Sunday, September 30, 2012
The State of the Presidential Race (2)
AP has a story today the point of which is that if the election were today, President Obama would be reelected. This seems to be the accepted feeling in the country. The first debate is coming up Wednesday. I hope the President is aggressive and doesn't go into a prevent defense. The race will is still too close to take any chances.
William H. Chafe - Bill and Hillary
This dual biography of the Clintons is a delightful romp thru the life and times of Bill and Hillary Clinton. If there is a theme to this book, it is that of the intereaction of the personal and the public. In the case of the Clintons, their personal relationship affected the life of the U.S. since we are led to believe that Bill would never been President without Hillary's help, and she might not risen to her heights without him. At the same time, it is clear that he needed her more than she needed him. It is touching that they both felt like they could change the world but that they needed each other to do so.
Bill is of special interest in that like me his roots are in the small-town Deep South, and unlike me (!) he rose from his troubled and meager background to become not only President but one of the best known people in the world. Hillary is of special interest in that she overcome her Republican upbringing to a hard-nosed liberalism. I like both of their examples.
The story is not yet done with the Clintons. Hillary could yet be the Democratic nominee for President in 2016. Stay tuned.
Bill is of special interest in that like me his roots are in the small-town Deep South, and unlike me (!) he rose from his troubled and meager background to become not only President but one of the best known people in the world. Hillary is of special interest in that she overcome her Republican upbringing to a hard-nosed liberalism. I like both of their examples.
The story is not yet done with the Clintons. Hillary could yet be the Democratic nominee for President in 2016. Stay tuned.
Friday, September 28, 2012
The State of the Presidential Race
The polls show President Obama leading Romney oveall and in the swing states. Most people have made up their minds. I suspect the percentage of undecideds is low. There are still the debates to come and things can still happen but at the moment and the moment only it looks good for the President.
Sunday, September 23, 2012
Who Would George Vote For?
Sep 23, 2012 4:45 AM EDT On the 225th anniversary of the U.S. Constitution, Akhil Reed Amar, author of the new book America’s Unwritten Constitution: The Precedents and Principles We Live By, says that President Obama best represents the great constitutional ideals of Washington, Lincoln, and FDR—and what these historical ideals can teach us about our own time.
For serious constitutionalists, this has been the week.
Exactly 225 years ago this past week, the Philadelphia framers published their proposed Constitution proposing more democracy than the world had ever seen. Exactly 75 years to the week later—that is, precisely 150 years ago—President Lincoln went public with his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. Soon thereafter, slavery was constitutionally abolished immediately and everywhere in America. And 75 years after Lincoln’s initial Proclamation (and thus 75 years ago) President Franklin Roosevelt delivered a famous Constitution Day Address in mid-September 1937 explaining how a document born in the age of the horse-and-buggy still remains vital and relevant in the modern era.
What do these major anniversaries tell us about the choices we must make today? In particular, how does the 2012 presidential race look if seen through the prism of our triple anniversary?
Start with the founders, who offered up an audacious plan that began with the words “We the People”—not “We, the property” or “We, the corporations, my friend.” While many of the leaders at Philadelphia were the cream of society—the 1 percent of 1787—some of the best of them were wholly self-made, such as Ben Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and James Wilson. Most important of all, the Philadelphia framers put their proposed Constitution to an extraordinarily wide-open continental vote, in which ordinary property qualifications were abolished or reduced in most states. Compared to the rest of the world circa 1787, and compared to prior practice in America, the Constitution was an extraordinarily populist project. We the People, indeed.
Now flash-forward to the present moment. Republicans have plotted in several key states to restrict voting rights, through byzantine laws and regulations that go far beyond any legitimate interest in stemming voter fraud. Shame on these partisans. And shame on Mitt Romney for not speaking out forcefully against his party’s vote-suppressing agenda.
True, the Constitution’s leading man in 1787, George Washington, was a conservative of sorts. But he was a revolutionary conservative, willing to risk his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor to vindicate the grand idea of republican self-government. At his death, he provided for the freeing of his slaves. He consistently put country first. As a successful planter/businessman in the years preceding the Revolutionary War, he had made personal economic sacrifices to promote the general welfare, and during the war itself he suffered enormous privations to serve the Union.
Four years ago, the Republican presidential nominee, John McCain, could plausibly present himself to his fellow citizens as a man who, like Washington, had walked the walk of his country-first vision of patriotic sacrifice. But when it comes to personal sacrifice for the sake of the republic, Romney is no McCain, and no Washington.
And in fact, in key respects, McCain was no Washington either on the other key attribute that made Washington Washington—steadiness. Like the mercurial McCain, Romney has run an erratic campaign, filled with unforced errors by the candidate himself. Washington could inspire with words when the need arose; but most of the time, Washington simply exuded quiet strength. "No Drama" Obama, in this respect, is more Washingtonian—projecting a calm steadiness of purpose and character. Romney, by contrast, has both failed to speak when he needed to (about his taxes, for example) and failed to hold his tongue when he should have—as in the early stages of the Benghazi tragedy.
Consider next the great constitutional changes foreshadowed by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: a 13th Amendment abolishing slavery; a 14th Amendment guaranteeing equal citizenship for blacks and women; and a 15th Amendment permitting blacks to vote and hold office equally alongside whites. Barack and Michelle Obama are living embodiments of the grand promise of these amendments. Mitt and Ann Romney—not so much.
If there is a strong case that Mitt Romney is the man who best vindicates the greatest constitutional ideas of Washington’s generation, of Lincoln’s, and of the 20th-century progressives … I have yet to hear it.
It is worth recalling that these amendments were adopted only because Lincoln won reelection 1864, despite the fact that it was not clear that Americans in 1864 were better off than in 1860. But whose fault was that? In the end, voters decided that the anti-Lincoln party bore most of the blame. This party had pursued reckless anti-equality policies in the decade before Lincoln’s election; and major chunks of this party had in fact precipitated a crisis (a.k.a. secession) by refusing to acknowledge the very legitimacy of Lincoln’s election in 1860. (Sound familiar?) Despite massive suffering in America in 1864, voters decided that Lincoln was on the right path and that his opponent—George McClellan, an arrogant and wealthy martinet who showed little understanding of the lives of the less privileged—would simply return America to the very mess that Lincoln had been elected to clean up.
There are also uncanny parallels between the present moment and 1937. Then, as now, a reformist president faced a Supreme Court dominated by appointees of the opposite political party, and many in the opposite party implausibly claimed the reformer’s ideas were flat-out unconstitutional. And if Obama does manage to win reelection with a majority of the popular vote behind him, he will be the only Democratic president since the time of Lincoln to win the popular vote twice—other than FDR.
In his 1937 Constitution Day chat, Roosevelt defended Obamacare—er, the New Deal—against constitutional critics by reminding his audience that the Constitution had been designed to confer broad power on the federal government to address genuinely federal problems. But FDR missed a golden opportunity to point out that the Constitution that he had sworn to uphold was importantly different from the one that Washington and Lincoln had promised to protect and defend. FDR’s Constitution—and ours, today—contains a 16th Amendment that was undeniably drafted to bless a progressive income tax; and a 19th Amendment giving women the vote. Together, these two amendments—especially the 19th—are central pillars supporting the Obama candidacy. Women voted overwhelmingly for Franklin and Eleanor in 1937 and are apparently poised to do so again for Barack and Michelle.
Of course, history never repeats itself exactly. But serious constitutionalists believe that the past—even the distant past—can powerfully guide the present. If there is a strong case that Mitt Romney is the man who best vindicates the greatest constitutional ideas of Washington’s generation, of Lincoln’s, and of the 20th-century progressives who amended the Constitution yet again, I have yet to hear it.
For serious constitutionalists, this has been the week.
Exactly 225 years ago this past week, the Philadelphia framers published their proposed Constitution proposing more democracy than the world had ever seen. Exactly 75 years to the week later—that is, precisely 150 years ago—President Lincoln went public with his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. Soon thereafter, slavery was constitutionally abolished immediately and everywhere in America. And 75 years after Lincoln’s initial Proclamation (and thus 75 years ago) President Franklin Roosevelt delivered a famous Constitution Day Address in mid-September 1937 explaining how a document born in the age of the horse-and-buggy still remains vital and relevant in the modern era.
What do these major anniversaries tell us about the choices we must make today? In particular, how does the 2012 presidential race look if seen through the prism of our triple anniversary?
Start with the founders, who offered up an audacious plan that began with the words “We the People”—not “We, the property” or “We, the corporations, my friend.” While many of the leaders at Philadelphia were the cream of society—the 1 percent of 1787—some of the best of them were wholly self-made, such as Ben Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and James Wilson. Most important of all, the Philadelphia framers put their proposed Constitution to an extraordinarily wide-open continental vote, in which ordinary property qualifications were abolished or reduced in most states. Compared to the rest of the world circa 1787, and compared to prior practice in America, the Constitution was an extraordinarily populist project. We the People, indeed.
Now flash-forward to the present moment. Republicans have plotted in several key states to restrict voting rights, through byzantine laws and regulations that go far beyond any legitimate interest in stemming voter fraud. Shame on these partisans. And shame on Mitt Romney for not speaking out forcefully against his party’s vote-suppressing agenda.
True, the Constitution’s leading man in 1787, George Washington, was a conservative of sorts. But he was a revolutionary conservative, willing to risk his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor to vindicate the grand idea of republican self-government. At his death, he provided for the freeing of his slaves. He consistently put country first. As a successful planter/businessman in the years preceding the Revolutionary War, he had made personal economic sacrifices to promote the general welfare, and during the war itself he suffered enormous privations to serve the Union.
Four years ago, the Republican presidential nominee, John McCain, could plausibly present himself to his fellow citizens as a man who, like Washington, had walked the walk of his country-first vision of patriotic sacrifice. But when it comes to personal sacrifice for the sake of the republic, Romney is no McCain, and no Washington.
And in fact, in key respects, McCain was no Washington either on the other key attribute that made Washington Washington—steadiness. Like the mercurial McCain, Romney has run an erratic campaign, filled with unforced errors by the candidate himself. Washington could inspire with words when the need arose; but most of the time, Washington simply exuded quiet strength. "No Drama" Obama, in this respect, is more Washingtonian—projecting a calm steadiness of purpose and character. Romney, by contrast, has both failed to speak when he needed to (about his taxes, for example) and failed to hold his tongue when he should have—as in the early stages of the Benghazi tragedy.
Consider next the great constitutional changes foreshadowed by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: a 13th Amendment abolishing slavery; a 14th Amendment guaranteeing equal citizenship for blacks and women; and a 15th Amendment permitting blacks to vote and hold office equally alongside whites. Barack and Michelle Obama are living embodiments of the grand promise of these amendments. Mitt and Ann Romney—not so much.
If there is a strong case that Mitt Romney is the man who best vindicates the greatest constitutional ideas of Washington’s generation, of Lincoln’s, and of the 20th-century progressives … I have yet to hear it.
It is worth recalling that these amendments were adopted only because Lincoln won reelection 1864, despite the fact that it was not clear that Americans in 1864 were better off than in 1860. But whose fault was that? In the end, voters decided that the anti-Lincoln party bore most of the blame. This party had pursued reckless anti-equality policies in the decade before Lincoln’s election; and major chunks of this party had in fact precipitated a crisis (a.k.a. secession) by refusing to acknowledge the very legitimacy of Lincoln’s election in 1860. (Sound familiar?) Despite massive suffering in America in 1864, voters decided that Lincoln was on the right path and that his opponent—George McClellan, an arrogant and wealthy martinet who showed little understanding of the lives of the less privileged—would simply return America to the very mess that Lincoln had been elected to clean up.
There are also uncanny parallels between the present moment and 1937. Then, as now, a reformist president faced a Supreme Court dominated by appointees of the opposite political party, and many in the opposite party implausibly claimed the reformer’s ideas were flat-out unconstitutional. And if Obama does manage to win reelection with a majority of the popular vote behind him, he will be the only Democratic president since the time of Lincoln to win the popular vote twice—other than FDR.
In his 1937 Constitution Day chat, Roosevelt defended Obamacare—er, the New Deal—against constitutional critics by reminding his audience that the Constitution had been designed to confer broad power on the federal government to address genuinely federal problems. But FDR missed a golden opportunity to point out that the Constitution that he had sworn to uphold was importantly different from the one that Washington and Lincoln had promised to protect and defend. FDR’s Constitution—and ours, today—contains a 16th Amendment that was undeniably drafted to bless a progressive income tax; and a 19th Amendment giving women the vote. Together, these two amendments—especially the 19th—are central pillars supporting the Obama candidacy. Women voted overwhelmingly for Franklin and Eleanor in 1937 and are apparently poised to do so again for Barack and Michelle.
Of course, history never repeats itself exactly. But serious constitutionalists believe that the past—even the distant past—can powerfully guide the present. If there is a strong case that Mitt Romney is the man who best vindicates the greatest constitutional ideas of Washington’s generation, of Lincoln’s, and of the 20th-century progressives who amended the Constitution yet again, I have yet to hear it.
Friday, September 21, 2012
The Republican Disdain for Workers
Disdain for WorkersBy PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: September 20, 2012 587 Comments
By now everyone knows how Mitt Romney, speaking to donors in Boca Raton, washed his hands of almost half the country — the 47 percent who don’t pay income taxes — declaring, “My job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.” By now, also, many people are aware that the great bulk of the 47 percent are hardly moochers; most are working families who pay payroll taxes, and elderly or disabled Americans make up a majority of the rest.
But here’s the question: Should we imagine that Mr. Romney and his party would think better of the 47 percent on learning that the great majority of them actually are or were hard workers, who very much have taken personal responsibility for their lives? And the answer is no.
For the fact is that the modern Republican Party just doesn’t have much respect for people who work for other people, no matter how faithfully and well they do their jobs. All the party’s affection is reserved for “job creators,” a k a employers and investors. Leading figures in the party find it hard even to pretend to have any regard for ordinary working families — who, it goes without saying, make up the vast majority of Americans.
Am I exaggerating? Consider the Twitter message sent out by Eric Cantor, the Republican House majority leader, on Labor Day — a holiday that specifically celebrates America’s workers. Here’s what it said, in its entirety: “Today, we celebrate those who have taken a risk, worked hard, built a business and earned their own success.” Yes, on a day set aside to honor workers, all Mr. Cantor could bring himself to do was praise their bosses.
Lest you think that this was just a personal slip, consider Mr. Romney’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. What did he have to say about American workers? Actually, nothing: the words “worker” or “workers” never passed his lips. This was in strong contrast to President Obama’s convention speech a week later, which put a lot of emphasis on workers — especially, of course, but not only, workers who benefited from the auto bailout.
