Technorati Tags: Rahm Emanuel

By contrast, 2010 simply isn’t 2006, or even 2008. Whereas the Democrats were an opposition party in 2008, and especially in 2006, now they control every lever of the legislative process, especially the White House. And the sort of strategy that works for an opposition party simply doesn’t work for a governing party. The criticism that the DNC is too heavily geared towards advocacy for the Obama administration is just stupid; how voters feel about Obama’s Presidency will be (along with employment) the primary factor in how Democrats do in national elections, and to a lesser extent state elections. That’s just the place our national elections have evolved to; we have a parliamentary political system without having a parliamentary governing system. People view the President as the leader of government, assign outsized blame/credit to him for what the government does, and then votes accordingly. If unemployment stays around 10% and Obama’s approval ratings slip to the low-to-mid-40′s, it won’t make a bit of difference how many field organizers the Democratic Party has on payroll. This is something Republicans did a good job of recognizing, and getting their members of Congress on board for, for the most part, and something Democrats really need to figure out. Everyone staking out their own positions and haggling against one another isn’t really effective at managing public opinion, signing on the White House’s agenda and working to get it through Congress quickly would provide a much better political strategy, especially given that the President is much more popular than any Congressional actor, and certainly more popular than Congress as a whole. Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman posturing against the President is one thing, but the Democratic caucus as a whole would do well to look out for the political fortunes of their President, because they’re inextricably wedded to him electorally.

On a more personal note, I’d add that one problem with the SPP worship is that the field organizers it paid for weren’t necessarily that good at what they were doing. Speaking from personal observation, Ohio Republicans ran strategic and tactical circles around their Democratic opponents in 2006. In fact, it wasn’t even close; it was sort of like watching the #1 team in the country play an FCS division school. But Republicans were so unpopular, nationally and at the state level, that it simply didn’t matter how good their campaigns and staff were; people didn’t want them in charge of government anymore. And so even though the Democrats were operationally overwhelmed, they won 4 of 5 state executive offices, got more votes for their House candidates, and even got Sherrod Brown elected to the Senate. All this, of course, because George Bush and Bob Taft were incredibly unpopular.

Technorati Tags: 50 State Strategy, DNC, Howard Dean

One other point on the public option: This has been a complete and utter failure of White House leadership. They need to give this effort their support, or they need to kill it by publicly stating their opposition. But they can’t simply wait for someone else to make the decision for them, which has been their strategy until now.

On the one hand, I think Atrios is basically right to point out that, in releasing their own plan, the White House has staked out their position on reform, although I think the more relevant question is what the Senate will do here. Basically, I very much doubt that the White House is going to try to stomp out an effort to pass a public option in the Senate if 50 votes are actually there for it. But that’s the tricky part, because it isn’t really clear how many votes are there. It seems safe to assume that Lieberman, Nelson, Lincoln, Pryor, Bayh, Landrieu Carper, and Conrad are definite votes against it. Add in Jay Rockefeller, and assume Lautenberg won’t be able to mke the vote, and all you have left are 49 Democrats, assuming that all of them would vote for the public option, something that’s far from guaranteed. But maybe they could! It’s the uncertainty that makes it difficult to take a firm public stance. There’s also the question of whether the House could find the votes to pass a public option without the Stupak language. What I think the White House has managed to do is to find the easiest path through the minefield. If the votes for a public option via reconcilliation do materialize in the Senate, and the House can pass the same package, it will be much easier for the White House to sign off on it than it would be to backpedal away from public support for the public option, again, in the event that the votes for it can’t be found in Congress.

On the other hand, I really don’t see what good the White House can do either way here. Obama might be able to bring a few Senators on board by lobbying them to support the effort but most of that work would need to be done behind the scenes. Public support from the White House at this juncture would only raise the stakes and amplify the cost of failing to get the votes. Conversely, if liberal activists and lawmakers have their hopes up about a public option revival and don’t view this as a quixotic effort, then explicitly stamping out the effort isn’t going to make them feel any better about its failure so much as it guarantees they’ll be pissed off at the White House, probably for the remainder of Obama’s tenure in office. And if they haven’t gotten their hopes up, there’s no reason not to see if the movement can’t pick up more momentum. 50 votes in the Senate and 218 votes in the House is a higher hurdle than most people realize at this point, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. The White House has been reluctant to gamble on too many moves to this point, and I’ve largely supported that, but in this case, I really do think they ought to put the money down to see another card. They won’t lose that much more than they’re already in for if they don’t see the card they need.

