“Presidential Leadership Is A Moving Target”: For Republicans, President Obama Shouldn’t Do Anything That Might Make Them Mad
If Ron Fournier’s goal was to generate some discussion with his new column, he succeeded. Putting aside whether readers found his thesis compelling, it’s clearly generated some chatter.
Before highlighting Fournier’s case, it’s important to note for those unfamiliar with his work that the National Journal columnist is perhaps best known for his frequent – some might say, incessant – calls for President Obama to “lead” more. Many, including me, tend to think Fournier’s thesis is superficial and blind to institutional limits, but it’s nevertheless become a signature issue for him.
It’s with this background in mind that his latest piece seemed especially noteworthy. Fournier considered the president’s possible use of executive actions on some key issues, including immigration, and urged caution.
Bypassing Congress may be legal. The reforms he wants may be a good idea. But when I look beyond the next election and set aside my issue biases, I reluctantly conclude that it would be very wrong.
Depending on how far Obama extends presidential authority – and he suggested Wednesday that he’s willing to stretch it like soft taffy – this could be a political nuclear bomb. The man whose foundational promise was unity (“I don’t want to pit red America against blue America”) could seal his fate as the most polarizing president in history.
Well, that certainly sounds serious. Fournier has been eager, if not desperate, to see Obama lead more, but now that the president is considering a forceful demonstration of leadership, the columnist sees a “political nuclear bomb.” And why is that?
For argument’s sake, let’s say Obama is right on the issue and has legal authority to act. The big question is … Would it be wrong to end-run Congress? Another way to put it might be, “Would more polarization in Washington and throughout the country be wrong?” How about exponentially more polarization, gridlock, and incivility? If the president goes too far, he owns that disaster.
Hmm. For argument’s sake, the nation is facing some serious policy challenges, and the White House has some meaningful solutions in mind. Those solutions, again for argument’s sake, are both legally sound and correct on the merits. As a matter of public policy, President Obama could take these actions and advance proposals with real merit.
But apparently, he should do no such thing. Fournier, who has spent years complaining about the need for Obama to lead more, now recommends the president lead less – because doing the correct and legally sound thing would make Obama’s opponents unhappy.
It’s a curious prescription for presidential leadership: Obama should take bold moves to move the nation forward, but only if his opponents who refuse to govern first extend their approval.
Under this Fournier thesis, legal authority and policy merit are but two legs of a three-legged stool. The president still needs permission from those who would see him fail – even if they refuse to govern, even if they will not negotiate in good faith, even if their preferred policy is to do nothing, regardless of the consequences.
Kevin Drum summarized this nicely: “What Fournier is saying is that President Obama shouldn’t do anything that might make Republicans mad. But this means the president is literally helpless: No proposal of his has any chance of securing serious Republican engagement in Congress, but he’s not allowed to take executive action for fear of making them even more intransigent. Obama’s only legitimate option, apparently, is to persuade Republicans to support his proposals, even though it’s no secret that Republicans decided years ago to obstruct everything, sight unseen, that was on Obama’s agenda. So that leaves Obama with no options at all.”
I find Fournier’s argument well-intentioned, but ultimately incomprehensible. Indeed, to a certain degree it’s bizarre – Fournier has argued that Obama must “act” on his agenda. Great presidents, the columnist has said, “find a way” to advance their goals, even in the face of fierce opposition.
And as Obama prepares to do exactly that, effectively embracing on Fourier’s own advice, the National Journal columnist suddenly decides bold presidential action isn’t so great after all. Obama’s principal concern should no longer be advancing worthwhile ideas to advance national interests, but rather, the focus should be what might make Republicans – the unpopular party that lost the most recent elections – angrier than they already are.
The president’s detractors can’t have it both ways. They can’t say Obama is leading too much and too little at the same time. They shouldn’t demand bold action and passive timidity simultaneously.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, August 8, 2014
“Our Political System Is Morphing”: The Problem With The Koch Brothers Isn’t Their Politics. It’s Their Copycats
Did you see the “Creepy Carnival” from the Koch brothers on the Washington Mall the other day? Sponsored by the youth-outreach tentacle of the brothers’ operation, it featured Pennywise the Clown doppelgangers dunking millennials into “High-Risk Pools” – though, surely, they missed an opportunity to nail some old people to death panels. (There was no word about the presence of funhouse mirrors to artificially shrink the outsize influence of the Kochs on our national agenda.)