And when Mr. Romney waxed rhapsodic about the opportunities America offered to immigrants, he declared that they came in pursuit of “freedom to build a business.” What about those who came here not to found businesses, but simply to make an honest living? Not worth mentioning.
Needless to say, the G.O.P.’s disdain for workers goes deeper than rhetoric. It’s deeply embedded in the party’s policy priorities. Mr. Romney’s remarks spoke to a widespread belief on the right that taxes on working Americans are, if anything, too low. Indeed, The Wall Street Journal famously described low-income workers whose wages fall below the income-tax threshold as “lucky duckies.”
What really needs cutting, the right believes, are taxes on corporate profits, capital gains, dividends, and very high salaries — that is, taxes that fall on investors and executives, not ordinary workers. This despite the fact that people who derive their income from investments, not wages — people like, say, Willard Mitt Romney — already pay remarkably little in taxes.
Where does this disdain for workers come from? Some of it, obviously, reflects the influence of money in politics: big-money donors, like the ones Mr. Romney was speaking to when he went off on half the nation, don’t live paycheck to paycheck. But it also reflects the extent to which the G.O.P. has been taken over by an Ayn Rand-type vision of society, in which a handful of heroic businessmen are responsible for all economic good, while the rest of us are just along for the ride.
In the eyes of those who share this vision, the wealthy deserve special treatment, and not just in the form of low taxes. They must also receive respect, indeed deference, at all times. That’s why even the slightest hint from the president that the rich might not be all that — that, say, some bankers may have behaved badly, or that even “job creators” depend on government-built infrastructure — elicits frantic cries that Mr. Obama is a socialist.
Now, such sentiments aren’t new; “Atlas Shrugged” was, after all, published in 1957. In the past, however, even Republican politicians who privately shared the elite’s contempt for the masses knew enough to keep it to themselves and managed to fake some appreciation for ordinary workers. At this point, however, the party’s contempt for the working class is apparently too complete, too pervasive to hide.
The point is that what people are now calling the Boca Moment wasn’t some trivial gaffe. It was a window into the true attitudes of what has become a party of the wealthy, by the wealthy, and for the wealthy, a party that considers the rest of us unworthy of even a pretense of respect.
Thursday, September 20, 2012
The 47% Rage
.Jonathan Chait on NOW With Alex Wagner: Romney’s Sleight of Hand in Defining the ‘47 Percent’
The Intellectual Roots of Romney’s 47 Percent RageBy Jonathan Chait
So Mitt, read my book, talk it up at some closed-door fund-raisers, and MAKE SURE THERE ARE NO HIDDEN CAMERAS. You got that last part, right?
Mitt Romney’s leaked diatribe at a fund-raiser about non-income-tax-paying moochers has spawned a lot of interesting analysis about the spread of this fallacious and paranoid view on the right. The missing piece of the puzzle is, how did an apparently sober person like Romney himself come to believe it? Annie Lowrey and Michael Cooper report in the New York Times that Romney was channeling a popular book:
Mr. Romney’s thinking on the matter has been shaped in part by Arthur C. Brooks, the president of the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Brooks said that he had discussed his new book, “The Road to Freedom: How to Win the Fight for Free Enterprise,” with Mr. Romney, who was particularly interested in whether redistribution would lead to a disengaged electorate — with the government paying for programs benefiting more people with dollars coming from fewer of them.
This is a fairly disturbing revelation. I reviewed Brooks previous book, which is a pastiche of illogic, paranoia, and a series of flat-out falsehoods. It's possible his more recent book is of higher quality, though I doubt it. In any case, the general theme of it is that American politics is a battle between virtuous makers against parasitic takers, with the latter executing an insidious and possibly irreversible plot to undermine capitalism. It’s pure crankery – but a crankery that has overtaken
The Intellectual Roots of Romney’s 47 Percent RageBy Jonathan Chait
So Mitt, read my book, talk it up at some closed-door fund-raisers, and MAKE SURE THERE ARE NO HIDDEN CAMERAS. You got that last part, right?
Mitt Romney’s leaked diatribe at a fund-raiser about non-income-tax-paying moochers has spawned a lot of interesting analysis about the spread of this fallacious and paranoid view on the right. The missing piece of the puzzle is, how did an apparently sober person like Romney himself come to believe it? Annie Lowrey and Michael Cooper report in the New York Times that Romney was channeling a popular book:
Mr. Romney’s thinking on the matter has been shaped in part by Arthur C. Brooks, the president of the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Brooks said that he had discussed his new book, “The Road to Freedom: How to Win the Fight for Free Enterprise,” with Mr. Romney, who was particularly interested in whether redistribution would lead to a disengaged electorate — with the government paying for programs benefiting more people with dollars coming from fewer of them.
This is a fairly disturbing revelation. I reviewed Brooks previous book, which is a pastiche of illogic, paranoia, and a series of flat-out falsehoods. It's possible his more recent book is of higher quality, though I doubt it. In any case, the general theme of it is that American politics is a battle between virtuous makers against parasitic takers, with the latter executing an insidious and possibly irreversible plot to undermine capitalism. It’s pure crankery – but a crankery that has overtaken
Givers and Takers
Sep 18, 2012Mark Schmitt
The conservative narrative of the "entitlement society" ignores the fact that most Americans are both givers and takers.
As David Brooks points out, Mitt Romney's remarks describing 47 percent of the population as, in effect, moochers who would vote for Obama because they got government benefits were not “off the cuff,” as he described them today. There is a carefully developed theory behind his words, which has seen expression in previous Romney speeches, such as one last December in which he described Obama's vision as an “entitlement society” in which “everyone receives the same rewards,” but in which “we'll all be poor.”
The lab where this theory that we're headed toward a radical egalitarian state is being developed is the American Enterprise Institute, the oldest of the conservative think tanks and one that, much like Romney, has forsaken the traditional business-minded conservatism of, say, the first President Bush, for hard conservatism in which everything is a grand showdown of incompatible worldviews. The two recent books by the current AEI president, Arthur Brooks (The Battle and The Road to Freedom) embody this apocalyptic approach, as does a recent essay-with-graphs by longtime AEI scholar and accomplished demographer Nicholas Eberstadt, called “A Nation of Takers.”
AEI invited me to participate on a panel with Eberstadt a few months ago, when the essay was just a series of unpublished PowerPoint slides. I welcomed the invitation, but had to cancel due to a conflict. However, I wrote up notes at the time, and what follows is adapted from those notes.
“A Nation of Takers” shows in some detail the expansion of government benefits since the 1960s and the share of the population they reach. The data is not wrong, but it's selective, and the story that Eberstadt has wrapped around them – that receipt of benefits makes people “dependents,” that people are becoming “chiselers,” choosing to maximize benefits, that the expansion of entitlements was a political effort by the left that slowly overcame “resistance” from real Americans -- is highly tendentious. The reality is that people who receive benefits are no more or less “dependent” than corporations that get tax breaks or legal protections, that the expanding costs of major entitlements are about rising health care costs and, to a lesser extent, the demographics of an aging nation rather than more people becoming “takers,” and that the expansion of some benefits to the lower rungs of the middle class was a bipartisan project in which conservatives should take pride.
There is a story implied in the very word, “takers,” which is reminiscent of former Senator Phil Gramm's oft-repeated metaphor of a wagon: there are “people riding in the wagon,” he would say, and “people pulling the wagon,” and the people riding need to get out and pull. But while you can't pull a wagon and ride in it at the same time, you can certainly be a taker and a giver at the same time, or at different times in life. For example, Eberstadt's charts show that the government benefit that grew fastest in recent years, not surprisingly in a recession, is Unemployment Insurance. Everyone who receives benefits from Unemployment Insurance, without exception, has worked – usually full-time and steadily for at least a year – and paid into the system through their employers. And they will (they desperately hope) work again and pay even more. Some people might end up receiving more, over their long working lives, while others might pay in while having the good fortune never to be unemployed. But that's the nature of insurance. Most of us, other than the permanently disabled, are givers and takers to government, because that's what it is to be part of a community or a nation.
A look at the individual programs behind all of these charts indicates that the big story is the extension of the social safety net from the very, very poor to the lower rungs of the working poor, particularly through expansion of Medicaid and tax credits for working families. With bipartisan support, these innovations have fundamentally changed the social safety net that both conservatives like Charles Murray and Lawrence Mead and liberals like David Ellwood described in different ways two decades ago: a system in which it really did make more sense for poor parents not to work than to give up the linked package of benefits that went with non-work, including welfare, Medicaid, and food stamps. Meager as those benefits were, they were often economically preferable to a minimum-wage job without health care or other assistance, and with the added costs of child care.
Changing that system was not just a matter of imposing work requirements, but of smoothing the path into the workforce and toward self-sufficiency. Medicaid eligibility was delinked from welfare and linked instead to income, starting at 100 percent of the poverty level and reaching 185 percent in the Affordable Care Act. Together with the State Childrens' Health Insurance Program, expansions of the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Child Tax Credit, the Refundable Additional Child Tax Credit, the Child and Dependent Care Credit, the Make Work Pay Credit, expansion of child care, the after-school and summer food programs, and others, we have created a safety net that extends well into the low-income working population. These individuals, too, are both takers and givers – they are working hard, contributing to the economy, and while some of them may not pay federal income taxes at the moment, they will as they move up.
This dramatic reorientation of the safety net didn't just happen; most of these initiatives had significant bipartisan and cross-ideological support. Not only do they provide a ladder out of poverty and reward work, they also make possible the relatively low-wage, low-security labor market that gives employers enormous flexibility. Conservatives used to argue, for example, that raising the EITC was a better alternative to raising the minimum wage, and they mostly won that fight. The result is that low-wage employment is essentially subsidized, and businesses are able to hire at very low cost and low commitment, with none of the barriers to either hiring or firing that are common in Europe. Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney and others in the current wave of conservatism seem to have entirely forgotten the merits of these innovations, and in their promise to protect programs only for the very, very poor, they threaten to restore the hopeless poverty traps of the 1970s and 1980s.
It's also worth noting that most members of the “Nation of Takers” probably don't think of ourselves as “takers.” In her important recent book, The Submerged State, Suzanne Mettler of Cornell looked at data asking people whether they had ever benefited from a government social program. While most participants in the classic, older transfer programs were aware that they had benefited from programs, most of the newer programs, especially those delivered through the tax code, were invisible to a majority of their beneficiaries. (Even 45 percent of Social Security recipients said they had never used a government program, which may reflect the belief that they are receiving benefits they've paid for.)
While many on the left latched onto this data as evidence that Americans, especially conservatives, are hypocrites who revel in public benefits while maintaining an anti-government stance, there's really much more to it than that. Delivering benefits through “submerged state” programs has broken any kind of connection between citizens and the benefits we receive. We can't have a clear debate about whether we're a “Nation of Takers” or whether these benefits are essential to maintaining the promise of a middle class country if most of us don't even know the role that government plays in our lives.
Conservatives and liberals built the submerged state together, often sharing a preference for delivering benefits through the tax code. But a concerted effort to reduce the long-term budget deficit, with tax reform at the center of it, creates an opportunity to surface submerged programs and replace them with far more efficient, visible, direct programs. When the public is fully aware of the benefits it's receiving, it's possible that voters will recoil in shock at the degree of their dependency, or perhaps they will regain a healthy respect for the role of government in providing some of the security that helps them take full advantage of their capacities and opportunities.
It's disappointing that Romney shows no interest in either drawing out the submerged state or in the bipartisan project (of which his health reform in Massachusetts was a part) of smoothing the path to economic success for families. Instead, he just sees half the country as people who can't be convinced “that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.” That's a very strange view of this country and a tragic development in modern conservatism.
A Conservative Rift
Romney Wades Into a Conservative RiftBy ANNIE LOWREY and MICHAEL COOPER
Published: September 18, 2012
WASHINGTON — Mitt Romney decided to fully join the battle on social programs, warning in an interview Tuesday with Fox News that the nation’s spending was putting it “on a pathway that looks more European than American.”
.In standing by the substance, if not the tone, of his surreptitiously recorded remarks at a private fund-raiser in May and published on Monday, Mr. Romney waded into an ideological clash pitting two strands of conservative thinking against each other: the longstanding goal of reducing the tax burden on the poor with tax credits versus the growing anxiety that the nation’s “takers” are now overtaking its “makers.”
The statistic Mr. Romney referred to at the fund-raiser came from the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, which published an analysis showing that 46.4 percent of American households did not pay federal income tax in 2011. That statistic shocked many policy elites, small-government populists and members of Congress and has led to conservative hand-wringing.
The households in question consist primarily of the retired, the poor and low-income families with children, according to nonpartisan analysts. Moreover, they do pay taxes, if not income taxes: Just 8 percent of households do not pay payroll or federal income taxes, discounting the elderly.
Mr. Romney stood by his statement in an interview with Neil Cavuto of Fox News on Tuesday. “I think a society based upon a government-centered nation where government plays a larger and larger role, redistributes money, that’s the wrong course for America,” he said, adding that he hoped to improve the economy enough that people would be able to get well-paying jobs and rejoin the tax rolls.
Mr. Romney’s thinking on the matter has been shaped in part by Arthur C. Brooks, the president of the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Brooks said that he had discussed his new book, “The Road to Freedom: How to Win the Fight for Free Enterprise,” with Mr. Romney, who was particularly interested in whether redistribution would lead to a disengaged electorate — with the government paying for programs benefiting more people with dollars coming from fewer of them.
“It’s not necessarily a good thing for the country that more people are pulling more benefits out of the system than they’re paying in,” Mr. Brooks said in an interview. “That’s not a healthy thing for citizenship, and it’s not good for these people themselves either, if they feel attenuated from their government.”
The notion that too few Americans are paying income taxes has gained currency on the right in recent years. An influential 2002 Wall Street Journal editorial called the millions of American households that do not pay income tax “lucky duckies.” Last year, Erick Erickson, the conservative firebrand, started a Web site called “We Are the 53 Percent,” mocking the 99-percent theme of Occupy Wall Street and chiding Americans for failing to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
But other Republicans have argued that the focus on the people who do not pay taxes is a mistake.
Reihan Salam, a conservative author, wrote on National Review Online on Tuesday that “the version of conservative tax policy I favor might actually further reduce the share of tax units that pay federal income taxes, yet it would strengthen the work ethic, increase labor force participation, and discourage the kind of dependency that concerns Mitt Romney.”
For a long time, cutting taxes for the poor was a major emphasis of the Republican Party. One reason that many poor people no longer pay federal income taxes is that they qualify for credits such as the earned-income tax credit, which has its roots in conservative thinking and has long been supported by members of both parties as a way to help the poor without increasing welfare payments or raising the minimum wage. The credit was added to the tax code when Gerald Ford was president, and was expanded by Republicans and Democrats, including President Ronald Reagan, who called it “one of the best anti-poverty programs this country has ever seen” in 1986.
