Barack Obama talks up to the base.

As a basic rule, I admire politicians. It's an incredibly hard life to live in the public eye. You can't be frivolous. You're constantly the target of criticism and scrutiny, much of it unreasonable. Your motives are constantly questioned, and you're constantly forced to find a balance between self-preservation and responsibility to the public good. Only pols who obviously, shamelessly go too far in subverting the latter to the former earn my contempt. That includes basically the entire American right, and a big chunk of Canadian conservatives, including the opportunistic whiner Peter MacKay -- but also some scattered liberal politicians in both the US and Canada. Mainly though, I long to believe. So when pols say and do things that help confirm my belief in the importance and potential of liberal politicking, it makes my day.

Which brings me to Senator Barack Obama who today had a terrific diary up at the Daily Kos called "Tone, Truth and the Democratic Party". It's mainly a discussion of how most Americans view the Roberts confirmation, and a defence of progressive Dems like Leahy and Feingold who voted to confirm him, as well as a plea for reason generally in understanding why Democrats are the way they are. My favourite part is this:

The bottom line is that our job is harder than the conservatives' job. After all, it's easy to articulate a belligerent foreign policy based solely on unilateral military action, a policy that sounds tough and acts dumb; it's harder to craft a foreign policy that's tough and smart. It's easy to dismantle government safety nets; it's harder to transform those safety nets so that they work for people and can be paid for. It's easy to embrace a theological absolutism; it's harder to find the right balance between the legitimate role of faith in our lives and the demands of our civic religion. But that's our job. And I firmly believe that whenever we exaggerate or demonize, or oversimplify or overstate our case, we lose. Whenever we dumb down the political debate, we lose. A polarized electorate that is turned off of politics, and easily dismisses both parties because of the nasty, dishonest tone of the debate, works perfectly well for those who seek to chip away at the very idea of government because, in the end, a cynical electorate is a selfish electorate.


Kos himself had a smart response, agreeing with Obama in the main, but adding:

But here's the thing -- our elected officials due a piss poor job of explaining their votes, especially when those votes stray from party orthodoxy. They hope that by ignoring the issue, people will forget about the vote, or perhaps not notice it took place. And in the old media landscape, that was probably the case. Now, with blogs and wikis and email lists and 24/7 cable and all that, things have changed.


This speaks to a larger issue. Democrats do a horrible job not just of explaining themselves and their motives to voters genearally, but also of explaining thesemlves to, and dealing with, their own liberal base (or at least the part of it that's represented in the blogosphere and that makes up a big contingent of the activist class). As Kos says and as I've argued before, this is a problem that the institution of blogging has brought into new prominence, both by shining a light on the problem -- revealing grassroots discontent -- and by providing a potential remedy to the disconect between grassroots activists and party leaders.

Generally, Democrats and liberal thinkers have approached the base and its demands -- for partisanship, for aggressiveness, for clarity, for adherance to liberal orthodoxy -- in one of two ways: either by ignoring it and maintaining the traditional distance provided by the traditional media and communication mechanisms like op-eds and speeches; or by going on a blog but telling activists exactly what they want to hear, so you invite sychophantic agreement rather than any kind of feedback that might be evidence of that very lethal "dissatisfaction among your base". Even in the latter case, blogging by elected officials and their aides in the presence of a comment section that never goes away takes some guts. But what really takes guts is telling your supporters things they don't necessarily want to hear, particularly in a medium in which activists and partisans have the chance to talk back to you directly and tell you just exactly why they think you're wrong.

That's what Obama just did. I just voted in a poll at Kos in which respondants split almost 50/50 on our opinion of his diary -- a perfect microcosm of American political thought! As an added bonus, I actually agree with almost everything Obama said (and I just love his prose style -- I assume it's his). I quibble on the claim that voting yes on an extremely conservative judge, however qualified, can really be considered a "principled" thing for a liberal senator to do, at least on the floor -- though I can see that it might have strategic value. Also, taking the diary at face value, I think Obama slightly underappreciates the potential power, and occasional neccessity, of demagoguery, even in liberal politics. (For instance, I don't think it's a coincidence that Kerry improved on Gore's performance among males 18-29 by a whopping 10% in an election in which he and his partisans convinced 53% of said demographic of the unlikely possibility that Bush would reinstate the draft if reelected.) But that's not the point. What's really remarkable is Obama's guts: blogging on Daily Kos even though Hugh Hewitt and the Weekly Standard will say it confirms him as a out-of-the-mainstream-hard-lefty, just like Ted Kennedy or John Conyers. And then, having entered the medium, being honest with the Kossacks in saying that he wouldn't have supported a filibuster of Roberts; that most of his constituents don't share their views of the Adminstration; and that, in his opinion, Leahy and Feingold deserve progressives' respect even if they didn't join him in voting no on Roberts.

This sort of thing is far more impressive to me than the fact that Obama made a nice speech at the Convention a year ago, making all the pundits slobber. This was actually a pretty good imitation of leadership. Kudos, Senator.

The wingnuts are all right.

As everyone reading this knows by now, The Hammer has been forced to step down (at least temporarily) because his ethics problems have officially mutated into criminal ethics problems. The modern Republicans really are like bad parodies of themselves.

Anyway, apparently while I was kayaking and then reading about the history of the Old Age Security/ Guaranteed Income Supplement (Canadian retiree anti-poverty programs I'm trying to numerically simulate, blah blah blah), the GOP Congressional delegation has been arguing over who becomes the temporary leader in Delay's absence, House whip Roy Blunt (the third in line behind Hastert) or Rules Committee Chairman, David Dreier.

Word is, Delay wanted Drier because he's less ambitious. Most of the GOP caucus was on board with the plan because, unlike most Republicans including Delay and Blunt, Dreier is good on TV (that's what they say; I've never seen him). But Dreier hails from California, is modestly in favour of stem cell research, and is an opponent of the constitutional ban on gay marriage.

According to John Dickerson, writing in Slate, and backed up in a graf early in the Post article linked above,the rest was history:

But the best-laid plans fell clattering apart. Though Dreier's pick had been wired last night by House leadership, and was agreed to by members this morning, by the end of the day he was out, replaced by Blunt. It was a quick and bloody business.

Social conservatives who dislike Dreier's position in favor of stem-cell research started calling House leaders and members to lobby against him. "We do not find David Dreier representative of the values of conservatives," said Jessica Echard, executive director of the pro-family group the Eagle Forum, which contacted members of the Republican caucus. The House "Values Action Team," a group of GOP members tasked with pushing pro-life/pro-family issues within the caucus, blasted an e-mail to their colleagues alerting them that Dreier was to be tapped as a replacement and underlining his voting record supporting stem-cell research and against the marriage protection amendment.


I guess it's a relatively minor thing and Dickerson speculates that maybe Blunt was behind the anti-Dreier flash campaign. But I still think it's heartening. Lately I've been growing increasingly concerned that the Repubs are going to nominate John McCain, whose been sucking up to rightwing bloggers lately and laying the groundwork for 2008, as their next presidential candidate. A recent poll finding that GOP primary voters are seemingly undeterred by Rudy Guiliani's divorces and pro-choice stance in supporting him as the 2008 frontrunner, made me more concerned; if the rightwing base can stomach Guiliani, surely they can stomach the Goldwater conservative McCain. I think we can beat Huckabee with the right candidate. I think we can beat Allen or Frist with just about any candidate. But I just don't know who the Democrats have who can beat McCain (or Guiliani, but he's really too liberal for the Repubs) -- not Edwards, not Kerry, not HRC, not Biden, not Bayh, not Feingold, not Richardson. Maybe Clark if he runs. But unlikely.

But maybe I don't have to worry. Even with Falwell at least partially disgraced, if the Eagle-Forum/"values" crowd* can make such quick work of Dreier even against Delay and what passes for the "mainstream" Republican leadership, maybe all the sucking up to Powerline in the world isn't going to help McCain win the GOP primary. Maybe, even if the GOP can outride their corruption with chutzpah in the face of a desensitized electorate (and I wouldn't put it past them, though I think liberals have the advantage going into 2006), they won't be able to escape the vise-grip of the wingnut lobby. And that will be a problem, because neither "compassionate conservatism" nor "steady leadership in times of change" is likely to work next time. The GOP needs an at least implicitly anti-Bush "reformer" in 2008, and the most viable way to "reform" is away from the statist (crony big-government, Bible-thumping wingnut) right and back toward either the libertarian (arrogant, upwardly mobile white man) or traditional-conservative (Kempian, nominally-pro-progess) versions. With any luck, Phyllis Schlafly, with the expected help from Grover Norquist, really will keep that from happening.


*Side note: to understand just how electorally out-of-touch the Eagle Forum is these days, just check out this hilarious Phyllis Schlafly article from two summers ago on "man of the people" Alan Keyes vs. Barack Obama. I really find it hard to interpret this column as anything other than a testiment to Schlafly's absolute certainty about Keyes' impending landslide in the Illinois Senate race.

