“Plainly And Demonstrably Wrong”: Bob Woodward’s Unfortunate And Inexplicable Errors
In the world of media giants, the Washington Post‘s Bob Woodward has reached a legendary status with few rivals. If there’s a journalistic award to be won, Woodward has received it, including multiple Pulitzers. His Watergate coverage 40 years ago is, quite literally, the stuff of legend.
But even reporting icons sometimes make mistakes, some of them rather inexplicable.
Over the weekend, there was quite a kerfuffle when Woodward, to the delight of far-right bloggers, jumped into the debate over this week’s sequestration cuts, challenging some of the White House’s key assertions. For one thing, Woodward insists the sequester was President Obama’s idea. For another, Woodward wants the public to believe Obama is “moving the goal posts” by expecting Democrats and Republicans to reach a compromise including both spending cuts and revenue from closed tax loopholes. As far as the Washington Post reporter in concerned, sequestration cuts were supposed to be replaced entirely with different spending cuts, just as GOP policymakers demand.
Let’s take these one at a time. The first point, which Republicans and reporters find needlessly fascinating, is quickly becoming farcical. Tim Noah argued that the White House came up with the sequestration policy “in roughly the same sense that it was Charles Lindbergh’s bad idea eight decades ago to fork over the equivalent in today’s dollars of $840,000 to a German-born carpenter named Bruno Hauptmann…. The sequester was a ransom payment.” Noam Scheiber added that saying the sequester was Obama’s idea is “like saying it was your idea to give your wallet to a mugger when he said, ‘Your money or your life.'”
Republicans were threatening to crash the economy on purpose and Obama was scrambling to satisfy their demands before GOP lawmakers pulled the trigger and shot the hostage (which is to say, shot us). The sequester then became part of the plan that Republicans proceeded to vote for and brag about, before they came up with the “this is all Obama’s fault” talking point in the hopes of winning a bizarre public-relations fight.
After Republicans created a crisis, both sides created the sequester, and both sides now consider it dangerous. The point that matters, even if Very Serious People in Washington are reluctant to acknowledge it, is that only one side is prepared to compromise to resolve the problem.
Which leads us to Woodward’s second, and more dramatic, error.
For the Washington Post legend, Obama is “moving the goal posts,” since everyone realized in the summer of 2011 that the sequestration cuts were supposed to be replaced with a different set of cuts — and no new revenue. It’s unfair, Woodward argues, for the White House to suddenly expect a balanced compromise when that was never part of the original plan.
Woodward is plainly, demonstrably wrong. It’s not a matter of opinion and it’s not an answer found in a fuzzy gray area in which both sides have a credible claim.
When the Budget Control Act became law to end the Republicans’ debt-ceiling crisis in 2011, a “super-committee” was created to find an alternative to the sequester. Was the committee’s mandate to find a cuts-only policy? Of course not — even Republicans accepted the fact that some revenue would be part of a solution. President Obama, when signing the BCA, explicitly said, “You can’t close the deficit with just spending cuts…. It also means reforming our tax code so that the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations pay their fair share.'”
Brian Beutler added that Woodward “is just dead wrong.”
Obama and Democrats have always insisted that a balanced mix of spending cuts and higher taxes replace sequestration. It’s true that John Boehner wouldn’t agree to include new taxes in the enforcement mechanism itself, and thus that the enforcement mechanism he and Obama settled upon — sequestration — is composed exclusively of spending cuts. But the entire purpose of an enforcement mechanism is to make sure that the enforcement mechanism is never triggered. The key question is what action it was designed to compel. And on that score, the Budget Control Act is unambiguous.
First: “Unless a joint committee bill achieving an amount greater than $1,200,000,000,000 in deficit reduction as provided in section 401(b)(3)(B)(i)(II) of the Budget Control Act of 2011 is enacted by January 15, 2012, the discretionary spending limits listed in section 251(c) shall be revised, and discretionary appropriations and direct spending shall be reduced.”
Key words: “deficit reduction.” Not “spending cuts.” If Republicans wanted to make sure sequestration would be replaced with spending cuts only, that would have been the place to make a stand. Some of them certainly tried. But that’s not what ultimately won the day. Instead, the law tasked the Super Committee with replacing sequestration with a different deficit reduction bill — tax increases or no.
At a certain level, Woodward, despite having written extensively on the subject, seems somewhat confused about the specific details. In his op-ed, he wrote, “The final deal reached between Vice President Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in 2011 included an agreement that there would be no tax increases in the sequester….So when the president asks that a substitute for the sequester include not just spending cuts but also new revenue, he is moving the goal posts.”