President George W. Bush, for his part, doubled the child tax credit, and his tax cuts erased the federal income tax liability for millions of households.
And even as he attacked the entitlements of nontaxpaying households, Mr. Romney has pledged not to raise the share of taxes paid by families making less than $200,000 a year — a promise some analysts say is difficult to square with his proposal to cut tax rates and eliminate tax deductions. And he has proposed eliminating the taxes they pay on interest, dividends and capital gains.
Donald B. Marron Jr., the director of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, whose analysis Mr. Romney cited on the tape, said the tax code, by design, often aids the working poor. “This is due to longstanding, structural decisions in our tax code,” he said.
In any case, the debate within the Republican Party promises to continue. On Tuesday, many conservatives criticized Mr. Romney’s comments, and some Republican candidates for the Senate distanced themselves from them. Many others said that they supported his underlying ideas.
“There’s something mistaken about his analysis,” David Azerrad of the Heritage Foundation, a right-of-center Washington research group. “But there is something in the substance that points to something correct. There is a shift in our relationship with the government that we’ve witnessed in the past century, with more people ensnared in the tentacles of the welfare state.”
But both political parties have contributed to the growth of entitlement spending, and the benefits have not accrued just to Democratic voters as Mr. Romney suggested on the video.
Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute argues that entitlements are corrupting America in his forthcoming book “A Nation of Takers: America’s Entitlement Epidemic.” But he says that the growth of entitlement spending over the past half century has been greater under Republican administrations than Democratic ones.
“Between 1960 and 2010, the growth of entitlement spending was exponential,” he wrote in a recent excerpt published by The Wall Street Journal, “but in any given year, it was on the whole roughly 8 percent higher if the president happened to be a Republican rather than a Democrat.”
The states with the highest percentage of federal filers who do not owe income taxes tend to vote Republican in presidential elections. An analysis by the Tax Foundation found that in 2008 the state with the highest percentage of federal filers with no tax liability was Mississippi, and that most of the states with the highest percentage of filers with no liability were in the South.
And the politics of who receives help from the government are complex as well. Research by Dean Lacy, a professor of government at Dartmouth College, has found that states that receive more in federal spending than they pay in taxes have become increasingly Republican in presidential elections.
“Since 1984,” he said in an interview Tuesday, “the states that get the most money in federal spending per tax dollar paid have become increasingly Republican.”
Published: September 18, 2012
WASHINGTON — Mitt Romney decided to fully join the battle on social programs, warning in an interview Tuesday with Fox News that the nation’s spending was putting it “on a pathway that looks more European than American.”
.In standing by the substance, if not the tone, of his surreptitiously recorded remarks at a private fund-raiser in May and published on Monday, Mr. Romney waded into an ideological clash pitting two strands of conservative thinking against each other: the longstanding goal of reducing the tax burden on the poor with tax credits versus the growing anxiety that the nation’s “takers” are now overtaking its “makers.”
The statistic Mr. Romney referred to at the fund-raiser came from the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, which published an analysis showing that 46.4 percent of American households did not pay federal income tax in 2011. That statistic shocked many policy elites, small-government populists and members of Congress and has led to conservative hand-wringing.
The households in question consist primarily of the retired, the poor and low-income families with children, according to nonpartisan analysts. Moreover, they do pay taxes, if not income taxes: Just 8 percent of households do not pay payroll or federal income taxes, discounting the elderly.
Mr. Romney stood by his statement in an interview with Neil Cavuto of Fox News on Tuesday. “I think a society based upon a government-centered nation where government plays a larger and larger role, redistributes money, that’s the wrong course for America,” he said, adding that he hoped to improve the economy enough that people would be able to get well-paying jobs and rejoin the tax rolls.
Mr. Romney’s thinking on the matter has been shaped in part by Arthur C. Brooks, the president of the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Brooks said that he had discussed his new book, “The Road to Freedom: How to Win the Fight for Free Enterprise,” with Mr. Romney, who was particularly interested in whether redistribution would lead to a disengaged electorate — with the government paying for programs benefiting more people with dollars coming from fewer of them.
“It’s not necessarily a good thing for the country that more people are pulling more benefits out of the system than they’re paying in,” Mr. Brooks said in an interview. “That’s not a healthy thing for citizenship, and it’s not good for these people themselves either, if they feel attenuated from their government.”
The notion that too few Americans are paying income taxes has gained currency on the right in recent years. An influential 2002 Wall Street Journal editorial called the millions of American households that do not pay income tax “lucky duckies.” Last year, Erick Erickson, the conservative firebrand, started a Web site called “We Are the 53 Percent,” mocking the 99-percent theme of Occupy Wall Street and chiding Americans for failing to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
But other Republicans have argued that the focus on the people who do not pay taxes is a mistake.
Reihan Salam, a conservative author, wrote on National Review Online on Tuesday that “the version of conservative tax policy I favor might actually further reduce the share of tax units that pay federal income taxes, yet it would strengthen the work ethic, increase labor force participation, and discourage the kind of dependency that concerns Mitt Romney.”
For a long time, cutting taxes for the poor was a major emphasis of the Republican Party. One reason that many poor people no longer pay federal income taxes is that they qualify for credits such as the earned-income tax credit, which has its roots in conservative thinking and has long been supported by members of both parties as a way to help the poor without increasing welfare payments or raising the minimum wage. The credit was added to the tax code when Gerald Ford was president, and was expanded by Republicans and Democrats, including President Ronald Reagan, who called it “one of the best anti-poverty programs this country has ever seen” in 1986.
President George W. Bush, for his part, doubled the child tax credit, and his tax cuts erased the federal income tax liability for millions of households.
And even as he attacked the entitlements of nontaxpaying households, Mr. Romney has pledged not to raise the share of taxes paid by families making less than $200,000 a year — a promise some analysts say is difficult to square with his proposal to cut tax rates and eliminate tax deductions. And he has proposed eliminating the taxes they pay on interest, dividends and capital gains.
Donald B. Marron Jr., the director of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, whose analysis Mr. Romney cited on the tape, said the tax code, by design, often aids the working poor. “This is due to longstanding, structural decisions in our tax code,” he said.
In any case, the debate within the Republican Party promises to continue. On Tuesday, many conservatives criticized Mr. Romney’s comments, and some Republican candidates for the Senate distanced themselves from them. Many others said that they supported his underlying ideas.
“There’s something mistaken about his analysis,” David Azerrad of the Heritage Foundation, a right-of-center Washington research group. “But there is something in the substance that points to something correct. There is a shift in our relationship with the government that we’ve witnessed in the past century, with more people ensnared in the tentacles of the welfare state.”
But both political parties have contributed to the growth of entitlement spending, and the benefits have not accrued just to Democratic voters as Mr. Romney suggested on the video.
Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute argues that entitlements are corrupting America in his forthcoming book “A Nation of Takers: America’s Entitlement Epidemic.” But he says that the growth of entitlement spending over the past half century has been greater under Republican administrations than Democratic ones.
“Between 1960 and 2010, the growth of entitlement spending was exponential,” he wrote in a recent excerpt published by The Wall Street Journal, “but in any given year, it was on the whole roughly 8 percent higher if the president happened to be a Republican rather than a Democrat.”
The states with the highest percentage of federal filers who do not owe income taxes tend to vote Republican in presidential elections. An analysis by the Tax Foundation found that in 2008 the state with the highest percentage of federal filers with no tax liability was Mississippi, and that most of the states with the highest percentage of filers with no liability were in the South.
And the politics of who receives help from the government are complex as well. Research by Dean Lacy, a professor of government at Dartmouth College, has found that states that receive more in federal spending than they pay in taxes have become increasingly Republican in presidential elections.
“Since 1984,” he said in an interview Tuesday, “the states that get the most money in federal spending per tax dollar paid have become increasingly Republican.”
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
The King's Speech by Mark Logue and Peter Conradi
This was a nice read. It is about King George VI, who was monarch of England from 1936 to 1952. He is the father of the current monarch, Queen Elizabeth II. His story is compelling because he suffered from the speech impediment of stammering. As King, it is obvious that such a defect would be problematic, especially during a time when British royalty was more revered than it is today. However, he received years of speech therapy from Lionel Logue, an Australian. Their relationship blossomed into a true friendship, although Logue was a commoner and a colonial.
King George VI was never fully cured of his stammer, but Logue helped him with his speeches so successfully that the king could speak publicly with hardly a trace of difficulty. The king was roundly praised for his oratory and his triumph over his stammer. Logue helped him by infusing the king with confidence, teaching him to breath properly, showing him how to pause and pace himself, and helping him practice his speeches and change words or phrases that could be difficult.
King George VI never wanted to be king. When his father King George V died, his elder brother became King Edward VIII. His brother later abdicated the throne to marry his mistress, Wallis Simpson. That thrusted Bertie, as his family called him, from Duke of York to King.
King George VI was monarch during World War II. The part of the book about how that affected the country, the royal family, and the Logue family was as interesting as anything.
My criticisms of this book are that King George VI is able to successfuly give speeches from early on in his training with Logue and that success never wavers. So, it became boring to read about speech after speech that the King gave without a problem, There is a lack of drama, and consequently interest, in that. Also, the book does not discuss with any detail how Logue helps the King or the importance of someone with Logue's social status becoming so close to the monarch. Class hierarchy was important in British society then, perhaps more than today.
Mark Logue is the grandson of Lionel Logue.
King George VI was never fully cured of his stammer, but Logue helped him with his speeches so successfully that the king could speak publicly with hardly a trace of difficulty. The king was roundly praised for his oratory and his triumph over his stammer. Logue helped him by infusing the king with confidence, teaching him to breath properly, showing him how to pause and pace himself, and helping him practice his speeches and change words or phrases that could be difficult.
King George VI never wanted to be king. When his father King George V died, his elder brother became King Edward VIII. His brother later abdicated the throne to marry his mistress, Wallis Simpson. That thrusted Bertie, as his family called him, from Duke of York to King.
King George VI was monarch during World War II. The part of the book about how that affected the country, the royal family, and the Logue family was as interesting as anything.
My criticisms of this book are that King George VI is able to successfuly give speeches from early on in his training with Logue and that success never wavers. So, it became boring to read about speech after speech that the King gave without a problem, There is a lack of drama, and consequently interest, in that. Also, the book does not discuss with any detail how Logue helps the King or the importance of someone with Logue's social status becoming so close to the monarch. Class hierarchy was important in British society then, perhaps more than today.
Mark Logue is the grandson of Lionel Logue.
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
The Real Mitt
Here he is in all of his plutocratic glory.
By Jonathan Chait Presidential campaigns wallow so tediously in pseudo-events and manufactured outrage that our senses can be numbed to the appearance of something genuinely momentous. Mitt Romney’s secretly recorded comments at a fund-raiser are such an event — they reveal something vital about Romney, and they disqualify his claim to the presidency.
To think of Romney’s leaked discourse as a “gaffe” grossly misdescribes its importance. Indeed the comments’ direct impact on the outcome of the election will probably be small. Romney repeated the wildly misleading but increasingly popular conservative talking point that 47 percent of Americans pay no income taxes. The federal income tax is, by design, one of the most progressive elements of the American tax system, but well over 80 percent of non-retired adults pay federal taxes. But most people hear “income taxes” and think “taxes,” which is why the trick of using one phrase to make audiences think of the other is a standard GOP trick when discussing taxes. For that very reason, it won’t strike many voters as an insult: Most people who don’t pay income taxes do pay other taxes, and fail to distinguish between them, and thus don’t consider themselves among the 47 percent scorned by Romney.
Instead the video exposes an authentic Romney as a far more sinister character than I had imagined. Here is the sneering plutocrat, fully in thrall to a series of pernicious myths that are at the heart of the mania that has seized his party. He believes that market incomes in the United States are a perfect reflection of merit. Far from seeing his own privileged upbringing as the private-school educated son of an auto executive-turned-governor as an obvious refutation of that belief, Romney cites his own life, preposterously, as a confirmation of it. (“I have inherited nothing. Everything I earned I earned the old fashioned way.”)
It is possible to cling to some version of this dogma and still believe, or to convince yourself, that cutting taxes for the rich or reducing benefits for the poor will eventually help the latter, by teaching them personal responsibility or freeing up Job Creators to favor them with opportunity. Instead Romney regards them as something akin to a permanent enemy class — “I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”
Romney explained to reporters tonight that his remarks were not "elegantly stated," but did not repudiate them as his true beliefs. In fact, it was quite eloquently stated. The Romney speaking to fund-raisers was not the halting, smarmy figure so frequently on public display but an eloquent and passionate orator. He had no reason to believe his donors needed to hear him denounce the poor — they would have been perfectly satisfied with a bromide about how cutting taxes on the rich will create opportunity for one and all. Instead he put himself forward as the hopeful president of the top half of America against the bottom.
Some pundits have likened Romney’s comments to Barack Obama’s 2008 monologue, also secretly recorded at a fund-raiser, about his difficulties with white working class voters in rural Pennsylvania. But the spirit of Obama’s remarks was precisely the opposite of Romney’s. While Obama couched his beliefs in condescending sociological analysis about how poor small town residents vote on the basis of guns and religion rather than economics, the thrust of Obama’s argument was that he believed his policies would help them, and to urge his supporters to make common cause with them:
But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there's not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
Um, now these are in some communities, you know. I think what you'll find is, is that people of every background — there are gonna be a mix of people, you can go in the toughest neighborhoods, you know working-class lunch-pail folks, you'll find Obama enthusiasts. And you can go into places where you think I'd be very strong and people will just be skeptical. The important thing is that you show up and you're doing what you're doing.
Obama was aspiring to become president of all of America, even that part most hostile to him, in the belief that what they shared mattered more than what divided them. Romney genuinely seems to conceive of the lowest-earning half of the population as implacably hostile parasites.
The revelations in this video come to me as a genuine shock. I have never hated Romney. I presumed his ideological makeover since he set out to run for president was largely phony, even if he was now committed to carry through with it, and to whatever extent he’d come to believe his own lines, he was oblivious or naïve about the damage he would inflict upon the poor, sick, and vulnerable. It seems unavoidable now to conclude that Romney’s embrace of Paul Ryanism is born of actual contempt for the looters and moochers, a class war on behalf of his own class.
By Jonathan Chait Presidential campaigns wallow so tediously in pseudo-events and manufactured outrage that our senses can be numbed to the appearance of something genuinely momentous. Mitt Romney’s secretly recorded comments at a fund-raiser are such an event — they reveal something vital about Romney, and they disqualify his claim to the presidency.
