A thirteen-year-old Indian boy, Raju, is dressed as Mahatma Gandhi as he begs for alms from devotees during the Navratri (nine nights) festival outside a temple in Hyderabad on October 11, 2013. Navaratri is a vibrant nine-night festival worship of the Mother Goddess Durga. By Noah Seelam/AFP/Getty Images.
Amid fresh discussion over the nature of Catholicism sparked by the new Pope, Adam Gopnik spots a chance to revive appreciation for J.F. Powers, a Catholic author who “accepted the necessity of the divine institution, without unduly sanctifying its officials”:
The [new] collection of letters reveals that he spent the war years as a conscientious objector, and as a sympathizer with the Detachers—a Catholic movement, never officially approved, but apparently tolerated, that insisted that American materialism and militarism were both evils to be avoided at all costs by good Catholics. The idea of an American Catholicism whose central purpose was to stop the national-security state and the supermarket—in those days, supermarkets were seen as Wal-Mart is now—is alien to us, and Powers’s immersion in the often self-defeating politics of left-Catholic activism, with its glamorized poverty, is fascinating to follow from letter to letter.
Parents overhear the darndest things:
Walter Russell Mead notes that “one possible ACA-related compromise continues to get play in the media: the repeal of the medical device tax”:
As the shutdown as dragged on, a repeal emerged as both something that the GOP could claim as a victory as well as something that the Democrats could live with. And although the debt limit conversation is now shifting away from Obamacare toward other deals, the industry is still pushing hard for repeal.
Cohn pulls back the curtain on the lobbying effort to get the tax repealed:
[R]epealing the device tax would look like a favor to a special interest. And, notwithstanding arguments for or against the tax, appearances in this case are probably correct.
It’s highly unlikely that Senate bill got 72 votes because so many lawmakers, including about half the Democratic caucus, are worked up about the device tax on principle. No, the most likely explanation is that the device industry has a ton of influence, particularly in states where they have large operations. Among those who have endorsed repeal (though not explicitly as part of a debt ceiling or shutdown negotiation) are two liberal icons in the Senate, Al Franken and Elizabeth Warren. Both say they oppose the tax on the merits. Both also represent states with influential device makers. Medtronic, the nation’s fourth largest device maker, is in Minneapolis. Boston Scientific and Coviden, the eighth and ninth largest, have U.S. headquarters in Massachusetts. My colleague Alec MacGillis wrote about Warren and the device industry a year ago—it’s worth a read if you want to understand what’s going on behind the scenes in Congress right now. Or you can just consider the fact that senator-turned-lobbyist Evan Bayh has adopted device tax repeal as one of his causes. That’s usually a pretty good clue about how much special interest money is behind a campaign.
Jonathan Bernstein no longer considers Ted Cruz a viable presidential candidate:
It’s one thing to have a reputation as a loudmouth; it’s quite another to have a reputation as a loser. That’s what the shutdown fight has done to Cruz. Among true believers he’ll be the one who was a leader in a fight that surely would have won if the squishes hadn’t sold them out. But for most party actors, including many sympathetic to Tea Partyism, he’s going to be the guy who ran up the wrong hill.
Larison nods:
What may hurt Cruz’s prospects as a presidential candidate most is the fact that he will not or cannot acknowledge that he was wrong in promoting his failed strategy. As if to prove how oblivious to political reality he is, he was at it again today in his speech this morning.
Barro marvels at Cruz’s complete detachment from reality.
Silver believes that the shutdown is unlikely to significantly impact the midterms. In response, Ezra asks, “If they reopen the government and raise the debt ceiling for six weeks and then they get nothing for it, will they really be able to pass a clean CR and another debt-ceiling increase in late-November?”
If this ends and the negotiations fail, the lesson many in the party will take isn’t that the GOP erred terribly in in employing these extreme and unpopular tactics. It’ll be that they erred terribly in backing down from them, and letting the leadership muck up the clear messaging of Ted Cruz and the Tea Party.
Republicans should be very worried about what this episode means for their party in the midterms. But not because the shutdown itself is going to be foremost in voter’s minds 13 months from now. It’s because the shutdown is evidence of a Republican crack-up that is leading the party to pursue doomed, reckless and self-destructive campaigns. And if they keep doing that through the rest of 2013 and much of 2014, that will matter in the elections.
