Ah, The Good Old Days

Just a précis on budget negotiations today: the Big Five leadership has met over the last couple days, with more heat than light. The Governor remains committed to adding unrelated policy changes into any budget deal, items like changing contributions to public employee pensions, and tightening eligibility and rooting out fraud in programs like in-home supportive services for the disabled, Medi-Cal and Cal-Works. These items will do nothing to affect the current budget numbers, a fact Schwarzenegger has acknowledged, but he continues to leverage the impasse to capture long-sought goals. The Governor also has taken to lying about how these issues suddenly appeared in the negotiations, claiming that "reform issues were very clear" from the start, which is true if you define "reform" as "whatever Arnold wants it to mean." Karen Bass signaled her frustration with the Governor's clear unwillingness to close a deal by inserting unrelated items, boycotting today's meeting and questioning the Governor's figures on what reducing "fraud" would actually reap in savings (and since he's been consistently wrong on this front in the past, it's a good bet). The Governor did concede that suspending the Prop. 98 education funding mechanism would not be viable, but he keeps pushing for the amorphously defined "reform", no doubt because he thinks it plays well with the public (Matier and Ross transcribe that private polls show a jump in Arnold's approval ratings). This speaks more to the Democrats' inability to clearly explain reality than anything else, though Bass gave it a try today:

But Bass said she believes talks have gotten worse, not better. And she publicly blasted the governor for comments he made in Sunday's New York Times Magazine, in which he said he explained why he doesn't go home depressed by budget woes.

"Someone else might walk out of here every day depressed, but I don't walk out of here depressed," Schwarzenegger told the Times. Whatever happens, "I will sit down in my Jacuzzi tonight," he said. "I'm going to lay back with a stogie."

"He said he's happy to just go home and sit in his Jacuzzi every night," Bass said Monday. "I'm very, very concerned about this. He doesn't seem to be concerned that people are getting IOUs, and all he has to do is go out and blame the Legislature."

With squabbling and posturing like this, you'd think I'd agree with the Calbuzz take of why this crisis has dragged on for so long.

The constitutional requirement for a two-thirds vote of the Legislature to pass a budget is clearly the single most important reason why the Capitol is in a state of near-permanent political gridlock. But the two-thirds rule has been around since the New Deal and budgets used to get passed. So what’s the hang-up?

Power: Nobody’s got it.

The governor and the Legislature fulminate and flounder simply because no one in the Capitol in 2009 has the stature, clout or influence to cut a deal like Ronnie and Jesse or Pete and Willie once did.

Actually, the budget has ALREADY been passed once this year, closing a $42 billion dollar deficit. The new $26 billion dollar problem points to the unique nature of the current deep recession. I'd like to see good ol' Ronnie and Jesse and Pete and Willie deal with a $68 billion shortfall in the space of six months.

But beyond that, what is also missing from this analysis is the lengths to which the "big bully" theory of how to manage California government, where Democrats and Republicans get together and "cut a deal," is in a real sense RESPONSIBLE for the problem we now face. Take the assessment of the 1992 budget in the midst of a recession:

Contrast this year’s with the budget meltdown of 1992, the last time California issued IOUs. Although many of the same conditions applied, the big difference was that both Gov. Pete Wilson and Speaker Willie Brown wielded enough political authority to sit down in a room and cut a deal: Wilson took responsibility for rounding up Republican votes for tax increases and Brown for putting a lid on Democratic caterwauling over program cuts.

Somehow the inability of these major players to avoid a situation where IOUs had to be issued gets put to the side. But what Willie Brown did not use that clout to do, what no Democrat has done since 1978's Prop. 13 opened the structural revenue gap enforced by the 2/3 requirement for budgets and taxes, is actually solve the real problem. Instead he cut a deal, relying on a future asset bubble to bail him out again and again, and setting the table for today's crisis.

The 1980s saw the construction of the model. Sprawl was used to provide affordable housing. Special tax systems were set up to pay for suburban schools - the 1982 Mello-Roos Act - which were funded as long as there was enough credit to sustain sprawl. The loss of property tax revenue led cities to shift toward retail, further promoting sprawl (big box stores, malls). The jobs and spending created by sprawl provided enough prosperity to keep voters happy and the politicians in power. For those who were left behind - those living in the city centers, people of color, and the poor - 1978 had been partly about their political and economic marginalization, and the majority of Californians embraced it as part of the deal.

The ideal feature of the centrist system, from the view of its practitioners, is that it apparently neutralized the right-wing revolt of 1978. Low taxes could be paired with preservation of core services, albeit at a slightly reduced level, and thereby avoided another Jarvisite outburst. Well-paid consultants could run statewide TV campaigns to force the public to accept the consensus, without having to do the messy work of engaging a grassroots that would challenge the centrist status quo.

When the system came crashing down in 1991-92, the centrists found it possible to cut a deal to keep things going. Pete Wilson and Willie Brown had much in common, and were able to hammer out a package of tax increases and spending cuts that got a 2/3 majority. I don't romanticize that deal, but instead use it to show that it confirmed to the centrists that the system they'd built in 1980s could withstand crisis as long as everyone was willing to sit down and make a deal, damn the consequences.

However, the right-wing wasn't sleeping. In 1990 they managed to convince a bare majority of voters to approve Prop 140, a radical term limits measure that should have fallen afoul of the "revision" rule. But the real moment of change came in 1994, when the far-right in the Republican Party grabbed control of the agenda and launched a massive attack on Latino Californians. Pete Wilson wholeheartedly embraced the attack, and although it brought Republicans gains that year, it was a victory to make Pyrrhus jealous. Latinos registered for citizenship and to vote in massive numbers, and beginning in 1996 what had once been a state whose politics were fairly balanced shifted massively to the Democrats.

As long as Republicans stood a reasonable chance of winning control of California's legislature or its electoral votes, Democratic deal-cutting with Republicans could be sold to the base as a necessary move to stave off the Jarvisite hordes. But after 1996 this became less and less plausible. The California Republican Party became a captive of the extreme right, even more than usual, and in one of its last acts before leaving power in 1998, pushed through a massive and reckless series of tax cuts.

I don't disagree at all that we currently face a lack of leadership and clout to get deals done in Sacramento. Arnold Schwarzenegger has no role inside his own party, and Bass and Steinberg preside over a dysfunctional set of rule requirements and are term-limited out of gathering political capital. My point is that such leadership has ALWAYS been lacking from the Democratic side of the aisle, at least since 1978. When prosperity waned, it was clear that California's political structure would resist responsible governance at every turn. But instead of preparing for that eventuality by changing the rules, those good old boys of the past cut deals that exacerbated the problem. They forced the current crop of non-leaders into ringing up the state credit card and enabled the right-wing faction that holds a veto over economic policies. The center did not hold - but it could never hold. And the centrists who ruled California in the years after Prop. 13, the timid types who ran away from real solutions and put the state in the position to fail, should not be lauded. They should be ashamed.

I Love Me Some New Nixon Tapes

Another batch was released yesterday, and I wish I could fast-forward 40 years in time so I could drive down to Yorba Linda and spend the day listening to them all. Actually, I could telecommute, as the tapes, from 1973, can be heard right here.

One thing I love about the Nixon White House is the impression that they did almost nothing. Somebody would wander into the Oval Office, and Nixon and that figure, either Colson, Haldeman, Kissinger or Ehrlichman, would just shoot the bill with the President for about 45 minutes or so. It sounds less like the White House and more like The Office. I mean, this, from the Nixon Library, sums it up:

Other notable individuals on these tapes included Republican National Committee Chairman (and future President) George H. W. Bush, House Minority Leader (and future President) Gerald R. Ford, Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, journalist Barbara Walters, film director John Ford, professional golfer Arnold Palmer, conductor of the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra Eugene Ormandy, “Truck driver of the year” Curtis C. Stapp, and Washington Redskins football coach George Allen and his family.