To think of Romney’s leaked discourse as a “gaffe” grossly misdescribes its importance. Indeed the comments’ direct impact on the outcome of the election will probably be small. Romney repeated the wildly misleading but increasingly popular conservative talking point that 47 percent of Americans pay no income taxes. The federal income tax is, by design, one of the most progressive elements of the American tax system, but well over 80 percent of non-retired adults pay federal taxes. But most people hear “income taxes” and think “taxes,” which is why the trick of using one phrase to make audiences think of the other is a standard GOP trick when discussing taxes. For that very reason, it won’t strike many voters as an insult: Most people who don’t pay income taxes do pay other taxes, and fail to distinguish between them, and thus don’t consider themselves among the 47 percent scorned by Romney.
Instead the video exposes an authentic Romney as a far more sinister character than I had imagined. Here is the sneering plutocrat, fully in thrall to a series of pernicious myths that are at the heart of the mania that has seized his party. He believes that market incomes in the United States are a perfect reflection of merit. Far from seeing his own privileged upbringing as the private-school educated son of an auto executive-turned-governor as an obvious refutation of that belief, Romney cites his own life, preposterously, as a confirmation of it. (“I have inherited nothing. Everything I earned I earned the old fashioned way.”)
It is possible to cling to some version of this dogma and still believe, or to convince yourself, that cutting taxes for the rich or reducing benefits for the poor will eventually help the latter, by teaching them personal responsibility or freeing up Job Creators to favor them with opportunity. Instead Romney regards them as something akin to a permanent enemy class — “I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”
Romney explained to reporters tonight that his remarks were not "elegantly stated," but did not repudiate them as his true beliefs. In fact, it was quite eloquently stated. The Romney speaking to fund-raisers was not the halting, smarmy figure so frequently on public display but an eloquent and passionate orator. He had no reason to believe his donors needed to hear him denounce the poor — they would have been perfectly satisfied with a bromide about how cutting taxes on the rich will create opportunity for one and all. Instead he put himself forward as the hopeful president of the top half of America against the bottom.
Some pundits have likened Romney’s comments to Barack Obama’s 2008 monologue, also secretly recorded at a fund-raiser, about his difficulties with white working class voters in rural Pennsylvania. But the spirit of Obama’s remarks was precisely the opposite of Romney’s. While Obama couched his beliefs in condescending sociological analysis about how poor small town residents vote on the basis of guns and religion rather than economics, the thrust of Obama’s argument was that he believed his policies would help them, and to urge his supporters to make common cause with them:
But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there's not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
Um, now these are in some communities, you know. I think what you'll find is, is that people of every background — there are gonna be a mix of people, you can go in the toughest neighborhoods, you know working-class lunch-pail folks, you'll find Obama enthusiasts. And you can go into places where you think I'd be very strong and people will just be skeptical. The important thing is that you show up and you're doing what you're doing.
Obama was aspiring to become president of all of America, even that part most hostile to him, in the belief that what they shared mattered more than what divided them. Romney genuinely seems to conceive of the lowest-earning half of the population as implacably hostile parasites.
The revelations in this video come to me as a genuine shock. I have never hated Romney. I presumed his ideological makeover since he set out to run for president was largely phony, even if he was now committed to carry through with it, and to whatever extent he’d come to believe his own lines, he was oblivious or naïve about the damage he would inflict upon the poor, sick, and vulnerable. It seems unavoidable now to conclude that Romney’s embrace of Paul Ryanism is born of actual contempt for the looters and moochers, a class war on behalf of his own class.
Mr. 47%
September 18, 2012
by Mark Memmott
Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney told supporters that "there are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what" because they are "dependent upon government ... believe that they are victims ... believe the government has a responsibility to care for them ... these are people pay no income tax."
Who was he talking about?
Well, as The New York Times' Economix blog writes, "Mr. Romney is absolutely correct that about half of American households do not pay federal income tax."
The non-partisan Tax Policy Center, and others, have many times pointed out that a little less than half of Americans pay no federal income taxes. But as TPC also noted last year, "many of those who don't pay income tax do pay other taxes — federal payroll and excise taxes as well as state and local income, sales, and property taxes."
And why do so many not pay income taxes? According to TPC:
— "About half of people who don't owe income tax are off the rolls not because they take advantage of tax breaks but rather because they have low incomes."
— Of the rest in that group, 75 percent "pay no income tax because of provisions that benefit senior citizens and low-income working families with children."
To imply that most of those who don't pay income taxes are getting away with something, however, raises questions. "Put bluntly," Economix writes, "these are not households shirking their tax liabilities. The pool consists mostly of the poor, of relatively low-income working families and of old people. The tax code is specifically designed to reduce the burden on them."
So what about the "truthiness" of Romney's comments?
By grouping those who don't pay income taxes together with those who he says are "dependent upon government" and therefore support President Obama, Romney has earned "three Pinocchios" from The Washington Post's The Fact Checker. It writes that:
"Romney appears to conflate a few things — Obama's approval rating, the percentage of people who do not pay income taxes and people who rely on government assistance.
"There may be some overlap between these groups but they really are not the same thing."
In fact, while Romney seemed to say that the president will draw most of his support from those who pay no income taxes, a Tax Foundation map highlighting the 10 states with the highest percentages of "non-payers" shows most are Republican territories:
— Alabama
— Arkansas
— Florida
— Georgia
— Idaho
— Louisiana
— Mississippi
— New Mexico
— South Carolina
— Texas
The liberal news outlet Mother Jones has been breaking the news about Romney's remarks, which were secretly videotaped during a May fundraiser he held in Florida. The candidate himself has stood by his comments, though he's conceded they were "not elegantly stated."
by Mark Memmott
Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney told supporters that "there are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what" because they are "dependent upon government ... believe that they are victims ... believe the government has a responsibility to care for them ... these are people pay no income tax."
Who was he talking about?
Well, as The New York Times' Economix blog writes, "Mr. Romney is absolutely correct that about half of American households do not pay federal income tax."
The non-partisan Tax Policy Center, and others, have many times pointed out that a little less than half of Americans pay no federal income taxes. But as TPC also noted last year, "many of those who don't pay income tax do pay other taxes — federal payroll and excise taxes as well as state and local income, sales, and property taxes."
And why do so many not pay income taxes? According to TPC:
— "About half of people who don't owe income tax are off the rolls not because they take advantage of tax breaks but rather because they have low incomes."
— Of the rest in that group, 75 percent "pay no income tax because of provisions that benefit senior citizens and low-income working families with children."
To imply that most of those who don't pay income taxes are getting away with something, however, raises questions. "Put bluntly," Economix writes, "these are not households shirking their tax liabilities. The pool consists mostly of the poor, of relatively low-income working families and of old people. The tax code is specifically designed to reduce the burden on them."
So what about the "truthiness" of Romney's comments?
By grouping those who don't pay income taxes together with those who he says are "dependent upon government" and therefore support President Obama, Romney has earned "three Pinocchios" from The Washington Post's The Fact Checker. It writes that:
"Romney appears to conflate a few things — Obama's approval rating, the percentage of people who do not pay income taxes and people who rely on government assistance.
"There may be some overlap between these groups but they really are not the same thing."
In fact, while Romney seemed to say that the president will draw most of his support from those who pay no income taxes, a Tax Foundation map highlighting the 10 states with the highest percentages of "non-payers" shows most are Republican territories:
— Alabama
— Arkansas
— Florida
— Georgia
— Idaho
— Louisiana
— Mississippi
— New Mexico
— South Carolina
— Texas
The liberal news outlet Mother Jones has been breaking the news about Romney's remarks, which were secretly videotaped during a May fundraiser he held in Florida. The candidate himself has stood by his comments, though he's conceded they were "not elegantly stated."
Sunday, September 16, 2012
A New Take on Benji
Benjy’s Red-Letter Days‘The Sound and the Fury’ in 14 Colors
By RANDY BOYAGODA
Published: September 14, 2012
What happens when you add colored ink to the previous black-and-white type of a William Faulkner classic? Could the technology somehow compromise the reader’s experience, or do multiple inks actually make for a greater novel? Is this what Faulkner had in mind — and does it matter?
William Faulkner“The Sound and the Fury” in any color typeface tells the story of the Compsons, a once-aristocratic Mississippi family whose decline into despair, tragedy and chaos Faulkner imbued with an array of broader cultural, historical and philosophical resonances. But the book, originally published in 1929, has always been best known for its innovations in storytelling, particularly for the sudden, fragmentary and vertiginous shifts in time and place that govern the section narrated by Benjy Compson, a mentally retarded mute.
Faulkner readily acknowledged the difficulty of what he’d written. In fact, he himself first proposed using different-colored inks as a way to make Benjy’s section more accessible, with distinct shades assigned to its crisscrossed time-settings. But he had to accept that in the world of 1920s publishing, this just wasn’t possible. “I’ll just have to save the idea until publishing grows up to it,” he swaggered in an editorial exchange.
Last month, the industry finally caught up. Bound in vermilion goatskin and limited to 1,480 copies, an opulent new edition of THE SOUND AND THE FURY (Folio Society, $345) is intended for collectors and well-heeled Faulkner lovers — and it has already sold out. With multicolored printing far more plausible today, however, and publishers always looking for new ways to revive interest in (meaning, sales of) a classic, this edition could herald a future, mass-market counterpart. If so, it would no doubt be sold as the fulfillment of Faulkner’s original vision for the novel.
The writing in “The Sound and the Fury” isn’t difficult for the sake of difficulty, nor is its meaning confined to the story of one spectacularly dysfunctional Southern brood. Instead, the novel both reveals and embodies the jagged, individual experiences of modernity’s ironic provision for us all: an intense awareness of the particulars of each our own time and place, shot through with fearful unknowing about how these particulars fit together, about if they even can, or should, and why. Nowhere is this gyre of awareness and unknowing more apparent than in Benjy’s section. His monologue covers 28 years of mundane and tragic living, lighting upon his grandmother’s funeral, his sister’s wedding, his brother’s suicide, and his own wintry pasture walks and desperate runs along iron fences. Benjy’s hearing, smelling or seeing something in one setting sends him elsewhere, or looping back and forth between two times in the same place, a sensory-driven shuttling that occurs from paragraph to paragraph, sometimes even midsentence.
The colored inks, 14 in total, as determined by two leading Faulkner scholars, are an arresting visual statement of Faulkner’s daring technique and a helpful navigator for Benjy’s fractured, far-flung storytelling. In these ways, the scheme makes for an undeniable improvement. But the visual statement is finally too arresting, the navigation too helpful. Benjy’s interiority is disorienting and exhilarating to experience in standard black ink precisely because this neutral printing perfectly conveys the “unbroken-surfaced confusion of an idiot which is outwardly a dynamic and logical coherence” — Faulkner’s own description of his ambitions for Benjy’s section. Whereas in relieving the crucial tension between confusion and coherence, the colored inks make safe the novel’s most provocative claim: that we might recognize our own struggles, to understand the pieces and people of our lives and be understood by them, in the voice and efforts of a 33-year-old mute idiot man-child who, in his words, is always “trying to say.”
But what if Faulkner was actually wrong in wanting Benjy’s section read in different colors? To suggest this, I know, is to commit literary heresy. We like to venerate authorial intentions, especially when they’re the frustrated or ignored intentions of great writers, and when this, in turn, justifies a new edition of a classic that claims steadfast fidelity to those intentions. This premise governed the 2001 “Restored Edition” of Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men,” which prints the deleted passages and undoes the editorial modifications — like changing the demagogue politician Willie Stark’s name back to Willie Talos — that he had to accept in advance of its 1946 publication, and also the 2004 version of Sylvia Plath’s “Ariel,” which is pointedly subtitled “The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath’s Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement.” In reprinting the poems as Plath left them upon her desk at her death, this edition reflects plans that Ted Hughes bypassed when he arranged for their original publication in 1965. Likewise, the 2007 version of James Agee’s novel “A Death in the Family” is tagged “A Restoration of the Author’s Text”; its editor polemically advocates for this edition over its 1957 predecessor, which was published only after major editorial changes were made independent of the author, who had died two years earlier.
These new editions aren’t self-evidently more successful versions of long-heralded works. Instead, they afford publishers, editors, scholars and critics the prospect of delivering restorative literary justice while providing readers an intimate exposure to great writers’ first plans and frustrated hopes for their eventual masterpieces. Such reputed restorations inevitably work from a selective, static set of intentions on the now-distant writer’s part. Just how much significance should we accord an idea Faulkner brought up over drinks in a New York speakeasy and then mentioned a few times afterward before dropping it? How certain can we be that Plath’s last manuscript version of her poems was her “original selection”? Latter-day “restorations” are, in fact, less authentic restorations than painstaking, sincere contrivances that ultimately belong more to their latter-day contrivers than to their original authors. And in working according to their own singular depiction of a writer’s designs, they elide a basic truth about great books: Many come into being through a dynamic, heated, sometimes even hostile series of exchanges between author and editor, where the author isn’t always obviously right; T. S. Eliot’s original title for “The Waste Land” was “He Do the Police in Different Voices,” until his editor Ezra Pound persuaded him otherwise.
An author’s own reconsiderations can be just as important, as evidenced by the recent publication of a new edition of “A Farewell to Arms,” which includes 47 alternative endings. Hemingway would, I expect, be horrified by this gross display of the draft work he put into achieving the novel’s famously lean, clean, cold finish. With no pretense of restorative literary justice here, what is the value of this new book, other than providing an uptick in public interest to benefit Hemingway’s publisher and estate? For readers, there’s little other than the opportunity to confirm that Hemingway chose the best possible ending from among his drafts.
Indeed, by his own account, Faulkner rewrote and reworked “The Sound and the Fury” more extensively than he did any of his other novels. And as Faulkner’s correspondence and Joseph Blotner’s authoritative biography both attest, much of this was spurred by early editorial debates and also because colored inks weren’t then available. In other words, had colored inks originally been possible, Faulkner very likely would have made different decisions in revising Benjy’s section. Perhaps the novel would not have become quite what it was, and remains: an audaciously modern expression of the universal human effort of “trying to say.”
By RANDY BOYAGODA
Published: September 14, 2012
What happens when you add colored ink to the previous black-and-white type of a William Faulkner classic? Could the technology somehow compromise the reader’s experience, or do multiple inks actually make for a greater novel? Is this what Faulkner had in mind — and does it matter?
William Faulkner“The Sound and the Fury” in any color typeface tells the story of the Compsons, a once-aristocratic Mississippi family whose decline into despair, tragedy and chaos Faulkner imbued with an array of broader cultural, historical and philosophical resonances. But the book, originally published in 1929, has always been best known for its innovations in storytelling, particularly for the sudden, fragmentary and vertiginous shifts in time and place that govern the section narrated by Benjy Compson, a mentally retarded mute.
