Politics

by hilzoy

As a lot of people have noted, John McCain is opposed to Sen. Jim Webb’s bill expanding veterans’ educational benefits. Brian Beutler writes about John McCain’s record on veterans’ health care:

“Times have changed since McCain needed veterans services so urgently. And for many of those thirty-five years, McCain, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, the candidate who talks the best talk on veterans issues, has demonstrated a tendency to work against veterans’ interests, voting time after time against funding and in favor of privatizing services–in other words, of rolling back the VA’s improvements by supporting some of the same policies that wrecked Walter Reed.

During a March 2005 Senate budget debate, McCain voted to kill an amendment that would have “increase[d] veterans medical care by $2.8 billion in 2006.” That amendment lacked an assured funding stream, but lest one mistake this incident for a maverick’s stance against budget-busting, there’s more. Just a year later McCain voted against an amendment that would have “increase[d] Veterans medical services funding by $1.5 billion in FY 2007 to be paid for by closing corporate tax loopholes.” Two days after it failed, he voted to kill “an assured stream of funding for veterans’ health care that [would] take into account the annual changes in the veterans’ population and inflation to be paid for by restoring the pre-2001 top rate for income over $1 million, closing corporate tax loopholes and delaying tax cuts for the wealthy.” That amendment died quietly, forty-six to fifty-four.

In September 2006 McCain voted to table an amendment to a Defense appropriations bill that would have prevented the department from contracting out support services at Walter Reed. The amendment was indeed tabled–by a vote of fifty to forty-eight, the sort of margin a true veterans’ senator might have been able to flip if he really cared about veterans’ healthcare.

“John McCain voted against veterans in 2004, ’05, ’06 and ’07,” says Jeffrey David Cox, who spent twenty-two years as a VA nurse before moving to the American Federation of Government Employees, where he serves as secretary-treasurer (AFGE represents employees of several federal agencies, including the VA). Cox is right. Under Bush, McCain has voted for measures that target so-called Priority-7 and Priority-8 veterans (those whose injuries are not service-related and whose incomes are above a low minimum threshold) for annual fees, higher co-pays and even suspended enrollment. Priority-7 veterans without dependents earn more than $24,644 annually. Priority-8 veterans without dependents earn an annual minimum of $27,790.”

I am wary of using this as a political issue if the facts aren’t there. On the other hand, if the facts are there, then it ought to be a political issue. So, even though I trust Brian Beutler, I decided to check.

I put the wonky results, with links to all the roll call votes, below the fold. Short version: during the last four years (all I checked), McCain has supported basic appropriations for vets. However, when there are two competing proposals, he generally chooses the cheaper one, and often, when only one proposal to increase benefits is available, he opposes it. But, as Beutler says, this doesn’t seem to be because he is in general in favor of fiscal discipline: in 2006, in particular, he voted against several bills that actually tried not just to increase spending on vets, but to pay for it, in one case voting for an identical bill that was not paid for.

If you think that we ought to be spending more money on veterans’ benefits and health care, it’s not a very good record. (Brandon Friedman thinks it’s part of a larger pattern. I think he’s right, though I haven’t marched through all the bills I’d need to look at to lay it out.)

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by hilzoy

There are approximately a million stories today about Congressional Republicans’ reactions to their loss of what should have been a safe district in Mississippi. Josh Marshall responds:

“When you step back for a second, what’s weird is that we even see the Mississippi special election result as a surprise. The Republican party is tightly defined around George W. Bush. And his job approval has not consistently gotten out of the low thirties (deep crisis numbers) for almost two years. And amazingly, over that period, the congressional party has made little attempt to get out of under his mantle.”

The fact that Congressional Republicans have been going along with Bush for so long, even after the 2006 elections, is pretty amazing. As Matt Yglesias notes:

“After the spanking the GOP took in the midterms, conventional wisdom held that congressional Republicans would tell Bush that either he was going to embrace Baker-Hamilton and moves toward winding-up the Iraq War, or else he was going to face mass defections. The shrill blogger set, reading recent history, accurately predicted that no such thing would happen and we were right.”

