“Dopey Media Whiffs Again”: No, Dems Aren’t “Playing Politics” By Exposing GOP Idiocy
Lazy Beltway pundits have discovered a new Obama scandal: The president is telling his base the truth about how Republicans are making their lives worse, and he must be stopped.
Last week, Obama was accused of ginning up his base’s anger over voting rights: The New York Times reduced his Friday speech on the issue to an effort “to rally his political base,” while the Washington Post depicted the Democrats’ focus on voting rights as mere partisan strategy, calling it the party’s “most important project in 2014.”
Then came the National Journal’s James Oliphant, declaring that “Democrats are giving Republicans a run for their money in practicing the politics of grievance.” Oliphant accused Democrats of cynically exploiting anger over voter ID laws and the failure of bills to hike the minimum wage, reform the immigration system and help women achieve pay equity, for political gain.
Slate’s John Dickerson has topped them all, however, with “Obama trolls the GOP,” his Thursday column accusing the president of lying about the wage gap between men and women in order to win votes. Dickerson is the one doing the trolling, as he sort of admits upfront, blaming the Internet for rewarding columns that call the president names and make an argument without nuance.
But the essence of Dickerson’s argument is of a piece with the lazy “grievance” meme spreading among his peers: Obama is doing something wrong by telling a component of his coalition, in this case women, that Republican policies are hurting them. In other words, telling the truth while also, yes, practicing politics.
We can certainly debate which number we should use when debating pay equity, but the notion that Obama is deliberately lying to create “stray voltage” by choosing the wrong number seems cynical or worse. Dickerson relies on a Major Garrett column that relies on an older Major Garrett column in which White House adviser David Plouffe explained his theory of “stray voltage” – how any controversy, even ones that seem to hurt Obama, can be put to good political use when “stray voltage” from said outrage sparks the ire of Obama’s base.
Supposedly, the controversy around the White House continuing to use the Census Bureau figure – that women make 77 cents to a man’s dollar – even though other studies find a smaller gap, cements the impression that Republicans oppose measures to close the gap, and may create “stray voltage” to galvanize women voters in 2014 and 2016. Oliphant likewise relies on the pay-gap flap, and the Democrats’ embrace of the doomed Paycheck Fairness Act, as an example of unfair “grievance politics.”
But Republicans do oppose virtually all measures that might close the gap. It’s not just the Paycheck Fairness Act; take the minimum wage. Republicans (and others) say that 77 percent figure exaggerates the pay gap between equally qualified men and women, because women are clustered in low-wage fields. Raising the minimum wage would be a great way to get at that particular pay-gap widener, since two thirds of minimum wage workers are women. But of course, Republicans oppose not only the Paycheck Fairness Act, but an increase in the minimum wage as well.
Oh, but Democrats continuing to agitate for a minimum wage hike? That’s also unfair “grievance politics,” according to Oliphant, because “it may animate minority voters.” Concern about traditional low turnout in midterm elections, he writes:
… has forced the party to find reasons for people to come out and vote, and they’ve selected issues that target slices of the electorate. Hence, equal pay, an issue that especially resonates with single women; the minimum wage, which may animate minority voters; and immigration reform, which galvanizes Hispanics. And likely coming soon to a [Harry] Reid press availability near you: student-loan modification, teed up for the hard-to-get youth vote.
So let me make sure I understand. Telling your voters, accurately, that Republicans are trying to make it harder for them to vote, and are blocking action on pay equity, the minimum wage and immigration reform is unfair “grievance politics”? Likewise, any effort to deal with the scandal of $1 trillion in student loan debt? Oliphant compares it to the grievance politics practiced by Republicans under Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. But that form of grievance politics mainly relied on inflaming white voters’ fears of cultural and racial change with false or highly exaggerated claims about Democrats.
I would also argue that when one party’s leaders declare upfront that they’re going to block everything the other party’s president tries to do, and when that party even retreats from solutions to problems that it once favored – in the GOP’s case, that includes the individual mandate, immigration reform, cap and trade, the Voting Rights Act, and periodic increases to the minimum wage — the cultivation of anger in order to turn out voters is an excellent and entirely defensible strategy. In fact, Republican obstructionism seems designed at least partly to demoralize the Obama coalition — many of them occasional voters already discouraged by the political process. If you can convince young people, Latinos and women that voting changes nothing, you can make up for your reliance on aging white voters.
