil Rights Act and campaigned against ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. (Both eventually passed despite his opposition.) Johnson’s intransigence outraged Radical Republicans, who tried but failed to impeach him in 1867. The following year, the president attempted to sack Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, the man responsible for administering most of the key elements of Reconstruction in the South. Congress responded by successfully impeaching Johnson, who came within a single vote of conviction in the Senate.

So, before this day in 1999, a president had to derail Reconstruction to get impeached. (Remember that Nixon quit.) But no longer. Not on Henry Hyde’s watch. Now, the public would be safe from a chief executive who dissimulated about his sex life.

So where did all this come from, and why has the Republican Party as a whole accepted such nasty and extreme political actions?

Here's my opinion.

To Ari's list of members of the Republican coalition, let me add Goldwaterites and John Birchers (anti-Communist extremists) as significant parts of the alliance. It is an unlikely coalition, and someone had to assemble it. I suspect that a large part of what cemented them together in the 1980's was a group of left-over Nixon loyalists (like Cheney and Rumsfeld) nurtured by the Reagan administration.

I suspect that Nixon’s resignation motivated the general acceptance of extremism in the Republican Party, combined with removing the moderate Republicans. Nixon’s resignation over “a third-rate burglary” was widely believed in right-wing circles to have been the result of an extremist dirty trick by the left wing. That has justified the extremism that we have seen in the attacks on Bill Clinton by the vast right-wing (Scaife-funded) conspiracy as well as Bill’s impeachment. The Coors family and Bob Perry of Houston (financier of the Swift Boat Veterans) are also right-wing extremists who fund such things.

As I say, I “suspect” Nixon’s resignation was the justification of the nastiness practiced by the modern Republican coalition. As a non-historian, I really don’t know how to confirm or refute that suspicion.

My next suspicion is that Reagan’s election and the resulting power of the Presidency has been the glue that has held the Republican coalition together. The Republican establishment Money-cons really don’t care much for the evangelists, as the smearing of Huckabee clearly demonstrates. The foreign policy Republicans (NeoCons) and the low-tax, small government libertarian Republicans also don’t care much for the evangelists, but they all have to work together to elect a President. Once they elect a President, each group has gotten certain areas of power out of the government that were under their control. (The categories overlap a lot.)

Bill Clinton’s election really upset their apple cart, and since it could be blamed on Ross Perot, the Republican extremists again thought they were being thwarted by a ‘Left-wing dirty trick.’ That, I think, is what justified the extremism with which the right wing attacked Bill on a national level throughout his terms of office.

They saw Bush 43’s installation as President as being nothing more than setting right what had been stolen from them. But now, after 12 years of Republican domination of Congress and 7 years of the Bush administration, everything they have tried to install in government has literally blown up in their faces, and they can’t blame the Left Wing. There hasn’t been any left wing to blame.

The result of the massive and obvious failures of right-wing government has been that the Republican coalition has already lost Congress, and they have no real hope either to regain Congress or to win the Presidency in 2008. Power and the anticipation of power was what held the Republican coalition together, and that is gone. Now the Republicans have nothing left to unify them except the thoroughly discredited Bush administration - an administration whose policies the current candidates for nomination as President cannot abandon, because it is all that remains of the power that held the winning coalition together. Worse, the have no realistic hope of winning anything nationally in 2008. So the glue - power and the anticipation of power - that has held the coalition together is gone.

That’s why the coalition has collapsed.

They still have the insurgent’s tactic of disrupting legitimate government so severely that they can make it appear unworkable, hence illegitimate. That’s what the current Republican obstructionism in the Senate is all about. If they can destroy the legitimacy and public acceptance of the government and blame the Democrats, then there is a chance they can rebuild some form of alliance again. That is the one remaining hope the right-wing Republican coalition has of surviving as a national force. And it fits in well with the nastiness that has come to characterize Republican politics.

It might work. In fact, it might even limit Republican losses in 2008. But it won't put the Republican coalition back together this year.

Narrative - why it matters

Here is an interesting story of how narrative drives political actions.

Earlier this week on NPR, I heard a man-on-the-street segment about the current election cycle featuring three Southern women, two Texans, one a former New Orleans resident who left after Katrina.

The first woman is an assistant manager in a store somewhere in Texas. She sounded bone-weary about both politics and life. When the interviewer asked what national issues she followed most, she said that she just keeps her head down and tries to keep her family afloat, that all that stuff is beyond her. But when she was asked a bit later about what she’d find attractive about a presidential candidate, she very forcefully turned to the issue of illegal immigration. Illegal immigrants, she said, are what has made it difficult for Americans like herself to access welfare and health care. The interviewer pointed out that illegal immigrants usually don’t make use of welfare or unemployment compensation, but the woman shrugged that off. Her resentments were deeper: she sees people that she’s sure are illegal immigrants driving by in nice cars and they seem far better off than she is. She’s struggling just to keep afloat, she’s had to give up health insurance for her children because it’s unaffordable. Her answer to the mystery of how people around her seem better off is that government has something to do with it but in a deep and enigmatic way, and that she’s looking for the candidate who will admit to it, who will mirror her structure of feeling, long before she’s looking for some highly concretized solution. [Snip]

That woman in Texas is probably not a Democratic voter regardless of whom the candidate is. Her key issue maybe ought to be health care reform, but she’s enmeshed in another kind of narrative, one where racial resentment, among other things, is lurking very powerfully just underneath the surface. But even that is a layer covering the real depths. What I heard listening to her was someone who basically thinks that she’s in a hopeless place because some great engine is churning mysteriously in the depths of history, that life is just bad now.

The real problem as far as that woman is concerned is

that life is changing, that the changes are mysterious, that power lies somewhere far away from where the speaker exists, and that they don’t believe that there’s much to be done about it.

