February 13, 2009

The GOP’s news cycle strategy

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I agree with Yglesias that the Republican strategy of the moment, such as it is, is very much a short-term, win-the-news cycle approach: oppose Obama, make a lot of noise, and hope something sticks with the public and sparks a comeback. In fact, it’s very much like the John McCain campaign, which did a great job, for a while anyway, at commanding the gaze of the media with outrageous statements and stunts, but lacked a coherent policy argument for his candidacy.

So: the GOP “won” yesterday with Judd Gregg’s pulling the plug on his own nomination. It sort of “wins” when Republican members of Congress rebuff Obama’s overtures and give him no votes on key bills, which spark the usual raft of stories about how Obama has failed in his quest for Republican votes. As it did during the campaign, the media effectively cooperate in this effort, because the GOP gives good soundbites and provides the conflict that plays well on the cable shows and feeds a million blog posts.

As Eve Fairbanks wrote earlier this week:

They’re completely obsessed with winning the media “cycle” and getting the sexiest, most provocative quotes on TV, an attitude that yields the kind of overblown dreck RNC chair Michael Steele is now spouting. This obsession was born, I think, during last summer’s drilling fight with Nancy Pelosi in the House, which Republicans cite constantly as the moment that will someday be recognized as the beginning of their rebirth, their A.D. 0: They mounted a lot of antics, their brazenly hyperbolic rhetoric ended up all over the news, and a frightened Pelosi backed down. When I talked to a number of conservatives for a story on the future of the congressional GOP, many — Marsha Blackburn, Louie Gohmert, Republican Study Committee chair Tom Price — explained to me that the energy fight had proven this to them: The GOP lost power due to a failure to communicate its ideas. “Communication” was the it word within the minority. “We need to improve the ways we communicate,” Price told me, reminiscing about the drilling battle: “It [the energy fight] was spontaneous, it was different, it captured the public’s attention. We made clear we were passionate.”

It sounds old fashioned, but the best way to win enduring political popularity – which after all is what parties most prize – is to propose real solutions to the problems we face and get them passed. That doesn’t mean caving into the other side. But it does mean engaging with it and addressing the issues. Obviously, that’s very difficult for what remains of Republican Party, which is not exactly brimming with new ideas, and whose old ideas don’t exactly harmonize with the president’s. But what we’re hearing out of the GOP this week – Judd Gregg is a folk hero! – isn’t the kind of thing that the public responds to. The public doesn’t even know who the frack Judd Gregg is.

Unfortunately, world of Washington and the political media also buy into this kind of artificial drama – after all, it’s their artificial drama too. But Obama never did during the campaign, and it seemed to work pretty well for him.

 

November 4, 2008

Why I’m voting for Obama

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If you haven’t been able to figure it out by reading earlier posts, I’ll come right out and say it: I am voting for Obama. In general, I don’t like making partisan statements. I don’t put signs in my yard or bumper stickers on my car. One reason for this is habit. I used to be a newspaper reporter, and with the exception of opinion writers, newspapers prohibit their employees from openly supporting candidates or taking public stances on issues. But part of it is I don’t like boiling down my thoughts on politics to slogans or yes-or-no propositions.

But of course that’s exactly what an election is – a binary choice. And for me, and the country, I think the choice has been clear for some time. For me, George W. Bush’s biggest failing was that, with only a couple of exceptions, he simply didn’t care about governance. Bush (with Rove and Cheney) treated problems the country faced primarily as opportunities either to expand the support of the Republican Party or the power of the presidency. And as bigger, ever-more complex problems loomed, the Bush approach remained constant. Only over the past year, with its once-mighty political project in total collapse, has a semblance of pragmatism returned to the White House.

Barack Obama offers a return to reality-based government, in which problems will be examined empirically and policies devised to respond to them, and in which making government work will be a high priority. It’s really that simple. This is, of course, second grade-level civics. It’s amazing how far we strayed from it these past eight years. There are a lot of problems – climate change, the global financial meltdown, health care – that require some major governmental re-engineering, and require some fights with the Republican-allied business lobbyists that will like them the least. With his obvious political and managerial talents, Obama is obviously the man for this job.

