More Radical Than Bush
The full horror of John McCain's economic agenda.
Jonathan Cohn, The New Republic Published: Wednesday, September 24, 2008
John Goodman is a conservative economist who thinks all the fuss over people without health insurance is just hooey. As Goodman explained to a reporter from The Dallas Morning News last week, everybody can get medical care from an emergency room, so why not just stop tallying the uninsured altogether? "Voil à," Goodman quipped. "Problem solved." Like many far-right policy experts, Goodman had said such things before. But, unlike many far-right policy experts, Goodman isn't just some random wonk. As the Morning News noted, Goodman had helped craft McCain's health care plan. In other words, he is a McCain adviser.
Or, at least, he used to be. When Goodman's quote got the attention of reporters, a McCain spokesman issued a terse statement: "John Goodman is not an adviser to this campaign." When that position became untenable--it turns out Goodman had identified himself as an adviser not only to the Morning News but also in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, to which the McCain campaign never objected--the official story changed. Yes, Goodman had offered advice to McCain. But it was on an unpaid, voluntary basis, and McCain had since made clear that Goodman's input was not necessary. "John McCain could not disagree more strongly with Mr. Goodman," a spokesman said. "John McCain believes that addressing the problem of the nation's uninsured is one of our most pressing national priorities." (Goodman has been traveling and unavailable for comment.)
It wasn't the first time this campaign season that McCain distanced himself from a conservative adviser over controversial statements. Former Texas senator Phil Gramm, as a top economic adviser, had far more influence than Goodman. Fortune magazine actually called him "McCain's econ brain." But, in June, Gramm told a Washington Times reporter that the economy was stronger than most Americans realized. The real problem, he suggested, was a "mental recession"--that "we have sort of become a nation of whiners." Again, Gramm was offering a refrain common among conservatives, who think the press constantly dwells on bad economic news. But did McCain believe it, too? This time, McCain himself issued a denial. "Phil Gramm does not speak for me," he said. "America is in great difficulty. And we are experiencing enormous challenges." Soon Gramm was told his services, too, were no longer required.
Goodman and Gramm had, of course, committed political crimes. But, while they were guilty of ill-chosen rhetoric, they had also told the truth. Whatever their actual advisory roles, their statements were perfectly consistent with the thinking behind McCain's official economic agenda--a mix of supply-side tax cuts and conservative reforms of health care as extreme as any put forth by the Republicans in modern times. McCain might seem an odd vessel for such radicalism, given his notorious opposition to President Bush's first round of tax cuts and his reputation for bucking the GOP. But that all happened before he started running for president again. This campaign has shown how McCain intends to strike a balance between corralling his political base and actually governing the country. And it's not much of a balance. Hard as it may be to believe, after the mounting debt and rising inequality of the Bush era, McCain has indicated he wants to preserve Bush's conservative legacy on economic policy--and then take it even further.
To understand the absurdity of this proposition, it's important to remember just how awful that legacy is. When Bush took office in 2001, the federal government was running substantial surpluses--that is, it was taking in more money than it was spending. It also had a relatively progressive tax code, meaning that the wealthy paid significantly higher rates than the middle class and poor. During the presidential campaign, Al Gore had proposed putting the government's surpluses aside in order to avoid excessive future borrowing, which might slow down the economy, and to prepare for the retirement of baby- boomers, whose aging would soon strain Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Bush rejected that idea, arguing--as many Republicans did--that the government couldn't be trusted with surpluses (i.e., it might spend the money instead). When Bush took office, he pushed for, and won, massive tax breaks. Even though most of the benefits went to the wealthiest, Bush vowed they would promote a strong economy that would ultimately benefit all Americans.
It was the same argument conservatives had been advancing for more than two decades, ever since Ronald Reagan first made supply-side economics a cornerstone of Republican Party dogma. But, as in the past, the theory didn't turn out so well in practice. Predictions of self-financing tax cuts proved utterly wrong, as the Clinton-era budget surpluses quickly turned back into the deficits we still have now. Today, the government is digging itself into a deeper fiscal hole. If allowed to persist, high deficits could actually hinder growth in the long run, as the government soaks up money that businesses would like to borrow for their needs, while making future entitlement costs less manageable. The short-term picture isn't so pretty either. The economy grew following a recession that hit during Bush's first term, but it was a notoriously anemic expansion. Wealthy Americans made out like bandits, but the typical American's wages did not grow at all relative to inflation, something that hadn't happened in any expansionary period since World War II. Job creation under Bush has been the worst since Herbert Hoover's time, and the percentage of families living in poverty has actually increased.
No, you can't blame all of this on the Bush tax cuts. Economic inequality has been growing on its own, and the deficits reflect, in part, high spending on everything from the war to the new Medicare drug benefit. But, if the Bush tax cuts aren't the only reason for our current economic woes, they are an important one. It's hardly surprising that the poor and middle-class would fall behind just as the tax code started showering more benefits on the rich. Nor is it coincidental that deficits would reappear at the very same time tax revenues declined, relative to the economy as a whole.
When history so clearly refutes your economic doctrine, the intelligent response is to reassess your thinking. A case in point is the Democrats. Even though their policies were pretty successful during the 1990s, particularly compared to the recent Bush record, in the last few years leading Democratic thinkers realized that they could do better still. Precisely because the economy is heading in the direction of inequality--and because, absent other forces, the poor and middle-class will struggle--Democrats today are putting more emphasis on aggressive efforts to protect average Americans, even if that means meddling with the economy in ways they thought unwise a decade ago.
But Republicans have reacted differently. Instead of taking the last few years as a cue that maybe it's time to offer something besides more Bush-style tax cuts, they decided that what the country really needs is ... more Bush-style tax cuts! And McCain's agenda indicates that he agrees wholeheartedly. After extending Bush's tax reductions, which are set to expire in 2011, McCain would trim taxes on corporate income and estates. He's also proposed creating a new, parallel tax system into which any American could opt. While he's been a bit fuzzy on the details, it, too, would cut taxes disproportionately for wealthy Americans.
If all these proposals took effect, according to the independent and highly respected Tax Policy Center, 80 percent of the McCain tax cuts would go into the pockets of the richest quintile of Americans. They would see their after-tax incomes go up by an average of 6 percent. By contrast, somebody in the middle quintile would see his or her income rise by 1.4 percent while somebody in the poorest quintile would realize a yield of just 0.6 percent. To put these statistics in human terms, a multimillionaire--say, a wealthy landowner in Sedona, Arizona--would get enough money to buy a luxury car. (The top 1 percent of taxpayers would reap an average bonus of more than $100,000 per year under McCain's plan.) But a tool-and-die maker working for a Detroit auto supplier would get about $600, maybe enough to cover half a month's mortgage. Somebody in the lowest income quintile--say, a single waitress in rural Virginia--would, with her $65 windfall, get an extra trip or two to the grocery store.
But that's just half the story. Those tax cuts would cost money--a lot of money. McCain has, at times, invoked the thoroughly discredited supply-side argument that his tax cuts can help pay for themselves by generating more growth. Mostly, though, McCain has emphasized his intention to pay for the new tax cuts by slashing wasteful spending. And it's hard to overstate how laughable this is.
McCain may have a strong record of opposing pork-barrel spending, but there simply isn't enough pork in the budget to make up this kind of money. After consulting with budget experts, the Annenberg Public Policy Center's website factcheck.org concluded that McCain would have to cut discretionary spending-- including things like secondary education and veteran's health benefits--by 20 percent just to realize the $100 billion savings he's claimed he could find. And that $100 billion wouldn't even come close to offsetting the enormous tax cuts--which, according to the Tax Policy Center, would cost the federal government around $700 billion per year.
So, if McCain is serious about paying for his tax cuts, he'd have to look elsewhere--to the three big entitlement programs: Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. McCain has frequently indicated an interest in doing just that, suggesting that, as president, he'd convene a bipartisan commission on entitlement reform. He's called the present financing of Social Security--which relies on contributions from present workers to pay for present retirees--a "disgrace," even though it's the way the program has always run. McCain has also long supported efforts to privatize Social Security, an initiative that would erode the basic income guarantee that Social Security provides and result in reduced benefits. It may not sound so drastic, given that some Social Security recipients are pretty well-off. But remember that, for about two- thirds of elderly Americans, Social Security represents approximately half of their incomes. Even modest benefit reductions would affect these retirees.
Of course, it's possible McCain wouldn't slash entitlements, perhaps because it'd be politically impossible. But, if he left entitlements intact, he'd simply be reprising Bush's feat--that is, he'd run up more debt. The Tax Policy Center estimates that, absent offsetting cuts, the McCain tax agenda would add more than $8.5 trillion in new debt over the next ten years--more than double what Obama would add. And this would hit the poor and middle-class just as surely as spending cuts today would. Sometime in the future, the sky-high interest payments on that borrowed money (not to mention the depressed tax receipts from reduced growth) would force the government to choose between slashing entitlements for retirees or slashing spending that benefits everybody else. "He hastens the day of reckoning when government resources are too small to sustain current commitments," says Henry Aaron, a Brookings Institution economist. "The right analogy here is the kid who kills his parents and then asks for mercy as an orphan."
The other economic lesson of recent history concerns exposure to financial risk--specifically, the risk of high medical expenses. For the last 30 years or so, the proportion of Americans with health insurance has declined, primarily because insurance has gotten more expensive than either employers or individuals feel they can afford. Even people with insurance have felt the impact of these rising costs in the form of higher premiums, co-payments, and deductibles. But, rather than bolstering public insurance programs for the poor or creating a universal health care system--which is the solution Obama, like most Democrats, now favors--McCain has once again taken a cue from President Bush. His supposed solution to the health care crisis lies in a sweeping--and potentially destabilizing--change in the tax code.
Right now, the government exempts money spent on group health insurance premiums from personal income taxes. McCain would get rid of that exemption and replace it with a tax credit, worth $2,500 to individuals and $5,000 to families, to cover money spent on insurance and medical expenses. The credit would be refundable, which means that, if you were too poor to pay taxes, you'd get the money as a straight subsidy from the government. It's hard to know for sure exactly how the change would play out; among other things, McCain and his advisers have offered contradictory versions of whether they'd also cut the exemption for payroll taxes, too. But it's clear that at least some people who don't presently have health insurance would go out and buy some, thereby increasing their protection from medical expenses. For these reasons, it's easy to conclude--as some commentators have--that McCain's health care proposal is actually progress of a sort.
But what kind of insurance would people be getting? The existing tax break on group health insurance, which has been around since the 1940s, means that, for most workers, one dollar of health insurance from your employer is actually worth more than one dollar in salary. That's a major reason employees have pushed for group health coverage over the years--and employers have provided it. Take away the tax break, and the incentives will change. Fewer people will end up with group health insurance, since group coverage will, in effect, become more expensive.
That's fine if there's a good substitute for group insurance; Obama's universal coverage program, for example, would let anybody buy into a public insurance option or obtain private insurance through the system federal employees use. But McCain creates no such mechanism. As a result, people without group insurance would have to shop for coverage on their own, in the individual market, where it's difficult to find the same sort of protection. Individual coverage is generally available only to those in relatively good health, since when insurers sell policies one-by-one they can, and do, avoid people with pre-existing medical conditions. And the benefits are rarely as comprehensive, mostly because large companies have better bargaining leverage (to buy more protection for the same money) and because offering skimpy benefits for serious illness is yet another way insurers can avoid enrolling too many sick people.
Another seemingly small tweak in McCain's health plans would most likely make this problem even worse. McCain has said he would allow people to purchase coverage across state lines, something they cannot do now. This would reduce the cost of insurance, McCain says, since many states have enacted regulations that drive up the cost of medical care. What McCain doesn't mention is that these regulations are in place to make sure insurers provide certain benefits, price their offerings within certain limits, or abide by certain standards of solvency. Not all of these regulations are sensible--some are the result of lobbying by medical professionals or disease groups--but many of them are. They can require insurers to cover cancer screenings, diabetes care, or mental health treatments, for example. If people could purchase coverage across state lines, most likely the entire insurance industry would relocate to the state with the most lax regulations--and existing regulations in other states would become effectively meaningless--much as the credit card industry relocated to Delaware and South Dakota in the 1970s and '80s. And, again, people would end up with weaker health insurance.
The ultimate question about McCain's agenda, then, is not whether it's deeply conservative but whether he'd really pursue it. He has reportedly admitted he "doesn't really understand economics" and has never shown the kind of passion for it that he has, say, for national security issues. And, while McCain has at times surrounded himself with the likes of Goodman and Gramm, he also has more sensible voices in his orbit. Most notable among them is chief economic adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who gained a (well-deserved) reputation for integrity as head of the Congressional Budget Office by refusing to countenance fiscally irresponsible arguments--even when they came from fellow Republicans. Maybe this is a sign that, if elected, McCain would stop listening to the ideological zealots on economic policy--and start listening to saner, more moderate voices.
It's a comforting theory, but not, ultimately, a convincing one. Whether it's ambivalence, ignorance, expediency, or conviction that has propelled McCain to the right, there's no reason to think his behavior will change after Election Day. Remember, we've seen this all before. In 2000, Bush ran on a deeply conservative agenda of slashing taxes, gutting Social Security, and peeling back health insurance coverage even for middle class Americans. But, despite valiant efforts from writers like Paul Krugman to point this out, both the press and the public fell for the myth that Bush was a "compassionate conservative." And, while McCain will have to confront a more ornery Democratic Congress than Bush did in his first term, McCain's margin for error will also be a lot smaller. Bush was fortunate in that he took office after the Clinton boom, when the federal treasury was relatively flush and a long expansion had fattened people's pocketbooks. Now, the budget is back in the red, and the public is desperate for financial assistance and security. Dismissing McCain's declared agenda as empty rhetoric would be a huge gamble--one this country can ill afford.
Jonathan Cohn is a senior editor at The New Republic. He is also a senior fellow at Demos and the author of Sick: The Untold Story of America's Health Care Crisis--and the People Who Pay the Price.
Monday, September 15, 2008
Friday, September 12, 2008
David Sirota - Truthdig.com (Sept. 11, 2008)
Country First? Hardly
Posted on Sept 11, 2008
By David Sirota
Let’s say that you enjoyed watching last week’s Republican National Convention on television.
Let’s say you drank in the almost uniformly white faces and the regimented revivalism, you clapped when speakers belittled Barack Obama’s work organizing impoverished communities, indeed, you cheered with Rudy Giuliani’s zinger, “Drill, baby, drill!”
Let’s further stipulate that you were not at all discomfited by the convention’s incessant “Country First” mantra that defines loyalty to America as lock-step fealty to the Republican Party.
Let’s say—for sheer argument’s sake, of course—all of this is true. What, then, of the substance? Stripping away the partisanship, passion and propaganda, what about the veracity of the claim that the GOP puts this country first?
Well, let’s just say it’s a little dicey.
On national security, the Republican Party advocates continuing to force thousands of young Americans to risk life and limb refereeing Iraq’s civil war. Though the party’s slogan hearkens back to conservatives’ “America First” isolationism, the GOP nonetheless supports spending $12 billion a month on the war—money needed at home.
Same story on economics. In 2004, the Republican White House called outsourcing “a plus.” In 2006, the Republican commander in chief OK’d the sale of critical infrastructure to foreign dictators. And today the Republican presidential nominee is demanding more NAFTA-style trade pacts that eliminate American jobs. This, says the GOP, is putting our country first.
