When “Bipartisan” Means We’re Screwed

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At the Washington Post, if it’s “bipartisan” it must be righteous.

Baker and Weisman’s article reveals a House of Representatives oozing with self-congratulation.

President Bush hailed “the kind of cooperation that some predicted was not possible here in Washington.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) used the words “bipartisan” and “bipartisanship” 10 times in a brief appearance. “Many Americans believe that Washington is broken,” said House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio). “But I think this agreement, and I hope that this agreement, will show the American people that we can fix it.”

Paul Krugman has another opinion.

Specifically, the Democrats appear to have buckled in the face of the Bush administration’s ideological rigidity, dropping demands for provisions that would have helped those most in need. And those happen to be the same provisions that might actually have made the stimulus plan effective.

So what else is new?

Aside from business tax breaks — which are an unhappy story for another column — the plan gives each worker making less than $75,000 a $300 check, plus additional amounts to people who make enough to pay substantial sums in income tax. This ensures that the bulk of the money would go to people who are doing O.K. financially — which misses the whole point.

The goal of a stimulus plan should be to support overall spending, so as to avert or limit the depth of a recession. If the money the government lays out doesn’t get spent — if it just gets added to people’s bank accounts or used to pay off debts — the plan will have failed. …

…Yes, they extracted some concessions, increasing rebates for people with low income while reducing giveaways to the affluent. But basically they allowed themselves to be bullied into doing things the Bush administration’s way.

In his blog, Krugman explains why this is a problem.

Update: See also David Sirota, “The Stimulus Swindle“; Michael Mandel, “How Real Was the Prosperity?“

Booms and Busts

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You might enjoy this piece by Jonathan Freedland —

If the market economy is looking peaky, then its accompanying free market ideology should be on life support. Behold the hypocrisy. The free marketeers have spent the past two decades preaching against the evils of state intervention, the dead hand of government, the need to roll back the frontiers, and so on. Yet what happens when these buccaneers of unfettered capitalism run into trouble? They go running to the nanny state they so deplore, sob into her lap and beg for help. The results of their own greed – “exuberance”, they call it – and incompetence have caused more than 100 substantial banking crises over the past 30 years, yet time and again it is the reviled state which answers the call for help. Four times in this period, the authorities have had to rescue crucial parts of the US financial setup. If the banks make money, they get to keep it. The moment they look like losing it, we have to cough up. In Wolf’s brilliant summary: “No industry has a comparable talent for privatising gains and socialising losses.”

Today’s Results

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This will be brief, as I have a bad cold and feel pretty nasty. As I understand it, Clinton won more votes in the Dem Nevada caucuses, but Obama might have won more delegates. I have no idea why that would be true. Some people are calling Nevada a tie.

For the GOP, Romney won in Nevada, but as of this keyboarding South Carolina is between McCain and Huckabee and too close to call. The Dem South Carolina primary is next week.

Make of this what you will.

Destroyer of Worlds

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There’s an article in the current issue of Harper’s by Jonathan Schell that speaks both to my disgust with the Bush II Administration and my concerns about a potential Clinton II Administration.

In “NOTEBOOK: The Moral Equivalent of Empire” (PDF), Schell discusses nuclear proliferation, and says that during the Cold War the nuclear threat was addressed directly and contained. However,

Since the end of the Cold War, the nuclear threat has had a strange career. At first, it was simply forgotten, apparently in the profoundly misguided belief that the Cold War and the nuclear threat had been one and the same, and that the end of one meant the end of the other.

Schell provides a review of the nuclear challenge during the Cold War, then writes,

Such was the background of the issues faced by the United States when the Soviet Union liquidated itself, and, for a fourth time in the nuclear age, the question of what nuclear weapons were for was put on the table. But now the silence fell. The Clinton Administration announced a “detargeting” agreement with Boris Yeltsin’s Russia, but it was no more than a smoke screen, as the weapons could be retargeted in hours or minutes. Yet no new target was announced. The United States faced what Senator Sam Nunn called a “threat blank.” In the bowels of the Pentagon, some spoke of a counterproliferation role. for nuclear weapons, but such a goal could not even in theory justify arsenals of many thousands of warheads, which entered a sort of policy-free zone. During the Cold War, a sprawling intellectual edifice, centering on the deterrence doctrine, had been built up to justify nuclear arsenals and their use. Nothing of the kind emerged in the post-Cold War era.

