Crisis Management

Jon Favreau has a piece in The Daily Beast that, if I read it correctly, is meant to put all us "handwringers" and "bed wetters" in our place. As one of Barack Obama's speech writers, he knows the man better than most.

In his defense, he does make a number of salient points. A lot of us on the Left do tend to overreact. I remember the Denver debate very well. While I certainly wasn't calling for the President to "resign" over his performance, I was, nevertheless, extremely concerned; the same way a football coach who just saw his team squander a three-touchdown lead would be concerned. The specter of Mitt Romney stealing the election was more hellish than I could imagine.

Favreau is correct when he says that Obama isn't interested in "chasing news cycles" or adhering to Washington's "timeline." But while it might be admirable to have a president who would prefer to be "right" over being "first," I suspect that might be part of his problem.

Throughout most of his presidency, Obama has resisted the knee-jerk, reactionary, politics as usual approach to governing. Because he tends to be cautious, sometimes to a fault, more often than not, his opponents tend to get an early jump on him. That was clear all throughout the healthcare debate. Obama believed that in the end the public would see through the rhetoric and rationally come around to his way of thinking. He clearly underestimated the resilience of the opposition. The GOP redefined the whole debate and turned the tables on him. Yes, "Obamacare" eventually was passed, but to this day it remains the single most controversial piece of legislation ever signed into law. Astonishing, considering it is nothing more than Romneycare on steroids.

The debt-ceiling crisis of 2011, which Favreau cites in his piece, is, sadly, another example of Obama badly misreading the resolve of his opposition. Lost in all the insanity of that summer was the fact that his inability, or perhaps unwillingness, to strike the right deal in the 2010 lame-duck session was what brought the whole issue to the fore in the first place and, I might add, brought about the now infamous sequester that supposedly nobody wanted, but which we can't seem to get rid of.

And now we come to Triplegate (the Benghazi, IRS and AP scandals). Nobody not seriously hooked on crack or an escapee from an insane asylum believes for even a minute that the President participated in a coverup. Charges of Watergate and Nixonian behavior are sheer lunacy.

And yet this White House has spent most of the last week and a half having to defend itself, not so much against the facts, which as they slowly come out continue to exonerate the President from wrongdoing, but from the perception of ineptitude.  While Obama may not want to admit it, perception counts, especially in a town as polarized as Washington. That he hasn't come to grips with this reality is quite revealing.

It has been his failure to see the urgency of the scandals as they were brewing, more than the scandals themselves, that has plagued him the most. When Jon Stewart and Carl Bernstein start throwing you under the bus, your problem isn't merely narrative building, it's good old fashioned common sense.

Yes, many of us on the Left are nervous ninnies. And maybe we could all take a chill pill now and then. But Barack Obama would do well to remove some of that ice water that flows through his veins and occasionally see the political forest for the trees. It wouldn't eliminate every bump in the road, but it would make the journey a little less haphazard.

Link: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/05/20/how-obama-handles-crisis.html

Harry Reid Reaches Defcon 1

Just file this under, "What the fuck took you so long?"

Harry Reid finally got the message. After more than four years of trying his best to be the reasonable man in the room, giving the minority party the benefit of the doubt and allowing nominee after nominee to be filibustered, the majority leader has had enough.

According to a story in The Washington Post, Reid is prepared to undertake real filibuster reform this July if Senate Republicans block three upcoming nominations. The measure, referred to as going "nuclear" by its proponents, would be limited to judicial and executive branch nominations and would not affect legislation. Ostensibly, Democrats would only need 51 votes to get a nominee through the Senate, instead of the 60 votes now required.

The reason for the delay till July is due to Democrats' concern that if Reid moves forward with the rules change now it would likely kill any chance of passing immigration reform. While that is indeed a legitimate concern, most pundits have argued that Republicans stand to lose more by balking on a reform bill than Democrats, especially given the nation's demographic shift.

Of course there's always the possibility that Republicans will blink and allow all three nominations an up or down vote in the chamber. They've done it before. Call it a temporary stay of execution. That would certainly ease tensions somewhat and avoid the showdown that Reid and some Senate Democrats still don't want.