Faulkner readily acknowledged the difficulty of what he’d written. In fact, he himself first proposed using different-colored inks as a way to make Benjy’s section more accessible, with distinct shades assigned to its crisscrossed time-settings. But he had to accept that in the world of 1920s publishing, this just wasn’t possible. “I’ll just have to save the idea until publishing grows up to it,” he swaggered in an editorial exchange.
Last month, the industry finally caught up. Bound in vermilion goatskin and limited to 1,480 copies, an opulent new edition of THE SOUND AND THE FURY (Folio Society, $345) is intended for collectors and well-heeled Faulkner lovers — and it has already sold out. With multicolored printing far more plausible today, however, and publishers always looking for new ways to revive interest in (meaning, sales of) a classic, this edition could herald a future, mass-market counterpart. If so, it would no doubt be sold as the fulfillment of Faulkner’s original vision for the novel.
The writing in “The Sound and the Fury” isn’t difficult for the sake of difficulty, nor is its meaning confined to the story of one spectacularly dysfunctional Southern brood. Instead, the novel both reveals and embodies the jagged, individual experiences of modernity’s ironic provision for us all: an intense awareness of the particulars of each our own time and place, shot through with fearful unknowing about how these particulars fit together, about if they even can, or should, and why. Nowhere is this gyre of awareness and unknowing more apparent than in Benjy’s section. His monologue covers 28 years of mundane and tragic living, lighting upon his grandmother’s funeral, his sister’s wedding, his brother’s suicide, and his own wintry pasture walks and desperate runs along iron fences. Benjy’s hearing, smelling or seeing something in one setting sends him elsewhere, or looping back and forth between two times in the same place, a sensory-driven shuttling that occurs from paragraph to paragraph, sometimes even midsentence.
The colored inks, 14 in total, as determined by two leading Faulkner scholars, are an arresting visual statement of Faulkner’s daring technique and a helpful navigator for Benjy’s fractured, far-flung storytelling. In these ways, the scheme makes for an undeniable improvement. But the visual statement is finally too arresting, the navigation too helpful. Benjy’s interiority is disorienting and exhilarating to experience in standard black ink precisely because this neutral printing perfectly conveys the “unbroken-surfaced confusion of an idiot which is outwardly a dynamic and logical coherence” — Faulkner’s own description of his ambitions for Benjy’s section. Whereas in relieving the crucial tension between confusion and coherence, the colored inks make safe the novel’s most provocative claim: that we might recognize our own struggles, to understand the pieces and people of our lives and be understood by them, in the voice and efforts of a 33-year-old mute idiot man-child who, in his words, is always “trying to say.”
But what if Faulkner was actually wrong in wanting Benjy’s section read in different colors? To suggest this, I know, is to commit literary heresy. We like to venerate authorial intentions, especially when they’re the frustrated or ignored intentions of great writers, and when this, in turn, justifies a new edition of a classic that claims steadfast fidelity to those intentions. This premise governed the 2001 “Restored Edition” of Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men,” which prints the deleted passages and undoes the editorial modifications — like changing the demagogue politician Willie Stark’s name back to Willie Talos — that he had to accept in advance of its 1946 publication, and also the 2004 version of Sylvia Plath’s “Ariel,” which is pointedly subtitled “The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath’s Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement.” In reprinting the poems as Plath left them upon her desk at her death, this edition reflects plans that Ted Hughes bypassed when he arranged for their original publication in 1965. Likewise, the 2007 version of James Agee’s novel “A Death in the Family” is tagged “A Restoration of the Author’s Text”; its editor polemically advocates for this edition over its 1957 predecessor, which was published only after major editorial changes were made independent of the author, who had died two years earlier.
These new editions aren’t self-evidently more successful versions of long-heralded works. Instead, they afford publishers, editors, scholars and critics the prospect of delivering restorative literary justice while providing readers an intimate exposure to great writers’ first plans and frustrated hopes for their eventual masterpieces. Such reputed restorations inevitably work from a selective, static set of intentions on the now-distant writer’s part. Just how much significance should we accord an idea Faulkner brought up over drinks in a New York speakeasy and then mentioned a few times afterward before dropping it? How certain can we be that Plath’s last manuscript version of her poems was her “original selection”? Latter-day “restorations” are, in fact, less authentic restorations than painstaking, sincere contrivances that ultimately belong more to their latter-day contrivers than to their original authors. And in working according to their own singular depiction of a writer’s designs, they elide a basic truth about great books: Many come into being through a dynamic, heated, sometimes even hostile series of exchanges between author and editor, where the author isn’t always obviously right; T. S. Eliot’s original title for “The Waste Land” was “He Do the Police in Different Voices,” until his editor Ezra Pound persuaded him otherwise.
An author’s own reconsiderations can be just as important, as evidenced by the recent publication of a new edition of “A Farewell to Arms,” which includes 47 alternative endings. Hemingway would, I expect, be horrified by this gross display of the draft work he put into achieving the novel’s famously lean, clean, cold finish. With no pretense of restorative literary justice here, what is the value of this new book, other than providing an uptick in public interest to benefit Hemingway’s publisher and estate? For readers, there’s little other than the opportunity to confirm that Hemingway chose the best possible ending from among his drafts.
Indeed, by his own account, Faulkner rewrote and reworked “The Sound and the Fury” more extensively than he did any of his other novels. And as Faulkner’s correspondence and Joseph Blotner’s authoritative biography both attest, much of this was spurred by early editorial debates and also because colored inks weren’t then available. In other words, had colored inks originally been possible, Faulkner very likely would have made different decisions in revising Benjy’s section. Perhaps the novel would not have become quite what it was, and remains: an audaciously modern expression of the universal human effort of “trying to say.”
Saturday, September 15, 2012
Wherever We Look
The insanity of Republicans is mind-blogging. Raw partisan politics and ideology dominates fact and evidence. It's unbelievable.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
by Paul Krugman
September 15, 2012, 9:58
Mitt Romney, Liquidationist
How times have changed. Back in 2004, Greg Mankiw declared, in the Economic Report of the President, that
Aggressive monetary policy can reduce the depth of a recession.
But now, after the Fed has finally moved a bit in the direction of doing something about the Lesser Depression, Mitt Romney – supposedly advised by Mankiw among others – is outraged:
[T]he American economy doesn’t need more artificial and ineffective measures. We should be creating wealth, not printing dollars.
That word “artificial” caught my eye, because it’s the same word liquidationists used to denounce any efforts to fight the Great Depression with monetary policy. Schumpeter declared that
Any revival which is merely due to artificial stimulus leaves part of the work of depressions undone
Hayek similarly decried any recovery led by the “creation of artificial demand”.
Milton Friedman – who thought he had liberated conservatism from this kind of nonsense –must be spinning in his grave.
The Romney/liquidationist view only makes sense if you believe that the problem with our economy lies on the supply side – that workers lack the incentive to work, or are stuck with the wrong skills, or something. And that’s just not what the evidence says; instead, it points overwhelmingly to an insufficient overall level of demand.
When dealing with ordinary, garden-variety recessions, we deal with inadequate demand through conventional monetary policy, namely by cutting short-term interest rates. Until recently even Republicans were OK with this.
Now we face a more severe slump, probably driven by deleveraging, in which even a zero rate isn’t low enough, so monetary policy has to work in unconventional ways – in particular, by changing expectations about future inflation, so as to reduce real interest rates. This is no more “artificial” than conventional monetary policy – harder, yes, but it’s still about trying to get the market rate aligned with the “natural” rate consistent with full employment.
So where are Romney and his party coming from? Basically, they’ve thrown out 80 years of economic analysis and evidence because it doesn’t fit their ideological preconceptions, and they’re resorting to dubious metaphors – “sugar high” and all that – as a substitute for clear thinking.
What you really have to wonder about is all the not-stupid economists who have aligned themselves with this guy and that crew. Probably they imagine that once the election is past sensible economics will return. But the odds are that they are wrong, and that they’re sacrificing their own credibility to put charlatans and cranks in the driver’s seat.
.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
by Paul Krugman
September 15, 2012, 9:58
Mitt Romney, Liquidationist
How times have changed. Back in 2004, Greg Mankiw declared, in the Economic Report of the President, that
Aggressive monetary policy can reduce the depth of a recession.
But now, after the Fed has finally moved a bit in the direction of doing something about the Lesser Depression, Mitt Romney – supposedly advised by Mankiw among others – is outraged:
[T]he American economy doesn’t need more artificial and ineffective measures. We should be creating wealth, not printing dollars.
That word “artificial” caught my eye, because it’s the same word liquidationists used to denounce any efforts to fight the Great Depression with monetary policy. Schumpeter declared that
Any revival which is merely due to artificial stimulus leaves part of the work of depressions undone
Hayek similarly decried any recovery led by the “creation of artificial demand”.
Milton Friedman – who thought he had liberated conservatism from this kind of nonsense –must be spinning in his grave.
The Romney/liquidationist view only makes sense if you believe that the problem with our economy lies on the supply side – that workers lack the incentive to work, or are stuck with the wrong skills, or something. And that’s just not what the evidence says; instead, it points overwhelmingly to an insufficient overall level of demand.
When dealing with ordinary, garden-variety recessions, we deal with inadequate demand through conventional monetary policy, namely by cutting short-term interest rates. Until recently even Republicans were OK with this.
Now we face a more severe slump, probably driven by deleveraging, in which even a zero rate isn’t low enough, so monetary policy has to work in unconventional ways – in particular, by changing expectations about future inflation, so as to reduce real interest rates. This is no more “artificial” than conventional monetary policy – harder, yes, but it’s still about trying to get the market rate aligned with the “natural” rate consistent with full employment.
So where are Romney and his party coming from? Basically, they’ve thrown out 80 years of economic analysis and evidence because it doesn’t fit their ideological preconceptions, and they’re resorting to dubious metaphors – “sugar high” and all that – as a substitute for clear thinking.
What you really have to wonder about is all the not-stupid economists who have aligned themselves with this guy and that crew. Probably they imagine that once the election is past sensible economics will return. But the odds are that they are wrong, and that they’re sacrificing their own credibility to put charlatans and cranks in the driver’s seat.
.
Friday, September 14, 2012
The Republicans #1 Goal
from Jonathan Chait
The basic problem for Republicans is that their highest policy priority is to cut the effective tax rate paid by the richest 1 percent of Americans, but the vast majority of the voters don’t share that goal. Handling that problem is the single biggest challenge the Republican party faces. Normally, when a party has an extremely unpopular position, it just jettisons it. But Republicans care so much about this goal that they won’t give it up, which makes sense — you compromise on your secondary goals, not on your primary goal. Still, this ultimately places them in the position Romney finds himself and Paul Ryan and George W. Bush have found as well — the only way they can get elected is to obscure the real trade-offs and make up a bunch of fake numbers.
The basic problem for Republicans is that their highest policy priority is to cut the effective tax rate paid by the richest 1 percent of Americans, but the vast majority of the voters don’t share that goal. Handling that problem is the single biggest challenge the Republican party faces. Normally, when a party has an extremely unpopular position, it just jettisons it. But Republicans care so much about this goal that they won’t give it up, which makes sense — you compromise on your secondary goals, not on your primary goal. Still, this ultimately places them in the position Romney finds himself and Paul Ryan and George W. Bush have found as well — the only way they can get elected is to obscure the real trade-offs and make up a bunch of fake numbers.
Bill and Hillary
Jonathan Yardley
Critic “Bill and Hillary: The Politics of the Personal” by William H. Chafe
By Jonathan Yardley, Published: September 7
The Washington Post William H. Chafe understands, as do too few historians and biographers, that the personal and public lives of political figures cannot be separated: “Public figures are shaped by private experiences. Their political behavior reflects personal values and choices as well as issues of public policy. Personal experiences infuse and inspire the choices that political figures make. What goes on in the family where a child grows up helps define in fundamental ways how that child responds as an adult to moments of political or moral crisis.” This may seem obvious, but it has not seemed so in the past as chroniclers of political life have, with only occasional exceptions, tended to regard that life as self-contained, only marginally connected at most to the personal side of these politicians’ lives.
(FSG) - ‘Bill and Hillary: The Politics of the Personal’ by William Henry Chafe
.Thus one of the reasons I especially admire Jean Edward Smith’s biographies of Ulysses S. Grant, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower is that in none of them does he shy away from exploring their boyhoods, their marriages, their extended families. Obviously no biographer of FDR can avoid the effect of polio on his subsequent political career, but that was only part of the many ways in which private pain and unhappiness affected what he did in public and how he did it. The same goes for Grant’s long struggle to rise out of poverty and Eisenhower’s deep roots in the Midwest of his youth.
True, as Chafe says, our new understanding of this grows to some extent out of the women’s movement — which gave us the phrase “the personal is political” — but it probably is connected as well to the easy access we now have to other people’s private lives through the Internet, access that unfortunately we seem to take for granted and too often abuse, but that has given a heightened awareness of the importance of other people’s personal and even inner lives.
Chafe is quite right to insist that the stories of Bill and Hillary Clinton prove the point: “No personalities in recent history speak more compellingly to the importance of understanding that the personal and the political are inseparable.” They both had childhoods that veered sharply from received notions of “normal”; dating back to childhood, both mixed rank ambition with genuine reformist zeal and idealism; both grew up with tangled senses of insecurity and entitlement; both were shaped by the Vietnam War and the protest movement it engendered; both found themselves in an exceedingly complicated and often bitterly quarrelsome marriage.
All of which makes the temptations of armchair psychologizing irresistible, and Chafe does succumb to them, but unlike some others who have written about the Clintons, he doesn’t wallow in them. A respected historian who has written much about African Americans and women and who holds a chaired professorship at Duke, he approaches the Clintons with academic dispassion occasionally mixed with pop psychology, though also with little original research; this is a book based primarily on secondary sources.
No one who has paid even glancing attention to American politics is likely to be unaware that Bill Clinton has been deeply affected by the death of his father before his birth, by a childhood in a household “racked by alcoholism, child and spouse abuse, and the tyranny of marital jealousy,” as well as by the smothering presence of his larger-than-life mother. But it is useful to be reminded by Chafe of the lasting effects of his labyrinthine and at times dishonest maneuvers to avoid military service and of his “euphoria at having escaped the draft and the gnawing doubt that perhaps he had done an unethical thing.” Chafe also is at pains to document Clinton’s long history of “placing women into two categories — those who fit the ‘beauty queen’ image he had learned at home [from his mother], and those he saw as serious lifelong companions.” Though his bizarre relationship with Monica Lewinsky is the most famous instance of his proclivity for the beauty queen type, Chafe makes plain that this is a pattern dating back to Clinton’s adolescence, exposing him to risks that endangered his marriage, his political career and his presidency.
