“Enormous Power” Used Badly: Olympia Snowe’s Strange Martyrdom
The retirement of Olympia Snowe, at the young (by senatorial standards) age of 65, has again dramatized the perilous condition of the Senate moderates. They have been scorned, marginalized, and hunted close to extinction. Yet the striking fact about Snowe’s career is that, far from being shunted to the sidelines, she has wielded, or been given the opportunity to wield, enormous power. She has used it, on the whole, quite badly.
When George W. Bush proposed a huge, regressive tax cut in 2001, Snowe, sitting at the heart of a decisive block of centrists, used her leverage to support the passage of a modestly smaller and less regressive version. When Barack Obama proposed a large fiscal stimulus in 2009, Snowe (citing fears of deficits that she had helped create) decided to shave a nice round $100 billion off his figure and call it a day. If a Gingrich administration proposed spending a trillion dollars to erect a 100- foot-tall solid-gold Winston Churchill statue on Mars, Snowe would no doubt decide, after careful deliberation, that the wise course was to trim the height down to 90 feet and perhaps use a cheaper bronze alloy in the base.
The characteristic Snowe episode came during the health care fight. The Obama administration, desperate to win her vote, wooed her with endless meetings and pleas, affording her a once-in-a-generation chance to not only help pass health care reform but make it smarter, more efficient, and more compassionate. Instead, Snowe tormented the administration by dangling an elusive and ever-changing criteria before their noses. She at first centered her objections around the inclusion of a public option. Democrats removed it, and she voted for the bill in the Finance Committee, only to turn against it when it reached the decisive vote on the Senate floor. Snowe complained that the process was happening too fast, and that it was too partisan, which seemed to be her way of saying she wouldn’t vote for it unless other Republicans joined her.
This may sound sensible, even admirable, if you subscribe to the notion that securing bipartisan support for major bills is inherently valuable. But it’s worth noting that moderates like Snowe and their fans worship bipartisanship for reasons that have nothing to do with good government. A Republican representing a blue state, or a Democrat representing a red state, faces an inherently precarious situation. Often she will find the demands of her party’s national base pitted against those of her home state electorate. Olympia Snowe’s worst nightmare is to have to choose between infuriating Republicans in Washington and moderate voters in Maine. Creating legislation that passes by wide margins is not done out of a desire to bring bills closer into alignment with any abstract standard of good government, but to ensure her vote sits comfortably in the middle of a wide swath of support from both sides. In a farewell op-ed in the Washington Post, Snowe complains that centrism offers no electoral rewards. For her, though, such careful positioning was a matter of political self-preservation.
The New York Times report on her departure cast the central tension of her career as pitting “her own views as a Republican centrist against pressure from fellow Republicans to support the party position.” This is a common way people think about it – there are two poles, one representing the moderate’s principled convictions, and the other representing party loyalty. The negation of one implies the presence of the other. Snowe’s career proved that it’s entirely possible to steer clear of the party line without upholding any particular notion of the public good.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intel, March 2, 2012
Our Great Moral Decline: “Two Distinct Monologues”
Asked to explain his support for Rick Santorum in Michigan’s primary, voter Sandy Munro said, “Now what we need is a strong political leader to do something to get us out of the moral slump that we’re in.”
Mr Santorum would agree, having noted that “Satan has his sights on the United States of America.” As would Mitt Romney, who has attacked the decay caused by Barack Obama’s “secular agenda”. Newt Gingrich has gone the furthest, stating, “A country that has been now since 1963 relentlessly in the courts driving God out of public life shouldn’t be surprised at all the problems we have.”
But what are these problems? When considering America’s moral decline, my first instinct was to look at the crime rate. If Satan is at work in America, he’s probably nicking wallets and assaulting old ladies. But over the past several decades the crime rate has fallen dramatically, despite what you may think. The homicide rate has been cut in half since 1991; violent crime and property crime are also way down. Even those pesky kids are committing less crime. There are some caveats to these statistics, as my colleague points out, but I think we can conclude that crime is not the cause of America’s moral decline.
So let’s look elsewhere. Abortion has returned as a hot-button issue, perhaps it is eating away at our moral fiber. Hmm, the abortion rate declined by 8% between 2000 and 2008. Increases in divorce and infidelity could be considered indicators of our moral decay. There’s just one problem: according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the divorce rate is the lowest it has been since the early 1970s. This is in part due to the recession, but infidelity is down too.
Other areas that might indicate declining virtue are also going against the perceived trend. For example, charitable giving is up after a decline during the recession. The teenage pregnancy rate is at its lowest level in 40 years. And according to Education Week, “the nation’s graduation rate stands at 72 percent, the highest level of high school completion in more than two decades.” So where is the evidence of this moral decline?
Here’s one for the declinists: the number of Americans not affiliated with any religion has increased, while the number of those attending worship services has declined. And here’s another: out-of-wedlock births have increased in America so that now at least four in ten children are born to unmarried women. This is something Mr Santorum has focused on during the campaign, and he is right in pointing out that the children of unwed mothers in America tend to do worse in terms of health, schooling and income later in life.