The Liberals have been offering plans and programs that are intended to solve that woman's problems, but they all come down to one thing as far as she knows. She is currently fucked, things aren't getting better, and they won't get any better, and the only thing the Liberals offer is "I'm and expert. Trust Me." and she doesn't, because the experts in the past said the same damned thing, and look how THAT turned out.

The Conservatives offer a narrative that "explains" why her life is so difficult. It's simple. All the illegal immigrants are coming over the border and using up the resources. That's why she can't get any. The narrative is simply, it's understandable, and - Hey! It still won't change anything, but that lady understands what is happening to her, and nothing is going to change anyway. At least she has someone to blame.

I'd say that the same thing that drives this woman to the narrative "It's all about the illegal immigrants." will also drive her to find a leader who promises that if she will join him, things will get better because he understands her and her problems. That would fit right in with the idea that she is looking for someone who can mirror the structure of her feelings.

That structure is found in the narrative she accepts as explanation. As Mark Kleiman pointed out in his post that directed me to this one, The answer as far as that woman is concerned could just as well be that "Witches cause the problems."

She'll ignore the expert who says "Trust me." because that does not mirror her feelings the way the narrative she has accepted does.

The media doesn't drive the election - Oh no. Just ask them - Powerless wanks is all they are.

Ask a member of the political Press corps why they engage in on-the-bus groupthink and drive public expectations for the various candidates and ignore the candidates they don't like, and you will get the reply "Moi? You attribute that much power to little old me?"

Yeah. I do. And so does Glenn Greewald.

For all his obvious political abilities, Obama seems to have almost no clue regarding the real problems that the incoming President is going to have to face. He is running on his good looks and sunny disposition, with little real substance presented. He is the weakest of the three major Democratic candidates, yet the Press has anointed him "The Winner" and wants to ride his coattails to the White House. To do this they are smearing Hillary and ignoring Edwards.

They are doing much the same thing to the Republican candidates, although they tried hard to anoint Giuliani until he was found to simply not be up to prime time. McCain is now the Press flavor-of-the-week.

I'm not sure if the problem is that the political Press is afraid to dig into the real problems of America and so focus strictly on a press narrative driven by personality and who they like personally, or if they feel that they are part of the establishment and have to defend it. Whatever it is, the Press is making damned sure that American voters are as uninformed about the political capabilities of the various candidates as possible.

By obscuring the real issues, the Press becomes an extremely powerful influence in who gets elected as President and how America will operate in the next four to eight years. Let's never forget that the Press, through it's obvious detest of Gore, gave us an election in 2000 that was close enough to be stolen by the "Nice Guy" (and utter incompetent) George.

Average Brit has more income now than the average American

This would have to come from the BBC, because the American news media does not tell Americans they are no longer "number one."

The average UK person will this year have a greater income than their US counterpart for the first time since the 19th Century, figures suggest.

Here's the details:

Analyst Oxford Economics said the UK's GDP per head of population will reach £23,500 - £250 higher than in the US.

However, because goods and services are cheaper in the US, Americans will have stronger purchasing power, it added.

UK GDP per capita will also be higher than in Germany (£21,665) and France (£21,700), Oxford Economics calculated.

Managing director Adrian Cooper said: "The last 15 years have seen a dramatic change in the UK's economic performance and its position in the world economy. [Snip]

Oxford Economics said that in 1993, following the last major recession and the UK's ejection from the ERM, GDP per capita in the UK was 34% lower than in the US, 33% lower than in Germany and 26% lower than in France.

It said the improved UK position reflected the sustained strong growth it has enjoyed since then and the recent strength of sterling.

Mr Cooper said: "The UK has been catching up steadily with living standards in the US since 2001, so it is a well-established trend rather than simply the result of currency fluctuations."

Remember when Reaganomics were going to make all Americans rich? Guess what? The Labor Party in the UK has been in control since 1997, and the 1997 defeat of the conservatives resulted largely from the disasters that Thatcherism caused, leading to sharply increased unemployment and the eviction of a million householders from their homes.

The UK has demonstrated that a modern government run by the Labor Party is more effective than one run on Monarchical principles by corporate leaders. We've seen in America that a government run by corporate leaders is a disaster. The Progressives and union leaders can't possibly be as bad and the Republicans and their fellow-traveler corporatist Democrats.

Why an unregulated free market is unworkable

Once again we get a really good article from Ian Welsh. Let me briefly summarize:

• Everyone knew the current credit crunch and recession was coming years ago


• There a a lot of people who rode the housing bubble and free credit expansion to the top and made out like bandits. They made enough during the boom that they can easily survive the bust.


• From the point of view of individual self-interest the winners (generally top managers) would be fools to not ride the boom and expand it, but leave others to pay the price.


• The people who have created this boom and ridden it up are generally not the same people who will pay the price for it. Investors, consumers and the economy in general will pay the price, and they had almost nothing to do with creating the boom.


• Given this set of individual incentives and no regulations this boom and bust will be followed by another boom and bust.


• [Quote from Welsh.]

  "As a result of this incentive system, if it is possible to have another financial bubble after this one crashes out, there will be one. Guaranteed. There is no way to avoid it unless the economic circumstances are so bad it can't get off the ground (which is possible, if the monetary base starts collapsing.)
  
  The answer is fairly simple, mind you. These sorts of bubbles didn't happen in the post war period. They didn't happen because you couldn't pay enough people enough to make it worth their while. After a certain amount of income, in most western countries, you got taxed at a marginal rate of over 90%. A few CEOs might be able to make it, but most of the executive suite was going to need more than 5 years--they were going to need a career."



• [Further quote from Welsh]

  "At this point to wring the excesses out of the system and to stop the systemic incentives to keep blowing bubbles is going to require doing something to make it so it doesn't pay. [That is, change the incentives so that economically powerful individuals do not gain by creating economic bubbles. This uses the free market rather than abandoning it. It is changing the incentives, nothing more.] There are two parts to any solution.