But that simply doesn’t make any sense. The sequester didn’t include revenue, so it’s unfair to expect the sequester alternative to have revenue? Why is that, exactly?
What’s especially troubling is that Woodward’s own book is at odds with the argument he presented in the new op-ed.
But wait, it gets worse. Woodward, who for whatever reason doesn’t seem to care for the president, made an unfortunate mistake and got caught. And if Woodward acknowledged his missteps and corrected them, it would have been easy to simply move on. Even journalistic legends make mistakes.
But in this case, after learning of the criticism, Woodward emailed Politico‘s Mike Allen with a defense that made matters worse, flubbing several key, basic details, suggesting he’s even more confused about the debate than was evident from his mistaken op-ed.
Republicans seem thrilled with Woodward’s errors because they reinforce the story they’re eager to tell. But relying on mistakes to bolster a bad argument only makes Woodward and Republicans look worse.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 25, 2013
“Sequester Of Fools”: We Should Be Spending More, Not Less, Until We’re Close To Full Employment
They’re baaack! Just about two years ago, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, the co-chairmen of the late unlamented debt commission, warned us to expect a terrible fiscal crisis within, um, two years unless we adopted their plan. The crisis hasn’t materialized, but they’re nonetheless back with a new version. And, in case you’re interested, after last year’s election — in which American voters made it clear that they want to preserve the social safety net while raising taxes on the rich — the famous fomenters of fiscal fear have moved to the right, calling for even less revenue and even more spending cuts.
But you aren’t interested, are you? Almost nobody is. Messrs. Bowles and Simpson had their moment — the annus horribilis of 2011, when Washington was in thrall to deficit scolds insisting that, in the face of record-high long-term unemployment and record-low borrowing costs, we forget about jobs and concentrate exclusively on a “grand bargain” that would supposedly (not actually) settle budget disputes for ever after.
That moment has now passed; even Mr. Bowles concedes that the search for a grand bargain is on “life support.” Let’s convene a death panel! But the legacy of that year of living foolishly lives on, in the form of the “sequester,” one of the worst policy ideas in our nation’s history.
Here’s how it happened: Republicans engaged in unprecedented hostage-taking, threatening to push America into default by refusing to raise the debt ceiling unless President Obama agreed to a grand bargain on their terms. Mr. Obama, alas, didn’t stand firm; instead, he tried to buy time. And, somehow, both sides decided that the way to buy time was to create a fiscal doomsday machine that would inflict gratuitous damage on the nation through spending cuts unless a grand bargain was reached. Sure enough, there is no bargain, and the doomsday machine will go off at the end of next week.
There’s a silly debate under way about who bears responsibility for the sequester, which almost everyone now agrees was a really bad idea. The truth is that Republicans and Democrats alike signed on to this idea. But that’s water under the bridge. The question we should be asking is who has a better plan for dealing with the aftermath of that shared mistake.
The right policy would be to forget about the whole thing. America doesn’t face a deficit crisis, nor will it face such a crisis anytime soon. Meanwhile, we have a weak economy that is recovering far too slowly from the recession that began in 2007. And, as Janet Yellen, the vice chairwoman of the Federal Reserve, recently emphasized, one main reason for the sluggish recovery is that government spending has been far weaker in this business cycle than in the past. We should be spending more, not less, until we’re close to full employment; the sequester is exactly what the doctor didn’t order.
Unfortunately, neither party is proposing that we just call the whole thing off. But the proposal from Senate Democrats at least moves in the right direction, replacing the most destructive spending cuts — those that fall on the most vulnerable members of our society — with tax increases on the wealthy, and delaying austerity in a way that would protect the economy.
House Republicans, on the other hand, want to take everything that’s bad about the sequester and make it worse: canceling cuts in the defense budget, which actually does contain a lot of waste and fraud, and replacing them with severe cuts in aid to America’s neediest. This would hit the nation with a double whammy, reducing growth while increasing injustice.
As always, many pundits want to portray the deadlock over the sequester as a situation in which both sides are at fault, and in which both should give ground. But there’s really no symmetry here. A middle-of-the-road solution would presumably involve a mix of spending cuts and tax increases; well, that’s what Democrats are proposing, while Republicans are adamant that it should be cuts only. And given that the proposed Republican cuts would be even worse than those set to happen under the sequester, it’s hard to see why Democrats should negotiate at all, as opposed to just letting the sequester happen.
