Mapping the Tyranny of the Minority

This map locates the districts represented by the "suicide caucus" holding the rest of us hostage. It accompanies this pointed post at The New Yorker.

"As the above map, detailing the geography of the suicide caucus, shows, half of these districts are concentrated in the South, and a quarter of them are in the Midwest, while there’s a smattering of thirteen in the rural West and four in rural Pennsylvania (outside the population centers of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh). Naturally, there are no members from New England, the megalopolis corridor from Washington to Boston, or along the Pacific coastline.

These eighty members represent just eighteen per cent of the House and just a third of the two hundred and thirty-three House Republicans. They were elected with fourteen and a half million of the hundred and eighteen million votes cast in House elections last November, or twelve per cent of the total. In all, they represent fifty-eight million constituents. That may sound like a lot, but it’s just eighteen per cent of the population.

[. . .] While the most salient demographic fact about America is that it is becoming more diverse, Republican districts actually became less diverse in 2012. According to figures compiled by The Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman, a leading expert on House demographics who provided me with most of the raw data I’ve used here, the average House Republican district became two percentage points more white in 2012.

The members of the suicide caucus live in a different America from the one that most political commentators describe when talking about how the country is transforming. The average suicide-caucus district is seventy-five per cent white, while the average House district is sixty-three per cent white. Latinos make up an average of nine per cent of suicide-district residents, while the over-all average is seventeen per cent. The districts also have slightly lower levels of education (twenty-five per cent of the population in suicide districts have college degrees, while that number is twenty-nine per cent for the average district).

The members themselves represent this lack of diversity. Seventy-six of the members who signed the Meadows letter are male. Seventy-nine of them are white.

As with Meadows, the other suicide-caucus members live in places where the national election results seem like an anomaly. Obama defeated Romney by four points nationally. But in the eighty suicide-caucus districts, Obama lost to Romney by an average of twenty-three points. The Republican members themselves did even better. In these eighty districts, the average margin of victory for the Republican candidate was thirty-four points.

In short, these eighty members represent an America where the population is getting whiter, where there are few major cities, where Obama lost the last election in a landslide, and where the Republican Party is becoming more dominant and more popular. Meanwhile, in national politics, each of these trends is actually reversed."

Thoughts About Guns and Politics

First, if you are a fan of bi-partisanship and think it will do wonders for our conflictual politics please note that our current morass on gun policy is thoroughly bipartisan. Neither party will challenge the status quo other than to applaud even less restrictive access to weapons of all sorts.

Second, if you are a Republican and have supported all of the recently imposed or proposed restrictions on access to voting - voter ID and so forth - you will know that there is zero evidence that there has been significant voter fraud. We seem to have plenty of evidence that unfettered access to guns is deadly. Where is the groundswell of conservative voices calling out to safeguard the sanctity of life?

Third, there is a nice interactive data map here at The Guardian - just looking at the various correlations deflates much of the gun lobby rhetoric. Then again, that presupposes, that this is a reality based conversation we are involved in.

Finally, there are various policy options around. Libertarians like this fellow (affiliated withe the Florida chapter of the Campaign for Liberty) recommend that we proliferate guns - in their case by eliminating "gun free zones" and allowing (mandating?) teachers to carry weapons. (His comments on policy start @ 1:40 in the segment.)




And here is a "thought experiment" aiming at the same point (aren't academics weird?). Both proposals are nonsense and would be laughable if it weren't the case that, as I've mentioned here before,  similar schemes have been tried already.

Instead of chanting "liberty" (as though incantations will solve problems) while riding the sham authority that comes from having had a "career in law enforcement" here is an actual argument, complete with reasons, for why this policy is totally unpersuasive.

Post-Election Desperation on the Right

This image was made by photographer Scout Tufankjian not this week but in Iowa last summer.* This week, however, it acquired notoriety because the Obama campaign included it in a celebratory - "Four More Years" -  tweet and plastered it across their Face Book page.