This new story line also reinforces a core Republican claim about Obama and the Democrats: that they’re trying to buy off the electorate with “gifts,” to use sore-loser Mitt Romney’s term. When rich people use the political process to make their lives better, that’s just the way things work. When people who aren’t rich do so, they’re looking for a handout. This new “grievance politics” story line is just one more way mainstream journalism’s weakness for false equivalence, which is intellectually lazy, politically rewards Republicans.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, April 17, 2014
“Chris Christie Ain’t Got It”: He Isn’t Aware Of What He Doesn’t Know
There’s a scene in the comedy film “High Anxiety” in which a driver meets Mel Brooks at the airport and offers to pick up his cumbersome trunk. “I got it, I got it, I got it,” the driver insists as he struggles to lift the luggage before gasping, “I ain’t got it!” It lands with a thud.
The sequence came to mind recently as I thought about why I’m so skeptical of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s presidential prospects — and it doesn’t concern the scandal surrounding the George Washington Bridge lane closures.
Having observed Christie on the national scene for a number of years now, I’ve been left with the impression that he isn’t aware of what he doesn’t know. He’s in love with his image as a tough-talking pragmatic governor and thinks he can go before just about any audience and rock em’ and sock em’ with his New Jersey humor and war stories about budget battles. I imagine that he goes before new audiences thinking to himself, “I’ve got this,” without doing the homework necessary to really understand the nuances of national or international politics.
This struck me for the first time when I saw Christie speak at the annual dinner of the Cato Institute in May 2012, in which he rattled the libertarian audience at the outset by referring to them as “a small group of committed conservatives.”
Anybody who has a basic understanding of the intellectual traditions of the limited-government movement would know that libertarians take great pains to differentiate themselves ideologically from conservatives. Referring to a Cato Institute audience as “committed conservatives” is kind of like speaking at a jazz conference and mixing up John Coltrane and Kenny G.
I was reminded of this incident when controversy ensued following Christie’s appearance at the Republican Jewish Coalition conference in Las Vegas in late March. After failing to mention Israel at all during his opening remarks, he was asked to offer his reflections on his 2012 visit there.
“I took a helicopter ride from the occupied territories across and just felt personally how extraordinary that was to understand the military risk that Israel faces every day,” Christie said during his remarks.
Christie’s overall intention, of course, was to tell the pro-Israel audience that he’s with them in steadfastly supporting the traditional U.S. ally. And yet he sloppily used the terminology “occupied territories.” Not only is the term inaccurate (as even the internationally accepted definition of occupation requires that the area in dispute is part of another sovereign nation), but the term endorses the Palestinian narrative that says any Jewish presence in the area is illegitimate.
According to a source who works within the pro-Israel community, Christie has repeatedly declined offers from those friendly to the idea of his candidacy to receive more advice and briefing on the issue. So it’s no surprise that the savvier RJC audience members were left with the impression that whatever his sympathies, he had little understanding of the dynamics of the Middle East.
To be clear, neither of these dustups are likely to be remembered much by the time the 2016 Republican primaries heat up. I’m not predicting a series of attack ads centered around his “occupied territories” remark. But Christie’s candidacy will be killed in its crib if he thinks he can rely on razzmatazz to impress Republican audiences — especially ones who are already suspicious of him.
His ego may have been inflated by the rousing reception he would receive when campaigning for Mitt Romney in Iowa, New Hampshire and other key states. But there’s a huge difference between being the warm-up act and undergoing the scrutiny of a candidate himself, where every slip-up gets magnified.
If he continues to take his “everything I need to know I learned in New Jersey” approach to national politics, Christie’s presidential candidacy is likely to end with a thud.
By: Philip Klein, Columnist, The Washington Times, April 10, 2014
“The ‘Toil And Trouble’ Of The Bush Dynasty”: The Resurrection Of A Dangerous Political Family
Here’s how I picture Jeb Bush, with his father George and his big brother George, huddled around a boiling cauldron: “When shall we three meet again?/in Florida, Texas or in Maine?”