In the absence of global leadership or consensus, several nations — including India, Pakistan, Iran, and North Korea — decided to join the privileged circle of nuclear powers. An age of renewed nuclear proliferation was under way. And then came Dubya.

Thus things remained, more or less, until just after September 11, 2001, when George W. Bush launched a full-scale revolution in the nation’s nuclear policies. He gave an answer to the basic questions that had gone unasked since the early 1990s: What were nuclear weapons for? Who, if anyone, should possess them, who should not, and who should decide which was to be which, and make the decision stick? Bush’s answers were simple, bold, clear, and pursued with tenacity. The United States and its allies would possess nuclear weapons, and others–especially “rogue states”–would not. The United States alone would enforce the rules in this double-standard world, and would do so with the application of overwhelming military force, including nuclear force. The threat blank and the policy vacuum were now at an abrupt end. For better or worse, the United States was at last in possession of a comprehensive nuclear policy. …

… Today, almost five years later, this policy is manifestly in ruins. Proliferation ‘has not been checked; it has gained new force and breadth. Existing arsenals still provoke proliferation, and vice versa. North Korea is a fledgling nuclear power, and Pakistan is in the midst of a deep political crisis, raising fears that its nuclear weapons could fall into the hands of Islamic extremists. The mirage of a smoking gun/mushroom cloud in Iraq lured the United States into a disaster that has acquired a dangerous and unpredictable life of its own. Military dominance of the globe by an imperial United States, whether aimed at counter-proliferation or anything else, is a vanished dream. Meanwhile, there are signs of renewed confrontation between the old Cold War nuclear powers, where, after all, the mother lode of nuclear danger still lies. Russia and the United States are sparring over missile defenses that the United State proposes to deploy in Eastern Europe. Putin has likened the Bush Administration to “a madman running around with a razor,” and has threatened to withdraw from nuclear arms-control agreements made during the Cold War

However, Schell argues, the moral is not that the Clinton approach was right and the Bush approach wrong. The Clinton I Administration mostly avoided the nuclear question. It’s understandable why they did so; had they made any serious moves toward nuclear disarmament the Right would have had a fit. (Of course, Clinton could not so much as walk across linoleum without the Right having a fit about it. He might as well have ignored them.)

To me this exemplifies the pattern shown in the Clinton I Administration that Hillary Clinton has continued in her Senate career — going along to get along. Caution and political expedience are the primary directives; their “bold, new” policies amount to wonky tweaks of the status quo.

Bush, on the other hand, did respond to nuclear proliferation with an audacious, comprehensive doctrine on a scale appropriate to the problem. What the Bush Doctrine offered was a Hobbesian response to a serious issue.

Peace in this scheme was not a casualty of dominance but the product of it. From early modem times down to the present, these tenets have been embodied in the concept of sovereignty, which rests on the idea that in every political system there must be a single, unified power whose decisions are final because it possesses a monopoly on the means of force. (The proponents of absolutism, then as now, have never lacked cogent arguments.)

With remarkable consistency, the Bush doctrine proposed this logic for our time. In this thinking, the idea of global dominance is to today’s world what the idea of national sovereignty was to the time of the foundation of nation-states. It would amount to a system of something like Earth-rule by one nation. In a very real sense, Bush was proposing the United States as a benign global Leviathan. (His unprecedented assertion of presidential powers at home, under the doctrine of the “unitary executive,” , would make the president a kind of sovereign over the United States as well.) In such a system, a double standard, in regard to nuclear weapons and much else, is not a flaw but a first principle and a necessity, as all consistent absolutists know. Whether in: the context of nation-state formation half a millennium ago or of international order today, as large a gap as possible in both rights and power between the lord and the vassals is essential, for it is precisely on this inequality that the system, promising law and order for all, relies. If there is no double standard, there will be no dominance; and if there is no dominance, there will be no peace; and if there is no peace, there will be nuclear anarchy; and if there is nuclear anarchy, there will be nuclear war. And is it wrong to suggest that today, in a widening sphere, the business of the world, going far beyond the management of nuclear danger, must be dealt with on a global basis or not at all?

