Perspectives on the Corruption of American Politics

Over at the Huff Post I came across links to not one but two sharp political entries today: (1) this skewering of the sanctimonious Evan Bayh* for his post-Senate career in shameless lobbying and (2) this graphic presentation of the wildly negative consequences of the Bush-Obama** tax cuts.
__________
* P.S.: To date Bayh has barely risen to the level of visibility - he played bit roles in posts on nepotism and political cronyism. But he is a poster child for my campaign against bi-partisanship.
** P.S.: This label is not my creation I heard it on the radio - but it is true that Obama allowed for the renewal of the tax cuts - due in part to his sincere policy preferences and in part to his political ineptitude.

The Truth From Washington

"The ground shifted and spending reductions Democrats recently described as 'extreme' and 'draconian,' they are now calling 'historic' and 'common sense.' The debate has turned from how much to grow government to how much to reduce it."~ Senator Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky).


"There are a number of us in the caucus now pushing back very hard on our leadership. ... Who knows where they'll end up, but maybe we can take enough D's with us to make them uncomfortable and to make them stick with making the president act like a Democrat." ~ Congressman Peter DeFazio (D-Oregon).

I rarely agree with McConnell about much. But he is dead on here. The Democrats have been politically inept again. They have let the Republicans set the agenda - pure and simple. Meanwhile, Defazio's problem - as a member of the "progressive caucus" in the House - is that Obama is acting like a Democrat.

(Among the Reason) Why I Loath Bi-Partisanship

My oldest son Douglas is set to graduate from college this coming May. He has been a good student and an athlete for four years. The obvious consideration at this point is what he is going to do with his B.S. in Biology (minor in Environmental Studies) once he navigates the end of the semester festivities. So, this installment from Paul Krugman hits home with even greater force than it might:

"I still don’t know why the Obama administration was so quick to accept defeat in the war of ideas, but the fact is that it surrendered very early in the game. In early 2009, John Boehner, now the speaker of the House, was widely and rightly mocked for declaring that since families were suffering, the government should tighten its own belt. That’s Herbert Hoover economics, and it’s as wrong now as it was in the 1930s. But, in the 2010 State of the Union address, President Obama adopted exactly the same metaphor and began using it incessantly.

And earlier this week, the White House budget director declared: “There is an agreement that we should be reducing spending,” suggesting that his only quarrel with Republicans is over whether we should be cutting taxes, too. No wonder, then, that according to a new Pew Research Center poll, a majority of Americans see “not much difference” between Mr. Obama’s approach to the deficit and that of Republicans.

So who pays the price for this unfortunate bipartisanship? The increasingly hopeless unemployed, of course. And the worst hit will be young workers — a point made in 2009 by Peter Orszag, then the White House budget director. As he noted, young Americans who graduated during the severe recession of the early 1980s suffered permanent damage to their earnings. And if the average duration of unemployment is any indication, it’s even harder for new graduates to find decent jobs now than it was in 1982 or 1983.

So the next time you hear some Republican declaring that he’s concerned about deficits because he cares about his children — or, for that matter, the next time you hear Mr. Obama talk about winning the future — you should remember that the clear and present danger to the prospects of young Americans isn’t the deficit. It’s the absence of jobs.

But . . . these days Washington doesn’t seem to care about any of that. And you have to wonder what it will take to get politicians caring again about America’s forgotten millions."

Douglas is, in the eyes of his father, indeed one in a million. But that phrase takes on an unhappily ironic cast in the age of bi-partisan political delusion. If it sometimes sounds like my criticisms of Obama and his failure to stand up to the right are personal that is because they are.

Wake Up Democrats! American Workers are Under Assault by Republicans

It is no surprise that Republicans across the country have taken aim on unions and done so in a concerted campaign. Nor is it a surprise that they have done so hypocritically, rationalizing their political agenda in terms of the need to address fiscal crisis in the states. What is also unsurprising - and no less disturbing - is that neither the unions nor the Democrats seem to have had a clue that this attack was in the offing. They were too busy hoping for the emergence of civil, bi-partisan politics. Is there a lesson here?

As I drove in this morning there were two useful segments on npr: the first confirmed the predictable, namely that the Obama administration is steering clear of controversy and hoping for a nice bi-partisan resolution to the labor conflicts in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Ohio ... the second was an interview with a law professor who studies public sector unions and, guess what, they are not nearly the drag on the public budget or boon to selfish workers that the Republicans portray them as being. Surprised?

