How A Birther Thinks: A Demonstration
Mike Huckabee’s defenders have made much of the fact that he’s never endorsed the idea that President Obama wasn’t born in the United States. Therefore, he’s not a “birther” and his comments on a conservative radio show earlier this week are those of a man who either “didn’t mean it” and “clearly misspoke” or who is guilty of an “odd” but relatively benign ignorance about Obama’s biography.
As I’ve noted, these defenses fall flat on several levels. Even if you put the birther issue aside, It should be obvious that Huckabee didn’t just misspeak when he claimed that Obama grew up in Kenya; after all, he went into detail about the effect that a Kenyan upbringing filled with stories from relatives about the horrors of British colonial rule and the glory of the Mau Mau uprising would have had on Obama’s worldview and his actions as president today. Nor is this benign ignorance akin to (as Dave Weigel suggested) Obama being fuzzy on the details of Huckabee’s life story. Obama, to my knowledge, is not promoting an inflammatory indictment of Huckabee’s basic worldview and policy instincts that is based on an entirely and laughably false understanding of the circumstances of his upbringing.
Then there’s the matter of birtherism. Yes, it’s true, Huckabee is not claiming that Obama was born in Kenya — or in Indonesia or in any country other than the United States. But, as Jonathan Bernstein pointed out earlier this week:
This is where birtherism gets tricky. In its wildest forms, birtherism is about a massive conspiracy to install a conscious, deliberate enemy of the United States in the White House. It’s nice that Mike Huckabee doesn’t subscribe to that. But in its more plausible, and presumably more popular forms, it’s really just a way of saying that Barack Obama isn’t a “real” American.
Which brings me to the e-mails we’ve been receiving in response to our coverage of Huckabee, which (as you might have noticed) has been on the critical side. Plenty of readers are upset with Huckabee’s comments, to be sure, but I’ve also noticed an unusually large number of virulently anti-Obama e-mails written in Huckabee’s defense. I’ll readily admit that I don’t know any of the people who are sending these individually; for all I know, some or all of them are fake. But I’ve gotten so many expressing the same basic sentiments that I think it’s worth running one in its entirety:
Steve,
Where were you when Obama had to think so hard that it hurt-his-brain when he stated he went to 57 states in his campaign?
You continued supporting Obama and covering up his mistakes because of his skin color.
Because you are white, You are So Racist and bigoted and can’t help it.
So why should you worry when someone thinks Obama was born in Kenya—especially when the Kenyan official government states he was born there.
Instead, Obama claims to be born in the last state to enter the Union, so how could Obama claim 57 states?
Is it because he is stupid?
Since you never brought it up, you must agree with someone that ignorant and stupid.
And why does Indonesia have a school enrollment certificate that categorically states Obama is a Muslim? And why can Obama recite the muslim evening call to prayer from memory if he is a Christian, but he is a member of the “God Damn America” church of the most reverend Wright.
You can deny facts all you want, just like the hide the decline global warmest conspirators but that does not make you right.
Smug maybe, because you like attacking selected people because you are bigoted and racist.
Again, I don’t know the person who sent this to me. Who knows — it could be a mischievous liberal having some fun by assuming the voice of a right-winger. But the points this e-mailer makes are representative of the points that many, many others have expressed to me this week. In that sense, I think this e-mail demonstrates how Huckabee’s comments — even though they didn’t endorse birtherism in any literal sense — encourage the exact kind of attitude that has led a majority of Republicans likely to participate in next year’s primaries to express doubt over whether their president was even born in this country.
Note that the e-mailer didn’t get the part where Huckabee resisted endorsing full-on birtherism. “[W]hy should you worry when someone thinks Obama was born in Kenya?” he/she asks. And note how quick the e-mailer is to latch onto the false equivalency that Huckabee has been promoting since the interview blew up — that he committed a “slip of the tongue” no different from the slip of the tongue Obama committed as a candidate in 2008 when he said he’d visited 57 states. The difference between these episodes, as I noted yesterday, ought to be blindingly obvious.
Not all of the anti-Obama e-mails I received this week were as specific and detailed as this one. But almost all of them seemed to be written with the conviction that the president of the United States is a fundamentally un-/anti-American figure. Yes, the slice of the Republican Party base that actually bothers to send e-mails to Salon writers is very, very small. But the basic feelings expressed to me this week are more widespread. What Huckabee has done is to reinforce those feelings.
By: Steve Kornacki-News Editor, Salon, March 3, 2011
Mr. Obama’s Health Care Challenge-The Ball Is In Your Court GOP
President Obama had a splendid idea this week. He challenged governors who oppose his health care reforms, most of whom are Republicans, to come up with a better alternative. He has agreed to move up the date at which states can offer their own solutions and thus opt out of requirements that they oppose, like the mandate that everyone buy health insurance and that most employers provide it.
