March 11th, 2010 by Daniel
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I loved this article by George Will on the State of the Union:
The increasingly puerile spectacle of presidential State of the Union addresses is indicative of the state of the union and is unnecessary: The Constitution requires only that the president "shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the union." But a reaction may be brewing against these embarrassing events. Speaking in Alabama, Chief Justice John Roberts said "to the extent that" this occasion "has degenerated into a political pep rally," he is "not sure why we’re there." He was referring to Supreme Court justices. But why is anyone there?
Roberts was responding to a question concerning the kerfuffle about Barack Obama’s January address, wherein Obama criticized — and flagrantly mischaracterized — a recent Supreme Court decision that loosened limits on political speech. The decision neither overturned "a century of law" nor conferred an entitlement on foreign corporations to finance U.S. candidates. Nevertheless, the Democratic donkeys arrayed in front of Obama leapt onto their hind legs and brayed in unison, while the six justices who were present sat silently. Justice Samuel Alito, in an act of lese majeste, appeared to mutter "not true" about Obama’s untruths.
When Republican presidents deliver these addresses, Republican legislators, too, lurch up and down like puppets on strings. And Congress wonders why it is considered infantile.
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Many conservatives were congressional supremacists until Ronald Wilson Reagan arrived possessing the rhetorical skills requisite for a Wilsonian presidency. His unfortunate filigree on the dramaturgy of State of the Union addresses was to begin the practice of stocking the House gallery with ordinary but exemplary people whose presence touches the public’s erogenous zones.
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Next year, Roberts and the rest of the justices should stay away from the president’s address. So should the uniformed military, who are out of place in a setting of competitive political grandstanding. For that matter, the 535 legislators should boycott these undignified events. They would, if there were that many congressional grown-ups averse to being props in the childishness of popping up from their seats to cheer, or remaining sullenly seated in semi-pouts, as the politics of the moment dictates.
March 10th, 2010 by Daniel
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Patrick Kennedy is not keeping it together:
The problem is that the debate could just as easily be covered on CSPAN without having to go through the hassle of getting through security at the Capitol.
March 10th, 2010 by Daniel
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I really like this trailer. I’m trying not to have high hopes for the movie. But the first trailer looked great too.
March 10th, 2010 by Daniel
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Scott Rasmussen explains:
Why can’t the president move the numbers? One reason may be that he keeps talking about details of the proposal while voters are looking at the issue in a broader context. Polling conducted earlier this week shows that 57% of voters believe that passage of the legislation would hurt the economy, while only 25% believe it would help. That makes sense in a nation where most voters believe that increases in government spending are bad for the economy.
When the president responds that the plan is deficit neutral, he runs into a pair of basic problems. The first is that voters think reducing spending is more important than reducing the deficit. So a plan that is deficit neutral with a big spending hike is not going to be well received.
But the bigger problem is that people simply don’t trust the official projections. People in Washington may live and die by the pronouncements of the Congressional Budget Office, but 81% of voters say it’s likely the plan will end up costing more than projected. Only 10% say the official numbers are likely to be on target.
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The final piece of the puzzle is that the overwhelming majority of voters have insurance coverage, and 76% rate their own coverage as good or excellent. Half of these voters say it’s likely that if the congressional health bill becomes law, they would be forced to switch insurance coverage—a prospect hardly anyone ever relishes. These numbers have barely moved for months: Nothing the president has said has reassured people on this point.
The reason President Obama can’t move the numbers and build public support is because the fundamentals are stacked against him. Most voters believe the current plan will harm the economy, cost more than projected, raise the cost of care, and lead to higher middle-class taxes.
That’s a tough sell when the economy is hurting and people want reform to lower the cost of care. It’s also a tough sell for a president who won an election by promising tax cuts for 95% of all Americans.
March 8th, 2010 by Daniel
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Ezra Klein’s article in Newsweek is pretty amusing. Ezra is another Democrat who has taken to blaming the Filibuster for the Senate not passing the a deeply-unpopular health care bill. His article contains some interesting history of about the filibuster, but it lacks any reason why the Senate should do away with the filibuster. Ezra opines:
This is the consequence of running the Senate by twisting the rules rather than following their spirit. It’s not just that you have the 60-vote filibuster process competing against the 51-vote reconciliation process. It’s that you have the Senate wasting days and weeks in cloture votes for doomed filibusters and rewriting legislation to conform to the odd limits of the reconciliation process. And as the minority becomes less responsible with the filibuster (and hoo boy, have minority Republicans become less responsible with the filibuster), the majority needs to use reconciliation more often.