But here’s where the real debate over America’s moral position comes into focus. As the New York Times notes, out-of-wedlock births are increasing in much of the developed world—for example, over half of babies in Iceland and Sweden are born to unwed mothers. But according to Wendy Manning, a professor of sociology at Bowling Green State University, “In Sweden, you see very little variation in the outcome of children based on marital status. Everybody does fairly well… In the US, there’s much more disparity.”
So out-of-wedlock birth need not correspond to worse outcomes for children. And if it didn’t in America, should we still consider out-of-wedlock births a moral problem? One could ask a similar question about religion. While rates of religious participation may be declining in America, young people today have similar moral beliefs as their parents and grandparents. So is the decline in religious observance a moral problem?
When it comes to out-of-wedlock births, the issue is complicated because discouraging these types of the births may be a more efficient way of securing children than the type of nanny-state intervention that can be found in a country like Sweden. But in general, I think the debate over America’s moral position comes down to this: Republicans want the best outcomes based on solutions that fit into preconceived notions of what society should look like. So even if there are few tangible harms that point to our moral decay, any move away from their vision of society is evidence of declining virtue. Democrats, on the other hand, are more concerned with outcomes, even if that means upending the way things were (or accepting that they have been upended and cannot be restored).
So in the case of out-of-wedlock births, Republicans would probably see the increase as a moral problem regardless of the outcome. Whereas Democrats might feel more comfortable with, say, promoting a corresponding increase in stable familial relationships outside of marriage. It is a dynamic we’ve seen elsewhere recently, in regard to issues like gay marriage and contraception. And it leads to a debate over what “moral” really means. If “immoral” means “causing avoidable harm to other people” then gay marriage, pornography, sex, reality TV, soft-drug use and euthanasia are hardly immoral, even if distasteful to some.
But as we grind through the Republican primary process, it seems like the debate over morality in America has less to do with moral outcomes and more to do with a vision of how society should look based on idealistic remembrances of how things were. So people like Mr Munro and the Republican candidates believe America is in a moral slump. The odd thing is, people on the left might actually agree, though for very different reasons. They are upset by the perceived greed of the 1%, and the broad acceptance of torture and war as foreign-policy tools. In the end, the debate over morality more closely resembles two distinct monologues.
By: Democracy in America Blog, The Economist, March 2, 2012
“The White-Knight Syndrome”: Why Republicans Need To Get Over The Idea Of Jeb Bush In 2012
The former Florida governor has made perfectly clear that he has no plans to belatedly jump into the presidential race, despite the clamor from those who are still underwhelmed by Mitt Romney’s candidacy. But let’s set aside his reluctance and imagine what would happen if he did.
First, the elephant in the room: A third member of the Bush family serving in the White House within 20 years? Really? Once the focus moved from virtual Jeb to flesh-and-blood Jeb, the media would go wild speculating whether the country has had enough of the Bush clan.
Jeb’s last name is both a blessing and a curse, but mostly a curse. It’s been just over three years since George W. Bush walked out of the White House at a low ebb of popularity. Fairly or unfairly, his eight-year term is associated with the Iraq quagmire, Katrina, big spending, big deficits, an education law no one seems to like, and a Wall Street collapse that led to the much-reviled TARP bailout. The other Republican candidates almost never mention his name, as if he’d been airbrushed from party history.
Jeb Bush has considerable gifts—he was, in fact, widely considered the better politician in the family—and racked up his share of accomplishments in Florida. Which, of course, is a crucial swing state. If his name was Jeb Jones, he would indeed be a formidable contender—and probably would have run in 2012 rather than staying on the sidelines.
But beyond being one of Poppy’s boys, the actual Jeb Bush would have another problem as a candidate. The party has marched inexorably to the right in a way that leaves him decidedly out of step. Don’t take my word for it; here’s what Bush told a gathering in Dallas, as reported by Fox News:
“I used to be a conservative and I watch these debates and I’m wondering, I don’t think I’ve changed but it’s a little troubling sometimes when people are appealing to people’s fears and emotion rather than trying to get them to look over the horizon for a broader perspective.”
When a Republican says he “used to be a conservative,” he means he doesn’t much like the party’s rightward lurch. Are angry primary voters who have given Rick Santorum a series of victories (and a near-miss in Mitt Romney’s home state of Michigan) going to flock to a candidate who talks like that?
Then there is Bush’s somewhat moderate approach to immigration. Jeb is fluent in Spanish and married to a Mexican-born woman; that would seem an ideal profile for a party that badly needs to attract Hispanics. But Jeb opposed Arizona’s harsh law cracking down on those here illegally and similar efforts in other states.
As he said in January, “Hispanic voters hear these debates and see the ramifications of the Alabama law and other things like that and get turned off. It’s not a good thing—I know this will sound a little crazy—but I happen to believe that if swing voters decide elections and swing voters in swing states are the most important voters in the presidential race, and if you send a signal that turns them off, that’s a bad thing.”
Is a 2012 Republican candidate even allowed to say that anymore? Remember how Newt Gingrich caused an uproar by saying he wouldn’t deport illegal immigrants who had been part of their community for 25 years?
