“No One Was Audited At Bridgegate”: The Classic Conservative Right Wing “So’s Your Old Man” Argument
You know the worst sign for Chris Christie about Bridgegate? The line most of his conservative defenders (and not all conservatives are defending him) are taking isn’t really about the scandal at all. Here’s John Podhoretz at the New York Post:
Most government scandals involve the manipulation of the system in obscure ways by people no one has ever heard of. That is why George Washington Bridgegate is nearly a perfect scandal — because it is comprehensible and (as they say in Hollywood) “relatable” to everyone who has ever been in a car. This is the reason this one is not going to go away so easily, even if one accepts the contention that Gov. Chris Christie had nothing whatsoever to do with it….
And yet, you know what is also something everybody would find “relatable”? Politicians who sic the tax man on others for political gain. Everybody has to deal with the IRS and fears it. Last year, we learned from the Internal Revenue Service itself that it had targeted ideological opponents of the president for special scrutiny and investigation — because they were ideological opponents.
That’s juicy, just as Bridgegate is juicy. It’s something we can all understand, it speaks to our greatest fears, and it’s the sort of thing TV newspeople could gab about for days on end without needing a fresh piece of news to keep it going.
And yet, according to Scott Whitlock of the Media Research Center, “In less than 24 hours, the three networks have devoted 17 times more coverage to a traffic scandal involving Chris Christie than they’ve allowed in the last six months to Barack Obama’s Internal Revenue Service controversy.”
Why? Oh, come on, you know why. Christie belongs to one political party. Obama belongs to the other. You know which ones they belong to. And you know which ones the people at the three networks belong to, too: In surveys going back decades, anywhere from 80% to 90% of Washington’s journalists say they vote Democratic.
In debates from schoolyards to the presidential campaign trail, this is what used to be called a “so’s your old man” argument. It’s not a defense at all, but rather a counter-complaint suggesting that we ought to be talking about something else, or that the perpetrators of one forgotten offense should be brought to justice along with those we’re talking about.
The classic right-wing “so’s your old man” argument was enapsulated in the bumper sticker that sprouted up when Ted Kennedy ran for president shortly after prominently criticizing the policies and practices that led to the Three Mile Island nuclear spill: “No one died at Three Mile Island,” an unsubtle reference Chappaquiddick.
So never mind that the IRS “scandal” has been largely discredited as a scandal at all, or that its “victims” were not New Jersey motorists commuting to work but political activists trying to get a tax subsidy and the power to cloak donors–it’s part of the permanent conservative grievance list and involved alleged abuse of government power, so out it comes again!
That should be cold comfort to Chris Christie, being involved in the lesser of scandals. But that’s the best he can expect from conservative gabbers who don’t really want to help him other than as the enemy of their enemy.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Editor, Washington Monthly Political Animal, January 13, 2014
“The Vicious Circle Of Income Inequality”: New Forces Are Causing Inequality To Feed On Itself
Almost every culture has some variation on the saying, “rags to rags in three generations.” Whether it’s “clogs to clogs” or “rice paddy to rice paddy,” the message is essentially the same: Starting with nothing, the first generation builds a successful enterprise, which its profligate offspring then manage poorly, so that by the time the grandchildren take over, little value remains.
Much of society’s wealth is created by new enterprises, so the apparent implication of this folk wisdom is that economic inequality should be self-limiting. And for most of the early history of industrial society, it was.
But no longer. Inequality in the United States has been increasing sharply for more than four decades and shows no signs of retreat. In varying degrees, it’s been the same pattern in other countries.
The economy has been changing, and new forces are causing inequality to feed on itself.
One is that the higher incomes of top earners have been shifting consumer demand in favor of goods whose value stems from the talents of other top earners. Because the wealthy have just about every possession anyone might need, they tend to spend their extra income in pursuit of something special. And, often, what makes goods special today is that they’re produced by people or organizations whose talents can’t be duplicated easily.