Like many others, I didn’t much care for John McCain’s campaign. It summoned up many of the worst elements of the culture wars. The socialism charges were both divisive and ridiculous. It set new standards for blatant dishonesty. But unlike many others, I didn’t find any of this particularly surprising or “dishonorable” or the worst ever. It was just politics, and it wasn’t effective, and it will probably be even less effective the next time around. What was more disappointing about McCain’s effort was its slavish attachment to eye-catching, empty symbolism, from the choice of Sarah Palin to the September “suspension” of the campaign.

The symbolism masked a serious substance deficit. McCain’s policy proposals were mostly tired, off-the-shelf Republican ideas that poorly fit our current reality. He seemed to have no political priorities beyond stopping Obama. It was impossible to discern what he’d do as president. This isn’t that surprising either; if you’re behind, you’re going to be tearing down the other guy. But it still left a void. I expect a President McCain would likely be far more pragmatic than Bush, simply by virtue of facing solid Democratic majorities in Congress. But he would be whipsawed by Pelosi-Reid on the one side and the remaining Republican power structure of lobbyists and neocons on the other. Not a recipe for success.

So, I’m off to vote at Sligo Creek Elementary School.

 

October 31, 2008

Whither Drudge?

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Has Drudge lost his mojo? If even Mark Halperin, once Drudge’s most devoted MSM acolyte, is turning against him, it must be a sign of some shift in the zeitgeist.

And it’s true. Drudge has been all but irrelevant this campaign season, flogging one pro-McCain story after another, each lamer than the next. The race is tightening! The B girl! Obama kicks the Washington Times off the campaign plane! His talent for the seizing on the most outrageous cable news-friendly stories — those having to do with the base urges of politicians, the darkest trenches of the culture wars and, of course, hurricanes — seems to have deserted him. Has the Drudge moment that began in 1997 with the Monica story finally passed?

We can only hope. I’ve always found Drudge interesting, but his influence over the cable news networks and political journalists is undeserved and arbitrary. They were lost in the wilderness and cowed by the success of Fox News, so they seized upon Drudge – who gave them those links and page views – as a kind of Moses to lead them to … what, exactly? The fallow point for Drudge-ism may have come in September, when the McCain campaign was dominating every news cycle with one outrageous, Drudge-tailored lie and misrepresentation after another. It became so ridiculous that media outlets, against deeply ingrained habits demanding a “both sides do it” false equivalency, began calling BS.

There are a couple of obvious reasons for Drudge’s fall from the pinnacle of MSM influence. As Eric Boehlert noted, this fall’s economic crisis instantly became the dominant political story and overall story — but it’s not a good Drudge story, despite of his fondness for tracking the Dow. Too complicated. Too policy-oriented. Drudge stories have a voyeuristic quality – you’re watching someone else’s trainwreck. But the economic crisis is everybody’s train wreck. We don’t want lurid headlines about how our 401Ks are evaporating.

The other reason is that Drudge went all-in for McCain. McCain is still running a Drudge-friendly campaign, hitting all the hot buttons it possibly can. But it is also a losing campaign, one a majority of people aren’t buying. The big story here is Obama, who’s all uplift and inspiration and cool. Also not a good Drudge story.

Bill Clinton was the best thing that ever happened to Drudge. Obama, who despite his star power cultivates a kind of strategic political blandness, could turn out to be the worst thing that ever happened to Drudge.

 

October 27, 2008

McCain-Derrida 2008

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Expanding on the previous post: it’s interesting that John McCain has ended up presiding over a campaign that is, in its flailing attempts to construct a “narrative” about “character,” a textbook exercise in postmodern literary theory.

Here’s what the Wikipedia entry for post-structuralism says:

Post-structuralists hold that the concept of “self” as a singular and coherent entity is a fictional construct. Instead, an individual comprises conflicting tensions and knowledge claims (e.g. gender, class, profession, etc.). Therefore, to properly study a text a reader must understand how the work is related to his or her own personal concept of self. This self-perception plays a critical role in one’s interpretation of meaning. While different thinkers’ views on the self (or the subject) vary, it is often said to be constituted by discourse(s). Lacan’s account includes a psychoanalytic dimension, while Derrida stresses the effects of power on the self. This is thought to be a component of post-modernist theory.