Up is down.

OK, make that "light blogging til Saturday". Two things deserve comment:

MSNBC declares: Ex-hawk Shraron Cements Role as Centrist

Good God. Ariel Sharon is not a "centrist". For instance:

Sharon has tried to mollify hardliners by vowing that Israel will never give up large settlement blocs in the West Bank, where 245,000 Jews live isolated from 2.4 million Palestinians.


I'm glad Sharon won the Likud Central Committee vote. I think the Laborites had a point in offering to give him a new coalition to keep him in power, given his current authority and support in Israel. But the fact that Netanyahu and the other crazies have challenged him from the right doesn't make Sharon a "centrist" and it's a terrible thing to start saying so (for reasons TAPPED explained yesterday). Sharon's actions over the past two years make him a more practical, less messianistic right-winger than some of his old allies. That's to his credit, in the way Bush beating back some of the Congressional GOP's early plans to further reform welfare by forcing pregnant teenagers to marry was to his credit. Bush isn't a centrist either.

Actually, Bush is Jimmy Carter, according to this parody (I hope it's a parody!) from The Note. The New York Times also made the predictable Carter analogy while reporting on Bush's meaningless (except as an excuse to get into ANWR and open up a bunch of new refineries) conservation suggestions, noting that Bush didn't make his comments in a cardigan. Our tired, tired media.

It would be a bittersweet sort of irony if, after all the awful things Bush has done, it's high gas prices (that he really can't control, and that we're much better off if he doesn't try to) that finally do him in.

Untie.

Good news for Canada's moral conscience. We're moving to drop the percentage of our food aid to the Third World that has to come from Canada from 90% to 50%.

"Tying" aid to the donor country's products -- that is, donating the products themselves rather than the cash to buy products locally in the recipient countries -- is a terrible practice in general, and Canada is one of the world's worst offenders. But tying perishable food aid is an especially eggregious pander to domestic farmers:

"This new policy gives us the ability to respond more quickly and with greater flexibility to disasters world-wide, buying more food and feeding a greater number of people in need," [International Cooperation Minister] Ms. Carroll said.

The change will mean lowered transportation costs, food that is more culturally appropriate and "allow Canada's aid dollars to go further while supporting local farmers in developing countries, she said.

The government noted that the change will have little effect on Canada's agricultural community because Canadian domestic food aid purchases account for 0.3 per cent of the total Canadian agri-food production.


In addition to NGOs like Oxfam, the U.N. World Food Program, the world's prime vehicle for managing and dispensing food aid, has been trying since 1999 to encourage donor countires to provide food aid in cash rather than in kind. I'm glad our government is listening. Hopefully, we'll be doing more untying before too much longer.

Evil, boiled down to a thick sauce.

Matt Yglesias stares in wonder at John Shadegg and the Republican Study Committee's Katrina budget. Schedule A of the budget gives us the theme: "Tough Choices for Tough Times" -- that is, how to pay for Katrina reconstruction without having to do anything extreme like cancel tax cuts to multimillionaires. Sure enough, the choices these tough thinkers offer are very tough. If you're poor.

One of the proposals is to "Reduce Medicaid Administrative Spending". Nobody likes that red tape spending, afterall. Let's cut it! Didn't Katrina prove how awful bureaucracy can be?

"Under this plan," the Study Committee explains, "the federal government would cap the per-enrollee amount that it pays each state for Medicaid administration. This would give states a stronger incentive to improve the efficiency with which they manage their Medicaid programs."

Of course, another way they could cut those costs back down would be just to discourage people from participating in Medicaid in the first place. But that can be at least a little tricky since the feds are supposed to regulate Medicaid's reach to some extent and protect poor people from governors like Haley Barbour. To make the offloading of Medicaid users easier, the Study Group proposes to "Increase Allowable Co-payments for Medicaid": "This option would raise the federal limits on allowable co-payments in Medicaid--from $3 for adults and zero for children to $5 and $3, respectively. The higher co-payments would apply to outpatient hospital visits, prescription drugs, non-emergency visits to emergency rooms, and visits to physicians and dentists."

Because God knows it's a drag on the system for low-income families to be going to the dentist all the time. But the good news is that the research shows that if you just raise the co-payments just a wee little bit, by an amount that most voters can't imagine would be a burden for a poor family to pay for an occasional doctor's visit, a good chunk of them will just stop going. From a budget-strapped state Medicaid administrator's point of view, this is just perfect. No fuss, no muss.

Making poor people pay for more of their care also has the additional benefit of slightly lessening the fiscal shock to the states (and therefore the amount of grumbling from Republican governors who are required for successful campaign events) of moving to a "Block Grant" for the acute-care section of Medicaid. The tough-thinking Republicans explain this part of the plan as follows: "Funding acute care with a block grant rather than with federal matching payments would strengthen states' incentive to spend money cost-effectively by eliminating the subsidy for each additional dollar spent on health care." Families USA explained what this really means back in 2003, the last time the GOP, with support from the Bush Administration, made a block grant proposal.

Having been tough on Medicaid participants, the Study committee moves on to crack down on Medicare users, grad students (this one is defensable IMO, not that it'll save much money), civil servants, Eastern Europe, Egypt, Ireland, sub-Saharan Africa, AIDS sufferers everywhere, Columbia (this one might be a good thing; I don't know enough about it to judge), East Asia, the U.N. and the Peace Corps. Especially laughable is the item containing the authors' justification of killing the Millineum Challenge Accounts because they're redundant with USAID payments. This item appears a full seven bullets before they urge cutting USAID "operating expenses" on the grounds that the USAID is basically a front for junkets. Not that the junket class has too much to worry about. Basically, the only group out there that wouldn't be paying for Katrina in this budget is Homo Americanus Millionairus. Oh, except for Homo Americanus Billionairus.

By page six, the Study Committee has dropped all pretense of being "a different kind of Republican" -- or whatever it is these days -- and has wandered back into Newt Gingrich territory. Kevin Drum calls the three pages of "Eliminate"s and "Reduce"s a pretty standard "conservative wish list" and wonders how the revival of cracking down on EITC claimant abuse can be seen as anything but class warfare. I think it might actually be a secret partisan weapon to demoralize liberals by reminding us of Bill Clinton's single biggest sellout back in 1999, caving into that shameless GOP-engineered crackdown on the working poor as a way of getting at the IRS.

But that's not all. Two added bonuses in today's budget are eliminating the cap on recollection of overpaid SSI payments (translation: if you're permanently disabled and the government has systematically given you too much money because they messed up their calculations, and then some bureaucrat discovers the mistake, you're fucked) and making sure unwed teenaged mothers can't qualify for the funding required to move out of their parents' houses. Oh, and since it's unfair that the poor take all the hits, there's also the elimination of matching funds for federal elections.

Really, though, all this is just gravy, especially the concluding section on "corporate welfare", which (a) is geared almost entirely to cutting payments to politically powerless clean-technology programs and (b) cuts a grand total of $50 billion over 10 years, or just under 10% of the meat of the proposal, which is contained in Section I: "Tough Choices for Tough Times". The real long-term cost cutting -- about 25% of the whole -- comes from slashing federal responsibilities toward Medicaid. We can tell just how tough this is by the authors' assurances that this won't hurt a bit: the real costs of Medicaid come from bureaucratic inefficiency and user "abuse" (the latter is one of Haley Barbour's favourites). But to really demonstrate how "tough" they are, these tough-thinking Republicans are actually back-loading the whole thing. For instance, increasing the co-pays in Medicaid will save $90 million next year. But over the course of the next four years, it will magically save an additional $1.89 billion. We only get tougher as time goes on.

What this suggests is that, despite the hyperbolic title of this post, in fact the GOP Study Committee isn't so tough after all: they're actually a bunch of softies. Sure, they'd like to see block grants for Medicaid -- actually they'd like to eliminate Medicaid, period -- but they really aren't going to force it through over the wails of goo-goos. They're just going to wait until Katrina is out of the news and the governors start wingeing, and then, with Arlen Spectre and Mike DeWine's help, they'll keep those future cut phase-ins from going into effect and just run up the deficit instead. I say this because of my Pollyannish belief in human nature. Because it's much better to be an intellectually unserious coward posturing as a "budget hawk" than it is to be the sort of evil fuck who'd use a natural disaster as an excuse to shake hundreds of thousands of people out of the safety net.

A break in the action.

I have deadlines, deadlines, deadlines, which means no more blogging til Saturday. Come back then, y'all if yer interested.

Let the hell-week begin...

Update: In the meantime, let me recommend to all you TNR subscribers this rather sobering article by John Judis about John Roberts in the bigger scheme of things, and why Dems really should vote against him on principle. In the matter of racists on the court, Roberts is almost certainly a big improvement on William Renquist. But racism isn't what it used to be. And, to judge from Judis' analysis, Roberts is still the antithesis of what the party of E plaribus unum ought to stand for.