Who Says We Lack Bi-Partisanship? Or, Batista, Pahlavi, and Marcos, Oh My!

Occasionally, the folks at The New York Times get things right. Today, they published this story about U.S. foreign policy toward authoritarian tyrants. Here are some of the good bits:

"If the United States is, as so many presidents have said in so many speeches, the world’s pre-eminent champion of democracy, then why does the drama unfolding in Cairo seem so familiar?

A Washington-friendly dictator, propped up for decades by lavish American aid as he oversees a regime noted for brutality, corruption and stagnation, finally faces the wrath of his people. An American administration struggles over what to say, what to do and what to expect if the strongman is toppled.

Every country has both values and interests. Sometimes they coincide — for example, promoting human rights can help combat terrorism — and sometimes they conflict. What makes the United States stand out, perhaps, is how frequently American officials proclaim their values to the world, setting themselves up for charges of hypocrisy when a policy is expedient rather than idealistic.

History is rich with precedents. ... Since World War II, the White House, under the management of both parties, has smiled on at least a couple of dozen despots."

The report is brief, hence leaves out some especially deadly clients (Pinochet, Hussein - yes, the very same Saddam - Somoza, Suharto, etc.) but basically hits the nail on the head. Of course, it is unclear whether The Times would encourage support for the values over the interests here. Are they concerned about the hypocrisy? Or are they concerned that the bi-partisan American consensus is to back a dictator more or less whenever given the chance?

Against Bipartisanship (yet again)

And here is a piece by Paul Krugman & Robin Wells, also from the most recent NYRB. They lay out the electoral imperatives that the Democrats confront quite nicely. In short, given the choice between actual Republicans and Republican-lite, voters tend to opt for the genuine article. Among the culprits here are those - from the feckless Obama on down - who've joined the cult of bipartisan consensus. It is way past time to call in the de-programmers.

Against Logo Politics

There has been a lot of hoop-la recently about the emergence of this "movement." You can find news reports here and here and here. Regular readers will not be surprised to learn that I have a pretty dim view of the enterprise. Beyond the exclusively top-down, logo-centric character of the putative "movement," there are two distinct substantive issues that seem objectionable about the group: (1) their presumption that the basic problem in American politics comes down to lack of civility (what they call "the tone of politics") and (2) their presumption that something called bi-partisanship is a smart way to approach democratic politics. I think the No Label folks are dead wrong on both issues.

As a good place to start I suggest this commentary by E.J. Dionne. That said, I am much less patient with the No Label types than he seems to be. Our problem, documented not by partisan accusation but by actual research (since we all want, in Dionne's terms, to be fact based), is a rapid, relentless move rightward among Republicans. That shift is grounded in and subsequently helps sustain dramatic increases in political-economic inequality. Incivility and the hectoring tone of politics is a symptom of that underlying reality. So simply making nice is not going to get us anyplace useful. What it will get us is Obama-esque capitulation to reactionary demands. In other words, the location the No Label crowd hope to occupy - what they call " the vital civil center" - is not the center; it consists in a set of right-leaning or flat out conservative positions that look "moderate" only in comparison to the reactionary views of conservative Republicans. If we neglect that, our politics will generate disastrous consequences. And talking nicely to one another as we head over the precipice does nothing to change that.

Politics is about competition and disagreement. One need not be a cynic to suspect that "consensus" is typically a way of papering over the way one or another group is getting the shaft. I have inveighed against bi-partisanship repeatedly here and won't do so again. It generates bad policy and undermines democracy more generally. The No Label folks simply don't get that. They think we need a new logo. I think we need democratic politics.

Clegg, Obama, 'Old-Style Progressives' and 'Pragmatism'

In the U.S. political ideas seem to twist and turn at the whim of various right-wing media mouthpieces. Typically the re-fashioning occurs in cahoots with the right wing politicians. So, as the conservative DLC types in the Democratic Party make a hard charge to the right (which has been ongoing since the late 1980s) there is not much push-back from people who say ... ''Not so fast, that is a bastardization of this or that progressive or liberal idea ... or ... No, actually the constitution or our political tradition (or whatever) don't state or imply anything like what you claim!'