But who is the “country”? According to the Census Bureau, it will soon be mostly nonwhites. That is, the demographic groups that the alleged “country first” party regularly disparages, whether Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) yearning for a return to segregation, Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) scapegoating Latinos, Rep. Howard Coble (R-N.C.) celebrating Japanese internment, President Bush genuflecting to Bob Jones University’s white supremacists, or Ronald Reagan echoing bigoted rallying cries at the scene of Mississippi race murders.
Maybe, you insist in your post-convention fervor, I just don’t get it. Maybe “country first” really does mean refereeing foreign civil wars, spending billions overseas while cutting domestic programs, exporting jobs and bashing ethnic groups that will soon make up the majority of the nation.
But I don’t think so. More likely, Republicans have simply taken the famous parable to heart—the one about patriotism being the last refuge of scoundrels.
As a political strategy, it’s not stupid. Following the Bush-DeLay-Abramoff era, many Americans rightly think Republican politicians are scoundrels. And so those politicians are trying to make sure “this election is not about issues,” as John McCain’s campaign manager said this week, but about a hideous hypernationalism only Joe McCarthy could love. Employing flag pins, war stories and Bible-thumping social conservatism, former POW McCain and Christian fundamentalist Sarah Palin hope their red-white-and-blue phantasmagoria will hypnotize America into voting Republican.
Such desperation leads to seeming incoherence at times. For instance, when anti-war protesters at the GOP convention demanded lawmakers actually put country first by bringing the troops home, Republican delegates responded like an entranced mob of cultists, mindlessly chanting “U.S.A.”
Then again, in the Karl Rove age, every televised scene—no matter how absurd—is part of sculpting an election victory with a mallet of jingoism and a chisel of intolerance.
On the seventh anniversary of the 9/11 atrocities, the Republican convention reminds us of what Barry Goldwater suggested 44 years ago: Terrorists are not the only ones who believe extremism is no vice. And, as the old aphorism warns, when the most virulent extremism attacks our country, it won’t be shrouded in Islamic fatwas—it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross.
Sadly, the when is now. McCain is the flag, Palin is the cross—and Americans will have to decide whether we believe their zealotry puts country first.
Posted on Sept 11, 2008
By David Sirota
Let’s say that you enjoyed watching last week’s Republican National Convention on television.
Let’s say you drank in the almost uniformly white faces and the regimented revivalism, you clapped when speakers belittled Barack Obama’s work organizing impoverished communities, indeed, you cheered with Rudy Giuliani’s zinger, “Drill, baby, drill!”
Let’s further stipulate that you were not at all discomfited by the convention’s incessant “Country First” mantra that defines loyalty to America as lock-step fealty to the Republican Party.
Let’s say—for sheer argument’s sake, of course—all of this is true. What, then, of the substance? Stripping away the partisanship, passion and propaganda, what about the veracity of the claim that the GOP puts this country first?
Well, let’s just say it’s a little dicey.
On national security, the Republican Party advocates continuing to force thousands of young Americans to risk life and limb refereeing Iraq’s civil war. Though the party’s slogan hearkens back to conservatives’ “America First” isolationism, the GOP nonetheless supports spending $12 billion a month on the war—money needed at home.
Same story on economics. In 2004, the Republican White House called outsourcing “a plus.” In 2006, the Republican commander in chief OK’d the sale of critical infrastructure to foreign dictators. And today the Republican presidential nominee is demanding more NAFTA-style trade pacts that eliminate American jobs. This, says the GOP, is putting our country first.
But who is the “country”? According to the Census Bureau, it will soon be mostly nonwhites. That is, the demographic groups that the alleged “country first” party regularly disparages, whether Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) yearning for a return to segregation, Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) scapegoating Latinos, Rep. Howard Coble (R-N.C.) celebrating Japanese internment, President Bush genuflecting to Bob Jones University’s white supremacists, or Ronald Reagan echoing bigoted rallying cries at the scene of Mississippi race murders.
Maybe, you insist in your post-convention fervor, I just don’t get it. Maybe “country first” really does mean refereeing foreign civil wars, spending billions overseas while cutting domestic programs, exporting jobs and bashing ethnic groups that will soon make up the majority of the nation.
But I don’t think so. More likely, Republicans have simply taken the famous parable to heart—the one about patriotism being the last refuge of scoundrels.
As a political strategy, it’s not stupid. Following the Bush-DeLay-Abramoff era, many Americans rightly think Republican politicians are scoundrels. And so those politicians are trying to make sure “this election is not about issues,” as John McCain’s campaign manager said this week, but about a hideous hypernationalism only Joe McCarthy could love. Employing flag pins, war stories and Bible-thumping social conservatism, former POW McCain and Christian fundamentalist Sarah Palin hope their red-white-and-blue phantasmagoria will hypnotize America into voting Republican.
Such desperation leads to seeming incoherence at times. For instance, when anti-war protesters at the GOP convention demanded lawmakers actually put country first by bringing the troops home, Republican delegates responded like an entranced mob of cultists, mindlessly chanting “U.S.A.”
Then again, in the Karl Rove age, every televised scene—no matter how absurd—is part of sculpting an election victory with a mallet of jingoism and a chisel of intolerance.
On the seventh anniversary of the 9/11 atrocities, the Republican convention reminds us of what Barry Goldwater suggested 44 years ago: Terrorists are not the only ones who believe extremism is no vice. And, as the old aphorism warns, when the most virulent extremism attacks our country, it won’t be shrouded in Islamic fatwas—it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross.
Sadly, the when is now. McCain is the flag, Palin is the cross—and Americans will have to decide whether we believe their zealotry puts country first.
Eugene Robinson - Washington Post (Sept. 11, 2008)
A Campaign Without Ideas
Posted on Sept. 11, 2008
By Eugene Robinson
There was a time when Republicans campaigned on their ideas, programs and values. This year—lacking ideas, programs or values—John McCain and Sarah Palin are running for the White House on an elaborate fictional narrative of victimhood. Their supposed persecutors are Democrats and the news media, and the aim of this whole charade is to keep Americans from talking about ideas, programs and values.
Every day, the McCain campaign brays anew with over-the-top indignation at “the outrageous attacks” on Palin’s family. The McCain people don’t cite specifics, because there are no specifics to cite. What newsworthy Democrat has ventured any personal criticism of Palin or any member of her family? What serious news outlet has done any such thing?
I hear McCain’s amen chorus screaming, “Lipstick on a pig! Lipstick on a pig!” But they’re well aware that Obama was unambiguously talking about McCain’s economic ideas, not his running mate. It seems incomprehensible that the McCain campaign would make so much noise about an allegation that clearly doesn’t hold a drop of water—until you realize that the noise is the whole point.
As long as people are talking about barnyard beauty tips, they’re not talking about substance. Any day spent arguing about meaningless ephemera is a small but significant victory for a campaign that has nothing to say.
It’s not in McCain’s interest to talk about the 46 million Americans who don’t have medical insurance; Obama has a plan to get most of them covered, while McCain promises a modest tax credit and his best wishes for good health. It’s not in McCain’s interest to talk about the economy; Obama wants to renew our sense of shared enterprise and responsibility, while McCain is happy to stick with the Republican philosophy of “I’ve got mine, suckers.” It’s not in McCain’s interest to talk seriously about the occupation of Iraq; Obama was prescient in calling for a withdrawal date, while McCain outdoes even George W. Bush in insisting that our troops stay where they are no longer even wanted.
The most important fact about the political landscape this year is that 80 percent of Americans believe the country is headed in the wrong direction. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that McCain’s only chance of winning is to obscure the fact that on the issues voters most care about, he essentially proposes to stay the course.
So McCain stopped talking about experience and started echoing Obama’s mantra of change, change, change. No one is supposed to remember that when he was courting his party’s conservative base he bragged that in his Senate votes he supported Bush 90 percent of the time. Only the party faithful are supposed to be mindful of the fact that McCain is, like Bush, an actual Republican.
Running for and against one’s party at the same time is not an easy trick to pull off, however. The contradiction is too big to hide—it’s like a huge, lipstick-smeared Yorkshire boar wallowing in the middle of the room. At some point, people are going to notice it unless you draw their attention elsewhere.
That’s the function of the McCain campaign’s daily screams of feigned outrage. Creating the false impression that Democrats and journalists are unfairly attacking Palin serves another purpose as well: It helps create the impression that legitimate and necessary questions about her record—such as her one-time support for the Bridge to Nowhere or her history of seeking the congressional earmarks she now claims to reject—are somehow out of bounds.
To mix things up, sometimes the campaign pretends that McCain is the one being persecuted—for his age, usually. It’s all just noise, intended to drown out meaningful debate.
If you scream bloody murder every day, however, people eventually stop taking you seriously. News stories about the lipstick remark stated forthrightly that the McCain people were misrepresenting what Obama had said. At some point, these tactical lamentations become not worth reporting at all.
And there will be at least four key moments when the McCain-Palin campaign will be unable to avoid the issues. Obama and McCain will hold three debates; Palin and Joe Biden will hold one. The television audience for these encounters is expected to be enormous, perhaps the biggest ever.
Americans will be presented with a straightforward question. Do they want a Republican in the White House for four more years, continuing to take the country in the same direction? Or not?
Posted on Sept. 11, 2008
By Eugene Robinson
There was a time when Republicans campaigned on their ideas, programs and values. This year—lacking ideas, programs or values—John McCain and Sarah Palin are running for the White House on an elaborate fictional narrative of victimhood. Their supposed persecutors are Democrats and the news media, and the aim of this whole charade is to keep Americans from talking about ideas, programs and values.
Every day, the McCain campaign brays anew with over-the-top indignation at “the outrageous attacks” on Palin’s family. The McCain people don’t cite specifics, because there are no specifics to cite. What newsworthy Democrat has ventured any personal criticism of Palin or any member of her family? What serious news outlet has done any such thing?
I hear McCain’s amen chorus screaming, “Lipstick on a pig! Lipstick on a pig!” But they’re well aware that Obama was unambiguously talking about McCain’s economic ideas, not his running mate. It seems incomprehensible that the McCain campaign would make so much noise about an allegation that clearly doesn’t hold a drop of water—until you realize that the noise is the whole point.
As long as people are talking about barnyard beauty tips, they’re not talking about substance. Any day spent arguing about meaningless ephemera is a small but significant victory for a campaign that has nothing to say.
It’s not in McCain’s interest to talk about the 46 million Americans who don’t have medical insurance; Obama has a plan to get most of them covered, while McCain promises a modest tax credit and his best wishes for good health. It’s not in McCain’s interest to talk about the economy; Obama wants to renew our sense of shared enterprise and responsibility, while McCain is happy to stick with the Republican philosophy of “I’ve got mine, suckers.” It’s not in McCain’s interest to talk seriously about the occupation of Iraq; Obama was prescient in calling for a withdrawal date, while McCain outdoes even George W. Bush in insisting that our troops stay where they are no longer even wanted.
The most important fact about the political landscape this year is that 80 percent of Americans believe the country is headed in the wrong direction. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that McCain’s only chance of winning is to obscure the fact that on the issues voters most care about, he essentially proposes to stay the course.
So McCain stopped talking about experience and started echoing Obama’s mantra of change, change, change. No one is supposed to remember that when he was courting his party’s conservative base he bragged that in his Senate votes he supported Bush 90 percent of the time. Only the party faithful are supposed to be mindful of the fact that McCain is, like Bush, an actual Republican.
Running for and against one’s party at the same time is not an easy trick to pull off, however. The contradiction is too big to hide—it’s like a huge, lipstick-smeared Yorkshire boar wallowing in the middle of the room. At some point, people are going to notice it unless you draw their attention elsewhere.
That’s the function of the McCain campaign’s daily screams of feigned outrage. Creating the false impression that Democrats and journalists are unfairly attacking Palin serves another purpose as well: It helps create the impression that legitimate and necessary questions about her record—such as her one-time support for the Bridge to Nowhere or her history of seeking the congressional earmarks she now claims to reject—are somehow out of bounds.
To mix things up, sometimes the campaign pretends that McCain is the one being persecuted—for his age, usually. It’s all just noise, intended to drown out meaningful debate.
If you scream bloody murder every day, however, people eventually stop taking you seriously. News stories about the lipstick remark stated forthrightly that the McCain people were misrepresenting what Obama had said. At some point, these tactical lamentations become not worth reporting at all.
And there will be at least four key moments when the McCain-Palin campaign will be unable to avoid the issues. Obama and McCain will hold three debates; Palin and Joe Biden will hold one. The television audience for these encounters is expected to be enormous, perhaps the biggest ever.
Americans will be presented with a straightforward question. Do they want a Republican in the White House for four more years, continuing to take the country in the same direction? Or not?
Jonathan Cohn - The New Republic (Sept. 5, 2008)
Don't Believe the Hype: McCain Is Still a Bush Republican
How did it play politically? Will it energize the base? Will it make swing voters swoon?
As usual, your guess is as good as mine--or any of the pundits you see yapping on the television right now. Until the focus groups and polls come in, we're all just speculating.
But I can register a verdict on substance. If this was McCain's answer to voter anxiety about the economy, it wasn't too impressive.
As you've been reading--or, perhaps, as you've noticed on your own--economic policy has not been a big theme this week in Minneapolis. The Republicans have been campaigning heavily on McCain's character and supposed leadership skills. To the extent they recognzied the high anxiety over employment, wages, or health care costs, they have spent most of their time criticizing Barack Obama's plans for relief rather than offering their own. Only when they have made the case for more oil drilling--or that old Republican standby of cutting taxes--have they talked substance. And even that's been pretty thin gruel.
At times tonight, it looked like McCain might take a different approach. He made a point of acknowledging the financial difficulties confronting many Americans:
These are tough times for many of you. You're worried about keeping your job or finding a new one, and are struggling to put food on the table and stay in your home. All you ever asked of government is to stand on your side, not in your way. And that's just what I intend to do: stand on your side and fight for your future.
He repeated the argument later, saying, "I know some of you have been left behind in the changing economy and it often seems your government hasn't even noticed."
But what, besides "noticing" people's economic struggles, did McCain actually propose to do? Nothing terribly useful, I would argue.
McCain reiterated his interest in drilling for more oil--a strategy that, as noted in this space, wouldn't actually do much to reduce gas prices. He also vowed to cut taxes, failing to mention that most of the cuts would go to the very wealthy--and that paying for those cuts would require slashing entitlements or running up huge deficits. (And, don't forget, unmanageable deficits will ultimately hurt poor and middle-income workers, too.)
McCain did talk about his health care plan--something, as best as I can recall, no other prime time speaker did. But his suggestion that it would "make it easier for more Americans to find and keep good health care insurance" is just plain wrong. As numerous experts have noted, its primary effect will be to move people out of employer-sponsored insurance and into the individual market, where the benefits are less comprehensive and insurers refuse coverage to anybody with pre-exsiting medical conditions.
Of course, McCain's primary argument about the economy has never been about specific policies. It's been about character. And tonight's speech hit those themes over and over again. I'm a maverick. I buck my own party. I will clean up Washington.
But will he really? McCain's tax cut proposal looks an awful lot like President Bush's. So does his plan for oil drilling. So do his health insurance reforms. When it comes to economic policy, McCain is just another Bush Republican.
And, yes, McCain has tried to curb the influence of special interests in Washington. These were good, important fights and McCain deserves real credit for waging them.