These two men have commanded center stage in the dark-money circus since the US supreme court started the political money free-for-all four and a half years ago. The Kochs have become the focus of electoral campaigns themselves.
But however effective they may be as conservative bogeymen, the real problem with the Kochs is not that they are ultra-conservative. The problem is that they are a leading indicator that our political system is morphing from elections based on ideology to elections based on the preferences of individual donors.
Big “fundraisers” like the Kochs don’t care so much about candidates or parties. They care about policies, and that tendency to narrowly target their dollars naturally pushes candidates to tailor their platforms to issues more than coherent ideologies. Jjust look at Sheldon Adelson and Israel, or Tom Steyer and green energy, or Paul Singer and gay rights – or the Koch brothers themselves, whose political manipulations have always been based in a fervent economic libertarianism more than purely Republican politics.
The negative focus on mega-donors on both sides of the aisle is having one effect: it’s turning Americans firmly against the current electoral financing system. According to Gallup, fully 50% of the country would support a federally funded campaign finance system with no private contributions whatsoever; 79% would vote for a law limiting contributions in some way.
As a result, the movement for a small-donor revolution in campaign finance is slowly clawing its way into the mainstream. The leading general in that revolution, Lawrence Lessig – who launched Mayday Pac to blow up big money in politics by raising big money – just surpassed his initial fundraising goal of $5m by raking in $7.6m in small donations. (Ironically, a few mega-donors will be kicking in another $5m in matching funds.)
But Lessig’s Kickstarter-esque project is itself the kind of single-issue project that has, to date, been the purview of fundraising behemoths: he plans to give the money only to candidates who hew to his vision of campaign finance reform. Like them, it lays the groundwork for the decentralization of parties, whether or not Lessig’s own goals are achieved.
As it stands, the number of Americans who identify with a particular political party do so now with unprecedented intensity, and the number of Americans who don’t identify with either party has grown as well. Sheer frustration could move some – or perhaps many – independents who currently favor a particular party to a more radicalized center.
Disillusioned with actual politicians, apolitical activists could make the candidates the least important part of a ballot by donating to and campaigning for policies, rather than politicians. And that is what issue-oriented Super Pacs, like Lessig’s and others, are counting on: small donors, and voters interested in issues over ideology – or, at least issues-as-ideology.
The idea of non-partisan issue activism is an old one, but what’s changed is the degree of overall partisanship and our expectations of infinite, individualized choice today. When we’ve got Uber in our hands and Spotify playlists inside our headphones, it seems reasonable to expect technology could do the same for democracy.
Anil Dash, a tech activist and entrepreneur, envisions a kind of Amazon for activism – a literal marketplace of ideas, wherein a donor with a little money and a few major passions could shop for candidates that fit an issue checklist. They could even target those who appear particularly “flexible”, based on a database matching their voting history to donors, or particularly in need of cash to keep the campaign going. These, of course, are tactics that big money donors have long used to sway the opinions of politicians. The question is whether the aggregation of enough small donors could be equally effective.
But do today’s policy crises even lend themselves to the micro-targeted solutions that app-enabled voters could select? Do we wind up with solutions to climate change, or just pockets of pollution? And what issues disappear entirely when pressures from both special interest big donors and special interest small donors push parties to the breaking point?
As it is, just the system is broken – or bent, leaning heavily in the direction of that easy mega-donor money. The undoing of campaign finance reform has made more and more obvious to more and more people; Larry Lessig’s project to leverage that disgust will spotlight the ugliness just in time for 2016. Perhaps it will drive at least some conversations, if not solutions.
By: Ana Marie Cox, The Guardian, July 28, 2014
“McCain’s Descent Into Self-Pity”: Oh Please Mr. President, Say To Me, You’ll Let Me Hold Your Hand!
At a fundraiser this week, President Obama told supporters, “I’d love nothing more than a loyal and rational opposition, but that’s not what we have right now.” Apparently, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) wasn’t amused.
