“The Urgency Of Growth”: Congressional Doom-Mongers Need To End Their Campaign Of Government By Deadline And Emergency
If you care about deficits, you should want our economy to grow faster. If you care about lifting up the poor and reducing unemployment, you should want our economy to grow faster. And if you are a committed capitalist and hope to make more money, you should want our economy to grow faster.
The moment’s highest priority should be speeding economic growth and ending the waste, human and economic, left by the Great Recession. But you would never know this because the conversation in our nation’s capital is being held hostage by a ludicrous cycle of phony fiscal deadlines driven by a misplaced belief that the only thing we have to fear is the budget deficit.
Let’s call a halt to this madness. If we don’t move the economy to a better place, none of the fiscal projections will matter. The economic downturn ballooned the deficit. Growth will move the numbers in the right direction.
Moreover, the whole point of an economy is to provide everyone with real opportunities for gainful employment and economic advance — the generational “relay” that San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro affectingly described at last year’s Democratic convention. When we talk only about deficits, we take our eyes off the prize.
But there is good news. Gradually, establishment thinking is moving toward a new consensus that puts growth first and looks for deficit reduction over time. In the last few months, middle-of-the-road and moderately conservative voices have warned that if we cut the deficit too quickly, too soon, we could throw ourselves back into the economic doldrums — and increase the very deficit we are trying to reduce.
Here, for example, is excellent advice from the deservedly respected (and thoroughly pro-market) economic columnist Martin Wolf, offered last week in the Financial Times: “The federal government is not on the verge of bankruptcy. If anything, the tightening has been too much and too fast. The fiscal position is also not the most urgent economic challenge. It is far more important to promote recovery. The challenges in the longer term are to raise revenue while curbing the cost of health. Meanwhile, people, just calm down.”
“Calm down” is exactly what we need to do. We have been inundated with apocalyptic prophecies about our debt levels. While they come from the center as well as the right, Republicans are using them to turn the next two years into a carnival of contrived crises. These will (1) make normal governing impossible — no agency can plan when budgets are always up in the air; (2) distract us — we need to think about measures, such as an infrastructure bank, that would promote prosperity now and into the future; and (3) drive business people crazy — no enterprise would put itself through the contortions that are becoming part of Washington’s routine.
Only if you believe that deficits mean the end is near can any of this be justified. Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader, perfectly encapsulated the effort to diminish the importance of all else (including growth) when he declared recently that “deficit and debt” constitute the “transcendent issue of our era.”
No, it’s not. As Bruce Bartlett, the bravely dissident conservative economics specialist wrote a few days ago: “In fact, our long-term deficit situation is not nearly as severe as even many budget experts believe. The problem is that they are looking at recent history and near-term projections that are overly impacted by one-time factors related to the economic crisis and massive Republican tax cuts that lowered revenues far below normal.”
Former Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers warned in The Post that we can’t “lose sight of the jobs and growth deficits that ultimately will have the greatest impact on how this generation of Americans lives and what they bequeath to the next generation.” And economists at the International Monetary Fund have offered some honorable mea culpas about underestimating the damage that ill-timed austerity programs have done to growth — and to the fiscal positions of the nations affected by them.
You have to hope that President Obama will use his State of the Union message to speak forcefully for growth and the public investments that will foster it. But sensible people also need to rise up and tell the congressional doom-mongers that they have to calm down and end their wholly destructive campaign to turn our great system of self-rule into a government by deadline and emergency.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 27, 2013
“Rewarding Failure”: Reince Priebus Re-elected To Lead The Republican National Committee
Reince Priebus was re-elected chairman of the Republican National Committee on Friday, overcoming divisions and tensions in the party as he pledged to remake and restore the Republican brand before the Congressional elections next year and the 2016 presidential race.
He was elected with near unanimity to serve a second term at the helm of the Republican Party. He allayed concerns from some party officials and activists about the outcome of last year’s elections and sought re-election without serious opposition.
“We can stand by our timeless principles and articulate them in ways that are modern and relevant to our time and relatable to the majority of voters,” Mr. Priebus said in his speech. “And that, I believe, is how we’ll achieve a Republican renewal. That’s how we’ll grow. That’s how we’ll win.”