Wealthy people don’t choose just any architects, artists, lawyers, plastic surgeons, heart specialists or cosmetic dentists. They seek out the best, and the most expensive, practitioners in each category. The information revolution has greatly increased their ability to find those practitioners and transact with them. So as the rich get richer, the talented people they patronize get richer, too. Their spending, in turn, increases the incomes of other elite practitioners, and so on.
More recently, rising inequality has had much impact on the political process. Greater income and wealth in the hands of top earners gives them greater access to legislators. And it confers more ability to influence public opinion through contributions to research organizations and political action committees. The results have included long-term reductions in income and estate taxes, as well as relaxed business regulation. Those changes, in turn, have caused further concentrations of income and wealth at the top, creating even more political influence.
By enabling the best performers in almost every arena to extend their reach, technology has also been a major driver of income inequality. The best athletes and musicians once entertained hundreds, sometimes thousands of people at one time, but they can now serve audiences of hundreds of millions. In other fields, it was once enough to be the best producer in a relatively small region. But because of falling transportation costs and trade barriers in the information economy, many fields are now dominated by only a handful of the best suppliers worldwide.
Income concentration has changed spending patterns in other ways that widen the income gap. The wealthy have been spending more on gifts, clothing, housing, celebrations and other things simply because they have more money. Their extra spending has shifted the frames of reference that shape demand by others just below them, so these less wealthy people have been spending more, and so on, all the way down the income ladder. But because incomes below the top have been stagnant, the resulting expenditure cascades have made it harder for middle- and low-income families to make ends meet. Despite taking on huge amounts of debt, they’ve been unable to keep pace with community standards. Interest payments impoverish them while enriching their wealthy creditors.
But perhaps the most important new feedback loop shows up in higher education. Tighter budgets in middle-class families make it harder for them to afford the special tutors and other environmental advantages that help more affluent students win admission to elite universities. Financial aid helps alleviate these problems, but the children of affluent families graduate debt-free and move quickly into top-paying jobs, while the children of other families face lesser job prospects and heavy loads of student debt. All too often, the less affluent experience the miracle of compound interest in reverse.
More than anything else, what’s transformed the “rags to rags in three generations” story is the reduced importance of inherited wealth relative to other forms of inherited advantage. Monetary bequests are far more easily squandered than early childhood advantage and elite educational credentials. As Americans, we once pointed with pride to our country’s high level of economic and social mobility, but we’ve now become one of the world’s most rigidly stratified industrial democracies.
Given the grave threats to the social order that extreme inequality has posed in other countries, it’s easy to see why the growing income gap is poised to become the signature political issue of 2014. Low- and middle-income Americans don’t appear to be on the threshold of revolt. But the middle-class squeeze continues to tighten, and it would be imprudent to consider ourselves immune. So if growing inequality has become a self-reinforcing process, we’ll want to think more creatively about public policies that might contain it.
In the meantime, the proportion of our citizens who never make it out of rags will continue to grow.
By: Robert H. Frank, Economics Professor, The Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University; The New York Times, January 11, 2014
“Something’s Still Fishy In Jersey”: There Are Reasons To Question Chris Christie’s Bridge Scandal Story
I doubt the veracity of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christies’ bumper-to-bumper mea culpa. A trove of circumstantial evidence indicates that he had at least some knowledge that his deputy chief of staff, Bridget Anne Kelly, and former Port Authority officer David Wildstein colluded to wreak traffic havoc on Fort Lee, N.J.
It wasn’t like the week of Sept. 9, 2013 saw a typical commute on the George Washington Bridge. Drivers spent more than two hours stuck in traffic, and news of it was all over the New Jersey press. Thousands of people, including Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich and New York State Port Authority officials, were screaming bloody murder up and down the Palisades Parkway. It’s amazing that the entire New Jersey phone grid didn’t collapse from the tidal wave of calls flooding Christie’s office.
Even if the governor didn’t take one of these calls, he was in the midst of campaign season. His campaign team would’ve told him about the problem and how to respond to reporters should the traffic jam come up on the campaign trail. They wouldn’t have wanted to put him in a position where he might cede his advantage to his democratic challenger Barbara Buono.
