Consistency Is An Over-Rated Virture: What “Left” And “Right” Really Mean
Perhaps my biggest frustration with the U.S. news media (and yes, I am a card-carrying member) is that we permit the two parties to decide what is “left” and what is “right.” The way it works, roughly, is that anything Democrats support becomes “left,” and everything Republicans support becomes “right.” But that makes “left” and “right” descriptions of where the two parties stand at any given moment rather than descriptions of the philosophies, ideologies or ideas that animate, or should animate, political debates.
There is a good reason why we do it this way. It isn’t the media’s job to police political ideologies, and it wouldn’t be a good idea for us to try. But that leaves ordinary voters in a bit of a tough spot.
The reality is that most Americans aren’t policy wonks. They don’t sit down with think-tank papers or economic studies and puzzle over whether it’s better to address the free-rider problem in health care through automatic enrollment or the individual mandate. Instead, they outsource those questions to the political actors — both elected and unelected — they trust.
Unfortunately, those political actors aren’t worthy of their trust. They’re trying to win elections, not points for intellectual consistency. So the voters who trust them get taken for a ride.
Consider the partywide flips and flops of just the past few years:
— Supporting a temporary, deficit-financed payroll-tax cut as a stimulus measure in 2009, as Republican Sen. John McCain and every one of his colleagues did, put you on the right. Supporting a temporary, deficit-financed payroll tax-cut in late 2011 put you on the left. Supporting it in early 2012 could have put you on either side.
— Supporting an individual mandate as a way to solve the health-care system’s free-rider problem between 1991 and 2007 put you on the right. Doing so after 2010 put you on the left.
— Supporting a system in which total carbon emissions would be capped and permits traded as a way of moving toward clean energy using the power of market pricing could have put you on either the left or right between 2000 and 2008. After 2009, it put you squarely on the left.
— Caring about short-term deficits between 2001 and 2008 put you on the left. Caring about them between 2008 and 2012 put you on the right.
— Favoring an expansive view of executive authority between 2001 and 2008 put you on the right. Doing so since 2009 has, in most cases, put you on the left.
— Supporting large cuts to Medicare in the context of universal health-care reform puts you on the left, as every Democrat who voted for the Affordable Care Act found out during the 2010 election. Supporting large cuts to Medicare in the context of deficit reduction puts you on the right, as Republicans found out in the 1990s, and then again after voting for Representative Paul Ryan’s proposed budget in 2011.
— Decrying the filibuster and considering drastic changes to the Senate rulebook to curb it between 2001 and 2008 put you on the right, particularly if you were exercised over judicial nominations. Since 2009, decrying the filibuster and considering reforms to curb it has put you on the left.
— Favoring a negative tax rate for the poorest Americans between 2001 and 2008 could have put you on the right or the left. In recent years, it has put you on the left.
I don’t particularly mind flip-flops. Consistency is an overrated virtue. But honesty isn’t. In many of these cases, the parties changed policy when it was politically convenient to do so, not when conditions changed and new information came to light.
There are exceptions, of course. It’s reasonable to worry about short-term deficits during an economic expansion and consider them necessary during a recession. That’s Economics 101.
But nothing happened to explain the change from 2006, when the individual mandate was a Republican policy in good standing, to 2010, when every Senate Republican, including those who still had their names on bills that included individual mandates, agreed it was an unconstitutional assault on liberty. Nothing, that is, but the Democrats’ adopting the policy in their health-care reform bill.
Flips and flops like these make the labels “left” and “right” meaningless as a descriptor of anything save partisanship over any extended period of time. I could tell you about a politician who supported deficit-financed stimulus policies and cap-and-trade, and I could be describing McCain. Or Newt Gingrich. And I could tell you about another politician who opposed an individual mandate, and who fought deficits, expansive views of executive authority and efforts to reform the filibuster, and be describing Sen. Barack Obama.
Parties — particularly when they’re in the minority — care more about power than policy. Perhaps there’s nothing much to be done about this. And as I said, it isn’t clear that the media, or anyone else, should try. But it puts the lie to the narrative that America is really riven by grand ideological disagreements. America is deeply divided on the question of which party should be in power at any given moment. Much of the polarization over policy is driven by that question, not the other way around.
But the voters who trust the parties don’t know that, and they tend to take on faith the idea that their representatives are fighting for some relatively consistent agenda. They’re wrong.