Not on the war, not on S-CHIP, not on anything. It’s pretty astonishing behavior for a group of people whose jobs depend on getting people to vote for them.

[UPDATE: throughout what follows, by ‘Republicans’ I mean Republicans in Congress’, not rank and file GOP members. I should have been clearer about that. END UPDATE]

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by hilzoy

Yesterday, I wrote about John McCain’s chief political advisor, Charlie Black, and his history of being a paid shill for some of the world’s worst dictators. But I left one of his clients for a later post, because Jonas Savimbi truly is a special case.

Those of you who were too young to be paying attention during the 1980s might not remember Jonas Savimbi and his organization, UNITA. Briefly: there had been armed resistance to Portuguese rule for years, but when Angola became independent of Portugal in 1975, a full-bore civil war broke out. It lasted, with a few short breaks, from 1975 until Savimbi’s death in 2002. It started as a scramble for power after independence, heightened by the Cold War. (Apparently, declassified documents show that we intervened before the USSR and Cuba. I didn’t know that.) Savimbi, who started out as a Maoist and a Portuguese agent, became one of our guys (he was also heavily supported by the apartheid government of South Africa); his main rival, the actual government of Angola, was supported by the USSR and Cuba.

During the 1980s, this turned into a full-bore Cold War proxy fight. This did not have to happen. We could have let Angola be. Its government was dreadful, but Savimbi was no rose either; even if you think that we should intervene in other countries, when a country seems to have a choice between two awful options, there’s no real point in choosing sides, and certainly no point in plunging a country into civil war to get your side to win. This would not have prevented civil war — Savimbi was supported by South Africa, which had a policy of trying to bog down the states near its borders in civil wars — but it would have meant not actively contributing to the destruction of a country for no good reason. Alternatively, we could have chosen to support Savimbi, who was even more dreadful, in a civil war.

We chose to support Savimbi, with predictable results:

“The tap that Kissinger had turned on, and Carter had turned off, was opened again in 1981, when Ronald Reagan approved a covert aid package for Unita. South African Special Forces were good at what they did. Unita’s performance was already much improved by comparison with its half-hearted exertions against the Portuguese. Even so, Washington’s financial and diplomatic backing was an immense boost. The country, which was now a Cold War cockpit, remained undefeatable, but it could be comprehensively ruined, and this is what happened. The figures for war-related deaths, and child deaths in particular, leapt dramatically in the 1980s. Towns and villages were deserted or shelled to extinction. The countryside was a living death. There were landmines and limbless people everywhere (there still are). Young men were press-ganged into the burgeoning rabble of the Angolan Army, where the discipline of the elite units could not hope to reach. Unita kidnapped and abducted its fighters or picked up the homeless, traumatised survivors of Government offensives. Some of them were so-called ‘child soldiers’ – ‘premature adults’ is a better description. Provincial capitals became slum havens for hundreds of thousands of displaced people. Savimbi’s struggle, subsumed though it was in a large-scale offensive driven by South Africa and paid for in the United States, had come home to Angola.”

We did not have to make this choice. Angola’s government was bad, but all-out civil war was much, much worse for the Angolan people. What Charlie Black was lobbying for, in the 1980s, was enough US assistance to allow Jonas Savimbi to mount that all-out civil war, and to destroy his country.

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by publius

Today’s Post article on the ugly racism that Obama campaign workers have faced is disappointing, though (sadly) unsurprising. It’s also been humiliating — as a native Kentuckian — to read some of the openly racist sentiments being expressed to reporters on the ground there. But let’s face it — race is playing a big role not just there, but throughout the Midwestern white working classes.

