Month: November 2009

A father and a son like this.

Ben Smith scoffs at the softball "questions" Greta lobbed at Palin last night. It seems to me that Fox is no longer a news channel and no longer an opinion channel. It's a propaganda channel in which the hosts are actual leaders of various Republican party constituencies or mouthpieces for certain Republican politicians (van Susteren long ago abandoned any pretense of not being a p.r. employee for the Palins) and use the channel for political organizing. So we don't even have feisty debates any more. We have cloying propaganda events. 

It's a free country and they can do what they want. But Fox News isn't even opinion journalism in any normal sense any more.

Susannah Vila sketched out the meta-narrative of Brownstein's White House-recommended post:

Critics will undoubtedly suggest that this is another sign of Obama giving preferential treatment to the reporters who are more supportive of his policies. Or, as one TPM commenter suggested , perhaps this was a carefully crafted ploy by both Brownstein and Obama to prepare "liberals for the dropping of the public option." On the other hand, when a president regularly links out as well as getting linked to, it's also a sign that he gets the "ethic of the link–connecting people to knowledge wherever it is;" he's paying attention, and hopefully responding, to the comments, criticisms and suggestions that are buzzing around the public sphere.

Maureen Dowd's column today hits on something she's been tuning into for a while. Dowd's instincts about human character are foolish to bet against. She has essentially read every recent president correctly from the get-go as types. And she has always seen Obama as a bit of a cold fish, aloof, too unwilling to punch back, too arrogant to explain himself too much. MoDo worried about that in the campaign as the Clintons brought more raw human emotion to the trail and Obama often seemed to coast too cockily only to right himself, usually with some spell-binding speech or shrewd piece of campaign management. I generally trusted Obama's instincts. In the campaign, MoDo was nearly right (Obama did let the Clintons get back off the mat a few too many times) but in the end, wrong (look who got elected). But in government? The coolness has yet to be proven effective – as Kissinger has noted.

You see this in the almost clinical way Obama has assessed the politics of taking on the Bush administration's interrogation, detention and rendition policies. The way in which both Greg Craig and Phil Carter have been dispatched for insisting that Obama live up to his campaign promises (no, I don't believe the personal reasons line) is chilling in its raw political calculation. Ditto Obama's disciplined refusal to fulfill his campaign pledges on civil rights any time soon. And his rhetorical restraint during the Green Revolution. The determination to figure out the very best and most detailed way forward in Afghanistan, even during a war in which allies are waiting and enemies are watching, and to take his time … well this is also a sign that we are dealing with one very, very cool character here.

Since I've always had a soft spot for cold fish in realpolitik – which high Tory (pun fully intended) doesn't get a frisson from Bismarck or Kissinger? – this impresses me. Since I'm also a red-blooded Irishman, eager for a fight and a little romantic about my ideals, this also angers me at times.

As readers remember, I wasn't exactly staying aloof during the Green Revolution or being cold-blooded defending gay equality. But that's why I'm a writer and not a statesman. We all have our roles to play. And in politics, I prefer cool to hot, other things being equal. In today's populist, emotional climate, coolness is a virtue in getting things right. Especially when it has been rarely more important to get things right – from Afghanistan to climate change to health insurance reform.

The paradox is: in today's populist, emotional climate, coolness can be eclipsed in the political drama, and thereby rendered moot. In many ways, Palin is the extreme counter-example. She plays a short game of around ten minutes in duration. She deploys no substantive policy content and no interest whatever in actual government. But she channels pure emotion, identity and rage very effectively. As such, she is a political nightmare, someone whom most Americans would never entrust with actual responsibility (yes, that means John McCain is the biggest cynic in Washington, but that's another story). But she is a cultural phenomenon who thereby wields political power.

Will this kind of heat – however irrational, however impulsive – overwhelm the cool emanating from the White House in this period of discontent? Not should it – but will it? That is the question. Is Obama a political version of Anderson Cooper up against a Bill O'Reilly repeat? Can he win a political ratings war in this atmosphere? Of course, Obama's campaign was very hot – but its heat came from its insurgency and its moment, not from the temperament of its figurehead. In government, the coolness makes policy sense, but does it make political sense?

