Month: November 2011

A fascinating account from Dana Milbank of how Senator Jon Kyl almost single-handedly insured no Grand Bargain in the Super-Committee.

“I’ve never seen anything quite like what Newt did. We’ve had plenty of political figures who’ve come out and done a lot of speaking at high rates, done some consulting, gone into lobbying, and made lots of money. But nobody that I’ve ever seen has come close to building the type of complicated web that Newt did and parlaying it into apparently as much incredible money as he did,” – Norm Ornstein, AEI.

Nate Silver drills down:

A lot of Mr. Gingrich’s current support, I suspect, comes from voters who had once been inclined to support an outsider like Mr. Cain or Mrs. Bachmann or even Donald Trump — but who got tired of hearing about how they weren’t cut out for the job or developed some of those concerns themselves. They found in Mr. Gingrich a candidate who espouses many of the same policies and embodies much of the same fighting spirit — but who seems at least passably presidential.

I think that's partly it. He is a former Speaker, rather than a former foster-mom or restaurant lobbyist. But surely the base understands how limited his appeal is beyond them. Or has epistemic closure truly begun its suicidal phase?

A reader provides a superb counterpoint to yesterday's liberal dissenters:

Thank you so much for writing such an eloquent defense of Obama. I'm a black attorney in my mid-20s and I'm very gainfully employed at a big law firm. My parents grew up in poverty, raised themselves to the middle class and then sacrificed so that I could go to elite schools for my entire life with the hopes that I will do better than them one day. Things are good for me mostly, but times are tough for a majority of my friends. My minority friends and I are very happy with the president and take attacks on him very personally. To the first point, we are happy because it seems that minorities, unlike the liberal white students I went to school with, had reasonable expectations. We knew that Obama could only do but so much in the face of the opposition he has to deal with and we are happy with what he has achieved.

And not to be too racial about this, but myself and a lot of my minority friends sense that white liberals' disappointment from Obama comes from a sense of entitlement.

Unlike affluent white liberals, minorities in this country seem to have a better grasp of a key truth in life: you don't always get everything you want. We know, if not firsthand then from the stories of our parents, that America isn't always a nice place, and all you can hope for is incremental change. Unlike a lot of our affluent white liberal friends, we are used to not getting it all and have learned to live with it.

To the second point, the way Obama is attacked hurts us personally because so many of us see ourselves in the president. We are middle-class black and Hispanic kids who did all the right things. Worked hard. Went to elite schools. Got the right jobs. We did what conservatives often accuse blacks of not doing. We pulled ourselves up.

And then what? We are torn down, doubted by our white coworkers and called affirmative action phonies by our white supervisors. We see it in the workplace in a thousand different subtle ways. We are held to a different standard. So when we see the best of us, a man who has independently climbed to the top of the American meritocracy, be attacked in such unreasonable and personal ways, we take it hard. If the editor of the Harvard Law Review can't be accepted as competent in this country, then how can we?

But again, we still 'know hope' because we know how the world works. We know how America is. We hold onto incremental progress and don't fixate on what hasn't been achieved. We've done it for 400 years. We'll keep doing it because this is home and we don't have any other choice.

The above video, uploaded a few years ago, is making the rounds again. The following comment from "Irish Eyes Are Smiling" posted on The Blaze, Glenn Beck's site, illustrates our reader's email on many levels:

my question is – Why was Barak [sic] Obama, a nobody, selected to give this Black History Month moment? Usually someone who is known is selected. He hadn’t run for office yet, all he had done was graduate from Yale [sic]. So who recommended him for this and why was HE selected? That is the point I think Glen [sic] is trying to make and I ask the same question. Who was working behind the scenes. Who paid for his college expenses?

On Jimmy Fallon's show, Bachmann was greeted by a few strains of the song "Lyin' Ass Bitch." Maura Johnston is not amused:

Casual sexism in politics and entertainment and, you know, the rest of the world is of course nothing new, and it's something that as a consumer of the Internet crushes me on a near-hourly basis—even though I've aesthetically internalized it enough to enjoy songs like, say, "Lyin'-Ass Bitch." But it kills me when it's used by smart people who I respect against someone like Bachmann, who has no shortage of completely legitimate reasons to inspire ire. Calling her a bitch is too easy—it glosses over the actual concrete problems with her as a candidate—and more importantly, the woman-specific use of "bitch" toward people who allegedly "deserve" it only serves to further crack open the door to it being used against any woman who's trying to make her way in a male-dominated field.

Megan Carpentier concurs. Me too. Fallon has apologized for the sophomoric lack of manners – she was a guest, after all. Dan Amira has ideas for insulting songs for each member of the 2012 field.

A reader writes:

Here is a more artful presentation of the same meme.  Now, this is how you beat Romney.

Jamelle Bouie's theory:

Huntsman’s problem, aside from serving as the administration’s ambassador to China, is that he doesn’t seem to hate Democrats in general and Barack Obama in particular. His rhetoric is of someone who disagrees with the president, but doesn’t doubt his commitment to improving the country. Unfortunately for Huntsman, this runs counter to nearly every bit of conservative rhetoric over the last three years. If the current GOP were a party which didn’t reward personal animus toward the president, then Huntsman would probably be in a much better position.

I think he finally broke through last night. I refuse to give up all hope as far as his candidacy is concerned. I just suspect it will come to full fruition in four years' time.

A rare moment captured on state television:

Not dead yet, as this piece in a Penn State paper reveals. A reader adds:

Just to underscore your point, I would draw your attention to the fact that the author of this article describes the WSJ piece as "shocking," but the (alleged) serial rape of children as "Jerry Sandusky's alleged indiscretions." If anything sums up the kind of culture that places hero-worship over the safety of children, this is it.

Ezra Klein sees an opening: 

[I]t would behoove Obama to press the reset button. To say that he made a mistake. At the very least, a process based off Bowles-Simpson would have forced both sides to recognize what a reasonable, centrist proposal looked like. That alone is better than what we’ve had thus far. The failure of the congressional negotiations presents an opportunity to undo that mistake. Obama should ask Congress to begin drafting legislation based on Bowles-Simpson, including some fixes (few Republicans will resist the White House’s entreaties to lower the defense cuts) and additions (no deficit proposal should be signed if it doesn’t extend unemployment insurance and the payroll tax cut).

Allow me to second that. Tom Friedman adds his suport today as well. As readers know, I was crushed by the political decision last January to punt on Bowles-Simpson, and have recently argued that radical tax simplification should be integral to Obama's re-election campaign. Obama should run for re-election on Simpson-Bowles and isolate Romney as the defender of the super-wealthy and a captive of an exhausted ideology.