Two Good Pieces On Obama By Lefty Journalists

This one by The Nation's Chris Hayes and this one by The American Prospect's Harold Meyerson. Both are worth reading. They think that Obama is the left's best chance to make transformative change.

Hayes makes the point that many progressives are backing Clinton. And Meyerson talks about how Clintonites are too warped by the 90s to move everyone on.

Sadly, I think the Clinton appeal to many progressives may lie in this seething resentment, fear and hatred of conservatives and anyone who makes nice with them. Clinton demonizes conservatives and promise to fight them by any means necessary. After 8 years of wussy Democrats, this is what the partisan progressives want to hear.

Yet these progressives have forgotten how the Clintons fight: mostly, by minimizing the differences between themselves and Republicans. They act hawkish on foreign policy. They fight the culture wars from the right. They adopt anti-government rhetoric. Etc.

All these positions undermine liberal goals. The progressive Clintonites may get their partisan bloodbath, but it won't be free.

i'm blogging at another site

it's over here: http://inclusionist.org/

i'm gonna keep bloggin here too. i think it'll be mostly on politics and ideology, but we'll see.

More on Centrism

I was thinking a little more about that last post on centrist reformer types. I wrote it before South Carolina, and I think it just goes to show how ineffective centrist politics has become.

This has probably occurred to many observers. I just wonder if it's isolated to the Clintons or centrists in general.

In addition to seeming contemptuous of outsiders, the centrists seem to think that people who take their values seriously are naive. They don't know how to win elections and govern. The ends always justify the means, and there are no bounds on means. That's how you win.

But this thinking is flawed as political strategy. Or at least it's unsustainable. People do care about things like authenticity and consistency. This would seem to become particularly important when we're still fighting a war launched on false pretenses and faith in government has reached historic lows.

And centrists use division to win. Both the Clintons and Bush, who could once be considered a centrist, rely heavily on this tactic. But Obama's victory shows that people (at least in South Carolina) are sick of divisive politics and its cynical underpinnings.

So ironically, the things centrists excel at have become a liability. Seeming the least strategic is the best strategy. And the centrists seem too strategic.

Centrists may have things to offer in terms of political vision and policy. But strategic advice, once their strong suit, isn't one of them. Hopefully this point is reinforced by Clinton losing Super Tuesday.

George Orwell Is An Asshole With A Point

Ever notice how everyone loves George Orwell?

He was a pretty cool dude. He wrote a lot of famous books. He was a talented journalist. He documented the lives of the poor perceptively and with empathy. He forcefully opposed totalitarianism.

But he was also a dickhead. The Road to Wigan Pier shows both how talented and annoying Orwell was. The bulk of the book is a pretty heartbreaking account of the lives of poor British coal miners in the 1930s. But in the last chapter he critiques socialists (as opposed to socialism, which he's pretty much fine with). Mainly his point is that they can be alienating and they don't know how to message.

I do not think the Socialist need make any sacrifice of essentials, but certainly he will have to make a great sacrifice of externals. It would help enormously, for instance, if the small of crankishness which still clings to the Socialist movement could be dispelled. If only the sandals and the Pistachio-coloured shirts could be put in a pile and burnt, and every vegetarian, teetotaller, and creeping Jesus sent home to Welwyn Garden City to do his Yoga exercises quietly!

I guess he's joking, but he doesn't get just how aggravating it is to hear that if you are, say, a yoga-doing vegetarian who wears a pistachio-coloured shirt.

This has modern relevance in the flaws of Clintonite centrism. Their contempt for outsiders is palpable. They think lefty outsiders make the Democrats lose. And they give the impression that they think they're lame.

But they have a point. Lefties can be a little exculsive (as either elites or outsiders) and that is used against us (Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas kinda makes this point). And a lot of progressive groups are doing some serious thinking about just how to present themselves and their ideas effectively. It's just hard to agree with the third-way types when they more or less call you a loser for being who you are.

And it's equally wrong, I think, for those of us on the left to get baited into this name calling. We call the third-way types corporate Dems, or Wall Street Dems, and neo-liberals with a sneer. Basically calling them the tools of business will only make them resent us more, though.

I hope this old politics of division within the Democratic party will end if Obama, who has sympathy for the struggles of both social insiders and outsiders, wins the nomination. His message is broad and inclusive (in much more than the racial sense that it's commonly labeled). I think he's highly sensitive to these grudges, but we'll see.

Thoughts On The Stimulus Package

The package announced today is disappointing. The Democrats have missed another opportunity to make good policy for the people they're supposed to represent. See my former employer for a good rundown of what's in the package and all the progressive proposals left out. Add to that list a lack of relief for state and local budgets, infrastructure funding, job training money, child support, etc. And the housing component looks bad, too.

