“Oh, The Irresponsibility”: Karl Rove–Presidents Who Leave Deficits, Bad Economies, And War Are The Worst
Karl Rove is most famous for being architect of one of the worst presidencies in American history and then a Superpac strategist/delusional Romney campaign-night dead-ender. I’m a Rove junkie, and just as a snobbish fan of any popular band must have some obscure album he finds superior to the band’s most popular work, the Rove career function I find most delightful and rewarding is his work as a Wall Street Journal op-ed columnist. This is the medium that truly pulls back the curtain on Rove’s fascinating combination of insularity from facts outside the conservative pseudo-news bubble, delusional optimism, and utter lack of self-awareness. The Journal column is a weekly gift to amateur Rove psychoanalysts everywhere.
Today’s column begins with Rove’s bizarre belief that the health exchanges in Obamacare are a “single-payer” system, reflecting his apparent confusion about what this term means. (The single-payer in a single-payer system is the government, not the insurance companies in the exchanges.) But the main point is the Orwellian proposition that “Mr. Obama’s pattern is to act, or fail to act, in a way that will leave his successor with a boatload of troubles.” What kind of president would bequeath a boatload of troubles to his successor? Oh, the irresponsibility. The first count in Rove’s indictment is the budget deficit, which “was equal to roughly 40% of GDP when Mr. Obama took office. At last year’s end it was 72% of GDP.” One possible cause of this deficit might be the over-trillion-dollar annual deficit, that one George W. Bush handed over when he left office, along with the massive economic collapse.
Rove’s column goes on to express very strong views on the need for fiscal responsibility:
Then there’s Medicare, whose Hospital Insurance Trust Fund will go bankrupt in 2026. For five years, Mr. Obama has failed to offer a plan to restore Medicare’s fiscal health as he is required by the law establishing Medicare Part D. When Medicare goes belly-up, he will be out of office.
The Congressional Budget Office projects the Affordable Care Act will reduce deficits by more than a trillion dollars in its second decade. Yes, the Hospital Insurance Trust Fund is expected to reach insolvency by 2026, but when Bush left office, that projected insolvency date was nine years earlier. Meanwhile, Medicare’s projected spending has fallen by nearly $600 billion since the passage of Obamacare:
You can plausibly argue that these changes, combined with other cuts to long-term deficits, including partial expiration of the Bush tax cuts, don’t go far enough. But Rove is trying to make the case that Obama’s policies made the long-term budget outlook worse, which is false.
You know whose policies made the long-term outlook way, way worse? Yes, of course you do. Literally the entire Bush agenda – tax cuts, new domestic spending, major expansions of the military — was financed by debt. Rove tries to paint Bush as fiscally responsible because Obama has “failed to offer a plan to restore Medicare’s fiscal health as he is required by the law establishing Medicare Part D.”
That sentence is really the best. The point of the column is that Obama is terrible for leaving deficits to his successor. Rove is supporting this charge by citing a law his president passed, that created a major new debt-financed entitlement that Obama inherited. And he’s presenting this as Obama’s irresponsibility because the debt-financed entitlement Bush passed required the next president to come up with a law solving Medicare’s problems. And because Obama has alleviated but not completely solved Medicare’s problems, this shows that Obama has sloughed problems off onto the future. What a slacker, Obama is, sloughing off problems onto his successor rather than solve them as the president who came before him required him by law to do.
This leads us to the most Rove-ian paragraph in the column, and possibly in the entire history of the Rove oeuvre:
From the record number of Americans on food stamps to the worst labor-force participation rate since the 1970s to rising political polarization to retreating U.S. power overseas and increasing Middle East chaos and violence, Mr. Obama’s successor—Republican or Democratic—will inherit a mess.
What kind of president would leave his successor with a bad economy and a violent Middle East?
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, February 14, 2014
“How Radical Becomes Normal”: The Fight Over Unemployment Benefits Underscores The Right’s Extremism
So this is showdown week in Congress for extension of unemployment benefits. Frankly, it looks bleak. No, it’s not that the public is against it. In fact far from it—58 percent support the extension in a new poll. But as I’ve written a kajillion times these last few years, it unfortunately doesn’t much matter what the people think. Republicans in Congress care only about the views of the more radical half of their party. And in that same poll, Republicans opposed the extension 54-42.
As long as that remains the case (and there’s no reason it’s likely to change), “UI,” as they call it on the Hill, seems a heavy lift. Republicans are insisting on cuts from elsewhere in the federal budget to pay for the benefits’ $6.4 billion cost. And Democrats are talking with them. But there’s no progress yet. In fact, it seems today that even the six Republicans who voted in the Senate last week to allow debate to proceed would not vote to extend the benefits just yet.