Most telling was that on Sept. 13th, Port Authority Executive Director Patrick Foye, an appointee of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, ordered the lanes open, a decision made by a senior New York state official affecting the New Jersey side of the bridge. Cuomo’s office would have had to have spoken with Christie’s office before the order went out. Resolving that traffic jam depended on a lot of moving parts that needed to be coordinated on a state and Port Authority level.
In a perfect world, Christie would resign, showing deference to the people of New Jersey, not spend 107 minutes spouting flimflam meant to keep his presidential aspirations afloat. But this isn’t a perfect world – it’s a world where politicians can cough up a well-crafted, poll-tested apology to avoid punishment for their bad behavior.
In keeping with the standard trajectory of most political scandals, many commentators are now blaming Democrats for the scrutiny Christie is under. My colleague Peter Roff posted a bait-and-switch piece arguing that governor’s apology was a proper way to school President Obama on how to handle Benghazi, Fast and Furious and his dog Bo’s pooping on the White House rug.
Although it’s easy to blame every problem on Obamacare, none of what Roff argues has anything to do with anything. The Christie administration engineered a major traffic jam to get back at a politician whose endorsement or lack thereof would have made no difference to the inevitable outcome of the election. Christie’s apology doesn’t make him the George Washington Bridge Memorial Professor of Presidential Leadership.
The most disappointing part about this whole affair is that another talented politician with the potential to become president has collapsed under the weight of his own self-destructive behavior. Perhaps Christie will run for president next year, but the GOP would be better off if he didn’t. There are plenty of prominent Republicans out there who’ve demonstrated enough integrity to qualify for 2016. Perhaps they’ll throw their hats into the race soon, of course, provided that they’re not stuck in traffic on announcement day.
By: Jamie Chandler, U. S. News and World Report, January 10, 2014
“Chris Christie Is Not The Victim”: The Governor Accepted Full Responsibility But Not An Ounce Of Blame
You know a politician is having a bad day when he has to stand before a news conference and plead, “I am who I am, but I am not a bully.”
Frankly, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was unconvincing on that score Thursday as he attempted to contain a widening abuse-of-power scandal. Moreover, Christie displayed a degree of egocentrism that can only be described as stunning. His apologies would have sounded more sincere if he hadn’t portrayed himself as the real victim.
A bit of background is needed: During his successful reelection campaign last fall, Christie — shown by polls to be a leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, should he decide to seek it — tried to run up the score by winning endorsements from elected officials across the state, Democrats as well as Republicans.
The mayor of Fort Lee, the town on the New Jersey end of the George Washington Bridge to New York City, declined to give Christie his support. Shortly thereafter, Christie’s deputy chief of staff, Bridget Anne Kelly, sent an e-mail to an official at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey — the agency that controls the bridge — that said: “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.”
The e-mail went to David Wildstein, who was installed at the Port Authority by Christie and has known the governor since high school. He replied to Kelly: “Got it.”
Four weeks later, on Sept. 9, Wildstein ordered the closure of two traffic lanes approaching the bridge from Fort Lee, ostensibly to conduct a traffic study. This may sound like a minor inconvenience, but the George Washington Bridge is one of the most heavily traveled in the country. Closing the lanes caused hours-long traffic jams in Fort Lee for four straight days, snaring commuters in hopeless gridlock. In one widely reported incident, an elderly woman died of cardiac arrest after emergency responders were delayed by the snarl.
Further e-mail traffic involving Kelly, Wildstein and Christie’s campaign manager, Bill Stepien — mostly using their personal e-mail accounts, not their official ones — showed unalloyed glee at the mess Wildstein had created. Finally, a Port Authority higher-up discovered what Wildstein had done and reversed the order.
All along, Christie had ridiculed the suggestion that there was any political motivation in the lane closures. On Thursday, faced with proof to the contrary, he apologized and said he had been “betrayed” by staff members and associates he believed he could trust. “I am embarrassed and humiliated by the conduct of some of the people on my team,” he said.
Christie announced that he has fired Kelly — not because she helped create a maddening and dangerous situation for the people of Fort Lee but because she lied when Christie asked all the members of his senior staff whether they had any involvement in the affair.