Others, though, believe a rules change is inevitable, whether it comes in July or down the road. The simple fact is that the GOP has been unwilling to listen to reason. Appeasement has clearly not worked. Sooner or later Harry Reid will be forced to do the obvious.


Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2013/05/17/harry-reid-eyeing-july-for-the-nuclear-option/

All Apologies

My Fellow Progressives,

I wish to sincerely apologize for a few of my most recent pieces. It seems I may have been a bit hard on Barack Obama and I know how upset that makes some of you. Reading some of your comments really brought a lump to my throat. I had no idea I had hurt you that badly. Please know, that was not my intention.

If I had only known that pointing out that our fearless leader should have gotten out in front of the current controversies that have plagued his administration a bit sooner would cause you such distress, I would never have mentioned it; or that pointing out that his failure to effectively deal with them might derail his second term agenda might be viewed as an affront to your sensibilities, I would have blotted it from my obviously right-wing propagandist brain.  And can you imagine how touched I was when so many of you expressed your true feelings to me over my criticism of the President when he agreed to waive the FAA requirement to furlough its workers. As our lord and savior, Bill Clinton, used to say, "I feel your pain."

So let me just say this to those of you who were insulted by my impertinence. I will never again critique Barack Obama. From here on out I will only write "positive good stuff," as one reader was so kind to point out. And right you are for bringing that to my attention, oh enlightened one.

What on Earth was I thinking ruffling so many feathers in such an unprofessional manner? I should be flogged and then apply for a job on Fox News, as one reader suggested. Or was that apply for the job, then get flogged?

Well you can bet the ranch that I have learned my lesson, my fellow comrades. Going forward, you can count on my loyalty to the President. Not only will I refrain from being critical of him, if I hear anybody else attacking him, I will do everything in my power to rip that person a new one, just as so many of you have had the courage to do with me.

After all, it's us against them and I would much rather be an us than a them.


Sincerely, your repentant servant.

P.S., when do I get my tin foil hat?

The Real Threat to Obama's Second Term

According to the CBO, the budget deficit will shrink to $642 billion this year, the lowest it's been since 2008. That's approximately $200 billion less than a previous estimate from February.  Even better, the deficit is expected to be around $378 billion by 2015.

That should be great news and you'll be delighted to know I found it somewhere between the stories about Michael Vick being accused of cheating and Angelina Jolie's decision to have a double mastectomy. Not to worry, though, it was definitely ahead of the story about Selena Gomez showing off her curves in a bikini. Boy, I bet Justin Bieber is kicking himself right about now.

Oh, the lead story? You'll never guess. Seems there's this little thing going on in Washington having to do with Benghazi, the IRS and the Associated Press that is all the rage. Our beloved President is up to his ears having to fend off charges of coverup and incompetence. It's kind of like being trapped in a nightmare you can't wake up from.

Of the three "scandals," Benghazi looks like the odd man out. What was once considered to be a pissing contest between the CIA and the State Department, now appears to be a pissing contest between ABC and CNN. Both networks have released emails that ostensibly contradict each other regarding the talking points that Susan Rice used in her now infamous talk show appearances. With each passing day it looks more and more like a major screw up, nothing more. Tragic, but certainly not rising to the level of a coverup, no matter what Darrell Issa says.

It's the other two that have the potential to cause the most damage. The IRS scandal is the perfect fodder for the wingnuts on the Right who were already paranoid about the government to begin with. Now, they're practically in hyperdrive. How incompetent do you have to be to make Mark Levin sound legit? Pretty damn incompetent, that's how. Obama took an important first step by forcing the resignation of the acting director of the agency. But more heads need to roll here.

The real headache, though, is the AP scandal. There's an old, established axiom in politics. You don't fuck the fourth estate. Never. It always fucks back. Nixon found that out the hard way. Even if the DOJ had a legitimate reason for going after one or two reporters who it felt had jeopardized national security and endangered lives, this wasn't the way to go about doing it. You don't use a shark's net to catch a minnow.  It was stupid and unnecessary.

The result of this fiasco is that the media now has its dander up and is taking it out on the Administration. In case you missed yesterday's briefing - AKA, the feeding frenzy - Jay Carney was being savagely ripped apart by the White House press corp. Reporters who normally sleep walk through such briefings were channeling their inner Edward R. Murrow.