By: Ezra Klein, The Washington Post, February 24, 2012
“Pathological Dishonesty”: On The Campaign Trail With Mitt Romney
Paul Krugman argued today that Mitt Romney “is running a campaign of almost pathological dishonesty.” That need not be considered hyperbole.
Indeed, Greg Sargent added this morning that Romney’s “falsehoods and all around dissembling” may be designed to “simply wear reporters and commentators down by trafficking in them so heavily that they throw up their hands and give up on trying to track or debunk them.”
But I remain undeterred. A couple of months ago, I launched a Friday afternoon feature, highlighting the most offensive Mitt Romney falsehoods of the week. It moved to Maddow Blog a few weeks ago, so let’s keep this going with another installment.
1. Romney told an audience in Arizona this week, in reference to President Obama, “He said he’d cut the deficit in half. He’s doubled it. He’s doubled it.”
For an alleged numbers guy, Romney is either lying or he’s bad at arithmetic. When Obama took office, the deficit was about $1.3 trillion. Last year, it was $1.29 trillion. This year, it’s on track to be about $1.1 trillion. Does Romney not know what “double” means?
2. On health care, Romney argued, “Our bill [Romneycare] was 70 pages; his bill [Obamacare] is 2,700 pages.”
This not just a dumb argument, it’s also not true.
3. On foreign policy, Romney said, “[T]his president should have put in place crippling sanctions against Iran, he did not.”
Actually, he did.
4. Romney claimed that Syria is Iran’s “route to the sea.”
Iran has 1,520 miles of its own coastline — and doesn’t share a border with Syria.
5. Romney boasted, “I also served in the Olympics, balanced a budget there.”
Well, that’s not entirely right. He hired lobbyists to get a taxpayer bailout for the Olympics and then balanced the budget.
6. Romney claimed, “You can’t be, I don’t believe, anything but a fiscal conservative and run a business, because if you don’t balance your budget, you go out of business.”
That’s both untrue and ridiculous. Businesses operate in the red all the time, and take out loans for capital improvements, expansions, acquisitions, etc. If Romney’s background is in the private sector, how could he not know this?
7. On contraception access, Romney argued, “I don’t think we’ve seen in the history of this country the kind of attack on religious conscience, religious freedom, religious tolerance that we’ve seen under Barack Obama.”
That’s so ridiculous, even Romney couldn’t actually mean that.
8. Also on contraception access, Romney said, “[The Obama administration is] requiring the Catholic Church to provide for its employees and its various enterprises health care insurance that would include birth control, sterilization and the morning-after pill. Unbelievable.”
Yes, it’s literally unbelievable, because he’s lying: churches are exempt. (He’s also contradicting his own previous position.)
9. On the Affordable Care Act, Romney said, “I will repeal Obamacare for a lot of reasons. One, I don’t want to spend another trillion dollars… Number two, I don’t believe the federal government should cut Medicare by some $500 billion.”
One, the ACA saves money and reduces the deficit. Number two, the Medicare claim continues to be wildly misleading.
10. On Pentagon spending, Romney claimed, “This is a president who is … cutting our military budget by roughly a trillion dollars.”
That’s not even close to being true.
11. On international affairs, Romney argued about the president, “He decided to give Russia their number one foreign policy objective — removal of our missile defense sites from Eastern Europe — and got nothing in return.”
That’s just not what happened.
12. Romney’s new attack ad says Rick Santorum voted to confirm Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
Santorum left the Senate in 2006 — three years before Sotomayor’s confirmation. [Update: It looks like the Romney camp played fast and loose on this one, showing Sotomayor with President Obama in 2009 when she was nominated for the Supreme Court, but counting Santorum’s vote when Sotomayor was a lower-court nominee. The implication for viewers is that Santorum backed Sotomayor for the high court, which is not true, when he and other Republicans did support her confirmation to a lower court.]
Foreign Policy columnist Michael Cohen noted yesterday that he understands that “politicians mislead and occasionally fib,” but added, “[H]onestly, I’ve never seen anyone do it as brazenly as Mitt Romney.”
With each passing week, I find it harder to disagree with such a sentiment.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 24, 2012
Utah House Passes Bill To Allow Schools To Skip Sex Education
A bill to allow Utah schools to drop sex education classes — and prohibit instruction in the use of contraception in those that keep the courses — moved significantly closer to becoming law Wednesday. The House passed HB363 by a 45-28 vote after a late-afternoon debate that centered largely on lawmakers’ differing definitions of morality.
