Morning Fog

Getting Real

Politicians now show some signs of facing reality regarding our debt/spending crisis --  but for most, it's still too soon to stop posturing and start proposing.  That will get going in earnest about December 20, probably.  Congress is a congregation of 535 Last-Minute Louies.

Interest groups at this stage are showing even less willingness to get real.  "Don't tax (or cut) you, don't tax (or cut) me - tax that fellow behind the tree," as the old saying goes.  Every expenditure - the mortgage deduction, the lower tax rates on dividends, existing benefits for individuals, the military budget, corporate welfare ... all these, if you listen to their proponents, are indispensable and will be defended to the death.  Let's hope that every one of these groups will be disappointed in their attempt to keep all their piece of pie while everyone else gives up a bite.  It won't work otherwise.

One proposal for reducing our spending on entitlements is to tie federal cost-of-living adjustments to a new yardstick known as the "chained" CPI.  As the Washington Post explains, compared to the "regular" CPI, this measurement produces somewhat lower figures for annual inflation (about three-tenths of one percent lower), meaning that all social security beneficiaries and federal retirees would get slightly lower rates of increase in future BUT our government would be reducing expenditure by about $300 billion over ten years.        

Those who benefit from the CoLA will complain if this change is made.  They might say that the current CPI itself doesn't truly keep pace with inflation, because it measures the wrong things, is calculated after inflation has already taken place (a sort of de-compounding effect), and is usually reduced by Congress for political reasons. Also, the chained CPI turns out lower estimates of inflation because it postulates that when prices go up, people substitute lower-priced alternatives for some goods, which isn't really true for the basics that retirees must buy.  (Shortly after my retirement, the price of natural gas for home heating just about doubled within two years.)

Those objections are all basically true, yet the effect on benefits would amount to only about thirty cents less per hundred -  $99.70 instead of $100.  Frankly, nobody is going to driven into starvation by that.  

As a former Fed, I don't receive social security but I do receive in retirement an "annuity," for which I contributed 7% of my pre-tax income, and that annuity has a cost-of-living adjustment based on the CPI.  Yes, I would lose something from a switch to the chained CPI, but I say, even to have a CoLA is a significant benefit.  Maybe not perfect, but certainly better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, as my pappy used to say. And changing it in this small way is, to my mind, entirely reasonable. 

Let's all get real in assessing how change will affect us.

 

 

SuperPACs Pack Up After The Election

I think nearly everyone who has a phone or television must be pleased with the immediate disappearance, by about midnight on November 2, of all those political messages.    It's as if we the people took our airwaves back, the same way some politicians and media personalities wanted to "take their country back."  

Except that we succeeded, they didn't.  Despite record spending by super-PACs in this election, about 70-80% of it in favor of Republican candidates (or more accurately, against Democratic candidates), it wasn't enough to sway the voters decisively toward the candidates they wanted.  Should we then be complacent about the effects of the Supreme Court's infamous "Citizens United" decision?

Probably not.  First, we don't really know how many voters were influenced by all those negative ads, we only know that not enough were.   (Although when you look at the other major negatives piled up against Obama, we can intuit that nowhere near enough were.)

Second, the main candidate who was supposed to benefit from Republican superPAC spending, Romney, was a man without a compass, and unlikable to boot.  Next time, the candidate the moguls choose to support may be more simpático. 

And third, this being the first real chance for a superPAC blowout, they were unpracticed.  Both their methods and their actual ads were crude.  Leaving aside the fact they were uniformly negative on both sides, they also tended to make outlandish and incredible claims, shouting "it's true!" (literally) to emphasize their patently false charges.  Over time, though, we can expect the PACmeisters to refine their methods and their message. 

"Citizens United" remains a potential danger to democracy, particularly as long as the propagandists are permitted to remain anonymous.  Let's have them make the same statement as the candidates do:  "I'm Rodney Rabid, and I approved this message."

Petty Pediatric Politics

Heard the latest?  Mitt thinks that he lost the election because Obama gave goodies to key constituencies; oh, and also because of that gosh-darn hurricane.   Recriminations and post-election analysis are natural and necessary, but serious people will look to examine their own failings.   Romney thinks people didn't understand him?  I think they understood him all too well.  It's amazing that after his defeat he could be so childish as to blame it on exogenous factors, or to stick by his attitude that  "47%" of Americans are worthless bums.   These recent statements, coupled with his complete lack of principle in switching policy during the campaign from day to day, deepen my conviction that the country dodged a bullet in not electing Romney.  

Equally puerile are the grousing of Senators McCain and Graham concerning the non-incident in Benghazi.   We who served as diplomats overseas know well that there is, and can be, no absolute security, and that in a siege situation, things on the ground aren't always crystal clear (the military gets by calling it "the fog of war").  McCain and Graham know these things too.  I don't believe there is any "story" here, nothing with which to embarrass the President, and the idea that officials would purposely label a terrorist attack as a spontaneous mob demonstration is ridiculous - how would that benefit them?  Recall that when the first plane struck one of the twin towers on September 11, 2001, many people thought - and reported - that it was a terrible accident.  