Speechifyin' and pundit fallacy.

Last night I was looking over the relatively scanty and uninteresting media coverage of the big Kerry and Edwards Katrina-rebuttal speeches from Tuesday (not even C-SPAN has posted them). On paper, Kerry's address looks like a pretty standard partisan blast and was basically treated as such by the printed press. Edwards' speech deservedly got a little more attention, in the press and on the blogs. At the very least, Edwards' speech was remarkable for its happy reversal of the standard Democratic approach to politicking: wrapping fairly liberal policy ideas in mushy-middle rhetoric. Edwards did the stylistic-substantive opposite: he presented his wonkish, think-tank moderate ideas (the sort that are (a) attainable and (b) would actually make a significant but not radical difference in how we approach the issues surrounding American poverty and inequality) in the sort of expansively liberal language that makes us goo-goo partisans cheer. The Dems, at least the national ones, have long been a more liberal party than they sound as they drone about their exquisite moderation out there on the trail. If Edwards can turn that around, I'll give him serious consideration in 2008 (with my big, dangerous New Jersey primary vote!). His "We haven't built the levees high enough" refrain was also pretty inspired. Not surprisingly, little of this came across in the by-the-numbers reporting of the two speeches, usually one article to summarize both.

Unfortunately, while trolling Lexis Nexis, I stumbled on what appears to be the only TV pundit-show discussion (there are probably others that haven't been uploaded yet) of either speech -- this grisly exchange about Kerry between Douglas Brinkley and the host of The O'Reilly Factor:

O'REILLY: But Doug, it just looks to me like he's getting an early jump [on the 08 race]. And then, this is what he's going to do. He's not going to say he's running for president, but he's going to make as many appearances as possible, and basically remind people that they should have voted for him.

DOUG BRINKLEY: Absolutely. There's not any doubt that John Kerry's running for president. He's definitely going to run in `08.

The big factor, the name everybody puts in front of him is Hillary Clinton. She has the momentum. She has the ability to raise a lot of money.

But from a Kerry perspective, people toss around names like Vilsack or Biden for the Democratic nomination. It really is going to become, unless somebody just catapults to the top, a Hillary Clinton-John Kerry square-off. They're the two that could raise the money to do it. And Kerry wants to be seen as the alternative to Hillary.

He had to say something hard about Katrina. John Kerry was just -- you didn't hear from him through this whole month here. I think it would raise questions on the campaign trail. Instead, he went to the left of the Clintons slightly in the speech he gave at Brown. And he's positioning himself.

O'REILLY: Well, he has to run to the left of Hillary, does he not?

BRINKLEY: Yes, he does. And that's what this was really all about. Where Bill Clinton has been -- immediately was seen in the White House starting to fund raise for Katrina with former President Bush, Hillary came to the Astrodome and gave a kind of mild comments about Katrina.Kerry now came off as a bit of a firebrand, at least for Kerry's type of rhetoric firebrand. And it's the beginning really, you might want to call the Brown speech the opening salvo of `08 for him.


I don't want to trash Brinkley. I haven't read Tour of Duty but I thought his Carter bio, The Unfinished Presidency was a wonderfully subtle and observant book. But this performance was disgraceful. How does Brinkley know that Kerry is "definitely" running in 2008? It would have to be because Kerry told him or had it leaked to him. If that's the case, either he's in Kerry's confidence and shouldn't be passing off the confidence as his "opinion" on the talk shows; or it's knowledge he's intended to make public and so should tell us point-blank how he came about it. But the likeliest possibility is that Brinkley has simply no idea whether Kerry will run again, that he's engaging in wishful thinking. It's unlikely Kerry knows whether he's running at this point either. Surely it will depend on some combination of the polls, the party establishment's feelings and the prospective field over the next 16 months.

This is such a tired old saw. Remember back during the fall of 2002 when all sorts of pundits and various anonymous sources were "sure" that Al Gore was "definitely" running again? Same story: those people were clearly quite wrong. More to the point, they even, at the time, obviously had no idea what they were talking about because it was obvious that Gore hadn't told them. In political journalism, nobody ever gets called on the carpet for trying to pass off their uninformed opinions as truth. Rarely is anybody asked to back up their confident predictions with facts so we might know whether to take the prediction seriously. Pundits can pretty much assert anything, and quote sources asserting anything. It's a terrible, terrible practice.

Worse, as a Kerry partisan, Brinkley really ought to see the trap he's walking in to when he does these shows. By bringing him on with a Kerry-agoniste (Nina Easton), O'Reilly can quickly turn any discussion of Kerry away from what Kerry actually said in his speech (though, to be fair, in this instance he didn't really say much) to a speculative take on the 2008 horserace, in which it's certain to be pointed out how many people in Washington think Kerry Take II is an awful idea. The image O'Reilly wants us to take away is of Kerry, the scheming, calculating, vaguely hapless pol, running smack up against the Great Wall of Hillary in the 2008 primary. In this segment, the theme went unchallenged. Brinkley played his role in the drama just fine.

Don't vote for Roberts.

John Roberts was always going to be confirmed as Chief Justice. And I don't consider it something to wail and rent and tear over. My impression of Roberts is that he might actually be that rarest of all beasts: a genuine modern American conservative, like Robert George, instead of the sort of flailing reactionary that is the mainstay of today's American right -- Happy birthday, Weekly Standard! Even if we had the votes, I probably wouldn't have favoured a judicial filibuster.

Of course I might be wrong. Roberts is so inpenetrable, any story is possible. His paper trail can be read a lot of ways. But the point is, we're going to find out. We were always going to find out, whatever kabuki Joe Biden came up with.

That said, why would any Democrat actually vote for him? I understand the tradition of voting for internal Adminstration appointments in all but the most extreme, Gonzales-like, cases (it's one of the things I most admire about Russ Feingold, actually). A president, even the worst president, has to be able to surround himself with people he trusts and can work with if anything at all is going to get done. It's not the Senate's job to choose the cabinet. But we're not talking about the cabinet here. We're talking about a lifetime appointment to the independent judiciary. Roberts is only ever going to be accountable to one set of voters and the votes they cast ought to be as representative as possible -- given that it's the Senate, which isn't representative at all -- of how Americans split over judicial philosophy. No Democratic president -- like the hypothetical ones who lost incredibly close, partisan elections to Bush over the past five years -- would have even considered appointing John Roberts to the Supreme Court. When Americans vote for Democrats, as a huge minority or plurality do every two years, they're not voting for people like Roberts.

Mostly, it's the tired old saws in the bipartisanship-above-all "mod squad" who are probably voting for Roberts against any pretense of a liberal ideology: Max Baucus, Kent Conrad, Tim Johnson, Ben Nelson. What can you do about these guys? But why on earth is Patrick Leahy on board? Maybe he thinks encouragement from ideological opponents will make Roberts more sympathetic to their concerns.

Or maybe Leahy has just given in to the Cult of Bipartisanship. Leahy says that, despite his concerns, "in my judgment, in my experience, but especially in my conscience I find it is better to vote yes than no. Judge Roberts is a man of integrity. I can only take him at his word that he does not have an ideological agenda". This sounds perilously close to Ellen Tauscher and the House New Democrat Coalitions' bullshit about "not wanting to be the party of 'no'." The question here, the one we'll have the answer to soon enough, is whether Roberts is a traditional conservative or a faddish originalist hack determined to further increase the power of the conservative executive at the expense of the Congress. I think Leahy is perfectly justified in expressing optimism that Roberts is closer to the former. But neither possibility deserves actual Democratic support, just different degrees of opposition. What about being the party of moderate, tough-minded liberalism?

Two bits of good news.

Sometimes it's good to be wrong.

1) It doesn't look like the "30,000 body bags" are going to be filled afterall. According to the Christian Science Monitor, the Louisiana death toll stands at 579. It will go higher, but it's unlikely to be anything like the thousands we feared.

2) On the front page of Polling Report (which for some reason the folks at the conservative blog Polipundit have chosen to link today of all days), Bush's approval ratings have hit a new low in the CNN/Gallop poll. Kos (and an analysis by Survey USA) thinks it was last Thursday's Katrina speech, which further turned off conservatives with its big-government, throw-money-at-the-problem rhetoric without appeasing the mods and libs who, at some point, bought Bush's schtick for the last time. Maybe, more generally, it just reflects an electorate that is sick of messianistic disaster-and-response and doesn't want to be comforted or promised things anymore. Less soaring response; more quiet prevention.

I think my instincts were wrong on this. Watching Bush's speech, and reading others write about the inevitable TV-media response to it, I felt all fatalistic, like "here we go again". Comfy, fake words, the same ones Bush has always made it on. Bush used to be able to whip polls around with his speeches -- post-911; early in the Iraq conflict; at the Republican Convention in 2004; at his inaugurals. And he's actually better at speechifying now than he's ever been. If the public hated it, or didn't give a shit about it, as much as the Gallop poll suggests, that really might mean that it's the morning after the bender in America.