Steve Schmidt, Rick Davis, Mark Salter and the rest of McCain’s brain trust are constantly manipulating their construct of McCain in various ways, and attempting to tie it to voters’ own collective perception of self (e.g., Joe the Plumber). The result is a set of shifting, unstable discourses in which there is no clear “meaning” or “self.”

 

October 26, 2008

McCain’s narrative problem

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Robert Draper’s New York Times piece on the McCain campaign skillfully maps out the strange remove from which McCain and his aides have been operating, a place that few people outside the world of politics could locate in their own experience. It is an imaginary land built entirely of literary abstractions, including “narrative,” “character,” and “true character moment.” Here is one example:

The campaign was in the throes of an identity crisis by June 24, when a number of senior strategists gathered at 9:30 a.m. in a conference room of McCain’s campaign headquarters in Arlington. As one participant said later, the meeting was convened “because we still couldn’t answer the question, ‘Why elect John McCain?’ ” Considering that the election was less than five months away, this was not a good sign.

“We had a narrative problem,” Matt McDonald recalls. “Obama had a story line: ‘Bush is the problem. I’m not going to be Bush, and McCain will be.’ Our story line, I argued, had to be that it’s not about Bush — it’s Congress, it’s Washington. And Obama would be more about partisanship, while John McCain would buck the party line and bring people together.”

The others could see McDonald’s line of reasoning — and above all, the need to separate McCain from Bush. But the message seemed antiseptic, impersonal. That was when the keeper of McCain’s biography, Mark Salter, took the floor. There’s a reason McCain bucks his party, McDonald remembers Salter arguing. It’s because he puts his country ahead of party. Then the speechwriter, who is not known for his dispassion, began to yell: “We’re talking about someone who was willing to die before losing his honor! He would die!”

OK, then. I can appreciate as well as anyone the difficulty of crafting a consistent national message for a presidential campaign, especially a losing one taking place in a time of crisis. But like most people, I tend to think that the message flows from some basic questions any contender might ask him/herself before running: what do I want to do as president? What problems does the country face at this pass in our history? What programs and policies might I put in place to confront those problems? One perk of running for president is you get to think really, really big.

But there’s very little evidence in this piece, based on months of reporting and interviews with McCain staffers, that McCain and his advisers have done this. His campaign seems based on one idea alone: because of who he is – not what he has done as a senator, not what he wants to do as president, but who he is – John McCain should be president. It’s not like this is nothing. Who John McCain is is clearly an interesting story, and they play around with it just about every conceivable way in successive attempts to sell his candidacy. But nowhere in the piece do you get the sense that McCain is grappling with the issues of the day. Instead, his staff is shown furiously packaging and staging the candidate’s reactions to passing news events such as the Russia-Georgia skirmish, trying to fit them to one of their narratives.

This reaches its low point with the Sept. decision to suspend the campaign, which is supposed to be a “true character moment.” But as Hilzoy notes, the campaign’s response is all about staging and perception and “character,” not, well, character – the qualities a real leader employs to respond to a political crisis:

If a Presidential candidate truly wants to do the right thing in a situation like this, it seems to me that the best thing to do is not to talk about it, and not to do anything dramatic, but to work as hard as you can behind the scenes. Very few difficult policy decisions are improved by having Presidential politics injected into them, and this seemed unlikely to be one of the exceptions. McCain is not on any of the relevant committees, has no obvious expertise in finance, and, by all accounts, does not have the kind of standing in Congress that would let him rally members behind him. That means that it’s not at all clear how his returning to DC would help at all, especially since he could just as easily have tried to round up support for whatever course of action he thought best by phone.

If McCain had actually asked himself what the right thing to do was, it’s hard to see how he could have come up with the answer: suspending my campaign and heading to Washington. If he did think that that was the most helpful thing he could do under the circumstances, I’d have to seriously question both his judgment and his insight into his own capacities.