  The first and simplest way is to put a very progressive tax on all income no matter how or where earned that probably comes in at over 95% of all income over, say, $500,000 or a million at the most. Suddenly, needing to actually keep the companies sound, and knowing that in 7 years when the loans go bad, they'll still be there taking the heat for it, will tend to concentrate the mind not on "can I make enough money to be in a yacht in 3 years" but into "does this deal make sense over the longrun".

  The second thing to do is to stop allowing people to sell risk. For years Greenspan argued that risk markets (the ability to take on, say, default risk in credit or for that matter to sell loans in CDOs) made the system stronger and actually reduced systemic risk by spreading risk around. What it did instead is take the risk away from the people who were able to manage it because they were close enough to the ground to know whether a loan was risky and give it to people who really had no clue and had to rely on bond rating agencies to tell them if the risk was acceptable. [Snip]
  
  So the rule going forward has to be that if you make the loan you keep the risk on your books. You cannot load it off on other people. There are mathematical reasons why in theory it ought to reduce systemic risk to do so, but in the real world they generally don't actually occur because of the problem of incentives--the people with the necessary information to manage the risk have no incentive to do so; the people who wind up with the debt do not have the ability to manage the risk; and the third parties like bond agencies have neither the incentives nor the ability to manage the risk either."

  [Blockquotes mine - Editor WTF-o]

Which leads to Welsh's conclusion

the idea that the financial sector could somehow make far greater returns than GDP growth and do it for decades was always insane and simply could not work. The only way to do it, the only way it has in fact been done, was to cheat and to ignore system risk, use massive leverage, print money and shove it into asset bubbles and so on.

The end result has been two financial bubbles and thirty years in which the average American hasn't had a raise and has taken on debt. A lot of people have gotten rich, mind you, and for them these last thirty years have been great, which is why there's a bipartisan consensus amongst the people who matter in both parties to keep what has been, for them, the best of all possible times, going.

Given a choice, they will keep it going. And there'll be a lot more rich in America, but odds that you'll be one of them are near zero. And when it all comes crashing down, somehow ordinary Americans, despite having never been invited to the party, will be stuck with cleanup duty and the bill.

In hindsight it is obvious. The Economists have created some beautiful mathematical models that explain how everyone can benefit by selling risk from an underlying operation to investors. The investors focus entirely on the risk and ignore the operation that underlies it, depending on their knowledge of the arcane mathematical models which purportedly describe the risk they are trading. But those beautiful models depend on everyone involved having perfect knowledge of the various risk products and applying a strict rigid rule of optimization to the models. That level of knowledge is impossible for anyone not actually involved in the underlying economic activity itself. Herbert A. Simon explained why in his 1950's studies of decision-making (for which he received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics "for his pioneering research into the decision-making process within economic organizations" (1978.))

Herbert A. Simon demonstrated that human beings cannot ever have perfect knowledge of any set of circumstances because of the cost (in both time and money) of gathering information. So he presented a model called Bounded Rationality in which actors make their decisions based, not on full knowledge of the situation, but on heuristics or Rule-of-thumb.

As the current mortgage and credit mess clearly demonstrates, any investor who purchases risk from an underlying economic activity with which they are not intimately familiar has no way of establishing effective heuristics as guidelines, and has no way of knowing that they guidelines they are applying aren't working.

Wall Street has been badly served by the genius mathematical whiz kids who have been creating mathematical models of risk to guide them, and the movement conservative free market (and Libertarian) politicians who bought into the apparent certainty described in those models have been lining their pockets as they fooled the public. Sen. Phil Gramm has been a key individual who practiced this deceit.

This is why the Laissez-Faire economics plank of the Reagan revolution has brought us economic stagnation for workers and two economic bubbles in the last decade.

This is why the Reagan Revolution is over.

George McGovern advocates impeaching Bush

From today's Washington Post:

By George McGovern
Sunday, January 6, 2008; Page B01

As we enter the eighth year of the Bush-Cheney administration, I have belatedly and painfully concluded that the only honorable course for me is to urge the impeachment of the president and the vice president. [Snip}

Bush and Cheney are clearly guilty of numerous impeachable offenses. They have repeatedly violated the Constitution. They have transgressed national and international law. They have lied to the American people time after time. Their conduct and their barbaric policies have reduced our beloved country to a historic low in the eyes of people around the world. These are truly "high crimes and misdemeanors," to use the constitutional standard.

From the beginning, the Bush-Cheney team's assumption of power was the product of questionable elections that probably should have been officially challenged -- perhaps even by a congressional investigation.

In a more fundamental sense, American democracy has been derailed throughout the Bush-Cheney regime. The dominant commitment of the administration has been a murderous, illegal, nonsensical war against Iraq. That irresponsible venture has killed almost 4,000 Americans, left many times that number mentally or physically crippled, claimed the lives of an estimated 600,000 Iraqis (according to a careful October 2006 study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health) and laid waste their country. The financial cost to the United States is now $250 million a day and is expected to exceed a total of $1 trillion, most of which we have borrowed from the Chinese and others as our national debt has now climbed above $9 trillion -- by far the highest in our national history.

All of this has been done without the declaration of war from Congress that the Constitution clearly requires, in defiance of the U.N. Charter and in violation of international law. This reckless disregard for life and property, as well as constitutional law, has been accompanied by the abuse of prisoners, including systematic torture, in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions of 1949.

I have not been heavily involved in singing the praises of the Nixon administration. But the case for impeaching Bush and Cheney is far stronger than was the case against Nixon and Vice President Spiro T. Agnew after the 1972 election. The nation would be much more secure and productive under a Nixon presidency than with Bush. Indeed, has any administration in our national history been so damaging as the Bush-Cheney era?

How could a once-admired, great nation fall into such a quagmire of killing, immorality and lawlessness?