That’s exactly how the Bushies and neocons think, isn’t it? And after seven years it still seems stunning. We think Bush is being a hypocrite, or just plain delusional, when he calls himself a man of peace, but in his own mind that’s exactly what he is.

Please note that Schell is not saying that the Bushies did the right thing. He’s very clear that this approach has been a disaster.

In the early modern age, an alternative to dominance was proffered at the national level. It was the conception of the state based on law and, the will of the people embodied in the long tradition of democratic consent. … In responding to the universal danger posed by nuclear proliferation, the United States therefore had two suitably universalist traditions that it might have drawn on, one based on consent and law, the other based on force. Bush chose force. It was the wrong choice. It increased the nuclear danger it was meant to prevent. It engendered pointless—and unsuccessful—war and destruction. It set
back democracy at home and abroad. It degraded the United States, and disgraced it in the eyes of the world. It launched the world on a vicious, escalating cycle of violence that could not succeed yet could not, as long as the doctrine was pursued, be abandoned. It collided head-on with the deep-seated conviction of peoples everywhere who, whatever else they may want, are firmly resolved not to bend the knee to any imperial master.

Yet to invoke the tradition of consent and law is not to name a solution to the nuclear dilemma, for obviously none yet has been initiated. Bush has been taken to task for the stubborn willfulness of his leadership as well as for the ambition and audacity of his doctrine, but those qualities are to his credit. They correspond to the immensity and urgency of the task at hand. In this respect, Bush is a model. If such is not granted, the ruin he has brought will not be repaired—it can only be compounded, though possibly at a slower pace. It will be of no use to revive the tepid measures, vacillating and half-hearted, of the Clinton years, which created the vacuum that Bush so disastrously filled with his imperial doctrine. The deeper tragedy of our times is that no comparable ambition, no comparable audacity, no comparable will, has been mustered by the exponents of the tradition of consent and law. On the contrary, they fearfully offer only half a loaf of their prescription, or, worse, watered-down Bushism, or something in between. Their failing has been as great as his, and more contemptible, since they are the guardians of the path that in all likelihood alone offers hope for delivery from the multiplying perils of our day.

I don’t know if any of the Democratic presidential candidates would have the guts to lead us in a new direction. All I do know is that a Clinton II Administration would likely “manage” the nuclear problem, as in keep their wonky little fingers in the holes in the dike. But that’s about it.

Elsewhere on the Harper’s site I found this article by Scott Horton. Horton quotes President Bush saying that he is being divinely guided.

Of course, looking back on Bush’s divinely inspired works, one wonders about the identity of the deity with whom Bush is conversing. That he was the God of Abraham seems highly improbable. Cartoonists in the United States have regularly given Bush’s God the bodily manifestation and voice of a Yale dropout and retired corporate executive named Dick Cheney. But this lacks imagination. No one doubts the involvement of Dick Cheney in this orgy of blood and destruction, but he himself is merely a mortal vessel serving the god of war and destruction. I’m zeroing in on the Godhead in question, and I’m increasingly convinced that he’s a denizen of the South Asian subcontinent, and in particular the Lord Shiva. He’s famous for a dance of destruction, creating the way for Lord Brahma, the creator. But no doubt about it, Bush is in the gallery of presidents a tremendously potent destructive force. Lord Brahma may, of course, follow in his wake. But I wouldn’t count on it.

You might remember that when physicist Robert Oppenheimer saw the first nuclear mushroom cloud, he quoted the Bhagavad Gita — “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” The destroyer of worlds is Shiva. Scott Horton may be on to something.

Idiots Abroad

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Oblivious to the fact that no one gives a bleep what he does any more, President Bush is whining that people misunderstand him. Dan Froomkin writes,

President Bush’s self-image continues to amaze. Wrapping up an eight-day Middle East trip, the man who has launched two wars and may be hankering for a third told ABC News yesterday that he is terribly misunderstood in the region.

“I mean, my image [is]: ‘Bush wants to fight Muslims.’ And, yeah, I’m concerned about it. Not because of me, personally. I’m concerned because I want most people to understand the great generosity and compassion of Americans,” Bush told Terry Moran.

“But yeah, look, I’m sure people view me as a warmonger and I view myself as peacemaker.”