Even better news: A new Pew Poll also shows that voters -- every age group, both genders --are chomping the bit to vote the Dems into Congress in 2006. This is a long-term result; voters were saying the same thing in the summer of 2004 and the Dems lost the popular vote nationally at the House level in the 2004 election. But one thing that's especially interesting is, in addition to the strong Dem-leaning among independents, self-IDed Dems are much more devoted to voting the party line (96-3) than Repubs are to voting theirs (89-8). That's not a long-term trend but it's a welcome one.

Five years into an impossible presidency, one doesn't like to get too optimistic. But maybe, just maybe, this really is the beginning of the end of the Bush playbook.

Site stuff, briefly.

I don't know who's reading me, but glancing at my hit counter, I seem to have had a lot of page views over the past eight hours. So: if you're reading and you've got something to say, and especially if you see something that needs correcting, feel free to leave a comment. But I find my comment section with its spam protection (this is my fault for once stupidly linking through to a spam site and thereby opening the floodgates; we goo-goos are terribly naive) pretty user-unfriendly. However, I love getting email, so feel free to send me a message if you want to sound off or correct something. Just don't be mean.

Also, my blogroll is pretty elitist for a small-fry blogger like myself -- it's just the things I read at least once every three days. If you have a blog you want me to add, let me know and I'll stick 'er on the list.

Schroeder's big comeback.

I haven't had time to follow the German elections like I hoped to. But Schroeder's SPD mounted a pretty amazing comeback, winning only 0.9% less of the popular vote than Angela Merkel's CDU/CSU coalition with 98 of 99 districts reporting. Since the Greens came in fourth behind the libertarian Free Democrats, the center-right has a very slight advantage, since both centrist parties have sworn off making deals with Oskar Lafontaine's Left Party (the former communists). But the advantage is slight enough that the CDU will have to bring either the Greens or the SPD into its ruling coalition. Schroeder is obviously feeling his oats, swearing he won't enter into a coaltion with Merkel, and his best option is probably to try to force a coalition-making-stalemate leading to new elections (and hope for the CDU, in the meantime, to torpedo Merkel, creating all sorts of internal strife). Not surprisingly, the markets are unhappy about the left's stronger-than-expected showing.

One thing that's interesting is the moaning from the right and from the European press about how the Germans' circumstances -- which include both the demographic moment and the contribution of its corporatist, personalized-proportional-representation electoral system -- favour the status quo and make it difficult for reformers, either conservative or liberal (but in today's climate mainly conservative) to really get their program enacted. The Paris daily Liberation moans about "Germany..entering that club of nations where the ability of protesters and radicals to cause a nuisance... paralyses long-term policies," and the Swiss Le Temps argues that "Populism triumphs, and moderation... no longer pays", which, for all the America-bashing that went on in the campaign, seems an odd conclusion to draw from an election in which the two historically mainstream parties still scored 70% of the vote between them and where the main dynamic behind the Left Party's showing (mainly at the CDU's expense) seems to be more about the continuing economic dichotomy between the East and West than dilletantish ideological extremism.

Traditionally, the German system gets a fair amount of love from liberals on this side of the Atlantic. Hendrik Hertzberg, for instance, holds the German model up as the sytem to emulate, if we want to replace the weird American one and, presumably, the British-Canadian first-past-the-post one too (I'll add the relevant quote from Hertzberg when I get my copy of Politics back from the reader who borrowed it two months ago. Ahem). The German system is fairer not only because it rules out government-by-plurality but also because it doesn't create the huge mass of basically-irrelevant votes the American and Canadian systems do, imposing only the little bit of voter discipline that your party has to reach 5% on the second (party) ballot to be represented in the Bundestat. It also makes more parties possible than the two enabled by the US system and the three national parties generally enabled by the British-Canadian system. In Germany, there are a whopping five major national-ideological parties to choose from right now. While I'm skeptical that it's lack of choices -- at least directly -- that keeps turnout low in the U.S. and is driving it down in Canada (we Canadians seem to be gaining parties, not losing them as turnout falls), the fact that your vote always counts for something probably does help keep turnout high. The turnout in the German election was 77.7%, down just a bit from 2002. That ought to make us a little bit jealous.

But does the German system really enshrine the moderate status quo? It's not like "more democracy" necessarily prevents ideologically extreme governments from coming to power -- witness Israel. But in Germany, it seems to be working the way its founders intended. As Clay Risen pointed out last month in Slate, Merkel was never likely to become the new Thatcher -- or Bush -- in Germany's corporatist, power-sharing system, even with a big victory at the polls. As it is, voters expressed plenty of dissatisfaction, but the combination of all their disperate voices and demands basically led to the continuation of the current moment, shifting their government at most a little to the right and highlighting regional beefs that need attending to. The conservative reformers, who want more and faster, don't like it. But those who lose out never like it. It's worth asking whether the net welfare effect of democratically-induced moderate gridlock is better or worse than the sort of situation that currently prevails in Canadian and especially US politics with its small number of clear-cut (if you're paying attention) choices and susceptability to radical shifts to the right or left produced relatively small numbers of votes in the right districts. In principle, Germany wins hands down. In practice, it probably depends on who's in power. Which, right now, means that Germany still wins hands down.

Note just tilting at windmills.

There's been a lot of talk about the possibility of Katrina being the "Democrats' 911" (as Ryan Lizza puts it). That's mainly because the one overarching lesson from the catastrophe is the need for effective, self-confident, authoritative government which the Democrats, for all their faults, still basically believe in. But it's also the historical moment. In 2001 Bush had just run a fairly clean, progressive-for-a-Republican-if-you-didn't-know-any-better campaign against his Democratic opponent. His domestic policy indescretions were still relatively minor (if you weren't a union member or an environmentalist). And at a time when Americans wanted a Strong Leader to rally around, he and his p.r. division offered us just that -- quite skillfully pandering to our fear and anger without actually sounding like they were channelling it.

That was then. The Bushies have since dropped any pretense of being "uniters", domestically or otherwise. They've pretty much established themselves as a heady combination of incompetent, messianistic, opportunistic and thuggish. The public is sick of the messianism in Iraq and at least vaguely aware that Bush might not be such a swell guy afterall. Marc Schmidt is almost certainly exactly right in forecasting the GOP's real motivation in rebuilding the Gulf region: turning the lemons of a big-government-requiring reconstruction into the lemonade of forcing the Dems to defend their "interests groups" (like working people) against "the people" like it did with Joe Lieberman's Homeland Security bill right before the 2002 midterm. But we have precedent now, and we're not battling stratospheric approval ratings. Any Dem that falls for the "bipartisan", "blame game" trick this time (Donna Brazille, this means you) really doesn't deserve a defence.

There are some signs that the Dems are aware of their chance. Lizza notes Harry Reid's quick legislative offerings in the wake of the August recess (I like the symbolism too: see, Reid can actually be productive on vacation!) Bill Clinton's recent call for the repeal of the tax cuts is most very welcome and we need to hear it echoed over and over. But the real pay-off is going to be longer-term, just like it was after 911, the reconfiguring of the national mood in a liberal or at least neoliberal, smart-government direction.

This, and the fact that I've been reading Charles Peters' 1987 autobiography Tilting at Windmills all week made me decide to be lazy and, instead of writing anything original, post Peters' advice to Democrats in the wake of the 2002 midterm defeat, which remains some of the best so-simple-it's brilliant advice dished out to the "party of the people" since Bush took office. Some substitutions are necessary: say "reconstruction cost cutting" for "Wall Street reform"; "anti-worker Davis-Bacon repeal" for "Harvey Pitt"; "trailer park towns" for "prescription drug benefits"; "backdoor voucher programs" for "leave-no-child-behind"; "civilian engineering and preparedness issues" for "military" etc. But the basic message -- be brave and explain yourselves -- is timeless:


IN THE WAKE OF THE DISASTER last month, here's my advice to my fellow Democrats:

Don't let the Republicans seize the middle. Expose the phoniness of Wall Street reform a la Harvey Pitt, of prescription drug benefits that don't give enough help to enough people, and of leave-no-child-behind education programs that do not provide the money to really improve poor schools. When the Republicans actually have good ideas, as in the case of seeking higher standards and better teachers, you can warmly embrace them, confident in the, sure and certain knowledge that they will be few and far between. The GOP is far too firmly rooted in its right wing.

Lead the base; don't follow its lowest common denominator. The Democratic base consists of women, minorities, and unions, especially those of public employees and teachers, who are the party's major contributors. It is essential that we lead our base instead of selling out to its worst side, as the Republicans have too often done with their judicial and regulatory appointments.

...

Don't talk down. Don't treat people who oppose liberal policies such as gun control and abortion as cretins. Often they are workers and farmers who would be our natural political allies on economic issues. Treating them with disdain doesn't win elections. Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter understood this, and they are the only Democrats to win the presidency in the last 34 years.

