The Dish

Josh Barro analyzes Obama’s economic speech from yesterday, the first in a series of speeches the president has planned on the subject:

It’s likely the White House’s real goal with these speeches is one they can’t say out loud: Defend status-quo policy, and the tepid recovery it is allowing, against any future crises that Republicans might manufacture.

Andrew Sprung sharpens that point:

If an extremist GOP, drunk with its budget war victories over Obama since 2011, rivets the entire nation by shutting down the government because Obama won’t agree to defund Obamacare, or threatens the nation with default because Obama won’t agree to ruinous new spending cuts on top of sequestration — then Obama’s sane, sober, repetitive, essentially centrist calls for long-term investment and commitment to the middle class should trigger a public opinion backlash against the GOP, just as Bill Clinton’s did when the Republicans shut down the government because the president wouldn’t agree to massive cuts to Medicaid and Medicare …  Obama has said that he won’t negotiate over the debt ceiling. He most definitely will not agree to spending bills that defund Obamacare implementation. Will events finally drive him to hold firm in some kind of full-scale showdown with intransigent Republicans?

That’s how I saw it. Obama shows his persistent attention to the economy, which has improved on his watch, while the GOP tends to their fanatical base and moves toward shutting down the entire government because they lost the last election and cannot bear to see the winner actually govern, even from the banal center. Beutler is on a similar page:

Whether this is the White House’s true intent or not, the speeches will have the effect of reminding the country, implicitly, that of all the things the government can do to improve the economy, a debt default threat is among the worst. Addressing the issue obliquely is actually key to preserving the fragile governing coalition he’s helped to build in the Senate, and to avoid the sense that he’s the one drawing battle lines. And If voters have the question of the country’s economic future in mind through the summer, it will make picking a debt limit fight all the more dangerous for the GOP, and certainly be preferable to blindsiding the country with a new round of brinksmanship that puts the fragile recovery on the line once again.

How Jon Cohn understood the purpose of the president’s speech:

Obama mentioned Republican obstructionism in his speech, not once but several times, and not in short bursts but for extended soliloquies. There’s a reason. Major fiscal fights loom—over how to pay for government services, and under what conditions to raise the nation’s borrowing limit. House Republicans are already warning of new attempts at brinkmanship—like threatening to shut down the government if Obama won’t agree to de-funding of his health care plan.

Wednesday’s speech was the beginning of an effort to remind the American people about the stakes in those fights, and who supports what. Obama’s not going to win over the conservative base of the Republican Party, obviously, but he’s having at least some success working with less extreme members, like Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham. Not coincidentally, Obama chose his words carefully, criticizing a “a sizable group of Republican lawmakers” who have threatened not to raise the debt limit but also praising the “growing number of Republican Senators [who] are trying to get things done.”

Chait adds:

Obama’s ultimate goal is not merely to insulate himself from blame if and when House Republicans shut down the government or threaten to default on the debt, but to build a coalition with pragmatic Republicans to negotiate around Boehner’s back. It’s not totally hopeless: Mitch McConnell is fighting back a revolt among pragmatic Republicans, like John McCain, who want to compromise on the budget.

Suderman doubts that Obama can break the gridlock:

Obama’s insistence that he would do everything he could to break congressional gridlock only underscored how little there is he can do in response. “I will not allow gridlock, inaction or willful indifference to get in our way,” he said. “Whatever executive authority I have to help the middle class, I’ll use it. Where I can’t act on my own, I’ll pick up the phone and call CEOs, and philanthropists, and college presidents – anybody who can help – and enlist them in our efforts.” That’s right: The president is willing to pick up the phone and call philanthropists and college presidents, if that’s what it takes.

There isn’t, in other words, much he can do—or at least not much he can do that he also wants to do. And in Obama’s view, that seems to be the real problem.

And Drum wishes Obama’s speech had been bolder:

In what possible universe would bold new proposals break through the brick wall of modern Republican opposition to anything that’s not a tax cut for the rich? Obama could announce that John Galt has invented a free energy machine and just needs a small federal grant to commercialize it, and Republicans would oppose it. Obama could announce anything at all, and Republicans will reflexively oppose it.