Bush said he had something to prove on his trip. But, he said, “it’s not so much to prove for my sake. It’s really to prove for peace.”

How does he intend to turn his image around? “You just have to fight through stereotypes by actions,” he said, adding that he intends to let “the results speak for themselves. . . .

… Apparently forgetting his “I’m a war president” motto of the 2004 campaign, Bush said: “I don’t believe democracies, you know, generally lead to war-like governments. You know, ‘Please vote for me, I promise you war.’ It’s not something that tends to win elections.”

You can’t make this up. If Bush were a fictional character — well, let’s just say that most cartoons are more realistic.

Bush is so thoroughly disliked abroad that even our “friends” are badmouthing him. Scott MacLeod writes for Time,

Bush was also harshly criticized — albeit in more circumspect language — in countries with close ties to Washington, including some from the very countries that rolled out the red carpet for the visiting President. Commenting on the two main purposes of the tour, even the most liberal Arab press questioned the sincerity of Bush’s efforts to establish a Palestinian state and criticized his campaign to pressure Iran over its nuclear program. On occasion, senior Arab officials contradicted or disputed Bush’s pronouncements even before he left their countries. Perhaps the unkindest cut of all was an editorial in the Saudi Gazette, comparing back-to-back visits by Western leaders to Riyadh this week. “It would be difficult to argue that French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s visit to the Kingdom was not in almost every way a success,” the paper said, adding, with an unmistakable swipe at Bush: “It’s refreshing to see a Western leader come to the Kingdom speaking of peace rather than just issuing warnings on the state of affairs in the region.”

Bush’s efforts to rally an Arab coalition to isolate Iran in the Gulf seemed to fall flat. Only days after he visited Kuwait, liberated in 1991 by a coalition led by the President’s father, Kuwaiti Foreign Minister Mohammed Sabah al-Salem al-Sabah was standing beside Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki in Tehran, declaring: “My country knows who is our friend and who is our enemy, and Iran is our friend.”

Seldom has an American President’s visit left the region so underwhelmed, confirming Bush’s huge unpopularity on the street and his sagging credibility among Arab leaders he counts as allies. Part of the problem was the Administration’s increasingly mixed message, amplified by the intense media coverage of his trip. For example, in Dubai he gave what the White House billed as a landmark speech calling for “democratic freedom in the Middle East.” But during his last stop in Sharm el-Sheikh Wednesday, he lauded President Hosni Mubarak as an experienced, valued strategic partner for regional peace and security and made no mention of Cairo’s ongoing crackdown on opponents and critics — and the continuing imprisonment of Mubarak’s main opponent in the 2005 presidential election. “He is saying he supports the presidents and the governments in the Arab countries,” says Ghada Jamsheer, a women’s rights activist in Bahrain. “This is why people are angry. Why is he not putting pressure on these governments to push for human rights?” The fact that Bush rarely ventured beyond the walls of heavily guarded royal palaces, embassies and hotels, though completely understandable given concerns for his security, nonetheless further prevented him from making much connection with the people whose liberty he says he sincerely seeks.

Bush received his warmest welcome in Saudi Arabia, where King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al-Saud accorded him an honor reserved for special friends by inviting him to his horse farm outside Riyadh. But the Saudis didn’t hesitate when it came to publicly disagreeing with Bush’s views on various Middle East matters. Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal, standing beside Secretary of State Condeleezza Rice, pointedly declined to endorse her call for more Arab gestures toward Israel or her relatively rosy assessment of political reconciliation in Iraq. After Bush jawboned the Saudis about increasing oil production to bring down oil prices, the Saudi oil minister shot back, “We will raise production when the market justifies it.”

The irony is that the Bush Administration is all about being “strong” and imposing its will by force. But Bush is ending his reign of error as the limpest sock to reside in the White House since James Buchanan.

Win, Lose, Draw

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You probably already know that yesterday’s primary in Michigan was meaningless for Democrats. The Dem Party stripped Michigan of its delegates for holding its primary too early. One result of the primary has raised eyebrows, however. As Josh Marshall writes,

According to the Fox exit polls, in the Democratic primary tonight, Clinton took 25% of the African-American vote and “uncommitted” is getting 69% of the African-American vote. Now remember, Hillary is only major candidate on the ballot. The others, and even Hillary to a degree, boycotted the primary because Michigan got crosswise with the national Democratic party over the date of their primary. Rep. Conyers (D) is an Obama supporter and he pushed for the state’s African-American community to vote “uncommitted.” There’s too much screwy about the Democratic primary in Michigan tonight to draw too much from this; but it is suggestive.