But let’s take a step back here, because introducing a little bit of historical context shows just how extreme the Republicans’ position is, and it shows us how, over time, what used to be crazy-radical becomes normal with the people.
When George W. Bush was president, noted Labor Secretary Thomas Perez on Jim Lehrer’s PBS show last week, unemployment benefits were extended five times, “no strings attached any of those times.” So as long as it was a Republican president under whom their constituents were out of work, they were happy to vote to extend the benefits. The last extension under Bush, in late 2008, passed 368-28 in the House of Representatives. Remember, this was with no “pay-fors,” in the argot. This vote took place a month before Election Day, which may have partly motivated 142 Republicans to vote for it with only the real hard-shellers going against it.
Now let’s move forward to 2010. We have a new president from a different party. The economy is struggling. The Republicans of course haven’t exactly been supportive of Barack Obama’s agenda, but on this one, they’re ready to agree. All but one. Jim Bunning, then a GOP senator from Kentucky, insisted that he wasn’t against extending such benefits, but he was against increasing the deficit by a few billion bucks.
But even then, the Senate GOP leadership wasn’t with Bunning. I remember that time well. Bunning had a few defenders among his colleagues, but basically, his position was seen as extreme by Democrats and even many or possibly most Republicans. Bunning finally got the message after a couple of weeks of antics—which included him whining that his noble filibuster against helping the nation’s jobless was preventing him from watching an important Kentucky Wildcats basketball game—and relented.
But what was considered extreme and nutty then is standard operating procedure today. A key development here was Rand Paul saying a couple of weeks ago that benefits beyond 26 weeks just make people lazy. That unleashed the right-wing id. In addition to that, of course, there’s the standing GOP House opposition to anything with Obama’s name on it. And this is how radical becomes normal.
Friday, I was at a meeting with a group of House Democratic lawmakers. They offered a few ideas about how they might get Republicans to agree. John Garamendi of California talked about a few billion being spent on a program in Afghanistan that he thought the GOP might play ball on. There were a few other notions, but none of them, I noticed, bruited with much confidence that they’d actually get anywhere.
Several echoed Connecticut’s Rosa DeLauro in saying that they just have to win the battle in the court of public opinion. “These are Americans’ stories,” DeLauro said. “When people hear them, they’re moved.” There’s no doubt that that’s true. But it was true of gun safety, and it was true of immigration reform, and numerous other things.
I don’t know if the Democrats can win this on the floor. Maybe the horrible jobs report from December helps a little, maybe not. But since public opinion is already on their side, they can at least take this issue and make it hurt Republicans in states with high unemployment or Republicans who are singing a different tune than they did in 2010, a list that starts with Mitch McConnell, who agreed to the 2010 extension and is now going around saying that if Democrats want UI benefits extended, they’d have to agree to a one-year delay in the individual mandate under Obamacare.
And if Democrats win, great. But it looks like they’ll only win by agreeing to the pay-for demand, which means that there’ll be new demands next time. There’s no end to how far right these people will go.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, January 13, 2014
“The GOP’s Poverty Problem”: Views Of Republicans Toward Poor People Run From Active Hostility At Worst, To Indifference At Best
Poverty is all the rage among conservatives this week, and will be for, oh, another few days at least. My guess is that this is happening largely because Democrats have made clear that income inequality is the issue they’ll be pressing from now until the November midterm elections, and Republicans are concerned that it might work. So they’re going to head it off by showing voters that they care about people who are struggling, too. The question is, how do you do that when you’re fighting against extending unemployment benefits, trying to cut food stamps, preventing poor people from getting health insurance through Medicaid, and arguing against increasing the minimum wage?
The answer, it seems, is to make public statements in which the word “poverty” appears. Marco Rubio and Eric Cantor gave speeches on it, Paul Ryan will be doing interviews on it, and you’ll probably be hearing more from Republicans on the topic. Mixed in will be some advocacy for policies they’ve pushed for a long time like school vouchers, and the occasional grand if counterproductive idea, like turning over all federal antipoverty programs to the states.
In seeing this, I couldn’t help but think about one of my favorite tidbits from the 2004 presidential campaign, the Bush website’s “Compassion Photo Album,” which consisted entirely of photos of George and/or Laura Bush hanging out with black and Hispanic people. Put aside how condescending it was to present the very fact of talking to a black person as an exercise in “compassion,” as though they were so pathetic that it took a mighty act of generosity for Bush to deign to place himself amongst them. The point is that things like that, and “compassionate conservatism” in general, were never about winning the votes of minorities. It was about showing moderate white voters that Bush was, in the phrase that was so often applied to him by the press when he first ran in 2000, “a different kind of Republican.” When he weighed in on a 1999 Republican budget proposal by saying, “I don’t think they ought to balance their budget on the backs of the poor,” he wasn’t speaking to poor people, he was showing middle class people that he had a heart.