The election here on Friday during the annual winter meeting of the committee unfolded without the drama and dissent of two years ago when Mr. Priebus was elected after surviving seven contentious rounds of balloting to overtake Michael Steele, the embattled party chairman.
Mr. Priebus, 40, a former chairman of the Wisconsin Republican Party, delivered a blunt message to the party during his acceptance speech. He said that the Republican Party needed to rebuild across the country and not simply focus on the same battleground states that are at the center of every presidential election.
“There is one clear, overriding lesson from November: We didn’t have enough voters,” Mr. Priebus said. “We have to find more supporters. We have to go places we haven’t been and we have to invite new people to join us.”
In his remarks, Mr. Priebus reported to members of the committee that he had led the party out of the debt that he inherited when he took over two years ago. He said the party still needed to make strides to compete with the Democratic Party.
Mr. Priebus secured the support of the party’s major donors and state officials, even as he appealed to the Libertarian strains of the party that are represented by supporters of Ron Paul. He fought back the possibility of a challenge from Mark Willis, a committee member from Maine, who supported Mr. Paul in last year’s presidential campaign.
Mr. Willis did not receive enough support on Friday to have his name placed into nomination. Party officials who gathered here said Republicans needed to be unified if they were going to successfully rebuild after losing the race for the White House and seats in the House and Senate last year.
In his remarks on Friday, Mr. Priebus said the party needed to improve its technology to compete with Democrats, but also focus on returning to the basics of building a strong get-out-the-vote operation. He did not talk specifically about the divisions inside the party over fiscal and social issues, but he urged Republican officials to be driven by their overarching goal: winning elections.
“Growing the party to be more welcoming and more inclusive does not require abandoning our principles,” Mr. Priebus said. “It means renewing those principles because only they can offer the solutions to the liberal-induced problems of our time.”
By: Jef Zeleny, The New York Times, January 25, 2013
“The Republican Pity Party”: They Gave It Their All And Came Up Empty
Conservative behavior since President Obama’s reelection in November has evoked, at least in me, a keen sense of sadness. Hardly a day goes by without weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth by the likes of Rush Limbaugh on talk radio and Sean Hannity on Fox News over Obama’s return to the White House. Similar whining is heard among Republicans on Capitol Hill.
Simply put, conservatives are in agony over the president’s smashing victory. Their pain is hard to watch. Only small-minded Democrats would gloat.
What we’re seeing is the impact of losing when you believed with all your heart, soul and mind, buttressed by the predictions of pollsters and pundits, that you would win handily.
The reaction is, for me, heart-rending.
Consider the feeble attempt by House Republicans to recover political ground by threatening Obama over the debt limit.
The poor things, crazed by their defeat, didn’t realize that they had no leverage. They had to back down with a face-saving gimmick to suspend through May enforcement of the limit on federal borrowing.
Consider some Republicans’ return to the issue of what happened in Benghazi, Libya. Did they really think that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would traipse up to the Hill this week, prostrate herself before Congress and confess to something that she knew wasn’t true?
They so wanted her to say that there was mendacity and attempts by the administration to cover up malfeasance in the Sept. 11 attack on a U.S. diplomatic facility. Some seemed truly distressed that Clinton wouldn’t give them what they wanted. They were so desperate. It was so sad.
And so it has gone since election night. The lamentations abound:
●Obama’s nominations of Jack Lew as Treasury secretary and Chuck Hagel as defense secretary are confrontational; woe unto us.
●“I would have liked to have seen some outreach” in Obama’s inaugural address, complained Sen. John McCain, who, with his Republican cohorts, did everything they could to kick Barack Obama out of the White House.
●The Obama administration will “attempt to annihilate the Republican Party . . . to just shove us into the dustbin of history,” House Speaker John Boehner wailed this week.
And so it goes: one big conservative pity party.
Imagine how hard it must have been to lose.
For four long years they hit Obama with everything they had, assailing him at every turn. No insult was too offensive to be hurled; no abuse too outrageous to be tried; no name too abusive to call.
From Day One, destruction of the Obama administration and preventing his reelection was top priority; the second item too far down the list to remember.
Four years of blame, blame, blame. Blah, blah, blah.