Then arrives in the mail our copy of The Economist sporting the same photo. The publication had, I believe, endorsed Obama. So, what is with the outlandish caption? Surely, if the editors had meant try to hug a Republican they'd have said so. So this cannot be taken as friendly, encouraging advice. And the editors surely know - the accompanying editorial suggests as much - that the overwhelming source of animosity and inaction over the past four years has come from far to the right of our centrist chief executive. Then again, the editors decry Obama's record, proclaiming that "his failure to work successfully with the Republicans has been woeful." Their advice? Another helping of the bi-partisanship that found no takers over the past four years. In the end this post-election campaign is a bit of a mystery. Why not send a message to the reactionaries among the Republican party, especially the Congressional contingent? I am not an Obama fan. But he and his party just kicked the snot out of the hapless Republicans. And they did so under far from auspicious economic circumstances. The right - including not just the usual talking heads but the editorial board at The Economist -  seem not to have noticed. I hope the new Obama administration does notice and that they press their political advantage rather than embracing a supine bi-partisanship.
__________
* I found this at Tufakijan's web page: "NOTE:  Scout was not employed by or affiliated with the Obama campaign in any manner, shape, or form.  She was a journalist covering the campaign." It is important to underscore that disclaimer because of the potentially misinterpret-able statement in the report to which I link above. It states "Tufankjian has been a campaign photographer with President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign since the beginning."

A Note to Liberals

"Our economy is recovering. A decade of war is ending. A long campaign is now over. And whether I earned your vote or not, I have listened to you, I have learned from you, and you've made me a better president. And with your stories and your struggles, I return to the White House more determined and more inspired than ever about the work there is to do and the future that lies ahead. 

Tonight you voted for action, not politics as usual. You elected us to focus on your jobs, not ours. And in the coming weeks and months, I am looking forward to reaching out and working with leaders of both parties to meet the challenges we can only solve together. Reducing our deficit. Reforming our tax code. Fixing our immigration system. Freeing ourselves from foreign oil. We've got more work to do"

These two paragraphs come from Obama's victory speech last night. Notice what his agenda includes and what it neglects. Deficit reduction. Tax reform. Energy independence. Immigration reform. This sounds like the Romney/Ryan platform minus the assault on reproductive choice and health  insurance reform. Nothing on political economic inequality. Nothing on unemployment - except insofar as that is taking care of itself, however slowly. Nothing on enforcement of financial sector reforms. This is what Obama has in store for you. More center-right policy with a garnish of bi-partisanship.

Once More with Feeling - Against Bi-Partisanship

It has been six months or so since the last installment in my ongoing argument against bi-partisanship. Today at The New York Times, economist Simon Johnson published this essay highlighting one of the major problems with bipartisanship - it often represents little more than a consensus among self-interested parties aimed at rationalizing crappy policies like, say, the deregulation of the finance sector which set the stage for our current depression. As he points out:

Financial deregulation in the 1980s and 1990s was pushed by both Democrats and Republicans. It reached its apogee when Alan Greenspan, a Republican, was chairman of the Federal Reserve and Robert Rubin, a Democrat, was Treasury secretary. Bill Clinton was president; Newt Gingrich was speaker of the House.

I am not sure whether Johnson would characterize the ongoing economic crisis a depression. It doesn't mater, really. I am simply following those - from Dick Posner on the right to Paul Krugman on the left - who do so. There is no need to trade in euphemisms.

Johnson's whole column is worth reading. It is really a dissection of an initiative being peddled by the Bipartisan Policy Center. Two points  are worth noting. The first is that the former president of the University of Rochester, Tom Jackson is on the board that generated the initiative the Johnson finds suspect. I teach at Rochester. And Johnson rightly points out that Jackson is an independent, accomplished scholar. He simply laments the fact that, unlike Jackson, most of the committee that drafted the initiative were on the payroll (figuratively, at least) of big finance outfits. The second is that Johnson suggests that the Center might offset some of this finance friendly tilt by appointing members of Occupy the SEC to their committee! This at first seemed to me to be a capital idea (pun intended). I have sung the praises of Occupy the SEC here several times. So, on second thought, I would hate to have them peddling bi-partisanship too!