Obviously the big news hook has been Nixon's comments on abortion:

The tapes also caught his reaction to Roe vs. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion. In a Jan. 22 conversation with aide Chuck Colson, Nixon can be heard saying: "There are times when abortions are necessary -- I know that. . . . Suppose you have a black and a white, or a rape."

Nixon and Colson agreed that legalized abortion encouraged permissiveness.

"It breaks the family," Nixon says.

Please note that Loving v. Virginia was the law of the land for Nixon's entire Presidency.

But more interesting is this:

Nixon had promised "peace with honor" and pledged to withdraw American forces only when South Vietnam could defend itself. But if Nixon couldn't persuade Thieu to agree to his peace agreement, Hughes said, the American president would have had difficulty justifying his continuation of the war during his first four-year term, during which 20,000 American troops died.

"For domestic political reasons, Nixon needed to conceal the failure of his strategy of Vietnamization and negotiation," Hughes said. "If people realized that he had added 20,000 additional American casualties to the war, and the communists were going to win anyway, then it would have proved his critics right that he should have ended the war at the start of his (first) term."

And this, which is just classic Nixon:

On Feb. 23, 1973, he placed a call to future President George H.W. Bush, then the Republican National Committee chairman.

The call was "nothing of great importance," Nixon says, but he wanted to inform Bush of what he witnessed during his recent visit to the South Carolina state Legislature.

"I noticed a couple of very attractive women, both of them Republicans, in the Legislature," Nixon tells Bush. "I want you to be sure to emphasize to our people, God, let's look for some. . . . Understand, I don't do it because I'm for women, but I'm doing it because I think maybe a woman might win someplace where a man might not. . . . So have you got that in mind?"

"I'll certainly keep it in mind," Bush replies.

"Boy, they were good lookin' and bright," Nixon continues. And he had been informed, further, that "they're two of the best members of the House."

"Well, that's terrific," Bush says.

In addition to releasing tapes, the Nixon Library released a cache of documents, one of them showing that Mississippi Democrat John Stennis secretly approved of the bombing of Cambodia before Nixon carried it out in 1970.

In an April 24, 1970, telephone conversation with Sen. John C. Stennis (D-Miss.), who was then chairman of the Armed Services Committee, Nixon said the administration was going to provide arms to the Cambodian government to prevent its overthrow by a pro-communist element, and continue secret B-52 bombing raids, "which only you and Senator Russell know about." Richard Russell (D-Ga.) was the former committee chairman.

"We are not going to get involved in a war in Cambodia," Nixon reassured Stennis. "We are going to do what is necessary to help save our men in South Vietnam. They can't have those sanctuaries there" that North Vietnam maintained.

Stennis replied, "I will be with you. . . . I commend you for what you are doing."

ConservaDems, then as now...

Nixon is just a fascinating character sketch, and I wish I could marinate in all this material for a long while.

Jarvisism - A Tale Told By An Idiot

George Skelton has a punishingly absurd column today. He has in the past recognized that Prop. 13, and more importantly the Trojan horse of the 2/3 requirement for revenue hikes embedded inside it, has foisted much of the problems upon the state that it now faces. He recognizes that again here. But he then goes on to suggest that Arnold Schwarzenegger should take the attitude of "born-again tax cutter" Jerry Brown and treat our current "tax revolt" (which he takes as gospel from the results of last week's special election) by slashing services for all manner of struggling Californians. Skelton hints at a tactic of merciless cuts as a means to show the public the painful reality of Howard Jarvisism, but really he just sort of agrees with the conventional wisdom, which he plays a role in setting, that the voters rejected tax increases of any kind and now the Governor must do the serious thing of cutting all manner of state spending.

Let's take a look back in time and be clear about who's driving this conventional wisdom. California's political observers have been stuck in a post-June 1978 mindset for the past thirty years, scared to death of the terrifying spectre of Howard Jarvis, himself a bundle of contradictions. He was a Mormon who drank vodka. An anti-government crank who nonetheless ran for US Senate and Mayor of Los Angeles. A supposed defender of homeowners when at the time of Prop. 13 he was employed by the Los Angeles Apartment Owners Association. Jarvis was a liar and a fool. In the ballot argument for Prop. 13 in 1978, he claimed that school funding would not be affected by the amendment, and responded to the possibility of library services being cut by saying that "63 percent of the graduates are illiterate, anyway.” He had a disdain for the average Californian, and probably took up the mantle of property tax revenue caps after seeing his home at 515 North Crescent Heights Boulevard in Los Angeles increase in value from $8,000 to $80,000 in 35 years.

Prop. 13 addressed one specific problem - property tax assessments were growing faster than wages. But grafted onto the measure designed to slow down that growth were a series of proposals - shifting the balance of power from local to state government, capping commercial property with residential, and establishing the 2/3 requirement for revenue - that have gradually but steadily eroded the quality of life that previously made the state the envy of the nation and the world. In 1978 the state had enough of a surplus to paper over the immediate effects of Prop. 13. The measure was practically designed to drain that, and put an end to effective governance in the state. Today, businesses and homeowners benefit from public investment in infrastructure - sewers, roads, electrical lines, freeways, mass transit - without having to contribute to the improvements. And to get a true sense of how that attitude of, basically, selfishness, can be traced back to Jarvis himself, read this flashback from the 1979 budget crisis, and the anti-tax champion's march on Sacramento.

Into the volatile political atmosphere parachuted Howard Jarvis, the irascible co-author of Prop. 13 and the cranky embodiment of the tax cut movement. Jarvis and his posse came to Sacramento on June 7, the one-year anniversary of the measure; 30 years later, the episode offers a look back in time at some hints of what was to follow.

Jarvis, a burly and profane spud of a man, had come to deliver 150,000 computer-generated letters sent by tax-cut supporters to warn the Legislature, “We’re not going to let anybody get away with a new plot to circumvent Proposition 13.”

One target of his ire was Assembly Bill 8, which radically restructured California’s system of public finance and sent $5 billion from Sacramento to local jurisdictions. Still in effect in 2009, it cast the framework for many of today’s structural budget problems, by putting the state in the permanent business of financing schools, cities and counties.

Surrounded on the east steps of the Capitol by dozens of boxes containing the letters, Jarvis accused then-Speaker Leo McCarthy of a “plot” to undercut Prop. 13, and got into a beef with a reporter who asked him to be specific about the alleged conspiracy.

As a daily report of the incident had it: “Jarvis snapped angrily: ’I’m not going to list all of them. I don’t carry the bill numbers around in my pocket.’” [...]

As Jarvis spoke, a group of mothers who’d come to Sacramento to lobby for more spending for pre-schools began shouting at him: “What about the schools? They’re ending programs to help,” a woman from Azusa hollered.

“That would be your problem, not mine,” Jarvis yelled back. “It’s absolutely not so. Prop. 13 didn’t have any effect on the schools at all.”

Jarvis then walked into the Capitol, where he and his backers dropped off boxes of letters in legislative offices. All went well until he called on Assemblyman, later Congressman, Doug Bosco, who was meeting with a county supervisor and three fire chiefs from his district.

“We were discussing why there isn’t enough money to put out the fires,” Bosco said later. “In walked Howard Jarvis and I said, ‘Good, you can explain it to them.’”

“Jarvis insisted that reduced property tax revenues allowed by Proposition 13 were more than sufficient to finance essential services,” a future Calbuzzer reported. “When the chiefs asked Jarvis what specific cuts he proposed, he told them, ‘that’s up to you,” which set off “a heated exchange that lasted 10 or 15 minutes before Jarvis left…in a bit of a huff.”