It happened in part because the Bush-Cheney team repeatedly deceived Congress, the press and the public into believing that Saddam Hussein had nuclear arms and other horrifying banned weapons that were an "imminent threat" to the United States. The administration also led the public to believe that Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks -- another blatant falsehood. Many times in recent years, I have recalled Jefferson's observation: "Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just."

The basic strategy of the administration has been to encourage a climate of fear, letting it exploit the 2001 al-Qaeda attacks not only to justify the invasion of Iraq but also to excuse such dangerous misbehavior as the illegal tapping of our telephones by government agents. The same fear-mongering has led government spokesmen and cooperative members of the press to imply that we are at war with the entire Arab and Muslim world -- more than a billion people.

Another shocking perversion has been the shipping of prisoners scooped off the streets of Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and other countries without benefit of our time-tested laws of habeas corpus.

Although the president was advised by the intelligence agencies last August that Iran had no program to develop nuclear weapons, he continued to lie to the country and the world. This is the same strategy of deception that brought us into war in the Arabian Desert and could lead us into an unjustified invasion of Iran. I can say with some professional knowledge and experience that if Bush invades yet another Muslim oil state, it would mark the end of U.S. influence in the crucial Middle East for decades.

Ironically, while Bush and Cheney made counterterrorism the battle cry of their administration, their policies -- especially the war in Iraq -- have increased the terrorist threat and reduced the security of the United States. Consider the difference between the policies of the first President Bush and those of his son. When the Iraqi army marched into Kuwait in August 1990, President George H.W. Bush gathered the support of the entire world, including the United Nations, the European Union and most of the Arab League, to quickly expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait. The Saudis and Japanese paid most of the cost. Instead of getting bogged down in a costly occupation, the administration established a policy of containing the Baathist regime with international arms inspectors, no-fly zones and economic sanctions. Iraq was left as a stable country with little or no capacity to threaten others.

Today, after five years of clumsy, mistaken policies and U.S. military occupation, Iraq has become a breeding ground of terrorism and bloody civil strife. It is no secret that former president Bush, his secretary of state, James A. Baker III, and his national security adviser, Gen. Brent Scowcroft, all opposed the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Another good American weighs in on the clearly unAmerican regime that currently despoils the White House.

NY Times hire of Kristol exposes the NeoCon cancer at the gray lady

The recent history of publishing Bush administration and pro-war NeoCon propaganda as news by Judith Miller has been explained when Charles Kaiser explained the NeoCon nepotism that got Bill Kristol his undeserved perch on the New York times editorial page. There is a Conservative cancer at the heart of the New York Times that is destroying its reputation for journalistic integrity. The hire of Bill Kristol (while letting him continue to write for the Rupert Murdoch Weekly Standard) clarifies what has happened to the New York Times.

From Charles Kaiser at RADAR:

Last week, Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. managed to enrage practically everyone who still holds the Times to that higher standard by anointing Bill Kristol as the paper's newest op-ed columnist.

Many Times readers consider Kristol a third-rate neocon apparatchik, a stark symbol of the steep decline of the Washington culture—and arguably the most consistently mean-spirited and wrong-headed pundit of our time. [Snip]

Outrage was followed by bafflement after editorial page editor Andy Rosenthal described Kristol as "a captivating writer and keen observer of the political landscape."

Rosenthal added, "The idea that the New York Times is giving voice to a guy who is a serious, respected conservative intellectual—and somehow that's a bad thing. How intolerant is that?" Well, it is true that Kristol is a conservative.

Kristols and Rosenthals go back a long way together. Bill's father, Irving, and Andy's father, Abe—both charter neocons—were good friends, and Irving Kristol was a proud member of the "Rosenthal for President" lunch club, which also included Bill Buckley, Dick Clurman, Bernard Kalb (known as Bruno Frescobaldi) and Arthur Gelb. And when Andy Rosenthal covered the Bush I White House with Maureen Dowd, Bill Kristol—then vice president Dan Quayle's chief of staff—was a source for both Times reporters.

Kaiser quotes from an email sent by John Schwartz

Rosenthal either (1) has no understanding of what the criticism re Kristol actually is, or (2) does understand but feels it's his job to lie about it. Moreover, Rosenthal genuinely not understanding the criticism is arguably worse than him lying, since it would demonstrate he's completely detached from reality.

Obviously anyone angry about this knows that in Rosenthal's circles, Kristol is "respected" and considered "serious" and "intellectual." That's why they're angry.

Bill's appointment to the editorial page of the New York Times simply clarifies the rot that has grown in the New York Times as conservative ideology has replaced journalistic integrity and ability in the management at the Newspaper. Kristol has not been correct in any of his significant opinions as a pundit, but his track record is unimportant to Rosenthal and the NeoCons. Rosentahal and the NeoCons hold up Bill Kristol as an exemplar of what a 'conservative' should be. Bill's father was Irving Kristol and he has - no, he represents - the 'correct ideology' and puts a great deal of energy into convincing others hoe correct that ideology is. It simply does not matter that he is consistently wrong. What is important it that he is 'One of us.' That't what a true conservative 'should be' - ideologically correct and from a trusted conservative family, thus 'one of us.'

That's how the conservatives are killing the New York Times as a journalistic organization and converting it into a propaganda arm of the conservative movement. They see 'journalistic integrity' as a bar to converting America to the 'right ideology.' They will, of course, run the converted conservative America because they come from 'the right families.'

[ h/t to Glenn Greenwald. ]

CIA, FBI battle over questioning of Zubaydah

I only just stumbled on this article in "Radar" by Charles Kaiser. Essentially he describes the ABC news story by Brian Ross on the effectiveness of waterboarding Zubaydah as a single-source crock, presenting the views of ex-CIA man John Kiriakou who wasn't even a witness to the events.