As for Hillary Clinton, her childhood in the Rodham family of Chicago scarcely fit the “idealized portrait” she painted in her memoir, “Living History,” and elsewhere. “Far from nurturing an environment of love and mutual support,” Chafe writes, “the family often was dominated by hostility and authoritarianism. Rather than provide a model of mutual affection, it frequently degenerated into a brittle verbal truce between avowed combatants.” On one side was her father, a fierce disciplinarian and unloving parent, on the other her mother, encouraging the girl’s ambitions and her assertiveness as well as her commitment to Methodism. Growing up in a conservative household, Hillary gradually moved leftward as tensions over Vietnam increased, but she maintained a delicate balance, wanting to maintain communications with all parties just as, presumably, she had wanted to be a bridge between her warring parents.
.Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham met at Yale Law School and quickly clicked. They “brought out the best in each other,” Chafe writes. “She helped impart discipline and rigor into his quest for making a difference. He helped soften and humanize her.” But soon a more complicated pattern emerged: “The only problem was that more often than not, their complimentary differences also generated outright conflict. Just as often as the two cooed and flirted, they fought viciously, using their superintelligence to rip each other apart.”
Though obviously no outsider can fully understand the dynamics of their relationship, Chafe leaves no doubt that it was a blend of genuine devotion and remarkable calculation. They loved each other, but each also understood that the other could help him or her politically. Hillary repeatedly rejected Bill’s proposals of marriage but finally relented: “It was not a simple decision. She knew by now exactly what she was getting in for. . . . As much as she appreciated the risks in marrying Clinton, she also grasped the uniqueness of what Bill had to offer. She was in love, he had unlimited potential, he would make a difference, and she could be part of that.”
Here’s where the long-distance psychologizing gets a bit deep. For all the love he felt for Hillary, Bill “was afraid of her.” The “fear of losing her ultimately became the critical variable in his response to their conflicts. He would not go against her wishes or alienate her.” No doubt that was intensified by her reluctant willingness to move to Arkansas and accept the role of loyal wife as he began his political rise. The result was not so much that this gave her leverage, though doubtless it did (especially when she stood by him amid charges of sexual misbehavior during the 1992 presidential campaign), as that he was always aware that he had to act within the limits sanctioned by her.
Much though his compulsive womanizing hurt her, she was committed to the marriage. This continued through his terms as governor of Arkansas and of course into the White House: “The pattern was by now familiar. Clinton, by his own admission, had a sex addiction. Hillary was an enabler who actually acquired power, and husbandly affection, when she came to his aid. Both features of their partnership were evident in the Lewinsky affair.” Chafe writes.
“In some respects, their partnership achieved a new intimacy and camaraderie when she stood by him in the face of his misbehavior. Thus, in the strangest of ways, Clinton’s reckless sexual behavior actually enhanced their personal ties. It made their relationship more functional and productive. Arguably — and in the strangest irony of all — it was at the heart of their partnership, the centerpiece that made it work.”
This may be a bit of a stretch, but surely Bill Clinton’s sexual forays, combined with other aspects of both partners — his “facile tongue” and “unmatched capacity for ambiguity,” her haughty attitude toward the media and all who disagreed with her — had much to do with creating the “political poison” that infused the country during the impeachment proceedings against him. It is no small irony, in a tale full of such, that as the country became ever more divided, tensions between the Clintons abated. Her decision to run for Senate in New York was liberating, making her “an independent figure” and “restructuring the relationship, but not on the same old terms.” He became “a supportive, not a dominant, presence,” while she in turn mellowed, returning to the conciliatory person she had been before their marriage: “Rather than defining herself by those she chose to do battle with, she created her Senate identity by reaching out to colleagues on both sides of the aisle,” which she has continued to do throughout her admirable service as secretary of state.
Peace — it’s wonderful.
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
Why Romney Can't Say Anything
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
by Paul Krugman September 11, 2012, 11:58 am5 Comments
No Details Forthcoming
Hmm. So even on the right, people are complaining that Romney isn’t providing enough details about his plans. And I’ve spoken to journalists who are sure that Romney will be forced to say more before Election Day.
No he won’t. He might lose for lack of detail, but no detail will be provided, for a very simple reason: his proposals don’t add up. He literally can’t do what he says he would do, namely cut tax rates on the rich without raising the tax burden on the middle class or making the deficit surge; nor can he propose spending cuts as large as he claims without cutting deeply into programs people depend on.
Another way of saying this, of course, is that his alleged budget plan is actually a fraud.
Why would be do such a thing, and expose himself to the criticism he now faces? Well, why should he have expected this scrutiny? Paul Ryan has been running around for years with a supposed fiscal plan constructed largely out of magic asterisks, and got hailed as a Bold Truthteller. Romney must be asking why the rules have changed.
Apparently, though, they have. And because Romney went with the assumption that he would never be asked to put up, he is now in a position where he can’t.
The Tragedy of John Edwards
What bothers me about the downfall of former presidential contender John Edwards is that he may be the last major party candidate, at least nationally or for president, to talk about the poor. All we hear from Obama and Romney is helping the middle class. The Democratic contention is that by uplifting the middle class, those below and above will benefit. That may be true, but I wish we had a candidate who talks about the poor, about those working two or more jobs and who are struggling to pay their bills, clothe their children, or find a decent place to live. John Edwards talked about the poor, and I think we need more of that in our politics.
Conservative Lunacy
Even though he is a conservative and hates liberalism, political pundit George Will used to have good sense. You could disagree with him, but at least he made sense. No longer. Like other conservative, Will has gone off the deep in. College football is a liberal conspiracy? Please!
Yesterday at 9:58 AM64CommentsGeorge Will Is Definitely Not Ready for Some FootballBy Jonathan Chait
George Will is a longtime hater of liberalism, and a longtime hater of football, so it makes sense that he would try to align his hatreds and write a column arguing that college football is an expression of liberalism:
College football became a national phenomenon because it supposedly served the values of progressivism, in two ways. It exemplified specialization, expertise and scientific management. And it would reconcile the public to the transformation of universities, especially public universities, into something progressivism desired but the public found alien. Replicating industrialism’s division of labor, universities introduced the fragmentation of the old curriculum of moral instruction into increasingly specialized and arcane disciplines. These included the recently founded social sciences — economics, sociology, political science — that were supposed to supply progressive governments with the expertise to manage the complexities of the modern economy and the simplicities of the uninstructed masses.
Football taught the progressive virtue of subordinating the individual to the collectivity. Inevitably, this led to the cult of one individual, the coach.
One flaw with Will's thesis here is that the regions of the country most enamored with college football are least enamored with liberalism. College football is most popular in the Deep South, followed by the Midwest, followed by the West Coast, followed by the Northeast. The popularity of liberalism by region is that list in reverse.
The obvious solution here is for George Will to tour the Deep South explaining to rabid football fans that they have been taken in by the sinister hand of progressivism.
Yesterday at 9:58 AM64CommentsGeorge Will Is Definitely Not Ready for Some FootballBy Jonathan Chait
George Will is a longtime hater of liberalism, and a longtime hater of football, so it makes sense that he would try to align his hatreds and write a column arguing that college football is an expression of liberalism:
College football became a national phenomenon because it supposedly served the values of progressivism, in two ways. It exemplified specialization, expertise and scientific management. And it would reconcile the public to the transformation of universities, especially public universities, into something progressivism desired but the public found alien. Replicating industrialism’s division of labor, universities introduced the fragmentation of the old curriculum of moral instruction into increasingly specialized and arcane disciplines. These included the recently founded social sciences — economics, sociology, political science — that were supposed to supply progressive governments with the expertise to manage the complexities of the modern economy and the simplicities of the uninstructed masses.
Football taught the progressive virtue of subordinating the individual to the collectivity. Inevitably, this led to the cult of one individual, the coach.
One flaw with Will's thesis here is that the regions of the country most enamored with college football are least enamored with liberalism. College football is most popular in the Deep South, followed by the Midwest, followed by the West Coast, followed by the Northeast. The popularity of liberalism by region is that list in reverse.
The obvious solution here is for George Will to tour the Deep South explaining to rabid football fans that they have been taken in by the sinister hand of progressivism.
Monday, September 10, 2012
Here It Is: A Lucid Summary of our Economic Situation
Obstruct and ExploitBy PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: September 9, 2012 249 Comments
Does anyone remember the American Jobs Act? A year ago President Obama proposed boosting the economy with a combination of tax cuts and spending increases, aimed in particular at sustaining state and local government employment. Independent analysts reacted favorably. For example, the consulting firm Macroeconomic Advisers estimated that the act would add 1.3 million jobs by the end of 2012.
There were good reasons for these positive assessments. Although you’d never know it from political debate, worldwide experience since the financial crisis struck in 2008 has overwhelmingly confirmed the proposition that fiscal policy “works,” that temporary increases in spending boost employment in a depressed economy (and that spending cuts increase unemployment). The Jobs Act would have been just what the doctor ordered.
But the bill went nowhere, of course, blocked by Republicans in Congress. And now, having prevented Mr. Obama from implementing any of his policies, those same Republicans are pointing to disappointing job numbers and declaring that the president’s policies have failed.
Think of it as a two-part strategy. First, obstruct any and all efforts to strengthen the economy, then exploit the economy’s weakness for political gain. If this strategy sounds cynical, that’s because it is. Yet it’s the G.O.P.’s best chance for victory in November.
But are Republicans really playing that cynical a game?
You could argue that we’re having a genuine debate about economic policy, in which Republicans sincerely believe that the things Mr. Obama proposes would actually hurt, not help, job creation. However, even if that were true, the fact is that the economy we have right now doesn’t reflect the policies the president wanted.
Anyway, do Republicans really believe that government spending is bad for the economy? No.
Right now Mitt Romney has an advertising blitz under way in which he attacks Mr. Obama for possible cuts in defense spending — cuts, by the way, that were mandated by an agreement forced on the president by House Republicans last year. And why is Mr. Romney denouncing these cuts? Because, he says, they would cost jobs!
This is classic “weaponized Keynesianism” — the claim that government spending can’t create jobs unless the money goes to defense contractors, in which case it’s the lifeblood of the economy. And no, it doesn’t make any sense.
What about the argument, which I hear all the time, that Mr. Obama should have fixed the economy long ago? The claim goes like this: during his first two years in office Mr. Obama had a majority in Congress that would have let him do anything he wanted, so he’s had his chance.
The short answer is, you’ve got to be kidding.
As anyone who was paying attention knows, the period during which Democrats controlled both houses of Congress was marked by unprecedented obstructionism in the Senate. The filibuster, formerly a tactic reserved for rare occasions, became standard operating procedure; in practice, it became impossible to pass anything without 60 votes. And Democrats had those 60 votes for only a few months. Should they have tried to push through a major new economic program during that narrow window? In retrospect, yes — but that doesn’t change the reality that for most of Mr. Obama’s time in office U.S. fiscal policy has been defined not by the president’s plans but by Republican stonewalling.
The most important consequence of that stonewalling, I’d argue, has been the failure to extend much-needed aid to state and local governments. Lacking that aid, these governments have been forced to lay off hundreds of thousands of schoolteachers and other workers, and those layoffs are a major reason the job numbers have been disappointing. Since bottoming out a year after Mr. Obama took office, private-sector employment has risen by 4.6 million; but government employment, which normally rises more or less in line with population growth, has instead fallen by 571,000.
Put it this way: When Republicans took control of the House, they declared that their economic philosophy was “cut and grow” — cut government, and the economy will prosper. And thanks to their scorched-earth tactics, we’ve actually had the cuts they wanted. But the promised growth has failed to materialize — and they want to make that failure Mr. Obama’s fault.
Now, all of this puts the White House in a difficult bind. Making a big deal of Republican obstructionism could all too easily come across as whining. Yet this obstructionism is real, and arguably is the biggest single reason for our ongoing economic weakness.
And what happens if the strategy of obstruct-and-exploit succeeds? Is this the shape of politics to come? If so, America will have gone a long way toward becoming an ungovernable banana republic.
Published: September 9, 2012 249 Comments
Does anyone remember the American Jobs Act? A year ago President Obama proposed boosting the economy with a combination of tax cuts and spending increases, aimed in particular at sustaining state and local government employment. Independent analysts reacted favorably. For example, the consulting firm Macroeconomic Advisers estimated that the act would add 1.3 million jobs by the end of 2012.
There were good reasons for these positive assessments. Although you’d never know it from political debate, worldwide experience since the financial crisis struck in 2008 has overwhelmingly confirmed the proposition that fiscal policy “works,” that temporary increases in spending boost employment in a depressed economy (and that spending cuts increase unemployment). The Jobs Act would have been just what the doctor ordered.
But the bill went nowhere, of course, blocked by Republicans in Congress. And now, having prevented Mr. Obama from implementing any of his policies, those same Republicans are pointing to disappointing job numbers and declaring that the president’s policies have failed.
Think of it as a two-part strategy. First, obstruct any and all efforts to strengthen the economy, then exploit the economy’s weakness for political gain. If this strategy sounds cynical, that’s because it is. Yet it’s the G.O.P.’s best chance for victory in November.
But are Republicans really playing that cynical a game?
You could argue that we’re having a genuine debate about economic policy, in which Republicans sincerely believe that the things Mr. Obama proposes would actually hurt, not help, job creation. However, even if that were true, the fact is that the economy we have right now doesn’t reflect the policies the president wanted.
Anyway, do Republicans really believe that government spending is bad for the economy? No.
Right now Mitt Romney has an advertising blitz under way in which he attacks Mr. Obama for possible cuts in defense spending — cuts, by the way, that were mandated by an agreement forced on the president by House Republicans last year. And why is Mr. Romney denouncing these cuts? Because, he says, they would cost jobs!
This is classic “weaponized Keynesianism” — the claim that government spending can’t create jobs unless the money goes to defense contractors, in which case it’s the lifeblood of the economy. And no, it doesn’t make any sense.
What about the argument, which I hear all the time, that Mr. Obama should have fixed the economy long ago? The claim goes like this: during his first two years in office Mr. Obama had a majority in Congress that would have let him do anything he wanted, so he’s had his chance.
The short answer is, you’ve got to be kidding.
As anyone who was paying attention knows, the period during which Democrats controlled both houses of Congress was marked by unprecedented obstructionism in the Senate. The filibuster, formerly a tactic reserved for rare occasions, became standard operating procedure; in practice, it became impossible to pass anything without 60 votes. And Democrats had those 60 votes for only a few months. Should they have tried to push through a major new economic program during that narrow window? In retrospect, yes — but that doesn’t change the reality that for most of Mr. Obama’s time in office U.S. fiscal policy has been defined not by the president’s plans but by Republican stonewalling.