Have faith in the common sense of the people and explain. Too often Democrats assume the public can't or won't understand. For example, the real position of most Democrats on Iraq was that there was no need to rush to decision in October because there was no evidence of imminent danger and that Bush's effort to keep the issue on the front burner in September and October was designed to keep economic issues that would favor the Democrats off the front pages. Why didn't they explain themselves? Doing so would have enabled them to expose Bush's cynical manipulation and at the same time put the spotlight on his administration's economic and regulatory failures.

...

On health care, the Democrats need to explain that they have been the party that from Truman to Johnson to Bill and Hillary Clinton has tried to expand the protection of the American people against the expense of medical care, The greatest challenge for the party is to learn from the failure of the Clinton plan and develop a health program for all that the American people can and will support, for this is our greatest need.

On regulation, the Democrats must explain that they have been the protectors of the environment, economic fairplay, and public health and safety, and that the Republican deregulators have usually been the enemy.

Where they don't know enough to explain, they need to learn. Democrats must accept their responsibility to master military issues. We need new Gary Harts and Sam Nunns. And that means a lot of Democrats have to learn a lot more than they know now so that they can discuss equipment and manpower needs with authority. This is not only relevant to national preparedness but to making sure that we do not waste money that could be spent on health and education to develop weapons that we don't truly need.

Finally Democrats must always remember that we are the party not of the privileged but of the people, that we have a proud history of protecting the powerless from the powerful, of caring about what happens to average everyday Americans and of appealing to the generosity and idealism in the human spirit. If we remain true to ourselves, victory at the polls will come.



Be brave. Be informed. And tell it like it is.

My Congressman's mad prose stylings.

Our awesome Congessman in absentia, Rush Holt, was blogging last week at TPMC's Table for One. Holt is such a total geek, he once introduced a bill in the House to establish National Chemistry Week, "Whereas chemistry is at the core of every technology we enjoy today". That, being a former Jeapordy champion and being probably the House's prime mover on voting reform. What's not to love?

I didn't like everything Holt wrote during his tenure at Table for One, but even that's a good thing. It's easy just to publish standard Democratic opinions that won't offend any of your liberal constituents. My Congressman is gutsy enough to post up opinions that even a yellowdog might disagree with here and there. The commentators were right to praise him for being brave. Anyway, in addition to his great contribution on intelligent design, one thing I really did like was what he wrote on the lessons of Katrina last Friday:

This failure of government over the past week should not be taken as a repudiation of government, but rather as a reminder of our great dependence on government. After all, government is just another word for doing together those things that we can do better collectively than separately. A hurricane is a dramatic reminder of the danger of the philosophy that has been gaining such currency in recent years--that you are on your own and better off on your own--with your own retirement savings account, your own medical savings account, your own approach to workplace safety and protection, your own school vouchers, your own environmental clean-up, and your own disaster escape plan-- without any need for the government. The American dream is built much more on community that on individualism, much more on helping each other get ahead than on leaving each other behind. Yes, if we never forget that we are in this together, America will be.


Judging from the president's rhetoric last night, he and and his K-Street speechwriters have rapidly re-learned the political appeal of offering up a robust government that hands out goodies and provides 1-877 numbers to an upset public. The difference is that Holt believes in activist government implicitly, as a philisophical thing, as the essence and prime medium of civil society. Bush believes in working government as a political tool, sort of like an inflatable tent to be hauled out onto the lawn and pumped up when necessary to serve the public, and the rest of the time to store the lobbyists and campaign flacks and other various patronage IOUs in. But it takes a long time to dump out the flacks and reinflate the tent, and hopefully Bush's nice Bull Mooseian words won't wipe away too many memories of how long that process took when the hurricane hit.

Of course, the Bushies' own spite -- a pretty common reaction to having to keep saying things you don't believe all the time -- might end up doing them in anyway. Bush is in too precarious a situation to be playing with the symbols so soon. And as we all know, nothing says "helping each other get ahead" in the great American family like promising to cut other domestic spending -- $200 billions worth; do they even think about what they're saying? -- to pay for reconstruction. (And this is to say nothing of ugly but less politically dangerous digs like legalizing the paying of sustanance wages in federal contracts or suspending environmental quality laws). And of course, nothing screams "disinterested professional competence in serving the public good" quite like appointing Karl Rove to oversee reconstruction efforts, even informally. Talk about playing with fire. When the indictments come down from the Plame case, does Bush really want the spotlight to land on yet another unqualified, unethical, political crony assigned important civil service tasks for which he's totally unqualified? Do they really not think continued scandal will hurt the prospects of Bush's successor? Or do they really just not care?

Pulpit power.

I just finished watching Bush's Katrina response speech from New Orleans. It just underscores what I thought all throughout the 2004 campaign: Bush has improved exponentially as a speaker in his five years in the top seat. And it sounds like they brought the big guns (i.e. Michael Gerson) out for this one what with all the soaring, inoffensively religious come-together imagery. Gerson or not, whoever wrote this address was absolutely right to provide Bush with a substantive-sounding, responsive-government, New Democrat-sounding speech (at a time when people want lots of substance, a responsive, authoritative government, and, even if they don't know it, New Democrats.)

Still, I always find the first minute of a Bush speech feels like the moment after getting splashed with cold water. Can this be for real? Then I sort of settle into it. Yes, yes, of course it's for real. And it's even going to sound pretty good by the time he's done.

Speechmaking is so frigging important in US politics. The Big Speech -- the nomination acceptance, the inaugural, the SOTU/S, the post-disaster address -- make and break pols. A competent speech wipes out the effects of all sorts of actual real-world incompetence. That Bush talks substance makes up for a giant chunk of the fact that he has none. That he sounds concerned when he says the word "poverty" (oooh, the fourth rail!) makes us forget that he's done next to nothing to ameleorate it (by, say supporting an increase in the minimum wage or refundable tax credits, or an expansion of health care access) since the last time he sounded concerned about it, during the 2000 campaign. That he says the words "I consider detailed emergency planning to be a national security priority" obliterates the fact that his administration handed over the Federal Emergency Management Agency to a bunch of useless campaign hacks, spun wildly about their initial response to the disaster as people died, and tried to shift blame to the Louisiana Democrats, and then to the hapless fall-guy, Michael Brown. Bush insists, in the most earnest tones imaginable, that the response was as good as could be expected. And just like that, in the minds of many, it was.

It's a depressingly good speech. The affirmation of government; the acceptance of responsibility; the invocation of history; even the occasional change of inflection, of cadence. It's steady leadership in times of change. At moments, it sounds exactly like what I voted for when I cast my ballot against Bush. That what he's saying is as fake as snow in a can makes basically no difference, unless, like me, you're in the 40% or so of the voting public whose minds have been made up about Bush for six years already. And even then, it's really only at the very end, when Bush says "And may God bless America" in that "Let's roll" voice of his that you catch a hint of that insolent, willfully clueless swagger that made him so fucking insufferable when he was first on the national political scene back in 1999.

It's times like this when being leaderless is a really huge problem for the Democrats. Bill Clinton is on board raising money for relief efforts and his partisan hands are tied. I adore Nancy Pelosi and admire Harry Reid but they haven't got the rhetorical ability, or the Gerson-power in their stable, to effectively answer this sort of rhetorical intoxicant. Joe Biden might be able to do it, but he's already been overexposed this week during the Roberts hearings. John Edwards does empathy well (and what he says about poverty is so much more authentic than what Bush says on the subject, it's almost surreal), but empathy isn't what the Dems need to convey right now. Howard Dean, Al Gore, Russ Feingold and Jimmy Carter all convey partisan or ideological connotations that would undermine the effectiveness of their rebuttal. Joe Lieberman would be perfect, but, well, who am I kidding? That leaves, among the Dems who could actually get air time, either John Kerry, Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. I hope one of them has an answer to this.


Update: Too fucking perfect. According to David Kuznet at TNR, it wasn't Gerson who wrote the masterpiece. It was Bush's new head speechwriter, William McGurn. Just how completely phony was the speech? McGurn is a former editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page! All that big-government-conservatism, your-government-is-there-for-you pap Bush was spouting had been penned by one of those WSJ drown-it-in-the-bathtub, government-is-the-enemy hyper-libertarians, whose ex-colleagues have, among other things, been urging Bush to use Katrina as an excuse to push school vouchers on the exiled flood victims moving into other communities! Oh Democrats, Democrats, wherefore art thou?

Why aren't we saving?

In Canada, businesses are saving, and government is saving (though not quite as much recently, for which we can thank Jack Layton). But the net household saving rate just keeps falling. It started falling from a long-run average between 12 and 16% around 1993, tanked out completely sometime around the bursting of the tech bubble (this is in contrast to the American private saving rate that had been falling since the early 1980s, and now both rates are routinely negative. In a nutshell, the North American household sector is routinely spending more than it takes in as income.

The Globe and Mail had the latest yesterday:

Because Canadians have almost no savings, economic shocks could be exacerbated by a slowdown in consumer spending, the main driver of Canadian economic growth, [CIBC economist] Mr. Tal said.

