Month: January 2015

Chait expects historians to be relatively kind:

In an April speech at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library to praise the 36th president’s legacy, Obama turned to the theme of vindication in an explicit way. His choice of Johnson was a telling one. No American president left such a gap between the scale of his lasting accomplishments and the indignities he suffered in his own time. The Democrat who dismantled legal apartheid in the South and created Medicare and Medicaid was so loathed he did not even bother trying to run for reelection. At times in the speech, Obama linked Johnson’s travails to his own. The triumphs of history that seem clear and simple in retrospect, he noted, felt contemporaneously grueling and ugly. “From a distance, sometimes these commemorations seem inevitable, they seem easy,” Obama said. “All the pain and difficulty and struggle and doubt—all that is rubbed away.” You can sense his desperate wish to arrive at a vantage point where his accomplishments will be buffed of disappointment and take on the same heroic gloss.

One can imagine future histories that focus less on Obama’s dysfunctional relationship with Congress, and that measure accomplishment in more discerning proportion. But the lesson Johnson offers for Obama’s own eventual vindication is not quite so encouraging. LBJ’s political career was defined by his singular failure in Vietnam. The hatred this spawned blotted out his massive and more enduring achievements. The current film Selmainaccurately depicts Johnson as an opponent of the civil-rights struggle he had, in reality, thrown all his energy behind. Five decades on, Johnson still has not escaped the feelings he engendered—indeed, he still requires rehabilitation by figures like Obama.

Christopher Caldwell dissents:

Obama may wind up the most consequential of the three baby-boom presidents. He expanded certain Bush ­policies—Detroit bailouts, internet surveillance, drone strikes—and cleaned up after others. We will not know for years whether Obama’s big deficits risked a future depression to avoid a present one, or whether the respite he offered from “humanitarian invasions” made the country safer. Right now, both look like significant achievements. Yet there is a reason the president’s approval ratings have fallen, in much of the country, to Nixonian lows. Even his best-functioning policies have come at a steep price in damaged institutions, leaving the country less united, less democratic, and less free.

A poll of more than 50 historians provides another perspective:

Almost every respondent wrote that the fact of his being the first black president will loom large in the historical narrative — though they disagreed in interesting ways. Many predict that what will last is the symbolism of a nonwhite First Family; others, the antagonism Obama’s blackness provoked; still others, the way his racial self-consciousness constrained him. A few suggested that we will care a great deal less about his race generations from now — just as John F. Kennedy’s Catholicism hardly matters to current students of history. Across the board, Obamacare was recognized as a historic triumph (though one historian predicted that, with its market exchanges, it may in retrospect be seen as illiberal and mark the beginning of the privatization of public health care). A surprising number of respondents argued that his rescue of the economy will be judged more significant than is presently acknowledged, however lackluster the recovery has felt. There was more attention paid to China than isis (Obama’s foreign policy received the most divergent assessments), and considerable credit was given to the absence of a major war or terrorist attack, along with a more negative assessment of its price — the expansion of the security state, drones and all. The contributors tilted liberal — that’s academia, no surprise — but we made an effort to create at least a little balance with conservative historians. Their responses often echoed those from the far left: that a president elected on a promise to unite the country instead extended the power of his office in alarming, unprecedented ways.

(Photo: Nicholas Kamm/Getty)

Michael Levi wants to raise the gas tax:

[W]hen oil prices fall, fuel efficient cars, homes in city-centers, and public transit investments all drop in value. This can lead to economic waste: underused automobiles, unrented homes, empty subways. A particularly glaring example came on Wednesday when President Obama visited a Ford plant that makes fuel-efficient vehicles: because of the drop in oil prices, that plant was closed, wasting both the factory and the skills of the workers that it would have employed.

In this world, a newly higher gasoline tax would actually avoid economic waste rather than creating it.

Ford and others that invested money on the expectation that oil prices would remain relatively high (and, if options prices on oil futures as recently as six months ago are any indication, that means most businesses) would see their investments hold more value. The same goes for drivers who, facing higher oil prices, already spent their money on ever-more-fuel-efficient cars. (They’d still pay more at the pump, but the resale value of their cars would rise.) One can go down the list of oil-sensitive consumers and find more examples like this.

Josh Mitchell provides some context:

The federal levy—which amounted to about $23.5 billion in gasoline tax revenue in the 12 months through September 2013—has stood at 18.4 cents a gallon since the first year of the Clinton administration, despite multiple proposals over the years to raise it. Over the past decade, Congress has approved higher spending for highway construction but hasn’t raised the tax to pay for it, creating periodic funding crises.

