‘We R in Control’ Category Archive
Rick Santorum’s home turf is blue
This crazy blue football field is home to as many national championships as Republican nominations that Rick Santorum will win.
Mitt Romney lost two more states yesterday, finishing third in both Alabama and Mississippi. Rick Santorum won both states, which were seen as Newt Gingrich’s last chance at relevance; he’s apparently pressing on regardless, though it certainly seems that doing so hurts Santorum much more than it does Romney. Despite lackluster performances in strongly conservative states, Romney’s still basically on track to secure the nomination at some point, but it’s probably going to take winning some of the big, winner-take-all states later in the calendar. That means there’s theoretically still time for a Santorum miracle — he needs to win a significant majority of remaining delegates to actually secure the nomination before the convention — or that we could be heading for the ultimate Washington press corps fantasy, the brokered convention.
As Ed Kilgore notes, relaying comments from Jonathan Bernstein, party elites retain considerable power in the nominating process. They want Romney, and they have for a long time. Whatever happens in traditional primary states, there are enough delegates chosen at county- and state-level conventions (that is, the later parts of the caucuses that actually matter) to keep things slouching toward Romney if the voters don’t come through. But what happens if the party bigwigs change their minds? What might make Santorum suddenly palatable?
Romney’s big selling point has always been electability, and it’s been especially prominent since he’s had to focus on an opponent whose last election was a 17-point loss. But the more he tries to balance appeals to the far-right of the GOP primary electorate and general-election moderation, the tougher it becomes to secure his own base going into the general election. With the economy picking up and Barack Obama looking like more of a favorite, GOP elites might start thinking not just about who they want as President (it’s still Romney, and will continue to be), but also about damage-mitigation in the event of a loss. I don’t think there’s any question that a Santorum loss to Obama is better than a Romney loss for the future of the Republican Party; frankly, a Romney loss could lead to the kind of intra-partisan shake-up we haven’t seen since the Dixiecrats switched sides. That he wasn’t conservative enough to win would be the rallying cry of the right going into Obama’s second term and the 2014 and 2016 campaigns. A Santorum loss wouldn’t necessarily push the party back toward the center, but it would provide leverage for those trying to pull it there.
But let’s be clear: A flood of elite abandoning Romney for Santorum is the only way Santorum wins the nomination. Romney might not win it cleanly or anytime soon, but if the party chiefs want him, they’ll find a way to get him before the convention. The brokered convention dream is an illusion in modern politics, in much the same way the small-conference national college football champion dream is an illusion pursued by so many sports reporters and pundits. Like the Boise State Broncos, Rick Santorum can only win if the system wants him to win, and right now it doesn’t.
Filed: We R in Control || 16:07, March 14 || View Comments
TelePrompted
There’s a lot of interesting stuff in HBO’s “Game Change,” a dramatized version of the story of the McCain campaign’s selection of Sarah Palin in 2008. But as someone who spends a lot of time sorting through the mythologies and shibboleths of both the liberal and conservative blogospheres, what most caught my attention was two references to TelePrompters.
If you’re not up to speed on why this would grab me, allow me to lay out perhaps the silliest of the tribal markers currently in vogue on the American right. It is taken as a truism by many conservatives that Barack Obama is dumb and not much of a speaker, and it’s only through the aid of a TelePrompter that he’s able to come off as so eloquent. Without the TelePrompter, he’s just a regular guy, or maybe not even that. This is part of a larger, racially driven narrative that suggests Obama only got into the universities he attended because of affirmative action, or at times that he actually didn’t go to either Columbia or Harvard. Offhand references to TelePrompters have been big laugh lines in conservative speeches for the last several years, despite the fact that every national politician since the invention of the device has used it.