His report comes after Statistics Canada said last month that the rate plummeted to minus 0.5 per cent in the second quarter. In the U.S., meantime, the personal savings rate stands at minus 0.6 per cent, the lowest level on record.

While the methodology of calculating the rate may be flawed because it doesn't include asset prices, it's been compiled in the same way for decades. Ten years ago it stood at 10 per cent, 20 years ago at 20 per cent — an indication of a significant downwards trend, he said. Moreover, all age groups have seen a steady drop in their savings rate, Mr. Tal said in the report.

He attributed the falling rate to a number of reasons, among them lower inflation expectations, an extended period of low interest rates, a slower pace of personal income growth and changing financial attitudes.


Incredibly, 40% of Canadian households have no liquid assets at all other than what's in their chequing accounts. Not only does this make us very vulnerable to a housing market crash (since so many people are building their next egg by paying down a mortgage), but it also means that, as a nation, we're really liquidity contrained; we can't free up resources to get us through economic hard times.

Why are households so spendthrift? Another report in today's Globe and Mail provides the basic answer: inequality combined with wealth:

Among findings cited in the [international Social Watch] study:

— Between 1997 and 2003 Canada's economy was the fastest-growing among G-8 countries, expanding 55 per cent in real terms. The Gross National Product has surpassed $1-trillion.

— Federal spending stands at 11 per cent of the economy, down from 16 per cent in 1993-94, well below historic averages [note: it's now back up to 12% according to the study. We can thank Jack Layton for that.]. Recent increases in spending have not offset deep cuts made in the mid '90s.

— Only 38 per cent of unemployed workers receive government benefits, down from 75 per cent in the early 1990s.

— More than $1.7-million households live on less than $20,000 a year, and most are precariously housed. They do not own their own homes and spend more than 30 per cent of their income on rent.

— Cuts to post-secondary education and deregulation of fees have doubled or tripled tuition costs.

— Despite repeated promises there is no national child care program.

Ms. Yalnizyan said Ottawa has focused overwhelmingly on economic growth, dramatically limiting its role and transferring money to provinces without accountability or conditions.


The Social Watch people, including the folks at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternativesare a bunch of serious lefties. But while I doubt I'd love all their solutions, their points about the trade off between social spending (which mainly enhances equity) and tax cutting (which, even progressive ones like the recent increase in the personal deduction, mainly enhances growth) are well taken. Though it's not the focus in Social Watch report, this tradeoff also has big implications for saving.

There's not necessarily a direct causal relationship between poverty and saving. Rich people and rich nations do save more as a percentage of income, but poor societies have also always saved, and poor households within rich countries have historically saved. Neither is it the case that all the households who are undersaving are objectively "poor". Even that $20,000 a year figure the Social Watch authors cite for Canada isn't really indicative of the dire poverty encountered in the developing world, especially for households without children. When I was making $20,000 a year I was certainly saving. The problem is that when there's an enormous amount of wealth like there is in Canada and the US, people try to consume up to the social standard. Everyone wants their cell phone, their 250-channel cable package, their European vacation. And when those things are so easily in reach of the people living down the block, you come to think it's easily in your reach too. The banking industry, the credit card industry, the personal loan industry, are all out to confirm this belief; after all, the vast majority of non-savers are not serious credit risks. Defaulting on various types of consumer loan remains relatively rare.

The government encourages this too when it sends you your tax rebate every April. Even the tax advantages of Registered Retirement Savings Program accounts (which, before Bush cranked the IRA contribution limits, were more generous and universally accessible than similar programs in the US) are only available to those who are wealthy enough to write the investments off their taxes. And more often than not, that write-off then comes back to you in the form of a big, juicy, spendable cheque.

The fall in the household sector saving rates from around 15% to less than 0% is probably the biggest demographic-behavioural change we North Americans have experienced over the past 30 years, and Canada's recent racing to the bottom to catch the Americans suggests there's something in the structure of the liberal market-based economy that's provoking this change. There's lots of peripheral factors involved: financial market liberalization; the tech bubble bursting; the enduring strength of the housing market and low interest rates are all big ones. But I venture that the real driving force behind the fall in saving is the combined pressures of rapid growth and high or increasing inequality. If we want to reverse the trend, that's what we need to look at.

Let them burn the synogogues.

I make no bones about being pro-Israel. I am. And I think whatever Sharon's war-criminal past and true intentions for the region, he's done a difficult and historically important thing in forceably dismantling the settlements in Gaza, taking on his own party and his own past convictions in the process.

But the decision not to raze the 19 Gush Katif synogogues before the last soldiers left Gaza was a stupid, cheap ploy on the Israeli cabinet's part -- especially foreign minister Silvan Shalom's silly, cynical appeal to Kofi Annan for the UN to step in. (And do what exactly? Never mind genocide in Darfur; there's a bunch of buildings that might get set on fire if Kofi doesn't act!) NRO's Cliff May says that the inevitable Palestinian desecration and torching of the synagogues isn't getting much attention; but, in addition to the New York Times article he links to, it was the headline on Google News early this morning (or late last night on the west coast) and a quick search turns up piles of stories on that very subject.

Everyone knows the Palestianian Authority is no real match for Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the Palestinian territories right now; and that, even as PA leadership goes, Abbas isn't the revered figure that Arafat was most of the time. Everyone knows that the Palestinian Authority's security forces would have all they could handle keeping Gaza's greenhouses from being looted by the frustrated-jubilant crowds and wouldn't have either the time or authority for symbolic gestures like preserving synogogues or even of protecting them from militants until the PA's bulldozers could get to them. The Christian Science Monitor reports on one Palestinian cop at the scene:

We want to protect things because it's in our interest, but there are people who want to destroy everything," complained Lieut. Izzadin Najar, sweating and breathless from chasing teenagers.


Israel's apparent willingness to sneer at this sort of thing is disgusting. And it's not as if Abbas or the PA have any illusions about what would happen if Isreal left its synogogues in place. They told the Israelis from the get-go this is what would happen. But never mind:

"I think Israelis felt that by completing the withdrawal from Gaza, they had created an opportunity for peace for the Palestinians to seize upon," says Dore Gold, Sharon's adviser. "And what they saw was synagogues in flames, and that's something with a very ominous tone for the success of any future negotiations."


At The Corner, May echoes the sentiment:

"Wouldn’t it be nice if Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas were to condemn such destruction and say plainly that it is wrong to destroy Jewish or Christian houses of worship? Imagine if he were to say that someday he hopes there will be peace and that these synagogues could then be in use again. Muslims freely attend mosques in Israel. Why not imagine that someday there could be Jews again in the Gaza -- as business partners, as tourists, as residents?"


And wouldn't it be nice if the Likudniks has gotten rid of the synogogues in the first place so Abbas wasn't left in such an impossible, symbolically humilitating, diplomatic situation?

Rex Murphy's handwringing.

Twice a week I get all tingly, and I silently, fulsomely thank the Globe and Mail for bringing us John Ibbitson (it's the same warmth I feel toward David Remnick for bringing us Hendrik Hertzberg at least every other week) and then I'm tempted to read the other op-eds in the Globe. Today's edition finds Rex Murphy, feeling really prosy, saying this about the Katrina aftermath:

The failures of planning and response may, in part, be set down to that sense of immunity to disaster, our sense of favoured exceptionalism, that has seeded itself in the West. The recklessness and criminality on display from some in New Orleans perhaps belongs to some territory beyond explanation. Both factors have made a horror more horrible.

However, there is one aspect of the debate that is a very troubling signal of the state of American politics now. The ferocity of unstoppable partisan frenzy, which began with the first news of Katrina's landfall, is, I fear, almost too much for the American political system to contain. For the antagonists of George W. Bush, there is nothing too grotesque or outrageous by way of insinuation or allegation to lay on his doorstep. Of which the charge that racism "explains" whatever shortcomings the U.S. federal response may have displayed is both the most vivid and toxic.

A great natural calamity is just another stick to wield in the partisan wars. American politics is day by day more a continuous fever of accusation, irrational hostility, and destructiveness. Partisan combat knows no limits. A democratic system cannot be sustained under such a pitch of opportunism and cynicism.

The dead have not been numbered, grief has not been given its time -- and, yet, partisanship rages on. This may be Katrina's second dour gift: the eclipse of American politics.


Good God. I personally agree with Ezra and Michael Froomkin that hurling racism charges at Bush misses the point and is probably even "unfair" on a personal level(though Froomkin's commentators make good arguments to the contrary). But what country does Rex Murphy think he's living in to be bemoaning the overheatedness of partisanship?