“A short time later, Jarvis wandered by Governor Brown’s office, where he received a considerably warmer reception.”

Howard Jarvis had no interest in governing and even less interest in people. He treated budgeting only in the abstract, without detail and certainly without any projection of a human face on the consequences of his actions. He was a miserable, selfish old coot.

Only in California can this man be transformed from guy-shouting-at-the-end-of-the-bar status into a figure worthy of any respect, both by politicians like Jerry Brown and the political media. The assumption is that he led this grand movement that persists to this day, but his stature only remains because so few dared to challenge him on the basic facts. We have a government with the structural architecture of that selfish old man, but a population that simply doesn't think that way. Yet nobody has the courage or the leadership to actually point out that architecture, the main stumbling block to returning California to anything approaching fiscal sanity. Howard Jarvis, like a headless Ozymandias statue surveying a wrecked land, became a king because of the vacuum of leadership into which he stepped. His reputation is unassailed, and we are all poorer for it.

"Is There Anything Wrong With Saying Yes?"

New York Times reporters had a conversation with Barack Obama on his plane, where they actually asked him if he were a socialist. Obama answered no, explained the thought process behind his budget, and later, after pondering it, actually called the reporters back and said, "It was hard for me to believe that you were entirely serious about that socialist question."

As a statement of empirical reality, this is true. As Daniel Gross pretty expertly explained, the Bush tax cuts that Obama is allowing to expire would result in about 3-4 percentage-point increases in the two top marginal tax rates, which is about $4 a day for someone making $300,000 a year. And despite the media insanity around the issue, the other 98% that doesn't make over $250,000 would see a tax cut, making it hard to understand how you can call this an overall increase. People in that top 2% can whine about how they are being persecuted for their genius and talk about going Galt all they want - and I hope they do instead of just talking about it, we need elites that don't have a track record of breaking the global economy - but the kind of "burden" placed on the wealthy, who have it better in America than any other country on Earth, isn't even the burden their patron saint placed upon them in the 1980s, which they also whined about incessantly.

According to a recent Treasury Department study, Ronald Reagan proposed the largest peacetime tax increase in American history as part of a budget deal to get the federal deficit under control. The Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act (TEFRA) of 1982 was signed into law on Sept. 3, and most of its provisions took effect on Jan. 1, 1983.

During debate on TEFRA, many conservatives predicted economic disaster. They argued that raising taxes in the midst of a severe recession was exactly the wrong thing to do. "Every school child knows you don't raise taxes in a recession unless you want to make it worse," The Wall Street Journal's editorial page warned. Said Rep. Newt Gingrich, "I think it will make the economy sicker." The Chamber of Commerce of the U.S. said it had "no doubt that it will curb the economic recovery everyone wants."

Looking at the data, however, it is very hard to see any evidence that TEFRA had a negative effect on growth. Indeed, one could easily make a case that its enactment stimulated growth. As one can see, the economy's growth rates after TEFRA took effect were among the fastest in history.

I know that Paul Volcker's monetary policy at the Fed, a luxury we pretty much don't have right now, had a lot more to do with this, but the point is that the same defenders of the rich and powerful made the same statements about taxes then that they are making now.

But beyond the debates over opinions which are obviously ridiculous, there's a larger point that was touched upon in the follow-up question about socialism by the Times.

Q. Is there anything wrong with saying yes?

Only in a country where the balance of acceptable discourse has been so tainted and distorted that reasonable social democratic policies are completely forbidden from the conversation. And so you have Obama's advisers running to David Brooks to prove that they aren't crazy socialist radicals, but pragmatists. Which makes a certain political sense, but isn't actually true. In fact, the debate over the stimulus package was quite instructive in this regard. Obama released an initial bill that was too small for the task, perhaps assuming that the package would get bigger, as most spending bills do, as it made its way through Congress. Therefore they would not be saddled with the impression that they were expanding government as much as Congressional Democrats would. That's not what happened, and as a result, the stimulus is looking too small for the task.

Analysts increasingly view the administration's actions so far as insufficient given the scope of the problem. The stimulus package was designed to "save or create" 3.5 million jobs, according to the administration. But the nation has already lost 4.4 million jobs since the start of the recession. Many banks and other financial institutions, whose health is critical to the economy, are teetering, and the Treasury Department has yet to finalize the details of its plans to remove from their balance sheets the toxic assets dragging them down.

"It's premature to say we need another stimulus, but the economy is performing much worse than when [the law] was signed, and the odds are increasing that we'll need a bigger policy response," said Mark Zandi of Moody's Economy.com, who has advised Democratic lawmakers. "What we've learned is policy has been a step behind this whole downturn. It's important to get a step ahead."

It was well-known among economists that the size of the stimulus may have been too small, but that perspective was kept off the news. It was surely known to the Administration, however, which preferred a more cautious route.

The subsequent release of the budget, along with moving forward on long-sought initiatives on health care and energy, does seem bolder, and there are signs that Obama is learning from what may have been an initial negotiating mistake. But even this
"boldness" is being carried out along narrow technocratic liberal lines that becomes very clear from a look at the past:

Barack Obama's bold, ambitious budget plan proves that he is the true heir of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Consider Obama's Rooseveltian energy plan. In 1939, President Roosevelt decided to mobilize Americans to create a new source of energy: atomic power. Although he was urged to focus on government-funded R&D, FDR chose a different route. He wisely encouraged private capital to invest in atomic energy research by a variety of tax incentives. To make atomic power investment more palatable to private capital, FDR boldly chose to make all other forms of energy in the U.S. uneconomical, by slapping high taxes on kerosene and coal. With the money from the new federal Kerosene Cap and Trade system, President Roosevelt and Congress funded a small-scale federal research program, in the hope of attracting much greater private investment ...

Wait. What's that you say? FDR didn't do that? He poured federal money into the all-public Manhattan Project and created the first atomic bomb in a couple of years? He didn't tax kerosene to make it uneconomical and to encourage private investment in atomic power? [...]

All right, then, forget FDR. He was a socialist, anyway. Let Dwight Eisenhower serve as a model for the Obama administration. President Eisenhower authorized the biggest infrastructure program in American history, when he signed the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956. The interstate highway act created an elaborate system of private tax incentives and public-private partnerships (PPPs) to encourage private corporations to build national highways. To begin with, all U.S. highways were leased to domestic and foreign corporations for a period of decades. Second, all U.S. highways were set up with toll booths, so that American drivers would be forced to repay the corporate owners of the national highways every few dozen miles. Finally, a system of high-speed lanes with higher tolls was created, so that the rich could whiz down the road while middle-class and poor Americans were stuck in traffic jams ...

All right, what now, wise guy? So that's wrong, too? Eisenhower's national highway system wasn't based on tolls, leases to foreign companies, income-based pricing, and tax credits for private corporations? It used gasoline taxes to fund free public highways?

Free highways without toll booths, owned by the public, paid for out of taxes? My God. So the John Birch Society was right after all. Dwight Eisenhower was as much of a socialist as Franklin Delano Roosevelt!

The point here is that conservatives have so demonized the concept of the public commons, particularly inside the Beltway, that what is now considered a bold and socialistic policy shift - raising the top marginal tax rates 3-4%, investing in infrastructure with a mix of public and private money, using an individual mandate to keep insurance companies in the health care game, cap and trade - is actually a pre-compromised, market-friendly, neoliberal jumble that fits squarely in the center of the ideological divide. And this is essentially why the Army of Galts screams about socialism, to force the debate further to the right from the center where it is now situated.

I'm not totally blaming Obama for this. As a pragmatist, he is more interested in what is politically possible, and 50 years of conservative demonization has battered the ability to make anything that's not "market-friendly." In addition, members of his own party are even more cautious than he is and thus even more unwilling to do anything truly paradigm-shifting. But we have to understand the historical reality.