Conservatives on Capitol Hill and right-wing commentators left nothing on the field.
They gave it their all — and came up empty.
What an emotional letdown. How not to feel at least a little sorry for them?
So where do they go from here?
This should be a time for introspection, for conservatives to examine their thoughts and look inside for answers as to why they lost when, at first blush, they had so much going for them. And why were they so dead set on not just defeating but breaking this president?
Hard-liners, of course, will take exception to my characterization of their behavior. What I might call abusive or mean they would probably describe as passionate: their passionate defense of liberty, the Constitution, smaller government, free enterprise and the individual — all things they see Obama as opposing.
The conservative wing regards itself as all that stands between freedom and tyranny, between order and chaos, between values and licentiousness.
And perhaps that self-view explains why they are taking their loss so hard.
It also may help explain why their conduct is so, well, touching.
Conservatives yakking it up in House and Senate chambers and on the airwaves these days are delusional, in much the way that the South deluded itself into thinking it was in the right during the Civil War or that Republicans held fast to the misguided belief that the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt was wrong for the country.
American principles endure. But America is changing, just as it evolved during the Lincoln era and just as it emerged from the Great Depression under FDR’s leadership.
What makes this so excruciatingly sad is that some forces on the right are too far gone to see the truth.
By: Colbert I. King, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 25, 2013
“Already In The Line Of Fire”: Predictable Republican Response To Women’s Roles In The Military
The conservative reaction to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s announcement that the military would abolish its arbitrary restriction against women serving in positions defined as “combat roles” is predictable but a bit behind the times. As Adam Serwer at Mojo quickly pointed out, a lot of women are already placing themselves in the line of fire without technically being in a combat role. Check out Serwer’s response to the Daily Caller‘s Tucker Carlson, who has been prominent among opponents of the rule change:
Carlson is a political journalist, so he might be expected to know that there is a woman US Army veteran amputee named Tammy Duckworth currently serving in Congress. Duckworth, who represents Illinois’ 8th congressional district, lost her legs after an attack brought down the helicopter she was piloting in Baghdad.
But this development is actually a bit older than you might think. Back in 2002, on the brink of the second Iraq War, in a Washington Monthly article, Phillip Carter predicted thousands of women would serve in de facto combat roles in Iraq, based on earlier experience:
Since the Gulf victory in 1991, a series of largely unnoticed policy changes have opened new opportunities for women to fight alongside, and even to lead, front-line troops. The Navy and Air Force, with some fanfare, allowed women into the cockpits of fighters and bombers. But less well known is how vastly the Army has expanded the role of women in ground-combat operations. Today, women command combat military police companies, fly Apache helicopters, work as tactical intelligence analysts, and even serve in certain artillery units–jobs that would have been unthinkable for them a decade ago. In any war in Iraq, these changes could put thousands of women in the midst of battle, far more than at any time in American history.
Carter, like Serwer, notes that having combat roles officially opened will be extremely helpful to women who want a professional career in the armed services, since combat experience is often crucial to promotion opportunities. And in any event, elimination of the gender barrier does not mean women unqualified for combat roles will assume them, any more than unqualified men, a point Serwer makes:
Most men cannot meet the necessary mental and physical requirements for service in combat. Any woman who can meet those standards should not be denied the opportunity because of an arbitrary gender restriction. Moreover, removing the restriction is not about celebrating militarism. The military has long been a path for historically disfavored groups to claim the full benefits of citizenship. Justifying discrimination against blacks, gays and lesbians, or women becomes much more difficult when they’re giving their lives for their country.
Perhaps that’s an underlying motive for conservatives deploring the change: it helps give discrimination a bad name!
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, January 24, 2013
“The Elephant Doesn’t Exist”: Guns And The Tyranny Of Extreme Rhetoric
Let’s say you’re making lunch in the kitchen while your kids play in the living room. When you come in with their mid-day meal, the place is a disaster. You look at them. They look at you. And before you know it they’re blurting out something like “the elephant did it!”
Now, I suppose there’s something to be said for that argument. It takes a quick wit. Or at least a keen sense of mammalogy. But it’s got one fundamental flaw: There is no elephant. And you know that’s true no matter how hard they argue otherwise.