Just as a small example of what I mean, back in the summer, when the Tories were trying to bring down the minority federal government on one of several potential non-confidence votes, a mini-scandal arose when the Tories became convinced that the Liberals were trying to stage a crucial budget vote specifically when two Tory MPs were out of Parliament for terminal cancer treatment. "We're not going to play another week so that (Martin) can hope the health of some members of Parliament deteriorates," said Steven Harper. "Next they'll be dragging in Tiny Tim" said Liberal-leaning MP Carolyn Parrish when the Conservatives had their two cancer sufferers take the floor during Question Period. Jack Layton accused everybody of using cancer sufferers as "political footballs". And that was just two days of the fun that transpired throughout the Summer of Not-Quite-Non-Confidence. Not long afterward, the Tories started running TV ads against the Liberals claiming that "Paul Martin will do anything to hang on to power. He eliminated parliamentary debate on Liberal corruption. He blew $4.6 billion of your money to buy off the NDP." Harper later called the Liberal-NDP budget the work of a "red-orange coalition" with everything that implies. Then there was the intrigue surrounding the Bloc. Gilles Duceppe, right before a budget vote that the Liberals won, declared that "Beyond the simple arithmetic in the House of Commons, Paul Martin no longer has any credibility or legitimacy'' to govern. A few weeks later, Duceppe's party happily screwed over the Conservatives to preserve the government when their election prospects started to look a bit dimmer. Accusations of "demagoguery", "secret plans to destroy Medicare", "vote-buying", "desperation"... you name it, filled the air and the papers and the halls of Parliament. And that's not even getting into the sponsorship scandal or the early leaks from the Gomery Report.

Yup, we Canadians can do "accusation, irrational hostility and destructiveness" with the best of world's political classes. Really, the difference between our partisan mudslinging and the American version is that up here it's the politicians themselves who actually say these things, while with the Americans, its the political observers who are the most overheated. American pundits clutch their pearls when Howard Dean calls the Republicans "pretty much a white, Christian party" or when Nancy Pelosi calls Bush a "dangerous" leader. Up here, these kinds of comments are just the markers of a good day's Question Period. If anything, American pols aren't frank enough, particularly compared to their fiery Canadian counterparts. Jack Layton annoys the crap out of me, but it's because I'm a card-carrying Liberal and he's constantly effectively dissing my man Martin and pushing on him from the left. By contrast, the Democratic critique of Bush hasn't been particularly convincing, not enough heat or light (with exceptions, of course.)

The "opportunism and cynicism" Murphy is on about really refers more to the sort of Bush-hating shmoes who comment on blogs or write letters to the editor, or picket occassionally in front of the White House, or maybe about the stray rap star going one comment too far (if that) -- after an otherwise rather poignant monologue on Katrina -- on national TV. I understand the sensation perfectly well; partisanship can be blind. But what does it matter? People have opinions, particularly about things they care about, and Americans care a lot about politics right now.

And that's a good thing. At a time when turnout in presidential elections has basically caught up with our own declining turnout in federal elections, maybe we should wish that the hyperbole coming from parliamentarians would spread to the Martin-, Harper-, Layton- antagonists out there in cyberspace or in bars and coffeeshops across the land. For all its lack of delicacy, an angry, hyperbolic, tuned-in electorate basically beats a disinterested one, faintly distrustful of the status quo and easily influenced by the reflexively cynical, studiously non-partisan media. That's what brought us Bush to begin with, and what I fear could bring us Harper, if he gets his party's act together. On the other hand, that's probably want Murphy wants...

It's about competence.

I just had an argument with one of my (now apparently six!) readers about whether a more forward-looking, streamlined, competent governmental response to Katrina really could have made things better or whether the disaster was bigger than even the most competent government reaction or foresight could have mitigated.

His answer: no; New Orleans residents were just powerless in the face of nature and there's nothing the various levels of government could have really done to evacuate them. What we've just witnessed is a correction to American infallibility, not a reminder of what happens when a certain political class lets effective government languish. My answer: yes, a functional, competent government could have done plenty to alleviate the suffering both before and after the flood and it's an absolute atrocity that they didn't.

The conversation left me with one major conclusion: despite my readership's collective belief that I'm the right winger in my political discussion circle, it's become apparent that I'm in fact the starry-eyed liberal, at least in the family. So I refer my reader to other, less utopian, sources of argument than myself, specifically to the blog Respectful of Otters where they've done a great job of keeping up with the various micro-failures of the federal and state response to Katrina, particularly the failure to respond and give the OK to private and semi-public entities who lined up to help and awaited orders. I'm cribbing this directly, so all kudos goes to Rivka et al.

One hundred surgeons and paramedics sat idle in a superbly outfitted mobile hospital in rural Mississippi last Monday, because of red-tape:

"The bell was rung, the e-mails were sent off. ...We all got off work and deployed," said one of the frustrated surgeons, Dr. Preston "Chip" Rich of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

"We have tried so hard to do the right thing. It took us 30 hours to get here," he said. That government officials can't straighten out the mess and get them assigned to a relief effort now that they're just a few miles away "is just mind-boggling," he said.


The Chicago Tribute reported that while people trapped in the Convention Center had no water and those in the Superdome were rationed to a pint a day, the USS Bataan waited for federal orders just offshore:

The USS Bataan, a 844-foot ship designed to dispatch Marines in amphibious assaults, has helicopters, doctors, hospital beds, food and water. It also can make its own water, up to 100,000 gallons a day. And it just happened to be in the Gulf of Mexico when Katrina came roaring ashore.

The Bataan rode out the storm and then followed it toward shore, awaiting relief orders. Helicopter pilots flying from its deck were some of the first to begin plucking stranded New Orleans residents.

But now the Bataan's hospital facilities, including six operating rooms and beds for 600 patients, are empty. A good share of its 1,200 sailors could also go ashore to help with the relief effort, but they haven't been asked. The Bataan has been in the stricken region the longest of any military unit, but federal authorities have yet to fully utilize the ship.


National Guard units offered by other states were held up until late Thursday (the 1rst) night because of paperwork not signed in Washington.


Federal caches of fire-fighting equipment designed to be shipped anywhere in less than 12 hours remained unshipped six days after the storm because hurricane-ravaged governors had not made formal requests for them.


The American Ambulance Association wanted to send 300 ambulances from Florida, but got shuffled between agencies, ending up with FEMA, and, as of last Sunday, couldn't get cleared.

And here's a a predictable bit from the same WaPo article:

By this year, almost three of every four grant dollars appropriated to DHS for first responders went to programs explicitly focused on terrorism, the Government Accountability Office noted in a July report. Out of $3.4 billion in proposed spending for homeland security preparedness grants in the upcoming fiscal year, GAO found, $2.6 billion would be on terrorism-focused programs. At the same time, the budget for much of what remained of FEMA has been cut every year; for the current fiscal year, funding for the core FEMA functions went down to $444 million from $664 million.

New leaders such as Allbaugh were critical of FEMA's natural disaster focus and lectured senior managers about the need to adjust to the post-9/11 fear of terrorism. So did his friend Michael D. Brown, a lawyer with no previous disaster management experience whom Allbaugh brought in as his deputy and who now has the top FEMA post. "Allbaugh's quote was 'You don't get it,' " recalled the senior FEMA official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "If you brought up natural disasters, you were accused of being a pre-9/11 thinker." The result, the official said, was that "FEMA was being taxed by the department, having money and slots taken. Because we didn't conform with the mission of the agency."


And finally, this story:

Several Wisconsin charter bus companies signed on with FEMA soon after the disaster hit but as of September 2 were still waiting for a call back regarding financial reimbursement, a destination and an approved route, at which point some citizens took charge of contacting state governments and arranging the bus trips.

As Rivka puts it:

"Properly harnessed, this impulse to be useful could have created the greatest rescue and relief effort the world has ever seen. If FEMA had facilitated and directed - or even allowed - the spontaneous direct help offered to Katrina survivors, thousands of lives might have been saved and untold amounts of suffering might have been prevented."


There's a meta-issue here. Liberalism isn't about supporting "big government", massive redistribution, state control of everything, chucking money around and/or protesting war on principle. It's not even about saving people from themselves (though I may have argued otherwise before). It's mainly about taking government seriously as the representative of the people who chose it. That is, expecting government, and the people who run it, to be accountable; to take itself, and its responsibilities, seriously rather than using its various agencies as repositories for campaign hacks in the offseason. Government is made up of the organized representatives of the people. But it's not just the soul of the mob: it ought to be able to provide a channel for the best of people and stop up the flows of the worst of people. It can't be a whole lot better or a whole lot worse than the parameters set out by its population, unless it ceases to be representative of society and hence democratic. (That's the mistake made by people on the left that leads me not to consider myself "on the left".) But there's a lot of room to manoeuver within those paramaters.