Republicans are doing the same thing now. The fact is that views in the GOP toward poor people run from active hostility at worst to indifference at best. I’m not saying your average Republican wouldn’t be pleased if cutting the capital gains tax did trickle down to the little guy, but even if it doesn’t, they’re still eager to do it because their hearts are with the wealthy. Conservatives see wealth as an expression of virtue; if you have it, it’s because you work hard and deserve it, and if you don’t, that reflects a defect in your character. That’s why so many of their proposals to address poverty are either of the “tough love” variety—have the government stop helping you as a means of encouraging you to get a firm grip on those bootstraps—or things like “enterprise zones” that involve giving tax breaks and exemptions from environmental regulations to wealthy investors and corporations, in the belief that the largesse will trickle down.
The political problem Republicans are trying to address is that, deny it though they might and protest it with cries of “Class warfare!”, economic populism has always been effective for Democrats. That’s partly because it speaks to people’s genuine sentiments about their own struggles and how society should work, and partly because Republicans are the party of the rich. They’d prefer not to be seen that way, of course. But they just are. So when Democrats say “They’re the party of the rich!”, they don’t have to do a lot of persuading, since it’s what voters already believe. A few speeches about poverty aren’t going to change that.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, January 9, 2014
“Far Nastier Than Anything Revealed By Gates”: Cabinet Officials Going Rogue, A Brief History
Washington is predictably hyperventilating about the swipes against the Obama White House delivered by his former secretary of defense in a new memoir, but the fact that a cabinet official had differences of opinion with a president is hardly a shocking development. Pick any history book about a presidential administration, and you will find loads of palace intrigue, bruised egos, grudge matches, and sharp words from those who lost internal arguments.
Furthermore, battles between presidents and cabinet members have been known to be far nastier than anything revealed by Gates.
You may recall that President George W. Bush was wounded when Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill unloaded to reporter Ron Suskind. O’Neill accused the White House of systematically putting politics ahead of policy, revealed the blind obsession of some officials with invading Iraq, and quoted Vice President Dick Cheney defending tax cuts for the rich by saying “deficits don’t matter.” O’Neill’s revelations became the centerpiece of Suskind’s 2004 book The Price of Loyalty, which helped shape the narrative of the Bush presidency, even though it failed to derail his re-election.
Ronald Reagan’s second term was famously hit with a double blast of vengeful books from former cabinet members. People Magazine observed at the time that “Ronald Reagan is the first president in the nation’s history to suffer — while still in office — such opportunistic vivisection by former associates.”
His first budget director David Stockman published The Triumph of Politics: Why The Reagan Revolution Failed in 1986, which popularized the terms “rosy scenario” and “magic asterisk” to explain how budget gimmicks were deployed to mask the failure to cut spending. Later, former Treasury Secretary and Chief of Staff Donald Regan slammed the White House in For the Record, which revealed how Nancy Reagan sought to control the White House with the help of astrology.
Indeed, fierce scraps between presidents and key cabinet officials are par for the course, if not always well known or remembered.
President Harry Truman’s secretary of state, the wildly popular war hero George Marshall, told him to his face that if he recognized the new state of Israel he would vote against him for re-election, an implicit threat to sandbag his campaign. Truman was stunned, but he held firm and Marshall backed down, kept his opposition to himself, and rebuffed suggestions he should resign in protest.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had an ugly tangle with his first budget director Lewis Douglas. In 1933, Douglas, horrified by Roosevelt’s plans to take American currency off the gold standard (he privately deemed it “the end of western civilization”) began leaking to the press that some administration officials considered the monetary strategy to be unconstitutional. But Roosevelt thought Dean Acheson, then undersecretary of the Treasury, was the leak and fired him instead.
The following year, Douglas resigned in protest of Roosevelt’s decision to increase public works spending to fight the Depression instead of ending all “emergency expenditures.” Once out of the White House, Douglas publicly lashed out at the New Deal as having a “deadly parallel” to Soviet communism, and campaigned for the Republican presidential nominees in 1936 and 1940.