Reality Based Politics - Problems with the Media

I noticed this report from NPR over on my FB news feed. A week or so ago I was on a panel here at the University of Rochester sponsored by various student groups. There were a bunch of folks from the community - mostly business types - in the audience. The panel was about the need for bi-partisanship and civility in American politics. My line is that bipartisanship is (following Ian Shapiro) collusion in restraint of democracy. I've said that here numerous times before. I also pointed out that the Republicans were the source of our polarization and that the entire problem mapped onto increasingly extreme political-economic inequality. I attributed all of that to McCarty-Poole-Rosenthal, pointing out that two at least of the authors are pretty right-leaning politically. I've said all that here before too.

At the panel the audience was more or less totally incredulous and made plain that they thought I was full of crap. The 'blame both sides' mentality is alive and well out in the hinterlands of Western NY - regardless of the actual state of the world! Why? Because, in part, even for stories like this one on the actual sources of polarization reporters feel obliged to run off and find a shill for the right from AEI to say 'both sides are at fault!' Even when there are not two sides to the story reporters feel the need to offer two. Are they simply idiots?

Pandering, yes ... But to Whom, Mr. Obama?

Image © Mr. Fish.

Today, even the center-right editorial board at The New York Times took this swipe at Obama for being politically tone-deaf. (Of course the presumption is that he actually might be vaguely progressive on the economy, which I doubt.) But here is the relevant factual basis for their complaint:

"The Times and CBS News released a new poll on Friday, and once again we were impressed that Americans are a lot smarter than Republican leaders think, more willing to sacrifice for the national good than Democratic leaders give them credit for, and more eager to see the president get tough than Mr. Obama and his conflict-averse team realize."

In other words the stress on bi-partisanship - which actually means pandering to right-wing elite preferences - is a pretty poor political strategy. Not only has it led to policy disasters, but it is pretty lame in simple electoral terms. In other words, even if Obama is, as I believe, a center-right politician, he is going to lose the election by if he keeps pandering to the right. In fact, it may be too late.

Pass the Treacle, Please

Representative Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot in January,
appeared on the floor of the House of Representatives after
the vote. (House Television, via Associated Press)

This is the image accompanying the report in The New York Times this evening about the House vote on the deficit/debt limit deal. Let's get a couple of things straight at the outset. Giffords is still a sworn member of the Congress; so she has every right to be there and cast her vote even if, as it turned out, her vote was superfluous. Second, nothing I say here is meant to downplay the horrors of the attempt to assassinate her or the suffering of those who died or were injured in that melee.

That said, when I saw this photograph I nearly blew a gasket. Tonight is not a feel-good moment. The Giffords appearance does nothing to alter that. The House was voting on a piece of legislation drawn up under pressure of extortionate tactics embraced by reactionaries in the Congress. These are reactionaries of the same ilk as those who drew bull's eyes on the targeted districts of Democratic Representatives - including Gabrielle Giffords - during the last electoral cycle. In other words, the legislation that she came back to vote on is distinctly not a "compromise." It will pay off enormous deficits - run up, remember, by successive Republican administrations - on the backs of the poor and the working and unemployed classes in the United States. This bill stinks and I would have been among the 161. The Giffords intervention would've been way more impressive - and newsworthy - if she'd voted no!

What Did We Learn About Politics Today?

The first thing we learned is about irony. It was ironic to learn that John Boehner's budget cutting plan - which would've been dead in the water anyhow - really was dead when the CBO announced that the cuts he proposes would not be quite so deep and draconian as he announced. And it was even more ironic to learn from the very same CBO that the putatively Democratic plan advanced by Harry Reid in the Senate would actually cut more deeply than would Boehner's! So, it is not just that the Senate plan is not "balanced" in the sense of approaching the task of deficit reduction by including both tax revenues and spending cuts (it relies solely on the latter), but it actually cuts more than the Republican leadership in the House would like. (Read the report here.) Call all that bi-partisanship in action.

The second thing we learned is that this bi-partisanship takes aim dead at the foreheads of working Americans - or should I say Americans who are not working due to the depression. Spending cuts will have a negative impact on an already depressed labor market. (Report here.) No self-respecting Democrat is saying anything about that. So, thank the lord for Brother West! He is taking his 'call out the President for abandoning working and poor America' show on the road. Not only are the democrats out-doing the republicans at the reactionary deficit reduction by spending cuts game, they are screwing their own putative "base." That would be ironic too, if it were not so predictably pathetic.