Great. After nearly three decades of phoning it in, they suddenly discovered they're reporters. Who knew?

Don't think for a moment that this is just some temporary phase that will die of its own volition. For over four years, Barack Obama has enjoyed a rather cordial relationship with the press. At the risk of sounding like a Fox News' correspondent, you could say he's been given the benefit of the doubt more often than not.

As Billy Joel once sang, "Say goodbye to Hollywood." I'm not saying Obama is the modern-day equivalent of Richard Nixon. For one thing, Nixon was a total dick and everyone knew it even before Watergate broke. Obama is nowhere near that point and most of the media - those that aren't crazed on Meth - understand that. But the heat is about to go up more than just a few degrees.

If I were the White House, I would expect a lot more confrontational press briefings. The "in your face" treatment is here to stay for the foreseeable future. The media is funny that way. It's kind of like a baseball team. When one of their own gets thrown at by the opposing pitcher, they all come together to protect their player. Deep down, they know it's bullshit, but outwardly it's all for one and one for all.

All this adds up to a major dilemma for the Administration. Obama has, at best, seven months with which to achieve something substantive for his second term. Immigration reform, gun control, a grand bargain, all are achievable, but the window of opportunity is rapidly closing. The midterms are next year. Good luck getting anything through Congress in an election year. After that it's primary season as both parties strut out their potential hopefuls for 2016. If Obama can't clean up this mess soon, he will be a lame duck president with a hostile Congress and a pissed off press corp chomping at his heals.

Legacies aren't written; they're made. Barack Obama must decide what his will be. And he better do it quick before it's too late.

The Batshit Hits the Fan

Memo to Barack Obama: There's a storm brewing in Washington and it's bearing down on your White House. This storm makes Superstorm Sandy look like a cold front, that's how big it is.  You can blame the opposition party all you want, but this time, the blame rests squarely with you. 

Your crime? Perhaps nothing. Perhaps the talking points memo clusterfuck after the Benghazi attack was nothing more than a pissing contest between the CIA and State; perhaps the IRS scandal will end with a few over zealous officials being fired, nothing more; perhaps there was a legitimate reason why the Department of Justice "obtained" phone records of AP reporters; and perhaps none of this will have legs and will eventually blow over in due time.

I wouldn't count on it.

For the first time in your presidency, your opposition hasn't had to fabricate a story about you. This one stands on its own two feet. The blood in the water is real and it's yours. What's worse, the wound is self inflicted. This isn't some bogus death panel canard, sir; it's legitimate and it's a beaut.

Do I think you had anything to do with a cover up? Of course not. Are the Republican attack dogs politically motivated? Is the Pope Catholic? And let's get one thing straight: this isn't Watergate, no matter how many times Fox News says it is.

That's hardly the point. The issue at hand, Mr. President, is that once more your inability to get on top of a festering issue, define it and prevent it from becoming a crisis is threatening to bring down your administration.

Think I'm overreacting? Maybe, but consider this. Bill Clinton got impeached for lying about getting a blow job in the Oval Office. If you don't think a Republican Party that is ten times more "out there" and loathes you even more than they did Bubba, is capable of impeaching you, then you're delusional. Infidelity is nothing compared to the deaths of four Americans, let alone the contempt people historically have had for the IRS.

Honestly, I don't know how this plays out. The damage maybe too much to overcome. But this much I do know. You need to get out front and do some damage control fast. Jay Carney's just not cutting it; not even close. Every time he takes that podium, the hole gets deeper. Right now, you're about a hundred feet from Beijing.

If you have any hope of leaving a lasting legacy in your second term, this must be put to bed. Your press conference was a nice start. But much more is needed. Defending the honor of Hillary Clinton and Ambassador Pickering is nice but ultimately superfluous. It's not their honor that's at stake here, and, with all due respect, if there's one thing we know about the Clintons, it's that they can take care of themselves. A few "heads will roll" would be appropriate right about now.

You need to take charge of this situation before it deteriorates any further.  Whether your finger prints are on the weapon or not is irrelevant; you own it by virtue of the fact that you're the commander in chief. Due mainly to your own incompetence, the wingnuts on the Right have become super charged like never before. If they can get all ramped up over bullshit like birtherism, imagine just how rabid they will get over a real story.