That was the central message of Christie’s nearly two-hour performance before reporters: I was betrayed by people I trusted. I’m the victim here.
The whole episode “makes me ask . . . what did I do wrong to have these folks think it was okay to lie to me,” Christie said. He described his principal emotion as “sadness” at the betrayals by associates to whom he had shown loyalty — and from whom he expected loyalty in return.
The governor accepted full responsibility but not an ounce of blame. “Politics ain’t beanbag,” he said, but “that’s very, very different than saying that, you know, someone’s a bully.”
But is it really all that different? Christie maintained that he never sought the endorsement of Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich — never even met him, actually — and therefore had no reason to want him punished. What, then, would make his deputy chief of staff and several of his closest political associates think otherwise?
If Christie is truly in the mood for soul-searching, asking how his aides could tell him such lies should be secondary. The more urgent question is what Christie might have said or done to make these loyal lieutenants conclude it would be appropriate — and a lot of fun — to torment the people of Fort Lee because of the mayor’s refusal to pledge fealty.
Federal prosecutors are reviewing the whole affair. One obvious question is whether other officials who declined to endorse Christie faced retribution of any kind.
If voters see Christie’s pugnacious, in-your-face political persona as refreshing, he has a big future. If they see it as thuggish, he doesn’t. In that sense, you’re right, Governor. This is all about you.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 9, 2014
“It Was All For Spite”: A Scandal We Can Sink Our Teeth Into
During the Lewinsky scandal, our nation’s brave pundits spent a good amount of time fluttering their hands in front of their faces and expressing dismay that they had to spend so much time talking about something so lurid. The truth was that they loved it like a labrador loves liverwurst, but some scandals are just more fun than others. Does it concern a lot of dull policy arcana, or something a little more human? Is there room for lots of speculation about people’s motivations? Are there interesting characters—your Gordon Liddys, your Linda Tripps—to liven up the proceedings? These are the things that make a scandal.
We haven’t yet met the people at the heart of the Chris Christie George Washington Bridge scandal, but since they’re people in New Jersey politics, I’m guessing that if we ever get them in front of the cameras, a new media star or two would be born. And what I find glorious about this story is that the action in question had no practical purpose whatsoever. It didn’t enrich anyone or give anyone an unfair political advantage. It was just for spite. Members of the Christie administration, it now appears, created monumental traffic tie-ups in the town of Fort Lee, which abuts the G.W. Bridge, simply because the mayor, a Democrat, didn’t endorse Christie in an election he would win by 22 points.
We now have some fabulous emails and texts, including the smokingest of smoking guns, where a top Christie aide emailed a Port Authority official and said, “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee,” to which he replied, “Got it,” and it was made so. If it sounds like something out of an episode of “The Sopranos,” that isn’t just because it takes place in New Jersey. The only danger I see is the possibility that the cat has been let out of the bag too soon, and there won’t be even more juicy revelations to come. But we can hope.
In all likelihood, Governor Christie will say that he knew nothing of these nefarious doings, and nobody’s angrier about it than he is. Anyone whose name is on an incriminating email will be shown the door forthwith, having so brazenly subverted the tradition of integrity in public service for which the state has long been known. It may well be that Christie knew nothing about it; after all, he isn’t an idiot, and only an idiot would think screwing over a small-town mayor in so public a fashion, just before an election you’re going to win in a walk, would be a good idea.
But it does present a problem for him, because it’s the kind of scandal you’d dream up if you wanted to undermine the Christie ’16 bid. As Ezra Klein reminds us, Chris Christie doesn’t just have a reputation for being a bully, he’s actually a bully. And it would take a bully to say to a town of 35,000 people, “Your mayor didn’t endorse me? Well see how you like it when it takes you two hours to get over the Bridge, you worms.”
But what we need is to get everybody involved under oath, so we can get to know them and hear their stories. Maybe give them immunity; that’s what Congress did with Oliver North, and his testimony was riveting. Benghazi? Boring. IRS? Snoozeville. This is a scandal that could offer some real entertainment.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, January 8, 2014
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