Bruce McCall praises this week’s Nobel prize-winner Alice Munro for her precise depiction of southwestern Ontario – “that grindingly conformist, stonily Calvinist world of humble lives and humbler expectations, where a gnawing sense of shame was inevitable”:
Hers doesn’t really feel like Nobel territory. A low cloud of modesty over-hangs Ms. Munro’s fictional world – no harrowing diasporas, no heroic sagas, just vignettes of everyday life in perhaps the least colorful, least dramatic setting in North America. And no grand passion – that’s for the Yanks and the Brits. There is instead a clinical quality to Ms. Munro’s work, a dissection of her characters as if they were so many bugs under a microscope. …
Yet a root part of the Munro magic is that you somehow care deeply about her forlorn losers and their constricted lives. She gets you hoping against hope that they’ll come out OK. And even when they don’t, she has set up fates of such exquisite and spiritually just logic that you realize there was ultimately no alternative. Ruefully perhaps, certainly sadly, you have to agree: that’s life. Unforgiving, unfair, futile life. If only Alice Munro had lived in, say, Southern California!
(Photo of an aging barn in Huron County, Ontario, by Flickr user breakthrunow)
Douthat considers where it leads:
[T]he strategy that Republicans choose today doesn’t only shape the landscape for 2014: It has consequences for the Republicans’ broader position and brand identity, and for how everything from ongoing gubernatorial campaigns to the ’16 presidential election
plays out. The G.O.P.’s problem at the moment is that it’s a congressional party with no clear ability to win presidential-level majorities. In that context, a faction that’s trying to gain control of the party — as the right’s populists currently are — should be demonstrating why its preferred approach and preferred policies are winning ones, and why a more populist turn can actually help Republicans avoid a replay of 2012 in 2016 and beyond.
But the strategy that the populists are currently pursuing — narrowing the definition of True Conservatism to a point where tactics rather than ideology are the only working litmus test, pursuing those tactics even when they put conservatives squarely on the wrong side of public opinion, and then denouncing any alternative approach as a sell-out that justifies bolting for a third party — is likely to deliver one of two alternatives instead: Either a successful populist/Tea Party takeover, à la Goldwater in ’64, that leaves the party in no position to actually contest a national election and secures Obama’s legacy instead, or a backlash that elevates a Republican nominee who runs against Congressional conservatives, à la George W. Bush in 2000, and in the process re-empowers all the interest groups that the populists detest.
My bet is on a Goldwater moment. Meep meep.
Yes, this dude is running for Lieutenant Governor of Virginia:
Correction from a reader:
You’re confusing E.W. Jackson – who is running for Lieutenant Governor of Virginia – and Dr. Ben Carson, who appears in the clip you posted. But yes, this dude is an actual neurosurgeon!
Apologies to Jackson. Though he is also prone to extreme rhetoric.
Nate Silver entertains the possibility:
Most political stories have a fairly short half-life and won’t turn out to be as consequential as they seem at the time. … None of this applies if the United States actually does default on its debt this time around, or if the U.S. shutdown persists for as long as Belgium’s. But if the current round of negotiations is resolved within the next week or so, they might turn out to have a relatively minor impact by November 2014.
He goes on to argue that, even “if the shutdown were to have a moderate political impact — and one that favored the Democrats in races for Congress — it might not be enough for them to regain control of the U.S. House”:
First, there are extremely few swing districts — only one-half to one-third as many as when the last government shutdown occurred in 1996. Some of this is because of partisan gerrymandering, but more of it is because of increasingly sharp ideological divides along geographic lines: between urban and rural areas, between the North and the South, and between the coasts and the interior of the United States.
So even if Democrats make significant gains in the number of votes they receive for the House, they would flip relatively few seats because of the way those votes are distributed. Most of the additional votes would come in districts that Democrats were already assured of winning, or where they were too far behind to catch up.
Nate Cohn agrees:
[I]f Democrats do as well in 2014 as they did in 2006, they’ll gain far fewer seats, simply because the best pick-up opportunities are already held by Democrats. Or put differently: without 8 or 9 pick-ups in lean-Democratic districts, a 2006-esque wave would only barely get the Democrats over the 17 seat threshold they need to take back the House in 2014.
All of this ignores, I think, a central factor. Will this experience traumatize enough Republicans to begin to inch back from the precipice of far right Southern nullification politics they now favor? We have to wait and see. My fear is that their cultural alienation and economic vulnerability and religious fundamentalism has gone too far to be turned back any time soon. Maybe a presidential candidate who runs against the Tea Party could do it. But the climate of fear is hard to pierce; and the epistemic closure is close to hermetic at this point.
The Dish 