These days, some on the right have seized on an invisible elephant all their own. They’ve named him Tyranny, and to hear them tell it, he’s big, he’s scary, and he’s tearing up the place. The problem, of course, is that he doesn’t exist—but that hasn’t stopped them from trying to convince the rest of us that he does.
Their latest effort came in the form of a Scott Rasmussen poll that found “65 percent See Gun Rights As Protection Against Tyranny.” If it’s true, that’s quite a finding. It means most of us believe that our government may descend into tyranny and that guns are the right way to protect ourselves from that eventuality.
Of course, there’s good reason to doubt Rasmussen: His polls reliably lean to the right. But for the sake of argument let’s take his findings on their face. How should we reconcile them with the great many other polls that suggest broadening support for gun control? The 55 percent in a CNN/Time poll who say gun controls should be tightened. The 58 percent in an ABC/Washington Post poll who back an assault weapons ban. The 63 percent in a CBS/New York Times poll who support banning high capacity magazines. The 78 percent in the same poll who favor creating a database to track all gun sales in the United States.
If you take the Rasmussen poll on the one hand and all the other polls on the other, it can only mean that there are many millions of us who somehow believe both that Americans need guns to protect ourselves from a government that may turn tyrannical and that we should make it harder for Americans to get guns. This is a, ahem, nuance that Rasmussen fails to address.
And then of course, there’s this: According to a recent Pew survey, only 33 percent of Americans have a gun in their home at all. If so many of us really think that tyranny looms and that guns are our protection but so few of us actually own them…well, we must be a pretty self-destructive lot.
As it happens, there was another poll in the field at around the same time as Rasmussen’s that was about the same issue, and conducted by a similarly conservative pollster—Wenzel Strategies (the pollster for Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, among others). Wenzel asked respondents whether they believed the Second Amendment “exists to allow Americans to have small arms for hunting and self-protection” or “to give Americans the ability to defend themselves against government if it becomes tyrannical?” The results? Forty-seven percent said it’s just for hunting and self-protection. A whopping 8 percent said it’s just to defend against tyranny. And 40 percent said all of the above.
In other words, two polls that can be relied on to skew right, but on the question of tyranny and guns, Rasmussen’s big majority turns into Wenzel’s minority. And a less partisan researcher would presumably find that support is actually significantly lower than is suggested in both.
None of this, however, put the brakes on the Rasmussen poll among the conservative press and punditry. Breitbart, NewsMax, FreedomWorks, etc. all quickly linked to or posted stories like the one Katie Pavlich authored at TownHall.com reporting that “an overwhelming majority of Americans believe the Second Amendment and gun rights are necessary to protect against tyranny.”
Look, I don’t put any more stock in Wenzel than I do Rasmussen. In my view, they both poll in the service of ideology rather than in an effort to uncover actual attitudes and beliefs. (Wenzel used his findings, for example, to suggest that we are more at risk of tyrannical takeover precisely because we don’t think it’s going to happen. Sigh.) And I have no doubt that there are those who actually believe that tyranny is in the offing. But the fact is, most of us, regardless of our political or ideological stripe, don’t believe that. We know the difference between our government and that of other countries in world, between Saddam Hussein and John Boehner. The former subjected Iraqis to years of death squads and oppression. That’s a tyrant. The latter’s subjected Americans to years of weepy incompetence. That’s irritating.
That doesn’t make the tyrannists’ rhetoric any less insidious, however. In asking us to conceive of an America that is profoundly different from the one in which we actually live they seek to conform our public policy to threats that exist only in some kind of make-believe place. When they are successful, the mainstreaming of lunatic ideas (like: We live under the threat of tyranny) makes possible ever more extreme policies (like: We all must have the right to semi-automatic weapons). And when we let that happen, nightmares of a very different kind than those conjured up by the ideologues really do come true.
When you take the invisible elephant out of your living room, you can clearly see what caused the mess (your kids.) And when you take the false threat of tyranny out of the equation, the case against assault weapons is pretty clear too (we don’t need them).
The elephant doesn’t exist. And it’s time for us to say so.
By: Anson Kaye, U. S. News and World Report, January 24, 2013
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