“We’ve been culturally watered down to think we have to teach about sex, about having sex and how to get away with it, which is intellectually dishonest,” said bill sponsor Rep. Bill Wright, R-Holden. “Why don’t we just be honest with them upfront that sex outside marriage is devastating?”
It was a viewpoint that met with equal conviction from those opposed to the bill.
“You cannot speak of abstinence without talking to students about methods of birth control that are not certain, about protecting oneself from [sexually transmitted diseases] and all the things that can happen in a negative sense to a young person who engages in sex ,” said Rep. Carol Spackman Moss, D-Holladay. “It’s really immoral not to teach kids about what the consequences are.”
Over the course of nearly an hour, lawmakers took turns trying to change the bill. Ultimately, the version the House passed would allow school districts to forgo teaching about sex altogether.
Lawmakers also, however, changed the bill on the House floor to prohibit schools that continue to teach sex education from instructing students in “the use of contraceptive methods or devices.” It was a change from the version that passed out of committee earlier this month that would have prohibited “instruction in the advocacy or encouragement of the use of contraceptive methods or devices.”
Wright said the version of the bill that passed Wednesday would prohibit instruction in contraception, although teachers could respond to student questions about the matter.
It would be a big shift from current law, which prohibits only the advocacy of contraceptive use. Current law requires high schools to teach sex education, allowing them to choose whether to simply stress abstinence or teach abstinence-only.
By: Lisa Schencker, The Salt Lake Tribune, February 22, 2012
Rick Santorum Cashes In On The Very Tax Credit He Claims To Hate
Rick Santorum regularly knocks the stimulus bill that the Democratic Congress passed, and President Obama signed into law, back in early 2009. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act “cost American jobs,” he told CNN last July. But that didn’t stop Santorum from claiming a tax credit for home efficiency funded through the stimulus plan that year.
According to his 2009 tax form, which was released last week, Santorum claimed a $3,151 expenditure on new exterior windows and skylights, one of the “qualified energy efficiency improvements” for homes that was granted a tax credit through the stimulus bill. The stimulus bill revived a tax credit that had expired at the end of 2007 and increased the amount of money homeowners could claim. This allowed the Santorum family to knock $945 off their taxes.
The purpose of the tax credit was to help homeowners save money by using less energy, while at the some time generating fewer emissions. But the efficient choices can often cost more upfront—hence the desire to create a tax credit to incentivize that kind of expensive upgrade. The measure was also intended to benefit the manufacturing and construction industries by creating more opportunities for them to make and install the windows and other efficient products.
Santorum has made attacking the Obama administration’s energy and environmental policies a prime plank in his platform, implying just last week that the president is some kind of dirt-worshiping hippie aligned with “radical environmentalists.” He’s also used his position on the subject as a way to distance himself from rival Mitt Romney, who has at times shown sympathy for protecting the environment.
“Who would be the better person to go after the Obama administration on trying to control the energy and manufacturing sector of our economy and trying to dictate to you what lights to turn on and what car to drive?” Santorum told the crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference earlier this month. “Would it be someone who bought into man-made global warming and imposed the first carbon cap in the state of Massachusetts, the first state to do so in the country?”
Despite the major boost that the stimulus bill gave to the manufacturing sector, Santorum has accused Obama of “talk[ing] about how he’s going to help manufacturing, after he systematically destroyed it.” The stimulus is also one of the many things Santorum targets when he criticizes Obama’s “radical agenda.” “We’re not like the liberals. Every time we see a problem, we don’t have to find a government program to fix it,” Santorum said on the campaign trail in Michigan this week. “We encourage others to fix it without the government’s heavy hand.”
Santorum has also said he thinks that “all subsidies to energy should be eliminated.” He doesn’t, however, seem to have a great grasp on what those subsidies are, as he also claims that “there are not a lot of them” to eliminate—when in fact we provide about $20 billion worth every year. Nor did he comment on whether the tax credit he claimed just a few years ago would qualify as one.
By: Kate Sheppard, Mother Jones, February 24, 2012
“Wealth-Tainted Asides”: Mitt, Michigan And A Couple Of Cadillacs
Mitt Romney just can’t stop wealth allusions from creeping into the conversation.