Finally we learned about the power of capitalists and their ideologists. What we are worried about - after all, there is no evidence we are worried about the poor and the working classes, those who will bear the brunt of all the deficit reduction shenanigans - are the investors in the bond markets. We already know that they can withhold investment to signal their displeasure. But we're now being threatened by rating agencies too. Standard and Poor's is threatening to downgrade the rating on U.S. Treasury Bonds. If you ignore all of the other links in this post, I urge you to check out this commentary by Robert Reich. Credit rating agencies are accountable to precisely no one. But they sure are throwing their weight around. No irony in that.

One useful thing I did learn is that we really don't need the debt ceiling at all. It turns out that lots of other perfectly functional capitalist political economic systems work perfectly well without any such legal constraint. Read about it here. But why be sensible?

Appearance and Reality in Obama's Digital Democracy

I came across this terrific post over at the Harvard Business Review blog. Here is the punch line:

"I'm a citizen of a generation whose future is going up in smoke faster than you can say "credit default swaps." And what you're really telling me is this: in some parts of the world, social tools can fuel the revolutions that topple dictators. Here, in the nation that invented them? They're used for marketing stunts."

The author, Umair Haque, is reacting, of course, to the AskObama tweet-o-rama earlier in the week. He rightly calls it "a meaningless marketing stunt."

So much for appearance. In the reality section we have Paul Krugman here in The New York Times suggesting that it is not just Obama's rhetoric that is disturbingly right-wing. It is his actual political and economic views that are right wing. Talking about Obama's recent interventions in the deficit reduction fiasco Krugman writes:

"So the goal may be to paint the G.O.P. into a corner, making Republicans look like intransigent extremists — which they are.

But let’s be frank. It’s getting harder and harder to trust Mr. Obama’s motives in the budget fight, given the way his economic rhetoric has veered to the right. In fact, if all you did was listen to his speeches, you might conclude that he basically shares the G.O.P.’s diagnosis of what ails our economy and what should be done to fix it. And maybe that’s not a false impression; maybe it’s the simple truth."

That seems just about right to me. After all, Obama appointed the Bowles/Simpson commission and now he is offering precisely the sorts of cuts to Social Security and Medicare that his mouthpieces recommended. There is no surprise here; Obama has been angling to cuts "entitlements" all along.

The next time someone asks what happened to all the moderate Republicans you can reply - They are in the Obama administration.

Perspectives on the Corruption of American Politics

Over at the Huff Post I came across links to not one but two sharp political entries today: (1) this skewering of the sanctimonious Evan Bayh* for his post-Senate career in shameless lobbying and (2) this graphic presentation of the wildly negative consequences of the Bush-Obama** tax cuts.
__________
* P.S.: To date Bayh has barely risen to the level of visibility - he played bit roles in posts on nepotism and political cronyism. But he is a poster child for my campaign against bi-partisanship.
** P.S.: This label is not my creation I heard it on the radio - but it is true that Obama allowed for the renewal of the tax cuts - due in part to his sincere policy preferences and in part to his political ineptitude.

The Truth From Washington

"The ground shifted and spending reductions Democrats recently described as 'extreme' and 'draconian,' they are now calling 'historic' and 'common sense.' The debate has turned from how much to grow government to how much to reduce it."~ Senator Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky).


"There are a number of us in the caucus now pushing back very hard on our leadership. ... Who knows where they'll end up, but maybe we can take enough D's with us to make them uncomfortable and to make them stick with making the president act like a Democrat." ~ Congressman Peter DeFazio (D-Oregon).

I rarely agree with McConnell about much. But he is dead on here. The Democrats have been politically inept again. They have let the Republicans set the agenda - pure and simple. Meanwhile, Defazio's problem - as a member of the "progressive caucus" in the House - is that Obama is acting like a Democrat.