But a lot has changed since Wall Street imploded last fall. The great investment banks are gone, the U.S. has nationalized much of the financial system, and appears to be on the way to effectively nationalizing the automobile and housing sectors as well. In this environment, we need to consider some heresies, like the idea that the best way to provide a public good is not necessarily to pour subsidies on middlemen, and then bail them out with more subsidies when they fail at their public function.

The fundamental barrier today is the way that the issues are framed, by Democrats and Republicans alike. Thus the problem is defined not as making credit available for individuals and businesses, but as saving the banks and the shadow banking system. The goal is not to provide healthcare to all citizens, but to enable all citizens to purchase private health insurance. The objective is not to ensure universal access to higher education; it is to insure universal access to colleges and universities. In these and other cases, the means is confused with the end. The ultimate goal -- providing credit, healthcare or education -- is identified with the interests of non-governmental for-profit or nonprofit providers of that service. If these private institutions fail to provide the public service in a low-cost, effective and equitable way, then they must be subsidized even more. The idea of achieving the same public goals through simpler, more direct and efficient means that would cut out the middleman appears to be heresy to the Obama administration.

By the way, this is a centrist, Michael Lind, writing this. But one who is mindful of the past.

I grow fairly tired of the defense that "the President isn't a socialist; he isn't even doing anything that radical" used as a defense, when we're in a position with unemployment and the overall economic meltdown where we actually, um, NEED something radical done. And I think the country is prepared for that more than Beltway insiders think. So while I agree with the empirical assessment that Obama's positions are squarely in the center, and that the cult of Galtism is absurd, I don't believe that Obama's team is made up of pragmatists. Because pragmatists would look at reality and do exactly what's necessary, regardless of ideological concerns.

It's About Winning The Argument For Change

Michael Hirsh explains the current dynamic in Washington better than anyone else I've seen. Despite the President's belated attempt to reassert control over the agenda, it's important to figure out how this spun so out of control in such a short space of time. Hirsh nails it:

Obama's biggest problem isn't Taxgate—which resulted in the Terrible Tuesday departure of his trusted friend, Tom Daschle, and the defanging of his Treasury secretary, Tim Geithner. Nor is the No. 1 problem that the president can't seem to win a single Republican vote for his stimulus package. That's a symptom, not a cause. The reason Obama is getting so few votes is that he is no longer setting the terms of the debate over how to save the economy. Instead the Republican Party—the one we thought lost the election—is doing that. And the confusion and delay this is causing could realize Obama's worst fears, turning "crisis into a catastrophe," as the president said Wednesday.

Obama's desire to begin a "post-partisan" era may have backfired. In his eagerness to accommodate Republicans and listen to their ideas over the past week, he has allowed the GOP to turn the haggling over the stimulus package into a decidedly stale, Republican-style debate over pork, waste and overspending. This makes very little economic sense when you are in a major recession that only gets worse day by day. Yes, there are still some very legitimate issues with a bill that's supposed to be "temporary" and "targeted"—among them, large increases in permanent entitlement spending, and a paucity of tax cuts requiring immediate spending. Even so, Obama has allowed Congress to grow embroiled in nitpicking over efficiency when the central debate should be about whether the package is big enough. When you are dealing with a stimulus of this size, there are going to be wasteful expenditures and boondoggles. There's no way anyone can spend $800 to $900 billion quickly without waste and boondoggles. It comes with the Keynesian territory. This is an emergency; the normal rules do not apply.

But the public isn't hearing about that all-important distinction right now. And by the time Obama signs a bill—if he can get one approved—many Americans may have concluded that the GOP is right and that the Democrats have embarked on another spending spree, as if this were just another wearying Washington debate.

I think the Administration is starting to get this, perhaps because they see the more ominous warning signs of the economy on the horizon, and they're determined to take back the agenda starting today, using all elements at their disposal, including the bully pulpit and grassroots action. Heck, they're even writing blog posts at whitehouse.gov on how the plan would create 3-4 million jobs. This is a kitchen sink strategy, albeit a week or two late.

It seems to me that they let their foot off of the accelerator. There was a lot of talk during the transition about how economists and elites of all political ideologies knew something major had to be done, and they must have thought they would just coast to a quick victory on this plan. But that's not what's happening, as public support has melted away under a heap of Republican and media misinformation. The conservative noise machine forced an argument about small particulars rather than the need to have a massive job creation program as soon as possible to stave off disaster. The bill was pre-compromised and nothing like a Roosevelt-era New Deal but it would be enough to spur job creation, save a lot more jobs that would be eliminated, and face down the abyss of massive job loss and a deflationary spiral.

The Administration misread the tenacity of a conservative movement, which has no problem denying basic reality as a governing method, and which capitalized on Obama's bipartisanship fetish instead of a fetish of doing what works. They picked apart the bill and criticized tiny pieces instead of the whole. They disconnected the bill from the argument that the economy is in a nosedive and something must be done to save it. And while ultimately they may lose and something will be enacted, they will have won because they will preserve the fundamental argument that government spending is negative and suspicious while tax cuts are always positive and righteous. Their goal is to muck up the bill enough to discredit it and make it functionally inoperable, purely for reasons of party and not country.

Of course, at some level, why would Republicans be trying to drive the country off a cliff? Well, not pretty to say, but they see it in their political interests. Yes, the DeMints and Coburns just don't believe in government at all or have genuinely held if crankish economic views. But a successful Stimulus Bill would be devastating politically for the Republican party. And they know it. If the GOP successfully bottles this up or kills it with a death of a thousand cuts, Democrats will have a good argument amongst themselves that Republicans were responsible for creating the carnage that followed. But the satisfaction will have to be amongst themselves since as a political matter it will be irrelevant. The public will be entirely within its rights to blame Democrats for any failure of government action that happened while Democrats held the White House and sizable majorities in both houses of Congress.

Ultimately, you don't win any element of the progressive agenda in America through the back door. In secret conservatives can funnel massive amounts of money to contributors and hangers-on, use government as a profit-taking machine, pass legislation with all kinds of corporate giveaways and run roughshod over regulatory agencies. Progressives have to win the argument. It's a hell of a double-standard but it's the cross to bear for the party of the people. Nothing big has ever been done without a lot of people pushing on the outside, and without a forceful component of activism inside and outside of government making the case. I believe they call it leadership. And given the current economic straits, there's no other choice.

But there's a bigger problem here, one that the Obama Administration may not have seen coming, the underlying narrative to government for the last 30 years, one that has sustained through both Republican and Democratic victories. The great Rick Perlstein has a fascinating article about the late, lamented liberal Wisconsin Democrat William Proxmire, and his role in "shooting Santa Claus" - basically, planting the seed in our collective noggins that government spending is wasteful and unnecessary, that "in fact it will make things worse." This flies in the face of all reasonable macroeconomic thought, but talk of "porkbarrel projects" and something called the Golden Fleece Awards brought this contradiction into being, gave it power, and unleashed it on America. It's a ditch out of which we still cannot pull ourselves.

While re-reading old journalism by Tom Geoghegan, I found myself riveted by a piece of his from the New Republic in November of 1972, the same month George McGovern's landslide loss to Richard Nixon marked a major lurch in the long, slow slide of liberalism away from ideological hegemony. The piece was a profile of Wisconsin senator William Proxmire. Reading it, I began to reflect whether Bill Proxmire wasn't the most influential politician of the last 40 years—as the grandfather of the Clinton-era Democratic fetish for fiscal austerity.