The reason Obama should be bolder is not because it might “break through the resistance.” He should be bolder precisely because it wouldn’t make any difference. If you’re going to meet an adamantine wall no matter what you do, why not shoot for the stars? At least that way you’ve made it clear whose side you’re on.

A reader understandably asks:

I think your readers are a little bit more interested in what Ken was thinking while he was in the closet and shepherding anti-gay marriage laws in several states as head of the Republican Party. Why hasn’t he been asked this?

Because he felt that he had adequately addressed that question already, and our policy in the Ask Anythings is not to insist on an answer for any specific question. We give a huge amount of autonomy to the guests – and that was no different for Mehlman than for anyone else. Here are his previous confessions:

In an interview with Salon, the chairman of President Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign says he personally apologizes to people who “were harmed by the campaigns in which I was involved.” Ken Mehlman came out as gay in 2010. At the time, he expressed regret that he didn’t push back against the Bush campaign’s support for a federal anti-gay marriage amendment and anti-gay marriage initiatives on state ballots. “I can’t change the fact that I wasn’t in this place personally when I was in politics, and I genuinely regret that. It was very hard, personally,” he said.

Earlier this year, he said: “At a personal level, I wish I had spoken out against the effort,” Mehlman said. “As I’ve been involved in the fight for marriage equality, one of the things I’ve learned is how many people were harmed by the campaigns in which I was involved. I apologize to them and tell them I am sorry.”

I know exactly why these responses may not feel sufficient to many Dish readers.

But the Ask Anythings are not designed as classic persistent interviews by a lone interviewer. They’re constructed to give the speaker a chance to say whatever he or she feels – to shine or not, in the eyes of the readers. I am not in the room when the sessions are recorded, (with a few exceptions). The questions are voted on by readers. And what a guest chooses to talk about is often as revealing as what he or she chooses not to talk about. Our policy is to let them prove or hang themselves – and let you be the judge.

I also totally understand the sentiment that the man should still be raked over the coals for the 2004 campaign, especially in Ohio. But I have a firm and long policy in these cultural wars. Those seeking heretics will always lose to those seeking converts. And Mehlman is not just talking the talk on this; he has made a real difference in recent years in advancing the cause – which seems to me more important than settling old scores. Given that Mehlman has publicly apologized (unlike, say, Bill Clinton) to the gay victims of his past, I was not going to force another one in a format where we never do that anyway. It was my call to maintain these rules, but, of course, if Mehlman had wanted to apologize and explain again, I would not have stood in the way. He chose not to.

Because of these very limitations on Ask Anythings, we’ll be offering subscribers this fall a series of podcast conversations between me and a variety of other human beings where, trust me, I follow up questions relentlessly. They will not be traditional interviews, as on cable news or TV generally, just as the Ask Anything isn’t like anything on TV. They’ll be conversations – wide-ranging, spontaneous and with no topics off the table. They have no fixed time limit – and vary wildly in length and content.

We’re calling them “Andrew Asks Anything”. We have several in the bag and I’ll be taping more this fall. Stay tuned. But these will only be for subscribers. To become one, [tinypass_offer text=”click here”]. It’s as little as $2 a month, and, without ads, is our only source of income.

Ken’s previous answers are here. Our full Ask Anything archive is here.

A reader writes:

I’ll leave readers to decide how convincingly Mark Oppenheimer made his case about liberal puritanism, but as a proud Stumptowner, I gotta call BS on dragging Portland into it.  Like so many local issues, when an essayist just grabs a headline and lazily uses it as a metaphor for some larger theme, his whole premise is undermined by misunderstanding what actually happened.

So here’s what actually happened. Flouridation has gone down at the ballot three times here – 1956, 1962, and 1978.  Oregon, like other Western states, was red until the Clinton years.  The voters who defeated these measures through the decades were not the hipster stereotypes you see on Portlandia.  In this year’s election, the proponents outspent opponents 3 to 1 and represented a lot of the bedrock liberal interests that fuel Portland’s liberalism.

