The “Deficit Problem” Isn’t Financial: It’s Political
The federal budget deficit and its cumulative cousin, the national debt, are much more political and media phenomena than they are financial. Which isn’t to say that they don’t exist. Obviously, they do. But they have been invested with apocalyptic significance mainly for political purposes: to scare people and to coerce them into reducing the size and the scope of government.
The truth is that massive deficits are almost exclusively a Republican creation. But Republicans were conspicuously silent in the decades of their big run-up, when the deficits were providing the hollow illusion of easy prosperity. The other truth is that it is only deficits that can get the economy out of the ditch that Republicans left it in when Bush slunk out of office.
But as Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell has said, “Our first priority is to make sure Obama is a one-term president.” That is the real reason Republicans are born-again fiscal fundamentalists: deficits are the only thing that might actually turn the economy around and that is exactly what the Republicans are so intent on avoiding.
The first tip-off about the fake hysteria surrounding the deficits is that all the Chicken Littles crying the end of the world were silent when the real run-up was being conducted. Look at the history.
Ronald Reagan inherited a national debt of $1 trillion. He cut taxes on the rich and exploded government spending so that in just twelve years, by the end of the Bush I administration, the debt had quadrupled to $4 trillion.
Where were the Nervous Nellies back then? And Republicans have apotheosized Reagan into some kind of secular saint, a totally schizophrenic adulation if we are to believe their current hair-on-fire shtick about the toxicity of debt.
Bill Clinton reversed Reagan’s supply side economics. He raised taxes on the wealthy and cut government spending to the lowest percent of GDP in 40 years. As a result, he paid down the deficit every year he was in office, even delivering a budgetary surplus in each of his last three years. He handed a $136 billion surplus to George W. Bush in 2001.
If Republicans were truly sincere about their putative religious aversion to deficits, they would idolize Clinton, who paid them down, and demonize Reagan who ran them up. It says everything about their honesty that they do exactly the opposite.
Bush II, of course, returned to the same voodoo economics that Reagan and his father had embraced. He aggressively cut taxes on the rich (his “base” as he called them) and exploded government spending. He ran deficits every single year of his presidency, doubling the national debt in only eight years.
Again, where were the Heraldic voices of doom when their country really needed them? They were nowhere to be found. In fact, Bush’s vice president, Dick Cheney, brushed off Treasury secretary Paul O’Neil’s concerns about the hemorrhage with his famous dictum, “Deficits don’t matter. Reagan proved that.” Remember?
So, the choice to get all apoplectic about government borrowing is exactly that — a choice, and a political one at that. It is a choice Republicans conveniently never invoke when the deficits are their own, as they almost always are. Again, look at the history.
A Republican has occupied the White House for 28 of the last 42 years and never once in all of those years did any one of them ever produce a single balanced budget. Not once. They are financial phonies. Fiscal frauds.
And how ironic is it that these same Cassandras who are prophesying the end of the world are just as adamant that Bush’s tax cuts for the very rich must be preserved at all costs. Over the next ten years, those tax cuts will cost the government $700 billion in lost revenues, a seven hundred billion dollar, dollar-for-dollar increase in the deficit.
So, they can’t have it both ways. If the deficits do, in fact, pose an existential threat to the republic, then the government had better bring in more revenues from whatever source it can. But it looks like the deficits aren’t quite so onerous that we should bring in revenues from the only source that could actually pay them, the very rich. Funny thing, huh?
It is this duplicity on both history and policy that so clearly betrays Republican hypocrisy. They’re not interested in reducing deficits. They’re interested in reducing the size, the scope, and the efficacy of government, for government is the only agent left in the country with the capacity to stand up to the big corporations, to stop their sociopathic looting of the economy and their suicidal predations on the environment.
Republicans are also determined to undermine, even destroy, anyone who stands in the way of their agenda. Scott Walker, governor of Wisconsin, is the archetypal poster-child for this role.
Wisconsin’s legislative fiscal analyst had reported that the state had a $120 million surplus before the governor gave $140 million in tax breaks to corporations. So now, being shocked — SHOCKED — to discover a deficit, Walker claims he needs to dismantle public sector unions.