Kaiser refers back to the Story published in Vanity Fair last July by Katherine Eban which rather fully described the capture and questioning of Zubaydah, and points out that it contradicts Brian Ross' story on ABC at every turn. But for some odd reason, the ABC story never mentions the prior Vanity Fair story.

From Charles Kaiser at RADAR:

It turns out that ABC's amiable source is at the center of an all-out war between the CIA and the FBI over which agency actually got the terrorist Abu Zubaydah to talk—and whether or not any of the CIA's coercive techniques were useful, or totally counterproductive. But Brian Ross never mentioned that. Here are some of the discrepancies between the ABC and the Vanity Fair versions:

• The FBI says that after Zubaydah was shot during the effort to capture him, he was stabilized at the nearest hospital. There, the FBI questioned him, using its typical rapport-building techniques. An FBI agent showed him photographs of suspected al Qaeda members until Zubaydah finally spoke up, blurting out that "Moktar," or Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, had planned 9/11. He then laid out the details of the plot. According to Eban, "America learned the truth of how 9/11 was organized because a detainee had come to trust his captors after they treated him humanely"—exactly the opposite of what ABC reported.


• ABC's CIA man says he was the first person to speak to Zubaydah when he came out of his coma, and he learned nothing useful from him before he was waterboarded. The FBI says no CIA man was present when Zubaydah first started to talk.


• Vanity Fair says Zubaydah's cooperation actually evaporated "with the arrival of the CIA's interrogation team."


• According to Eban, after Zubaydah clammed up, the CIA was left to conclude that Zubaydah would talk only when he had been reduced to complete helplessness and dependence.

Kaiser also points to the Washington Post article by Walther Pincus and Dan Eggen that lays out the facts of the capture and interrogation of Zubaydah.

It looks like the real story is that ABC and Brian Ross either screwed up badly, or were used by the CIA in a public disagreement with the FBI, or ABC and Brian Ross have other reasons to publish pure disinformation as fact. The ABC report reports as fact things that no one else does, and they do not appear to have any confirmation.

Of course, the CIA kept videotapes of the entire interrogation, so we can learn which it the truth very easily. Except, of course, the CIA and much of the Bush administration concealed those tapes until they convinced someone in the CIA to destroy them. But now, even if someone who is aware of what was on those tapes tells his story, it is still just "he said; he said" with no likely confirmation possible.

Can you spell "Obstruction of Justice?"

And while we are discussing nasty politics...

Steve Benen has an excellent article on what the wealthy financiers of the nastiest of the 2004 practices are doing this year. The rich bastards behind the Swift Boat Veterans haven't gone away, they've just found new candidates.

This year they are already contributing to John McCain. And the target? We'll see who threatens their candidate most.

The Iowa Caucuses

What happened last night in Iowa? Several things.

First was turnout.

238,000 people turned out on a cold night in Iowa to participate in the Democratic caucus, and 120,000 did the same for the Republican caucus. This is the highest turnout for a caucus in Iowa ever, sharply higher than 2004 which was also considered a high turnout. That is 66% Democrat to 34% Republican. Compare this to the Presidential vote (much easier to cast) in 2004. Bush ( R) got 751,957 and Kerry (D) got 741,898 – 50% Republican and 49 % Democratic. The caucuses involved almost one-fourth the total number of voters who voted in the 2004 Presidential election in Iowa. Almost a quarter of the caucus-goers were new voters under age 30, the potential voters who rarely vote. The caucus-goers in Iowa told us that this Presidential election matters, and they also said that they strongly preferred the Democrats.

Second. Who won.

First the Republicans. From Washington Post

Candidate	Votes	Percent
Mike Huckabee	39,814	34%
Mitt Romney	29,405	25%
Fred Thompson	15,521	13%
John McCain	15,248	13%
Ron Paul	11,598	10%
Rudy Giuliani	4,013	3%
Duncan Hunter	515	0%
Tom Tancredo	5	0%

Message and native skill as a politician trumped money. Both Romney and Clinton tried to buy the caucuses. Each spent a great deal of money. It didn't work. In the Republican Party, Huckabee strongly defeated Romney, even though Huckabee ran his campaign on a shoestring. Huckabee is clearly a gifted politician. He ran on his Republican evangelist message, but he also ran on a strong populist, anti-corporate message that the Wall Street dominated Republican establishment finds quite abhorrent.

Then the Democrats. Also from The Washington Post.

Candidate	Votes	Percent
Barack Obama	940	38%
John Edwards	744	30%
Hillary Clinton	737	29%
Bill Richardson	53	2%
Joe Biden	23	1%
Uncommitted	3	0%
Chris Dodd	1	0%
Mike Gravel	0	0%
Dennis Kucinich	0	0%
Other	0	0%

The Democrats report the estimated number of delegates each candidate is expectent to send to the state convention rather than the number of individuals who voted for the candidate. Iowa Democratic Party Rules. The caucuses also have a 15% threshold. If there are not at least 15% of the caucus-goers at a given precinct in favor of a candidate, that candidate gets no delegates and the individuals supporting that candidate can choose to support another candidate. Caucus-goers who would have supported Richardson or Biden were reported to switch to Obama rather than Clinton or Edwards.

The results in the Democratic Party caucuses appear to have been similar to the results in the Republicans except that while the underfunded clearly populist anti-corporate candidate, John Edwards, defeated the well-financed establishment candidate, Hillary, the gifted politician was Obama. Obama offered a message that it was time for change, but that change was not made explicit and he worked hard to offer change without blaming anyone for the problems America has. It looks like the Iowa voters indicated by the relative turnout that were ready for a change in which party has the Presidency, but that another change they wanted was to eliminate the nastiness which has dominated Washington since the 1990's. So they voted for Obama. However, the great spread between Obama and both Edwards and Clinton represents an unknown number of second choices by individuals who initially preferred Biden or Richardson. That they did not switch to Clinton again points to the general caucus-goer demand for change away from the establishment. Many of those second-choicers may not be firm Obama supporters. Still, they may be firm opponents of Hillary, and the bandwagon effect may keep them with Obama even as it attracts more Democrats to his side.