What I hadn’t put together previously, was that this weird obsession might derive from some cockeyed Sarah Palin origin myth. Until “Game Change” got to Palin’s convention speech, I’d forgotten that the TelePrompter supposedly died on her halfway through, meaning she just winged it the rest of the way. I don’t buy this — the Palin portrayed earlier in the film doesn’t seem like the sort to be able to memorize her entire speech, and the Palin we saw in real life doesn’t seem like the sort to be able to string together a coherent 10-15 minutes to fill out her time slot — and Politico disputed it at the time, but a myth is a myth. Later in the film, Palin demands the opportunity to give her own concession speech and orders a campaign staffer to “load it in the TelePrompter,” and of course she and every other national Republican are frequent TelePrompter users.
Several years later, cue Rick Santorum calling for the outlawing of presidential candidates using TelePrompters. Why? “Because all you’re doing is reading someone else’s words to people.” Presumably President Santorum will have no speechwriters.
Filed: We R in Control || 15:31, March 12 || View Comments
Safe seats
Nancy Pelosi is calling for an investigation into Anthony Weiner’s sexting habits, making a pretty clear show of throwing him under the Democratic caucus bus after his press conference admissions. It presents an interesting wrinkle to the notion that Weiner should just try to ride this out, since he’s in a “safe” seat. This was the same logic that applied to Senator David Vitter, a conservative Republican in conservative Louisiana, who won re-election in 2010 despite being revealed as a prostitute-frequenter. But for Weiner, if Pelosi and the national party turn against him, suddenly his seat may go from safe — in that it’s a strongly Democratic district that is highly likely to elect whomever the Democratic nominee is in 2012 — to dangerous — in that its general election safety allows the party to feel free to support a primary challenge against Weiner, knowing the challenger would likely win the general election. It’s a good illustration that a “safe” seat is simply one in which party power players, rather than unaffiliated voters, have the most sway.
Filed: We R in Control || 21:05, June 7 || View Comments
Probably the biggest exaggeration maybe in American history
Condi Rice on George W. Bush’s bullhorn speech:
“But President Bush had at Ground Zero probably the most important moment maybe in American history. It was when this wounded nation watched their commander-in-chief stand on that rubble and say that they will hear us, we are going to avenge this.”
I suppose it could go without saying that this was said on Fox News.
Filed: We R in Control || 18:33, May 3 || View Comments
What we can’t do
I try to be optimistic about the potential for political and social change, especially in the light of the tremendous democratizing possibilities afforded by the Internet. My optimism is tempered by cynicism, to be sure — I never bought into the Obama hope hype, in part because I did buy into it in 1992 (in my defense, I was only 13 then). But still, this just crushes the soul:
Most Americans know about that budget. What they don’t know is that there is another budget of roughly equal heft, traditionally maintained in complete secrecy. After the financial crash of 2008, it grew to monstrous dimensions, as the government attempted to unfreeze the credit markets by handing out trillions to banks and hedge funds. And thanks to a whole galaxy of obscure, acronym-laden bailout programs, it eventually rivaled the “official” budget in size — a huge roaring river of cash flowing out of the Federal Reserve to destinations neither chosen by the president nor reviewed by Congress, but instead handed out by fiat by unelected Fed officials using a seemingly nonsensical and apparently unknowable methodology.
Now, following an act of Congress that has forced the Fed to open its books from the bailout era, this unofficial budget is for the first time becoming at least partially a matter of public record. Staffers in the Senate and the House, whose queries about Fed spending have been rebuffed for nearly a century, are now poring over 21,000 transactions and discovering a host of outrages and lunacies in the “other” budget. It is as though someone sat down and made a list of every individual on earth who actually did not need emergency financial assistance from the United States government, and then handed them the keys to the public treasure. The Fed sent billions in bailout aid to banks in places like Mexico, Bahrain and Bavaria, billions more to a spate of Japanese car companies, more than $2 trillion in loans each to Citigroup and Morgan Stanley, and billions more to a string of lesser millionaires and billionaires with Cayman Islands addresses. “Our jaws are literally dropping as we’re reading this,” says Warren Gunnels, an aide to Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. “Every one of these transactions is outrageous.”