Even a kid in civics class would recognize that this is all nuts. The Senate should eliminate the filibuster and budget reconciliation, and require either a 51- or 60-vote majority. Exploiting loopholes is no way to run a country.
You are right Ezra, exploiting loopholes is no way to run a country. A better way is by being bipartisan. If the Democrats had worked from the beginning to be bipartisan, they could have passed a bill a year ago. If you have minority Republicans being “less responsible with the filibuster”, you might have why. In this case, we have a Democratic majority that wants to ram through a partisan health care bill that the public doesn’t want. I’m not speaking to all cases of the Republicans using the filibuster, but in this case it looks like it is the Republicans who are responsibly using the filibuster to try to defeat a program the American people don’t want. That’s a reason to keep the filibuster, not repeal it.
March 7th, 2010 by Daniel
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Steve Hayward has an interesting piece in the Washington Post about Reagan, Palin, and the tea parties.
Sarah Palin invokes him. Mitt Romney glorifies him. The "tea party" movement hopes to recapture him. And the Republican Party still can’t get over him.
Six years after his death, and almost a century since his birth, conservatives are more transfixed than ever by Ronald Reagan, so much so that I fully expect a Gipper anxiety disorder to appear in the next edition of the psychiatrists’ diagnostic manual.
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You can’t assume the Reagan mantle simply by repeating his name ad nauseum or by bickering with primary opponents over who is more like him. (Romney and Huckabee duked it out in the 2008 campaign, engaging in a Reaganer-than-thou exchange memorable for its inanity — lots of good it did them.) That said, there are two largely unrecognized elements of Reagan’s statecraft that his imitators should recognize and study if they truly want to emulate him.
The first is the deliberate but unseen crafting of Reagan’s public profile. As we have come to learn with the opening over the past decade of Reagan’s personal papers, his public style was a product of enormous discipline, hard work and calculation. Long before Palin was ridiculed for writing reminders on her hand, Reagan was derided as the 3-by-5 note card candidate (actually, he used 4-by-6 cards) — but his cards were his means of staying succinctly on point and delivering his message in a compelling way. Reagan’s speeches, including his State of the Union addresses, were typically much shorter than average. He knew from show business the power of leaving your audience wanting more. Is there a politician today who you wish gave longer speeches?
The second underappreciated aspect of Reagan’s statecraft is his idiosyncratic ideology — entirely a product of his self-study, much of which he concealed. Some of it was orthodox, small-government conservatism (he once stated that "the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism"), but it was leavened with an older liberalism, part of which he inherited from FDR.
March 2nd, 2010 by Daniel
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Every once in a while environmental groups get an environmental issue right. Now if they only would have fought ethanol subsidies from the beginning, we might not have wasted billions upon billions trying to support an unsustainable industry. Here’s the conclusion from a recent post on the Mother Jones website:
Bottom line: corn ethanol is no greener than gasoline. In fact, it’s almost certainly less green, and at the very least, there’s no urgent need for the U.S. government to pay billions of dollars to subsidize its production. Too bad Iowa is the first state on the primary calendar every four years, isn’t it?
Now if only Mother Jones would see that subsidies are wasteful—both financially and environmentally. Then we really might be on to something.
February 25th, 2010 by Daniel
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February 25th, 2010 by Daniel
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February 22nd, 2010 by Daniel
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I’m not a fan of FDR, but here are some reasons I should give him some credit:
FDR could have nationalized the banks in 1933 and war industries in the 1940s. Instead he prevented runs on the banks and called in captains of industry to help run the war effort.
Fluent in German, he listened to Hitler on short-wave radio and recognized by 1938 that he was a monster that must be destroyed. Alerted by Albert Einstein’s letter to the possibilities of nuclear fission, he said, "We can’t let Hitler get this before we do," and authorized the spending in secret of something approaching 1 percent of gross domestic product on building the atomic bomb.
His judgment in picking military leaders — Gens. Marshall, MacArthur, Eisenhower, Adms. King and Nimitz — was unerringly brilliant. His decisions to invade North Africa in 1942 (against all military advice), to concentrate on the European theater and not the Pacific in 1943 (against the Navy’s urging), to stage the cross-Channel invasion in 1944 rather than 1943 (despite British and Russian pressure) all look very good in retrospect. It wasn’t so easy to make them at the time.