Chris Edwards isn’t convinced:

Gas tax supporters say that it is time to raise the tax because it has not been raised in two decades. What they leave out of the story is that the gas tax rate more than quadrupled between 1982 and 1994 from 4 cents per gallon to 18.4 cents, as shown in the chart [above]. Thus, looking at the whole period since 1982, federal gas tax revenues have risen at a robust annual average rate of 6.1 percent (based on Tax Foundation data). So, again, we have a spending crisis, not a funding crisis.

But, just last week, Krauthammer once again supported raising the tax:

A tax is the best way to improve fuel efficiency. Today we do it through rigid regulations, the so-called CAFE standards imposed on carmakers. They are forced to manufacture acres of unsellable cars in order to meet an arbitrary, bureaucratic “fleet” gas-consumption average.

This is nuts. If you simply set a higher price point for gasoline, buyers will do the sorting on their own, choosing fuel efficiency just as they do when the world price is high. The beauty of the tax — as a substitute for a high world price — is that the incentive for fuel efficiency remains, but the extra money collected at the pump goes right back into the U.S. economy (and to the citizenry through the revenue-neutral FICA rebate) instead of being shipped overseas to Russia, Venezuela, Iran and other unsavories.

It’s looking likely that the general will face felony charges for leaking classified information to his mistress. Trevor Timm reviews the relevant law:

By all accounts, Petraeus’s leak caused no damage to US national security. “So why is he being charged,” his powerful friends will surely ask. Well, that does not matter under the Espionage Act. Even if your leak caused no national security damage at all, you can still be charged, and you can’t argue otherwise as a defense at trial. If that sounds like it can’t be true, ask former State Department official Stephen Kim, who is now serving a prison sentence for leaking to Fox News reporter James Rosen. The judge in his case ruled that prosecutors did not have to prove his leak harmed national security in order to be found guilty.

Eli Lake notes how unusual this is:

Senior officials such as Petraeus, who serve at the highest levels of the national security state, are almost never punished as harshly as low- and midlevel analysts who are charged with leaking.

When former CIA director John Deutch was found to have classified documents on his unsecure home computer, he was stripped of his security clearance and charged with a misdemeanor. President Bill Clinton pardoned him. Sandy Berger, who was Clinton’s national security adviser, absconded with sensitive documents relating to al-Qaeda from the National Archives. In 2005, he was fined $10,000 and stripped of his security clearance for three years.

The fate for lower-level leakers is rarely so kind.

Martin Longman remarks that “one of the most dispiriting recent trends in Washington has been the way that high officials have skated despite the worst kind of malfeasance and incompetence”:

Holding anyone to the same standards we hold regular folks to would have to be considered a turn in the right direction. If you want to restore some faith in government, you have to demonstrate that we’re capable, at least occasionally, of acting like there is one set of rules that applies to everyone equally. Tossing Petraeus in prison would definitely send that message.

Having said that, I think his crime is significant but ultimately not that serious. His punishment should be commensurate with his offense.

Joyner joins the conversation:

My instinct is that people in the highest positions of public trust ought indeed to be prosecuted when they violate that trust. Putting the sainted David Petraeus on trial would send a powerful signal that no one is above the law and that we take safeguarding our secrets seriously. This wasn’t, after all, a situation where he skirted the law in misguided pursuit of the nation’s security; he did so for the most selfish reasons. To the extent that his long history of service to the nation counterbalances his transgressions here, it can be weighed at sentencing.

And Marcy Wheeler is sick of Washington elites defending one of their own:

McCain (and his sidekick Lindsey) are not the only ones rending their garments over the injustice of a top Obama official being investigated for leaking classified details to make himself look good. Jason Chaffetz keeps complaining about it. And Dianne Feinstein took to the Sunday shows to declare that Petraeus has suffered enough. Richard Burr apparently made false claims about how the Espionage Act has been wielded, of late, even against those whose leaks caused no harm.

Golly, you’d think all these legislators might figure out they have the authority, as legislators, to fix the overly broad application of the Espionage Act.

(Photo: by Karen Bleier/AFP/Getty Images)

Romney is apparently considering yet another run at the White House:

“Everybody in here can go tell your friends that I’m considering a run,” the former candidate told the gathering in midtown Manhattan, according to Politico. But insiders who spoke to BuzzFeed News about Romney’s evolution on the 2016 question said he only began to entertain the possibility recently, and that he still needs to weigh a number of factors — including Jeb Bush’s electability — before he decides to take the plunge.

Enten tries to understand Mitt’s logic:

In March, I wrote that this was the most split Republican presidential field in the modern era (since 1976). And that still holds today. Jeb Bush’s 23 percent support in a recent CNN survey was the highest for any non-Romney candidate over the past year. Most polls show every candidate (besides Romney) south of 20 percent.

