2009 is not a Rerun of 1993

Daniel Larison is one of the few conservatives not drinking the kool-aid:

There is a widespread and quite wrong conservative interpretation of the present political moment as being very much like 1993, but where Clinton mistook a repudiation of Bush for an endorsement of an aggressive Democratic agenda it is the GOP that has misread what just happened last year. Most of the right seems to expect a replay of ‘93-’94, and so are sticking to the same tactics that they used then (including the turn to Limbaugh and the return of Gingrich)…

Conservatives seem to have spent the last year rapidly regressing from cheering on lame politicians who could at least intelligently recite their platitudes (Romney) to worshipping pseudo-populists who could not even do that (Palin) to elevating random guys who didn’t like taxes (the Plumber) to rallying around a radio host who makes Romney’s own brand of Reagan nostalgia and three-legs-of-the-stoolism seem deep and meaningful by comparison. Of course, there isn’t that much substantively different between Romney’s opportunistic recitations and Limbaugh’s boilerplate, but at least with Romney you knew that he was capable of saying something else and would have said it if he had thought it was to his advantage. The boilerplate is not only all Limbaugh knows how to say, but if you pressed him to elaborate on any of it he would just repeat himself.

Republican David Brooks on GOP Response: “Insane”

QoD: Tim Pawlenty on Current State of Republican Party

One has to wonder if McCain might have done better with Pawlenty or Crist.

“The Republican Party is going to have to adhere to its principles, because they are foundational and they are important. But they need to be presented in a hopeful, optimistic, up-tempo, modern, practical way, and that’s not what we have been doing recently. We’ve become too petty and angry in many aspects. That’s unappealing to swing voters.”

-Tim Pawlenty, 02.23.09

QoD: Anonymous Liberal on Grandstanding Governors Refusing Stimulus Aid

“First there would be nothing principled about refusing Federal stimulus money. These very same governors routinely accept all sorts of federal money. In fact, if you rank states according to the ratio of federal money received per tax dollar contributed, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alaska are all in the top 4. South Carolina and Idaho are in the top 20 and receive significantly more in federal money than they contribute.

These politicians are not standing up for principle. They are grandstanding. Most of them (particularly Palin, Sanford, and Jindal) are trying to raise their national profile and give themselves a talking point to use in a future presidential run.

Moreover, they are doing so in direct contravention of the interests of their own constituents. These folks are not federal office holders. Their duty is to look after the interests of the people of their respective states, not to police the federal budget. If they were CEOs of a corporation or trustees of organization or trust, this kind of action would be seen as a breach of their fiduciary duties. They would get sued. And rightfully so. By turning down federal stimulus money, they would be inflicting harm on their own citizens.”

-Anonymous Liberal, 02.20.09

The Continuing Comedy that is the Minnesota Senate Death Match

Eric Kleefeld has been doing a great job chronicling the strange but true saga that is the Norm Coleman-Al Franken Death Match.

The latest:

We’ve now found a case of lead Coleman lawyer Joe Friedberg actually being concerned about ballot fraud, and wanting to keep a vote out as a result — so much so that he’ll speculate about a Franken-voter being mentally disabled.

Really. No joke.

In court just now, lead Franken lawyer Marc Elias went over a rejected ballot envelope for which he said a power of attorney had been granted by a disabled voter, to allow a family member to fill it out. The issue was that the mark made to authorize the family member was not a signature or a conventional “X”, but was instead an amorphous scribble. Elias and Goodhue County elections official Carolyn Holmsted spent some time hashing it out.

Then Friedberg took issue with this whole idea of the power of attorney to fill out a ballot, which is a specifically allowed clause in Minnesota law for disabled voters.

Mileage Tax: Not A Good Idea To Begin With

I am glad that Obama has come out against it.

It would be a regressive move that would hinder the development of  highly fuel efficient cars, whereas the gas tax punishes inefficient cars.

Toles Does it Again: Detroit Bailout

Tom Toles / Washinton Post

QoD: Josh Marshall on Republican Strategy in MN Senate Recount

“…it’s worth considering what Republicans are getting — not by keeping Coleman’s hopeless effort alive but far more importantly by delaying Al Franken’s swearing in.

The Stimulus Bill battle is a good example. The Dems needed Specter, Collins and Snowe to get the thing through. With Franken they would have needed only two of those votes. I don’t know precisely what each of them wanted. But I don’t think there’s much doubt that would have led to a less watered-down bill. And it seems quite possible that that missing vote will play a similarly consequential role in the weeks ahead. Perhaps in the months ahead.

The court process has to play itself out. There’s no way around that — though the judges seem ready to strangle Coleman. But we could do with a little more recognition of the fact that this is not about getting Norm Coleman into the senate. It’s about paying money to give the Republicans a few more months of leverage against the Democrats 59 seat majority.”

-Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo, 02.18.09

Has the World Gone Crazy?

Just maybe:

A Republican is suggesting bank nationalization and a Democrat thinks it is a bad idea.

~ ~ ~

To be honest, this should be an interesting situation to playout in the coming months. My take is that the Obama Administration will opt against a one size fits all approach. I believe they sent a clue as to their intention by Treasury Sec. Geithner’s discussion of “stress tests” on banks.

The tests themselves will publicize just how poorly managed some of the banks are; thereby allowing more leeway from the American public in how best to handle the situation.

QoD: Rahm Emanuel on Benchmarking White House Progress

“Having been in two separate White Houses, within our third week, given our set of accomplishments — well, measure them up.”

-Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s Chief of Staff, who also served as a senior adviser in Clinton’s administration.

Obama’s Leadership Style

National Journal’s Ronald Brownstein has a nice piece regarding a press interview that President Obama gave on Air Force One on the way to Chicago yesterday. In particular Brownstein hones in on how Obama’s outlook could tell us about his leadership style:

“My consistent bottom line is: How do we make sure that the American people can work, have a decent income, look after their kids and we can grow the economy.”-President Barack Obama

Any compromises or course corrections, he argued, must serve those overriding priorities.

That’s an elastic and responsive vision of the presidency which doesn’t quite match the preferences of either the ideological warriors of left and right, or those who define consensus as simply the midpoint between each party’s traditional answers. It contrasts markedly with the style of George W. Bush, who too often viewed rigidity as proof of resolve. Bill Clinton came closer to Obama’s approach, but even he seemed more intent on proving certain fixed assumptions — that opportunity could be balanced with responsibility, for instance, or government activism squared with fiscal discipline. Ronald Reagan likewise shared an instinct toward compromise, but he operated within a more constricting ideological framework than Obama.

Obama’s determination to elevate ends over means could bring him closer in temperament to presidents like Franklin D. Roosevelt (who pledged “bold, persistent experimentation”) and Abraham Lincoln, who often insisted, “My policy is to have no policy.” That doesn’t mean either man lacked identifiable goals, much less bedrock principles. It did mean they were willing to constantly recalibrate their course in service of those goals and principles — as Lincoln once put it, like river boat pilots who “steer from point to point as they call it — setting the course of the boat no farther than they can see.”

File this Under: Not a Good Idea

I think it would behoove anyone in the Obama Administration to read Frank Rich’s article in last Sunday’s New York Times, “Slumdog’s Unite!“.

That being said, MSNBC’s First Read is reporting that Harold Ford, Jr. is being touted by some Democrats as a possible Commerce Secretary. But it may raise more questions than needed:

There is one, potential, gigantic problem: Ford’s current place of employment — Merrill Lynch. Given the current views of Wall Street, Ford’s nomination could come under immediate fire and he’d have to disclose exactly what his job was with ML etc. and whether he was one of the 700 million dollar bonus recipients before Merrill completed its sale to Bank of America in late 2008.

There is a very real and very frustrated anger in the American public right now regarding what is being done by the powers that be (both in public and private life).

Obama rode into Washington on a wave of this growing mood. He raised a lot of people’s hopes that things can be different. He should be (and I believe he is) smart enough to take heed of Mr. Rich’s advice:

Americans have had enough of such arrogance, whether in the public or private sectors, whether Democrat or Republican. Voters turned on Sarah Palin not just because of her manifest unfitness for office but because her claims of being a regular hockey mom were contradicted by her Evita shopping sprees. John McCain’s sanctification of Joe the Plumber (himself a tax delinquent) never could be squared with his inability to remember how many houses he owned. A graphic act of entitlement also stripped naked that faux populist John Edwards.

A Sensible Immigration Policy

Fareed Zakaria nails it:

The U.S. currently has a brain-dead immigration system. We issue a small number of work visas and green cards, turning away from our shores thousands of talented students who want to stay and work here. Canada, by contrast, has no limit on the number of skilled migrants who can move to the country. They can apply on their own for a Canadian Skilled Worker Visa, which allows them to become perfectly legal “permanent residents” in Canada—no need for a sponsoring employer, or even a job. Visas are awarded based on education level, work experience, age and language abilities. If a prospective immigrant earns 67 points out of 100 total (holding a Ph.D. is worth 25 points, for instance), he or she can become a full-time, legal resident of Canada.

Companies are noticing. In 2007 Microsoft, frustrated by its inability to hire foreign graduate students in the United States, decided to open a research center in Vancouver. The company’s announcement noted that it would staff the center with “highly skilled people affected by immigration issues in the U.S.” So the brightest Chinese and Indian software engineers are attracted to the United States, trained by American universities, then thrown out of the country and picked up by Canada—where most of them will work, innovate and pay taxes for the rest of their lives.