In all this, Obama reminds me of George H W Bush in government, and of Ronald Reagan in campaigning. It's a dream combo in many ways. In theory. It's the practice thing that we're beginning to test. My sense remains the same as in the campaign. He's got this. Americans aren't that crazy. If he avoids major errors (and so far, it appears he has) and if we are not simply entering such a depressed economic era that any president is helpless, then my money is on him. An attempt to fake populist emotion would be as damaging as when Bush Senior tried. And Obama has a much stronger tie to his own party than Bush I ever had with his.

But this is history. Anything can happen. And probably will.

(Photo: Obama last night from the Getty pool.)

A reader writes:

The first thing that struck me about these "unity principles" is the fact that they have largely framed themselves in opposition. While I know that a minority party usually takes this sort of stance, it still makes them sound partisan and petty. Seven of the 10 include the word "oppose."
 
The second is how nonsensical the wording of some of the points comes across. How do you develop/support/have market energy reforms THROUGH opposition to the prevailing option? You have to offer a solution.  "Workers'' rights? Why choose this wording, which is classically associated with Communist and socialist movements?  I guess it's the populism taking over.  I can only hope these are the draft forms of these points, because they are such a cobbled together mess of partisan sniping and minor issues and as someone who used to consider herself conservative.  It drives me crazy.

Compare the current commandments with the policies laid out in the '94 Contract with America. It's the difference between a party interested in governing and a party interested in venting.

“[Obama] reminds me of a chess grandmaster who has played his opening in six simultaneous games. But he hasn’t completed a single game and I’d like to see him finish one,” – Henry Kissinger.

Suderman thinks that health care reform will drive up insurance premiums:

In 1996, Massachusetts passed an earlier set of reforms—community rating and guaranteed issue—that required insurers to take all comers, and to sell plans to individuals at the same price, regardless of their individual health status.

For pretty obvious reasons, those sorts of reforms drive up premium prices tremendously. In New York, for example, similar reforms have driven up individual insurance premiums enough that the Manhattan Institute estimates that premium prices would drop 42 percent if they were repealed. And going back to AHIP's reports, sure enough, New York and Massachusetts are the states with the two most expensive individual market premiums.

A reader writes:

Word on the street, courtesy of McClatchy, is that Obama is planning on sending 34,000 more soldiers to Afghanistan. In light of this possibility, and on behalf of all Americans who want some semblance of sane government, can I respectfully request that you lay off of Sarah Palin, including withholding, for the time being, any kind of bombshell that you're putting together? If escalation in Afghanistan is a reality, I am concerned that Obama's base – which has already been battered through the health care fight, the failure to deliver on promises of homosexual rights, the failure to effectively address the financial crisis and a general sense that Obama has 'sold them out' – is going to collapse.

I think that the left can tolerate a less than ideal health care plan, the postponement (we hope) of a push for homosexual rights, and a crappy attempt at putting a band-aid over the financial giants, but the left really found its voice during the last Administration around the Iraq War. Support for that war was the litmus test that drove many to Obama over Hillary in the first place. If Obama is to truly own the Afghan War, and to do so through escalation, I can't see how he holds his base together. And without his base, without Bush, and with the worst economy any of us can remember, I don't think that Obama or vulnerable Democrats in Congress get re-elected.
 
This is why we need Palin. It's cynical, it's political, it is devoid of any intellectual integrity. But that's politics, you can't get to the stuff you really want to do if you don't have the power to achieve it. We need Palin to win the Republican nomination. We need the tea baggers to continue rolling. The Republicans are not in any shape to be a viable alternative, and so even though the Democrats for all their electoral success have completely and utterly refused to govern (including Obama) they are still preferable. The only thing I can think of, in the face of the complete abandonment by Democrats of the things they told the American people they were going to deliver, that brings the base home is the specter of a Palin presidency. We need the Republicans to think that she's viable. So please, lay off of Palin. Or, if you are despised by the right, continue to attack her so that she can build up much needed cred.