Imagine the Republicans not only holding the House in 2014, but taking back the Senate. That would be the definition of a nightmare scenario. Each day you fail to effectively deal with this issue brings that scenario one day closer to reality.

For four years the GOP has tried to stop you in your tracks. They have lost at the ballot box and in the court of public opinion. It would be the crime of the century to hand them this victory virtually uncontested. 

Shame on you, sir, if that happens!

Tip of the Hat

Picking up on an earlier Keynes' theme, I stumbled upon this piece courtesy of David Frum. It is well written, well laid out, thoughtful, insightful and, given the current state we're in, economically speaking, highly relevant. There's nothing like a former drinker of the Kool-Aid to dispense with false doctrines.

What's amazing about the piece is how closely it aligns itself with what Paul Krugman has been saying for years. Hmmm.

Keynes’s Biggest Mistake

By BRUCE BARTLETT

Bruce Bartlett held senior policy roles in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations and served on the staffs of Representatives Jack Kemp and Ron Paul. He is the author of “The Benefit and the Burden: Tax Reform – Why We Need It and What It Will Take.”

Over the weekend, there was a kerfuffle about whether Keynesian economics ignores the long-run implications of its policies. The Harvard historian Niall Ferguson asserted that this was the case and said that it resulted from the British economist John Maynard Keynes’s homosexuality. Professor Ferguson said that those without children, as is the case with most gay men and women, necessarily had less of a long-term view of the world than those with children who will live on after their death.

Professor Ferguson has apologized for his off-the-cuff comment, which was widely interpreted as being homophobic. But before this incident fades from memory, I’d like to take the opportunity to discuss the questions raised by it: Is Keynes’s sexual orientation at all relevant to the interpretation of his economic theories? Does Keynesian economics completely ignore the long run?

First of all, Keynes’s sexual orientation has been known for some time, at least since publication of Michael Holroyd’s biography of Lytton Strachey in 1968. Strachey was a noted biographer, an active member of the literary Bloomsbury Group and one of Keynes’s lovers.

The revelation of Keynes’s homosexuality greatly excited his right-wing enemies, who have long used it to defame him and discredit his theories. A 1969 book, “Keynes at Harvard: Economic Deception as a Political Credo,” contains a long chapter on the subject, which describes Keynes as “a lifelong sexual deviant.” Like Professor Ferguson argued, it says that Keynes’s “aversion to human conception” was a key to his economic theories, which the book likened to Bolshevism.

The author of “Keynes at Harvard” is Zygmund Dobbs, but the driving force behind it was Archibald B. Roosevelt, who founded the Veritas Foundation, which published the Dobbs book. The youngest son of Theodore Roosevelt, Archibald Roosevelt was very active in right-wing politics throughout his life, attacking both Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman for coddling communists. In 1954, Archibald Roosevelt demanded that an organization named for his father rescind an award to the United Nations under secretary Ralph Bunche because of his “close affiliation with communism.”

Brad DeLong, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, has posted a long list of conservative attacks on Keynes that have used his homosexuality as a reason to reject his economic theories. But even economists who had no interest in this aspect of Keynes’s life, like the economist James Buchanan, have criticized Keynesian economics for its excessively short-term focus and negative long-run consequences.

Unfortunately, Keynes himself was to a large extent responsible for giving this criticism of his work currency. That is because he titled his most important work “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.” The term “general theory” obviously implies that it is applicable at all times, in all economic situations.

This was an unfortunate error, because the core insight of Keynesian economics is that there are very special economic circumstances in which the general rules of economics don’t apply and are, in fact, counterproductive.

This happens when interest rates and inflation are so low that there is no essential difference between money and bonds; money, after all, is simply a bond that pays no interest. When this happens, monetary policy becomes impotent; an increase in the money supply has no stimulative effect because it does not lead to additional spending by consumers or businesses.

Keynes called this situation a “liquidity trap.” Under such circumstances, government spending can be highly stimulative because it causes money that is sitting idle in bank reserves or savings accounts to circulate and become mobilized through consumption or investment. Thus monetary policy becomes effective once again.