There's talk that the package might be amended. This seems possible. Every statement on the package I've seen has been largely critical. And I don't think the hardline rightists are particularly happy either, as their beloved marginal tax rates have stayed the same. But few people are going to want to undermine such high-profile legislation, particularly if the bottom ever does fall out of the stock market.

I doubt a second package would be more progressive. This package is a significant revenue drain, it violates PAYGO, and Republicans seldom cooperate as much they are now. People who don't like this package should speak now, or you know.

Yet again the Congressional leadership, and perhaps the progressive community, has disappointed. They seem clueless. Do they not see how much leverage they have? Worse, they seem spineless. NOT ONCE have they had a real showdown with Bush and the Republicans. They give them far too much and ask for far too little in return. Why is the progressive movement letting them get off so easy?

Hillary Clinton Will Destroy America

A lot of ink has been spilled on how similar the Democratic candidates are. Not enough has been spilled on key differences. The differences in their fiscal worldviews in particular will be very important depending on the depth and scope of our economic problems

Clinton's is largely the same as Bill's. She's promised to balance the budget. She says she's committed to deficit reduction. She says she won't raise taxes beyond the 90s marginal rate for the richest tax bracket.

Obama's, as far as I can tell, has a progressive worldview. He's said he would not make a balanced budget a high priority. He hasn't, I think, ruled out raising taxes higher than Clinton did. But he's promised to pay for all of his biggest programs, and seemed to get defensive when Clinton accused him of the dreaded fiscal irresponsiblity during the last debate.

Edwards has said he's by far the most progressive. He's said he would increase the deficit guilt-free. He's said he wouldn't himself push for increasing taxes beyond the Clinton rate, but he wouldn't oppose it. And I don't think he's promised to pay for everything he's proposed.

Generally these worldviews aren't reflected in the candidate's policy proposals, which are largely the same, and probably for that reason the media hasn't examined them much. But they are very important.

Let's say the stimulus package doesn't work and the recession deepens. Congress will take up another package. The President will be a key negotiator, and their worldviews will probably shape what they push for.

For example, look at the modest package Clinton originally proposed. If she's in office, there'll be no Obama to pressure her to increase the price tag.

You could also look at Bush. He proposed a package larger than ALL the Democrats (though much less progressive). And guess what? He could give a shit about the deficit.

Point is, another fiscal-responsibility obsessive in the White House might not be aggressive enough when it counts. And they'll destroy America or something.

Hilary Goes A Courtin'

Who's that my darkening my doorstep? Why it's Sen. Hillary Clinton, Democratic candidate for pres'dent. She's come to court my liberal self, and she's saying all the right things. Like this NYT interview, she talks all abstract about government and how we need it.

Interviewed between campaign appearances in Los Angeles on Thursday, she said those problems were also keeping the United States economy from growing as quickly as it could.

“If you go back and look at our history, we were most successful when we had that balance between an effective, vigorous government and a dynamic, appropriately regulated market,” Mrs. Clinton said. “And we have systematically diminished the role and the responsibility of our government, and we have watched our market become imbalanced.”

She added: “I want to get back to the appropriate balance of power between government and the market.”

Ooo! I'm swooning! And look, I hear she's mean to Republicans!

But wait, I need to think about this. Last time a Clinton was in office the highest national priorities were balanced budgets and free trade- a retreat of government. How can a candidate who's running on 90s nostalgia implicitly advocate a break from the 90s?

Maybe Clinton's a one-night stand. Notice throughout the piece just how vague her promises for aggressive government are. Clinton still thinks the only way to make policy is by giving out tax credits- not the way a committed believer in the power of government ought to behave. And you know who else was mean to Republicans? Bill Clinton. The Clinton way in politics is to leave just enough rhetorical flexibility for her to make her break to the center upon becoming the nominee or while governing.

You can see them gearing up for it. They call Obama weak on fiscal responsibility and accuse him of wanting to raise taxes on the "working families" who make over $94,000 a year. Yet guys like Paul Krugman and Sean Wilentz aren't inspired to write column after column documenting Clinton's appropriation of right-wing and centrist claptrap.

Liberals: Clinton's going to use us and abuse us. She doesn't really like us and she never will.

Why Just Stimulus Package?

Since the European markets crashed yesterday, and everyone's waiting for the other shoe to drop, a stimulus package will likely be crafted by the end of this or next week. Already, I can't help but feel the Democrats dropped the ball by failing to set the terms of the debate and get out in front of Bush.

One area for improvement would be this obsession with "stimulus." Too many people agree that the recession is underway for stimulus to be the sole purpose. "Relief" might be a better way to phrase it. People struggling in recession-hit areas should get assistance. But they probably won't if a package is only intended to "stimulate" the economy.