He did it again on Friday. At the end of a speech about his economic plan before the Detroit Economic Club, when it felt as though he was just winging it, he said: “I love this country. I actually love this state. This feels good being back in Michigan. Um, you know the trees are the right height. The, uh, the streets are just right. I like the fact that most of the cars I see are Detroit-made automobiles. I drive a Mustang and a Chevy pickup truck. Ann drives a couple of Cadillacs, actually.”
Two Cadillacs?
That’s rich, literally.
That’s not what you want to say when you are in Detroit, which, as I pointed out last week, has the highest poverty rate of any big city in America.
That’s not what you want to say in a city where Megan Owens of the Detroit-based advocacy organization Transportation Riders United said on Friday that roughly half of its bus service has been eliminated in the past five or so years.
That’s not what you want to say when discussing a tax-cut plan that, according to models prepared by the Tax Policy Center, would heavily weight the benefits toward the top of the income spectrum.
That’s not what you want to say when, as David Cay Johnston of Reuters pointed out this week, Romney’s plan would:
“Raise taxes on poor families with children at home and those going to college. Romney does this by reducing benefits from the child tax credit and the earned income tax credit and by ending the American Opportunity tax credit for college education.”
That’s probably not the thing to say in Detroit after arguing in a now-famous New York Times Op-Ed article against the auto bailouts, saying: “If General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye.”
That was probably not the thing to say on the day after Steven Rattner, the lead adviser on the Obama administration’s auto task force in 2009, smacked you down in a New York Times Op-Ed article for suggesting that the government “should have stayed on the sidelines” and allowed the companies to go through “ ‘managed bankruptcies’ financed by private capital.”
As Rattner put it:
“That sounds like a wonderfully sensible approach — except that it’s utter fantasy. In late 2008 and early 2009, when G.M. and Chrysler had exhausted their liquidity, every scrap of private capital had fled to the sidelines. I know this because the administration’s auto task force, for which I was the lead adviser, spoke diligently to all conceivable providers of funds, and not one had the slightest interest in financing those companies on any terms. If Mr. Romney disagrees, he should come forward with specific names of willing investors in place of empty rhetoric. I predict that he won’t be able to, because there aren’t any.”
Ouch. I need to catch my breath after that one.
O.K., carrying on.
The “couple of Cadillacs” comment probably wasn’t the thing to say the day after the Pew Research Center found that most Americans now support the bailouts, with 56 percent saying “the loans the government made to G.M. and Chrysler were mostly good for the economy.”
That probably wasn’t the thing to say in a city where you published an op-ed in The Detroit News on Valentine’s Day continuing to argue against the bailout, saying:
“This was crony capitalism on a grand scale. The president tells us that without his intervention things in Detroit would be worse. I believe that without his intervention things there would be better.”
That probably wasn’t the thing to say the week that your campaign felt the need to remove this lovely little passage from The Detroit News’s endorsement of you before sending it to reporters:
“We disagree with Romney on a point vital to Michigan — his opposition to the bailout of the domestic automobile industry. Romney advocated for a more traditional bankruptcy process, while we believe the bridge loans provided by the federal government in the fall of 2008 were absolutely essential to the survival of General Motors Corp. and Chrysler Corp. The issue isn’t a differentiator in the G.O.P. primary, since the entire field opposed the rescue effort.”
The Detroit Free Press’s endorsement this week echoed the complaint about Romney’s opposition on the bailouts, calling him “dead wrong” and saying that in the past year he has been “refashioning himself as something other than what his record suggests. He has made gestures toward economic and social radicalism, and eschewed the common sense of cooperative governing that made him a success in Massachusetts.”
But what is likely more telling about Romney’s ineloquence and continued wealth-tainted asides that draw attention away from his message onto his wallet is this gem from his Friday endorsement by The Arizona Republic:
“There are better orators in American politics. Indeed, the Democrats appear to have one. And certainly there are Republicans who better project the passion for the office they seek. Steady, unflappable Romney would not a ‘passion president’ make.”
So, poor oratory, anemic passion, possessed of “utter fantasy,” and gestures toward radicalism while cruising in a couple of Caddies: That’s probably not the image you want going into a make-or-break primary.
By: Charles Blow, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, February 24, 2012
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