As governor, Jeb opposed oil drilling off Florida’s pristine coastlines, and even though he’s modified that stance, the record puts him at odds with the “drill, baby, drill” party.
And what about Jeb’s role in delivering Florida for his bro during that fiercely contested recount? The Democrats, and the press, will waste no time resurrecting that contentious subject.
Still, the white-knight syndrome is deeply embedded in the Republican psyche. Andy Card, who was chief of staff in his brother’s White House, calls Jeb the “perfect” candidate. There’s even a Facebook page, “Jeb Bush 2012—Keep Hope Alive.” (Was stealing a Jesse Jackson slogan the best they could do?).
But the thing about white knights is that they lose their armor the moment they charge into battle. The same would happen with Chris Christie or Mitch Daniels, two other GOP “grownups” often mentioned as potential saviors, despite the inconvenient fact that they both weighed running and took a pass.
And don’t forget the practical obstacles. Filing deadlines have passed for all but a handful of large states, such as California and New Jersey. And for all the empty talk about a brokered convention, a sizable number of delegates elected on behalf of Romney and Santorum would have to jump ship.
Jeb could have shut down the chatter by endorsing Romney in the Florida primary, but he kept his powder dry. That hardly amounts to a secret plan to run himself.
Bush probably calculated that memories of his brother’s administration will have faded enough to make 2016 a better year for him. Eight years was, after all, the length of time it took for Bill Clinton to make voters a tad nostalgic for George H.W. Bush, opening the door for his son to recapture the White House for the family. Jeb will be 62 when the next New Hampshire primary rolls around. He’s got time.
Every time the 2012 question comes up, Bush says he has no intention of running. It’s time for the fantasists to take him at his word.
By: Howard Kurtz, The Daily Beast, March 2, 2012
“Blinded By The Hate”: The Real Problem With Judge Cebull’s Email
Earlier this week a Great Falls Tribune reporter found something startling in his inbox: a shockingly racist and misogynistic email forwarded from the most powerful federal judge in Montana, which “joked” that the president of the United States was the product of his mother having sex with a dog. The story soon became national news, with groups like ours calling on Judge Richard Cebull to resign.
Cebull quickly apologized to the president and submitted himself to a formal ethics review, somewhat quelling the story. But the story is about more than one judge doing something wildly inappropriate and deeply disturbing. It’s about a conservative movement in which the bile and animosity directed at the president — and even his family — are so poisonous that even someone who should know better easily confuses political criticism and sick personal attack. Come on: going after the president’s late mother?
Attempting to explain his email forward, Judge Cebull told the reporter, John S. Adams,
The only reason I can explain it to you is I am not a fan of our president, but this goes beyond not being a fan. I didn’t send it as racist, although that’s what it is. Is sent it out because it’s anti-Obama.
Judge Cebull is hardly alone in using the old “I’m not racist, but…” line. In fact, his email was the result of an entire movement built on “I’m not racist, but…” logic that equates disagreement with and dislike of the president with broad-based, racially charged smears. These smears, tacitly embraced by the GOP establishment, are more than personal shots at the president — they’re attacks on the millions of Americans who make up our growing and changing country.
Mainstream conservatives have genuine objections to President Obama’s priorities and policies. But since he started running for president, a parallel movement has sprung up trying to paint Obama as an outsider and an imposter — in unmistakably racially charged terms. Too often, the two movements have intersected.
The effort to paint Obama as a threatening foreigner sprung up around the right-wing fringe in the run-up to the 2008 election with the typically muddled conspiracy theory that painted him as both a secret Muslim and a member of an America-hating church. They soon coalesced in the birther movement, which even today is championed by a strong coalition of state legislators and a certain bombastic Arizona sheriff.
But the birther movement, the “secret Muslim” meme and the idea that the president of the United States somehow hates his own country are no longer confined to the less visible right-wing fringe. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, until recently a frontrunner in the GOP presidential race, continually hammers on the president’s otherness, most notably criticizing his “Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior.” Rick Santorum flatly claims that Obama does not have the Christian faith that he professes, and eagerly courted the endorsement of birther leader Sheriff Joe Arpaio. And before they dropped out, Rick Perry and Herman Cain couldn’t resist flirting with birtherism.
But perhaps more than either of these fringe-candidates-turned-frontrunners, Mitt Romney has been catering to the strain of conservatism that deliberately confuses policy disagreements with racially-charged personal animosity. Romney went in front of TV cameras to smilingly accept the endorsement of Donald Trump, whose own failed presidential campaign was based on demanding the president’s readily available birth certificate. And Gov. Romney continually attacks Obama — falsely — for going around the world “apologizing for America.”
Judge Cebull needs to take responsibility for his own actions. And if the GOP has any aspirations of providing real leadership to this country, it needs to jettison the deeply personal vitriol being direct against Barack Obama and start talking about real issues. When a federal judge has seen so much racially-charged propaganda against the president of the United States that he can claim not to know the difference between genuine disagreement and offensive personal smears, something in our discourse has gone terribly awry.
By: Michael B. Keegan, The Huffington Post, March 2, 2012
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