Meanwhile, President Bush seems to have regained some of his old political touch, even though Paul Krugman says that many parts of his massive proposal wouldn't get the economy back on track. It might make things easier for a lot of people, particularly, in true Bush fashion, rich people. Bush has already shifted the debate, because the package seems attractive at first glance and it looks like he wants to help, while the Democrats are dragging their feet.

Anything could happen in the next few days, but the Democrats look like they're blowing another opportunity to actually do something. The people they represent will suffer the consequences.

Stimulus Package...Yes, That Will Do

Just about everybody and their mom has a proposal out to boost the economy and prevent the recession that in many places has already begun. Here's a few for your reading pleasure:

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

Economic Policy Institute

Center for Economic and Policy Research

Center for American Progress

They all sound pretty good, keeping in mind that it's probably too late to do anything significant. But they, as far as I can tell, all lack one essential, devious element. They don't slip in normal budget spending.

I'm gonna make a bold prediction: the Bush budget will suck, and the Republicans will be complete dicks and not compromise until the last minute, embarrassing everyone. But according to my former employer, there are already signs they might actually work with the Democrats on a stimulus bill. In good faith. I know, I kinda don't really believe it either.

But Republicans have their reasons, I imagine. The stimulus bill already has a national profile, and the few reps who haven't retired or been disgraced and care about being reelected are probably worried that opposition to anything called stimulus would be bad form.

And anything could be called stimulus. Seriously. I have no idea what that term really means. Bush has even been trying to say that making his tax cuts permanent is stimulus, which he hasn't gotten away with. But that's mostly because it's a long-term structural change. Budget money would only last a year.

So let's avoid the drama of another futile and embarrassing budget debate and get some of it over with while the time is right.

Obama and The New New Left

When Sen. Barack Obama emerged as a Democratic presidential candidate, a good many people on the center-right cottoned to him. And they mostly still support him. But now some are having second thoughts, because he's actually pretty liberal.

David Brooks on Obama:

His weakness is that he never breaks from his own group. In policy terms, he is an orthodox liberal. He never tells audiences anything that might make them uncomfortable. In the Senate, he didn’t join the Gang of 14, which created a bipartisan consensus on judges, because it would have meant deviating from liberal orthodoxy and coming to the center.

Yet at the same time, commentators and activists on the left are having doubts about Obama's liberal credentials. Paul Krugman's probably the most visible of this camp, but Bob Kuttner's article today in the LA Times summarizes their doubts well:

Barack Obama has positioned himself as the candidate with a great life story who rises above partisan divides. But he has stumbled on the two key pocketbook issues of Social Security and health insurance. Obama bought the much exaggerated story about Social Security's coming insolvency, and proposed payroll tax increases not just on the rich but on the upper middle class as well. His health insurance plan fails to insure everyone. He is capable of talking like a bold progressive, but his senior economic advisers -- University of Chicago professor Austan Goolsbee and Harvard's David Cutler -- are both economic centrists infatuated with markets.

Both of these smart people can't be right. Or can they? Obama, I think, is perceived so differently because he's attempting a balancing act. He's making subtle gestures to both groups to show he's listening to them, that he's on their side. And recently he's been getting caught.

But Obama is neither the centrist the left sees nor the liberal the centrists see, but an entirely new type of politician that's yet to be categorized- someone who'll bring left, center-left and center-right together in a strong coalition. Unlike the Clinton coalition, it wouldn't be necessary to sell one faction out to gain another, nor would it be necessary to excessively co-opt conservative rhetoric and policy to get elected. Independents and moderates are up for grabs, thanks to Bush and Co., and I think Obama wants to seize the opportunity without losing liberals. Read this Mark Schmitt piece for an even better explanation of this basic idea.

Hopefully, it will all be in the service of transformative liberal policy. Obama has explicitly promised that, but sometimes it feels uncomfortably reasonable to have doubts of a slightly different sort. The entire thing could fall apart if he goes too far one way and not the other. And both the left and the center are on watch.

There Will Be Blood and the Self-Made Man

I just saw the movie "There Will Be Blood." It seemed to mock the myth of the virtuous self-made man, which I think is a very powerful and important part of our culture. The main character is a self-made oil businessman who's deeply resentful and cruel but regretful. Greed and egoism alienates the people he was closest to- well, that, and violence that's so extreme and absurd that it makes him look more foolish than evil.

This has some timely political relevance. People like him populate the ultra-conservative movement that's now losing its hold on power. Sidney Blumenthal's "The Rise of the Counter-Establishment" offers what I think is the best portrait of this type of political personality. I've excerpted a passage below.