But what, ultimately, do special interests have to do with the financial anxiety of the poor and middle class? Tectonic economic forces like globalization and the increasing linkage between skills and wages are the real problem here. To the extent special interests have a role, it's because they've blocked measures that would ease labor union organizing, tilt the tax code more towards lower-income Americans, and make health insurance universally available. McCain has made it quite clear that he opposes all of these things.
In the end, tonight's speech merely confirmed what many of us knew along: McCain just doesn't have good answers to our troubled economy. I don't know whether the voters will care about this, but I do know they should.
How did it play politically? Will it energize the base? Will it make swing voters swoon?
As usual, your guess is as good as mine--or any of the pundits you see yapping on the television right now. Until the focus groups and polls come in, we're all just speculating.
But I can register a verdict on substance. If this was McCain's answer to voter anxiety about the economy, it wasn't too impressive.
As you've been reading--or, perhaps, as you've noticed on your own--economic policy has not been a big theme this week in Minneapolis. The Republicans have been campaigning heavily on McCain's character and supposed leadership skills. To the extent they recognzied the high anxiety over employment, wages, or health care costs, they have spent most of their time criticizing Barack Obama's plans for relief rather than offering their own. Only when they have made the case for more oil drilling--or that old Republican standby of cutting taxes--have they talked substance. And even that's been pretty thin gruel.
At times tonight, it looked like McCain might take a different approach. He made a point of acknowledging the financial difficulties confronting many Americans:
These are tough times for many of you. You're worried about keeping your job or finding a new one, and are struggling to put food on the table and stay in your home. All you ever asked of government is to stand on your side, not in your way. And that's just what I intend to do: stand on your side and fight for your future.
He repeated the argument later, saying, "I know some of you have been left behind in the changing economy and it often seems your government hasn't even noticed."
But what, besides "noticing" people's economic struggles, did McCain actually propose to do? Nothing terribly useful, I would argue.
McCain reiterated his interest in drilling for more oil--a strategy that, as noted in this space, wouldn't actually do much to reduce gas prices. He also vowed to cut taxes, failing to mention that most of the cuts would go to the very wealthy--and that paying for those cuts would require slashing entitlements or running up huge deficits. (And, don't forget, unmanageable deficits will ultimately hurt poor and middle-income workers, too.)
McCain did talk about his health care plan--something, as best as I can recall, no other prime time speaker did. But his suggestion that it would "make it easier for more Americans to find and keep good health care insurance" is just plain wrong. As numerous experts have noted, its primary effect will be to move people out of employer-sponsored insurance and into the individual market, where the benefits are less comprehensive and insurers refuse coverage to anybody with pre-exsiting medical conditions.
Of course, McCain's primary argument about the economy has never been about specific policies. It's been about character. And tonight's speech hit those themes over and over again. I'm a maverick. I buck my own party. I will clean up Washington.
But will he really? McCain's tax cut proposal looks an awful lot like President Bush's. So does his plan for oil drilling. So do his health insurance reforms. When it comes to economic policy, McCain is just another Bush Republican.
And, yes, McCain has tried to curb the influence of special interests in Washington. These were good, important fights and McCain deserves real credit for waging them.
But what, ultimately, do special interests have to do with the financial anxiety of the poor and middle class? Tectonic economic forces like globalization and the increasing linkage between skills and wages are the real problem here. To the extent special interests have a role, it's because they've blocked measures that would ease labor union organizing, tilt the tax code more towards lower-income Americans, and make health insurance universally available. McCain has made it quite clear that he opposes all of these things.
In the end, tonight's speech merely confirmed what many of us knew along: McCain just doesn't have good answers to our troubled economy. I don't know whether the voters will care about this, but I do know they should.
Paul Krugman - N.Y. Times (Sept. 12, 2008)
September 12, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Blizzard of Lies
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Did you hear about how Barack Obama wants to have sex education in kindergarten, and called Sarah Palin a pig? Did you hear about how Ms. Palin told Congress, “Thanks, but no thanks” when it wanted to buy Alaska a Bridge to Nowhere?
These stories have two things in common: they’re all claims recently made by the McCain campaign — and they’re all out-and-out lies.
Dishonesty is nothing new in politics. I spent much of 2000 — my first year at The Times — trying to alert readers to the blatant dishonesty of the Bush campaign’s claims about taxes, spending and Social Security.
But I can’t think of any precedent, at least in America, for the blizzard of lies since the Republican convention. The Bush campaign’s lies in 2000 were artful — you needed some grasp of arithmetic to realize that you were being conned. This year, however, the McCain campaign keeps making assertions that anyone with an Internet connection can disprove in a minute, and repeating these assertions over and over again.
Take the case of the Bridge to Nowhere, which supposedly gives Ms. Palin credentials as a reformer. Well, when campaigning for governor, Ms. Palin didn’t say “no thanks” — she was all for the bridge, even though it had already become a national scandal, insisting that she would “not allow the spinmeisters to turn this project or any other into something that’s so negative.”
Oh, and when she finally did decide to cancel the project, she didn’t righteously reject a handout from Washington: she accepted the handout, but spent it on something else. You see, long before she decided to cancel the bridge, Congress had told Alaska that it could keep the federal money originally earmarked for that project and use it elsewhere.
So the whole story of Ms. Palin’s alleged heroic stand against wasteful spending is fiction.
Or take the story of Mr. Obama’s alleged advocacy of kindergarten sex-ed. In reality, he supported legislation calling for “age and developmentally appropriate education”; in the case of young children, that would have meant guidance to help them avoid sexual predators.
And then there’s the claim that Mr. Obama’s use of the ordinary metaphor “putting lipstick on a pig” was a sexist smear, and on and on.
Why do the McCain people think they can get away with this stuff? Well, they’re probably counting on the common practice in the news media of being “balanced” at all costs. You know how it goes: If a politician says that black is white, the news report doesn’t say that he’s wrong, it reports that “some Democrats say” that he’s wrong. Or a grotesque lie from one side is paired with a trivial misstatement from the other, conveying the impression that both sides are equally dirty.
They’re probably also counting on the prevalence of horse-race reporting, so that instead of the story being “McCain campaign lies,” it becomes “Obama on defensive in face of attacks.”
Still, how upset should we be about the McCain campaign’s lies? I mean, politics ain’t beanbag, and all that.
One answer is that the muck being hurled by the McCain campaign is preventing a debate on real issues — on whether the country really wants, for example, to continue the economic policies of the last eight years.
But there’s another answer, which may be even more important: how a politician campaigns tells you a lot about how he or she would govern.
I’m not talking about the theory, often advanced as a defense of horse-race political reporting, that the skills needed to run a winning campaign are the same as those needed to run the country. The contrast between the Bush political team’s ruthless effectiveness and the heckuva job done by the Bush administration is living, breathing, bumbling, and, in the case of the emerging Interior Department scandal, coke-snorting and bed-hopping proof to the contrary.
I’m talking, instead, about the relationship between the character of a campaign and that of the administration that follows. Thus, the deceptive and dishonest 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign provided an all-too-revealing preview of things to come. In fact, my early suspicion that we were being misled about the threat from Iraq came from the way the political tactics being used to sell the war resembled the tactics that had earlier been used to sell the Bush tax cuts.
And now the team that hopes to form the next administration is running a campaign that makes Bush-Cheney 2000 look like something out of a civics class. What does that say about how that team would run the country?
What it says, I’d argue, is that the Obama campaign is wrong to suggest that a McCain-Palin administration would just be a continuation of Bush-Cheney. If the way John McCain and Sarah Palin are campaigning is any indication, it would be much, much worse.
Op-Ed Columnist
Blizzard of Lies
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Did you hear about how Barack Obama wants to have sex education in kindergarten, and called Sarah Palin a pig? Did you hear about how Ms. Palin told Congress, “Thanks, but no thanks” when it wanted to buy Alaska a Bridge to Nowhere?
These stories have two things in common: they’re all claims recently made by the McCain campaign — and they’re all out-and-out lies.
Dishonesty is nothing new in politics. I spent much of 2000 — my first year at The Times — trying to alert readers to the blatant dishonesty of the Bush campaign’s claims about taxes, spending and Social Security.
But I can’t think of any precedent, at least in America, for the blizzard of lies since the Republican convention. The Bush campaign’s lies in 2000 were artful — you needed some grasp of arithmetic to realize that you were being conned. This year, however, the McCain campaign keeps making assertions that anyone with an Internet connection can disprove in a minute, and repeating these assertions over and over again.
Take the case of the Bridge to Nowhere, which supposedly gives Ms. Palin credentials as a reformer. Well, when campaigning for governor, Ms. Palin didn’t say “no thanks” — she was all for the bridge, even though it had already become a national scandal, insisting that she would “not allow the spinmeisters to turn this project or any other into something that’s so negative.”
Oh, and when she finally did decide to cancel the project, she didn’t righteously reject a handout from Washington: she accepted the handout, but spent it on something else. You see, long before she decided to cancel the bridge, Congress had told Alaska that it could keep the federal money originally earmarked for that project and use it elsewhere.
So the whole story of Ms. Palin’s alleged heroic stand against wasteful spending is fiction.
Or take the story of Mr. Obama’s alleged advocacy of kindergarten sex-ed. In reality, he supported legislation calling for “age and developmentally appropriate education”; in the case of young children, that would have meant guidance to help them avoid sexual predators.
And then there’s the claim that Mr. Obama’s use of the ordinary metaphor “putting lipstick on a pig” was a sexist smear, and on and on.
Why do the McCain people think they can get away with this stuff? Well, they’re probably counting on the common practice in the news media of being “balanced” at all costs. You know how it goes: If a politician says that black is white, the news report doesn’t say that he’s wrong, it reports that “some Democrats say” that he’s wrong. Or a grotesque lie from one side is paired with a trivial misstatement from the other, conveying the impression that both sides are equally dirty.
They’re probably also counting on the prevalence of horse-race reporting, so that instead of the story being “McCain campaign lies,” it becomes “Obama on defensive in face of attacks.”
Still, how upset should we be about the McCain campaign’s lies? I mean, politics ain’t beanbag, and all that.
One answer is that the muck being hurled by the McCain campaign is preventing a debate on real issues — on whether the country really wants, for example, to continue the economic policies of the last eight years.
But there’s another answer, which may be even more important: how a politician campaigns tells you a lot about how he or she would govern.
I’m not talking about the theory, often advanced as a defense of horse-race political reporting, that the skills needed to run a winning campaign are the same as those needed to run the country. The contrast between the Bush political team’s ruthless effectiveness and the heckuva job done by the Bush administration is living, breathing, bumbling, and, in the case of the emerging Interior Department scandal, coke-snorting and bed-hopping proof to the contrary.
I’m talking, instead, about the relationship between the character of a campaign and that of the administration that follows. Thus, the deceptive and dishonest 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign provided an all-too-revealing preview of things to come. In fact, my early suspicion that we were being misled about the threat from Iraq came from the way the political tactics being used to sell the war resembled the tactics that had earlier been used to sell the Bush tax cuts.
And now the team that hopes to form the next administration is running a campaign that makes Bush-Cheney 2000 look like something out of a civics class. What does that say about how that team would run the country?
What it says, I’d argue, is that the Obama campaign is wrong to suggest that a McCain-Palin administration would just be a continuation of Bush-Cheney. If the way John McCain and Sarah Palin are campaigning is any indication, it would be much, much worse.
N.Y. Times (Sept. 12, 2008)
September 12, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Blizzard of Lies
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Did you hear about how Barack Obama wants to have sex education in kindergarten, and called Sarah Palin a pig? Did you hear about how Ms. Palin told Congress, “Thanks, but no thanks” when it wanted to buy Alaska a Bridge to Nowhere?
These stories have two things in common: they’re all claims recently made by the McCain campaign — and they’re all out-and-out lies.
Dishonesty is nothing new in politics. I spent much of 2000 — my first year at The Times — trying to alert readers to the blatant dishonesty of the Bush campaign’s claims about taxes, spending and Social Security.
But I can’t think of any precedent, at least in America, for the blizzard of lies since the Republican convention. The Bush campaign’s lies in 2000 were artful — you needed some grasp of arithmetic to realize that you were being conned. This year, however, the McCain campaign keeps making assertions that anyone with an Internet connection can disprove in a minute, and repeating these assertions over and over again.
Take the case of the Bridge to Nowhere, which supposedly gives Ms. Palin credentials as a reformer. Well, when campaigning for governor, Ms. Palin didn’t say “no thanks” — she was all for the bridge, even though it had already become a national scandal, insisting that she would “not allow the spinmeisters to turn this project or any other into something that’s so negative.”
Oh, and when she finally did decide to cancel the project, she didn’t righteously reject a handout from Washington: she accepted the handout, but spent it on something else. You see, long before she decided to cancel the bridge, Congress had told Alaska that it could keep the federal money originally earmarked for that project and use it elsewhere.
So the whole story of Ms. Palin’s alleged heroic stand against wasteful spending is fiction.
Or take the story of Mr. Obama’s alleged advocacy of kindergarten sex-ed. In reality, he supported legislation calling for “age and developmentally appropriate education”; in the case of young children, that would have meant guidance to help them avoid sexual predators.
And then there’s the claim that Mr. Obama’s use of the ordinary metaphor “putting lipstick on a pig” was a sexist smear, and on and on.
Why do the McCain people think they can get away with this stuff? Well, they’re probably counting on the common practice in the news media of being “balanced” at all costs. You know how it goes: If a politician says that black is white, the news report doesn’t say that he’s wrong, it reports that “some Democrats say” that he’s wrong. Or a grotesque lie from one side is paired with a trivial misstatement from the other, conveying the impression that both sides are equally dirty.
They’re probably also counting on the prevalence of horse-race reporting, so that instead of the story being “McCain campaign lies,” it becomes “Obama on defensive in face of attacks.”
Still, how upset should we be about the McCain campaign’s lies? I mean, politics ain’t beanbag, and all that.
One answer is that the muck being hurled by the McCain campaign is preventing a debate on real issues — on whether the country really wants, for example, to continue the economic policies of the last eight years.
But there’s another answer, which may be even more important: how a politician campaigns tells you a lot about how he or she would govern.
I’m not talking about the theory, often advanced as a defense of horse-race political reporting, that the skills needed to run a winning campaign are the same as those needed to run the country. The contrast between the Bush political team’s ruthless effectiveness and the heckuva job done by the Bush administration is living, breathing, bumbling, and, in the case of the emerging Interior Department scandal, coke-snorting and bed-hopping proof to the contrary.
I’m talking, instead, about the relationship between the character of a campaign and that of the administration that follows. Thus, the deceptive and dishonest 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign provided an all-too-revealing preview of things to come. In fact, my early suspicion that we were being misled about the threat from Iraq came from the way the political tactics being used to sell the war resembled the tactics that had earlier been used to sell the Bush tax cuts.
And now the team that hopes to form the next administration is running a campaign that makes Bush-Cheney 2000 look like something out of a civics class. What does that say about how that team would run the country?
What it says, I’d argue, is that the Obama campaign is wrong to suggest that a McCain-Palin administration would just be a continuation of Bush-Cheney. If the way John McCain and Sarah Palin are campaigning is any indication, it would be much, much worse.
Op-Ed Columnist
Blizzard of Lies
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Did you hear about how Barack Obama wants to have sex education in kindergarten, and called Sarah Palin a pig? Did you hear about how Ms. Palin told Congress, “Thanks, but no thanks” when it wanted to buy Alaska a Bridge to Nowhere?