It may be that there was nothing McCain could have done to turn the tide of the election this year. But he did have an opportunity – the one taken away from him in 2000 – to put his own stamp on the Republican Party. Sure, it might have torn the party apart. But even that would have shown that McCain and his aides were actively thinking about the party and the country, rather than merely endlessly crafting perceptions.

 

October 22, 2008

The Palin wardrobe malfunction

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The RNC has spent $150,000 at Nieman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue outfitting Sarah Palin for the campaign trail. Obviously, this looks terrible – it is terrible. We’re entering what looks to be a severe recession, people are losing their jobs and homes, and the RNC’s VP candidate, who ostentatiously touts herself as a representative of small-town values, burns through 3x the median U.S. annual family income in a matter of weeks on clothing and cosmetics. Republican honchos are apparently not pleased, either – the RNC might as well have given the money directly to the Obama campaign.

More interesting, though, are the ways this illustrates how faux the already-pretty-faux populism of the Republican Party has become, and how Palin’s candidacy so perfectly captures that evolution. Palin’s wardrobe malfunction harks back in various ways to Richard Nixon’s 1952 “Checkers” speech – and it makes Nixon’s cynical exploitation of cultural resentments look heartfelt.

In the midst of the 1952 presidential race, VP candidate Nixon was accused of receiving $18,000 in illegal campaign contributions, and there were rumblings he might be dropped from the ticket. He gave a dramatic national address defending himself – an early example of a direct campaign appeal to the public via TV. “Checkers” was the name of a cocker spaniel a supporter had given the Nixons, the one contribution Nixon admitted to receiving. But the core of the speech was a recounting of the Nixon familiy’s modest family finances: his $20,000 mortgage on a $41,000 house, $4,000 in life insurance, 1950 Oldsmobile, “no stocks and bonds of any type,” a $4,000 bank loan at 4 percent interest, a $3,500 loan from Nixon’s parents, a $500 loan on the life insurance policy:

Well, that’s about it. That’s what we have. And that’s what we owe. It isn’t very much. But Pat and I have the satisfaction that every dime that we have got is honestly ours. I should say this, that Pat doesn’t have a mink coat. But she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat, and I always tell her she would look good in anything.

The speech saved Nixon’s career. And it contains the palpable anger toward “elites” – with their inconvenient, reality-based rules – that has been a constant theme in Republican politics ever since. But Nixon’s anger was at least authentic, rooted as it was in his life experience. Sarah Palin, on the other hand, may sincerely resent the heck out of “elites,” but her attitude has no basis in any real kind of disadvantage. Palin and her husband are quite well-off:

The Palins’ assets seem enviable: a half-million-dollar home on a lake with a float-plane at the dock, two vacation retreats, commercial-fishing rights worth an estimated $50,000 or more and an income last year of at least $230,000. That compares to a median income of $64,333 for Alaskans and $50,740 for Americans in 2007, according to the Census Bureau.

For decades, the Republican Party has managed to ally the interests of big business with those of its base by exploiting Palin’s brand of cultural resentment. But the “culture card” seems increasingly out of tune with current economic realities. It’s also increasingly detached from people’s actual life experience. Nixon earned his resentments the hard way. For post-baby boomers like Palin, it’s mainly an inheritance, a learned set of attitudes and useful political symbols. If anything, this seems to have conferred upon the Palins a perverse sense of entitlement. Which is why there’s something essentially artificial about Sarah Palin, and why her wardrobe choices matter as much as Pat Nixon’s cloth coat did in 1952.

 

October 20, 2008

Spreading the wealth

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John McCain has been using the phrase “spread the wealth” – uttered by Barack Obama in his now-famous conversation with Joe the Plumber – to claim Obama is an advocate of socialism. This is, of course, a ridiculous way to describe Obama’s proposals to make the tax code more progressive, especially coming on the heels of the Bush years. It does show, however, just how far rightward the debate in America has lurched over the past forty years, and just how gestural the populism practiced by both parties really is. (Yes, this is a case of “they both do it.” In economic policy terms, the U.S. political debate still takes place within a very narrow band in which actual wealth redistribution is always constrained. GOP populism, such as it is, is cultural; Democratic populism is economic, but incremental.)