The Sunbelt entrepreneurs possess neither authority endowed by inheritance nor authority stemming from bureaucratic function. For almost all Sunbelt entrepreneurs, social status is derived entirely from crisp new money, not any prior rank in the community. Often their communities are new and their public leadership untested.....

The Sunbelt entrepreneurs generally don't view the corporation as a social institution with communal obligations. Instead they see it as the projection of an individual: they preach economic egoism. This new plutocracy lacks both the patrician heritage of nobless oblige and the managerial instinct for conformity. To the entrepreneurs, private success is the fulfillment of social responsibility. Members of the larger community, they believe should strive to emulate their example and become successful, too. Work-and-win is the way for everybody.

The entrepreneurs identify with an old version of business ideology, which they believe is completely contemporary. To them, free-market doctrine is autobiography. For the most part, they think of themselves as country boys who have made good in the city Entrepreneurs believe that the American frontier is still vibrant in the Sunbelt. They see themselves near the beginning of time, the New World still unexplored, its riches barely tapped. Free enterprise, individualism, survival of the fittest- these are their dogmas. they believe that this is the true Americanism and that the inherent legitimacy of go-getters derives from universal truths. If the entrepreneurial worldview isn't correct, the the very terms of American success that made this country great are wrong. And that can't be.

Although the Sunbelt entrepreneurs have accumulated great wealth, they are envious and resentful of the Eastern Establishment, which they equate with the Liberal Establishment. the pervenu entrepreneurs tend to be practical men who are often obsessed with the prerogatives of caste superiority, especially those they may not possess, such as an Ivy League education. their own rise is recent, a postwar phenomenon, and they feel excluded because of an Eastern Establishment monopoly of prestige and political power. To be wealthy and yet to be an outsider engenders an extremely powerful emotion of resentment.

Somebody Tell David Brooks That Trickle Down Economics Didn't Work

Let's start this blog off by picking on an easy target: a David Brooks column on fiscal policy.

Brooks thinks tax cuts are old hat, which is good, but in the process he makes factual mistakes and an illogical argument.

In 1974, a group of economists and journalists got together in a bar and launched supply-side economics. It was a superb political and economic package. It addressed a big problem: stagflation. It had a clear policy focus: marginal tax rates. It celebrated a certain sort of personality: the risk-taking entrepreneur. It made it clear that the new, growth-oriented Republican Party would be different from the old, green-eyeshade one.

Supply-side economics had a good run, but continual tax cuts can no longer be the centerpiece of Republican economic policy. The demographics have changed. The U.S. is an aging society. We have made expensive promises to our seniors. We can’t keep those promises at the current tax levels, let alone at reduced ones. As David Frum writes in “Comeback,” his indispensable new book: “In the face of such a huge fiscal gap, the days of broad, across-the-board, middle-class tax cutting are over.”

A more plausible explanation is that tax cuts for the rich also have been shown, especially since the Bush tax cuts failed to promote strong growth, to be ineffective growth policy, while highly effective at increasing the take-home pay of the very wealthy. If they were more effective growth policy, we would be compelled to keep reducing marginal rates. We would always find more regressive ways of financing social insurance programs, whose problems Brooks also tends to exaggerate and distort.

And income tax rates don't have much to do with the viability of these programs. Rather, it's discretionary spending -defense, education, etc.- that's much more at risk when marginal rates are cut, because that's what income taxes are supposed to finance. And most experts now believe that health care costs unrelated to demographic change are the biggest problem facing the nation.

These distinctions are important, but Brooks ignores or contradicts them.

And there's no consensus that the Reagan tax cuts actually addressed stagflation, while there's almost unanimous agreement that monetary policy changes had a strong positive influence. Europeans countries, for instance, have dealt with economic crises without reducing marginal tax rates significantly.

Anyway, I shouldn't be too hard on the guy. The point of Brooks' column is that the GOP should help workers more. I want the Republican party to help workers more, too. But Brooks then goes on to make the case that the Republican presidential candidates are paying more attention to everyday economic problems.

This is a dubious idea. First, nearly all of the GOP candidates have promised to extend the President's tax cuts and to continue fighting wars and occupying countries in the middle east. The most politically likely way to finance a pro-worker agenda would be to do the exact opposite.

And second, as I mentioned above, and which Brooks doesn't mention, is that the GOP's highest priority is to extend all the Bush tax cuts, including ones that exclusively benefit the wealthy. This is not the behavior of a party truly concerned with the middle class.

In sum, this column is a great example of Brooks' writing. He's got a keen eye for politics, but is a policy lightweight and a bit of a hack for the GOP. He's just not worth listening to when he writes about fiscal policy.