President Woodrow Wilson perhaps dealt with the harshest rebuke from a cabinet member when his Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, a huge political force in the Democratic Party, resigned in protest of Wilson’s handling of Germany during the run-up to World War I. Bryan proceeded to travel the countryside, rallying support against any moves toward entering the war and threatening a fatal split in the party. Yet Wilson’s own barnstorming in favor of military preparedness kept the Democrats unified, allowing him to win re-election and steer Democratic Party foreign policy away from isolationism for the next 100 years.
Compared to the above, the Gates memoir — with its reported mix of praise and criticism — seems like a gentle ribbing.
More importantly, the history of cabinet tensions reminds us that the view from one cabinet member can’t give a full picture of a president and an administration. It is only one account, and needs to be reconciled with several others, and assessed alongside the final outcomes of presidential policies, before it can be properly analyzed. The Gates memoir is sure to be an important artifact of the Obama historic record, but it’s unlikely to be the Rosetta Stone.
By: Bill Scher, The Week, January 9, 2014
“The Doomed Wars”: In Afghanistan And Iraq Wars, No Amount Of Enthusiasm From President Obama Was Going To Change That
Washington loves few things more than a tell-all memoir. Even if a memoir doesn’t tell very much, the media will do their best to characterize it as scandalous and shocking. So it is with the book by former Defense Secretary Robert Gates which will soon be appearing in airport bookstores everywhere. From the excerpts that have been released, it sounds like Gates has plenty of praise for President Obama, and some criticisms that are not particularly biting. Sure, there’s plenty of bureaucratic sniping and the settling of a few scores, but his criticisms (the Obama White House is too controlling, politics sometimes intrudes on national security) sound familiar.
Gates’ thoughts on Afghanistan, however, do offer us an opportunity to reflect on where we’ve come in that long war. The quote from his book that has been repeated the most concerns a meeting in March 2011 in which Obama expressed his frustration with how things were going in Afghanistan. “As I sat there,” Gates writes, “I thought: the president doesn’t trust his commander, can’t stand Karzai, doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out.” Well let’s see. Should Obama have trusted David Petraeus? I can’t really say. Hamid Karzai is corrupt, incompetent, and possibly mentally unstable. As to whether he believed in his own strategy (the “surge” of extra troops), by then there were plenty of reasons to doubt that it would work. The war wasn’t his—it had been going on for over seven years before he even took office. And “it’s all about getting out”? Well wasn’t that the whole point? The reason the administration undertook the “surge” in the first place was to create the conditions where we could get out.
Another thing Gates writes is, “I never doubted Obama’s support for the troops, only his support for their mission,” and that that is a problem for the troops in the field. I’m sure it can be, to a degree, and morale can be undermined if you think the president doesn’t believe you’re going to succeed. I would also imagine that if you were a soldier in Iraq in 2005 or so and you saw George Bush on TV all the time talking about how great everything was going, you’d think your Commander in Chief was an idiot, and that might not be so good for morale either. But the real point is that in neither case was the president’s confidence going to make much of a difference. The problem was never the president’s disposition, or the particular decisions made in one year or one month. It was launching the war in the first place.
Let’s look at Iraq. Bush was nothing if not confident, and after about 4,500 American deaths and an expenditure of two trillion dollars, things finally quieted down enough for us to get out. Success! And two years after we left, the country is devolving into another civil war, or if you prefer, the latest inflammation of a civil war that never ended. We sure as hell aren’t going to re-invade to deal with it, not just because the American people would never stand for it, but because it wouldn’t make anything better there if we did. No sane person can look at the situation today and believe that it all could have been averted if the Americans had made some different decisions along the way.
As for Afghanistan, the predictions back in 2001 that the country was impossible to pacify, the war would inevitably become a quagmire, and we’d end up washing our hands of the place and leaving it to its own miserable existence just like the Russians and British before us, well they’re looking pretty prescient about now.
So what’s going to happen when we leave? I’m hardly an expert in internal Afghan politics, but from this vantage point it sure looks like there’ll be a government in Kabul that isn’t capable of holding the country together, and there will quickly be a violent struggle for power whose outcome is hard to predict. In other words, pretty much exactly what would have happened if twelve years ago we had said, “We kicked out the Taliban, so we’ve extracted what revenge we can on this particular spot on the earth for September 11. Now we’re going to install a provisional government and get the hell out.”
That isn’t to say there weren’t plenty of mistakes along the way and things that could have been done better by both the Bush and Obama administrations. And the question of our moral responsibility to Afghanistan’s future is one we’re going to have to grapple with—though if Iraq is any indication, our response to future death and misery there is likely to be, “Wow, that’s unfortunate. Now put on American Idol.” The awful reality is that the Afghanistan war, like the Iraq war, was doomed from the start, and no amount of enthusiasm from President Obama was going to change that.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, January 8, 2014
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