Proxmire, who left public service in 1989 and died in 2005, may be best remembered—it's what I remember—for a monthly publicity stunt called the "Golden Fleece Award," bestowed upon what he would claim was the month's most wasteful and ridiculous pockets of government spending. The pundits fell in love with the notion's good-government pretensions, and for all I know the stunt did the nation some good paring the federal budget of waste, fraud, and abuse.

I suspect, though, the exercise was largely a silly waste of time. One of my professors in graduate school won a Golden Fleece award. Senator Proxmire awarded it for a supposed grant to fund her "mountain climbing hobby." Actually, she's one of the nation's most distinguished anthropologists. She has never climbed a mountain in her life, but used her field work among the Sherpas of Nepal to arrive at some of the most incisive theorizing extant on how societies work. Second-guessing the peer-review process of National Science Foundation grants made for nifty headlines. But it was also numbingly reactionary. According to the Wikipedia entry on Proxmire, the prizes sometimes "went to basic science projects that led to important breakthroughs." [...]

Indeed it's not hard to imagine how during the high tide of no-one-shoots-santa-claus-ism, things might have become rather decadent. The moral hazard is plain: If spending is good in itself, the door opens to boondoggles. The field was ripe, in other words, for Golden Fleeces.

Enter William Proxmire, filled with liberal good intentions, introducing a new story into the American political culture: We can do better. That the problem wasn't spending as such, but the misdirection and corruption of spending. Proxmire would quote his hero, the late liberal senator Paul Douglas, chastising their fellow liberals: "Say 'spend,' and they salivated." The source of the quote is significant: Even Paul Douglas,—who, in his days as an an academic economist, had done much the work establishing that it was sound fiscal policy to stimulate consumer spending—understood that things could go too far.

And so we've done a complete 180 in this country. Instead of recognizing that federal spending isn't always virtuous but is part of the overall economy, and vital in an economic trap when consumers and investors aren't ponying up, we've been beaten down by and consumed with far-right rhetoric about pork. So liberals say "we can do better" while conservatives say "we can't do anything." And since the middle ground is spending too little to matter, the country suffers in the process.

And, of course—this is where the "Santa Claus" idea transformed itself from a witty little metaphor to literal Republican principle—"conservatives" didn't cut spending at all. They ballooned it. Here were some contrasts between Reagan and Proxmire: His most useful Golden Fleece awards went to Pentagon expenditures. When Richard Nixon, in the spirit of Republican fiscal responsibility, proposed to lower the federal government's debt ceiling to $250 billion, Proxmire did him one better, saying it should be only $240 billion. Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush after him, provide the plain contrast: Make the idea of reigning in Pentagon spending anathema, utterly unpatriotic, and ignore responsible debt ceilings altogether. They did away with fiscal responsibility, under cover of the rhetoric of fiscal responsibility, only changing government spending into a channel for private pilfering instead of a function of the public good.

Alack and alas, William Proxmire: like it or not, your "critique of pork barrel Keynesians" greased the skids for this big con. You and your enlightened Dem budget-hawk comrades made the usual mistake: presume good faith on the part of the modern Republican Party. "One of Proxmire's favorite statistics," Geoghegan reported in 1972, "compares the rate of return on government investment with the rate of return on private investment. (The public sector falls short by five percentage points.) Rather than spend tax money to reach a social goal, he urges the use of tax policy to the same end." Sound familiar? Says today's well-dressed wingnut: tax cuts are the only responsible stimulus. Thought Proxmire: "Neither the Executive nor Congress is organized to make spending 'cost effective.' That rankles him." He convinced a nation. Now, concludes the well-dressed wingnut, government spending is inherently irresponsible. And the well-dressed Democrat half believes he must be right.

This is a story that has put liberals—"responsible" ones, "populist" ones, all of them—into a terrible bind. At this late date, decades since anyone in Washington would admit to believing that any government spending is useful spending, when flesh-and-blood Democrats in the White House like Bill Clinton proved themselves such responsible stewards of the public purse that the federal payroll went down under their watch, Barack Obama wants to do some spending. He wants to do it in a way Proxmire the liberal budget hawk would surely have signed off on: targeted, responsible, scientifically—sophisticated spending, on public-service jobs, spending that starts fast and automatically tapers off as the economy recovers.

And what is his reward? Republicans are able to parade themselves before our supposedly most responsible media commentators and proclaim, "Not in the history of mankind has the government ever created a job."

You have to do more than win an election. You have to win the argument. You have to tell people why your ideas are more worthy of their vote than the opponent's ideas. It cannot be style, or charisma, or superior resources. Not if you want big change. As Tom Geoghegan said at a chat with LA-area bloggers yesterday, people don't like taxes because they don't feel like they get anything for them in return. Instead of blaming those in government siphoning away that money to the rich, they blame the taxes. It's natural. And it becomes a terrible conditioned response, one that disrupts and distorts progressive change for our whole society.

We have to, in the short term, turn around the flood of calls and fight for this recovery plan. As the months go on, we have to continue to make the arguments, as we have on the blogosphere for years, to our lawmakers, and press them to make those arguments wherever they go. President Obama started this today with a simple statement.

In the past few days, I've heard criticisms that this [stimulus] plan is somehow wanting, and these criticisms echo the very same failed economic theories that led us into this crisis in the first place, the notion that tax cuts alone will solve all our problems, that we can ignore fundamental challenges like energy independence and the high cost of health care, that we can somehow deal with this in a piecemeal fashion and still expect our economy and our country to thrive.

I reject those theories. And so did the American people when they went to the polls in November and voted resoundingly for change.

Especially in the midst of this meltdown, we cannot sit back for a moment while the forces conspiring to maintain the failed status quo push ever forward. Forget about campaigning, this is governing. And while different rules apply, one thing is constant - we will never win the battle of ideas by sitting on the sidelines.

Call your Reps.

Bill O'Reilly v. Jessica Alba

And Alba wins. Big.

Alba and Fox TV show host Bill O’Reilly traded punches last week after the presidential inauguration. After Alba told a Fox reporter that O’Reilly was “kind of an a-hole;” he retaliated by calling her a “pinhead” for telling a reporter to “be Sweden about it,” assuming she meant Switzerland.

“I want to clear some things up that have been bothering me lately,” Alba blogged on MySpace Celebrity. “Last week, Mr. Bill O'Reilly and some really classy sites (i.e.TMZ) insinuated I was dumb by claiming Sweden was a neutral country. I appreciate the fact that he is a news anchor and that gossip sites are inundated with intelligent reporting, but seriously people... it's so sad to me that you think the only neutral country during WWII was Switzerland.”

Although Switzerland is more frequently cited as an example of neutrality, Sweden did indeed follow a policy of neutrality during World War II. History point to Alba.

Of course, O'Reilly thinks that our soldiers killed unarmed Germans in cold blood at Malmedy when the opposite was true, so he's not what I would call a WWII scholar. Or a scholar. Or smart.

Nixon's Id On Display

Coming out of reading Nixonland, I'm fascinated by his Presidency, and the fact that he used the Oval Office the way that a speaker would use Hyde Park, spouting off about whatever popped into his head. And he KNEW he was taping it! Yesterday the Nixon Library released 200 more hours of Nixon tapes, and I wish I was not working so that I could go down to Yorba Linda and listen to every one of them. Here's just one example:

-- On Dec. 9, 1972, Nixon talks to Colson about the appointment of building trades union leader Peter Brennan as secretary of labor:

NIXON: "The idea, they finally think the appointment of a working man makes them think we're for the working man.”

COLSON: “That's precisely it.”

NIXON: “They talk about all the tokenism. We appoint blacks, and they don't think we're for blacks. Mexicans. They don't think we're for Mexicans. But a working man, by golly, that is really something."

It takes a special kind of cognitive dissonance to complain about charges of tokenism while admitting that he's hiring a trade unionist for reasons of tokenism.