It’s like that iconic parable describing chutzpah: the child who kills his parents and then throws himself on the mercy of the court because he’s an orphan. But wait! It actually gets worse. The unions responded with substantial give-backs to help control the state government’s costs. Walker’s response? He’s not interested.
You see, the deficit is not, in fact, the problem. It’s just the fiscal train wreck that Republicans, from Wisconsin to Washington, have engineered to justify dismantling the social safety net and breaking the resistance of those people who will not submit themselves to living as serfs.
Finally, beyond the sham of their real history, beyond two-faced policies, there is the simple, conveniently overlooked matter of economics itself.
Ninety percent of the Obama deficits can be traced directly to actions of the Bush administration that carry over to the present. These include two sets of tax cuts for the rich, two seemingly unending wars, a $600 billion give-away to the pharmaceutical industry, and The Greatest Economic Collapse Since the Great Depression. That is what Obama inherited from Bush, together with a $1.3 trillion deficit. Again, look at the data.
Bush’s Great Recession started in December 2007, 13 months before Obama took office. In January 2009 when Obama was sworn in, the economy was losing 780,000 jobs a month. A month later, in February 2009, he pushed through a $787 billion stimulus package. Job losses bottomed out two months later, in April, and by November the economy was not only not losing jobs any more, it was creating them.
Did the turn-around require deficits? Of course it did! The economy had imploded and Bush was only too happy to toss the turd to his successor. And where else was the impetus going to come from to actually re-start demand? The alternative would have been an accelerating death spiral into complete economic collapse. We did that once under the tutelage of Republican economics. It was called The Great Depression.
Now, to be sure, the current recovery is fragile. Eight million jobs were lost in the Bush Recession. They haven’t been replaced. Eight trillion dollars of home equity was destroyed and it may not be replaced for decades. Fifty million people are living in poverty. Consumer spending makes up some 70% of the economy. So, as long as consumers are so battered, spending is going to be weak.
And businesses are certainly not taking up the slack. Though their balance sheets are glutted with some $2 trillion made from shifting jobs to China, investment in the U.S. economy as a percent of GDP is at 12%, the lowest it’s been in the last 40 years.
Are Obama’s policies beyond reproach? Not by a long shot. He should have pushed for a much larger stimulus package and not caved to Republican demands to extend the Bush tax cuts. He shouldn’t have gone along with Bush’s larcenous give-aways to the banks and should have done much more to constrain the soaring costs of health care which are the real source of the economy’s debt problems.
But right now it is federal government spending that is keeping the economy afloat, the more so as states and cities, which cannot run deficits, are cutting their spending. In fact, the surest way to sink the economy would be to pull the plug on federal government spending. Which says more about the real motives of the latter-day deficit hawks than all of their insufferably strident sanctimony combined.
Yes, in the long run, the debts will have to be repaid. But the best way to assure that that can happen is to get the economy moving again, to get people working and paying taxes, just like Roosevelt did the last time Republicans drove it over a cliff. But rebuilding is going to require some deficit spending, at least in the short run.
Republicans don’t abhor deficits. They love them. That is the real “money-where-your-mouth-is” truth that all of their pious posturing cannot disguise. Their own history couldn’t be more persuasive on that point. What they abhor is deficit spending that will help the economy on a Democrat’s watch. Their aversion to deficits isn’t economic, it’s political. And their motives aren’t exemplary. They’re despicable.
By: Robert Freeman, CommonDreams.org, originally posted February 27, 2011
Tax Hike Prevention Act of 2010: How It Affects You
Now that President Obama has signed the Tax Hike Prevention Act of 2010, taxpayers will have some certainty about their tax situation, if only for the next 24 months.
The new law contains a bevy of tax breaks — new and extended — and emergency help for the jobless. Its cost over 10 years is estimated at $858 billion.
Here’s a rundown of some of the biggest ticket items that will affect individuals. (Except where noted, all provisions are for 2011 and 2012).