(Among the Reason) Why I Loath Bi-Partisanship

My oldest son Douglas is set to graduate from college this coming May. He has been a good student and an athlete for four years. The obvious consideration at this point is what he is going to do with his B.S. in Biology (minor in Environmental Studies) once he navigates the end of the semester festivities. So, this installment from Paul Krugman hits home with even greater force than it might:

"I still don’t know why the Obama administration was so quick to accept defeat in the war of ideas, but the fact is that it surrendered very early in the game. In early 2009, John Boehner, now the speaker of the House, was widely and rightly mocked for declaring that since families were suffering, the government should tighten its own belt. That’s Herbert Hoover economics, and it’s as wrong now as it was in the 1930s. But, in the 2010 State of the Union address, President Obama adopted exactly the same metaphor and began using it incessantly.

And earlier this week, the White House budget director declared: “There is an agreement that we should be reducing spending,” suggesting that his only quarrel with Republicans is over whether we should be cutting taxes, too. No wonder, then, that according to a new Pew Research Center poll, a majority of Americans see “not much difference” between Mr. Obama’s approach to the deficit and that of Republicans.

So who pays the price for this unfortunate bipartisanship? The increasingly hopeless unemployed, of course. And the worst hit will be young workers — a point made in 2009 by Peter Orszag, then the White House budget director. As he noted, young Americans who graduated during the severe recession of the early 1980s suffered permanent damage to their earnings. And if the average duration of unemployment is any indication, it’s even harder for new graduates to find decent jobs now than it was in 1982 or 1983.

So the next time you hear some Republican declaring that he’s concerned about deficits because he cares about his children — or, for that matter, the next time you hear Mr. Obama talk about winning the future — you should remember that the clear and present danger to the prospects of young Americans isn’t the deficit. It’s the absence of jobs.

But . . . these days Washington doesn’t seem to care about any of that. And you have to wonder what it will take to get politicians caring again about America’s forgotten millions."

Douglas is, in the eyes of his father, indeed one in a million. But that phrase takes on an unhappily ironic cast in the age of bi-partisan political delusion. If it sometimes sounds like my criticisms of Obama and his failure to stand up to the right are personal that is because they are.

Wake Up Democrats! American Workers are Under Assault by Republicans

It is no surprise that Republicans across the country have taken aim on unions and done so in a concerted campaign. Nor is it a surprise that they have done so hypocritically, rationalizing their political agenda in terms of the need to address fiscal crisis in the states. What is also unsurprising - and no less disturbing - is that neither the unions nor the Democrats seem to have had a clue that this attack was in the offing. They were too busy hoping for the emergence of civil, bi-partisan politics. Is there a lesson here?

As I drove in this morning there were two useful segments on npr: the first confirmed the predictable, namely that the Obama administration is steering clear of controversy and hoping for a nice bi-partisan resolution to the labor conflicts in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Ohio ... the second was an interview with a law professor who studies public sector unions and, guess what, they are not nearly the drag on the public budget or boon to selfish workers that the Republicans portray them as being. Surprised?

Who Says We Lack Bi-Partisanship? Or, Batista, Pahlavi, and Marcos, Oh My!

Occasionally, the folks at The New York Times get things right. Today, they published this story about U.S. foreign policy toward authoritarian tyrants. Here are some of the good bits:

"If the United States is, as so many presidents have said in so many speeches, the world’s pre-eminent champion of democracy, then why does the drama unfolding in Cairo seem so familiar?

A Washington-friendly dictator, propped up for decades by lavish American aid as he oversees a regime noted for brutality, corruption and stagnation, finally faces the wrath of his people. An American administration struggles over what to say, what to do and what to expect if the strongman is toppled.

Every country has both values and interests. Sometimes they coincide — for example, promoting human rights can help combat terrorism — and sometimes they conflict. What makes the United States stand out, perhaps, is how frequently American officials proclaim their values to the world, setting themselves up for charges of hypocrisy when a policy is expedient rather than idealistic.

History is rich with precedents. ... Since World War II, the White House, under the management of both parties, has smiled on at least a couple of dozen despots."