The problem, in part, is that any such voice of sanity is drowned out by the megaphones on the right. And, let's be clear here, I am not even talking about the Republicans with their party organ Fox 'News.' I am talking about the voices of 'moderation' among the Democrats. Of course, those voices are not typically attuned to intellectual discourse; they are concerned to show that they are realists. Think Bill Galston or Cass Sunstein. Think Rahm Emmanuel. No egg-head talk for them.

Here is an example from the U.K. Lib-Dem leader Nick Clegg offers this pronouncement on 'authentic' progressive politics in The Guardian. He constructs a dichotomy between old-style progressive who are obsessed with equality and new style progressives (like himself) who are properly re-focused on social mobility as a way of fracturing inherited, hence unjust, patterns. This rhetorical move brings to mind a remark from Vaclav Havel: "... hard and fast categories ... tend to be instruments used by the victors." In this instance, the distinction also fails - as Stuart White points out in this astute commentary - to grasp the actual claims of 'old style' progressives of a liberal or socialist stripe.

Distinctions, in other words, carry consequences. and in this instance Clegg surely is aiming to shift the terms of discourse rightward. It is not enough to say, as he does in numerous ways, 'let's work together,' 'let's think in non-zero-sum terms,' lets embrace bi-partisanship' (to echo our own hoper-in-chief). Because, having constructed a false dichotomy at the start he proceeds to neglect the fact that any reconciliation has profound distributional consequences. And those consequences are, as White notes, precisely the basis for pervasive inequalities that subvert the prospects for social mobility.

There are lessons here for the Obama is a pragmatist crowd. It is not enough to simply listen to everyone and split the difference. One has to look at where we stand, how we got here, assess responsibility and, most importantly, see how political-economic power has been used to shape the current circumstances, before making a plan to move forward. Simply splitting the difference leads to more of the 'winner take all' politics that Clegg claims to abhor simply because it takes the current state of affairs, with its already established winners and losers, as the point of departure. Old style progressives, in other words, insist on getting an historical grip before plunging ahead. Without that historical perspective, a putatively pragmatist focus on consequences simply re-confirms the fixed inequities we currently endure. On health Insurance; on war-crimes; on economic recovery; on foreign adventurism. On all those fronts, Obama has done lots of listening and little serious analysis of the sort I mention above. As a result we get not pragmatism but opportunism. There is a big difference.

Have a nice Thanksgiving.
__________
P.S.: (Added 26 November 2010) You can find yet another astute reply to Clegg here. The punchline: "This isn’t democracy. It isn’t a new way of being progressive. It is the deep marketisation of our society, carried out at breakneck speed."

Deficit Reform My Keester

President Barack Obama, center, walks with Erskine Bowles,
left, and Sen. Alan Simpson, R-Wyo., co-chairs of the National
Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (April 2010).
Photograph © Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images.

The fully predictable has happened. The right-leaning (Erskine Bowles) and 'aw, shucks' reactionary (Alan Simpson), co-chairs of Obama's "bipartisan" deficit reduction commission, have announced what they think should happen. As Paul Krugman writes in The Times today: "It seemed obvious, as soon as the commission’s membership was announced, that 'bipartisanship' would mean what it so often does in Washington: a compromise between the center-right and the hard-right."

As I have argued here many times before, bi-partisanship is bad politics - it gets us regressive, incoherent policy and, more importantly, it subverts the competition on which democracy itself relies. (If you are interested in reasons and examples aplenty look here and then here.) Fortunately, there are some people and groups out there who seem willing to call the co-chair's proposal what it is - reactionary twaddle. This proposal is clearly meant as an agenda setting move. The thinking goes like this: 'If we make an extreme initial claim we will likely end up with something only slightly less regressive." There is all sorts of talk about 'shared-sacrifice' in the face of deficits. But the sources of our deficits are easy to see (look here and here) and gutting Social Security (for instance) is irrelevant to getting them under control. The working and middle classes, to say nothing of the poor, in America already have undertaken sacrifices as the rich have run off with the goodies. That has been going on for three decades. What we need now is redress, not shared sacrifice.

As Krugman also writes: "It will take time to crunch the numbers here, but this proposal clearly represents a major transfer of income upward, from the middle class to a small minority of wealthy Americans." Obama, like the Clinton-ites before him, is adept at that game. It runs under the guise of bi-partisanship, so Obama can position himself between Bowles and Simpson and look like the great compromise-r. But being between two positions doesn't necessarily make you centrist.