I guess the testiness on Obama and Graham's parts just reflects the residual effects of the bitterness of the campaign, but It doesn't serve them well; more important, it doesn't serve us well.  Why not focus on something serious?

Both attitudes - Romney and the two Senators - lessen my optimism that agreement can be reached on avoiding the fiscal cliff.  Success in that, or anything else, will depend on senior and supposedly responsible Republicans acting like adults to address problems, rather than refighting an election they already lost.  Can they bring themselves to do so?  Can Boehner and the House lead the way in this?   

Defense of Kerry? Kerry of Defense?

We've been hearing noises since about an hour after the election that Obama might be looking to nominate former Presidential candidate and current Senator John Kerry as our next SecDef.  Now this rumor is getting legitimized.

I can't help but think that would be a big mistake in several ways.

OK, Kerry may be one of the few people in the upper circle of the Democratic Party to have served in the military; he may have been unfairly and incorrectly savaged by the prevaricating "Swiftboats" crew, and appointing him may be politically convenient (the Democratic majority in the Senate is secure, and there's a good chance Massachusetts would elect another Democrat in a couple of years to take his place, anyway - though maybe the moderate Republican Brown wouldn't be a bad thing either).

But he's just the wrong guy. Justifiably or not, his appointment would rankle with the military; he would likely start in a hole with the uniforms and be in constant battles for legitimacy.  To appoint him certainly does not scream "bipartisan," so he would probably face a bruising (and perhaps unsuccessful) nomination battle.  Nor does he give any appearance of being a decisive manager, or the kind of hardass that could give the brass as good as they give.

Kerry himself is right to prefer Secstate.  I suspect he's wise enough to turn down the Secdef offer, if it's extended.  Get somebody else for Secdef.  McCain?

On the less serious side, that last thought raises some other interesting bipartisan possibilities.  How about Romney himself as a jobs czar? Republicans hated "czars" four years ago but philosophically, they should applaud the concept.  Mitt could set about creating those 12 million jobs out of whole cloth, much the way Jesus did that thing with the wine.

Election Chaff

A lot is being written about the recent U.S. presidential election -- analyzing the results, looking at how Republicans are dealing with their disillusionment, prescribing how the administration now should deal with the problems facing the nation. At this point it would be hard, I thought, to add anything to the blizzard of words, so it seemed a good time for a general political blogger like me to sit back for a few days and watch the chaff float down, just as the last leaves are blizzarding down off the trees in today's rain and wind.

But like the leaves, which can smother my grass seed and prevent it from sprouting, chaff is a threat too if we don't recognize it and discard it. 

Foremost among the chaff on the ground are special interest group pleadings.  No affinity group - African Americans, tea-party goers, seniors organizations, Latinos, LGTBs, religion-firsters, big pharma, big money, big oil - has not been heard from by now, espousing its own self-focused take on how to proceed.  Yesterday I even caught a television ad from some environmental group, suggesting that as voters had "clearly chosen" the ecologically green path, it was time to get busy...never mind that climate change and environment were scarcely mentioned by either candidate during the election campaign!

All these approaches have the same fatal flaw in that they fail to consider the whole picture; their piecemeal patches just lead to further fragmentation.  For what many think is our most urgent issue, the fiscal cliff, I'd suggest that the Simpson-Bowles recommendations are among the few "solutions" that was comprehensive and fair enough to be workable.  They are a good place to start.

Politically, I've already noted that the stern pronunciamentos of political leaders, to the effect that one idea or another is "off the table" or "completely non-negotiable," are more chaff.  UItimately, if they're at all serious about reaching a solution, everything is going to have to be on the table.  Pronunciamentos will have no place there, except as a little snack for the participants, roasted with a little olive oil and garlic.

Another category is the futile acts of paltry people.  For example, in commentary on the Washington Post web page yesterday, I noticed a few people extending the "hope" that Obama might still be impeached - over Benghazi, or all things!  I added my view that the only President since at least FDR who might truly deserve impeachment - George W. Bush - had somehow escaped it, probably because today's Democrats aren't as desperate or vindictive as today's Republicans.

The Washington Post reports that a number of petitions have been filed on the White House website for various states' secession from the union.  The internet makes it much simpler for such empty gestures of protest to gather steam, especially with the help of irresponsible politicians like Texas Governor Perry (who talked about secession but backed away) and Tennessee Representative Zach Wamp (who apparently is not a character from a Faulkner novel, but a real person who didn't back away).  We may judge these efforts by the company they keep:  other recent petitions on the site have been for legalization of marijuana and to obtain the White House beer recipe. 