The report is brief, hence leaves out some especially deadly clients (Pinochet, Hussein - yes, the very same Saddam - Somoza, Suharto, etc.) but basically hits the nail on the head. Of course, it is unclear whether The Times would encourage support for the values over the interests here. Are they concerned about the hypocrisy? Or are they concerned that the bi-partisan American consensus is to back a dictator more or less whenever given the chance?

Against Bipartisanship (yet again)

And here is a piece by Paul Krugman & Robin Wells, also from the most recent NYRB. They lay out the electoral imperatives that the Democrats confront quite nicely. In short, given the choice between actual Republicans and Republican-lite, voters tend to opt for the genuine article. Among the culprits here are those - from the feckless Obama on down - who've joined the cult of bipartisan consensus. It is way past time to call in the de-programmers.

Against Logo Politics

There has been a lot of hoop-la recently about the emergence of this "movement." You can find news reports here and here and here. Regular readers will not be surprised to learn that I have a pretty dim view of the enterprise. Beyond the exclusively top-down, logo-centric character of the putative "movement," there are two distinct substantive issues that seem objectionable about the group: (1) their presumption that the basic problem in American politics comes down to lack of civility (what they call "the tone of politics") and (2) their presumption that something called bi-partisanship is a smart way to approach democratic politics. I think the No Label folks are dead wrong on both issues.

As a good place to start I suggest this commentary by E.J. Dionne. That said, I am much less patient with the No Label types than he seems to be. Our problem, documented not by partisan accusation but by actual research (since we all want, in Dionne's terms, to be fact based), is a rapid, relentless move rightward among Republicans. That shift is grounded in and subsequently helps sustain dramatic increases in political-economic inequality. Incivility and the hectoring tone of politics is a symptom of that underlying reality. So simply making nice is not going to get us anyplace useful. What it will get us is Obama-esque capitulation to reactionary demands. In other words, the location the No Label crowd hope to occupy - what they call " the vital civil center" - is not the center; it consists in a set of right-leaning or flat out conservative positions that look "moderate" only in comparison to the reactionary views of conservative Republicans. If we neglect that, our politics will generate disastrous consequences. And talking nicely to one another as we head over the precipice does nothing to change that.

Politics is about competition and disagreement. One need not be a cynic to suspect that "consensus" is typically a way of papering over the way one or another group is getting the shaft. I have inveighed against bi-partisanship repeatedly here and won't do so again. It generates bad policy and undermines democracy more generally. The No Label folks simply don't get that. They think we need a new logo. I think we need democratic politics.

Clegg, Obama, 'Old-Style Progressives' and 'Pragmatism'

In the U.S. political ideas seem to twist and turn at the whim of various right-wing media mouthpieces. Typically the re-fashioning occurs in cahoots with the right wing politicians. So, as the conservative DLC types in the Democratic Party make a hard charge to the right (which has been ongoing since the late 1980s) there is not much push-back from people who say ... ''Not so fast, that is a bastardization of this or that progressive or liberal idea ... or ... No, actually the constitution or our political tradition (or whatever) don't state or imply anything like what you claim!'

The problem, in part, is that any such voice of sanity is drowned out by the megaphones on the right. And, let's be clear here, I am not even talking about the Republicans with their party organ Fox 'News.' I am talking about the voices of 'moderation' among the Democrats. Of course, those voices are not typically attuned to intellectual discourse; they are concerned to show that they are realists. Think Bill Galston or Cass Sunstein. Think Rahm Emmanuel. No egg-head talk for them.

Here is an example from the U.K. Lib-Dem leader Nick Clegg offers this pronouncement on 'authentic' progressive politics in The Guardian. He constructs a dichotomy between old-style progressive who are obsessed with equality and new style progressives (like himself) who are properly re-focused on social mobility as a way of fracturing inherited, hence unjust, patterns. This rhetorical move brings to mind a remark from Vaclav Havel: "... hard and fast categories ... tend to be instruments used by the victors." In this instance, the distinction also fails - as Stuart White points out in this astute commentary - to grasp the actual claims of 'old style' progressives of a liberal or socialist stripe.