Extended income tax rates: $207.5 billion. The six federal income tax rates will remain at the same levels they are today: 10%, 15%, 25%, 28%, 33% and 35%. In addition, itemized deductions will continue to be allowed in full for high-income taxpayers.
AMT fix: $147 billion. More than 20 million tax filers will be protected from having to pay the so-called “wealth tax,” otherwise known as the Alternative Minimum Tax. For tax year 2010, the bill will raise the amount of income that is exempt from the reach of the AMT to $47,450 for individuals and to $72,450 for couples filing jointly. In 2011, those exemption amounts will increase to $48,450 and $74,450 respectively. In addition, the bill will allow taxpayers to apply nonrefundable credits (which reduce one’s tax bill dollar for dollar) to their tax liability — whether under the AMT or the regular tax code.
Social Security tax break: $112 billion. Workers will get a 2 percentage-point break on their payroll tax for one year. Instead of paying 6.2% on wages up to $106,800, they will only have to pay 4.2% in 2011. This tax break replaces the Making Work Pay credit, which expires this year. Unlike Making Work Pay, which was limited to workers making less than $75,000 ($150,000 for couples), the payroll tax holiday will be available to everyone who pays into Social Security.
Expanded child tax credit: $90 billion. The bill will retain the $1,000 child tax credit (up from $500 before the Bush tax cuts). It also will retain the reduced-earnings threshold, which allows more people to claim the credit as refundable. A refundable tax credit is one paid to a tax filer even if the value of the credit exceeds his tax liability. So if a filer doesn’t owe any federal income tax but qualifies for the credit, it is paid to him in the form of a refund.
Smaller estate tax: $68 billion. Barring any changes, the estate tax in 2011 and 2012 will be reinstated at an exemption level of $1 million and a top rate of 55%. But under the bill, the exemption level will be raised to $5 million and the top rate lowered to 35%. The legislation will also reinstate the so-called “step up in basis” for beneficiaries of those who die in 2010, 2011 or 2012. A stepped-up basis means that when someone sells an inherited asset, his capital gains tax bill will be based on the asset’s price the day he inherited it, rather than when the decedent originally bought it. Practically speaking that means the beneficiaries of those who died in 2010 will be allowed to choose which estate tax rules to follow — those of 2011 or those of 2010. Under 2010 rules, there is no estate tax but also no step-up rules; there is only an option to exempt $1.3 million worth of capital gains from tax.
Help for the jobless: $57 billion. The unemployed will get a 13-month extension of the deadline to file for additional unemployment benefits — which go as high as 99 weeks in states hit hardest by job loss.
Extended investment tax rates: $53 billion. Everybody will get to keep their low investment tax rates for the next two years. For most people, that means their qualified capital gains and dividends will continue to be taxed at 15%. Low-income tax filers (those in the 10% and 15% brackets), however, will continue to enjoy a 0% tax rate on their capital gains or dividends.
Marriage penalty relief: $27 billion. Marriage will still be hard (sorry), but not because less-than-wealthy two-earner couples will owe more to the IRS than they did when they were single. The bill continues to ensure that the standard deduction for couples is exactly twice that for single filers. It also maintains an expanded 15% tax bracket so that the amount of income in that bracket for joint filers is exactly double that for single filers.
Expanded college credit: $18 billion. Paying for college tuition in 2011 and 2012 will be made a bit easier with the retention of the American Opportunity tax credit, which is an expansion of the HOPE tax credit. The Opportunity credit is worth up to $2,500 (up to 100% of the first $2,000 spent and up to 25% of the next $2,500), and it may be claimed for four years’ worth of college. Eligibility to take the credit is limited to those with modified adjusted gross income below $90,000 ($180,000 for couples filing jointly).
Individual tax break extensions: Costs vary. The legislation will extend a number of tax breaks that have been introduced in the past few years such as the option to deduct on one’s federal return state and local sales tax instead of state and local income tax — at a cost of $6 billion. Also, it will extend a deduction for qualified tuition and other education-related expenses at a cost of $1.2 billion. Less pricey extensions include a break for teachers to deduct up to $250 in classroom expenses (just under $400 million).