Technorati Tags: public option

In other words, [Sen. Jay] Rockefeller was willing to be a righteous champion for the public option as long as it had no chance of passing (sadly, we just can’t do it, because although it has 50 votes in favor, it doesn’t have 60).  But now that Democrats are strongly considering the reconciliation process — which will allow passage with only 50 rather than 60 votes and thus enable them to enact a public option — Rockefeller is suddenly “inclined to oppose it” because he doesn’t “think the timing of it is very good” and it’s “too partisan.”  What strange excuses for someone to make with regard to a provision that he claimed, a mere five months ago (when he knew it couldn’t pass), was such a moral and policy imperative that he “would not relent” in ensuring its enactment.  [...]

This is why, although I basically agree with filibuster reform advocates, I am extremely skeptical that it would change much, because Democrats would then just concoct ways to lack 50 votes rather than 60 votes — just like they did here.  Ezra Klein, who is generally quite supportive of the White House perspective, reported last week on something rather amazing:  Democratic Senators found themselves in a bind, because they pretended all year to vigorously support the public option but had the 60-vote excuse for not enacting it.  But now that Democrats will likely use the 50-vote reconciliation process, how could they (and the White House) possibly justify not including the public option?  So what did they do?  They pretended in public to “demand” that the public option be included via reconciliation with a letter that many of them signed (and thus placate their base: see, we really are for it!), while conspiring in private with the White House (which expressed ”sharp resistance” to the public option) to make sure it wouldn’t really happen. 

There’s a few obvious mistakes Greenwald is making in this post. First of all, he’s overstating what Rockefeller said. As I’ve argued before, when you’re trying to make a point around a politician’s statement, you have to be careful to stick to what they actually said, because politicians carefully select their language. Rockefeller did not say he was completely opposed to using reconcilliation to pass a public option, he said he was “disinclined” to do so. What does that mean? I don’t really know, and neither does Greenwald. It’s certainly a pessimistic non-committal, at best, but it doesn’t give you any indication how committed Rockefeller is to this. Would he actually oppose the public option if there were 49 or 50 votes for it in the Senate? I don’t really think so, given the work his office did in writing the strong public option amendment in the Senate, but it’s possible. 

Secondly, Greenwald is constructing a bit of a strawman when he expresses his skepticism that you could get 50 votes for the public option. I can’t speak for everyone, but I’ve certainly been skeptical of the notion that there were 50 votes for it in the Senate, as have, among others, Ezra Klein and John Cole. Really, the only people I’ve seen who were certain there were enough votes for it were the progressive activists who spent the fall demanding Democrats use reconcilliation to get the bill done.

Lastly, Greenwald takes one person’s comment and spins a conspiracy involving the entire Democratic caucus. We’re to believe that, because Sen. Rockefeller doesn’t think using reconcilliation to pass the public option is a good idea, the entire recent campaign among a minority of the Democratic caucus is all a big sham. Aside from the obviously faulty reasoning here, I’m wondering to what extent Greenwald actually believes this. Bernie Sanders and Sherrod Brown have both signed the letter urging a reconcilliation vote on the public option, does Greenwald think these two Senators are just pulling a fast one on progressives? Does he think Bernie Sanders isn’t actually interested in passing the public option? And if he does (or even if he doesn’t), I’d like to see some actual evidence for his premise, not just more conspiracy theories. One political movement that’s consumed with paranoia and conspiracy theory is quite enough for me.

Technorati Tags: Glenn Greenwald, public option

So I gather that the new meme about town is that Obama needs to fire all those rubes from Chicago who are stearing him wrong and “ruining his brand,” and while I think it’s pretty self-evidently stupid (I haven’t seen anyone explaining why Obama either wouldn’t face a major shit-storm for such a drastic staff shake-up, or won’t be hurt by it), it is what it is. But this article by former Virginia governor Doug Wilder in POLITICO makes even less sense in the genre. Wilder, in addition to calling out Rahm Emmanuel, takes aim at former Virginia governor and current DNC chairman Tim Kaine in a truly bizarre fashion:

Though I discussed with Tim what I was doing relative to the vice presidency, he and I never had any discussions as to whether he should be the national party chairman. There are several reasons why I felt then, and do now, that it is not a good fit for Tim, the party or Obama.

 Positioning Democrats as “tax and spend” has been a favorite pastime of Republicans. Another has been “soft on crime.”

Though I discussed with Tim what I was doing relative to the vice presidency, he and I never had any discussions as to whether he should be the national party chairman. There are several reasons why I felt then, and do now, that it is not a good fit for Tim, the party or Obama.

 Positioning Democrats as “tax and spend” has been a favorite pastime of Republicans. Another has been “soft on crime.”