It might be preferable if these hecklers could relax, realize the sky really hasn't fallen, and spare their time for considering constructive contributions.  Dream on.  So, failing that, they may want to consider the same kind of solution they have recommended in the past for others: self-deportation.  For life in a society where traditional values hold sway, I recommend Saudi Arabia.     

Until this all passes, we might expect a sudden burst of chaffinches.  The chaffinch is a bird so named because it picks up and eats chaff. As it turns out, curiously but with impeccable political correctness, it's a bird with both reddish and bluish parts. 

The Cliffhanger

We're told that political Washington's agenda now must be to resolve the "fiscal cliff," the Rube Goldberg arrangement that Congress set in place to force resolution of a problem (the deficit) they couldn't solve at the time.

What are the odds they can fix it now?   I hope they can; I assume they will come up with something because the stakes are high; and I think chances are pretty good - not because stakes are high but because individuals' and political parties' reputations and futures are on the line.

The two key players, Boehner and Obama, are realistic politicians who can get the job done, but each of them will have to convince his backbenchers of the need for compromise.  Boehner has the harder job here; he especially will have to put up a tough public front for the extremists in the back seat. 

Neither side is ready yet for serious discussion. It will take some time for them to come to grips with reality, so anything said up to now should probably be ignored as pure posturing.  Yet time is short, only about 50 days now -- less time than it usually takes Congress just to decide to order coffee. 

The President will have some concession to make, but most likely those he offered before, for savings and cuts in entitlements (which the Republicans rejected at the time).  I don't think Boehner can escape at least some small increase in "taxes on the rich," even if a token one (or a higher amount of income subject to tax may do the trick).  But Boehner is right in one respect:  Presidential leadership is needed.     

 

Not Everyone Resets After The Election

It's just a few days after the U.S. presidential election, an event that is causing many in politics and elsewhere to reset their suppositions for the future.  That's true even of the winner, Obama, who will have to chart a course somewhat independent of his campaign rhetoric, and of House Speaker Boehner, who will gain in power within his own party.  But there are some interesting cases of folks that don't have to, or haven't see a need to, adjust.  

I had always thought that members of Congress who wanted to run for national office had to resign their seats.  Apparently not, because Paul Ryan was reelected to his on Tuesday.  He could have resigned, though.  No need for him to reset anything; in fact his failure to resign gives us a clear indication of what he thought the chances of Romney-Ryan were.

I don't suppose Romney sees a need to reset, because he seems programmed to do so approximately every two weeks anyway. The tea party clique blames poor Mitt for their loss -- he was just too darned liberal!  Too bad the election wasn't two weeks earlier (or later), when he would have been representing an entirely different portfolio of policies.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell greeted the news of Obama's win with a statement that said, in effect, that the people had only given the President more time to work out a deal on the Republicans' terms.  Mitch did allow as how the GOP would meet him halfway.  But Mitch's gang moved so far right that by the election it seemed they might be planning to attack the President from the left.  "Halfway" would represent somewhere at the table with the tea-party kooks; the GOP will have to come much farther than that.  The aging McConnell should recuse himself from leadership in the Senate but probably won't.  In fact there are rumors he'll soon announce the new Republican goal: making sure Obama is only a two-term President.

The State of Florida, whose failure to count votes properly in 2000 handed Bush the White House, is still at it, now reporting that they may finish counting as early as this weekend.  Alone among all our states and the voting jurisdictions, Florida seems unable to figure out they need a fix.

Republican strategists are saying perhaps they might have to make some adjustments. They're going to conduct some surveys to see if they do.  Their reset, obviously, should have come months or years earlier; but if at this point they have to ask "where did we go wrong," it only demonstrates how terminally they are out of touch.   

Election Mandates

Once the long, long, l-o-n-g election campaign ended Tuesday night with an Obama victory, it took the opposition only minutes to begin the spin.  Many claimed that the divided electorate, and the close results in many states, were proof that Obama and the Democrats had "no mandate," or that House Democrats had "also won" the evening and had a mandate of their own.

Not so fast, I say!  First, the obvious objection:  If Romney had won with the same share of electoral votes, you can be assured these same naysayers would be claiming a "mandate."

Second, though, the reality is that the "closeness" of this election was deceptive. Obama could never have won if there were not a strong voter sentiment in favor of his approach, a positive surge that overcame several deficits:

• The economy. Yes, it was bad.  After four years, Obama owned it.  And even if most voters had sense enough to know Obama didn't cause it, most also would have expected him to be able to do more about it, and more quickly.  It's unprecedented for a President to be reelected in these circumstances, yet it occurred.
• Republican Superpac ads.  Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent to derail Obama's candidacy.  Judging from what we saw in "battleground" Virginia, GOP PACs outspent Democratic ones by four or five to one.  It's hard to believe these ads had NO effect, but clearly, they had not enough effect. 
• Race:  I know, GOP pols will scream foul if I raise the race card, but they've got their pants around their ankles.  We know that racist attitudes persist among a certain percentage of voters; that there are people who would never vote for an African-American even if he was running against Bozo the Clown.  This isn't just slight anti-black bias, but hard-core knee-jerk hatred.  It's not widespread, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were 5% of us.