The AP has some more:

"Never forget," Nixon tells national security adviser Henry Kissinger in a taped Oval Office conversation revealed Tuesday. "The press is the enemy. The establishment is the enemy. The professors are the enemy.

"Professors are the enemy," he repeated. "Write that on a blackboard 100 times and never forget it."

The conversation was on Dec. 14, 1972, four days before the U.S. unleashed a massive bombing campaign on Hanoi and Haiphong aimed at getting North Vietnam to negotiate more seriously in peace talks.

"We're going to bomb them," Nixon told Kissinger and adviser Alexander Haig, green lighting one of the most controversial acts of the war. "We'll take the heat right over the Christmas period, then on January 3, it's Christmas withdrawal."

As early as 1966, Nixon was quoted as saying that Vietnam could not be won. He was bombing them into the Stone Age to get a better deal at the bargaining table, to get "peace with honor." This didn't work since he was inaugurated, but here in Christmas 1972, he's continuing with it.

The most obvious thing here is that all of the elements of the modern Republican Party are on display in Nixon's brain dump. The resentment, the anti-intellectualism, the demonization of academia and the press, the digging up of dirt (the big revelation is that Nixon's people knew about Tom Eagleton's shock treatments before it was made public), the siege mentality, the persecution complex, the bullying, the need to look tough, etc.

Of course, we had a chance to punish Nixon for his crimes, but we passed it up in the spirit of comity. Good move:

It's a good thing we decided for the good of the country not to play the blame game and to let bygones be bygones because it resulted in the Republicans completely changing their ways.

Dick Cheney, for instance, learned from Nixon's mistakes and completely repudiated Richard Nixon's imperial presidency and profane disrespect and operated with bipartisan good faith and total transparency as a result of the generosity with which Richard Nixon (and later Ronald Reagan) were dealt. It's a heartwarming story of the power of positive reinforcement, forgiveness and redemption.

Beware of Histo-tainment

I'm very glad that Matthew Pinsker penned this op-ed today taking a more critical look at Doris Kearns Goodwin's pop pseudo-history "Team Of Rivals". As a yarn, I hear the book is quite good, but as a piece of history it's not exactly true to the source. And since it's become accepted wisdom among the DC chattering class and the politicians they influence, that's a serious problem.

There were painful trade-offs with the "team of rivals" approach that are never fully addressed in the book, or by others that offer happy-sounding descriptions of the Lincoln presidency.

Lincoln's decision to embrace former rivals, for instance, inevitably meant ignoring old friends -- a development they took badly. "We made Abe and, by God, we can unmake him," complained Chicago Tribune Managing Editor Joseph Medill in 1861. Especially during 1861 and 1862, the first two years of Lincoln's initially troubled administration, friends growled over his ingratitude as former rivals continued to play out their old political feuds [...]

By December 1862, there was a full-blown Cabinet crisis.

"We are now on the brink of destruction," Lincoln confided to a close friend after being deluged with congressional criticism and confronted by resignations from both Seward and Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase. Goodwin suggests that Lincoln's quiet confidence and impressive emotional intelligence enabled him to survive and ultimately forge an effective team out of his former rivals, but that's more wishful thinking than serious analysis.

Consider this inconvenient truth: Out of the four leading vote-getters for the 1860 Republican presidential nomination whom Lincoln placed on his original team, three left during his first term -- one in disgrace, one in defiance and one in disgust.

The Village has more of a sense of bumper stickers than history, and Goodwin, whose scholarship is not exactly spotless, is a Villager in good standing, so this will probably pass through the Beltway without comment. But I hope someone in the office of the President-elect is paying attention. Pinsker doesn't even tackle the false equivalence between the Civil War and our day - the real rivals were seceding from the Union and massing an Army at the time. This was a moment that called for unity between anyone who wasn't a Confederate, necessitating Lincoln's choice - and it STILL DIDN'T WORK VERY WELL.

That is not to say that any of these rivals potentially in Obama's cabinet would create similar controversy. And I'm not talking about Hillary Clinton in this context - her political future would rise and fall on her ability to carry off positive results, and if she made peace in the Middle East her signature goal, the consequences would be very beneficial. But if you want to broaden out the analogy, is there that big a difference between the Republicans and the Confederates? I mean, this is really what Obama is talking about, even exploring, that ought to have you worried. Is it that wise to put people in the Cabinet who want us to be avowedly with them," as Lincoln put it?

Maybe the traditional media shouldn't keep parroting this concept when its application was actually flawed? Or is that the point, a back-door way to imprint bipartisan leadership on the new Administration?

Walking Gaffe Machine

Is it the self-assuredness or just the ability to rely on the compliant press that enables John McCain to bust out all these misstatements on a daily basis?

Adding to the total today is the idea that Iraq was the first major post-9/11 conflict... boy, I knew that the GOP forgot about Afghanistan, but I didn't know they TOTALLY forgot about it.

And then he tried to deflect Barack Obama's successful speech in Berlin today by saying that "I would rather speak at a rally or a political gathering any place outside of the country after I am president of the United States," apparently forgetting the events of a month ago:

However, on June 20, McCain himself gave a speech in Canada -- to the Economic Club of Canada -- in which he applauded NAFTA's successes. An implicit message behind that speech was that Obama had been critical of the trade accord. Also, McCain's trip to Canada was paid for by the campaign.

I could loop in the persistent and damaging reports about Randy Scheunemann working in close contact with Bush Library briber Stephen Payne on influence-peddling schemes, too.

If I were McCain I'd just pack it in and follow the route of William McKinley's front-porch campaign - never leave the office or the homestead, and for God's sake don't open your mouth anymore.

How The Media Learned To Bend Over Backwards

OK, so welcome to the main exhibit hall, where we just had a debate between Markos and Harold Ford. (who defended the Congressional vote on FISA by basically saying that the Constitution doesn't poll very well. I'll elaborate later.)

Right now I'm in the front row of Digby's panel on the media, with Rick Perlstein, Paul Krugman, and Atrios. Not a bad group.

Digby dedicated this panel to Molly Ivins, who called for "sustained outrage" on the part of the citizenry against the instruments of power, admonishing the media for its too-cozy respect for authority. Now we're on to Rick Perlstein, who is giving a little history lesson on how the media went awry. Back in the early 1960s, footage of civil rights marchers having hoses turned on them galvanized public opinion against repression and bigotry. But in 1968, when the Chicago police beat up antiwar protesters half to death, the public opinion was the opposite, "Right on for the cops," etc. There was a popular bumper sticker in the country at the time, reading "I Support Mayor Daley and His Police." The press, who considered themselves guardians of the public interest, started to consider whether or not they were prejudiced, elitist, not rooted in the heartland of America, biased toward young people and minorities. And it basically all went to shit from there.

This is going to be good. I'll update...

...Now we're on to the media's liberal guilt, and Spiro Agnew's series of speeches (written by William Safire) on the "nattering nabobs of negativism" and how the media is trying to tell ordinary Americans what to think. We're 40 years on and these pundits still are haunted by this. Old narratives die hard.

Paul Krugman is up. He says he was never told to stop writing what he was writing in the run-up to war through much of the Bush years, but he was told that he was making management nervous. In 2005, he was indirectly told to lay up a bit, and that "the election solved some things." He said that a lot of these failures of the media aren't exactly political. They go beyond politics. "It is better to be conventionally wrong than unconventionally right." The example is how nobody who was actually right about the war is allowed to comment about it, but that's also true with the housing bubble, etc. "There's something wrong with you if you actually figure this out too early." There's a narrow range of being counter-intuitive. It's acceptable, for example, to say "Bush is actually better on the environment than you think."