“The self-pity that Obama continues to exhibit is really kind of sad, really,” McCain said on Wednesday during Fox News’ “On the Record with Greta Van Susteren.” […]
“You know, I can’t work with him at all,” McCain said. “When is the last time he really called leaders of both parties together over at the White House, say, for a dinner, a social event.”
The failed presidential candidate added that Obama “does not have this desire to have social interface with people.”
I don’t mean to be picky, but when a politician accuses a rival of “self-pity,” and then in the next breath, he whines that the rival hasn’t invited him over for dinner, the politician probably hasn’t thought his argument through.
As Jed Lewison joked, “If President Obama would just call me up for dinner or a social event, and ask me to have social interface with him, then everything would be better and the world would be a fantastic place, but he won’t do that, so please excuse me while I go drown myself in a pool of tears shed over his self-pitying ways.”
But let’s go a step further with this, because McCain isn’t just confused about the nature of self-pity; he’s also wrong on the merits.
I’m reminded of an anecdote from last year when Obama invited several congressional Republicans to the White House for a private screening with the stars of the movie “Lincoln.” The president extended the invitation in secret, so the GOP lawmakers wouldn’t face any pressure from the right to turn Obama down.
It didn’t matter. None of the Republicans accepted the invitation to go and watch the movie at the White House.
Indeed, as we’ve discussed before, Obama has hosted casual “get-to-know-you” gatherings; he’s taken Republicans out to dinner on his dime; he’s taken House Speaker Boehner out golfing; and he’s held Super Bowl and March Madness parties at the White House for lawmakers.
Now, reasonable people can debate whether this outreach should have been even more aggressive, but for McCain to tell a national television audience the president “does not have this desire to have social interface with people” is obviously ridiculous.
But let’s go a step further still. If the lack of schmoozing isn’t the problem, what is? As we’ve discussed many, many times, traditional governing dynamics are largely impossible given that the Republican Party has reached an ideological extreme unseen in modern American history. It’s a quantifiable observation, not a subjective one.
The result is a situation in which GOP lawmakers refuse to compromise or accept concessions, partly due to partisan rigidity, partly out of fear of a primary challenge, partly out of their contempt for the president, and in many instances, all of the above.
Indeed, the parties sharply disagree with one another – there is no modern precedent for partisan polarization as intense as today’s status quo – and presidential outreach won’t change that. Congressional Republicans tend to fundamentally reject just about everything the White House wants, believes, and perceives as true. “Social interface” changes nothing.
Let’s return to the thesis presented a while back by Tom Mann and Norm Ornstein: “[W]e have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.”
The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.
When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.
“Both sides do it” or “There is plenty of blame to go around” are the traditional refuges for an American news media intent on proving its lack of bias, while political scientists prefer generality and neutrality when discussing partisan polarization. Many self-styled bipartisan groups, in their search for common ground, propose solutions that move both sides to the center, a strategy that is simply untenable when one side is so far out of reach.
The notion that schmoozing will lead to progress rests upon the assumption that congressional Republicans are responsible officials, willing to negotiate and work in good faith, and prepared to find common ground with Obama. All they need is some face-time and presidential hand-holding. Once they can get along on a personal level, a constructive process will follow.
It’s a pleasant enough fantasy, and I wish it were true, but everything we’ve seen points in the opposite direction.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 25, 2014
“Left Coast Rising”: California’s Success Demonstrates That Extremist Ideology Still Dominating Much Of American Politics Is Nonsense
The states, Justice Brandeis famously pointed out, are the laboratories of democracy. And it’s still true. For example, one reason we knew or should have known that Obamacare was workable was the post-2006 success of Romneycare in Massachusetts. More recently, Kansas went all-in on supply-side economics, slashing taxes on the affluent in the belief that this would spark a huge boom; the boom didn’t happen, but the budget deficit exploded, offering an object lesson to those willing to learn from experience.
And there’s an even bigger if less drastic experiment under way in the opposite direction. California has long suffered from political paralysis, with budget rules that allowed an increasingly extreme Republican minority to hamstring a Democratic majority; when the state’s housing bubble burst, it plunged into fiscal crisis. In 2012, however, Democratic dominance finally became strong enough to overcome the paralysis, and Gov. Jerry Brown was able to push through a modestly liberal agenda of higher taxes, spending increases and a rise in the minimum wage. California also moved enthusiastically to implement Obamacare.