So the caucus-goers in both parties rejected the establishment candidates and ignored the money that was being spent to go either for the populist or the gifted politician.

What has the Press gotten out of this?

From what I saw last night, the Press didn't know what to make of the caucus results, and today they are trying hard to place those results in the mostly horse-race political coverage they are used to. The outcome was a shock, and very few reporters seem to have picked up yet even this morning that this is going to be a big change election. In a regular election, all they have to do is routinely report the horse-race numbers of polls and money raised because the basic attitudes of the voters are much like they were in the previous elections. Iowa is a signal that this is not the case for 2008. But what do the reporters, most of whom were not reporting in 1980, do when all the basic rules are changing? What do they report on? At the moment is it all attempts to place the Iowa results into the horse-race formats they understand.

I think there are two big changes, though.

The Reagan Revolution has crashed and is burning.

The first issue is that the Reagan revolution has run its course. The idea that government is the problem, not the solution and we will all get rich if the government will quit trying to force businesses to behave in socially acceptable ways has been tried for a generation. Government no longer regulates interest rates so usury has become normal banking and bankruptcy has become more difficult. No one regulated mortgages, so now the mortgage market has collapsed, the general credit market has collapse, and homes are being foreclosed at a rate not seen since the Depression. Working Americans have not gotten effective raises in pay as they became more productive, but the managers have been making out like bandits from the additional profits the corporations made. CEO's get multi-million dollar bonuses for driving their companies into bankruptcy (Circuit City), while they also send American jobs to Mexico and China. Managers refuse to even deal with unions - the Producers walked out of talks with the Writers Guild and haven't been back for three months. The workers have not in their life-times had such uncertain lives, while the top managers get paid for doing nothing. The uncertainty that is the American lack-of-system for providing health care speaks for itself. Edwards and Huckabee have both been running on this populist response to the corporate-government disaster that our economy has become for most workers.

American voters hate the nasty negativism of politicians

The second issue is the one that both Obama and Huckabee are running on - the polarized politics in Washington. The American public is suffering through the extreme economic and social uncertainties that are too big to be handled by individual workers and they expect their representatives in government, and they watch as the corporations decide how to get even richer off the problems while the Republicans and Democrats sit in Washington and call each other names instead of doing something to solve the national problems. The K-Street Project made it perfectly clear that the American government belongs to the corporations who are screwing the American workers over every way possible, and the two political parties either participate in the screwing over of the American people or just yell at each other ineffectually. They don't solve problems. Instead they create them.

Sometime today the members of the punditocracy will begin to get these two stories correct. But that's just the result as of today!

What next

The next really big event is February 5 when 24 states hold primaries or caucuses. But between today and Feb 5 we have:

January
05 Sat Wyoming (Republican only)
08 Tues New Hampshire
15 Tues Michigan
19 Sat Nevada
19 Sat South Carolina (Republican)
26 Sat South Carolina (Democrat)
29 Tues Florida
February
01 Fri Maine

These are all relatively small, but the Press is going to be trying to figure out what Iowa means, and those are the best place to search. What I think we will see is the populist message and the demand for change with civility are going to be battling with the forces for the establishment. Since the Press is part of the establishment and hates being wrong, they will try to push the results towards those desired by the political establishment. Since the January events will all be small and mostly arcane, the populist message will be suppressed. They frighten the establishment a great deal.

Then there will be the 24 states on February 5th. The establishment will dominate that because money will dominate that. Both Edwards add Huckabee are underfunded for the February 5th events. Can they get the populist message out? I doubt it.

I can't guess who will be the Republican nominee, but we will know on February 6th. I suspect, though that Iowa will give Obama the funds he needs for February 5th, and since he is not one of those scary populists who frighten the establishment Press, he will get the mantle of the Hillary stopper. So we will know the shape of the 2008 Presidential election by early February. My best guess (right now) is that it will be Obama for the Democrats and a nominee yet to be named for the Republicans. Let's see how McCain and Huckabee do in New Hampshire. It's do-or-die for Mitt Romney, and I think we can write Rudy off.

So that's my take on the results of last night's Iowa caucuses. In 33 days we'll know how right I am.

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Addendum 3:04 PM CST
Josh Marshall has posted an interesting email from someone in Iowa.

Is Dick Cheney mentally ill?

There is no doubt that the foreign policy of the Bush administration has been an utter failure. Larry Johnson asks

George Bush has shown us that a weak, not-too-bright leader, can really cock things up on the foreign policy front even when surrounded by senior folks with scads of foreign policy experience. (How can a team comprised of Don Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, and Dick Cheney mess things up so badly?)

Good question, so let's look at what has happened to foreign policy under Bush 43.

The key foreign policy person in the Bush administration as been Vice President Dick Cheney. Cheney was the organizer of the incoming Bush administration in 2000 - 2001. He was personally responsible for choosing the political appointees to be placed throughout the top ranks of the Executive Branch. Cheney placed his acolytes throughout the government. By doing that, he gained the loyalty of those to whom he gave jobs, which gave him more power than anyone in the Executive branch outside of Bush himself.

The other event that was important was based on Bush's well-known ignorance of foreign policy when he was first elected. In preparation for his 2000 election campaign he had brought Dick Cheney in to tutor him on foreign policy - a job which Bush expanded to asking Cheney to find a candidate for Vice President. Cheney found himself. With that history and Bush's well-known distaste for the grubby details of management and policy, it is not any surprise that Bush abdicated foreign policy to Dick Cheney. Cheney then isolated and effectively neutered the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, and let Rumsfeld play with the organization of the Pentagon and the military toys it would use. No surprise there. Rumsfeld's military experience was as an aviator. Hardware and organization are more important than foreign policy. It is a truism that winning wars is first logistics, and only after that strategy and tactics matter. With the Department of State left out of policy-making Cheney was left to make conduct the actual foreign policy through the Pentagon.