McCain Running The Zachary Taylor Campaign

I mentioned this yesterday, but it's important to ponder how John McCain either doesn't believe in recording equipment or has so much faith in the people doing the recording, i.e. the BBQ-stained media, that he has no problem saying 100% different things to different audiences. Conservatives hear "I don't support the DREAM Act," Hispanics hear the opposite.

When I was in high school, I remembering learning about Zachary Taylor, our 12th President, put up by the Whig Party almost entirely because of his military background. He would visit different areas of the country and give completely different speeches, citing his support of slavery in the South and his opposition to it in the North, among other things. It worked in 1848 because there wasn't a lot of regional spillover in how information was disseminated. But now we have things like the television, and videotape, and YouTube, and archives, and there's no way for the new "Old Rough and Ready" to be as successful with this tactic as the old one.

Or maybe there is. There's been such a balkanization of the media landscape, with so many people only referring to friendly sources, and there's been such a devaluation of facts in the age of Bush and his spinners who create their own reality, that McCain's campaign might figure they can lie with impunity, deny it when challenged, and never give it a second thought.

That's kind of chilling to think about.

Don't Know Much About History

Chris Matthews' brutal takedown of some robotic wingnut yesterday was notable simply for how easy it was. Apparently asking a conservative to define the words coming out of their mouth is a question on par with the final round of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.



Of course, what the wingnut is referring to above is the President's comments yesterday in Israel, trying to stick it to the Democrats by calling them Nazi-appeasers. He used the artful phrase "an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.’ in discussing the times in 1939, aware but unwilling to admit that he was alluding to Republican isolationist Senator William Borah of Idaho. What he appeared blissfully unaware of was the collaboration of his own grandfather, Prescott Bush, who reaped financial reward for him and his family (including his son Bush 41 and grandson Bush 43) through sitting on boards of companies who did business with the Nazis.

(By the way, this is the biggest gift George Bush could have given the Obama campaign, so much so that I almost believe it had to have been staged.)

But less remarked upon was this amazingly ignorant comment by John McCain in an interview with Matt Bai.

as we talked, I tried to draw out of him some template for knowing when military intervention made sense — an answer, essentially, to the question that has plagued policy makers confronting international crises for the last 20 years. McCain has said that the invasion of Iraq was justified, even absent the weapons of mass destruction he believed were there, because of Hussein’s affront to basic human values. Why then, I asked McCain, shouldn’t we go into Zimbabwe, where, according to that morning’s paper, allies of the despotic president, Robert Mugabe, were rounding up his political opponents and preparing to subvert the results of the country’s recent national election? How about sending soldiers into Myanmar, formerly Burma, where Aung San Suu Kyi remained under house arrest by a military junta?

“I think in the case of Zimbabwe, it’s because of our history in Africa,” McCain said thoughtfully. “Not so much the United States but the Europeans, the colonialist history in Africa. The government of South Africa has obviously not been effective, to say the least, in trying to affect the situation in Zimbabwe, and one reason is that they don’t want to be tarred with the brush of modern colonialism. So that’s a problem I think we will continue to have on the continent of Africa. If you send in Western military forces, then you risk the backlash from the people, from the legacy that was left in Africa because of the era of colonialism.”

Of course, there is no history of colonialism in the Middle East. Except for Algeria. And Jordan. And Iran. And Saudi Arabia. And Yemen. And Bahrain. And Oman. And Qatar. And The United Arab Emirates. And Iraq, whose borders were almost randomly drawn on a British map, which has led us to the instability we see today.

(McCain, by the way, was for talking to Hamas before he was against it, another example of torching the past.)

The worst thing the conservative movement has foisted on the country is a collapse of historical memory. Our civic education here is not so robust, and our civic knowledge of history is worse. This has given wide latitude for conservatives to create their own reality, and jabber away with "facts" that consist of shibboleths and catch phrases, which by now have been ripped of all meaning outside the Manichean "good" and "bad." That's what we saw with that shameful appearance on Hardball. That's what we saw by the President yesterday. That's what we saw from McCain in that interview. And that, sadly, is a part of America. The Poor Man says it best:

It’s all like this. Everything is just like this. Some blank young person who has memorized a 5″x7″ index card of focus group-approved phrases, yelling, yelling, yelling over everyone. And you can say what you want, and be as right as you want, but he’s going to keep yelling, and yelling, and yelling until you get sick of it, and at the end of the day everybody knows that Barack Obama goes to secret Muslim church. Everything is like this. An election won’t fix it. This rules the world.

Seriously, He's Setting The Bar of "Worst President" Way Out Of Reach

Dana Milbank turns his eye to the most powerful man in the world, who's wrapping up his reverse-Joe-DiMaggio-56-game-hitting-streak of a Presidency:

7:13 a.m.: The South Lawn. President Bush, determined to dispel doubts about his relevance, grants an early-morning interview to Robin Roberts of ABC News's "Good Morning America." Joined by the first lady, he fields hard-hitting questions about . . . the White House grounds. "It's a beautiful place," the president discloses. "In the spring, the flowers are fantastic. In the fall, the -- it's just such a -- kind of a place that's so fresh. In the winter, of course, it's got a lot of snow. [Laughter.] Summer is real hot, but it's -- we love it out here. It's beautiful."

7:58 a.m.: By e-mail, the White House Communications Office sends out its "Morning Update." It lists two events on Bush's schedule for the entire day: a "Social Dinner in Honor of Cinco de Mayo" and, an hour later, post-dinner entertainment. To react to the main news of the day -- thousands of deaths from the cyclone in Burma -- Bush sends his wife out to make a statement. She criticizes the Burmese government for its failure "to issue a timely warning to citizens in the storm's path" and "to meet its people's basic needs." Reporters, too tactful to draw parallels to New Orleans, quiz her instead about daughter Jenna's wedding, and the names of future grandchildren. "George and Georgia, Georgina, Georgette," the first lady says.

12:39 p.m.: The White House Briefing Room. On the podium, the understudy to the understudy to the substitute to the understudy to Bush's first White House press secretary is giving a sparsely attended briefing on what he knows about Burma blocking relief efforts ("I am not aware of that report"), about the awarding of the Congressional Gold Medal to a Burmese dissident ("no announcements at this point"), and about word that the Saudi crown prince is dying ("I have not seen those reports"). The news of the day thus dispensed with, the questioning turns to why West Point allows its graduates to play pro football immediately but the Naval Academy does not.

Meanwhile the country is veering toward despondency, with small towns literally falling off the map due to failed conservative policies.

"I don't know what to tell you about Muncie, but it's a dying town," says Ron Cantrell, working the cash register of a dusty liquor store on the south side of town, where things are bleakest. "It's almost dead. It's like a cockroach lying there with its legs in the air."

Cantrell, 51, says he'll be voting Democratic this election. He's not sure for whom yet, but Democratic for sure. Hillary or that guy, whatever his name is.

"As far as I'm concerned, the Republicans have turned things to [expletive]," he says. "I'm working two jobs now just so I can put gas in my van."

Cantrell talks about what it was like when his dad came up from the South, like so many others, to work in the parts plants in Muncie. How the city was thriving then. If people think this is Middle America, he says, they're wrong. Muncie doesn't represent Middle America anymore.

Probably.

"Well, I hope Middle America is a little better than what's around here," he says. "Otherwise, that's depressing."

Seeing these two articles back to back, the word that springs to mind is "decadence." The society is crumbling while the grand poohbahs of politics obsess over nonsense. And right at the head of this fall of the Roman Empire is George W. Bush, America's worst President by leaps and bounds. But let's not divorce him from his party; he is a symbol of failed conservative leadership that has revealed itself in clear ways.