So:  An African-American incumbent President oversees a sluggish economy just beginning to turn around after four years, and is heavily outpropagandized in his campaign by the opposition.  But he wins, albeit "narrowly," when there was every reason in the world for Romney to come out on top.  Even assuming that each of these factors accounted for only about 2% difference in the gap between Romney and Obama, it's clear that the real margin of Obama's victory might have been 6% greater.  If we look at the whole iceberg, the outcome doesn't look so narrow any longer.

Thus for those who say the election produced no mandate, I beg, not-so-respectfully, to differ.  For starters, I see a mandate for a sensible mix of tax increases and spending cuts; I see a clear mandate for the Affordable Care Act; I see a mandate for the Republican Party to reform itself by broadening its appeal; and finally, of course, a mandate for both parties to break the logjam and get busy.      

Not Four More Years!

A common theme of pro-Romney PAC commercials in these last days before the election has been, "we can't take four more years," in which they paint the "Obama economy" in blackest hues. If you live in the U.S., and particularly in one of the states that is considered up for grabs but critical, you know the story line.

Actually, there are a number of perfectly credible retorts to the charges these ads make.  Obama has made progress in many areas, from giving us sane health care through slowly improving markets and employment rate, to ending an insane war in Iraq.  But you're familiar with those arguments, too, no need for me to repeat them.  Besides, by watching so many of these screeds by Crossroads GPS and others, I finally realized that these economic arguments are nothing more than blowing smoke; their premise is completely at odds with what today's extreme rightists believe.  They are an exercise in extreme hypocrisy:

• Why try to lay the blame for unemployment at the Democrats' door, when you don't believe government can create jobs anyway?
• Why complain about unemployment at all, if you think that a person who hasn't got a job is one who just hasn't looked hard enough?  What could government, Democratic or Republican, possibly do about that?
• Why would Obama's "raiding" $716 billion from Medicare to "pay for" Affordable Care, even if it were true, be problematic for Republicans, who say they want to reduce the costs of the program (and incidentally, agreed to those cuts in costs and incorporated them into their own budget plan)?
• Why film "small business owners" lamenting how hard times are, when you believe such people made it on their own, without any help from government or society?  Why don't these business owners live up to their legend, and go out and make it in a tough environment?
• Why try to pretend Romney isn't really against birth control and abortion, if you take it as an article of faith that he should be?

There are more examples, but these should suffice to illustrate the point:  The rabid right would like to win over the moderate middle by pretending they empathize with them, while their real interests and goals are quite different.  Hint:  It's not the economy.  Whatever the economy does, they'll be fine (check out bankers, lenders, financial advisors, big investors, and lawyers you know).  It's more about power, and far broader than economic power alone.  Sure, they'd like to feudalize us, and that implies certain economic differences from today, but they're more interested in imposing a social doctrine, one in which they set the permissible parameters of social mores and learning.  

Want gay marriage?  Decided to have an abortion?  Born in some other country?  Think science can't be conducted through religion-colored glasses?  Profess the Islamic faith?  Believe the world evolved?  No, no, no, no, no, and no! Freedom for all is great, as long as you can set your own limits on it, and you can do that when you're "the decider."

Which brings us back to George W. Bush.  No, we can't take another four years -- not another four years of the GOP's voodoo economics or its regressive social policy.  Let's turn back our nation's clocks an hour tonight; let's be sure not to turn them back 50 or 100 years on Tuesday.      

Political Wisdom 2 - Early Voting

I voted early this year.  In retrospect, I wish I hadn't.   It takes some of the fun out of the remaining few days before the election, and somehow, even though there are a few hundred million other people's votes to be counted, reduces the suspense of election evening.

I was planning to expand on that topic today, but I think Ruth Marcus has already covered it well in today's Washington Post, with "Early Voting's Pros and Cons." (q.v.)

Absentee voting is a different matter.  If you're traveling, or otherwise unable to vote on election day, you should have an alternate means of getting a ballot.  Early voting, on the other hand, just sends a subliminal message that voting isn't very important, it's something you do anytime in October (or maybe don't do if you happen to forget.  We ought to be able to devote one day, as a nation, to concentrate on determining our political future.  Shouldn't election day be at least as important a common national experience as trick-or-treating? 

 

P.S. - I would, however, support changing the DAY on which we vote.  Why should it be a work day?  It should be Sunday.