But he keeps in mind that “general election losers that have run for their party’s nomination again have a terrible record.” Ben Jacobs cracks open the history books:

The last [general election loser] to even mount a campaign was George McGovern, the Democratic nominee in 1972, who mounted a quixotic comeback attempt in 1984. In fact, with the exception of Richard Nixon’s win in 1968, the only time a former major party nominee has since been elected to the presidency since the Civil War was when former President Grover Cleveland won his 1892 rematch for the White House against Benjamin Harrison.

Cillizza expects that Romney’s announcement “freezes some not-insignificant portion of the Republican major donor base — especially in New York and New Jersey”:

Rather than signing on with Jeb in the next weeks or months, many of those money men and women will wait to see what Romney does before doing anything. So, Romney is really buying himself — and, whether intentionally or not, the rest of the potential field — some time. He’s taking the Bush pot off of boil and turning it down to simmer.

Lisa Lerer and Annie Linskey note that, while “Bush and Romney have always been cordial, they’ve never been close”

Some Romney advisers are still grumbling about Bush’s role in the 2012 campaign. Despite calls, e-mails, and private meetings with Romney before the hard-fought Florida primary, Bush endorsed Romney in March—nearly two months after the state’s contest and when the nomination was already within the former governor’s grasp. A few months later, in the midst of the general election, Bush criticized Romney’s approach to the immigration issue, saying at a Bloomberg View event that he needed to “change the tone.” “He got off message,” said Bush of Romney’s campaign in an interview last month with a Miami television station. “He got sucked into other people’s agenda.”

In private conversations, Romney has questioned Bush’s ability to beat Clinton, arguing that voters would recall her husband’s administration in a far more positive light than that of former President George W. Bush. He’s also warned that Bush, who spent his post-office years working on a range of business ventures, could be open to the same type of private equity attacks that Democrats successfully leveraged against Romney in the 2012 race.

Zeke Miller and Alex Altman aren’t sure how seriously to take Romney:

One Republican consultant suggests that posturing over a possible campaign was a way to signal that he wouldn’t cede automatically donors or staff to Bush. … This is why veteran operatives of the Romney campaigns consider the revived rumors of a 2016 campaign overblown. They have long scoffed at the notion he’d run again. They believe their former boss would be an excellent president. They say Romney agrees. At the same time, they don’t expect a campaign to materialize.

Jennifer Rubin hears much the same:

In my informal survey of about a 15 GOP insiders, some with other candidates and some unaffiliated, I did not find a single person convinced Romney was actually running. One person gave the back of the hand to the idea Romney was poised to enter the race: “I don’t think he is [serious]. I think his advisers are and they aren’t letting him kill the rumors.” Another remarked, “I think people who think Romney can still be president are living in a fantasy world. Great guy. Would have been super president. Should have won, but it’s over.” A third said, “It’s unclear if it is intended to start a ‘draft’ movement or if he wants to try and hold the field or if he wants to be in the wings in case the field implodes.” A fourth told me, “He has little to no natural constituency in the party.”

Larison rolls his eyes:

Given that success is very unlikely, and since it can only harm Romney’s reputation to embark on a third losing effort, it raises the question: what could Romney and his backers be thinking? Maybe his former staffers and advisers just want to get paid, but why would Romney want to go through the process all over again? There is every chance that he would be thoroughly humiliated along the way. That might be amusing to watch at first, but it would mostly just be sad.

Outside of a small band of loyalists, I can’t imagine who in the GOP would want to go through another failed presidential campaign.

(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Adrienne LaFrance researches the neurological changes that women undergo when they become mothers. Yes, it’s like a drug:

“We see changes at both the hormonal and brain levels,” brain researcher Ruth Feldman told me in an email. “Maternal oxytocin levels—the system responsible for maternal-infant bonding across all mammalian species—dramatically increase during pregnancy and the postpartum [period] and the more mother is involved in childcare, the greater the increase in oxytocin.” Oxytocin also increases as women look at their babies, or hear their babies’ coos and cries, or snuggle with their babies. An increase in oxytocin during breastfeeding may help explain why researchers have found that breastfeeding mothers are more sensitive to the sound of their babies’ cries than non-breastfeeding mothers. … What scientists do know, Feldman says, is that becoming a parent looks—at least in the brain—a lot like falling in love.

Dads get doped up too, but in a different way:

Oxytocin does not seem to drive nurturing behavior in men the way it does in women, Feldman and other researchers found in a study last year. Instead, a man’s parental brain is supported by a socio-cognitive network that develops in the brain of both sexes later in life, whereas women appear to have evolved to have a “brain-hormone-behavior constellation” that’s automatically primed for mothering. Another way to look at it: the blueprint for mothering behavior exists in the brain even before a woman has children.