By: Jeanne Sahadi, Senior Writer-CNNMoney.com, December 17, 2010
PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year: ‘A government takeover of health care’
In the spring of 2009, a Republican strategist settled on a brilliant and powerful attack line for President Barack Obama’s ambitious plan to overhaul America’s health insurance system. Frank Luntz, a consultant famous for his phraseology, urged GOP leaders to call it a “government takeover.”
“Takeovers are like coups,” Luntz wrote in a 28-page memo. “They both lead to dictators and a loss of freedom.”
The line stuck. By the time the health care bill was headed toward passage in early 2010, Obama and congressional Democrats had sanded down their program, dropping the “public option” concept that was derided as too much government intrusion. The law passed in March, with new regulations, but no government-run plan.
But as Republicans smelled serious opportunity in the midterm elections, they didn’t let facts get in the way of a great punchline. And few in the press challenged their frequent assertion that under Obama, the government was going to take over the health care industry.
PolitiFact editors and reporters have chosen “government takeover of health care” as the 2010 Lie of the Year. Uttered by dozens of politicians and pundits, it played an important role in shaping public opinion about the health care plan and was a significant factor in the Democrats’ shellacking in the November elections.
Readers of PolitiFact, the St. Petersburg Times‘ independent fact-checking website, also chose it as the year’s most significant falsehood by an overwhelming margin. (Their second-place choice was Rep. Michele Bachmann’s claim that Obama was going to spend $200 million a day on a trip to India, a falsity that still sprouts.)
By selecting “government takeover’ as Lie of the Year, PolitiFact is not making a judgment on whether the health care law is good policy.
The phrase is simply not true.
Said Jonathan Oberlander, a professor of health policy at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill: “The label ‘government takeover” has no basis in reality, but instead reflects a political dynamic where conservatives label any increase in government authority in health care as a ‘takeover.’ ”
An inaccurate claim
“Government takeover” conjures a European approach where the government owns the hospitals and the doctors are public employees. But the law Congress passed, parts of which have already gone into effect, relies largely on the free market:
• Employers will continue to provide health insurance to the majority of Americans through private insurance companies.
• Contrary to the claim, more people will get private health coverage. The law sets up “exchanges” where private insurers will compete to provide coverage to people who don’t have it.
• The government will not seize control of hospitals or nationalize doctors.
• The law does not include the public option, a government-run insurance plan that would have competed with private insurers.
• The law gives tax credits to people who have difficulty affording insurance, so they can buy their coverage from private providers on the exchange. But here too, the approach relies on a free market with regulations, not socialized medicine.
PolitiFact reporters have studied the 906-page bill and interviewed independent health care experts. We have concluded it is inaccurate to call the plan a government takeover because it relies largely on the existing system of health coverage provided by employers.
It’s true that the law does significantly increase government regulation of health insurers. But it is, at its heart, a system that relies on private companies and the free market.
Republicans who maintain the Democratic plan is a government takeover say that characterization is justified because the plan increases federal regulation and will require Americans to buy health insurance.
But while those provisions are real, the majority of Americans will continue to get coverage from private insurers. And it will bring new business for the insurance industry: People who don”t currently have coverage will get it, for the most part, from private insurance companies.
Consider some analogies about strict government regulation. The Federal Aviation Administration imposes detailed rules on airlines. State laws require drivers to have car insurance. Regulators tell electric utilities what they can charge. Yet that heavy regulation is not described as a government takeover.
This year, PolitiFact analyzed five claims of a “government takeover of health care.” Three were rated Pants on Fire, two were rated False.
‘Can’t do it in four words’
Other news organizations have also said the claim is false.
Slate said “the proposed health care reform does not take over the system in any sense.’ In a New York Times economics blog, Princeton University professor Uwe Reinhardt, an expert in health care economics, said, “Yes, there would be a substantial government-mandated reorganization of this relatively small corner of the private health insurance market (that serves people who have been buying individual policies). But that hardly constitutes a government takeover of American health care.”