The most important consequence of that stonewalling, I’d argue, has been the failure to extend much-needed aid to state and local governments. Lacking that aid, these governments have been forced to lay off hundreds of thousands of schoolteachers and other workers, and those layoffs are a major reason the job numbers have been disappointing. Since bottoming out a year after Mr. Obama took office, private-sector employment has risen by 4.6 million; but government employment, which normally rises more or less in line with population growth, has instead fallen by 571,000.
Put it this way: When Republicans took control of the House, they declared that their economic philosophy was “cut and grow” — cut government, and the economy will prosper. And thanks to their scorched-earth tactics, we’ve actually had the cuts they wanted. But the promised growth has failed to materialize — and they want to make that failure Mr. Obama’s fault.
Now, all of this puts the White House in a difficult bind. Making a big deal of Republican obstructionism could all too easily come across as whining. Yet this obstructionism is real, and arguably is the biggest single reason for our ongoing economic weakness.
And what happens if the strategy of obstruct-and-exploit succeeds? Is this the shape of politics to come? If so, America will have gone a long way toward becoming an ungovernable banana republic.
Yes, Republicans DO Think Americans Are Stupid
Paul Krugman
Revenge of the Three-Legged Stool
Another day, another Romney whopper. Now he says that he’ll keep the good parts of Obamacare, in particular coverage for people with pre-existing conditions, while scrapping the rest.
You can’t do that – and Romney knows very well that you can’t do that, because the logic that went into Romneycare in Massachusetts is the same as the logic behind Obamacare.
Suppose you want to guarantee that insurance is available to people with pre-existing conditions. Well, you can establish community rating, requiring that insurance companies make the same policies available to everyone. But if you stop there, you know what will happen: healthy people will opt out, leaving behind a high-risk, high-cost pool.
So you have to also have a mandate, requiring that people buy insurance. And you can’t do that without subsidies, so that lower-income people can afford their policies.
The inexorable logic of the situation, then, leads to a three-legged stool of community rating + mandate + subsidies = ObamaRomneycare.
So, does Romney think we’re stupid? Hey, he also thinks we’ll buy into his promises to slash taxes by $5 trillion but make up the revenue by closing unspecified loopholes in a way that doesn’t raise taxes on the middle class – which turns out to be arithmetically impossible. So the answer is, yes, he thinks we’re stupid.
.
Revenge of the Three-Legged Stool
Another day, another Romney whopper. Now he says that he’ll keep the good parts of Obamacare, in particular coverage for people with pre-existing conditions, while scrapping the rest.
You can’t do that – and Romney knows very well that you can’t do that, because the logic that went into Romneycare in Massachusetts is the same as the logic behind Obamacare.
Suppose you want to guarantee that insurance is available to people with pre-existing conditions. Well, you can establish community rating, requiring that insurance companies make the same policies available to everyone. But if you stop there, you know what will happen: healthy people will opt out, leaving behind a high-risk, high-cost pool.
So you have to also have a mandate, requiring that people buy insurance. And you can’t do that without subsidies, so that lower-income people can afford their policies.
The inexorable logic of the situation, then, leads to a three-legged stool of community rating + mandate + subsidies = ObamaRomneycare.
So, does Romney think we’re stupid? Hey, he also thinks we’ll buy into his promises to slash taxes by $5 trillion but make up the revenue by closing unspecified loopholes in a way that doesn’t raise taxes on the middle class – which turns out to be arithmetically impossible. So the answer is, yes, he thinks we’re stupid.
.
Sunday, September 9, 2012
Remember What Bill Says
In his autobiography Bill Clinton points out one significant fact of progressive politics: the country can absorb only so much change at once. The historical Progressive Era was an anomaly with so much change in a relatively short period of time. Meaning: Progressives should be happy with what the President has accomplished so far. Expectations were unrealistic to start with. Change is especially slow in this Tea Party country.
Saturday, September 8, 2012
Robert Reich - Beyond Outrage
In this slim book Reich, Bill Clinton's former Sec. Of Labor and now professor at Berkeley, has a simple thesis. The basic economic problem in this country is increasing inequality, which erodes middle class purchasing power, which is why the economic recovery is so slow. The middle class is not spending which means that businesses are not expanding and hiring. The middle class is being squeezed as economic gains go mostly to the rich. If Romney wins, things will only get worse as the Republicans are interested in cutting taxes for the rich.
Off and Running
The presidential race begins in earnest. It all comes down to turnout in the so-called swing states. Both sides know which are the swing states. The burden is heavier for Romney. He needs more of the swing states than Obama.
Thursday, September 6, 2012
Bill Brings It
Bill Clinton Brings a Passion Infusion to the DNC
by Howard Kurtz Sep 5, 2012 11:30 PM EDT
The former president fused folksiness and wonkiness in boosting his successor. Howard Kurtz on how he made the case that Obama struggles to make for himself.
Bill Clinton, riding to the rescue of his Democratic successor, delivered an entertaining tour de force Wednesday night, saying the Republicans had created a “total mess” that Barack Obama is still cleaning up.
“If you want a you’re-on-your-own, winner-take-all society, you should support the Republican ticket,” Clinton said. “If you want a country of shared prosperity and shared responsibility—we’re-all-in-this-together society—you should vote for Barack Obama and Joe Biden.”
With one line, Clinton both acknowledged and neutralized Obama’s natural reserve, as a leader “who’s cool on the outside but who burns for America on the inside.”
And by the way, Clinton got so wound up that he went long—not that anyone in the crowd was complaining. Even some conservatives on Twitter called it a great speech.
It was an extraordinary spectacle on the second night of the convention, with a once-impeached president trying to transfer some of his late-in-life popularity to the man who defeated his wife four years ago—and actually placed his name in nomination.
Whether out of conviction or political convenience, Clinton demonstrated anew a skill that Obama barely possesses, to translate complex policy arguments into simple human terms. And his starpower also guaranteed maximum media attention on the evening after Michelle Obama drew praise for her highly personal speech.
Teeing up the Charlotte crowd were Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown law student who briefly gained fame when Rush Limbaugh called her a slur, and Elizabeth Warren, a liberal hero who is nonetheless trailing Scott Brown in the Massachusetts Senate race.
Clinton’s value to Obama, beyond his rhetorical gifts, rests on the positive memories stirred by his eight years of peace and prosperity. That record was badly marred by his sexual hijinks with Monica Lewinsky, which led Republicans to try to drive him out of office. But as that scandal has receded into history, the balanced budgets and welfare reform he forged with the Gingrich Republicans look pretty good compared to today’s bitter Beltway paralysis.
Former Clinton and Obama aide Rahm Emanuel, now Chicago’s mayor, drew the analogy in an interview, saying a Democratic victory would force Republicans to come to the table as they did in Clinton’s second term.
“Heck, he appointed Hillary!”
The 42nd president of the United States Bill Clinton makes a point during his address at the Time Warner Cable Arena in Charlotte on Sept. 5, 2012, the second day of the Democratic National Convention (Robyn Beck / Getty Images)
With former Clintonites roaming the streets of Charlotte—Terry McAuliffe, Joe Lockhart, Harold Ickes—the night served as both a 20th anniversary of the man’s election and his reemergence as more than a Cabinet spouse with a cool global foundation.
What Clinton brought to the stage was the politics of joy, a performer with a playful sense of humor who revels in and draws strength from the crowd.
He deftly ridiculed the shift in the GOP by recalling how he worked with Republicans both in the White House and his post-presidency. “I actually never learned to hate them the way the far right that now controls their party seems to hate our president,” Clinton said.
And who else could wave off the tensions of 2008, when Obama aides believed Clinton was making a borderline racist appeal, by noting that the president had put several Hillary aides in the Cabinet—“Heck, he appointed Hillary!”
Did I mention he went long? Too long, closing in on an hour, crashing past the 11 p.m. deadline, refusing to stop until he had beat the viewing audience into submission. By the end Clinton was spewing statistics, as he did in those State of the Union marathons, and losing rhetorical steam. But he didn’t care. This was his moment, and he wasn’t going quietly. Clinton ensured that reviews of a boffo speech would morph into reviews of an endless speech.
It was a wonky speech at times, more theater than dramatic oration, a classic Clintonian riff. Whether it helps Obama repeat the Clinton feat of winning a second term is far from clear. But as Bubba is wont to do, he sucked up all the oxygen in the room.
About Bill's Speech
HA! The speech was too long only if you were a Republican.
The Huffington Post
By Rebecca Shapiro Posted: 09/05/2012 11:37 pm Updated: 09/06/2012 1:36 am
.Follow: Bill Clinton, Video, 2012 Democratic National Convention, 2012 Democratic National Convention Media Coverage, Bill Clinton DNC Speech, Bill Clinton Democratic National Convention, Bill Clinton Dnc Speech Media Coverage, Democratic National Convention Media Coverage, Dnc Media Coverage, Media Coverage Dnc, Media News . Media figures gave President Bill Clinton their seals of approval on Wednesday night after he energetically supported President Barack Obama as the Democratic Party's nominee for president of the United States, though some pointed out that he did seem to talk for a long time.
Clinton took the stage shortly after 10:30 p.m. in Charlotte, North Carolina, and spoke for well over 40 minutes. He continued speaking into the 11:00 p.m. hour, causing CBS and ABC to delay their local news broadcasts (NBC aired football instead of the second night of the DNC).
Immediately following the speech, the praise started pouring in. Wolf Blitzer led the pack on CNN. "I've been watching this president...going back to 1992 when I was CNN's White House correspondent," he said. "This may have been the best speech I have ever heard Bill Clinton deliver over all these years."
GOP strategist and CNN pundit Alex Castellanos said that Clinton's speech tilted the scale. "Tonight when everybody leaves, lock the door. You don't have to come back tomorrow. This convention is done. This will be the moment that probably re-elected Barack Obama," he said.
Fox News' Brit Hume said that Bill Clinton "is the most talented politician [he's] ever covered and the most charming man [he's] ever met." He added, "No one in my view can frame an argument more effectively than he can."
Hume also said that the speech was "convincing" but "a little self-indulgent, and about thirty percent too long," which he described as "par for the course for Clinton."
Anderson Cooper commented on the unexpected specificity in Clinton's speech. "The level of detail in the speech was quite surprising...and yet there was a personability," he said. Paul Begala, a Clinton confidante, said on CNN: "I don't know anybody else that can be as substantive and yet as riveting."
MSNBC's Chris Matthews made it clear that he thought Clinton did what he needed to do. "Bill Clinton came in and beat up the other side...he hit them hard where they were weak," he said. "I wouldn't want to be the guy fighting Bill Clinton if the issue is Barack Obama." Andrea Mitchell called it an "extraordinary speech."
While Clinton's delivery was heavily praised, the length of the speech was used as a point of criticism. Pundits were quick to comment on the length of Clinton's speech as the former president consistently riffed off his prepared remarks, making the speech last longer than originally anticipated.
Fox News hosts had several remarks about the running time. Bret Baier immediately noted that Clinton spoke for nearly 50 minutes. Megyn Kelly said that the crowd "ate up" Clinton's remarks, but also quickly commented on the length. Charles Krauthammer opined that the speech would not "move the needle" a bit, and said Clinton probably spoke for so long as revenge for the 2008 presidential campaign.
CNN's John King also mentioned the speech's length, saying, "Like every Clinton speech, it could use an editor."
The Huffington Post
By Rebecca Shapiro Posted: 09/05/2012 11:37 pm Updated: 09/06/2012 1:36 am
.Follow: Bill Clinton, Video, 2012 Democratic National Convention, 2012 Democratic National Convention Media Coverage, Bill Clinton DNC Speech, Bill Clinton Democratic National Convention, Bill Clinton Dnc Speech Media Coverage, Democratic National Convention Media Coverage, Dnc Media Coverage, Media Coverage Dnc, Media News . Media figures gave President Bill Clinton their seals of approval on Wednesday night after he energetically supported President Barack Obama as the Democratic Party's nominee for president of the United States, though some pointed out that he did seem to talk for a long time.
Clinton took the stage shortly after 10:30 p.m. in Charlotte, North Carolina, and spoke for well over 40 minutes. He continued speaking into the 11:00 p.m. hour, causing CBS and ABC to delay their local news broadcasts (NBC aired football instead of the second night of the DNC).
Immediately following the speech, the praise started pouring in. Wolf Blitzer led the pack on CNN. "I've been watching this president...going back to 1992 when I was CNN's White House correspondent," he said. "This may have been the best speech I have ever heard Bill Clinton deliver over all these years."
GOP strategist and CNN pundit Alex Castellanos said that Clinton's speech tilted the scale. "Tonight when everybody leaves, lock the door. You don't have to come back tomorrow. This convention is done. This will be the moment that probably re-elected Barack Obama," he said.
Fox News' Brit Hume said that Bill Clinton "is the most talented politician [he's] ever covered and the most charming man [he's] ever met." He added, "No one in my view can frame an argument more effectively than he can."
Hume also said that the speech was "convincing" but "a little self-indulgent, and about thirty percent too long," which he described as "par for the course for Clinton."
Anderson Cooper commented on the unexpected specificity in Clinton's speech. "The level of detail in the speech was quite surprising...and yet there was a personability," he said. Paul Begala, a Clinton confidante, said on CNN: "I don't know anybody else that can be as substantive and yet as riveting."
MSNBC's Chris Matthews made it clear that he thought Clinton did what he needed to do. "Bill Clinton came in and beat up the other side...he hit them hard where they were weak," he said. "I wouldn't want to be the guy fighting Bill Clinton if the issue is Barack Obama." Andrea Mitchell called it an "extraordinary speech."
While Clinton's delivery was heavily praised, the length of the speech was used as a point of criticism. Pundits were quick to comment on the length of Clinton's speech as the former president consistently riffed off his prepared remarks, making the speech last longer than originally anticipated.
Fox News hosts had several remarks about the running time. Bret Baier immediately noted that Clinton spoke for nearly 50 minutes. Megyn Kelly said that the crowd "ate up" Clinton's remarks, but also quickly commented on the length. Charles Krauthammer opined that the speech would not "move the needle" a bit, and said Clinton probably spoke for so long as revenge for the 2008 presidential campaign.
CNN's John King also mentioned the speech's length, saying, "Like every Clinton speech, it could use an editor."
Bill
I did watch Bill Clinton's speech, and it is the most electrifying political speech I have ever heard. It's too bad he can't run again, for he would be nominationd by acclimation and he would absolutely destryoy Mitt Romney and the Republicans. Tell the truth. This is all the Democrats have to do, and Bill Clilnton can tell the simple truth like no other politican in my lifetime.