So America's foreign policy has been the direct responsibility of Vice President Dick Cheney since 2001.

Dick himself has, I think, become extremely paranoid at least in part as a result of his heart trouble. This is one occasional side effect of heart trouble. In addition, he was attracted to the NeoCons who explained to him the views of the Israelis in the Middle East (Dick trusts the Israelis a lot more than the CIA. They certainly have experience in the Middle East which the CIA, focusing on the USSR, has never had.) Combine that with Cheney's impatience with bureaucracy in general (a characteristic of conservatism is that only results matter, and the process gets in the way of the anticipated and therefore right results - a very different attitude from that of good Intelligence analysts) and his belief that the CIA especially as well as most of the non-military Intelligence community was out to get him personally (see Paranoia above), and this gives us the results we have seen during the Bush administration.

Is there a good reason to believe that Cheney is likely to be paranoid? Consider his medical history.

CNN provided a summary of Dick Cheney's heart problems up to July 2001.

• 1978 - first heart attack.
• 1984 - another heart attack.
• 1988 - third heart attack before age 48 resulting in quadruple bypass surgery. This was considered to have stabilized him, so that he had no follow ups after 1994.
• November 22, 2000 - "a very slight heart attack" which led doctors to insert "a coronary stent to prop open a narrowed artery".
• March 5, 2001 - new chest pain and discomfort which leads to an "urgent" procedure to re-open the blocked heart artery treated in November.
• June 29, 2001 - Doctors inserted a pacemaker that includes a defibrillator.

The New York Times article entitled “Mental Decline Is Linked To Heart Bypass Surgery” points to the likelihood that open heart surgery causes brain damage because of interrupted blood flow to the brain. From the New York Times article

Five years after heart bypass surgery, 42 percent of patients show a significant decline on tests of mental ability, probably from brain damage caused by the surgery, doctors from Duke University say in a new study.

Older patients and those with a drop in test scores soon after surgery were most likely to show declines five years later.

With Cheney's history of heart problems that almost certainly themselves reduced blood flow to the brain, he would be a strong candidate to be among the 42 percent of patients who showed decline of mental ability.

Ten weeks after the surgery to insert the pacemaker with defibrillator was September 11, 2001. It would be very reasonable to assume that Dick Cheney's reaction to the threat represented by the 9/11 events would call forth a highly paranoid reaction.

As an unsupervised elected official, there is no one with the power to evaluate or control Dick Cheney outside of George Bush. It is obvious that Bush does not exert such control.

This is not to say that the clearly paranoid nature of the Bush administration foreign policy can be blamed on Dick Cheney's heart trouble. Cheney has always been one of the most extreme conservatives in the Republican Party. Conservatives are described in Bob Altemeyer's book The Authoritarians. They base election campaigns on fear that is intended to drive voters to the security offered by those with the image of a strong, certain leader. Such leaders prefer the military model to the diplomatic model because the entire process of diplomacy is murky and uncertain. But I really think that Cheney's paranoia contributes to the right-wing extremism of this administration.

Is Cheney mentally ill? I can't say for certain, but I think it is highly likely.

More Republican inflation coming

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram has this charming news story on the front page this morning:

AUSTIN -- Have that nagging feeling that your paycheck doesn't go as far as it used to?

It's not your imagination.

Tarrant County residents pay nearly three-quarters more today to heat and light their homes and fill up their gas tanks than they did at the beginning of the decade, a Star-Telegram analysis has found. At the same time household incomes, while increasing, have not come close to keeping up.

Since 2000, the average monthly electric bill for a typical Fort Worth household using 1,000 kilowatt-hours has jumped from $78.67 to $129.06

The average monthly home heating bill for 6,000 cubic feet of natural gas in Fort Worth has soared more than 67 percent during the same period -- from $42.63 to $71.43.

AAA reports that the price of a gallon of regular gasoline has gone up nearly 77 percent, from $1.43 to $2.63. That means that a typical Fort Worth resident using 47.5 gallons of gas a month now pays $124.93, compared with $67.94 in 2000.

Combined energy costs -- gasoline, home heating and electricity -- for a typical local household have gone up 72 percent.

Calculations based on Census Bureau and Federal Reserve Bank data show that energy costs rose about 2 1/2 times faster than median household income in Tarrant County between 2000 and 2006. The Census Bureau had no data for 2007.

So we have had inflation here already, in everything except the paycheck.

But the oil companies and the government are working on alternative forms of energy to reduce the costs, right? Nope. Of course not.

And in the meantime, the Associated Press this morning chimes in with

Oil Futures Rise to $100 a Barrel
Wednesday January 2, 2:09 pm ET

Crude Futures Hit Record $100 a Barrel on Supply Concerns After Violence Breaks Out in Nigeria

NEW YORK (AP) -- Crude oil prices soared to $100 a barrel Wednesday for the first time, reaching that milestone amid an unshakeable view that global demand for oil and petroleum products will outstrip supplies.

Surging economies in China and India fed by oil and gasoline have sent prices soaring over the past year, while tensions in oil producing nations like Nigeria and Iran have increasingly made investors nervous and invited speculators to drive prices even higher.

Violence in Nigeria helped give crude the final push over $100. Bands of armed men invaded Port Harcourt, the center of Nigeria's oil industry Tuesday, attacking two police stations and raiding the lobby of a major hotel. Word that several Mexican oil export ports were closed due to rough weather added to the gains, as did a report that OPEC may not be able to meet its share of global oil demand by 2024.

Light, sweet crude for January delivery rose $4.02 to $100 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, according to Brenda Guzman, a Nymex spokeswoman, before slipping back to $99.27.