Let as many states as possible test innovative approaches to determine which works best.
The president told the nation’s governors on Monday that he supported a bipartisan bill — sponsored by Senators Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, Scott Brown, Republican of Massachusetts, and Mary Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana — that would allow states to fashion solutions right from the start of full-scale reform in 2014, rather than waiting until 2017, as the law requires.
The catch is that a state’s plan must cover as many people as the federal law does, provide insurance that is as comprehensive and affordable, and not increase the deficit. That won’t be easy for the governors to accomplish, and House Republicans seem unlikely to pass the bill to let them try. They would much rather repeal the reform law — or have it declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court — than join Mr. Obama in improving it.
The decision to set the date at 2017 was based on a desire to get the reform elements up and coverage greatly expanded before allowing states to start changing the law. There also were concerns that the early start would be more costly. That’s because the states would be given money for alternatives equal to the cost of insuring their citizens under health care reform. Without three years of experience to get firm figures, those block grants would probably be set too high.
Neither rationale still seems compelling. It would be wasteful to require states to set up exchanges and other elements of the reform only to abandon them for an alternative system three years later. The pending bill would wisely allow states to submit proposals in the near future and, if approved, put them into effect in 2014.
Alternative approaches might include replacing the mandate to buy insurance with a system to automatically enroll people in health plans, reformulating tax credits for small businesses and low-income individuals to encourage near-universal coverage, adopting such liberal approaches as a single-payer plan or a public option, and even moving all or part of the enrollees in Medicaid into new health insurance exchanges. These would all have to be done without driving up the federal deficit or reducing benefits, affordability and coverage.
Reaction among Republican governors has been mixed. The vast majority are focused on their immediate need to reduce Medicaid spending to help close their budget gaps, not on fashioning alternatives for 2014. For the near-term budget problems, the administration is already advising states on ways to reduce Medicaid costs and the president asked the governors to form a bipartisan group to work on further cost-reduction.
The president’s new olive branch is not apt to change the legal arguments over whether the mandate in the reform law is constitutional. But it can’t hurt to bring forcefully to everyone’s attention that there are alternatives to the mandate if states want to pursue them. Republicans ought to rise to the challenge.
By: The New York Times-Editorial, Published March 1, 2011
Whatever Happened To Uncertainty?
With the House passing a two-week funding extension and Harry Reid promising the Senate will do likewise, it looks like we have at least until March 18th before any federal agencies have to shut their doors. But then there’s a shutdown risk. And there’s another one coming as early as April 15th, when the Treasury bumps into the the debt ceiling and needs Congress to lift it in order to avoid default. Federal budget policy over the next few months is going to be like a weekend with Charlie Sheen: A constant effort to avoid blackouts (yes, Wonkbook went there).
Prior to winning the election in November, the GOP spoke often about the pressing need to reduce “uncertainty” in the economy. This was a core principle of their plan to restore economic confidence and create jobs. As Rep. Paul Ryan put it to me in July, “uncertainty is a new economic buzzword, but for good reason: If we can reduce it, we’ll unlock capital.” If businesses and individuals could be confident about what government was doing, what taxes would look like, and what regulators would ask of them, they could start investing again.
So are they succeeding at their own promise of reducing uncertainty? It’s hard to see how. Budget experts on both sides of the aisle have sharply upgraded their estimate of how likely a government shutdown is in the next few months, either over the continuing resolution for 2011 or the debt limit or both. There’s an ongoing effort to starve health-care reform of implementation funds and a promise to “replace” it with some policy that hasn’t yet been written — no one in the health space would say that the shape of health-care policy over the coming years looks more certain now than it did six months ago. The GOP chose a tax deal that lowered all rates for two years rather than a tax deal that lowered most rates permanently, so there’s uncertainty over future tax rates. The tax and health-care policies would both do much more to increase the deficit than anything else on the list would do to reduce it, ensuring that concern continues to loom. So for what definition of “uncertainty” has the GOP succeeded in reducing its prevalence in the economy?
In each case, of course, the GOP has a good argument for the choice it’s made: Lower tax rates on large estates and income over $250,000 were judged more important than tax certainty or deficit reduction. The health-reform law is so unwise that repealing it should be a top priority. The prospect of a government shutdown and/or default provides leverage to extract spending cuts, which are more important right now than assuring the market that there won’t be some sort of shutdown or default. It’s all fair enough, at least on its own terms. But it’s meant that the post-election GOP takes the risk of uncertainty a lot less seriously than the pre-election GOP did. It’s a tension I’d like to hear more of them comment on.