Any resemblance to the Macbeth witches in thunder, lightning or rain is, of course, intentional. The Washington buzz that Jeb Bush will follow in his brother’s and his father’s footsteps in running for president is a bit scary for democracy. They are not done with us yet. Good and bad things come in threes.
Beware the current wave of nostalgia for Bush rule. They are not the brightest dynasty under the sun, but the House of Bush has staying power. If genial Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida runs, then we the people will be in for another pounding by an Eastern elitist family. They masquerade their cultural origins as south by southwest. But it all started with Prescott Bush, a Connecticut senator.
As the faithful gathered this past weekend in Texas to mark the 25th anniversary of the first Bush presidency, the Bush men are also re-engineering the family story with help from friends like Jim Baker and conservative cheerleaders in the national media. Even columnist George Will, who scorned the elder Bush, is on-message for Jeb as a moderate man of substance. He practically invented school choice. The rest of the story line goes something like this.
Apparently, the one-term president George H.W. Bush, aka “Poppy,” was a seasoned foreign policy hand who conducted the end of the Cold War with magisterial ease. Skeptics like me think it just happened to happen on his watch. His son, George W. Bush, upset a lot of China with wars of choice that proved feckless. But wait, we now know he has the perceptive sensibility of an artist. We know he could see into the soul of Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, after Putin “dissed” Bush’s dog Barney. The 43rd president told this tale as he explained his portrait of Putin – which is rather good, actually.
A pity that W. missed his calling. He never should have been president of the United States, and not only for his military misadventures. He never lost sleep over commandeering civil liberties. The “war president” did not write home much to a beleaguered, rattled public in the years after 9/11, though his visit to the site of the fallen towers is seen as a high point. While Washington slept, New Orleans wept as Hurricane Katrina raged past the broken levees of the beguiling city. The lame presidential response was the domestic analogue of the haphazard way the wars were being waged abroad. And then came the economy’s pitch downward.
The Bushes set great store by winning, any which way. The fury of the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court hearing back in 1991 went down the way it did because H.W. Bush would not back down on a divisive nominee who made many women’s blood boil. If you remember the Willie Horton political ads against Michael Dukakis in 1988, that was also Poppy’s way of doing business. He has said he’ll do whatever it takes to win, though vision was never his thing.
The family penchant for winning at all costs came to a head in Florida in the Bush v. Gore showdown in 2000. Shakespeare could not have set the scene or the stakes better, with the fate of the nation hanging on a state governed by a brother Bush. All family human resources rushed down there, with Baker leading the way and strategy. If the fight seemed fierce, the outcome felt preordained. The Supreme Court stopped the vote count cold. It was all over, by a 5-4 vote. Indeed Thomas was “the best man for the job,” as Poppy put it in 1991.
Let it not be forgot, this is how the Bush dynasty defines “one man, one vote.”
By: Jamie Stiehm, U. S. News and World Report, April 7, 2014
“Beyond Corruption”: A Campaign Finance System Warped Beyond What It Would Be Under Any Reasonable Conception Of Democracy
There was a time in our history, thankfully long past now, when bribery was common and money’s slithery movement through the passages of American government was all but invisible, save for the occasional scandal that would burst forth into public consciousness. Today, we know much more about who’s getting what from whom. Members of Congress have to declare their assets, lobbyists have to register and disclose their activities, and contributions are reported and tracked. Whatever you think about the current campaign finance system, it’s much more transparent than it once was.
But if outright bribery is rare, should we say that the system is good enough? It’s a question we have to answer as we move into a new phase of the debate over money in politics. In the wake of last week’s Supreme Court decision in McCutcheon v. F.E.C., many liberals are nervous that the Court’s conservative majority is poised to remove all limits on how much can be donated to candidates and parties. For their part, conservatives seem to be preparing to open a new front in this seemingly endless battle, this time on the disclosure requirements that allow us to track who’s spending money to get their favored candidates elected. But those of us who worry about money’s distorting effects on the process would do well to acknowledge that the combination of more transparency and more money—much, much more money—has created a new reality with dangers that aren’t well described by the traditional conception of “corruption.”