The reason voters rejected it is the same reason they always do: they have a romantic love of the natural beauty of Oregon and are enormously proud that their water comes straight from the Bull Run Reservoir in the Mt Hood wilderness.  It arrives completely untouched and untreated – pure Cascade spring water.  Most Oregonians are immigrants who were attracted to this region for the natural bounty, and Bull Run water is a powerful testament and metaphor for that purity.  The measure failed by 20 points, not because radical lefties were afraid of fluoride (even in Portland, you don’t get 60% on far-left votes), but because of the idiosyncrasies of tap water.  Lots of random Oregonians voted to save the water in its natural state.  That’s how we roll.

(For the record, I voted for fluoride.)

Update from a few readers:

“It arrives completely untouched and untreated – pure Cascade spring water.” Bullshit. All tap water in the country is treated. One hiker with giardia taking a dump in the watershed and the whole city, well, you get the idea. (The watershed is generally off-limits, but still.) From the City’s website:

The 102 square-mile protected Bull Run watershed collects water from rain and snowmelt that then flows to the Bull Run River and its tributaries. The river drains into two reservoirs, where more than 17 billion gallons are stored. The Portland Water Bureau treats the water before it enters into the three conduits that transport it to Portland. The water moves through the system by gravity, requiring no fossil fuel consumption to move water from its intake to the main storage reservoir at Powell Butte.

The other reader:

With all due respect to my fellow Portlander, my read of the anti-fluoride vote was very different.  I didn’t see it as a romantic desire to preserve the natural beauty or the clear water coming from Bull Run and helping maintain our PBFs.  Rather, I saw it as exactly the kind puritanism the author of the original piece so justifiably pointed out.

I wrote a piece for Skepchick on the subject and posted it to my Facebook wall and my circle disseminated it widely.  When I was interviewed by the Oregonian (local paper) about the issue, friends of my partner at PSU started asking why I was “shilling for the chemical industry” and accused me of the most sinister motives.  I didn’t “care about children” etc.  It is the psychology of purity and taboo in run completely rampant.

The left has entered into a love affair with the naturalistic fallacy which, at times, is equally infuriating and amusing.  Infuriating because there’s no scientifically supportable reason to be anti-fluoride, anti-vaccine or anti-GMO and the hypocrisy of leftists who mock right-wing partisans for their global warming denial or their evolution denial is just a little too rich for my tastes.  It is amusing because Whole Foods and other companies have discovered that the primrose path to the wallets of liberals is marked by the signs “Natural” and “Organic”.  Put those words on your product and lefties will beat a path to your door to give you their money. There’s a very cynical part of me that gets a chuckle out of it.  Then I remember the public policy implications of neither side being willing to be “humble before the data” of the real world and I face-palm and despair for the kind of mess we’re going to burden my grandchildren with.

Now, I say this as a committed liberal (although I like to think of myself as a Burkean Liberal, by which I mean that my public policy commitments are, on the whole, pretty in line with social democracy but tempered and held in check by a rather pessimistic view of human nature that we are not perfectible as a species and we should, where possible, look for incremental changes instead of radical lurchings pillar to post in public policy).  Above all we should try not to break things because as many ways as there are to have a society, there are far more ways to have a bad society than a good one.

Atul Gawande spotlights medical innovations that have failed to catch on. For instance:

The global problem of death in childbirth is a pressing example. Every year, three hundred thousand mothers and more than six million children die around the time of birth, largely in poorer countries. Most of these deaths are due to events that occur during or shortly after delivery. A mother may hemorrhage. She or her baby may suffer an infection. Many babies can’t take their first breath without assistance, and newborns, especially those born small, have trouble regulating their body temperature after birth. Simple, lifesaving solutions have been known for decades. They just haven’t spread.

Many solutions aren’t ones you can try at home, and that’s part of the problem. Increasingly, however, women around the world are giving birth in hospitals. In India, a government program offers mothers up to fourteen hundred rupees—more than what most Indians live on for a month—when they deliver in a hospital, and now, in many areas, the majority of births are in facilities. Death rates in India have fallen, but they’re still ten times greater than in high-income countries like our own.

Not long ago, I visited a few community hospitals in north India, where just one-third of mothers received the medication recommended to prevent hemorrhage; less than ten per cent of the newborns were given adequate warming; and only four per cent of birth attendants washed their hands for vaginal examination and delivery. In an average childbirth, clinicians followed only about ten of twenty-nine basic recommended practices.

He goes on to describe attempts to improve these practices.