Oil prices are within the range of inflation-adjusted highs set in early 1980. Depending on how the adjustment is calculated, $38 a barrel then would be worth $96 to $103 or more today.

So demand for oil continues to increase, while supply is static or even threatened with being reduced by instability in the oil producing nations. The Euro is rising slightly against the dollar, now costing $1.47 dollars per Euro, so that is also pushing the price of oil in dollars higher.

Increases in the price of oil will feed inflation into the American economy, even as the Recession that we see coming gets deeper.

Don't forget. For Recession the Federal Reserve lowers interest rates, making money easier to get and letting the economy work more. For Inflation, the Fed raises interest rates, making the economy slow down.

One really good campaign ad

Digby posted this at her site this morning.

2008 will be the nastiest election in memory

Right now we are looking at Iowa with a bit of amazement to see who will survive it and move forward to New Hampshire, but the real primary is coming when 24 states hold primaries on February 5th. We will know the nominees after that.

Then it is going to get really nasty. The right-wingers are going down in November, and they already know it. They hate that. Digby describes what is going to happen between Feb 6 and Nov 4, and maybe after.

The right is fully prepared to run against either The Bitch, O-Bambi, or The Breck Girl (and in case he makes a sprint for the finish, Bill "Anchor Baby" Richardson) with the most hideous misogynist/racist/quasi-homophobic/xenophobic campaign in history. They know they are probably going to lose --- but they'll let the neanderthals on the bench have some fun in the second half to sharpen their skills.

Plan on it. There will be lies, slime, criminal activity and just plain nastiness and almost all of it will come from the crazies on the right.

Musharraf not expected to last in office

Juan Cole provides further insight on the situation in Pakistan.

The government stonewalling on the issue of an autopsy and the coercion of government employees to toe a pre-determined line, smells to high heaven of complicity. It could be incompetence or stupidity, of course. And the Pakistani military is not all one thing. There is the Inter-Services Intelligence, some members of whom have long ties to Muslim militants. There is the officer corps, etc.

Three further notes: The Pakistan People's Party members and other opponents of Musharraf already were thinking like this before circumstantial evidence emerged that made it even more plausible. I fear their conviction will now be unshakeable, which does not bode well for social peace. It would be a feud.

Second, the physicians would not have had their lawyer speak out about their having been coerced by the military if they thought that Musharraf was likely to continue in office. That is, they have made a bet on a PPP prime minister and are more afraid of being punished by the new government than they are of being punished by the old one. Do they think the old one is about to be overthrown?

And, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, head of the Muslim League (N), called Monday for Musharraf to resign, saying of him, "He is a one-man calamity and the source of all the problems. The country is burning."

Dr. Cole makes a lot of sense here. I find his second point especially compelling. The Doctors really wouldn't have released that statement if they thought Musharraf was likely to last in office.

Apparently Dr. Cole was unaware of the story of that Bhutto was going to meet with Sen. Specter and Rep. Kennedy about the fixed election. Whether true or not, that story will also fit into Dr. Cole's first point. The members of the PPP are not going to believe anything the government says. Either Musharraf resigns or Pakistan is headed towards severe instability, even civil war.

Bhutto assassinated just before revealing the election was fixed

It hadn't seemed reasonable that Musharraf would arrange for Benazir Bhutto's assassination. When it happened, he was going to take the blame, and there did not seem to be enough reason for him to walk into that firestorm. That is no longer true. There was a reason he needed her dead and needed her dead when she was killed. McClatchy News has the story.

NAUDERO, Pakistan — The day she was assassinated last Thursday, Benazir Bhutto had planned to reveal new evidence alleging the involvement of Pakistan's intelligence agencies in rigging the country's upcoming elections, an aide said Monday.

Bhutto had been due to meet U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., and Rep. Patrick Kennedy, D-R.I., to hand over a report charging that the military Inter-Services Intelligence agency was planning to fix the polls in the favor of President Pervez Musharraf.

Safraz Khan Lashari, a member of the Pakistan People's Party election monitoring unit, said the report was "very sensitive" and that the party wanted to initially share it with trusted American politicians rather than the Bush administration, which is seen here as strongly backing Musharraf.

"It was compiled from sources within the (intelligence) services who were working directly with Benazir Bhutto," Lashari said, speaking Monday at Bhutto's house in her ancestral village of Naudero, where her husband and children continued to mourn her death.

The ISI had no official comment. However, an agency official, speaking only on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak on the subject, dismissed the allegations as "a lot of talk but not much substance." [Snip]

According to Lashari, the document includes information on a "safe house" allegedly being run by the ISI in a central neighborhood of Islamabad, the alleged headquarters of the rigging operation.

It names as the head of the unit a brigadier general recently retired from the ISI, who was secretly assigned to run the rigging operation, Lashari said. It charges that he was working in tandem with the head of a civilian intelligence agency. Before her return to Pakistan, Bhutto, in a letter to Musharraf, had named the intelligence official as one of the men she accused of plotting to kill her.

Lashari said the report claimed that U.S. aid money was being used to fix the elections. Ballots stamped in favor of the Pakistan Muslim League-Q, which supports Musharraf, were to be produced by the intelligence agencies in about 100 parliamentary constituencies.

"They diverted money from aid activities. We had evidence of where they were spending the money," Lashari said.

Lashari, who formerly taught environmental economics at Britain's Cranfield University, said the effort was directed at constituencies where the result was likely to be decided by a small margin, so it wouldn't be obvious.

Sen. Specter and Rep. Kennedy need to be put on record regarding whether they had planned to meet with Bhutto and when.

Musharraf will not be believed now no matter what he says or does. Also, Bush had placed everything America had behind him in support of the General, and now that policy has been demonstrated to be utterly ridiculous. So not only is Pakistan a lot more unstable than it was a week ago, the assassination is clearly going to have repercussions here in the U.S. also.

There will be more about the assassination and it looks like it will be sooner rather than later.