But if you want to get a true sense of what the “shadow budget” is all about, all you have to do is look closely at the taxpayer money handed over to a single company that goes by a seemingly innocuous name: Waterfall TALF Opportunity. At first glance, Waterfall’s haul doesn’t seem all that huge — just nine loans totaling some $220 million, made through a Fed bailout program. That doesn’t seem like a whole lot, considering that Goldman Sachs alone received roughly $800 billion in loans from the Fed. But upon closer inspection, Waterfall TALF Opportunity boasts a couple of interesting names among its chief investors: Christy Mack and Susan Karches.
Christy is the wife of John Mack, the chairman of Morgan Stanley. Susan is the widow of Peter Karches, a close friend of the Macks who served as president of Morgan Stanley’s investment-banking division. Neither woman appears to have any serious history in business, apart from a few philanthropic experiences. Yet the Federal Reserve handed them both low-interest loans of nearly a quarter of a billion dollars through a complicated bailout program that virtually guaranteed them millions in risk-free income.
The rich aren’t like you and me, and we live in a system designed to keep it that way.
Filed: We R in Control || 13:59, April 17 || View Comments
Romney’s slalom toward the White House
Josh Marshall notes that Mitt Romney has given a thumbs-up to Paul Ryan’s plan to end Medicare:
Two contenders, Pawlenty and Daniels, haven’t done more than say kind things in general. But most have said they’re down with it. And Mitt Romney in particular has signed on for the whole thing — which means he’ll go into the 2012 primary and possibly the general election as supporting the abolition of Medicare. And that’s a tough thing to carry, as it should be.
I’m going to be really curious to see what sort of follow-up questions he gets on that position and if anybody is able to get a clearer statement out of Pawlenty on this critical issue.
My guess? No follow-up questions of any sort, unless the impossible happens and Ryan’s flight of fancy becomes a real bill. We’re presently about eight and a half months from the first ballots being cast in the 2012 primaries, and probably six months from the general public paying much attention. Anything that a candidates says now, but doesn’t want to revisit later, about an early-2011 proposal that goes nowhere will simply disappear.
But still, Romney makes an interesting case to watch in this context. He has famously held every position on many issues, and gained favor among elites for his technocratic seriousness. My own view of the 2012 race is that a Romney nomination requires him to consolidate the remaining “serious” Republican technocrats, while the other candidates fight over the far right. There are a lot of voters on the far right, but if even two strong candidates persevere over there, Romney can likely win what he needs for the nomination. And my supposition is that, for the technocrats that make up Romney’s base, what he says doesn’t really matter. They know his political operation based on its personnel, not his public statements, and they know how he’ll govern because he’s just like them — the new H.W. Bush that we the party and the country so desperately need. If he has to say he likes the idea of killing Medicare, or that Ryan’s near-future projection of 3% unemployment is reasonable, well, what candidate hasn’t had to say some silly things to get elected? This could actually be a benefit for Romney, because due to his past flip-floppery, nobody is likely to believe he actually supports the Ryan plan anyway. Once he secures the nomination, he can get the party in line and we’ll just quit talking about such ridiculous things.
Filed: We R in Control || 11:52, April 14 || View Comments
Aspiration, ignorance and support for wealth redistribution
I’ve been sitting on this post by Kevin Drum for a week trying to figure out how to get through my response to its core idea without writing 20 pages. Drum (and Ezra Klein before him) focuses on the idea that private sector workers’ envy of public sector workers’ job security is at play in people’s responses to recessions. Now, I’m not entirely sure I buy this as a central feature, given that the general public has come to bat for the public employee unions during this recent unpleasantness in Wisconsin, but this is really a jumping off point for something sort of related.