FactCheck.org, an independent fact-checking group run by the University of Pennsylvania, has debunked it several times, calling it one of the “whoppers” about health care and saying the reform plan is neither “government-run” nor a “government takeover.”
We asked incoming House Speaker John Boehner’s office why Republican leaders repeat the phrase when it has repeatedly been shown to be incorrect. Michael Steel, Boehner’s spokesman, replied, “We believe that the job-killing ObamaCare law will result in a government takeover of health care. That’s why we have pledged to repeal it, and replace it with common-sense reforms that actually lower costs.”
Analysts say health care reform is such a complicated topic that it often cannot be summarized in snappy talking points.
“If you’re going to tell the truth about something as complicated as health care and health care reform, you probably need at least four sentences,” said Maggie Mahar, author of Money-Driven Medicine: The Real Reason Health Care Costs So Much. “You can”t do it in four words.”
Mahar said the GOP simplification distorted the truth about the plan. “Doctors will not be working for the government. Hospitals will not be owned by the government,” she said. “That’s what a government takeover of health care would mean, and that’s not at all what we”re doing.”
How the line was used
If you followed the health care debate or the midterm election – even casually – it’s likely you heard “government takeover” many times.
PolitiFact sought to count how often the phrase was used in 2010 but found an accurate tally was unfeasible because it had been repeated so frequently in so many places. It was used hundreds of times during the debate over the bill and then revived during the fall campaign. A few numbers:
• The phrase appears more than 90 times on Boehner’s website, GOPLeader.gov.
• It was mentioned eight times in the 48-page Republican campaign platform “A Pledge to America” as part of their plan to “repeal and replace the government takeover of health care.”
• The Republican National Committee’s website mentions a government takeover of health care more than 200 times.
Conservative groups and tea party organizations joined the chorus. It was used by FreedomWorks, the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute.
The phrase proliferated in the media even after Democrats dropped the public option. In 2010 alone, “government takeover” was mentioned 28 times in the Washington Post, 77 times in Politico and 79 times on CNN. A review of TV transcripts showed “government takeover” was primarily used as a catchy sound bite, not for discussions of policy details.
In most transcripts we examined, Republican leaders used the phrase without being challenged by interviewers. For example, during Boehner’s Jan. 31 appearance on Meet the Press, Boehner said it five times. But not once was he challenged about it.
In rare cases when the point was questioned, the GOP leader would recite various regulations found in the bill and insist that they constituted a takeover. But such followups were rare.
An effective phrase
Politicians and officials in the health care industry have been warning about a “government takeover” for decades.
The phrase became widely used in the early 1990s when President Bill Clinton was trying to pass health care legislation. Then, as today, Democrats tried to debunk the popular Republican refrain.
When Obama proposed his health plan in the spring of 2009, Luntz, a Republican strategist famous for his research on effective phrases, met with focus groups to determine which messages would work best for the Republicans. He did not respond to calls and e-mails from PolitiFact asking him to discuss the phrase.
The 28-page memo he wrote after those sessions, “The Language of Healthcare 2009,” provides a rare glimpse into the art of finding words and phrases that strike a responsive chord with voters.
The memo begins with “The 10 Rules for Stopping the ‘Washington Takeover’ of Healthcare.” Rule No. 4 says people “are deathly afraid that a government takeover will lower their quality of care – so they are extremely receptive to the anti-Washington approach. It’s not an economic issue. It’s a bureaucratic issue.”
The memo is about salesmanship, not substance. It doesn’t address whether the lines are accurate. It just says they are effective and that Republicans should use them. Indeed, facing a Democratic plan that actually relied on the free market to try to bring down costs, Luntz recommended sidestepping that inconvenient fact:
“The arguments against the Democrats’ healthcare plan must center around politicians, bureaucrats and Washington … not the free market, tax incentives or competition.”
Democrats tried to combat the barrage of charges about a government takeover. The White House and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi repeatedly put out statements, but they were drowned out by a disciplined GOP that used the phrase over and over.
Democrats could never agree on their own phrases and were all over the map in their responses, said Howard Dean, former head of the Democratic National Committee.