Distinctions, in other words, carry consequences. and in this instance Clegg surely is aiming to shift the terms of discourse rightward. It is not enough to say, as he does in numerous ways, 'let's work together,' 'let's think in non-zero-sum terms,' lets embrace bi-partisanship' (to echo our own hoper-in-chief). Because, having constructed a false dichotomy at the start he proceeds to neglect the fact that any reconciliation has profound distributional consequences. And those consequences are, as White notes, precisely the basis for pervasive inequalities that subvert the prospects for social mobility.

There are lessons here for the Obama is a pragmatist crowd. It is not enough to simply listen to everyone and split the difference. One has to look at where we stand, how we got here, assess responsibility and, most importantly, see how political-economic power has been used to shape the current circumstances, before making a plan to move forward. Simply splitting the difference leads to more of the 'winner take all' politics that Clegg claims to abhor simply because it takes the current state of affairs, with its already established winners and losers, as the point of departure. Old style progressives, in other words, insist on getting an historical grip before plunging ahead. Without that historical perspective, a putatively pragmatist focus on consequences simply re-confirms the fixed inequities we currently endure. On health Insurance; on war-crimes; on economic recovery; on foreign adventurism. On all those fronts, Obama has done lots of listening and little serious analysis of the sort I mention above. As a result we get not pragmatism but opportunism. There is a big difference.

Have a nice Thanksgiving.
__________
P.S.: (Added 26 November 2010) You can find yet another astute reply to Clegg here. The punchline: "This isn’t democracy. It isn’t a new way of being progressive. It is the deep marketisation of our society, carried out at breakneck speed."

Deficit Reform My Keester

President Barack Obama, center, walks with Erskine Bowles,
left, and Sen. Alan Simpson, R-Wyo., co-chairs of the National
Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (April 2010).
Photograph © Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images.

The fully predictable has happened. The right-leaning (Erskine Bowles) and 'aw, shucks' reactionary (Alan Simpson), co-chairs of Obama's "bipartisan" deficit reduction commission, have announced what they think should happen. As Paul Krugman writes in The Times today: "It seemed obvious, as soon as the commission’s membership was announced, that 'bipartisanship' would mean what it so often does in Washington: a compromise between the center-right and the hard-right."

As I have argued here many times before, bi-partisanship is bad politics - it gets us regressive, incoherent policy and, more importantly, it subverts the competition on which democracy itself relies. (If you are interested in reasons and examples aplenty look here and then here.) Fortunately, there are some people and groups out there who seem willing to call the co-chair's proposal what it is - reactionary twaddle. This proposal is clearly meant as an agenda setting move. The thinking goes like this: 'If we make an extreme initial claim we will likely end up with something only slightly less regressive." There is all sorts of talk about 'shared-sacrifice' in the face of deficits. But the sources of our deficits are easy to see (look here and here) and gutting Social Security (for instance) is irrelevant to getting them under control. The working and middle classes, to say nothing of the poor, in America already have undertaken sacrifices as the rich have run off with the goodies. That has been going on for three decades. What we need now is redress, not shared sacrifice.

As Krugman also writes: "It will take time to crunch the numbers here, but this proposal clearly represents a major transfer of income upward, from the middle class to a small minority of wealthy Americans." Obama, like the Clinton-ites before him, is adept at that game. It runs under the guise of bi-partisanship, so Obama can position himself between Bowles and Simpson and look like the great compromise-r. But being between two positions doesn't necessarily make you centrist.

A Plea for Partisanship

Just about a year ago I wrote this post railing against bi-partisanship. Much of what has gone wrong in the first year of Obama-fest in my view has been driven by an insipid Democratic quest for bi-partisanship and consensus. I stand by what I wrote last January. I recently came across this brief essay in Dissent by Nancy Rosenblum*, a political theorist at Harvard, who not only explains (in ways I find congenial) the reasons why bi-partisanship and non-partisanship and being 'independent' are flawed, vacillating, and counterproductive positions, but argues that, in fact, partisanship "is the morally distinctive political identity of representative democracy."
__________
* This essay reflects views that Rosenblum develops at considerably greater length in her recent book On the Side of the Angels: An Appreciation of Parties and Partisanship. Princeton UP, 2008.