These numbers may have something to do with the suddenly kinder and gentler Clinton campaign. Jeff Zeleny and Patrick Healy write for the New York Times about last night’s Dem debate in Las Vegas:

It was a night of “John” and “Barack” and “Hillary,” soft voices, easy jokes and belly laughs. Even the normally pugnacious Tim Russert, one of the moderators, seemed subdued.

“We’re all family in the Democratic party,” Mrs. Clinton said, glancing toward her competitors who were seated closely around a table. “We are so different from the Republicans on all of these issues.”

The Clintons had tried to take down Obama with some back-alley dirty campaigning. Surrogates for the Clintons kept stepping over the line to make racially tinged charges. Early this week the Obama campaign fought back by releasing a memo detailing alleged racial slurs. And then the Clinton’s noticed their once-secure lead among African Americans had gone with the wind. Oops.

Some have argued that the Obama campaign took some Clinton quotes out of context to give them a racial spin the Clintons didn’t intend. But there was plenty that wasn’t taken out of context. Michael Tomasky writes,

I tend to agree with the school of thought that believes that race-related controversy may help Obama in the short term by galvanizing the black vote for him in South Carolina, but will more likely hurt him in the larger picture because having to talk about race makes him look less “post-racial”, which is the presumed (emphasis on presumed, because this is just white pundits presuming, and no one really knows) heart of his appeal to independents.

This is why the attacks from Clinton surrogates don’t look completely like a coincidence to a lot of people. This is especially true of the ones about Obama’s admitted past drug use, which fuel certain racial stereotypes in a way that “progressive” campaigns ought to avoid. Many people I’ve spoken with fully expected Obama’s drug use to come up – in a general election, against the Republicans, if he made it that far. Most observers did not expect it to surface among Democrats. The fact that it has – and the fact that three Clinton surrogates have now bruited the subject – has infuriated a lot of people.

Maybe the Clintons figured they could afford to lose some black votes if they could stir up enough latent racism among white voters to keep them away from Obama.

… I think it may be assigning too much conspiratorial control to the Clintons to assume that every word spoken by every person is orchestrated from some central command. That doesn’t usually happen in campaigns – which are usually sloppy and disorganised things – either.

But what does happen is that the candidate establishes a tone (and in this case, the candidate and her husband, who happens to be unusually important). Surrogates pick up on that tone, and they decide what’s fair game and what isn’t with a nudge and a wink from central command. And the tone the Clintons have established these last two weeks is one of complete condescension toward and disrespect for Obama, and that, not Hillary’s artless comment about Dr Martin Luther King, is what’s really the problem here.

As I said earlier this week, I think the Obama campaign put the Clintons on notice that they could play the same game. And maybe the Clintons looked at the poll numbers and got the message. So now they’re all being nicey-nice, which works for Obama, who has been trying to run an I’m-above-all-this-dirt sort of campaign.

In “The race vs. gender war,” Gary Kamiya argues that racism remains a more radioactive element in politics than sexism, which in a way gives Obama an odd sort of advantage.

The fact that Obama is being treated with kid gloves shows not that racism is less potent than sexism, but that racism remains a much more radioactive force in American society. Politeness is a sign of ignorance, distance and fear. The mostly white commentariat feels freer to attack Clinton, a white woman, than it does Obama in part because he doesn’t have as long a track record, but mostly because most white people dread being perceived as racist. It’s good that white people don’t want to be seen as racist, but their wariness about criticizing him shows that America still has a long way to go.

On the other hand,

Obama himself has avoided tangling with the media by running on an inspirational message of hope and unity. But that message, as his critics point out, can veer into the ethereal. Obama is caught in a dilemma similar to that Clinton faces, but he has even less room to maneuver. If he gets tough, he risks being seen as “too black,” a perception that would doom his bid; if he floats above the fray, he invites criticism as being a fairy tale, all style and no substance.

If he wins the nomination, Senator Obama might want to add a little more gravitas to the mix.