“It was uncoordinated. Everyone had their own idea,” Dean said in an interview with PolitiFact.
“The Democrats are atrocious at messaging,” he said. “They’ve gotten worse since I left, not better. It’s just appalling. First of all, you don”t play defense when you”re doing messaging, you play offense. The Republicans have learned this well.”
Dean grudgingly admires the Republican wordsmith. “Frank Luntz has it right, he just works for the wrong side. You give very simple catch phrases that encapsulate the philosophy of the bill.”
A responsive chord
By March of this year, when Obama signed the bill into law, 53 percent of respondents in a Bloomberg poll said they agreed that “the current proposal to overhaul health care amounts to a government takeover.”
Exit polls showed the economy was the top issue for voters in the November election, but analysts said the drumbeat about the “government takeover” during the campaign helped cement the advantage for the Republicans.
Rep. Earl Blumenauer, an Oregon Democrat whose provision for Medicare end-of-life care was distorted into the charge of “death panels” (last year’s Lie of the Year), said the Republicans’ success with the phrase was a matter of repetition.
“There was a uniformity of Republican messaging that was disconnected from facts,” Blumenauer said. “The sheer discipline . . . was breathtaking.”
By: Bill Adair, Angie Drobnic Holan, PolitiFact-December 16th, 2010
Let’s Repeal 2010
Gail Collins-Photo:Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
This has been a bad summer for almost everybody — celebrities, shrimpers, Washington insiders, Tea Party outsiders, people who prefer pleasant weather. So far, my list of who did well only includes the Spanish soccer team and Paul the prophetic octopus. Plus, according to Senator Jim Bunning, George Steinbrenner. The Kentucky Republican praised the Yankee owner in the Senate Finance Committee for being “smart enough to die in 2010,” when the estate tax is temporarily suspended.
This week, Congress passed the huge reform of the financial industry that it had been working on for nearly two years. You’d think there would have been cheering from coast to coast, but the left was disheartened to discover that contrary to all previous precedent, Congress had passed a bill that was imperfect.
“Ending debate on the bill is finishing before the job is done,” said Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, the only Democrat to vote no.
Great idea. I think I speak for us all when I say that there is absolutely nothing I would like better than additional talking in the Senate. It always seems to make things better. Meanwhile, down in the House, John Boehner, the Republican leader, raised the ante, calling for repeal.
Who says that Boehner just hangs out at bars and tanning parlors and doesn’t work hard? The man is tireless! Everybody else was exhausted, but he wanted to start over.
“There are common sense things we should do to plug the holes in the regulatory system … and to bring more transparency to financial transactions. Because transparency is like sunlight and sunlight is the best disinfectant,” he said.
This is an exciting new analogy for Boehner. Just a couple of weeks ago he was leading the opposition to a bill that would require groups that pay for political attack ads to reveal their true identities. Boehner called it a “back-room deal to shred our Constitution.” In this case, transparency was a dangerous concept that would strip away all protective covering and allow vicious ultraviolet rays to stream through the window and burn away our precious freedoms.
Most Republicans are not joining Boehner in his call to repeal the financial reform bill because they are too busy calling for the repeal of health care reform. “The bill should be scrapped and replaced with much better ideas,” said Mario Rubio, the Republican Senate candidate in Florida.
Rubio’s own idea is to eliminate the requirement that healthy people have insurance, but keep the part that says insurance companies have to cover people with pre-existing conditions. This sounds like the ideal solution — no one would have to buy insurance until they got sick, and then they could make the companies sell them a whole bunch of coverage. I don’t know why nobody thought of this before.
With all these great ideas around — debate more, start over, don’t clean the windows — it’s a wonder that Washington hasn’t become the image of Athens in the age of Pericles. But instead, all Barack Obama’s critics have been able to do is make the country feel gloomy about Barack Obama. He’s passed more major legislation than anybody since Franklin Roosevelt and he’s got popularity ratings that look more like Martin Van Buren’s.