These stories have two things in common: they’re all claims recently made by the McCain campaign — and they’re all out-and-out lies.
Dishonesty is nothing new in politics. I spent much of 2000 — my first year at The Times — trying to alert readers to the blatant dishonesty of the Bush campaign’s claims about taxes, spending and Social Security.
But I can’t think of any precedent, at least in America, for the blizzard of lies since the Republican convention. The Bush campaign’s lies in 2000 were artful — you needed some grasp of arithmetic to realize that you were being conned. This year, however, the McCain campaign keeps making assertions that anyone with an Internet connection can disprove in a minute, and repeating these assertions over and over again.
Take the case of the Bridge to Nowhere, which supposedly gives Ms. Palin credentials as a reformer. Well, when campaigning for governor, Ms. Palin didn’t say “no thanks” — she was all for the bridge, even though it had already become a national scandal, insisting that she would “not allow the spinmeisters to turn this project or any other into something that’s so negative.”
Oh, and when she finally did decide to cancel the project, she didn’t righteously reject a handout from Washington: she accepted the handout, but spent it on something else. You see, long before she decided to cancel the bridge, Congress had told Alaska that it could keep the federal money originally earmarked for that project and use it elsewhere.
So the whole story of Ms. Palin’s alleged heroic stand against wasteful spending is fiction.
Or take the story of Mr. Obama’s alleged advocacy of kindergarten sex-ed. In reality, he supported legislation calling for “age and developmentally appropriate education”; in the case of young children, that would have meant guidance to help them avoid sexual predators.
And then there’s the claim that Mr. Obama’s use of the ordinary metaphor “putting lipstick on a pig” was a sexist smear, and on and on.
Why do the McCain people think they can get away with this stuff? Well, they’re probably counting on the common practice in the news media of being “balanced” at all costs. You know how it goes: If a politician says that black is white, the news report doesn’t say that he’s wrong, it reports that “some Democrats say” that he’s wrong. Or a grotesque lie from one side is paired with a trivial misstatement from the other, conveying the impression that both sides are equally dirty.
They’re probably also counting on the prevalence of horse-race reporting, so that instead of the story being “McCain campaign lies,” it becomes “Obama on defensive in face of attacks.”
Still, how upset should we be about the McCain campaign’s lies? I mean, politics ain’t beanbag, and all that.
One answer is that the muck being hurled by the McCain campaign is preventing a debate on real issues — on whether the country really wants, for example, to continue the economic policies of the last eight years.
But there’s another answer, which may be even more important: how a politician campaigns tells you a lot about how he or she would govern.
I’m not talking about the theory, often advanced as a defense of horse-race political reporting, that the skills needed to run a winning campaign are the same as those needed to run the country. The contrast between the Bush political team’s ruthless effectiveness and the heckuva job done by the Bush administration is living, breathing, bumbling, and, in the case of the emerging Interior Department scandal, coke-snorting and bed-hopping proof to the contrary.
I’m talking, instead, about the relationship between the character of a campaign and that of the administration that follows. Thus, the deceptive and dishonest 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign provided an all-too-revealing preview of things to come. In fact, my early suspicion that we were being misled about the threat from Iraq came from the way the political tactics being used to sell the war resembled the tactics that had earlier been used to sell the Bush tax cuts.
And now the team that hopes to form the next administration is running a campaign that makes Bush-Cheney 2000 look like something out of a civics class. What does that say about how that team would run the country?
What it says, I’d argue, is that the Obama campaign is wrong to suggest that a McCain-Palin administration would just be a continuation of Bush-Cheney. If the way John McCain and Sarah Palin are campaigning is any indication, it would be much, much worse.
N.Y. Times (Sept. 12, 2008)
September 12, 2008
Editorial
Anything Goes, Apparently
It seemed inevitable that bad things would happen when President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney packed the top posts at the Department of the Interior with lobbyists who had spent their careers representing the very industries they were now being asked to regulate. But it was left to Earl Devaney, the department’s inspector general — and the busiest gumshoe inside the federal bureaucracy — to demonstrate just how bad things could be.
In three extraordinary reports delivered to Congress this week, Mr. Devaney found that officials at the Minerals Management Service — the division responsible for granting offshore oil leases and collecting royalties — accepted gifts, steered contracts to favored clients and engaged in drugs and sex with oil company employees as part of what he described as a broader “culture of substance abuse and promiscuity.”
At the center of the scandal is the royalty-in-kind program, under which the service takes delivery of oil and gas in lieu of cash payments from energy companies, then sells it to refiners. The program is vulnerable to manipulation at either end of the transaction, by overvaluing the oil and gas when it is received or undervaluing it when it is sold.
The program obviously needs a complete overhaul. It has already been the subject of multiple investigations — by Mr. Devaney; Dirk Kempthorne, the interior secretary; the Justice Department; and Congress — for mismanagement and conflicts of interest. In an earlier report in 2007, Mr. Devaney found that the agency had failed — through negligence and possible ethical lapses — to collect billions of dollars in royalties from oil companies for leases in the Gulf of Mexico.
His new reports add more shameful details, including allegations that agency employees accepted gratuities and other favors — meals, ski trips, sports tickets and golf outings with industry representatives — “with prodigious frequency.”
Mr. Kempthorne, who has already transferred some employees and almost certainly will fire more, can take some comfort from the fact that nearly all of the misbehavior occurred before he arrived in Washington in 2006 to replace Gale Norton as interior secretary.
The White House can take no comfort at all. The people it brought to Washington to run the department had no interest in policing the oil, mining and agricultural interests they were sworn to regulate and every interest in promoting industry’s (and their own) good fortune. The most notorious of these was J. Steven Griles, a mining industry lobbyist who really ran the agency for four years and who later pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice in the Jack Abramoff scandal.
The fruit of these terrible appointments was aptly described by Mr. Devaney two years ago when he appeared before a House subcommittee. “Short of a crime,” he said, “anything goes at the Department of the Interior.”
It now appears that crime could be part of the mix.
Editorial
Anything Goes, Apparently
It seemed inevitable that bad things would happen when President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney packed the top posts at the Department of the Interior with lobbyists who had spent their careers representing the very industries they were now being asked to regulate. But it was left to Earl Devaney, the department’s inspector general — and the busiest gumshoe inside the federal bureaucracy — to demonstrate just how bad things could be.
In three extraordinary reports delivered to Congress this week, Mr. Devaney found that officials at the Minerals Management Service — the division responsible for granting offshore oil leases and collecting royalties — accepted gifts, steered contracts to favored clients and engaged in drugs and sex with oil company employees as part of what he described as a broader “culture of substance abuse and promiscuity.”
At the center of the scandal is the royalty-in-kind program, under which the service takes delivery of oil and gas in lieu of cash payments from energy companies, then sells it to refiners. The program is vulnerable to manipulation at either end of the transaction, by overvaluing the oil and gas when it is received or undervaluing it when it is sold.
The program obviously needs a complete overhaul. It has already been the subject of multiple investigations — by Mr. Devaney; Dirk Kempthorne, the interior secretary; the Justice Department; and Congress — for mismanagement and conflicts of interest. In an earlier report in 2007, Mr. Devaney found that the agency had failed — through negligence and possible ethical lapses — to collect billions of dollars in royalties from oil companies for leases in the Gulf of Mexico.
His new reports add more shameful details, including allegations that agency employees accepted gratuities and other favors — meals, ski trips, sports tickets and golf outings with industry representatives — “with prodigious frequency.”
Mr. Kempthorne, who has already transferred some employees and almost certainly will fire more, can take some comfort from the fact that nearly all of the misbehavior occurred before he arrived in Washington in 2006 to replace Gale Norton as interior secretary.
The White House can take no comfort at all. The people it brought to Washington to run the department had no interest in policing the oil, mining and agricultural interests they were sworn to regulate and every interest in promoting industry’s (and their own) good fortune. The most notorious of these was J. Steven Griles, a mining industry lobbyist who really ran the agency for four years and who later pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice in the Jack Abramoff scandal.
The fruit of these terrible appointments was aptly described by Mr. Devaney two years ago when he appeared before a House subcommittee. “Short of a crime,” he said, “anything goes at the Department of the Interior.”
It now appears that crime could be part of the mix.
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Prof. Andrew Bacevich - TomDispatch.com (Sept. 9, 2008)
9/11 Plus Seven
Tuesday 09 September 2008
by: Andrew J. Bacevich, TomDispatch.com
The events of the past seven years have yielded a definitive judgment on the strategy that the Bush administration conceived in the wake of 9/11 to wage its so-called Global War on Terror. That strategy has failed, massively and irrevocably. To acknowledge that failure is to confront an urgent national priority: to scrap the Bush approach in favor of a new national security strategy that is realistic and sustainable - a task that, alas, neither of the presidential candidates seems able to recognize or willing to take up.
On September 30, 2001, President Bush received from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld a memorandum outlining U.S. objectives in the War on Terror. Drafted by Rumsfeld's chief strategist Douglas Feith, the memo declared expansively: "If the war does not significantly change the world's political map, the U.S. will not achieve its aim." That aim, as Feith explained in a subsequent missive to his boss, was to "transform the Middle East and the broader world of Islam generally."
Rumsfeld and Feith were co-religionists: Along with other senior Bush administration officials, they worshipped in the Church of the Indispensable Nation, a small but intensely devout Washington-based sect formed in the immediate wake of the Cold War. Members of this church shared an exalted appreciation for the efficacy of American power, especially hard power. The strategy of transformation emerged as a direct expression of their faith.
The members of this church were also united by an equally exalted estimation of their own abilities. Lucky the nation to be blessed with such savvy and sophisticated public servants in its hour of need!
The goal of transforming the Islamic world was nothing if not bold. It implied far-reaching political, economic, social, and even cultural adjustments. At a press conference on September 18, 2001, Rumsfeld spoke bluntly of the need to "change the way that they live." Rumsfeld didn't specify who "they" were. He didn't have to. His listeners understood without being told: "They" were Muslims inhabiting a vast arc of territory that stretched from Morocco in the west all the way to the Moro territories of the Southern Philippines in the east.
Yet boldly conceived action, if successfully executed, offered the prospect of solving a host of problems. Once pacified (or "liberated"), the Middle East would cease to breed or harbor anti-American terrorists. Post-9/11 fears about weapons of mass destruction falling into the hands of evil-doers could abate. Local regimes, notorious for being venal, oppressive, and inept, might finally get serious about cleaning up their acts. Liberal values, including rights for women, would flourish. A part of the world perpetually dogged by violence would enjoy a measure of stability, with stability promising not so incidentally to facilitate exploitation of the region's oil reserves. There was even the possibility of enhancing the security of Israel. Like a powerful antibiotic, the Bush administration's strategy of transformation promised to clean out not simply a single infection but several; or to switch metaphors, a strategy of transformation meant running the table.
When it came to implementation, the imperative of the moment was to think big. Just days after 9/11, Rumsfeld was charging his subordinates to devise a plan of action that had "three, four, five moves behind it." By December 2001, the Pentagon had persuaded itself that the first move - into Afghanistan - had met success. The Bush administration wasted little time in pocketing its ostensible victory. Attention quickly shifted to the second move, seen by insiders as holding the key to ultimate success: Iraq.
Fix Iraq and moves three, four, and five promised to come easily. Writing in the Weekly Standard, William Kristol and Robert Kagan got it exactly right: "The president's vision will, in the coming months, either be launched successfully in Iraq, or it will die in Iraq."
The point cannot be emphasized too strongly: Saddam Hussein's (nonexistent) weapons of mass destruction and his (imaginary) ties to Al Qaeda never constituted the real reason for invading Iraq - any more than the imperative of defending Russian "peacekeepers" in South Ossetia explains the Kremlin's decision to invade Georgia.
Iraq merely offered a convenient place from which to launch a much larger and infinitely more ambitious project. "After Hussein is removed," enthused Hudson Institute analyst Max Singer, "there will be an earthquake through the region." Success in Iraq promised to endow the United States with hitherto unprecedented leverage. Once the United States had made an example of Saddam Hussein, as the influential neoconservative Richard Perle put it, dealing with other ne'er-do-wells would become simple: "We could deliver a short message, a two-word message: 'You're next.'" Faced with the prospect of sharing Saddam's fate, Syrians, Iranians, Sudanese, and other recalcitrant regimes would see submission as the wiser course - so Perle and others believed.
Members of the administration tried to imbue this strategic vision with a softer ideological gloss. "For 60 years," Condoleezza Rice explained to a group of students in Cairo, "my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East - and we achieved neither." No more. "Now, we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people." The world's Muslims needed to know that the motives behind the U.S. incursion into Iraq and its actions elsewhere in the region were (or had, at least, suddenly become) entirely benign. Who knows? Rice may even have believed the words she spoke.
In either case - whether the strategy of transformation aimed at dominion or democratization - today, seven years after it was conceived, we can assess exactly what it has produced. The answer is clear: next to nothing, apart from squandering vast resources and exacerbating the slide toward debt and dependency that poses a greater strategic threat to the United States than Osama bin Laden ever did.
In point of fact, hardly had the Pentagon commenced its second move, its invasion of Iraq, when the entire strategy began to unravel. In Iraq, President Bush's vision of regional transformation did die, much as Kagan and Kristol had feared. No amount of CPR credited to the so-called surge will revive it. Even if tomorrow Iraq were to achieve stability and become a responsible member of the international community, no sensible person could suggest that Operation Iraqi Freedom provides a model to apply elsewhere. Senator John McCain says that he'll keep U.S. combat troops in Iraq for as long as it takes. Yet even he does not propose "solving" any problems posed by Syria or Iran (much less Pakistan) by employing the methods that the Bush administration used to "solve" the problem posed by Iraq. The Bush Doctrine of preventive war may remain nominally on the books. But, as a practical matter, it is defunct.
The United States will not change the world's political map in the ways top administration officials once dreamed of. There will be no earthquake that shakes up the Middle East - unless the growing clout of Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas in recent years qualifies as that earthquake. Given the Pentagon's existing commitments, there will be no threats of "you're next" either - at least none that will worry our adversaries, as the Russians have neatly demonstrated. Nor will there be a wave of democratic reform - even Rice has ceased her prattling on that score. Islam will remain stubbornly resistant to change, except on terms of its own choosing. We will not change the way "they" live.
In a book that he co-authored during the run-up to the invasion, Kristol confidently declared, "The mission begins in Baghdad, but it does not end there." In fact, the Bush administration's strategy of transformation has ended. It has failed miserably. The sooner we face up to that failure, the sooner we can get about repairing the damage.
Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His bestselling new book is "The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism."
Tuesday 09 September 2008
by: Andrew J. Bacevich, TomDispatch.com
The events of the past seven years have yielded a definitive judgment on the strategy that the Bush administration conceived in the wake of 9/11 to wage its so-called Global War on Terror. That strategy has failed, massively and irrevocably. To acknowledge that failure is to confront an urgent national priority: to scrap the Bush approach in favor of a new national security strategy that is realistic and sustainable - a task that, alas, neither of the presidential candidates seems able to recognize or willing to take up.
On September 30, 2001, President Bush received from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld a memorandum outlining U.S. objectives in the War on Terror. Drafted by Rumsfeld's chief strategist Douglas Feith, the memo declared expansively: "If the war does not significantly change the world's political map, the U.S. will not achieve its aim." That aim, as Feith explained in a subsequent missive to his boss, was to "transform the Middle East and the broader world of Islam generally."