I guess we’re not in Kansas anymore. (Sorry, I couldn’t help myself.)
Needless to say, conservatives predicted doom. A representative reaction: Daniel J. Mitchell of the Cato Institute declared that by voting for Proposition 30, which authorized those tax increases, “the looters and moochers of the Golden State” (yes, they really do think they’re living in an Ayn Rand novel) were committing “economic suicide.” Meanwhile, Avik Roy of the Manhattan Institute and Forbes claimed that California residents were about to face a “rate shock” that would more than double health insurance premiums.
What has actually happened? There is, I’m sorry to say, no sign of the promised catastrophe.
If tax increases are causing a major flight of jobs from California, you can’t see it in the job numbers. Employment is up 3.6 percent in the past 18 months, compared with a national average of 2.8 percent; at this point, California’s share of national employment, which was hit hard by the bursting of the state’s enormous housing bubble, is back to pre-recession levels.
On health care, some people — basically healthy young men who were getting inexpensive insurance on the individual market and were too affluent to receive subsidies — did face premium increases, which we always knew would happen. Over all, however, the costs of health reform came in below expectations, while enrollment came in well above — more than triple initial predictions in the San Francisco area. A recent survey by the Commonwealth Fund suggests that California has already cut the percentage of its residents without health insurance in half. What’s more, all indications are that further progress is in the pipeline, with more insurance companies entering the marketplace for next year.
And, yes, the budget is back in surplus.
Has there been any soul-searching among the prophets of California doom, asking why they were so wrong? Not that I’m aware of. Instead, I’ve been seeing many attempts to devalue the good news from California by pointing out that the state’s job growth still lags that of Texas, which is true, and claiming that this difference is driven by differential tax rates, which isn’t.
For the big difference between the two states, aside from the size of the oil and gas sector, isn’t tax rates. it’s housing prices. Despite the bursting of the bubble, home values in California are still double the national average, while in Texas they’re 30 percent below that average. So a lot more people are moving to Texas even though wages and productivity are lower than they are in California.
And while some of this difference in housing prices reflects geography and population density — Houston is still spreading out, while Los Angeles, hemmed in by mountains, has reached its natural limits — it also reflects California’s highly restrictive land-use policies, mostly imposed by local governments rather than the state. As Harvard’s Edward Glaeser has pointed out, there is some truth to the claim that states like Texas are growing fast thanks to their anti-regulation attitude, “but the usual argument focuses on the wrong regulations.” And taxes aren’t important at all.
So what do we learn from the California comeback? Mainly, that you should take anti-government propaganda with large helpings of salt. Tax increases aren’t economic suicide; sometimes they’re a useful way to pay for things we need. Government programs, like Obamacare, can work if the people running them want them to work, and if they aren’t sabotaged from the right. In other words, California’s success is a demonstration that the extremist ideology still dominating much of American politics is nonsense.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, July 24, 2014
“Stop Undermining The President!”: I Am Glad We Have Barack Obama As Our President At This Time In Our History
For a short time after September 11, 2001 anyone who dared to criticize then President Bush was called an unpatriotic traitor. Remember the Dixie Chicks?
But today when international crises occur those same folks pushing that patriotic fervor are quick to find fault with our current Commander in Chief. Whatever happened to putting our country first? It seems to me any global unrest becomes an excuse to bash our President for political purposes.
Take this recent shooting down of Malaysian domestic Flight 17 over the Ukraine. President Obama addressed the disaster the day it happened at an event in Delaware but he was criticized by pundits at Fox News and right wing radio for continuing his speech about building infrastructure. A case could be made that the President wanted to promote calm and business as usual on the home front. On the same day he spoke on the phone with the Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, who later put the blame on Ukraine.
The next day our President labeled it an “outrage of unspeakable proportions” and a “global tragedy” and asked for a ceasefire between Russia and the Ukraine and called for an international investigation into the incident. He also spoke on the phone to Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razale, and Prime Minister Marke Rutte of the Netherlands over the course of the past two days.