Nixonland

Let me echo Bradrocket and Atrios. I'm about 100 or so pages into Nixonland and it's amazingly good. Rick Perlstein has a knack of finding the best contemporaneous sources, the ones which have completely fallen through the cracks of history, and resurrecting them to contruct a credible view of the political times as they were lived, in this case the era from 1965-1972. This book is the antidote to mawkish 60s love letters like Tom Brokaw's 1968. It gives the whole picture, from the silent majority and the hippie backlash on up, and it informs our politics, particularly on the right, up to this very day. It's also just a great read.

You should really order it.

I'll put a full review up when I'm done.

History

John Edwards is right.

It's time for me to step aside so that history can -- so that history can blaze its path. We do not know who will take the final steps to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but what we do know is that our Democratic Party will make history.

It's very heartening to have this choice of a black man and a woman. They are both game-changers who bring new voters to the process in a year when apathy is out. It's a very good thing that 1.7 million Floridian Democrats came out to vote in a contest that had absolutely no bearing on the Presidential race due to DNC rules. We are going to have record turnout in November, with more Americans than ever engaged in the process. That's always a good thing for progressives if they manage to capitalize on it.

I think Democrats were simply more excited about making history this year than go with a guy who ran an incredibly noble and forthright campaign. Considering that both Obama and Clinton borrowed liberally from Edwards' platform, there wasn't much distance on policy, and so that excitement and the historic opportunity ruled the day. What's ironic is that the best progressive fighter out of anyone associated with any of the campaigns is John Edwards' wife, who could run for any office and be a history-maker in her own right.

UPDATE: More on that progressive movement and the excitement that this election is engendering: Vote Hope's efforts in support of Barack Obama.

The Whole Head Of The Fascist Party Thing Just Slipped My Mind

It seems like the only counter-argument Jonah Goldberg and his defenders are able to make at the skewering of Liberal Fascism: At Least 3 Mix-ins For My Cold Stone Pistachio Ice Cream is that people haven't even read the book. This is amusing in the light that Goldberg clearly hasn't read any of the primary source material in making his argument. Saying that you "made a flub" by not knowing why Mussolini was called a fascist, when he created the Fascist party, kind of undercuts any possible argument you could hope to make about fascism. Furthermore, looking past inconvenient quotes from Mussolini like this:

Granted that the 19th century was the century of socialism, liberalism, democracy, this does not mean that the 20th century must also be the century of socialism, liberalism, democracy. Political doctrines pass; nations remain. We are free to believe that this is the century of authority, a century tending to the “right”, a Fascist century.

And the fact that he murdered socialists and liberals in Italy tends to undercut, you know, this idea that he was a big ole socialist.

Somebody should probably invest in a library card and maybe a backpack for something other than midday snacks before he decides that OTHER people need to read his deeply serious argument that's never been made with such care.

The Sellout on Iraq Funding Nears Completion

The delay of consideration of the FISA bill was a great victory for progressives to show that they can wield some institutional power, but as I said at the time, Harry Reid undoubtedly pulled the bill because he didn't want to mess up his plan of providing money for endless war in exchange for little.

The Senate on Tuesday night passed a spending bill combining funding for 14 Cabinet departments with $70 billion for U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

By a bipartisan 76-17 vote, senators approved the massive bill, which bundles 11 annual appropriations bills funding domestic agencies and the foreign aid budget for the budget year that began Oct. 1.

Earlier, by a 70-25 vote in the Senate, President Bush and his GOP allies won a major victory in passing a measure providing $70 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — without restrictions that Democrats had insisted on for weeks.

This was a renege on a promise not to take up Iraq spending until after the first of the year.

The budget battle actually ended up not being as severe as once thought; Democrats did end up reverting a lot of spending to their priorities (cutting all funding for new nuclear warheads, for example), and they used some "emergency" spending measures to keep in funding for veteran's issues that would have come under the knife. In the end the President did not stick to his budget number. And while I would have liked to have seen the pork removed, all pork is not created equal. "Pork" is sometimes a convenient code word for conservatives who really don't want any social services spending at all.

Democrats succeeded in reversing cuts sought by Bush to heating subsidies, local law enforcement, Amtrak and housing as well as Bush's plan to eliminate the $654 million budget for grants to community action agencies that help the poor.

That all, you see, is considered "pork."

But of course, the Iraq giveaway shocks the conscience. Especially because it used the FISA battle almost as misdirection, so that it could be snuck again with a minimum of effort. The Democrats got their spending bills done, but really got nothing major for this effort, like SCHIP, as they should have. This comes at a time when practically all of the factions in Iraq want us to leave, believing that the military invasion is the root cause of the security breakdown. So the Senate in their infinite wisdom signed the bill to keep us there indefinitely. And look at this little stab in the back from "I'm With McCain":

Twenty-one Democrats and Connecticut independent Joe Lieberman — who stood with Republicans at a post-vote news conference — voted with every Republican but Gordon Smith of Oregon to approve the Iraq funding.

I'd like to see him "stand with Republicans" permanently; can we get that to happen.

Dianne Feinstein, our West Coast Lieberman, took a powder on the vote - she was the only Senator not campaigning in Iowa to miss it. Even McCain managed to get back to cast his vote.

Now THAT'S leadership!

The continued funding of endless war, especially with nothing all that meaningful in return, is very dispiriting. It's hard to argue with a portrait of Democrats as a sort of placeholder, the Washington Generals to the Republican/corporate axis' Harlem Globetrotters, a safety valve so that people still believe they have some access to the system. And while I don't go as far as this writer, I do think this is an important historical note to keep in mind:

For progressives to take over the Democrats would be an unprecedented departure from the party's character. To understand this, one must first recognize that the sole Dem claim to being progressive is rooted almost entirely in the New Deal, itself a response to a unique crisis in American history. FDR recognized that to avert the very real threat of massive social unrest and instability, significant concessions had to be made to the working class by the ruling class. Government could act to defend the weak, and to some extent to rein in the strong, but this was all in the longterm interests of defending the existing social order.

Before FDR, the Dem Party had no progressive record whatsoever; and after FDR, though the New Deal coalition survived until the mid-1960's, it did so with a record of achievement that was restrained compared to the 1930's. After passing Medicare in 1965 the party reverted to its longterm pattern, and since then, there has again been no progressive record to speak of. The party's progressive social reform was thus concentrated mostly in the 1930's, with some residual momentum lasting until the mid 60's. The party's "progressive period" was thus 1) an exception to the longer term pattern; 2) a response to a unique crisis; and 3) has in any case been dead for over 40 years.

I think it's important to remember that progressives are working against the tides of history. However, the naked corruption of this Administration and the trashing of the Republican brand has given an opening, however slight. Sadly, Democrats are doing nothing with that opening, which is why Ron Paul is sucking up so much oxygen among the hopeless, the marginalized, the Nader/Perot "mad as hell and not going to take it anymore" caucus that could be actually a powerful cog in the progressive wheel. When Republicans offer authoritarianism and Democrats offer milquetoast in response, of course people will seek out a Diogenes and imbue him with saintliness.

This will take a generation to break, but the very fact of Paul's existence shows that it's far from impossible. Defeatism is powerful and has the benefit of never having to advocate for something, just against everything. I'm angry right now, but in the words of the labor leader Joe Hill, Don't Mourn, Organize.

The War On Terror Is Just Like The Battle Of Hastings

He really will link anything to his personal war, won't he? Now the war on terror is the same as the Revolutionary War? Is Al Qaeda engaging in taxation without representation?

This President really thinks in those hubristic terms where everything can be related back to him. George Washington and Abraham Lincoln only get credit for for being like George Bush, not for any of the accomplishments they made before George Bush was born.

Really, the only President who bears any resemblance to this one is William Henry Harrison, who spent almost his entire term in office suffering from delerium.