Over the last few decades of campaign finance history, the immediate arguments have changed many times. Sometimes we argued over “soft money” contributions to political parties, sometimes we argued over phony “issue ads,” or 527 organizations and 501(c)(4) organizations, or corporate contributions and aggregate contributions. The specific locus of controversy keeps changing because political money always seems to find its way around whatever obstacles are placed in its path. And the fundamental divide that runs through all these arguments is, just as it has always been, that liberals want to reduce money’s influence over politics while conservatives want to increase it.
Conservatives might protest that that’s not really true; they just care deeply about freedom. But no one buys that for a minute. Their position on the issue is both practical and ideological. They know that if the super-wealthy are allowed to put as much of their money as they want into elections, Republicans will benefit more than Democrats. It’s no wonder that Republican party chair Reince Priebus called the McCutcheon decision a “very big victory for the RNC.” And they genuinely believe that’s as it should be; both the poor person and the rich person have the same right to donate large amounts of money to candidates, and if in practice it’s a right only the rich person can exercise, well that’s the way of the world.
And exercise it they do, with candidates, parties, and independent groups the grateful recipients of that civic-minded largesse growing larger with each passing election. But if your idea of “corruption” is only that which is illegal under bribery laws, that isn’t a problem that demands a solution. In the McCutcheon decision, Justice Roberts was quite clear in his belief that “Any regulation must…target what we have called “quid pro quo” corruption or its appearance…a direct exchange of an official act for money.” Large donations meant to gain the donor access or mere influence over lawmakers, he argued, aren’t enough. In his dissent, Justice Breyer took issue with this rather pinched view, saying “we can and should understand campaign finance laws as resting upon a broader and more significant constitutional rationale than the plurality’s limited definition of ‘corruption’ suggest.”
So maybe what we have here is in part a problem of nomenclature. If you don’t want to call it “corruption,” call it “distortion”—the creation of a system that is warped far beyond what it would be under any reasonable conception of democracy, even if nobody’s breaking any laws.
There is a meaningful difference. Most of the benefits big money looks for these days are spread beyond an individual, sometimes to an entire industry (like banks or oil companies) and sometimes to an even larger group of people and entities who have a common interest, like wealthy people who want to keep taxes on investment income lower than taxes on wage income. If someone like the Koch brothers succeeds in getting their favored candidates elected and their favored policies enacted, many billionaires and corporations will smile in appreciation. They won’t be doing it just for themselves.
There’s an important caveat, which is that money can have a great influence on the arcane details of legislation, where the public neither knows nor particularly cares what’s going on. Lobbyists still give plenty of money to members of Congress, and they do so to ensure the access that allows them to nibble at the nation’s laws for their clients’ benefit. In and of itself, money may not be able to buy a big, visible policy change—a reduction in the top tax rate or the killing of a minimum wage bill, for instance. But it can still buy an obscure provision in the nation’s banking laws, one that could be worth billions to some very interested parties but makes no front-page news.
Even disclosure of all campaign contributions to every type of independent group would probably have just a small impact in reducing the distortion money imposes on the system, in part because citizens can’t be expected to expend the effort to follow its every tendril. When a voter sees an ad casting aspersions on Senator Smiley’s opponent and hears “Americans for an American America is responsible for the content of this advertising,” what can she conclude? Not much, unless she happens to also read an article informing her that AfaAA is a creation of Oswald Greedyhands, whom some consider a heroic job-creator and others consider a nefarious exploiter of working people. Then she’s going to have to think about Oswald’s relationship with Senator Smiley, and learn about the Senator’s legislative record to see what favors he might have done for Greedyhands Industries. It’s a lot to expect of a citizen who has her own life to lead.