Well look, I read a lot of Republican/conservative blogs, and get spam mail from a few right-wing blast email outfits and this is the first I’ve heard of this. So with plenty of time to train their sights on Kaine, Republicans haven’t. Which makes perfect sense, given that I can’t think of any election, ever, in which one of the party’s committee chairman became an issue. Not even the much more visible Howard Dean.

Wilder also pulls out the tired trope of the New Jersey, Virginia, and Massachusetts election results, and the requisite ignoring of special elections in NY-20 and NY-23, and declares that the problem with Obama’s inner circle is that they lack sufficient executive branch experience, even though Rahm spent quite a bit of time in the Clinton White House. All of which creates a pattern in which the much more interesting question is; who pissed in Wilder’s corn flakes?

Technorati Tags: Doug Wilder, Politico, Rahm Emanuel

But that pales in comparison to what Obama did today. Going to House Republicans at their retreat in Baltimore, Obama fielded questions from the most vehement of his opposition, the House Republican caucus, and he ran circles around them. One thing I don’t think conservatives realize is what talk radio has done to their attachment with reality. You can toss something around the echo chamber, unchallenged, and it starts to sound pretty good. When someone a lot smarter than you is handling the nonsense in real time, to your face, well, that makes you look quite a bit dumber (and it doesn’t help that House Republicans are really dumb to begin with). When you couple this with the address Wednesday night, it’s been a very good couple of days for the White House. They’re clearly back on top of the political world, at least for now.

What does it mean on a substantive level? It’s hard to say, but something has clearly had an impact on Congressional Democrats. Nancy Pelosi is absolutely determined to pass healthcare reform, and even Kent Conrad and Ben Nelson are holding out the possibility of going to reconcilliation to pass a bill.  A lot of Democrats clearly understand that they have to do healthcare reform, for political, policy, and moral reasons, and the momentum seems to be back, at least somewhat. Is that because of the White House? Maybe not, but something has lit a fire under very key players in the caucus to make this happen.

There’s hope yet.

Matt Taibbi’s latest polemic in Rolling Stone has been the topic of the weekend, and since I’ve weighed in on it in comment sections elsewhere, I might as well add it to my own neglected blog. Kevin Drum, Digby, Matt Yglesias, Tim Fernholz, Ezra Klein, and Brad Delong have, in my opinion, the best responses, and you should read all of them. I’m not at all a fan of this article, and more generally I’m not a fan of Taibbi’s, but I suspect that’s as much because I’m not a fan of polemics in general more than anything else. I do, however, think this article does a good job exposing the genre’s weaknesses.

First of all, yes, there are factual errors, and no, they’re not really that important. Confusing various James Rubins and so on is embarrassing, but it’s not a mortal sin. I will give Taibbi that. The bigger problems come in the somewhat vague interpretation of “facts” and the interpretation thereof. For example, did Michael Froman have a large role in the transition process? Yes. Does that mean he “hired” Tim Geithner as Secretary of the Treasury? Of course not. Presidents-elect don’t outsource selections for top tier cabinet positions. It’s ridiculous. But it’s not technically wrong since it’s not technically a fact, it’s just a transparently absurd interpretation of events. And of course there’s the rather central notion that the corruption is represented by various officials’ connections to Robert Rubin, which is likewise completely ridiculous. Robert Rubin spent 2 years as the chairman of the National Economic Council under President Clinton and another 4 years as Treasury Secretary, meaning that you could pretty much connect anyone who worked on economic policy during the Clinton administration to Rubin. Does anyone expect that the Obama administration wouldn’t or shouldn’t have people who worked in the last Democratic administration in it? That facing a tough economic situation the administration should only be staffed with people who have never been around the job before? That seems, well, ridiculous doesn’t it?

More damning, I think, is the way Taibbi chooses to characterize the people he casts as the good guys, for lack of a better term. The stalwarts of the campaign who have supposedly been vanquished now that Obama no longer needs them to fool the lefties, namely Austan Goolsbee and Karen Kornbluh. Here’s how he introduced them:

In order to grasp the full horror of what took place, however, one needs to go back a few weeks before the actual bailout — to November 5th, 2008, the day after Obama’s election.That was the day the jubilant Obama campaign announced its transition team. Though many of the names were familiar — former Bill Clinton chief of staff John Podesta, long-time Obama confidante Valerie Jarrett — the list was most notable for who was not on it, especially on the economic side. Austan Goolsbee, a University of Chicago economist who had served as one of Obama’s chief advisers during the campaign, didn’t make the cut. Neither did Karen Kornbluh, who had served as Obama’s policy director and was instrumental in crafting the Democratic Party’s platform. Both had emphasized populist themes during the campaign: Kornbluh was known for pushing Democrats to focus on the plight of the poor and middle class, while Goolsbee was an aggressive critic of Wall Street, declaring that AIG executives should receive “a Nobel Prize — for evil.”