That's, to me, what it means to be a liberal. And I believe the current US government is unrepresentative of its society. In very concrete ways, it failed to stop the worst of people -- either by stopping the looting after it started or, better yet, by altering the conditions that led to despair and violence -- and, as detailed above, it failed to encourage and promote the best of people. It failed at this because the people took it over five years ago at the federal level don't really see things the way I do. They just hope bad things won't happen, but if they do happen, then, as National Review put it sarcastically on their cover this week, that's "your government at work" -- a failure by nature, unable to even rise to the best of its citizens. To the extent the organized right in the US believe in anything, they believe in militaristic nationalism: warding off terrorists at home and chasing them around abroad. And maybe they're doing a bang-up job of that domestically. But terrorism isn't everything. And faced with a non-terrorist disaster, they've just given us a perfect picture of the worst in America: callous fatalism about what's possible; a failure to plan for all contingencies; aggressive self-protecting spin in the face of criticism; total, effective, carelessness for the less fortunate.

I really have trouble believing my reader honestly thinks this is the natural, inalterable order of things, that this is the best a first world country can do by its citizens. *Update: Actually, I had written some harsher things in conclusion about how anyone who thought this way ought to vote Libertarian since they wouldn't waste your tax-dollars on useless government, but another reader emailed me to say this sounded very harsh, and I know that all my readers are good Democrats, or the Canadian equivalents, and maybe I shouldn't blog when I'm all worked up about politics and ideology. I love you all, especially those who let me go on and on about the history of the Atari Democrats over dishes when I'm home.

The press reverts to form.

Nancy Pelosi for president.

Well, not really. But if only more Democrats were this tough in the face of aggressive, pox-on-all-your-houses-style criticism like CNN's Kyra Phillips', we'd be much better off as liberals and as citizens. Pelosi handled Phillips beautifully. Blaming things on "politics" is the classic "non-partisan" journalistic cop-out. And yes, just as Pelosi implies in the interview, the Bush Admin loves this sort of directionless, we're-all-guilty faux-outrage from the press, in which the anti-government party is, at worst, just one player in a funadmentally morbid drama of preening pols, whose sacred-cow institution of "government" it at least has the good taste to want to drown like a rat in the bathtub.

But Pelosi can only do so much. And in fact, the media's initial better-than-average response to Katrina -- aggressive, serious, coverage from CNN and the Washington Post all of which may have helped to tank Bush's Big Man In a Crisis ratings over the course of last week and expose Michael Brown for the absolute embarrassment of cronyism that he is -- was never likely to survive the first public statements from Hillary Clinton. Since Al Gore's retirement, HRC has been unrivaled in her ability to make reporters and pundits get very dumb, very fast. Just try to believe this was actually printed in today's Washington Post:

The raging debate over what happened after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and the Gulf Coast has provided Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) an opportunity to emerge as a national spokeswoman for the Democratic Party, stirring Republican criticism that she and other Democrats are seeking political gain at a moment of national crisis.

Clinton has long maintained that she is focused solely on serving the interests of her New York constituents. But she was on all three network morning shows yesterday to promote her call for returning the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to independent status, and for creating an independent commission to investigate what went wrong when the storm hit and the levees gave way in New Orleans.

...Other Democrats, lead by Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) have been far more strident than the Clintons -- so much so that both Republican and Democratic strategists said yesterday the opposition party is in danger of overplaying its hand. The harsh rhetoric, the strategists said, could create a backlash among the public and engender sympathy for a president who has been on the defensive much of the past week.

...Hillary Clinton has no formal role as a designated spokeswoman on the disaster, but by virtue of her celebrity status and her presumed presidential ambitions, she attracts attention when she chooses to speak out.

...Asked on NBC's "Today Show" about criticism from Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman, who accused her of seeking political gain at what he said should be a moment of national unity, she replied: "Well, you know, that's what they always do. We've been living with that kind of rhetoric for the last 4 1/2 years. . . . Every time anyone raises any kind of legitimate criticism and asks questions, they're attacked."


The message is obvious: Clinton can't make policy points because the only thing that matters is how she represents the party, and whether, in that role, she creates a "backlash" against "the left". And for her to worry about things happening in New Orleans, when she said she was going to focus on New York, and has been granted "no formal role" (whatever the hell that means) in the public response to the catastrophe, naturally opens her to charges of hypocracy which, even if the Post won't take an explicit position on the matter, will happily report as "news".

TAPPED has lots more on the decline of the media's post-Katrina coverage, and Ezra links to an article from LA Weekly, commenting on CNN's initial off-the-reservation reaction to Katrina last week (so I was right!), and its contrast to the lazy, predictable fare on the other networks. Maybe the most amazing piece of the article is that FOX's Bill O'Reilly actually used Katrina as a backdrop to say this:

“First, the huge, bureaucratic government will never be able to protect you. If you rely on government for anything, anything, you’re going to be disappointed, no matter who the president is...If you don’t get educated, if you don’t develop a skill, and force yourself to work hard, you’ll most likely be poor. And sooner or later, you’ll be standing on a symbolic rooftop waiting for help."


It's not Bush. It's not the Republicans. Divided government wouldn't make things better. We can't prove that James Lee Witt's FEMA would have done any better. "The Two Americas"? "Forward Engagement"? Meaningless, all meaningless words. O'Reilly is a FOX loudmouth and easy to hate. But if the Phillips-Pelosi interview is anything to go by, his message, more respectably presented, has once again won the day. Phillips is ragging on Pelosi, essentially for daring to be a politician at a time when government has clearly failed us. Just like is always does, and just like it always will.

And that's why the American press is so toxic. This is bigger than Bush. There will come a day very soon when a Republican president can maintain approval ratings in the high 30s and not even have to worry about his party losing Congress. Because they're all the same, anyway, all awful, and at least the Republicans understand that, and don't try to prettify things, don't try to pretend that government is something it isn't, that it could actually help.

Mea culpa.

I just realised that the WaPo article I linked to in my post from Sunday is the very article that contains that bogus claim -- presented straight -- from the White House official saying that Governor Blanco had never declared a state of emergency in Louisiana. Josh Marshall shot that one down before I even linked to the piece (of course, the article is still pretty devastating to everyone involved, bogus quote or no bogus quote. Though, not surprisingly, the White House fares the worst). This is why I keep this a semi-private blog; there's so much info flying around, it's easy to mess up.

Why, though, if Governor Blanco's administration was aware of what was coming as early as August 26th, was the pre-hurricane evacuation so pathetic as not to include vehicles to get the carless out of the city? That's on the feds as much, or more than it is on Blanco or Nagin. But still, as terrible as the aftermath of the storm has been, the response seems to have been as much of a dithering mess before the storm as after. According to the Guardian timeline, Nagin first recommended evacuating New Orleans on Saturday and made it manditory on Sunday the 28th. Also on Saturday, the 27th, Blanco sent her official letter to the White House requesting federal aid and the declaration of a national emergency for the state, retrospective to Friday the 26th. The first national guard troops were heading to the Gulf region as early as Friday as well. The hurricane didn't hit until Monday the 29th. Every level of government -- local, state, federal -- evidently had some inkling of what was coming; there were plenty of warnings being made about the levee system too. But not nearly enough was done. When the levees broke on Monday night, all those people were still in the city. Pretty much all the horror we've seen since then is because they weren't helped or forced (however you want to look at it) to evacuate.

There's plenty of blame to go around for what happened before the flood. But I think the concensus is right: the biggest villain here is still definitely FEMA, who messed up before, during and after the flood. And the decline of FEMA rests squarely with the current federal government. Blanco and Nagin might be blue dogs, but they're not fundamentally, philisophically opposed to the very existence of active, functional government (Blanco, for instance, attacked her GOP opponent for the governorship in 2003 over health care cuts), which is more than you can say than for a crowd who would hand over control of the country's foremost civilian rescue agency to the president's former chief of staff's college roomate, while rounding out operations with some other, less illustrious, campaign hacks. With that precedent, the White House ought to be careful where it plays the "blame game".

Anyway, Alexandra Starr in TNR follows up on the strategy behind that bogus claim the Bushies dropped on the WaPo and suggests it's a bad idea to tangle with Blanco, whatever her virtues and vices.

Blanco, who appears to be girding for a fight with the administration, could make things complicated for Bush. A big part of Bush's p.r. effort seems to involve making multiple appearances in the devastated region. When Blanco belatedly learned about Bush's visit earlier this week, she cleared her schedule and joined the president on his tour of Baton Rouge--and their obvious mutual dislike dominated subsequent news reports. (Witness the extent of Blanco's remarks when she introduced Bush: "I know I don't need to make any other introduction other than 'Mr. President.'") And it's not just photo-ops that could be marred by the simmering tension. Blanco recently hired former Federal Emergency Management Agency chief James Lee Witt to advise her on recovery efforts (a move that suggested just how much faith she has in the maligned current FEMA director Michael Brown). Witt was widely lauded for turning FEMA around during his tenure from 1993 to 2000. If the White House and Blanco do end up pointing fingers more openly, any criticism Witt levies at the Bush administration would carry weight.


Senator Mary Landrieu has already been messing with Bush's p.r. routine. Maybe Karl Rove should think about calling off his leaking thugs before the Admin ends up taking on more southern belles with D's behind their names than it can handle at one time. After all, Haley Barbour can only do so much.