Rumsfeld and Feith were co-religionists: Along with other senior Bush administration officials, they worshipped in the Church of the Indispensable Nation, a small but intensely devout Washington-based sect formed in the immediate wake of the Cold War. Members of this church shared an exalted appreciation for the efficacy of American power, especially hard power. The strategy of transformation emerged as a direct expression of their faith.
The members of this church were also united by an equally exalted estimation of their own abilities. Lucky the nation to be blessed with such savvy and sophisticated public servants in its hour of need!
The goal of transforming the Islamic world was nothing if not bold. It implied far-reaching political, economic, social, and even cultural adjustments. At a press conference on September 18, 2001, Rumsfeld spoke bluntly of the need to "change the way that they live." Rumsfeld didn't specify who "they" were. He didn't have to. His listeners understood without being told: "They" were Muslims inhabiting a vast arc of territory that stretched from Morocco in the west all the way to the Moro territories of the Southern Philippines in the east.
Yet boldly conceived action, if successfully executed, offered the prospect of solving a host of problems. Once pacified (or "liberated"), the Middle East would cease to breed or harbor anti-American terrorists. Post-9/11 fears about weapons of mass destruction falling into the hands of evil-doers could abate. Local regimes, notorious for being venal, oppressive, and inept, might finally get serious about cleaning up their acts. Liberal values, including rights for women, would flourish. A part of the world perpetually dogged by violence would enjoy a measure of stability, with stability promising not so incidentally to facilitate exploitation of the region's oil reserves. There was even the possibility of enhancing the security of Israel. Like a powerful antibiotic, the Bush administration's strategy of transformation promised to clean out not simply a single infection but several; or to switch metaphors, a strategy of transformation meant running the table.
When it came to implementation, the imperative of the moment was to think big. Just days after 9/11, Rumsfeld was charging his subordinates to devise a plan of action that had "three, four, five moves behind it." By December 2001, the Pentagon had persuaded itself that the first move - into Afghanistan - had met success. The Bush administration wasted little time in pocketing its ostensible victory. Attention quickly shifted to the second move, seen by insiders as holding the key to ultimate success: Iraq.
Fix Iraq and moves three, four, and five promised to come easily. Writing in the Weekly Standard, William Kristol and Robert Kagan got it exactly right: "The president's vision will, in the coming months, either be launched successfully in Iraq, or it will die in Iraq."
The point cannot be emphasized too strongly: Saddam Hussein's (nonexistent) weapons of mass destruction and his (imaginary) ties to Al Qaeda never constituted the real reason for invading Iraq - any more than the imperative of defending Russian "peacekeepers" in South Ossetia explains the Kremlin's decision to invade Georgia.
Iraq merely offered a convenient place from which to launch a much larger and infinitely more ambitious project. "After Hussein is removed," enthused Hudson Institute analyst Max Singer, "there will be an earthquake through the region." Success in Iraq promised to endow the United States with hitherto unprecedented leverage. Once the United States had made an example of Saddam Hussein, as the influential neoconservative Richard Perle put it, dealing with other ne'er-do-wells would become simple: "We could deliver a short message, a two-word message: 'You're next.'" Faced with the prospect of sharing Saddam's fate, Syrians, Iranians, Sudanese, and other recalcitrant regimes would see submission as the wiser course - so Perle and others believed.
Members of the administration tried to imbue this strategic vision with a softer ideological gloss. "For 60 years," Condoleezza Rice explained to a group of students in Cairo, "my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East - and we achieved neither." No more. "Now, we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people." The world's Muslims needed to know that the motives behind the U.S. incursion into Iraq and its actions elsewhere in the region were (or had, at least, suddenly become) entirely benign. Who knows? Rice may even have believed the words she spoke.
In either case - whether the strategy of transformation aimed at dominion or democratization - today, seven years after it was conceived, we can assess exactly what it has produced. The answer is clear: next to nothing, apart from squandering vast resources and exacerbating the slide toward debt and dependency that poses a greater strategic threat to the United States than Osama bin Laden ever did.
In point of fact, hardly had the Pentagon commenced its second move, its invasion of Iraq, when the entire strategy began to unravel. In Iraq, President Bush's vision of regional transformation did die, much as Kagan and Kristol had feared. No amount of CPR credited to the so-called surge will revive it. Even if tomorrow Iraq were to achieve stability and become a responsible member of the international community, no sensible person could suggest that Operation Iraqi Freedom provides a model to apply elsewhere. Senator John McCain says that he'll keep U.S. combat troops in Iraq for as long as it takes. Yet even he does not propose "solving" any problems posed by Syria or Iran (much less Pakistan) by employing the methods that the Bush administration used to "solve" the problem posed by Iraq. The Bush Doctrine of preventive war may remain nominally on the books. But, as a practical matter, it is defunct.
The United States will not change the world's political map in the ways top administration officials once dreamed of. There will be no earthquake that shakes up the Middle East - unless the growing clout of Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas in recent years qualifies as that earthquake. Given the Pentagon's existing commitments, there will be no threats of "you're next" either - at least none that will worry our adversaries, as the Russians have neatly demonstrated. Nor will there be a wave of democratic reform - even Rice has ceased her prattling on that score. Islam will remain stubbornly resistant to change, except on terms of its own choosing. We will not change the way "they" live.
In a book that he co-authored during the run-up to the invasion, Kristol confidently declared, "The mission begins in Baghdad, but it does not end there." In fact, the Bush administration's strategy of transformation has ended. It has failed miserably. The sooner we face up to that failure, the sooner we can get about repairing the damage.
Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His bestselling new book is "The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism."
Bob Herbert - N.Y. Times (Sept. 9, 2008)
September 9, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Hold Your Heads Up
By BOB HERBERT
Ignorance must really be bliss. How else, over so many years, could the G.O.P. get away with ridiculing all things liberal?
Troglodytes on the right are no respecters of reality. They say the most absurd things and hardly anyone calls them on it. Evolution? Don’t you believe it. Global warming? A figment of the liberal imagination.
Liberals have been so cowed by the pummeling they’ve taken from the right that they’ve tried to shed their own identity, calling themselves everything but liberal and hoping to pass conservative muster by presenting themselves as hyper-religious and lifelong lovers of rifles, handguns, whatever.
So there was Hillary Clinton, of all people, sponsoring legislation to ban flag-burning; and Barack Obama, who once opposed the death penalty, morphing into someone who not only supports it, but supports it in cases that don’t even involve a homicide.
Anyway, the Republicans were back at it last week at their convention. Mitt Romney wasn’t content to insist that he personally knows that “liberals don’t have a clue.” He complained loudly that the federal government right now is too liberal.
“We need change, all right,” he said. “Change from a liberal Washington to a conservative Washington.”
Why liberals don’t stand up to this garbage, I don’t know. Without the extraordinary contribution of liberals — from the mightiest presidents to the most unheralded protesters and organizers — the United States would be a much, much worse place than it is today.
There would be absolutely no chance that a Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton or Sarah Palin could make a credible run for the highest offices in the land. Conservatives would never have allowed it.
Civil rights? Women’s rights? Liberals went to the mat for them time and again against ugly, vicious and sometimes murderous opposition. They should be forever proud.
The liberals who didn’t have a clue gave us Social Security and unemployment insurance, both of which were contained in the original Social Security Act. Most conservatives despised the very idea of this assistance to struggling Americans. Republicans hated Social Security, but most were afraid to give full throat to their opposition in public at the height of the Depression.
“In the procedural motions that preceded final passage,” wrote historian Jean Edward Smith in his biography, “FDR,” “House Republicans voted almost unanimously against Social Security. But when the final up-or-down vote came on April 19 [1935], fewer than half were prepared to go on record against.”
Liberals who didn’t have a clue gave us Medicare and Medicaid. Quick, how many of you (or your loved ones) are benefiting mightily from these programs, even as we speak. The idea that Republicans are proud of Ronald Reagan, who saw Medicare as “the advance wave of socialism,” while Democrats are ashamed of Lyndon Johnson, whose legislative genius made this wonderful, life-saving concept real, is insane.
When Johnson signed the Medicare bill into law in the presence of Harry Truman in 1965, he said: “No longer will older Americans be denied the healing miracle of modern medicine.”
Reagan, on the other hand, according to Johnson biographer Robert Dallek, “predicted that Medicare would compel Americans to spend their ‘sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was like in America when men were free.’ ”
Scary.
Without the many great and noble deeds of liberals over the past six or seven decades, America would hardly be recognizable to today’s young people. Liberals (including liberal Republicans, who have since been mostly drummed out of the party) ended legalized racial segregation and gender discrimination.
Humiliation imposed by custom and enforced by government had been the order of the day for blacks and women before men and women of good will and liberal persuasion stepped up their long (and not yet ended) campaign to change things. Liberals gave this country Head Start and legal services and the food stamp program. They fought for cleaner air (there was a time when you could barely see Los Angeles) and cleaner water (there were rivers in America that actually caught fire).
Liberals. Your food is safer because of them, and so are your children’s clothing and toys. Your workplace is safer. Your ability (or that of your children or grandchildren) to go to college is manifestly easier.
It would take volumes to adequately cover the enhancements to the quality of American lives and the greatness of American society that have been wrought by people whose politics were unabashedly liberal. It is a track record that deserves to be celebrated, not ridiculed or scorned.
Self-hatred is a terrible thing. Just ask that arch-conservative Clarence Thomas.
Liberals need to get over it.
Op-Ed Columnist
Hold Your Heads Up
By BOB HERBERT
Ignorance must really be bliss. How else, over so many years, could the G.O.P. get away with ridiculing all things liberal?
Troglodytes on the right are no respecters of reality. They say the most absurd things and hardly anyone calls them on it. Evolution? Don’t you believe it. Global warming? A figment of the liberal imagination.
Liberals have been so cowed by the pummeling they’ve taken from the right that they’ve tried to shed their own identity, calling themselves everything but liberal and hoping to pass conservative muster by presenting themselves as hyper-religious and lifelong lovers of rifles, handguns, whatever.
So there was Hillary Clinton, of all people, sponsoring legislation to ban flag-burning; and Barack Obama, who once opposed the death penalty, morphing into someone who not only supports it, but supports it in cases that don’t even involve a homicide.
Anyway, the Republicans were back at it last week at their convention. Mitt Romney wasn’t content to insist that he personally knows that “liberals don’t have a clue.” He complained loudly that the federal government right now is too liberal.
“We need change, all right,” he said. “Change from a liberal Washington to a conservative Washington.”
Why liberals don’t stand up to this garbage, I don’t know. Without the extraordinary contribution of liberals — from the mightiest presidents to the most unheralded protesters and organizers — the United States would be a much, much worse place than it is today.
There would be absolutely no chance that a Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton or Sarah Palin could make a credible run for the highest offices in the land. Conservatives would never have allowed it.
Civil rights? Women’s rights? Liberals went to the mat for them time and again against ugly, vicious and sometimes murderous opposition. They should be forever proud.
The liberals who didn’t have a clue gave us Social Security and unemployment insurance, both of which were contained in the original Social Security Act. Most conservatives despised the very idea of this assistance to struggling Americans. Republicans hated Social Security, but most were afraid to give full throat to their opposition in public at the height of the Depression.
“In the procedural motions that preceded final passage,” wrote historian Jean Edward Smith in his biography, “FDR,” “House Republicans voted almost unanimously against Social Security. But when the final up-or-down vote came on April 19 [1935], fewer than half were prepared to go on record against.”
Liberals who didn’t have a clue gave us Medicare and Medicaid. Quick, how many of you (or your loved ones) are benefiting mightily from these programs, even as we speak. The idea that Republicans are proud of Ronald Reagan, who saw Medicare as “the advance wave of socialism,” while Democrats are ashamed of Lyndon Johnson, whose legislative genius made this wonderful, life-saving concept real, is insane.
When Johnson signed the Medicare bill into law in the presence of Harry Truman in 1965, he said: “No longer will older Americans be denied the healing miracle of modern medicine.”
Reagan, on the other hand, according to Johnson biographer Robert Dallek, “predicted that Medicare would compel Americans to spend their ‘sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was like in America when men were free.’ ”
Scary.
Without the many great and noble deeds of liberals over the past six or seven decades, America would hardly be recognizable to today’s young people. Liberals (including liberal Republicans, who have since been mostly drummed out of the party) ended legalized racial segregation and gender discrimination.
Humiliation imposed by custom and enforced by government had been the order of the day for blacks and women before men and women of good will and liberal persuasion stepped up their long (and not yet ended) campaign to change things. Liberals gave this country Head Start and legal services and the food stamp program. They fought for cleaner air (there was a time when you could barely see Los Angeles) and cleaner water (there were rivers in America that actually caught fire).
Liberals. Your food is safer because of them, and so are your children’s clothing and toys. Your workplace is safer. Your ability (or that of your children or grandchildren) to go to college is manifestly easier.
It would take volumes to adequately cover the enhancements to the quality of American lives and the greatness of American society that have been wrought by people whose politics were unabashedly liberal. It is a track record that deserves to be celebrated, not ridiculed or scorned.
Self-hatred is a terrible thing. Just ask that arch-conservative Clarence Thomas.
Liberals need to get over it.
Thomas Friedman - N.Y. Times (Sept. 10, 2008)
September 10, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
From the Gut
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
If John McCain can win this election race with a 50-pound ball called “George W. Bush” wrapped around one ankle and a 50-pound ball called “The U.S. Economy” wrapped around the other, then he deserves to represent America in the next Olympics in any race he wants — swimming, cycling or track — I don’t care how old he is. He would be the Michael Phelps of politics.
I confess, I watch politics from afar, but here’s what I’ve been feeling for a while: Whoever slipped that Valium into Barack Obama’s coffee needs to be found and arrested by the Democrats because Obama has gone from cool to cold.
Somebody needs to tell Obama that if he wants the chance to calmly answer the phone at 3 a.m. in the White House, he is going to need to start slamming down some phones at 3 p.m. along the campaign trail. I like much of what he has to say, especially about energy, but I don’t think people are feeling it in their guts, and I am a big believer that voters don’t listen through their ears. They listen through their stomachs.
If you as a politician connect with voters on a gut level, they will follow you anywhere and not fret about the details. If you don’t connect with them on a gut level, you can’t show them enough details. Obama early on, and particularly with young people, connected on a gut level like no other politician since Ronald Reagan.
But in recent weeks, I feel as though he has lost that gut connection. I thought his convention speech contained no memorable lines or uplifting visions. It never got me out of my seat. Forget trashing McCain’s ideas. If Obama wants to rally his base, he has to be more passionate about his own ideas. I have long felt that what propelled Obama early was the fact that many Americans understand in their guts that we need a change, but the change we need is to focus on nation-building at home. We’re in decline. We need to get back to work on our country. And that is going to require strong, smart government.
Who is bailing out Fannie Mae? Who is going to build a new energy system? Health care? More tax cuts are not going to do it. But I am just not sure that Obama is making the sale that he has the plan and passion to unite and mobilize the country for this task.
In a way, I would love to hear Obama say, just for shock value: “I am so eager to do whatever it takes to fix these problems that I am ready to be a one-term president. Mine will not be a presidency that is confined to the first 100 days. But that is what we have fallen into, folks. The first 100 days have become the only 100 days. Once they are over, presidents are told that they have to trim their sails to get ready for the midterm elections, and once the midterms are over they are told that they have to trim their sails and get ready for the next presidential election. We can’t solve our problems with a government of 100 days. I am going to work the hard problems the hard way for 1,461 days.”
