Month: October 2010

Megan reacts to a blogger's metaphor.

New York, New York, 7.16 am

A reader writes:

I just watched your interview with Charlie Rose again, and your comments about Obama's response to potential war crimes committed by the Bush Administration – that Obama simply didn't want to divide the country by pursuing an investigation into the controversial issue – engendered this thought: Should Obama pardon Bush for war crimes?

Although pilloried at the time for pardoning Nixon, President Ford has come to earn the respect of ordinary citizens and historians in recent years for that action, and his reason was that the nation needed to be healed after our "long national nightmare." Of course, that situation was considerably different than the issue of potential Bush Administration war crimes – Nixon resigned in disgrace, a tacit admission of wrong-doing, while Bush and his minions suffered no such humiliation and still cling to the notion that they did nothing wrong. I imagine that Bush supporters would raise hell that Obama was pardoning Bush for crimes he didn't commit. And would that action give ammunition to oversees courts to try Bush for war crimes, citing Obama's pardon as an admission that crimes were committed, and in whose jurisdiction an Obama-issued pardon would have no bearing?

But a blanket pardon of Bush – and perhaps Cheney and Rumsfeld and any others that may have perpetrated war crimes – would allow a full and potentially cathartic investigation of the perhaps-illegal actions that the Bush Administration took in our name. Under the circumstances, would such a pardon be a moral action?

Ross Douthat has an evenhanded column up about the emergency measure and the voter backlash against it. I think he gets it exactly right myself: TARP was necessary, surprisingly successful and a horrible example of moral hazard. A political rebuke of it is, in some ways, salutary.

But one realizes that most of those rebuking it do not credit its success; while most of those defending it acknowledge its poisonous necessity and the awful precedent it set. That's the difference between an irrational party and a rational one. And it seems increasingly clear that the role of the few sane Republican commentators left like Ross and Chris Caldwell will be to find a rational meta-defense for a seethingly emotion-driven base. Still, from Ross's and Chris's point of view, they're not going to lack for material for the foreseeable future, are they?

That's what Jeb Bush said when asked if he would support a Sarah Palin presidential bid were she the GOP nominee. McCain has anointed her his "legacy."

Yes, the notion that there is an establishment GOP able or even willing to resist this farce of a candidate is absurd. She is the establishment now. She is the GOP incarnate, and all it stands for.

That's Silver's judgment. No big surprise. This feels increasingly like a wave election, buoyed by economic and cultural discontent and bewilderment. I wouldn't be surprised if we saw a GOP take-over of House and Senate.

But the following strikes me as an important piece of perspective. It's highly predictable in that, barring some big external factor (like a war in 2002), a president loses big in his first midterm. 1994 saw a massive backlash against a president we now regard as a quintessential centrist, embraced by many in the GOP – a gain of 54 seats by the GOP. But they were starting from a relatively low base. The party gap wasn't that large in the general polling. In 1994, the GOP won 48 percent of the popular vote, to 44 percent for the Dems.

More interestingly, because the economic parallels are closer, 1982 saw a Democratic gain of 27 seats in the wake of Reagan's first two years. Not as impressive, but that's also largely because they began with a very large base.

The Democrats went into the 1982 midterms with a majority of 50 seats and ended it with a majority of 103! The Democrats won 54 percent of the vote to 43 percent for the GOP, an 11 percent lead. That compares with a 52 – 47 spread right now for the GOP in Obama's first term, a 5 point lead. By the end of 1982, Reagan had a Gallup rating of 40 percent. Obama currently has a Gallup rating of 41 percent, and a 45 percent rating in the poll of polls.

In 1982, unemployment was at 10.8 percent. Today, it is 9.6 percent. Just some data for an amnesiac political class.

My old friend – and uber-wonk – Reihan Salam says the Dish isn't providing the full story about his fiscal proposals. He writes in to elaborate:

I explicitly acknowledge that tax increases might be necessary. I've also explicitly said that I favor the expiration of the Bush tax cuts so that we could replace the current tax code with one modeled on the Growth and Investment Tax Plan devised by the Tax Reform Panel.

For example, I'm all for eliminating tax expenditures, which many will interpret as a tax increase. And I imagine we can save a lot. Competitive Medicare pricing alone will save $500B over a decade. I write more on that general subject here. The mortgage interest tax deduction alone costs ~$637B over five years. As you can see, these numbers start to add up.

If we also transition Medicare to a premium support model, as I think we should, we can tackle the fiscal imbalance without raising marginal tax rates.

"I expect Brit to punch me the minute we’re leaving," – Juan Williams, on how aggressively he counters Fox propaganda.

A reader writes:

Although I understand the disgust at the Human Rights Campaign for this, I actually believe such a bracelet is helpful.

In general, colored bracelets (Livestrong, breast cancer awareness) merely convey a weak form of solidarity – like "liking" something on Facebook. But in this case, the bracelet would serve a function of few other bracelets: A means of signaling. Imagine a gay teen being bullied at school. Where should he/she turn for support? Students, teachers, or administrators (or even people in churches) wearing an anti-bullying bracelet signals to these teens that they have someone to talk to. As a means of signaling, the bracelet would be both subtle and effective. No other bracelet I know of performs this sort of function.

However, buying such bracelets from the HRC is too much to ask. School districts should just make their own and hand them out to teachers, staff, and administrators interested in reaching out to bullied teens.

In other HRC news, revenue was down 17 percent from last year.

Nate Silver's updated House prediction:

Republican chances of taking over the House are now up to 80 percent, according to the FiveThirtyEight forecast model; they had been 75 percent two days ago.

And the Senate:

Our latest forecast shows little change in Republican chances of taking over the Senate after the Nov. 2 election. They now have a 19 percent chance of doing so, according to our forecast model; their chances had been 18 percent in our previous update on Thursday.