In other words, he took the appropriate steps and actions to lead and stay on top of this international crisis. Yet, Senator John McCain pointed fingers at President Obama for not supplying weapons to Ukraine to help fight off the Russian rebels accused of this dastardly deed (whether it was an accident or not.) In fact, President Obama just two days ago announced even tougher sanctions on Russia for its involvement in Ukraine. So he has been taking actions, just not the military ones that war hawks McCain and others in the GOP have been pushing.
Then the Fox pundits, Sean Hannity in particular, compared this situation to President Reagan‘s reaction to a downed Korean passenger airliner by the Soviet Union in 1983. Yes, President Reagan, great actor that he was, condemned it in strong words, but it took him four days to do it and then he never took any action after that. Plus, it was a totally different world then. We were in a Cold War with the Soviets and things are much more complicated today with all of the unrest in the Middle East.
The conservative pundits will never talk about the Iranian passenger plane Air 655 that we shot down by accident in 1988 under President Reagan’s watch. The United States never apologized for it, paid $61 million for the 290 victims’ families, and no one was fired or held accountable for it. Talk about ironic hypocrisy by those who are so outraged by this.
I, for one, am getting tired of hearing about how “weak” our President is regarding foreign policy. Isn’t it possible that calling him that undermines our country and our reputation in the world? He is not weak. He is not John Wayne (emulated by Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush) but rather Cool Hand Luke. He thinks before he acts. He doesn’t shoot from the hip. He takes his time and consults his advisors and looks at the big picture of any long term effects his decisions may create. This may infuriate the action hero testosterone crowd but I think it is the better approach.
Sure, there are statements and mistakes the President made that he would like to take back like the “red line” in Syria, providing more security in Benghazi, and domestically the “you didn’t build that” (although that was taken outside of context), and “if you like your plan you can keep it” (which I think he really believed.)
But the vitriol and hatred lashed out against our leader is very disturbing and maddening. Many of it is based on lies told against him by his opponents (remember the so-called “apology tour” and “death panels” and the debacle over his birth certificate?)
A Facebook friend accused President Obama of raising his middle finger to Republicans from the beginning. I had to straighten him out by pointing out that right after Obama was inaugurated he invited the GOP over to the White House for a Super Bowl party, he played golf with Speaker of the House John Boehner after the 2010 election, he said in his address to the American people “even if you didn’t vote for me, I am your President too.” He wanted to unite the country. Remember his 2004 Democratic Convention speech about the red and blue states and how we are the United States?
It was the Republicans who turned against him from the beginning. The first day of his Presidency they had a meeting to devise a plan to defeat him. The Senate Minority leader, Mitch McConnell, said his number one priority was to make Barack Obama a one-term president (we all know how that turned out.) Talk radio host Rush Limbaugh said in the midst of our Great Recession “I hope he fails.”
You can only extend the hand of friendship and have it rebuffed so many times until you get the message that it is pointless. And I’m not saying it’s racial although there may be elements of that. The GOP did the same thing to President Bill Clinton, leading numerous dead-end investigations until they latched onto the Monica Lewinsky scandal and actually impeached him in the House of Representatives.
The irony is that the oppositions’ constant barrages have actually strengthened the President. I have never heard him speak with more fire than after Boehner announced the GOP were going to sue him. He has become immune to the chatter on the right and has taken up this latest attack as a battle cry for him to “do his job” for the country as Congress has become the least productive branch of government in history.
President Obama has finally gotten the message that FDR, LBJ, Bill Clinton and even Ronald Reagan learned. You can’t please the opposing party so you have to stick to your principles and do what you feel is right for the country.
I don’t know if other Americans are sick of all of this infighting but I have reached my boiling point. I am seriously considering banning Fox News from my channel surfing as it just irritates the heck out of me.
I just wish we as a nation would get behind our President at times of international crises. Maybe that will happen after the mid-term elections, but I am not holding my breath. In the meantime, I am glad we have Barack Obama as our president at this time in our history. We need his calm, cool, clear headed approach to leadership at this time of unprecedented international turmoil. And if enough of us just get behind him, maybe we can once again become the “United States of America.”
By: Joan E. Dowlin, The Huffington Post Blog, July 19, 20
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