So here we go. The good news is that compared with our last two self-inflicted crises, the sequester is relatively small potatoes. A failure to raise the debt ceiling would have threatened chaos in world financial markets; failure to reach a deal on the so-called fiscal cliff would have led to so much sudden austerity that we might well have plunged back into recession. The sequester, by contrast, will probably cost “only” around 700,000 jobs.
But the looming mess remains a monument to the power of truly bad ideas — ideas that the entire Washington establishment was somehow convinced represented deep wisdom.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, February 21, 2013
“Republican Reformers”: Absolutist’s Advocating For No Tax Hikes Of Any Kind For The Rich
It’s been a good week for the intellectual cause of reforming the Republican Party. Ramesh Ponnuru has a sharp op-ed in the New York Times today arguing that Ronald Reagan’s economic program was well tailored to the conditions of 1980, but does not meet the needs of the present day. (Ponnuru could have noted that Reagan himself altered his own program in response to the massive structural deficits it created — the conservative liturgy defines the Reagan gospel as the pure 1981 version.) Bush administration veterans Michael Gerson and Peter Wehner have a longer piece in Commentary arguing along similar lines.
These are smart arguments and I devoutly hope for their success. Yet they contain the same flaws that seem to recur in all the efforts to reform the GOP from within: an unwillingness to identify or confront the forces within the party that prevent these reforms from succeeding.
Yesterday, for instance, Paul Ryan appeared on This Week to argue once again for why Republicans would not accept any new revenue as part of a deficit reduction plan:
But taking tax loophole, what we’ve always advocated is necessary for tax reform, means you’re going to close loopholes to fuel more spending not to reform the tax code. …
So if you take tax loopholes to fuel more spending, which is what they’re proposing, then you are preventing tax reform, which we think is necessary, to end crony capitalism and to grow the economy.
This is pure Republican orthodoxy. What’s remarkable about the ability of anti-tax zealots like Ryan to sustain their position is that it places them in direct opposition to conservative goals on both defense and spending. After all, Obama is offering to cut spending on retirement programs and to cancel out cuts to defense — two things large chunks of the GOP would like — in return for more revenue. He’s not even demanding higher rates. He’s merely asking to reduce tax deductions.
Ryan insists he won’t take the deal, because if he uses the revenue from reducing tax deductions to close the deficit, it won’t be available to reduce tax rates. Every other fiscal priority must give way for the overriding goal of reducing marginal tax rates.
But where are the Republicans speaking in opposition to Ryan and his allies? I haven’t seen a single one. Instead, they ignore the existing configurations altogether. Wehner had a blog post yesterday railing against “the refusal by Democrats to reform entitlement programs in general.” But Obama has been offering to reduce spending on Social Security and Medicare for two years now, in return for Republican agreement to spread the burden of the fiscal adjustment. They won’t take the deal.
Now, maybe Obama’s deal isn’t exactly what Ponnuru, Gerson, and Wehner would like. But if Republicans want to reform their party’s identity and make it into something other than absolutist advocacy of low taxes for the rich, they need to come up with some negotiating position on fiscal issues other than “no tax hikes for the rich of any kind no matter what we get in return.”
By: Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine, February 18, 2013
“Dire Consequences And Denial”: With Their Jobs Secure, Republicans Could Less About The Rest Of America
The sequester’s automatic, across-the-board spending cuts are set to go into effect on Friday, and there is no plan as yet to stop it.
America, this is your feeble government at its most ineffective and self-destructive.
The White House favors a balanced plan that would include spending cuts and some tax increases for the wealthy. Republicans reject any solution that includes tax increases.
These are two fundamentally different perspectives, only one of which is supported by a majority of Americans.
A Pew Research Center/USA Today survey released Thursday found that only 19 percent of Americans believe that the focus of deficit reduction should be only on spending cuts. Seventy-six percent want a combination of spending cuts and tax increases, with more emphasis on the former than the latter.
But the impasse could have dire consequences. A study last year by Stephen S. Fuller, a professor at George Mason University, estimates that the sequester could cost 2.14 million jobs and add 1.5 percentage points to the unemployment rate. Fuller’s analysis was cited in a Congressional Research Service report prepared for members of Congress.