So even if the information is out there somewhere, and activists sound the alarms, so long as the money keeps pouring in, the system will bend inexorably toward the interests of those who fund it. A plutocratic system of government of, by, and for the wealthy isn’t necessarily “corrupt,” in the sense of being awash in specific, explicit bribes. But it isn’t particularly democratic, either.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The National Memo, April 7, 2014
“Reared In The Game”: On Our Highest Court, A Former Lobbyist Guts Campaign Finance Reform
For a large and bipartisan majority of Americans, the increasing power of money in politics is alarming, but not for the conservative majority of the United States Supreme Court, whose members appear to regard the dollar’s domination of democracy as an inevitable consequence of constitutional freedom — and anyway, not a matter of grave concern. Expressed in their decisions on campaign finance, which continued last week to dismantle decades of reform in the McCutcheon case, the Court’s right wing sees little risk of corruption and little need to regulate the flamboyant spending of billionaires.
Given the behavior of certain conservative justices, such as Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito – who flout the rules that govern partisan behavior among lower-court judges – it is easy to regard their rulings as partisan cynicism. But there is also an element of willful naiveté when the conservatives claim, for instance, that corrupt donations will be exposed by the instant transparency of publication on the Internet. Any reporter who has covered elections can attest that there are dozens of ways for wealthy donors to avoid public scrutiny until it is much too late to matter.
But if right-wingers like Scalia and Thomas are simply pursuing ideological objectives, what about Anthony Kennedy, the Reagan appointee from California who was long seen as a moderating influence and a “swing vote”? On the issue of campaign finance, Kennedy has marched along with the majority, seeming just as fervent in his urge to destroy every regulation and protection against the “malefactors of great wealth” erected since the days of Theodore Roosevelt.
It was Kennedy who wrote the majority opinion in Citizens United, which dismissed the notion that corruption will arise from unlimited political campaign contributions because they will all be disclosed. “Citizens can see whether elected officials are ‘in the pocket’ of so-called moneyed interests …and disclosure permits citizens and shareholders to react to the speech of corporate entities in a proper way,” he wrote. “This transparency enables the electorate to make informed decisions and give proper weight to different speakers and messages.”
But if any Supreme Court justice knows how ridiculous that sounds, it must be Kennedy – whose own background as a corporate lobbyist and son of a lobbyist has been forgotten in nearly three decades since his Senate confirmation in 1987.
Yes, Kennedy was a respected appellate court judge before Reagan appointed him to the high court. But before that, he grew up and then worked as an attorney in Sacramento, where his father became a “legendary” lobbyist in a state capital renowned as “freewheeling” (a polite term that means “routinely corrupt”).
His father, Anthony “Bud” Kennedy, was a backslapping, hard-drinking partner in a powerful lobbying law firm run by one Arthur “Artie” Samish, “the “secret boss of California” who finally went to prison on tax charges in the mid-1950s, while young Tony was studying to enter law school. Samish liked to brag that he had amassed more power than anyone else in the state, including the governor, that he could buy any legislator with “a baked potato, a bottle, or a broad,” and that he was able to “unelect” any lawmaker who didn’t vote his way.
The major clients of Samish and Kennedy were racing, entertainment, and liquor interests, notably including Schenley Industries, then run by J. Edgar Hoover’s mobbed-up pal Lewis Rosenstiel. When Bud Kennedy died suddenly in 1963, young Tony was only two years out of law school. But he went into the family business and inherited his late father’s clientele.
While Kennedy always insisted that lobbying was only a “sideline” in his law practice, his billings were substantial – the equivalent of hundreds of thousands or more in today’s dollars. In 1974, he pushed through a bill for Capitol Records that saved the company (and cost the state) millions in sales taxes.
How did he do it? The same way that special interests work their will today – by doling out huge wads of cash to lawmakers on behalf of his clients. The single largest recipient of Kennedy lobbying largesse, according to the Los Angeles Times, was a legislator who introduced a bill to benefit the opticians’ lobby that Kennedy himself had drafted (it passed). He gave that guy alone about $6,500 in campaign contributions over six years, or roughly $40,000 in today’s dollars.
So if anybody on the Court knows how the political and legislative process is greased in this country, that would be Anthony Kennedy. After all, he was reared in the game. And it shouldn’t deceive anyone when he sounds as if he doesn’t understand how things work or who wins in that perverse process – and how everyone else loses.
By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, The National Memo; Author, Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth; Published in The National Memo, April 4, 2014
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