I don’t know how long or high the “Sarah Palin bounce” will go, but I would take her very seriously as a politician. She may not know nuclear deterrence theory, but she can deliver a line. “I think there are a lot of women out there that look at her, holding her baby, talking about being a hockey mom, and say, ‘She knows what I feel; she’s going through what I am going through,’ ” remarked leadership expert John Maxwell.
As Neil Oxman, political consultant at The Campaign Group, put it to me: For half the country, “Sarah Palin is Roseanne from the ‘Roseanne’ show. ‘Roseanne’ was the No. 1 comedy five years in a row and seven out of nine in the top 10.” She is connecting at a gut level. So does McCain — and, therefore, they don’t need to give their constituents many details.
This race has a long way to go. It is still Obama’s election to lose. But Obama got where he is today by defining himself as the agent of change and by defining change as the issue in this election. McCain, with Palin’s help, has once again not only made Obama’s experience an issue, but has now moved in on Obama’s strength and tried to define the G.O.P. ticket as the party of “change.”
How, you ask, can two people running with the exact same policies as the party that has been in power for eight years, claim to be the agents of “change?” That’s politics. There’s no shame. But what this has done is to make the word “change” as a campaign slogan meaningless. Obama will need to find another way to connect his ideas — clearly, crisply and passionately.
Because, while the pollsters tell us it is still really close, my own totally unscientific, seat of the pants poll tells me this: When you say Obama’s name today and ask people for their first impression — a quick, flash, gut, first impression — no single word or phrase or policy comes to mind. His opponents will fill that vacuum if he doesn’t. They already are.
Op-Ed Columnist
From the Gut
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
If John McCain can win this election race with a 50-pound ball called “George W. Bush” wrapped around one ankle and a 50-pound ball called “The U.S. Economy” wrapped around the other, then he deserves to represent America in the next Olympics in any race he wants — swimming, cycling or track — I don’t care how old he is. He would be the Michael Phelps of politics.
I confess, I watch politics from afar, but here’s what I’ve been feeling for a while: Whoever slipped that Valium into Barack Obama’s coffee needs to be found and arrested by the Democrats because Obama has gone from cool to cold.
Somebody needs to tell Obama that if he wants the chance to calmly answer the phone at 3 a.m. in the White House, he is going to need to start slamming down some phones at 3 p.m. along the campaign trail. I like much of what he has to say, especially about energy, but I don’t think people are feeling it in their guts, and I am a big believer that voters don’t listen through their ears. They listen through their stomachs.
If you as a politician connect with voters on a gut level, they will follow you anywhere and not fret about the details. If you don’t connect with them on a gut level, you can’t show them enough details. Obama early on, and particularly with young people, connected on a gut level like no other politician since Ronald Reagan.
But in recent weeks, I feel as though he has lost that gut connection. I thought his convention speech contained no memorable lines or uplifting visions. It never got me out of my seat. Forget trashing McCain’s ideas. If Obama wants to rally his base, he has to be more passionate about his own ideas. I have long felt that what propelled Obama early was the fact that many Americans understand in their guts that we need a change, but the change we need is to focus on nation-building at home. We’re in decline. We need to get back to work on our country. And that is going to require strong, smart government.
Who is bailing out Fannie Mae? Who is going to build a new energy system? Health care? More tax cuts are not going to do it. But I am just not sure that Obama is making the sale that he has the plan and passion to unite and mobilize the country for this task.
In a way, I would love to hear Obama say, just for shock value: “I am so eager to do whatever it takes to fix these problems that I am ready to be a one-term president. Mine will not be a presidency that is confined to the first 100 days. But that is what we have fallen into, folks. The first 100 days have become the only 100 days. Once they are over, presidents are told that they have to trim their sails to get ready for the midterm elections, and once the midterms are over they are told that they have to trim their sails and get ready for the next presidential election. We can’t solve our problems with a government of 100 days. I am going to work the hard problems the hard way for 1,461 days.”
I don’t know how long or high the “Sarah Palin bounce” will go, but I would take her very seriously as a politician. She may not know nuclear deterrence theory, but she can deliver a line. “I think there are a lot of women out there that look at her, holding her baby, talking about being a hockey mom, and say, ‘She knows what I feel; she’s going through what I am going through,’ ” remarked leadership expert John Maxwell.
As Neil Oxman, political consultant at The Campaign Group, put it to me: For half the country, “Sarah Palin is Roseanne from the ‘Roseanne’ show. ‘Roseanne’ was the No. 1 comedy five years in a row and seven out of nine in the top 10.” She is connecting at a gut level. So does McCain — and, therefore, they don’t need to give their constituents many details.
This race has a long way to go. It is still Obama’s election to lose. But Obama got where he is today by defining himself as the agent of change and by defining change as the issue in this election. McCain, with Palin’s help, has once again not only made Obama’s experience an issue, but has now moved in on Obama’s strength and tried to define the G.O.P. ticket as the party of “change.”
How, you ask, can two people running with the exact same policies as the party that has been in power for eight years, claim to be the agents of “change?” That’s politics. There’s no shame. But what this has done is to make the word “change” as a campaign slogan meaningless. Obama will need to find another way to connect his ideas — clearly, crisply and passionately.
Because, while the pollsters tell us it is still really close, my own totally unscientific, seat of the pants poll tells me this: When you say Obama’s name today and ask people for their first impression — a quick, flash, gut, first impression — no single word or phrase or policy comes to mind. His opponents will fill that vacuum if he doesn’t. They already are.
Robert Scheer - Truthdig.com (Sept. 9, 2008)
She’s Clueless, He’s Worse
Posted on Sept. 9, 2008
By Robert Scheer
Ignorance is bliss, which perhaps explains Gov. Sarah Palin being so confidently wrong about the root cause of the federalization of most of the nation’s mortgage market. But what is Sen. John McCain’s excuse? Both act as if the financial meltdown of the U.S. economy has nothing to do with the policies of the political party they represent—but she at least may not know any better.
Distracted momentarily from her campaign revelries of maverick opposition to the “bridge to nowhere,” which she had supported until it became a public relations debacle, and congressional earmarks for which she, as a small-town mayor, had hustled piggishly at the federal trough, Palin made the mistake of dealing with an unscripted subject.
Referring to the government’s bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Palin opined that the two had “gotten too big and too expensive to the taxpayers,” displaying abysmal ignorance of the fact that only now will those privately owned banks become a huge taxpayer obligation, as the federal government takes them over. Nor can the meltdown of home values be traced to those two beleaguered institutions, because they did not make the original subprime mortgage commitments.
The housing bubble was the result of the Ponzi-scheme antics of those other financial entities: commercial banks, stockbrokers and hedge funds, which were allowed in a GOP-deregulated market to get into the “swap” business. Through the rampant reselling of loans, the obligation to collect on a loan was divorced from the act of selling it in the first place, so who cared if the recipient of the loan was not at all qualified or the appraisal of the property value was inflated, as long as the paper was traded away, or insured, before the moment of foreclosure?
As with any Ponzi scheme, the perps, who included the legislators as well as the bankers who exploited the loopholes they provided, expected to bail long before the bubble burst. The role of the legislators, Republican-led but with far too many Democratic running dogs, was critical to the success of the scam.
The mortgage swaps distancing the originator of the loan from the ultimate collector were made legal only as a result of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which former Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, pushed through Congress just hours before the 2000 Christmas recess. Gramm, until recently co-chair of the McCain campaign, also had co-authored the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which became law in 1999 with President Bill Clinton’s signature. That gem, which Gramm had pushed for years with massive financial industry lobbying, destroyed the Depression-era barrier to the merger of stockbrokers, banks and insurance companies. Those two acts effectively ended significant regulation of the financial community, and no wonder we have witnessed an even more rapid and severe meltdown in housing values than during the Great Depression.
Not surprisingly, Gramm was rewarded for his service upon retirement as a senator and as head of the Senate Banking Committee with a top position at the Swiss-based UBS bank, which is close to drowning in the subprime mortgage nightmare he helped create. These folks have no shame, as was evidenced when the senator’s wife, Wendy, was named a director of Enron, whose roiling of the energy market had been made possible only through yet another provision of Gramm’s Commodity Futures Modernization Act.
While neophyte Palin can claim ignorance of such matters, that would be particularly difficult for McCain, who as a senator consistently lined up with Gramm in his deregulation crusade. Clearly McCain had not learned much from his previous involvement with the savings-and-loan debacle about the risks to consumers in unregulated banking.
McCain served as chair of Gramm’s abortive 1996 presidential campaign, and Gramm returned the favor, providing critical support for McCain with the hard-line Republican base, including the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal. It was assumed in the business press that Gramm was the front-runner to be Treasury secretary in a McCain administration. Gramm left his role as the top economic person near McCain only after he made an embarrassing statement blaming the current economic downturn on “whiners,” an awkward reference to the victims of his disastrous legislation.
Amazingly, the turmoil in the housing market, which has led to the socializing of the nation’s revered homeownership market in a massive expansion of the role of big government, has apparently not troubled McCain’s conservative supporters. As I said, ignorance is bliss, and evidently not just for the newbie Palin.
Robert Scheer is author of a new book, “The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America.”
Posted on Sept. 9, 2008
By Robert Scheer
Ignorance is bliss, which perhaps explains Gov. Sarah Palin being so confidently wrong about the root cause of the federalization of most of the nation’s mortgage market. But what is Sen. John McCain’s excuse? Both act as if the financial meltdown of the U.S. economy has nothing to do with the policies of the political party they represent—but she at least may not know any better.
Distracted momentarily from her campaign revelries of maverick opposition to the “bridge to nowhere,” which she had supported until it became a public relations debacle, and congressional earmarks for which she, as a small-town mayor, had hustled piggishly at the federal trough, Palin made the mistake of dealing with an unscripted subject.
Referring to the government’s bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Palin opined that the two had “gotten too big and too expensive to the taxpayers,” displaying abysmal ignorance of the fact that only now will those privately owned banks become a huge taxpayer obligation, as the federal government takes them over. Nor can the meltdown of home values be traced to those two beleaguered institutions, because they did not make the original subprime mortgage commitments.
The housing bubble was the result of the Ponzi-scheme antics of those other financial entities: commercial banks, stockbrokers and hedge funds, which were allowed in a GOP-deregulated market to get into the “swap” business. Through the rampant reselling of loans, the obligation to collect on a loan was divorced from the act of selling it in the first place, so who cared if the recipient of the loan was not at all qualified or the appraisal of the property value was inflated, as long as the paper was traded away, or insured, before the moment of foreclosure?
As with any Ponzi scheme, the perps, who included the legislators as well as the bankers who exploited the loopholes they provided, expected to bail long before the bubble burst. The role of the legislators, Republican-led but with far too many Democratic running dogs, was critical to the success of the scam.
The mortgage swaps distancing the originator of the loan from the ultimate collector were made legal only as a result of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which former Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, pushed through Congress just hours before the 2000 Christmas recess. Gramm, until recently co-chair of the McCain campaign, also had co-authored the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which became law in 1999 with President Bill Clinton’s signature. That gem, which Gramm had pushed for years with massive financial industry lobbying, destroyed the Depression-era barrier to the merger of stockbrokers, banks and insurance companies. Those two acts effectively ended significant regulation of the financial community, and no wonder we have witnessed an even more rapid and severe meltdown in housing values than during the Great Depression.
Not surprisingly, Gramm was rewarded for his service upon retirement as a senator and as head of the Senate Banking Committee with a top position at the Swiss-based UBS bank, which is close to drowning in the subprime mortgage nightmare he helped create. These folks have no shame, as was evidenced when the senator’s wife, Wendy, was named a director of Enron, whose roiling of the energy market had been made possible only through yet another provision of Gramm’s Commodity Futures Modernization Act.
While neophyte Palin can claim ignorance of such matters, that would be particularly difficult for McCain, who as a senator consistently lined up with Gramm in his deregulation crusade. Clearly McCain had not learned much from his previous involvement with the savings-and-loan debacle about the risks to consumers in unregulated banking.
McCain served as chair of Gramm’s abortive 1996 presidential campaign, and Gramm returned the favor, providing critical support for McCain with the hard-line Republican base, including the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal. It was assumed in the business press that Gramm was the front-runner to be Treasury secretary in a McCain administration. Gramm left his role as the top economic person near McCain only after he made an embarrassing statement blaming the current economic downturn on “whiners,” an awkward reference to the victims of his disastrous legislation.
Amazingly, the turmoil in the housing market, which has led to the socializing of the nation’s revered homeownership market in a massive expansion of the role of big government, has apparently not troubled McCain’s conservative supporters. As I said, ignorance is bliss, and evidently not just for the newbie Palin.
Robert Scheer is author of a new book, “The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America.”
Harold Meyerson - Washington Post (Sept. 10, 2008)
How to Beat McCain's Bounce
By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, September 10, 2008; A15
Sarah's a hit with the ladies -- white ladies, anyway. Monday's Washington Post-ABC News poll, which showed a newly deadlocked presidential race, registered a 20-point bump for the McCain ticket among white women since the previous poll, taken before Sarah Palin was loosed on the world. Among these women, Barack Obama's eight-point lead has turned into a 12-point deficit.
No wonder Republicans have been criticizing identity politics all these years. It works. And nobody is benefiting from it more than the selfsame GOP.
The Republicans come charging out of their convention bolstered by a hopped-up base, the empathetic support of working-class (chiefly married) white women and the mantle, however ludicrous, of change. There's not much Obama can do about energized GOP faithful, but there are any number of things he can do to erode voters' infatuation with Palin, and all manner of things he needs to do yesterday to debunk the Republicans' claim to the banner of change.
Anyone familiar with polling knows that when voters start liking a candidate, they start giving that candidate higher marks than they previously had on a wide range of issues, even though the candidate's record and positions on those issues may not have changed at all. This, along with the symbolism of Palin's selection, helps explain why voters' estimation of McCain's economic policies has risen: Obama's lead on the question of who can better handle the economy has abruptly shrunk to just five percentage points, and that change has been driven by white women. Before the conventions, they preferred Obama on the economy by 12 points; now, they prefer McCain by 10. (Other national polls show a similar narrowing of Obama's advantage on the economy.)
If Obama and his strategists can't reclaim the economic issue after eight years of Republicans presiding over the first recorded recovery in American history that failed to boost family incomes, and now over a slowdown that has its roots in the GOP's mania for deregulation, they ought to find another line of work. They need to ask John McCain at every turn: What Bush economic policies do you repudiate? Where have you broken with Bush on the economy?
After all, McCain is now merrily calling for tax cuts at every campaign stop. That's his economic revitalization program. Not coincidentally, that's also been George W. Bush's economic revitalization program for eight years: Cut taxes chiefly on the rich and their investments will enrich us all.
We all know how well that's worked.
Obama should have several distinct advantages here. First, his proposed tax cuts, unlike McCain's (which chiefly renew Bush's giveaway to the wealthiest Americans), are directed heavily toward working- and middle-class Americans, including most of the white women who are flirting with the Republicans. And while McCain attacks Obama's proposed tax hikes on the rich as job-killers, Obama's increases are modeled closely on those that Bill Clinton signed into law in 1993. Republicans made the same argument then: that Clinton's tax hikes would cost jobs. Problem is, the U.S. economy grew by 22 million jobs during Clinton's presidency. It has grown by just 5 million during Bush's presidency, and that number is falling every month as the slowdown deepens.