If President Obama is looking for smart government, there is much he, and all of us, could learn from our quiet—OK, sometimes boring—neighbor to the north.

Rich Lowry Must be Experiencing Erectile Dysfunction

This must be sad news to the paragon of intellectual political thought, Mr. Rich “I Seriously Need to Get Laid” Lowry:

By pulling out of CPAC she guarantees February will be relatively quiet. With continual attention from August to January, Palin courted overexposure, but looks to be avoiding it this month. She’s facing criticism in her own state for paying too much attention to her national image, and she wants to rectify that.

QoD: Joe Klein on Obama’s Working with Congress

“It pains me to watch normally reasonable colleagues overreacting to Obama’s situation now–which is far less dire than Clinton’s was. Some form of stimulus will pass. If it doesn’t revive the economy, then more stimulus will be passed. Obama’s maintaining the proper balance of reaching out to Republicans, making some compromises, but staying firm on the need for a bill that includes public works as well as tax cuts. A Republican Senator, a vocal opponent of the bill, told me the other day: “The guy has really impressed us. We may not vote for the bill, and he may have to learn that you have to give us more than he wants to give us to make us happy, but he’s made a really strong start that will work to his benefit down the road.”

…The legislative process is as ugly as a wart. We only notice it when an earth-shattering monstrosity like the stimulus bill comes gallumphing down the track, but there is no such thing as elegant legislation. You always have to throw in a little sweetener–the museum of organized crime in Las Vegas, the military kazoo band, whatever–if you want to cobble together the votes needed to win. This is business as usual–and Barack Obama is guilty as charged: he’s trying to get this thing through the old-fashioned way. So what? What’s new is his priorities: his efforts to put the needs of the working poor and the unemployed ahead of the wealthy, to build a new green economy, to fund inner city education and remake the health insurance system. That is what the American people voted for after an era of Republican neglect. The messiness of the current process is not only inevitable, it also says very little about Obama’s ability to deliver on those very necessary goals.”

-Joe Klein, 02.05.09

QoD: D.L. Hughley on Bush Lying

“Now I listened to those tapes and I’m not going to hide my affinity for this guy. I never met him before then but to me we have become such a trivial place that we will impeach a man for having sex, or lying about having sex with a woman. In California we will impeach a guy because he raises taxes on license plates because energy gets out of control. We’ll impeach a guy for saying some things on tape. But a man can take us to war and lie and we won’t do a damn thing about that. That makes me so mad.”

-D.L. Hughley

(Hat Tip: John Amato at Crooks & Liars)

Obama Reads Bush’s Letter from FOD Team

Hat Tip: Funny or Die.com

QoD: Alan Grayson on Rush Limbaugh

“Rush Limbaugh is a has-been hypocrite loser, who craves attention. His right-wing lunacy sounds like Mikhail Gorbachev, extolling the virtues of communism. Limbaugh actually was more lucid when he was a drug addict. If America ever did 1 percent of what he wanted us to do, then we’d all need pain killers.”

-Florida Rep. Alan Grayson

Hat Tip: Down With Tyranny

Belated Thoughts on the Inauguration

As you probably know, everyone and their grandmother were blogging on the inauguration last week. I just didn’t feel like it, to be honest, to be typing away at a computer while history was happening.

I got up late, watched the inauguration speech (which was truly sobering AND great) and turned it off during the official poem (which SUCKED way beyond what words can say). Afterward, me and my sweetie got dressed and went to a neighborhood bar. I bought a beer for myself and a round of drinks for the afternoon drinkers there. And then we left for an Irish pub where we had a nice lunch. To put things in perspective, people at the first bar were watching inauguration coverage and the people at the second bar were watching a Manchester United soccer match!

Later that night we attended a party. Everyone there could not believe that Bush and Cheney’s term had finally come to an end. I was as amazed as the next person.

QoD: Andrew Sullivan on Obama’s Centrism & Entitlement Reform

“…given that the possibility of a second great depression requires massive borrowing for a year or two, entitlement reform may be unavoidable. How do you persuade the global markets to lend the US more money in the short term if you do not show some small chance of getting back to fiscal sanity in the long term?

If Obama manages to leverage this crisis toward entitlement reform, he would become an historic president. It really would be Buchanan-Lincoln. I’ve spent too long in DC to believe it, but I can still hope can’t I? And the key thing this time around is whether we can build a grass-roots movement to support Obama in this, just as we did in the campaign. Raise the retirement age, means-test social security, raise Medicare premiums for the affluent. After what has amounted to a generational war on the under-40s under Bush, re-balancing is actually a moral cause.”

-Andrew Sullivan, 01.16.09