As a corrective, I went back and read some of Huey Long’s speeches, in which he urges people to join his “Share the Wealth Society,” whose purpose is to tax and cap the fortunes of the rich and use the money for massive public support programs:

1. The fortunes of the multimillionaires and billionaires shall be reduced so that no one persons shall own more than a few million dollars to the person. We would do this by a capital levy tax. On the first million that a man was worth, we would not impose any tax. We would say, “All right for your first million dollars, but after you get that rich you will have to start helping the balance of us.” So we would not levy and capital levy tax on the first million one owned. But on the second million a man owns, we would tax that 1 percent, so that every year the man owned the second million dollars he would be taxed $10,000. On the third million we would impose a tax of 2 percent. On the fourth million we would impose a tax of 4 percent. On the fifth million we would impose a tax of 16 percent. On the seventh million we would impose a tax of 32 percent. On the eighth million we would impose a tax of 64 percent ; and on all over the eight million we would impose a tax of 100 percent.

What this would mean is tat the annual tax would bring the biggest fortune down to $3 or $4 million to the person because no one could pay taxes very long in the higher brackets. But $3 or $4 million is enough for any one person and his children and his children’s children. We cannot allow one to have more than that because it would not leave enough for the balance to have something.

2. We propose to limit the amount any one man can earn in one year or inherit to $1 million to the person.

3. Now, by limiting the size of the fortunes and incomes of the big men, we will throw into the government Treasury the money and property from which we will care for the millions of people who have nothing; and with this money we ill provide a home and the comforts of home, with such common conveniences as radio and automobile, for every family in America, free of debt.

Now that’s populism. But it’s worth noting that this is not socialism, precisely, either. Exactly what the government does besides playing Robin Hood is not clear. In any case, if it didn’t catch on in 1935, it’s not going to catch on now (though the top marginal tax rate went from 24 percent in 1929 to 63 percent by 1935, then to 94 percent during World War II).

 

October 16, 2008

Bankrupt

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One thing leaped out at me in Wednesday night’s debate (aside from John McCain’s blinking and aggressively jumpy mien in those split screens): McCain is attempting to sell a set of default Republican policy proposals – tax cuts, spending cuts, health savings accounts – as the solution to our current woes. And this just isn’t credible. The first and most obvious reason is that, no matter how you package them, McCain’s proposals don’t address the financial crisis or the looming recession. Their Reagan-era provenance shows badly. Tax cuts for the wealthy won’t rescue the economy. Tax breaks for the middle class may help, but modestly at best. With the economy in the tank, we’re going to need more spending, not less. And introducing cracks into the employer-based health system is going to create more insecurity, not less. As Joe Klein notes:

I thought McCain was near-incomprehensible when talking about policy, locked in the coffin of conservative thinking and punditry. He spoke in Reagan-era shorthand. He thought that merely invoking the magic words “spread the wealth” and “class warfare” he could neutralize Obama. But those words and phrases seem anachronistic, almost vestigial now. Indeed, they have become every bit as toxic as Democratic social activist proposals–government-regulated and subsidized health care, for example–used to be. We have had 30 years of class warfare, in which the wealthy strip-mined the middle class. The wealth has been “spread” upward.

Part of this can be laid upon McCain’s disengagement from domestic policy. You get the sense his advisers just took all this stuff off the shelf of policies already pre-approved by all the Republican interest groups, tweaked it a bit, and voila.

But a better question is, why were these the only things on the shelf?

Being in power made Republicans complacent on the policy front. When you dominate the political scene, there’s not much need for new policies to expand your coalition. (And, in the case of the Rove project, you don’t believe you need to expand it at all.) But a more profound problem came in the disenagement of Bush himself, as well as the GOP congressional leadership, from pragmatic problem-solving. Normally, dealing with real-world problems is a good way to develop popular policies. The Bush administration, with its disdain for policy details and expertise itself, simply gave up on any meaningful, workable domestic policy innovation after the Medicare drug benefit passed. Bush’s one later attempt, the partial privatization of Social Security via stock market investments, was a disaster – and in retrospect, spectacularly off-base.