Wednesday, September 5, 2012
Michelle
I've read about Michelle Obama's dazzling speech at the convention. The truth is that Democratic women are intellectually superior to Republican women. Think about Michelle, Hillary. and Eleanor Roosevelt, and then consider Ann Romney. Case closed.
Tuesday, September 4, 2012
It's Good to See
That the mainstream media is finally seeing Paul Ryan for what he is---a bald-faced liar. The President needs to tell the American people this week exactly what Romney and Ryan will try to do if elected. If that message gets across, Obama should win easily. It won't be easy, though, no mattter what. I just can't understand anybody voting for those scoundrels who knows the truth.
Monday, September 3, 2012
Even Though
I am a Democrat I shall not watch the Democratic convention. The stress is too great. I'll get worked up enough before it's all over.
Sunday, September 2, 2012
Alan Brinkley - John F. Kennedy
The acclaimed historian Alan Brinkley has his go at President Kennedy in this concise biography of the 33rd President in the series of presidential biographies edited over the years by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. and Sean Wilentz. The result is a rather dry but handy reference to the life of JFK.
There is nothing new in this book. The major events of Kennedy's life are summarized in fine fashion. My interest was sparked by a recent trip to Dallas and a visit to the (in)famous 6th floor museum tribute to the fallen chief executive.
Republicans tout a theme these days of "we built it." Yes, we can admire JFK's relentless drive to the presidency. overcoming incredible medical problems, his personal courage and accomplishments. You can't help but admire his ambition overcoming such physical pain over his lifetime. At the same time, he had a millionare father who bankrolled his every move. He didn't do it alone. JFK was perhaps the perfect example of what money can do to make a politician successful in this country. JFK was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and his father kept sticking additional silver spoons in his mouth.
Historians will debate forever his rank in the presidential pecking order. As Camelot continues to fade over the decades, realistic appraisals will take hold. Who knows how JFK will rank in the coming decades.
Final conclusion: this book is dry but a serviceable summary of JFK's life.
There is nothing new in this book. The major events of Kennedy's life are summarized in fine fashion. My interest was sparked by a recent trip to Dallas and a visit to the (in)famous 6th floor museum tribute to the fallen chief executive.
Republicans tout a theme these days of "we built it." Yes, we can admire JFK's relentless drive to the presidency. overcoming incredible medical problems, his personal courage and accomplishments. You can't help but admire his ambition overcoming such physical pain over his lifetime. At the same time, he had a millionare father who bankrolled his every move. He didn't do it alone. JFK was perhaps the perfect example of what money can do to make a politician successful in this country. JFK was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and his father kept sticking additional silver spoons in his mouth.
Historians will debate forever his rank in the presidential pecking order. As Camelot continues to fade over the decades, realistic appraisals will take hold. Who knows how JFK will rank in the coming decades.
Final conclusion: this book is dry but a serviceable summary of JFK's life.
Saturday, September 1, 2012
Will They Get Away with It?
.The Medicare KillersBy PAUL KRUGMAN
Paul Ryan’s speech Wednesday night may have accomplished one good thing: It finally may have dispelled the myth that he is a Serious, Honest Conservative. Indeed, Mr. Ryan’s brazen dishonesty left even his critics breathless.
Some of his fibs were trivial but telling, like his suggestion that President Obama is responsible for a closed auto plant in his hometown, even though the plant closed before Mr. Obama took office. Others were infuriating, like his sanctimonious declaration that “the truest measure of any society is how it treats those who cannot defend or care for themselves.” This from a man proposing savage cuts in Medicaid, which would cause tens of millions of vulnerable Americans to lose health coverage.
And Mr. Ryan — who has proposed $4.3 trillion in tax cuts over the next decade, versus only about $1.7 trillion in specific spending cuts — is still posing as a deficit hawk.
But Mr. Ryan’s big lie — and, yes, it deserves that designation — was his claim that “a Romney-Ryan administration will protect and strengthen Medicare.” Actually, it would kill the program.
Before I get there, let me just mention that Mr. Ryan has now gone all-in on the party line that the president’s plan to trim Medicare expenses by around $700 billion over the next decade — savings achieved by paying less to insurance companies and hospitals, not by reducing benefits — is a terrible, terrible thing. Yet, just a few days ago, Mr. Ryan was still touting his own budget plan, which included those very same savings.
But back to the big lie. The Republican Party is now firmly committed to replacing Medicare with what we might call Vouchercare. The government would no longer pay your major medical bills; instead, it would give you a voucher that could be applied to the purchase of private insurance. And, if the voucher proved insufficient to buy decent coverage, hey, that would be your problem.
Moreover, the vouchers almost certainly would be inadequate; their value would be set by a formula taking no account of likely increases in health care costs.
Why would anyone think that this was a good idea? The G.O.P. platform says that it “will empower millions of seniors to control their personal health care decisions.” Indeed. Because those of us too young for Medicare just feel so personally empowered, you know, when dealing with insurance companies.
Still, wouldn’t private insurers reduce costs through the magic of the marketplace? No. All, and I mean all, the evidence says that public systems like Medicare and Medicaid, which have less bureaucracy than private insurers (if you can’t believe this, you’ve never had to deal with an insurance company) and greater bargaining power, are better than the private sector at controlling costs.
I know this flies in the face of free-market dogma, but it’s just a fact. You can see this fact in the history of Medicare Advantage, which is run through private insurers and has consistently had higher costs than traditional Medicare. You can see it from comparisons between Medicaid and private insurance: Medicaid costs much less. And you can see it in international comparisons: The United States has the most privatized health system in the advanced world and, by far, the highest health costs.
So Vouchercare would mean higher costs and lower benefits for seniors. Over time, the Republican plan wouldn’t just end Medicare as we know it, it would kill the thing Medicare is supposed to provide: universal access to essential care. Seniors who couldn’t afford to top up their vouchers with a lot of additional money would just be out of luck.
Still, the G.O.P. promises to maintain Medicare as we know it for those currently over 55. Should everyone born before 1957 feel safe? Again, no.
For one thing, repeal of Obamacare would cause older Americans to lose a number of significant benefits that the law provides, including the way it closes the “doughnut hole” in drug coverage and the way it protects early retirees.
Beyond that, the promise of unchanged benefits for Americans of a certain age just isn’t credible. Think about the political dynamics that would arise once someone born in 1956 still received full Medicare while someone born in 1959 couldn’t afford decent coverage. Do you really think that would be a stable situation? For sure, it would unleash political warfare between the cohorts — and the odds are high that older cohorts would soon find their alleged guarantees snatched away.
The question now is whether voters will understand what’s really going on (which depends to a large extent on whether the news media do their jobs). Mr. Ryan and his party are betting that they can bluster their way through this, pretending that they are the real defenders of Medicare even as they work to kill it. Will they get away with it?
Paul Ryan’s speech Wednesday night may have accomplished one good thing: It finally may have dispelled the myth that he is a Serious, Honest Conservative. Indeed, Mr. Ryan’s brazen dishonesty left even his critics breathless.
Some of his fibs were trivial but telling, like his suggestion that President Obama is responsible for a closed auto plant in his hometown, even though the plant closed before Mr. Obama took office. Others were infuriating, like his sanctimonious declaration that “the truest measure of any society is how it treats those who cannot defend or care for themselves.” This from a man proposing savage cuts in Medicaid, which would cause tens of millions of vulnerable Americans to lose health coverage.
And Mr. Ryan — who has proposed $4.3 trillion in tax cuts over the next decade, versus only about $1.7 trillion in specific spending cuts — is still posing as a deficit hawk.
But Mr. Ryan’s big lie — and, yes, it deserves that designation — was his claim that “a Romney-Ryan administration will protect and strengthen Medicare.” Actually, it would kill the program.
Before I get there, let me just mention that Mr. Ryan has now gone all-in on the party line that the president’s plan to trim Medicare expenses by around $700 billion over the next decade — savings achieved by paying less to insurance companies and hospitals, not by reducing benefits — is a terrible, terrible thing. Yet, just a few days ago, Mr. Ryan was still touting his own budget plan, which included those very same savings.
But back to the big lie. The Republican Party is now firmly committed to replacing Medicare with what we might call Vouchercare. The government would no longer pay your major medical bills; instead, it would give you a voucher that could be applied to the purchase of private insurance. And, if the voucher proved insufficient to buy decent coverage, hey, that would be your problem.
Moreover, the vouchers almost certainly would be inadequate; their value would be set by a formula taking no account of likely increases in health care costs.
Why would anyone think that this was a good idea? The G.O.P. platform says that it “will empower millions of seniors to control their personal health care decisions.” Indeed. Because those of us too young for Medicare just feel so personally empowered, you know, when dealing with insurance companies.
Still, wouldn’t private insurers reduce costs through the magic of the marketplace? No. All, and I mean all, the evidence says that public systems like Medicare and Medicaid, which have less bureaucracy than private insurers (if you can’t believe this, you’ve never had to deal with an insurance company) and greater bargaining power, are better than the private sector at controlling costs.
I know this flies in the face of free-market dogma, but it’s just a fact. You can see this fact in the history of Medicare Advantage, which is run through private insurers and has consistently had higher costs than traditional Medicare. You can see it from comparisons between Medicaid and private insurance: Medicaid costs much less. And you can see it in international comparisons: The United States has the most privatized health system in the advanced world and, by far, the highest health costs.
So Vouchercare would mean higher costs and lower benefits for seniors. Over time, the Republican plan wouldn’t just end Medicare as we know it, it would kill the thing Medicare is supposed to provide: universal access to essential care. Seniors who couldn’t afford to top up their vouchers with a lot of additional money would just be out of luck.
Still, the G.O.P. promises to maintain Medicare as we know it for those currently over 55. Should everyone born before 1957 feel safe? Again, no.
For one thing, repeal of Obamacare would cause older Americans to lose a number of significant benefits that the law provides, including the way it closes the “doughnut hole” in drug coverage and the way it protects early retirees.
Beyond that, the promise of unchanged benefits for Americans of a certain age just isn’t credible. Think about the political dynamics that would arise once someone born in 1956 still received full Medicare while someone born in 1959 couldn’t afford decent coverage. Do you really think that would be a stable situation? For sure, it would unleash political warfare between the cohorts — and the odds are high that older cohorts would soon find their alleged guarantees snatched away.
The question now is whether voters will understand what’s really going on (which depends to a large extent on whether the news media do their jobs). Mr. Ryan and his party are betting that they can bluster their way through this, pretending that they are the real defenders of Medicare even as they work to kill it. Will they get away with it?
A Labor Day Message
.Robert Reich.Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy, University of California at Berkeley; Author, 'Beyond Outrage'
It's Inequality, Stupid
Posted: 08/31/2012 8:29 am React Inspiring
The most troubling economic trend facing America this Labor Day weekend is the increasing concentration of income, wealth, and political power at the very top -- among a handful of extraordinarily wealthy people -- and the steady decline of the great American middle class.
Inequality in America is at record levels. The 400 richest Americans now have more wealth than the bottom 150 million of us put together.
Republicans claim the rich are job creators. Nothing could be further from the truth. In order to create jobs, businesses need customers. But the rich spend only a small fraction of what they earn. They park most of it wherever around the world they can get the highest return.
The real job creators are the vast middle class, whose spending drives the economy and creates jobs.
But as the middle class's share of total income continues to drop, it cannot spend as much as before. Nor can most Americans borrow as they did before the crash of 2008 -- borrowing that temporarily masked their declining purchasing power.
As a result, businesses are reluctant to hire. This is the main reason why the recovery has been so anemic.
As wealth and income rise to the top, moreover, so does political power. The rich are able to entrench themselves by lowering their taxes, gaining special tax breaks (such as the "carried interest" loophole allowing private equity and hedge fund managers to treat their incomes as capital gains), and ensuring a steady flow of corporate welfare to their businesses (special breaks for oil and gas, big agriculture, big insurance, Big Pharma, and, of course, Wall Street).
All of this squeezes public budgets, corrupts government, and undermines our democracy. The issue isn't the size of our government; it's who our government is for. It has become less responsive to the needs of most citizens and more to the demands of a comparative few.
The Republican response -- as we saw dramatically articulated this past week in Tampa -- is to further reduce taxes on the rich, defund programs for the poor, fight unions, allow the median wage to continue to fall, and oppose any limits on campaign contributions or spending.
It does not take a great deal of brainpower to understand this strategy will lead to an even more lopsided economy, more entrenched wealth, and more corrupt democracy.
The question of the moment is whether next week President Obama will make a bold and powerful rejoinder. If he and the Democratic Party stand for anything, it must be to reverse this disastrous trend.
It's Inequality, Stupid
Posted: 08/31/2012 8:29 am React Inspiring
The most troubling economic trend facing America this Labor Day weekend is the increasing concentration of income, wealth, and political power at the very top -- among a handful of extraordinarily wealthy people -- and the steady decline of the great American middle class.
Inequality in America is at record levels. The 400 richest Americans now have more wealth than the bottom 150 million of us put together.
Republicans claim the rich are job creators. Nothing could be further from the truth. In order to create jobs, businesses need customers. But the rich spend only a small fraction of what they earn. They park most of it wherever around the world they can get the highest return.
The real job creators are the vast middle class, whose spending drives the economy and creates jobs.
But as the middle class's share of total income continues to drop, it cannot spend as much as before. Nor can most Americans borrow as they did before the crash of 2008 -- borrowing that temporarily masked their declining purchasing power.
As a result, businesses are reluctant to hire. This is the main reason why the recovery has been so anemic.
As wealth and income rise to the top, moreover, so does political power. The rich are able to entrench themselves by lowering their taxes, gaining special tax breaks (such as the "carried interest" loophole allowing private equity and hedge fund managers to treat their incomes as capital gains), and ensuring a steady flow of corporate welfare to their businesses (special breaks for oil and gas, big agriculture, big insurance, Big Pharma, and, of course, Wall Street).
All of this squeezes public budgets, corrupts government, and undermines our democracy. The issue isn't the size of our government; it's who our government is for. It has become less responsive to the needs of most citizens and more to the demands of a comparative few.
The Republican response -- as we saw dramatically articulated this past week in Tampa -- is to further reduce taxes on the rich, defund programs for the poor, fight unions, allow the median wage to continue to fall, and oppose any limits on campaign contributions or spending.
It does not take a great deal of brainpower to understand this strategy will lead to an even more lopsided economy, more entrenched wealth, and more corrupt democracy.
The question of the moment is whether next week President Obama will make a bold and powerful rejoinder. If he and the Democratic Party stand for anything, it must be to reverse this disastrous trend.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)