Politics

by hilzoy

I wrote earlier about the robocalls in North Carolina. Briefly: a group called Women’s Voices Women Vote made robocalls that seemed to suggest that voters had to mail in a packet of stuff in order to be able to vote. The calls were made after the registration deadline for the NC primary, and caused confusion among registered voters who thought they might not be eligible if they didn’t mail in the packet. In this post, I wanted to lay out the facts as I understand them.

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by hilzoy

The NYT on John McCain’s health care speech:

“Mr. McCain’s health care plan would shift the emphasis from insurance provided by employers to insurance bought by individuals, to foster competition and drive down prices. To do so he is calling for eliminating the tax breaks that currently encourage employers to provide health insurance for their workers, and replacing them with $5,000 tax credits for families to buy their own insurance. (…)

Some health care experts question whether those tax credits would offer enough money to pay for new health insurance plans. The average cost of an employer-funded insurance plan is $12,106 for a family, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, a health policy group. Paul B. Ginsburg, the president of the Center for Studying Health System Change, a nonpartisan research organization financed by foundations and government agencies, said, “For a lot of people, the tax credits he’s talking about would not be enough to afford coverage.””

Not everyone has an extra $7,106 just lying around, waiting to be spent on health insurance premiums. What, I wonder, would happen to them? And wouldn’t you think that eliminating tax breaks for employers who offer health insurance might make some of those employers decide to stop offering it altogether? I would, and I’m not even a member of the party whose entire economic platform is designed around the thought that people are so exquisitely sensitive to tax rates that even a relatively small cut in the capital gains tax will unleash great raging torrents of entrepreneurial energy. McCain is; and yet, curiously enough, he doesn’t consider this possibility. Here’s what he says about employer-based health insurance: “Many workers are perfectly content with this arrangement, and under my reform plan they would be able to keep that coverage. Their employer-provided health plans would be largely untouched and unchanged.” Except for the ones whose employers stopped offering health insurance, ha ha ha.

Besides, you might be thinking …

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by hilzoy

Here is his statement:

Brief excerpt:

“The person I saw yesterday was not the person that I met 20 years ago. His comments were not only divisive and destructive, but I believe that they end up giving comfort to those who prey on hate, and I believe that they do not portray accurately the perspective of the black church.

They certainly don’t portray accurately my values and beliefs. And if Reverend Wright thinks that that’s political posturing, as he put it, then he doesn’t know me very well. And based on his remarks yesterday, well, I might not know him as well as I thought, either.

Now, I’ve already denounced the comments that appeared in these previous sermons. As I said, I had not heard them before. I gave him the benefit of the doubt in my speech in Philadelphia, explaining that he has done enormous good in the church, he’s built a wonderful congregation, the people of Trinity are wonderful people, and what attracted me has always been their ministry’s reach beyond the church walls.

But when he states and then amplifies such ridiculous propositions as the US government somehow being involved in AIDS; when he suggests that Minister Farrakhan somehow represents one of the greatest voices of the 20th and 21st century; when he equates the United States’ wartime efforts with terrorism, then there are no excuses. They offend me, they rightly offend all Americans, and they should be denounced. And that’s what I’m doing very clearly and unequivocally today.”

Here’s the Q and A:

Excerpt:

“In some ways, what Rev. Wright said yesterday directly contradicts everything that I’ve done during my life. It contradicts how I was raised, and the setting in which I was raised; it contradicts my decisions to pursue a career of public service; it contradicts the issues that I’ve worked on politically; it contradicts what I’ve said in my books; I’ve; it contradicts what I said in my convention speech in 2004; it contradicts my announcement; it contradicts everything I’ve been saying on this campaign trail.

And what I tried to do in Philadelphia was to provide a context, and to lift up some of the contradictions and complexities of race in America, of which Rev. Wright is a part and we’re all a part, and try to make something constructive out of it. But there wasn’t anything constructive out of yesterday. All it was was a bunch of rants that aren’t grounded in truth. And I can’t construct something positive out of that. I can understand it; people do all sorts of things. And as I said before, I continue to believe that Rev. Wright has been a leader in the South Side, I think that the church he built is outstanding, I think that he has preached in the past some wonderful sermons, he provided valuable contributions to my family, but at a certain point, if what somebody says contradicts what you believe so fundamentally, and then he questions whether or not you believe it, in front of the National Press Club, then that’s enough.”