Both Drum and Klein share a chart showing changes in private and public sector employment during the Obama Administration. The public sector looks fairly flat, though gradually declining, compared with the private sector, which cratered but has been crawling back up. Since roughly March 2010, they’ve been moving toward convergence, with the exception of the one-month census hiring spike. But when you ask the public about this, or when you listen to Republicans talk about it, they have no idea what’s actually going on. So here’s where I’m going with this (and this is where I decided to just delete a lot of explanatory material):
Do people really see themselves as someday being rich?
Kind of a logical chasm there, I know. But when we hear redistributionist policies mooted in the broad political discussion, we’re often told that the general public opposes increased taxes on the upper class because their aspirational feelings are so strong that they believe they will one day be subject to those confiscatory 39% marginal rates. A similar take is that middle class people, whether they see themselves as the future-rich or not, know that it’s just not fair to raise rich people’s taxes, even if they themselves will benefit. I imagine these are very comforting explanations if you are a rich person.
But allow me to be not-at-all the first to suggest that this is the result of rank ignorance. Some of this is well documented. Last year, a CBS News/New York Times poll found that just 12% believed their taxes had been lowered by Obama — in reality, 95% of Americans’ taxes had been lowered — and that an insane 24% believed their taxes had gone up. But OK, you could call this ignorance, but you could also call it being misinformed (by, say, certain news outlets) or a descent in agnotology. There are those with political and financial interests in convincing voters that what is false is true when it comes to taxes.
So how about this: To what extent can we suppose the typical American understands what benefits he or she receives from the public sector that are paid for with tax dollars? This goes beyond the facile argument about which states pay in more or less than they get from the federal government, with tendrils reaching out to the many spots noted by Tom the Dancing Bug — call it the “Keep the Government Out of My Medicare!” problem. Can we possibly have a meaningful debate about the trade-offs in expenditures and revenues if the public has no idea what’s happening in either of those categories?
Filed: We R in Control || 0:06, March 4 || View Comments
Elite cues in state judiciary elections
When it comes to electorates, there’s low-information, and then there’s low-information. State legislative elections features a lot of candidates that voters aren’t very familiar with, for example. An open city council primary like the one we just had in Carbondale — in which 16 candidates were whittled down to 12 for the general — is likely to rely on personal networking as much as anything else. But judicial elections are another beast entirely: Most people don’t really get what judges do, particularly at the appellate level and above (see, for example, Gregory Casey’s “The Supreme Court and Myth”).
So part of electing justices turns out to be lots of irrelevant scare-tactics about how Judge So-and-so wants to let child molesters loose in the schools, but another important part is elite cuing in the form of endorsements. You may not really know anything about the candidates or the job they’re running for, and you may not have the helpful cue of party identification, but it’s easy to sort out the latent partisanship of each candidate’s endorsements. Having said, Wisconsin will have a Supreme Court election in April, between incumbent David Prosser and challenger Joanne Kloppenburg. Let’s look at some of the prominent names in their lists of endorsers:
Prosser – Three former governors, a former lt. governor, apparently every Republican in the state legislature, many county sheriffs and DAs, and the county executive of Waukesha County
Kloppenburg – The county executive of Dane County, the mayor of Madison, several county supervisors, various aldermen, one state representative, and many private citizens.
Non-partisan election status aside, Prosser is the Republican and Kloppenburg the Democrat in this race. Notice the difference between how the parties understand this? The entire Wisconsin GOP is lined up behind Prosser, providing the kind of elite cuing that tells Republican voters how they should cast their ballot, even if they don’t know the first thing about Prosser or Kloppenburg as judges. Wisconsin Democrats, on the other hand, have apparently decided to sit this one out. Keep in mind, like all non-presidential elections, this is a turnout election — getting voters informed and interested in the election is the key to winning, particularly for a challenger. So where are the state legislative caucuses? Where is private citizen Russ Feingold and his considerable organizing and mobilizing weight? This is the first opportunity to demonstrate the energy of the anti-Scott Walker protests can be channeled into something sustained, and it has the added benefit of being a race that will impact the inevitable court decisions about what Walker’s trying to do.