This is an extremely important insight that policy makers have yet to grasp, even though interest rates on Treasury bills are just a couple of basis points above zero and inflation is virtually nonexistent. Although the Federal Reserve has increased the monetary base to almost $3 trillion today from $825 billion in 2007, it has had little apparent stimulative effect.

In normal times, one would expect such an increase in the money supply to be highly inflationary and sharply raise market interest rates. That this has not happened is proof that we have been in a liquidity trap for several years. We needed a lot more government spending than we got to get the economy out of its doldrums.

Although Keynes’s theory was most appropriate to the Great Depression, his followers did indeed believe in its general applicability and the Keynesian medicine was overapplied and misapplied during much of the postwar era, leading to stagflation in the 1970s. Conservatives like Professor Buchanan were right about that.

But in their rejection of Keynesian economics at a time when it needed to be rejected, conservatives threw the baby out with the bathwater and are now preventing its adoption when it is badly needed.

The criticism that Professor Ferguson implicitly leveled at Keynes of being excessively short-term oriented, therefore, has a grain of truth in it. But the much greater truth is that we are now holding the economy hostage to policies that are proper for the long-term – like stabilizing the debt-to-gross-domestic-product ratio – at a time when we face special circumstances that make such policies perverse.

In short, we are suffering from an excessive long-term focus that is crippling the economy in the short run, and the short run threatens never to end.

A friendly 1984 biography of Keynes by the economist Charles H. Hession acknowledged that his sexual orientation shaped his political philosophy. His homosexuality was “an independent element in his reformist tendency; as such, he was an outsider in a heterosexual world,” Professor Hession wrote.

I think this made Keynes more willing to think “outside the box,” as we say today, and consider ideas that ran counter to the conventional wisdom. But there is no reason to think he had any less concern for the long-run health of the economy or society than heterosexuals. Keynes understood that the long run is simply an infinite parade of short runs.

But Keynes erred in implying a more general applicability of his theories than he should have. We suffered for this in the past when they were misapplied in inappropriate circumstances, unfortunately discrediting them and preventing their adoption now, in highly appropriate circumstances.


Link: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/07/keyness-biggest-mistake/#more-163323

The Attack of the Watergates

If you've been watching Fox News or listening to AM radio recently, two things should be immediately apparent: the first is you obviously are a masochist and should seek help as soon as possible; the second is that you've probably heard the word Watergate uttered at least a couple million times.

Conservatives have taken to it like deranged sociopaths take to guns. It has become the new catchphrase for everything they don't like about Barack Obama. Whenever anything bad happens that they don't like - and for the record anything they don't like is, by definition, bad - they immediately assume it's part of a vast conspiracy between the Administration and the lap dog media.

For instance, remember when Fast and Furious was the going to be the next Watergate. That quickly fizzled under the spotlight of common sense. Now the conservative universe is all abuzz over Benghazi. They have convinced themselves that what was a truly horrific tragedy that resulted in four deaths, including Ambassador Stevens, is the second coming of Nixon. Mike Huckabee has virtually predicted that President Obama "will not fill out his full term" in office, so convinced he is of a massive cover-up.

It's one thing to be stupid and racist; it's quite another to be paranoid.

The latest installment of Benghazi fever comes courtesy of Darrell Issa, who should get the Academy Award for best performance in a kangaroo court. Issa has been doing his utmost to nail the Administration ever since the GOP took the House in the 2010 midterms. So badly did he embarrass himself during the Fast and Furious hearings that even some conservative writers called him out on it.

Not to be outdone - or deterred - Issa strutted out three key witnesses whose testimony he and his fellow cohorts believed would finally blow the lid off of the Administration's "cover-up." You could practically see Sam Ervin lurking in the corner.

And what was the grand result of all this testimony. Ostensibly we learned the following: The talking points memo that Susan Rice referred to on the Sunday morning talk shows was inaccurate; there was a huge disagreement over whether to send in a special ops team from Tripoli; and the State Department had been warned about the possibility of an attack on the consulate, a warning that obviously went unheeded. Basically nothing new, if you've been paying attention.

But a cover-up? Not even close.  Mistakes were made and judgments called into question, but, despite all the huffing and puffing, Republicans still don't have a smoking gun. They can shout Watergate all they want, but until they come up with their own missing 18 minutes, all they will accomplish is coming down with a good dose of laryngitis.