Since McCain is advocating the same tax policies that Bush enacted, why would anyone expect a different result?
Second, Obama's economic policies are keyed, as McCain's are not, to creating American jobs in a global economy. The problem with across-the-board tax cuts for corporations and the rich is that with each passing year there's a higher likelihood that those cuts will be invested by their recipients in jobs in China and India. Obama, by contrast, proposes eliminating tax cuts for companies that take jobs abroad and establishing tax cuts for companies that create jobs at home. Obama is also committed to spending $150 billion during his term in office for a green-jobs-alternative-energy program that would create millions of non-offshorable jobs. McCain makes rhetorical bows to helping alternative energy industries, but he's made no commitment of public dollars to back up his speechifying. Add his lack of commitment to green jobs to his faith in traditional trickle-down economics, and it becomes clear that McCain has no vision whatever for how to create American jobs in the 21st-century economy.
There are a few other points of economic differentiation between the candidates. Obama offers plausible plans to make college and health insurance more affordable; McCain doesn't. Obama opposed a number of proposed trade accords; McCain supported every trade treaty of the past three decades.
McCain, candidate of economic change? Even if Sarah Palin brings a working-mom pedigree to the ticket by schlepping her kids around with her while on state business (and collecting per diems for it, too), all that McCain-Palin promises is four more years of economic dysfunction and decline.
By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, September 10, 2008; A15
Sarah's a hit with the ladies -- white ladies, anyway. Monday's Washington Post-ABC News poll, which showed a newly deadlocked presidential race, registered a 20-point bump for the McCain ticket among white women since the previous poll, taken before Sarah Palin was loosed on the world. Among these women, Barack Obama's eight-point lead has turned into a 12-point deficit.
No wonder Republicans have been criticizing identity politics all these years. It works. And nobody is benefiting from it more than the selfsame GOP.
The Republicans come charging out of their convention bolstered by a hopped-up base, the empathetic support of working-class (chiefly married) white women and the mantle, however ludicrous, of change. There's not much Obama can do about energized GOP faithful, but there are any number of things he can do to erode voters' infatuation with Palin, and all manner of things he needs to do yesterday to debunk the Republicans' claim to the banner of change.
Anyone familiar with polling knows that when voters start liking a candidate, they start giving that candidate higher marks than they previously had on a wide range of issues, even though the candidate's record and positions on those issues may not have changed at all. This, along with the symbolism of Palin's selection, helps explain why voters' estimation of McCain's economic policies has risen: Obama's lead on the question of who can better handle the economy has abruptly shrunk to just five percentage points, and that change has been driven by white women. Before the conventions, they preferred Obama on the economy by 12 points; now, they prefer McCain by 10. (Other national polls show a similar narrowing of Obama's advantage on the economy.)
If Obama and his strategists can't reclaim the economic issue after eight years of Republicans presiding over the first recorded recovery in American history that failed to boost family incomes, and now over a slowdown that has its roots in the GOP's mania for deregulation, they ought to find another line of work. They need to ask John McCain at every turn: What Bush economic policies do you repudiate? Where have you broken with Bush on the economy?
After all, McCain is now merrily calling for tax cuts at every campaign stop. That's his economic revitalization program. Not coincidentally, that's also been George W. Bush's economic revitalization program for eight years: Cut taxes chiefly on the rich and their investments will enrich us all.
We all know how well that's worked.
Obama should have several distinct advantages here. First, his proposed tax cuts, unlike McCain's (which chiefly renew Bush's giveaway to the wealthiest Americans), are directed heavily toward working- and middle-class Americans, including most of the white women who are flirting with the Republicans. And while McCain attacks Obama's proposed tax hikes on the rich as job-killers, Obama's increases are modeled closely on those that Bill Clinton signed into law in 1993. Republicans made the same argument then: that Clinton's tax hikes would cost jobs. Problem is, the U.S. economy grew by 22 million jobs during Clinton's presidency. It has grown by just 5 million during Bush's presidency, and that number is falling every month as the slowdown deepens.
Since McCain is advocating the same tax policies that Bush enacted, why would anyone expect a different result?
Second, Obama's economic policies are keyed, as McCain's are not, to creating American jobs in a global economy. The problem with across-the-board tax cuts for corporations and the rich is that with each passing year there's a higher likelihood that those cuts will be invested by their recipients in jobs in China and India. Obama, by contrast, proposes eliminating tax cuts for companies that take jobs abroad and establishing tax cuts for companies that create jobs at home. Obama is also committed to spending $150 billion during his term in office for a green-jobs-alternative-energy program that would create millions of non-offshorable jobs. McCain makes rhetorical bows to helping alternative energy industries, but he's made no commitment of public dollars to back up his speechifying. Add his lack of commitment to green jobs to his faith in traditional trickle-down economics, and it becomes clear that McCain has no vision whatever for how to create American jobs in the 21st-century economy.
There are a few other points of economic differentiation between the candidates. Obama offers plausible plans to make college and health insurance more affordable; McCain doesn't. Obama opposed a number of proposed trade accords; McCain supported every trade treaty of the past three decades.
McCain, candidate of economic change? Even if Sarah Palin brings a working-mom pedigree to the ticket by schlepping her kids around with her while on state business (and collecting per diems for it, too), all that McCain-Palin promises is four more years of economic dysfunction and decline.
Monday, September 8, 2008
Naomi Klein - The Nation (Sept. 3, 2008)
New Orleans: The City That Won't Be Ignored
By Naomi Klein
This article appeared in the September 22, 2008 edition of The Nation.
September 3, 2008
The early results are in: Hurricane Gustav has helped John McCain's bid for the White House. This is nothing short of incredible.
In the combination of New Orleans and hurricanes, we have the most powerful argument possible for the necessity of "change." It's all there: gaping inequality, deep racism, crumbling public infrastructure, global warming, rampant corruption, the Blackwater-ization of the public sector. And none of it is in the past tense. In New Orleans whole neighborhoods have gone to seed, Charity Hospital remains shuttered, public housing has been deliberately destroyed--and the levee system is still far from repaired.
Gustav should have been political rat poison for the Republicans, no matter how well it was managed. Yet, as Peter Baker noted in the New York Times, "rather than run away from the hurricane and its political risks, Mr. McCain ran toward it." If this strategy worked, it was at least partly because Barack Obama has been running away from New Orleans for his entire campaign.
Unlike John Edwards, who started and ended his nomination bid surrounded by the decay of New Orleans's Ninth Ward, Obama has shied away from the powerful symbolism the city offers. He waited almost a year after Hurricane Katrina to visit New Orleans and spent just half a day there ahead of the Louisiana primary. During the Democratic National Convention, Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden made no mention of New Orleans in their keynotes. Bill Clinton spared just two words: "Katrina and cronyism."
In his Denver speech, Obama did invoke a government "that sits on its hands while a major American city drowns before our eyes." But that only scratches the surface of what happened to New Orleans's poorest residents, who were first forcibly relocated and then forced to watch from afar as their homes, schools and hospitals were stolen. As Obama spoke in Denver, families in New Orleans were already packing their bags in anticipation of Gustav, steeling themselves for yet another evacuation. They heard not even a perfunctory "our thoughts and prayers are with you" from the Democratic candidate for President.
There are plenty of political reasons for this, of course. Obama's campaign is pitching itself to the middle class, not the class of discarded people New Orleans represents. The problem is that by remaining virtually silent about the most dramatic domestic outrage in modern US history, Obama created a political vacuum. When Gustav hit, all McCain needed to do to fill it was show up. Sure, it was cynical for McCain to claim the hurricane zone as a campaign backdrop. But it was Obama who left that potent terrain as vacant as a lot in the Lower Ninth Ward.
Until now, Obama's supporters have largely accepted the campaign's assessment of the compromises necessary to win, offering only gentle prodding. The fact that the Republicans have managed to turn New Orleans to their advantage should put a decisive end to this blind obedience.
Republicans have a better attitude toward their candidate. When they don't like McCain's positions, they simply change them. Take the hottest-button issue of the campaign: offshore oil drilling. Just four months ago, it was not even on the radar. During the Republican primary, the issue barely came up, and when it did, McCain did not support it. None of this bothered former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his newly minted American Solutions for Winning the Future. Gingrich waited patiently for what his party loves most: a crisis. It arrived in May, when oil approached $130 a barrel. First came a petition to lower gas prices by opening up domestic drilling (nonsense). Next was a poll, packed with laughably leading questions: "Some people have suggested that, to combat the rising cost of energy and reduce dependence on foreign energy sources, the United States should use more of its own domestic energy reserves, including the oil and coal it already has here in the United States. Do you support or oppose this idea?" You can guess what people said. Two weeks later, McCain flipped on offshore oil drilling.
There was always a risk attached to making offshore drilling the centerpiece of the McCain campaign, since it is not nearly as safe as its advocates claim. Environmentalists have been trying to point this out, but nothing makes the case quite as forcefully as a Category 5 hurricane rocking oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, forcing evacuations and raising the specter of a serious spill.
Gustav was one of those rare moments when political arguments are made by reality, not rhetoric. It was the time to simply point and say: "This is why we oppose more drilling." It was also the time to recall that during Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the official Minerals Management Service report found more than 100 accidents leading to a total of 743,400 gallons of oil spilled throughout the region. To put that figure in perspective, 100,000 gallons is classified as a "major spill." If one is feeling particularly bold, a Category 5 hurricane is also an opportune time to mention that scientists see a link between heavier storms and warming ocean temperatures--warmed in part by the fossil fuels being extracted from those fallible platforms.
Obama was not able to make these kinds of arguments when Gustav hit. That's because his campaign had made another "strategic" decision: to compromise on offshore oil drilling. Again a vacuum that had been opened up was rapidly filled by the Republicans, who instantly (and absurdly) linked the hurricane to the need for "energy security." The morning after Gustav made landfall, Bush called for more drilling. Earlier, McCain had visited the hurricane zone with his new running mate, Sarah Palin, whose sole prior claim to national fame was telling cable shows that "we need to drill, drill, drill."
In moments of crisis, it is possible to speak hard truths with great force and clarity. But when the truth has gone silent, lies, boldly told, work almost as well.
About Naomi Klein
Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist and syndicated columnist and the author of the international and New York Times bestseller The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (September 2007); an earlier international best-seller, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies; and the collection Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate (2002)
By Naomi Klein
This article appeared in the September 22, 2008 edition of The Nation.
September 3, 2008
The early results are in: Hurricane Gustav has helped John McCain's bid for the White House. This is nothing short of incredible.
In the combination of New Orleans and hurricanes, we have the most powerful argument possible for the necessity of "change." It's all there: gaping inequality, deep racism, crumbling public infrastructure, global warming, rampant corruption, the Blackwater-ization of the public sector. And none of it is in the past tense. In New Orleans whole neighborhoods have gone to seed, Charity Hospital remains shuttered, public housing has been deliberately destroyed--and the levee system is still far from repaired.
Gustav should have been political rat poison for the Republicans, no matter how well it was managed. Yet, as Peter Baker noted in the New York Times, "rather than run away from the hurricane and its political risks, Mr. McCain ran toward it." If this strategy worked, it was at least partly because Barack Obama has been running away from New Orleans for his entire campaign.
Unlike John Edwards, who started and ended his nomination bid surrounded by the decay of New Orleans's Ninth Ward, Obama has shied away from the powerful symbolism the city offers. He waited almost a year after Hurricane Katrina to visit New Orleans and spent just half a day there ahead of the Louisiana primary. During the Democratic National Convention, Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden made no mention of New Orleans in their keynotes. Bill Clinton spared just two words: "Katrina and cronyism."
In his Denver speech, Obama did invoke a government "that sits on its hands while a major American city drowns before our eyes." But that only scratches the surface of what happened to New Orleans's poorest residents, who were first forcibly relocated and then forced to watch from afar as their homes, schools and hospitals were stolen. As Obama spoke in Denver, families in New Orleans were already packing their bags in anticipation of Gustav, steeling themselves for yet another evacuation. They heard not even a perfunctory "our thoughts and prayers are with you" from the Democratic candidate for President.
There are plenty of political reasons for this, of course. Obama's campaign is pitching itself to the middle class, not the class of discarded people New Orleans represents. The problem is that by remaining virtually silent about the most dramatic domestic outrage in modern US history, Obama created a political vacuum. When Gustav hit, all McCain needed to do to fill it was show up. Sure, it was cynical for McCain to claim the hurricane zone as a campaign backdrop. But it was Obama who left that potent terrain as vacant as a lot in the Lower Ninth Ward.
Until now, Obama's supporters have largely accepted the campaign's assessment of the compromises necessary to win, offering only gentle prodding. The fact that the Republicans have managed to turn New Orleans to their advantage should put a decisive end to this blind obedience.
Republicans have a better attitude toward their candidate. When they don't like McCain's positions, they simply change them. Take the hottest-button issue of the campaign: offshore oil drilling. Just four months ago, it was not even on the radar. During the Republican primary, the issue barely came up, and when it did, McCain did not support it. None of this bothered former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his newly minted American Solutions for Winning the Future. Gingrich waited patiently for what his party loves most: a crisis. It arrived in May, when oil approached $130 a barrel. First came a petition to lower gas prices by opening up domestic drilling (nonsense). Next was a poll, packed with laughably leading questions: "Some people have suggested that, to combat the rising cost of energy and reduce dependence on foreign energy sources, the United States should use more of its own domestic energy reserves, including the oil and coal it already has here in the United States. Do you support or oppose this idea?" You can guess what people said. Two weeks later, McCain flipped on offshore oil drilling.
There was always a risk attached to making offshore drilling the centerpiece of the McCain campaign, since it is not nearly as safe as its advocates claim. Environmentalists have been trying to point this out, but nothing makes the case quite as forcefully as a Category 5 hurricane rocking oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, forcing evacuations and raising the specter of a serious spill.
Gustav was one of those rare moments when political arguments are made by reality, not rhetoric. It was the time to simply point and say: "This is why we oppose more drilling." It was also the time to recall that during Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the official Minerals Management Service report found more than 100 accidents leading to a total of 743,400 gallons of oil spilled throughout the region. To put that figure in perspective, 100,000 gallons is classified as a "major spill." If one is feeling particularly bold, a Category 5 hurricane is also an opportune time to mention that scientists see a link between heavier storms and warming ocean temperatures--warmed in part by the fossil fuels being extracted from those fallible platforms.
Obama was not able to make these kinds of arguments when Gustav hit. That's because his campaign had made another "strategic" decision: to compromise on offshore oil drilling. Again a vacuum that had been opened up was rapidly filled by the Republicans, who instantly (and absurdly) linked the hurricane to the need for "energy security." The morning after Gustav made landfall, Bush called for more drilling. Earlier, McCain had visited the hurricane zone with his new running mate, Sarah Palin, whose sole prior claim to national fame was telling cable shows that "we need to drill, drill, drill."
In moments of crisis, it is possible to speak hard truths with great force and clarity. But when the truth has gone silent, lies, boldly told, work almost as well.
About Naomi Klein
Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist and syndicated columnist and the author of the international and New York Times bestseller The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (September 2007); an earlier international best-seller, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies; and the collection Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate (2002)
Associated Press (Sept. 8, 2008)
Video shows dead Afghan children after US raid
By FISNIK ABRASHI, Associated Press Writer 2 hours, 8 minutes ago
Two videos that appear to show the bodies of at least 10 children and many more adults covered in blankets and white shrouds lend weight to Afghan and U.N. allegations that a U.S.-led raid killed scores of civilians last month.