Well that’s great and all, but it isn’t anywhere near the full story. Goolsbee has never been a populist hero before Taibbi’s article painted him that way, at least that I’m aware of, and prior to this he was best known as being the guy who assured the Canadian government that candidate Obama’s anti-NAFTA rhetoric in Ohio shouldn’t be taken seriously. His description of Kornbluh isn’t inaccurate in its own right, but as Ezra points out, Taibbi conveniently neglects to mention that Kornbluh served in the Treasury Department under Clinton as deputy chief of staff to…Robert Rubin! Indeed as Ezra points out, it’s easy to imagine that had Kornbluh gotten a more prominent role in the administration, she’d be on Taibbi’s list of nefarious Rubinites. Unfair conjecture you say? Well, look at the treatment Taibbi gives Jason Furman:

Just below Summers is Jason Furman, who worked for Rubin in the Clinton White House and was one of the first directors of Rubin’s Hamilton Project. The appointment of Furman — a persistent advocate of free-trade agreements like NAFTA and the author of droolingly pro-globalization reports with titles like “Walmart: A Progressive Success Story” — provided one of the first clues that Obama had only been posturing when he promised crowds of struggling Midwesterners during the campaign that he would renegotiate NAFTA, which facilitated the flight of blue-collar jobs to other countries. “NAFTA’s shortcomings were evident when signed, and we must now amend the agreement to fix them,” Obama declared. A few months after hiring Furman to help shape its economic policy, however, the White House quietly quashed any talk of renegotiating the trade deal.

Now we could quibble with this all day if we really wanted to, but I’ll skip all that for the purpose of noting that whether you like Furman or not, he was a top economic adviser to the Obama campaign in 2008. So the larger takeaway here is that whether or not you agree with Taibbi on how bad the financial industry is, what he’s unquestionably doing is grossly misstating the nature of the Obama campaign. Which is what makes Drum’s defense of the article rather bizarre:

But look: this is all just nitpicky bullshit.  Taibbi’s piece is basically about how the finance industry owns Congress and the Obama administration, and that’s basically true.  In fact, I have a piece coming out in a week or so in the print magazine that makes pretty much the same point.  My approach is different, and my language is all PG-rated, but my conclusions are pretty much the same.  The finance industry, through both standard lobbying and what Simon Johnson calls “intellectual capture,” has, over the decades since Reagan was elected, convinced nearly everyone that what’s good for Wall Street is good for America, and that what’s bad for Wall Street would be catastrophic for America.  Everything else follows from that.

Well look, that’s all great, but that isn’t really the point of  Taibbi’s article. Hell, that would be a pretty boring polemic. After all, who needs Matt Taibbi to tell them that the banks own Washington, especially Congress? We all know that! What people need Matt Taibbi to do is spin entertaining stories of personal malfeasance. And Taibbi delivers in spades, but he isn’t writing about “intellectual capture,” his narrative is that Obama “sold out.” That’s a very specific charge that’s very different than simply claiming the Obama administration has too much affinity for the banking industry. It’s also entirely untrue, as evidenced by the fact that Taibbi had to a) reinvent Austan Goolsbee as a raging populist, b) ignore Karen Kornbluh’s rather direct ties to the dreaded Robert Rubin and, c) ignore Jason Furman’s role in the Obama campaign.

Now maybe this doesn’t bother you, but it should. For one thing, if it’s wrong for Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity etc. to feed their audience bullshit and conspiracy theories to validate their emotion based beliefs about politics and policy, then it should be wrong when someone “on the left” does it too. More importantly, painting an inaccurate picture of Obama the candidate’s views on economics and finance doesn’t really help anyone who’s actually interested in the problems with intellectual capture or Washington’s closeness to Wall Street. If anything, examining how much candidate Obama was in line with mainstream Washington/Wall Street during the campaign and why no one cared about it at the time would be a much more helpful piece of journalism. But it wouldn’t have been very entertaining, definitely wouldn’t have been as controversial as this piece has been (links baby links!), and wouldn’t have stoked the victim role a large segment of the netroots needs to survive. So that’s not the piece Taibbi delivers. Which is really a shame because the problem of Wall Street capture of Congress is a problem that really could use a good tongue lashing from a writer as talented as Taibbi.

Technorati Tags: Corruption, Financial Reform, Matt Taibbi