What’s more, the sequester would reduce military spending by $42.7 billion; nonmilitary discretionary spending would drop $28.7 billion, in addition to a mandatory $9.9 billion reduction in Medicare, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
In anticipation of the very real possibility that the sequester could come to pass, some Republicans are leaning on the shoulder of an old friend: denial.
This week on CNN, Senator Rand Paul pronounced the $85 billion in mandated cuts a “pittance” and a “yawn” that is “just really nibbling at the edges.” He also called President Obama’s warnings about the sequester’s impact “histrionics,” “ridiculousness” and “emotionalism.”
What a perfect segue to Rush Limbaugh, who took to the air this week to denounce predictions about the sequester’s effects as a “manufactured” crisis, saying that “for the first time in my life, I am ashamed of my country.”
Limbaugh continued:
“In truth, we’re gonna spend more this year than we spent last year. We’re just not gonna spend as much as was projected. It’s all baseline budgeting. There is no real cut below a baseline of zero. There just isn’t. Yet here they come, sucking us in, roping us in. Panic here, fear there: Crisis, destruction, no meat inspection, no cops, no teachers, no firefighters, no air traffic control. I’m sorry, my days of getting roped into all this are over.”
Those not denying the crisis are hoping to exploit it.
Karl Rove, writing in The Wall Street Journal on Thursday, called the president “a once-in-a-generation demagogue with a compliant press corps” who will subject the American people in the short term to a “slew of presidential photo-ops with those whom he claims will lose jobs.” Mr. Rove advised House Republicans to “pass a continuing resolution next week to fund the government for the balance of the fiscal year at the lower level dictated by the sequester — with language granting the executive branch the flexibility to move funds from less vital activities to more important ones.”
Rove supports the steep cuts but wants to allow the president “flexibility” in applying them. That Rove is as slick as an eel. In other words, he wants to force the president to rob Peter to pay Paul and take the flak for making all the tough choices.
Another Pew Research Poll released this week found that although many Americans favor cutting government spending in the abstract, most don’t agree with cuts to specific programs. “For 18 of 19 programs tested, majorities want either to increase spending or maintain it at current levels,” Pew found. “The only exception is assistance for needy people around the world.”
Ah, foreign aid, the tired old whipping horse that would do virtually nothing to reduce the deficit, as it accounts for a paltry 1 percent of the federal budget.
Rove’s plan to shift to the president the burden of choosing where to bring down the ax is Rove’s way of getting Republicans “to win public opinion to their side.” That is a roundabout way of acknowledging that right now they’re losing. A Bloomberg poll released this week found the president’s job-approval rating at its highest level and the Republican Party’s favorable rating at its lowest since September 2009.
Furthermore, the Pew/USA Today survey found that if a deal isn’t reached in time, about half the public will blame Congressional Republicans while fewer than a third will blame the president.
And if the sequester happens, we’ll all lose. It will be a disaster for the job market and the economy. But no one can accuse these politicians and pundits of caring about such things as long as their own jobs are secure.
By: Charles M. Blow, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, February 22, 2013
“Same Old Talking Points”: Republicans Are Committing Political Malpractice
Republican voters must be steaming mad.
But they don’t seem to show it despite the political malpractice of their party leaders over the last several years.
Republicans bet everything to defeat President Obama’s health care reform plan — without ever offering a real alternative or working with Democrats to find common ground. Then they doubled-down on hopes the Supreme Court would overturn the law. They doubled-down again believing that voters would deny President Obama re-election and they could repeal the law. They lost every time. Now, the country will live under a health care law — for probably a generation or more — that could have been based on many Republican ideas had they simply negotiated.
The GOP is doing the same thing with the budget sequester fast approaching on March 1. President Obama wants additional tax revenues by closing loopholes in the tax code as part of a plan to avoid the across-the-board spending cuts. He’s also promised significant cuts — including to both Social Security and Medicare — in return. But Republicans on Capitol Hill aren’t interested. They could likely win more spending cuts than they would have to concede in new tax revenues if they negotiated. Instead, they dig in.
The GOP’s stance is especially maddening since just two months ago they were willing to raise tax revenues by closing loopholes during the “fiscal cliff” debate. Now every Republican leader speaks from the same talking points saying additional tax revenues are “off the table.” As a result, the country will get fewer but more damaging spending cuts via the sequester.
Common sense would suggest Republican voters would rise up against their party leaders for failing so dismally to advance their party’s stated goals. Their silence is deafening.
By: Taegan Goddard, The Cloakroom with Taegan Goddard, The Week, February 19, 2013
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