That’s not saying all white working-class Americans feel this way, or even that most do. But a lot do — and everyone knows it. And that’s a big reason why Clinton is up by such obscene margins in West Virginia and Kentucky. We should stop pretending otherwise. But that said, I think Obama supporters should see this ugly reality as an opportunity — and as a motivation to double down in support and effort. More below the fold…

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by hilzoy

Since McCain’s Convention CEO and one of his campaign’s regional managers resigned when it came out that they had been lobbying for the government of Myanmar, I figured it was only a matter of time before more information about the clients of the many lobbyists who populate the McCain campaign began to come out. And lo! here’s a rundown on some of them.

I’m going to concentrate on Charlie Black. He’s generally described as McCain’s chief political advisor. He was the chair of BKSH & Associates, a lobbying firm, until last month, when he announced he was stepping down to work on McCain’s campaign fulltime. There’s a good profile of him here:

““The Republican Party’s quintessential company man,” as one friend calls him, Mr. Black has worked in every Republican presidential campaign since 1972, and sometimes a couple each season, being diplomat enough to get along with both sides in some of the fiercest rivalries.

In between, and often at the same time, he has parlayed his political connections to become one of Washington’s most successful lobbyists, making him an embodiment of the city’s permanent establishment.

Now 60, Mr. Black is easing Mr. McCain into his new role as standard bearer for a party that the senator has clashed with and even snubbed over the years. Mr. Black has done so in the quiet way that has made him such an enduring player in Washington.”

Here’s Ken Silverstein quoting an offline piece from Spy, which has a different take on Black’s record:

“An indispensable read about Black’s past–sadly not available online–was a wonderful 1992 piece by Art Levine published in Spy magazine, titled “Publicists of the Damned.” (…) Back then Black was the lead partner at the lobbying firm called Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly. (…)

Spy reviewed the operations of a number of top beltway lobbying firms and ranked Black, Manafort as the “sleaziest” of the firms it surveyed, giving it a “blood-on-the-hands” rating of four. That was a full bloody hand more than the rating accorded to lobbyist Edward van Kloberg, whose clients included Saddam Hussein and Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania.

Black, Manafort’s own clients at the time included Mobuto Sese Seko of Zaire, one of the most kleptocratic rulers of all time, Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, also known for stealing a few billion dollars, and the murderous Angolan rebels known as UNITA. “The well-compensated flacks at Black, Manafort stand at the pinnacle of organizational apologism,” Spy noted. “Name a corrupt despot, and Black Manafort will name the account.””

Over the years, Black has represented some truly dreadful people. In what follows, I will leave aside domestic clients, like Blackwater, Philip Morris, and Chiquita (which pleaded guilty to paying Colombian terrorists last year.) I will also ignore Black’s work on behalf of dictators who are bad but not truly horrific: for instance, Gnassingbé Eyadéma of Togo. I’m just going to focus on two groups: first, Black’s work for people who used disinformation to get us into the Iraq war, and second, the truly horrible dictators Charlie Black represented.

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by publius

I’m sure pundits and historians alike will be arguing for many years about why Clinton — who enjoyed such enormous advantages going in — lost the Democratic primary. (See, e.g., Karen Tumulty). Personally, I think the explanation is quite simple. Clinton lost the nomination because of Iraq. Period.

While that explanation seems overly simplistic, it’s more complex than you might think. Iraq hurt her not so much because she supported the war, but because the war interacted with her campaign — at this particular point in history — in a number of complex, harmful ways. Thus, what’s truly interesting is not so much that Iraq sunk her candidacy, but the particular manner in which it did so. Below the fold, I’ve listed several specific reasons why Iraq doomed her candidacy. While she deserves blame for some of these reasons, others must be chalked up to cruel Fortune.

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by hilzoy

First thought: it’s worth taking a step back and noticing that the gas tax pander didn’t work. At least, it’s hard for me to believe that Obama would have come as close as he did to winning Indiana in the face of the flap over Rev. Wright, the possible involvement of Limbaugh Republicans, and so on, if the idea of a gas tax holiday had really caught on.