 

October 6, 2008

21st century government

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James Fallows notes that we are at an historic pass:

In the short term, a worldwide financial panic and crisis. Just beyond that, the real economic and social problems that come when large numbers of people lose their jobs, their businesses, their investments, their homes, and even larger numbers become fearful about what might happen to them. And then, when we get a minute to think, profound global energy and environmental challenges, security concerns that range from loose nukes to terrorist organizations, plus a couple of ongoing wars and ever-rising medical costs. Just as starters. The United States is still incredibly rich, powerful, and productive. But the current situation is no joke, for America or the world.

Fallows is critiquing John McCain’s choosing this moment to focus on Barack Obama’s past associations with William Ayers. And I have to say, for someone who sees himself as a man of history, it’s sad and ridiculous for McCain to ignore the world-changing events going on around us all in favor of these threadbare character attacks. It can be seen as a legacy of the Bush/Rove attempts to manipulate perceptions even as reality came crashing down around them. Except that McCain isn’t directly responsible for the banking crisis, his history of backing deregulation notwithstanding. He could have put some of the best minds together and come up with something, instead of just ceding the whole issue – and the election – to Obama. I guess he really isn’t a man of history after all. At least, not for this moment in history.

What this does mean, though, is that if he wins, Obama will have giant challenges ahead of him. And I think there will be an opportunity to recast the sluggish 20st century institutions that have gotten us into such trouble over the past eight years (partly through the mismatch of their capacities to emerging problems such as global finance or climate change, partly through misuse and abuse by the Bush White House). Government institutions need to be nimbler, more pro-active, and more transparent, so they can recognize potential catastrophes before things go downhill, effectively communicate the risks to the public, and act effectively without getting bogged down in special interest hell. Not easy. But we’re reaching a point where we really have no choice.

 

September 28, 2008

The perils of stunt campaigning

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John McCain spent a lot of time in Friday’s debate repeating the mantra that Barack Obama was “naive” or “doesn’t understand” various things about foreign policy. But after reading Jonathan Weisman’s account of what happened last week with the budget bailout, it’s impossible not to conclude McCain is the naive one, at least when it comes to legislative brinksmanship.

As it was unfolding – McCain’s “suspension” announcement, the bailout deal taking shape, then apparently falling apart – it was impossible to figure out what was going on. Was McCain – who made such a big deal about returning to Washington to bridge the partisan divide – deliberately trying to derail the discussions by allying himself with the House Republicans, whose proposal was both politically and practically unworkable? That made no sense, even by the chaos-sowing standards of the McCain campaign. But what was going on?

Weisman recounts that McCain came back to Washington only to find himself exploited by the House Republican Study Committee (what is it they study, anyway – Hayek? Jude Wanniski?), looking to derail the talks, and outmaneuvered by the Democrats, who were looking to undermine McCain himself. This came to a head in a surreal meeting in the Cabinet Room:

Obama then jumped in to turn the question on his rival: “What do you think of the [insurance] plan, John?” he asked repeatedly. McCain did not answer.

One Republican in the room said it was clear that the Democrats came into the meeting with a “game plan” aimed at forcing McCain to choose between the administration and House Republicans. “They had taken McCain’s request for a meeting and trumped it,” said this source.

Congressional aides from both parties were standing in the lobby of the West Wing, unaware of the discord inside the Cabinet room, when McCain emerged alone, shook the hands of the Marines at the door and left. The aides were baffled. The plan had been for a bipartisan appearance before the media, featuring McCain, Obama and at least a firm statement in favor of intervention. Now, one of the leading men was gone.

McCain has been in Congress for 25 years. Why did he think he could ride into Washington – in the middle of a campaign, with the Republican Party divided, the Democratic Party united, and the fate of the nation literally on the line – and have everything fall into place around him?

 

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