By: Ezra Klein-The Washington Post, March 2, 2011
Can Seven Reports Be Wrong About The Risks of Spending Cuts? GOP Says Yes
Could two independent economic reports, a liberal think tank and four bipartisan reports on debt reduction be wrong? They all conclude that slashing federal spending this year could cause job losses and threaten the economic recovery.
The latest report, from Mark Zandi of Moody’s Analytics, says 700,000 jobs could be lost by the end of 2012 if Republicans succeed in their quest to cut $60 billion from domestic programs this year. Cuts and tax increases are necessary to address the nation’s long-term fiscal problems, Zandi said, but “cutting too deeply before the economy is in full expansion would add unnecessary risk.” The report largely echoes earlier analyses by Alec Phillips of Goldman Sachs and the Center for American Progress.
House Speaker John Boehner famously responded, when asked about potential job losses earlier this month, “so be it.” On Monday his office pointed to a new counter argument offered by Stanford economist John Taylor – that “a credible plan to reduce the deficit” will help the economy, not hurt it, and that $60 billion – the amount the other analyses assume will be cut this year – is an inaccurate, inflated figure.
Taylor is a former Bush administration official based at the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford; last year he received an award from the conservative Bradley Foundation. Zandi, founder and chief economist at Moody’s, was an adviser to Republican presidential nominee John McCain in 2008. However, he is a registered Democrat. (Update: Fed chairman Ben Bernanke, named by Republican George W. Bush and re-appointed by President Barack Obama, also disputes the Zandi and Phillips reports).
Boehner spokesman Michael Steel called Zandi “a relentless cheerleader for the failed ‘stimulus,'” who “refuses to understand that ending the spending binge will help the private sector.” That led the Chicago Tribune’s Mike Memoli to tweet, “Today, GOP discredits Mark Zandi. Last fall, cited his analysis in arguing against tax hikes.”
It is an article of faith among Republicans that 2009 stimulus package has “failed.” But the Obama administration, Zandi and many others disagree with that assessment. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that the stimulus created or saved up to 3.5 million jobs, raised the GDP and stabilized an economy that had been in free-fall.
There is no sign the stimulus will ever be anything but a partisan flashpoint. Yet there is bipartisan consensus to be found in the reports from various deficit and debt commissions. They are unanimous in suggesting either increased stimulus or steady government spending in 2011.
“Don’t disrupt the fragile recovery,” the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform warned in December. Its plan – adopted by 11 of the 18 panel members – calls for “serious belt-tightening” to begin in 2012. A report from the Bipartisan Policy Center suggested gradually phasing in steps to reduce deficits and debt “beginning in 2012, so the economy will be strong enough to absorb them.” The 2009 Peterson-Pew Commission on Budget Reform put off cuts to the same year, as did a recent proposal from Brookings fellow Bill Galston and Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
MacGuineas has mixed feelings about the GOP drive to slash spending and slash it now. “It’s good that we’re actually talking about spending reductions” instead of putting it off, she said in an interview. “On the one hand, that’s helpful. On the other hand, they are focusing on the wrong time frame — this year instead of this decade, and focusing on the wrong part of the budget — a very thin slice instead of the real problem areas” such as Medicare and Medicaid.
The ideal scenario in the view of MacGuineas and the bipartisan commissions would be for politicians serious about debt reduction to spend 2011 on a long-term plan to reduce domestic and defense spending, raise taxes, ensure long-term health for Social Security and solve the riddle of controlling Medicare and Medicaid costs. “The right model is to put in place this year a multiyear plan to get there,” MacGuineas said, adding she has high hopes for a bipartisan group of senators led by Democrat Mark Warner of Virginia and Republican Saxby Chambliss of Georgia.
The skirmishes over spending – destined to repeat themselves constantly this year as Congress confronts potential government shutdowns and loan defaults – have provided political fodder for all sides. Democrats seized on Boehner’s initial response to the prospect of job losses and now refer often to the GOP’s “so be it” jobs policy. Republicans, though they only control half of Congress, are making good on promises to the tea party movement and other voters who put a premium on cutting government spending.
If Republicans can’t secure Senate passage and Obama’s signature for their spending cuts, they will have at least made clear to their base that they tried. If by some political miracle they win the $60 billion in cuts they are seeking, and the recovery picks up, they can take credit. If the economy dips back into crisis, or even if the jobless rate is flat, they can blame Obama and bolster their case to take back the White House.
Unless of course Obama and the Democrats, equipped with who knows how many reports by then, figure out a way to blame them first.
By: Jill Lawrence, Senior Correspondent-Politics Daily, March 1, 2011
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