This week, there was an enormous outcry at the news that the president was going to take his wife and children to Maine for the weekend. This is the third time he and his family went away for a weekend since the gulf oil crisis. Three weekends in three months!
“Presidents are certainly entitled to vacation, just like everybody else, but there is a fine line as to when presidents should do it, what they should and where they should do it,” a former member of George W. Bush’s staff told CNN. The staff member in question, Brad Blakeman, was in charge of appointments and scheduling. Surely there is nobody better qualified to discuss this important subject than the man who helped the previous president get out of town for a third of his entire time in office.
The Republicans have now set up a site called “Golf or Gulf” that lists all the things Obama has been doing for the last three months when he could have been sitting around worrying about the oil spill. He had Paul McCartney over to the White House. And he played golf 10 times!
Let’s repeal the oil spill and start all over. The right way to handle the disaster, it appears from the many, many critiques, would have been to:
— Call all the oil company executives together to come up with a plan.
— Denounce all the oil companies.
— Apologize to the oil companies.
— Tell Paul McCartney he cannot sing in the White House until all the pelicans are clean.
By GAIL COLLINS-Op-Ed Columnist/NYT
Published: July 16, 2010
First “Obama’s Katrina,” Now “Obama’s Watergate”
On May 8, 1973, the Senate Watergate Committee began its nationally televised hearings. Archibald Cox served as the Justice Department's special prosecutor for the case.
It appears that the Republican Party and the conservative chattering classes are determined to identify Barack Obama with every famous conservative disaster of recent history. BP’s Gulf Oil spill, we are told incessantly, is “Obama’s Katrina,” presumably because of the common geographic location, and now we hear that the silly, contrived “scandal” over alleged job offers to Democratic primary candidates will be “Obama’s Watergate.” What’s next: Obama’s Iraq? Obama’s U.S. Attorney Scandal? Obama’s Plamegate? Obama’s Illegitimate Election? (Oh, sorry, I forgot, Republicans have already used that one!).In any event, the “Watergate” analogy is insane, unless maybe you are too young or too poorly read to remember what Watergate entailed. As Joe Conason explains at Salon:
“Watergate” was the place where the president’s henchmen staged a “third-rate burglary” of the Democratic National Committee headquarters on a June night in 1972, but its historical definition is the vast gangsterism of the Nixon regime. Watergate involved no political job offers, but a series of burglaries, warrantless domestic wiretaps, illegal spying, campaign dirty tricks, and assorted acts of thuggery by a group of goons whose leaders included G. Gordon Liddy and the late E. Howard Hunt. Watergate meant a coverup of those felonies with more felonies, set up by lawyers and bureaucrats who collected cash payoffs from major corporations and then handed out hush money and secret campaign slush funds. Watergate implicated dozens of perps, from Hunt and Liddy all the way up to the president, his palace guard, and his crooked minions at the highest levels of the Justice Department, the FBI and the CIA.
The allegations against the White House today involve alleged discussions of administration jobs for Democrats running in two Democratic primaries, who turned them down without consequences. Does that sound like Watergate in any way, shape or form?
But that even assumes there was anything wrong with the discussions, other than their political clumsiness. Yes, one defense is that the same thing has been done by federal, state and local executives from time immemorial, but even that concedes too much to the critics. The federal statute being invoked by conservatives in this situation makes it a crime to offer a job in exchange for “a political act.” But in this case, “the political act” is simply taking the job. If that’s illegal, then it’s illegal to offer appointments to anyone who is or might be running for office.
It’s not surprising that Republicans are seizing on this silliness, enabled by a bored press corps; not only does it contribute to the constant drumbeat of charges that Obama’s imploding politically and doomed to disaster in 2010 and/or 2012, but it’s also a handy weapon to use against Joe Sestak, who is well-positioned to beat one of the Right’s true heartthrobs, Pat Toomey, in November.
That’s all politics-as-usual, of course. But let’s not get hallucinogenic by comparing this to the wide-ranging use of federal power to raise money illegally and intimidate “enemies” characterized by Watergate.
Posted by Ed Kilgore on June 4, 2010-Photo: Marion Trikosko for USN and WR.
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