One video, obtained by The Associated Press on Monday and apparently taken by a cell phone, is grainy and details such as a precise body count are difficult to make out. But it appears that several dozen bodies, all covered by blankets, are lined up one next to another in a mosque.
Wailing Afghan women and men occasionally lift the blankets to show dead children or the disfigured faces of men.
A second video shows three young children wrapped in white shrouds. A fourth child has gruesome head wounds. In total, the bodies of at least 10 children can be seen.
The two videos, both obtained by The Associated Press, give weight to Afghan and U.N. findings that scores of civilians, including 60 children and 15 women, died in the Aug. 22 U.S.-led raid in the village of Azizabad. U.S. special forces and Afghan commandos carried out the operation.
A U.S. investigation found that only seven civilians died, as well as up to 35 militants, but the U.S. on Sunday said it would reopen the investigation because of emerging new evidence, an apparent reference to the videos, which have been in the possession of Afghan intelligence and the U.N. but have leaked to media outlets.
The new evidence that prompted the review is "some imagery evidence" that came to the attention of Gen. David D. McKiernan, who is the commander of the NATO-led force here, over the weekend, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said Monday.
He declined to say whether it was the cell phone video or something else.
"There is some evidence that suggests that the evidence that the U.S. military used in ... its investigation may not have been complete," Whitman said.
He said the general to be sent to Afghanistan by Central Command will review the initial investigation and how it was done.
But it is also possible that there will be a new investigation of the raid in Azizabad itself — this time by Central Command — said Lt. Cmdr. Bill Speaks, a spokesman for the command in Tampa., Fla.
The grainy cell phone video, shot by an unnamed Afghan aid official and handed over to the United Nations mission in Kabul, shows two long rows of people apparently killed during the raid, laid on the mosque floor before burial.
As Afghan women and a young boy sob over some of the bodies, bearded and turbaned men walk around, lifting some of the scarfs and blankets covering the dead.
At least eight children can be identified in the two videos. Two of them look as though they are asleep. One child has half of a skull blown off.
It was impossible to verify conclusively that the videos showed the aftermath of the Azizabad attack, but the contents of the video matched claims by Afghan and U.N. officials that the videos showed the U.S. operation killed far more civilians than the military has admitted to.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has for years now warned the U.S. and NATO that it must stop killing civilians in its bombing runs, saying such deaths undermine his government and the international mission. But the Azizabad incident could finally push Karzai to take action.
Shortly after the Azizabad attack, he ordered a review of whether the U.S. and NATO should be allowed to use airstrikes or carry out raids in villages. He also called for an updated "status of force" agreement between the Afghan government and foreign militaries. That review has not yet been completed.
Nek Mohammad Ishaq, a provincial council member in Herat and a member of the Afghan investigating commission, has said photographs and video taken of the victims are with Afghanistan's secretive intelligence service.
Afghan officials say U.S. special forces and Afghan commandos raided the village while hundreds of people were gathered in a large compound for a memorial service honoring a tribal leader, Timor Shah, who was killed eight months ago by a rival, Nader Tawakal.
The U.S. investigative report released Tuesday said American and Afghan forces took fire from militants while approaching Azizabad and that "justified use of well-aimed small-arms fire and close air support to defend the combined force."
The report said investigators discovered evidence that the militants planned to attack a nearby coalition base. Evidence collected included weapons, explosives, intelligence materials and an access badge to the base, as well as photographs from inside and outside the base.
But Afghan officials say Reza and other members of his family provided security and reconstruction work for the nearby U.S. base, and were not Taliban.
By FISNIK ABRASHI, Associated Press Writer 2 hours, 8 minutes ago
Two videos that appear to show the bodies of at least 10 children and many more adults covered in blankets and white shrouds lend weight to Afghan and U.N. allegations that a U.S.-led raid killed scores of civilians last month.
One video, obtained by The Associated Press on Monday and apparently taken by a cell phone, is grainy and details such as a precise body count are difficult to make out. But it appears that several dozen bodies, all covered by blankets, are lined up one next to another in a mosque.
Wailing Afghan women and men occasionally lift the blankets to show dead children or the disfigured faces of men.
A second video shows three young children wrapped in white shrouds. A fourth child has gruesome head wounds. In total, the bodies of at least 10 children can be seen.
The two videos, both obtained by The Associated Press, give weight to Afghan and U.N. findings that scores of civilians, including 60 children and 15 women, died in the Aug. 22 U.S.-led raid in the village of Azizabad. U.S. special forces and Afghan commandos carried out the operation.
A U.S. investigation found that only seven civilians died, as well as up to 35 militants, but the U.S. on Sunday said it would reopen the investigation because of emerging new evidence, an apparent reference to the videos, which have been in the possession of Afghan intelligence and the U.N. but have leaked to media outlets.
The new evidence that prompted the review is "some imagery evidence" that came to the attention of Gen. David D. McKiernan, who is the commander of the NATO-led force here, over the weekend, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said Monday.
He declined to say whether it was the cell phone video or something else.
"There is some evidence that suggests that the evidence that the U.S. military used in ... its investigation may not have been complete," Whitman said.
He said the general to be sent to Afghanistan by Central Command will review the initial investigation and how it was done.
But it is also possible that there will be a new investigation of the raid in Azizabad itself — this time by Central Command — said Lt. Cmdr. Bill Speaks, a spokesman for the command in Tampa., Fla.
The grainy cell phone video, shot by an unnamed Afghan aid official and handed over to the United Nations mission in Kabul, shows two long rows of people apparently killed during the raid, laid on the mosque floor before burial.
As Afghan women and a young boy sob over some of the bodies, bearded and turbaned men walk around, lifting some of the scarfs and blankets covering the dead.
At least eight children can be identified in the two videos. Two of them look as though they are asleep. One child has half of a skull blown off.
It was impossible to verify conclusively that the videos showed the aftermath of the Azizabad attack, but the contents of the video matched claims by Afghan and U.N. officials that the videos showed the U.S. operation killed far more civilians than the military has admitted to.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has for years now warned the U.S. and NATO that it must stop killing civilians in its bombing runs, saying such deaths undermine his government and the international mission. But the Azizabad incident could finally push Karzai to take action.
Shortly after the Azizabad attack, he ordered a review of whether the U.S. and NATO should be allowed to use airstrikes or carry out raids in villages. He also called for an updated "status of force" agreement between the Afghan government and foreign militaries. That review has not yet been completed.
Nek Mohammad Ishaq, a provincial council member in Herat and a member of the Afghan investigating commission, has said photographs and video taken of the victims are with Afghanistan's secretive intelligence service.
Afghan officials say U.S. special forces and Afghan commandos raided the village while hundreds of people were gathered in a large compound for a memorial service honoring a tribal leader, Timor Shah, who was killed eight months ago by a rival, Nader Tawakal.
The U.S. investigative report released Tuesday said American and Afghan forces took fire from militants while approaching Azizabad and that "justified use of well-aimed small-arms fire and close air support to defend the combined force."
The report said investigators discovered evidence that the militants planned to attack a nearby coalition base. Evidence collected included weapons, explosives, intelligence materials and an access badge to the base, as well as photographs from inside and outside the base.
But Afghan officials say Reza and other members of his family provided security and reconstruction work for the nearby U.S. base, and were not Taliban.
Sebastian Mallaby - Washington Post (September 8, 2008)
McCain's Convenient Untruth
By Sebastian Mallaby
Monday, September 8, 2008; A17
When it comes to fighting wars, John McCain stands up and calls for sacrifice. "We never hide from history; we make history," he declared in his convention speech. But when it comes to taxes, McCain is unwilling to demand even a teensy bit of sacrifice. In a McCain administration, Americans would not have to surrender a dime more of their money to a cause larger than themselves.
Why this bipolar attitude toward sacrifice? Start with the answer that McCain himself provides. "My tax cuts will create jobs. His tax increases will eliminate them," he said at the convention, offering one of the speech's few policy contrasts between Obama's platform and his own. In other words, McCain is not calling for tax sacrifice because he believes it would be counterproductive. On taxes, he is saying, you can selfishly avoid sacrifice -- and serve the public good.
This, unfortunately, is a convenient untruth. Tax hikes taken to an extreme can indeed backfire, harming growth and job creation. But it's a stretch to assert that Barack Obama's tax plan would do that. And it's downright scandalous to pretend that the economy can be strengthened in anything other than the short run by unaffordable tax cuts.
Obama is not proposing to raise taxes for most Americans. To the contrary, he would triple the earned-income tax credit for low-wage earners, increasing work incentives at the bottom. He would cut taxes on people in the middle -- indeed, he would do so more aggressively than McCain would. It is only the wealthiest Americans who would face higher tax bills under Obama. According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, Obama's plan would require the richest 1 percent of Americans to sacrifice a modest 1.5 percent of their after-tax income in 2012. By contrast, no-sacrifice McCain would award America's elite a 9.5 percent increase.
How might this impact jobs and the economy? Under Obama's plan, top earners would pay a marginal federal tax rate of maybe 46.5 percent (that includes the Medicare tax and Obama's proposed hike in Social Security taxes), considerably more than the 37.9 percent they would pay under McCain. There's no doubt that Obama's higher tax rates would mean weaker incentives to work, take risks and innovate; and stronger incentives to waste time and effort on avoiding the tax man.
But those bad effects must be weighed against a good one: Higher tax rates mean a lower budget deficit. According to the Tax Policy Center, over the course of a decade Obama's plan would result in a national debt $1.2 trillion smaller than you would get under McCain's plan. Less government borrowing ultimately means lower interest rates and more private investment. This positive effect may well outweigh the blow to growth and jobs from weaker work incentives.
Tax hikes, in other words, are not automatic job destroyers. Joel Slemrod of the University of Michigan, a top expert on this subject, says bluntly, "There is no compelling evidence that a low-tax strategy is better for the economy over the medium or long run." Just look at the Clinton era. In 1993, the top marginal rate (income tax plus Medicare) was raised to 42.5 percent -- the same rate that Obama proposes but minus the candidate's proposed increase in the payroll tax. During the rest of the Clinton period, the economy generated millions of new jobs, and careful academic postmortems find that the 1993 tax hike caused little to no damage to the incentives of top earners.
So McCain's swipe at Obama's tax plan was something other than straight talk. As a share of the economy, Obama's plan would create an overall tax burden similar to the one that existed in Ronald Reagan's time. It would not choke off job creation; rather, it would slow the growth of the deficit and soften inequality. But the really depressing thing is that McCain himself once knew that. He opposed the Bush tax cuts before he supported them, saying that they would deepen inequality. But now he touts a tax reduction that is larger and more radical than even President Bush proposed, and he slams his opponent for holding the view that he himself held until recently.
McCain used to be a real straight talker. On campaign finance, spending earmarks, Iraq and immigration, he has fought bravely for his principles; and that record might have been a trump against an opponent who has taken almost no such risks. But we are now witnessing what might be called McCain's Palinization. McCain once criticized Christian conservatives as agents of intolerance, but he has caved in to their intolerance of a pro-choice running mate. McCain claims to be devoted to his country, yet he would saddle it with a vice president who is unprepared to serve as commander in chief. In the same sad way, McCain has caved in to his party's anti-tax fanatics. The man of principle has become a panderer. The straight talker flip-flops.
By Sebastian Mallaby
Monday, September 8, 2008; A17
When it comes to fighting wars, John McCain stands up and calls for sacrifice. "We never hide from history; we make history," he declared in his convention speech. But when it comes to taxes, McCain is unwilling to demand even a teensy bit of sacrifice. In a McCain administration, Americans would not have to surrender a dime more of their money to a cause larger than themselves.
Why this bipolar attitude toward sacrifice? Start with the answer that McCain himself provides. "My tax cuts will create jobs. His tax increases will eliminate them," he said at the convention, offering one of the speech's few policy contrasts between Obama's platform and his own. In other words, McCain is not calling for tax sacrifice because he believes it would be counterproductive. On taxes, he is saying, you can selfishly avoid sacrifice -- and serve the public good.
This, unfortunately, is a convenient untruth. Tax hikes taken to an extreme can indeed backfire, harming growth and job creation. But it's a stretch to assert that Barack Obama's tax plan would do that. And it's downright scandalous to pretend that the economy can be strengthened in anything other than the short run by unaffordable tax cuts.
Obama is not proposing to raise taxes for most Americans. To the contrary, he would triple the earned-income tax credit for low-wage earners, increasing work incentives at the bottom. He would cut taxes on people in the middle -- indeed, he would do so more aggressively than McCain would. It is only the wealthiest Americans who would face higher tax bills under Obama. According to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, Obama's plan would require the richest 1 percent of Americans to sacrifice a modest 1.5 percent of their after-tax income in 2012. By contrast, no-sacrifice McCain would award America's elite a 9.5 percent increase.
How might this impact jobs and the economy? Under Obama's plan, top earners would pay a marginal federal tax rate of maybe 46.5 percent (that includes the Medicare tax and Obama's proposed hike in Social Security taxes), considerably more than the 37.9 percent they would pay under McCain. There's no doubt that Obama's higher tax rates would mean weaker incentives to work, take risks and innovate; and stronger incentives to waste time and effort on avoiding the tax man.
But those bad effects must be weighed against a good one: Higher tax rates mean a lower budget deficit. According to the Tax Policy Center, over the course of a decade Obama's plan would result in a national debt $1.2 trillion smaller than you would get under McCain's plan. Less government borrowing ultimately means lower interest rates and more private investment. This positive effect may well outweigh the blow to growth and jobs from weaker work incentives.
Tax hikes, in other words, are not automatic job destroyers. Joel Slemrod of the University of Michigan, a top expert on this subject, says bluntly, "There is no compelling evidence that a low-tax strategy is better for the economy over the medium or long run." Just look at the Clinton era. In 1993, the top marginal rate (income tax plus Medicare) was raised to 42.5 percent -- the same rate that Obama proposes but minus the candidate's proposed increase in the payroll tax. During the rest of the Clinton period, the economy generated millions of new jobs, and careful academic postmortems find that the 1993 tax hike caused little to no damage to the incentives of top earners.
So McCain's swipe at Obama's tax plan was something other than straight talk. As a share of the economy, Obama's plan would create an overall tax burden similar to the one that existed in Ronald Reagan's time. It would not choke off job creation; rather, it would slow the growth of the deficit and soften inequality. But the really depressing thing is that McCain himself once knew that. He opposed the Bush tax cuts before he supported them, saying that they would deepen inequality. But now he touts a tax reduction that is larger and more radical than even President Bush proposed, and he slams his opponent for holding the view that he himself held until recently.
McCain used to be a real straight talker. On campaign finance, spending earmarks, Iraq and immigration, he has fought bravely for his principles; and that record might have been a trump against an opponent who has taken almost no such risks. But we are now witnessing what might be called McCain's Palinization. McCain once criticized Christian conservatives as agents of intolerance, but he has caved in to their intolerance of a pro-choice running mate. McCain claims to be devoted to his country, yet he would saddle it with a vice president who is unprepared to serve as commander in chief. In the same sad way, McCain has caved in to his party's anti-tax fanatics. The man of principle has become a panderer. The straight talker flip-flops.
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