Senator Clinton gambled on the stupidity of the voters, and she lost.* That is truly worth celebrating.

Second, the NYT:

“Clinton advisers acknowledged that the results of the primaries were far less than they had hoped, and said they were likely to face new pleas even from some of their own supporters for her to quit the race. They said they expected fund-raising to become even harder now; one adviser said the campaign was essentially broke, and several others refused to say whether Mrs. Clinton had loaned the campaign money from her personal account to keep it afloat.

The advisers said they were dispirited over the loss in North Carolina, after her campaign — now working off a shoestring budget as spending outpaces fund-raising — decided to allocate millions of dollars and full days of the candidate and her husband in the state. Even with her investment, Mr. Obama outspent Mrs. Clinton in both states.”

This is where the rubber hits the road. If the campaign is “essentially broke”, and if she doesn’t somehow manage to raise money on tonight’s results, then the Clintons no longer get to decide whether to stay in the race, period. They get to decide whether to stay in the race on their own nickels. I imagine this might be a sobering thought. (But why? They can spare the money more easily than most of their supporters.)

Third: as I’ve said in comments, I think the fact that she has cancelled her public appearances for tomorrow is serious. God willing, she will drop out, and spare us any continuation of this nightmare.

Fourth: it occurred to me this evening that if Obama is the nominee, it will be the first time in my life that someone I have supported in a contested primary has been the nominee. Starting with McGovern in 1968 and continuing for the next forty years, the people I have supported have an unbroken record of failure in primaries. It was almost enough to make me consider coming out for Kucinich or Gravel, just to jinx them. (Though both of them seem to have done a fine job jinxing themselves, without any help from me.)

If Obama gets the nomination, I will scarcely know what to make of it. It will be almost as strange as seeing the sun rise in the west, or cockatiels quoting Proust. These things just don’t happen to me.

I hope I have the chance to get used to it. It sounds like fun. 😉

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by hilzoy

A few days ago, publius wrote about some of them. I just want to expand on one of his points.

The gas tax holiday is bad policy. Clinton has to know this. If she does, then she has come out in favor of it for purely political reasons: because she thinks it will give her an edge over Obama. (Note: this is the charitable reading of her conduct. I assume she’s much too smart to actually believe that this is a good idea.)

Moreover, this didn’t have to be an issue in the Democratic primary. It’s not as though it was already on the table and had to be discussed. Clinton made it an issue, and is running on it. Which is to say: she has not only come out in favor of a bad idea for political reasons; she has introduced a bad idea into the Democratic primary, and she is running on her willingness to embrace it.

Clinton is presently making a big deal about the fact that she is “a fighter”. After this primary season, I don’t think there can be any doubt about her willingness to fight. What Clinton’s gas tax proposal tells me is what she’s willing to fight for. She is not willing to fight for what she thinks is right in the face of public pressure. She’s not even willing to restrict her compromises to cases in which public pressure to do something stupid already exists. She will sacrifice principle and the public good when it’s expedient for her to do so.

Which is to say: she’s a fighter, all right, but what she fights for is her own interest, not what she thinks is right.

Based on this episode, how much confidence can we have that she’ll really be wiling to go to the mat to combat global warming? None at all. Based on her vote for the Iraq War Resolution — a vote that was, at the time, seen (wrongly) as one that Democrats had to cast if they wanted to secure their own political viability — how much confidence can we have that she’ll be willing to go to the mat to protect our national interests or to prevent a pointless, stupid, destructive war? Likewise, none at all.

If there’s anything we should have learned from George W. Bush, it’s that generalized combativeness is not a good thing in a President. We need not just someone who’s willing to fight in general, but someone who’s willing to fight for the right things. If you think that the right things just are the things that advance Hillary Clinton’s political interests, then there’s no problem. But if you want someone who is willing to fight for good policies that are in our national interest, that actually address serious problems, then it’s worth recognizing that while she is more than willing to fight, she is not willing to fight for that.

***

One other note:

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