Watch the whole thing. If you can’t watch it, and are wondering whether this is just some sort of pro forma statement, trust me on this: it isn’t. He is outraged and angry, and (I think) genuinely saddened by what Rev. Wright said.

As for me…

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by publius

Admittedly, Obama’s wording about working class Pennsylvanians was less than ideal. What’s interested me though is not so much his words, but the intensity of the reaction to them. What explains it? It’s not enough to cite “Kinsley Gaffe.” Even assuming he imprudently said what he really thinks (i.e., a Category II Kinsley), the follow-up question is why this particular belief would trigger such an intense backlash. One obvious reason is that it’s an obnoxious way to word his point. The less obvious one, though, is rooted in so-called “liberal self-hatred.”

The best way to understand this phenomenon is to return to the run-up to the Iraq War. Near the beginning of Heads in the Sand, Yglesias spends some time discussing the curious tendency of respected, liberal foreign policy voices to spend their scarce time bashing extreme marginal left-wing views (either imaginary or Ward Churchill-esque). I haven’t read much, so he may go on to explain why anti-war liberals spent so much time attacking the extreme left rather than the imminent war. My theory, though, is that the focus on the margins illustrates liberal guilt and inferiority.

More specifically, I think far too many liberals — particularly those in positions with political or journalistic influence — have deeply internalized conservative criticisms. I suppose these criticisms go back a long way (e.g., Adlai Stevenson), but they seem to have gained greater resonance in the past twenty-five years or so with the rise of Reagan and the 1994 election.

As a result, far too many liberals — particularly circa 2002-03 — had internalized the view that they were snobby, that they were elitist, that they were too anti-religion, or that they were insufficiently patriotic in the eyes of the American public. It’s not so much that they actually were any of these things (at least in any great number). It’s that they feared (deeply feared) being perceived in this way by the American public. To borrow from Dylan, a lot of issues came and went, but the Great Dirty Hippie never escaped their mind.

This curious self-loathing — the shame and guilt associated with perfectly valid and moral views — explains the rush to “condemn the marginal” in the lead up to war. It’s quite telling that, as the country marched off to a horribly misguided war, many liberal skeptics were more concerned with clarifying that they were not mindlessly liberal hippie pacifists. In doing so, they gave considerable political cover to the war advocates.

But the Iraq War is merely one example. Liberal self-loathing is evident in a number of contexts. In fact, you might consider it the theoretical foundation of the “Wanker of the Day.” To me, what truly makes one a wanker is when you care more about avoiding perceptions of hippie-ness than about the substance and politics of the underlying issue.

The 2005 Social Security debate provides another great example of this dynamic. What infuriated me about the media coverage was the rampant wankerousness. I got the sense that individual journalists and pundits — particularly Tim Russert — cared more about proving their non-hippie bona fides than about the substance of an extremely reckless proposed change to the most successful, efficient government program in American history. Rather than looking closely how many people depend upon the Social Security system, they chose to draw a line in the sand and say “here is where I’ll prove I’m not a wild liberal.” In doing so, and similarly to Iraq, people like Russert put the burden of proof on Democrats to explain what (unnecessary) changes they would propose.

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by publius

Rather inexplicably, I’m only now reading James Mann’s Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (it’s good). If anything, though, Mann’s book has made me somewhat less angry at the individual neoconservatives responsible for our disastrous Iraq policy. My net levels of anger haven’t changed — it’s just that I’ve reallocated some of that anger from these individuals to the American public. Specifically, I’ve realized that neoconservatism is not so much a cause, but a manifestation of larger political movements. Wolfowitz did not lead a Lenin-esque vanguard — he was himself created by underlying structural forces. Thus, blaming the individual neoconservatives lets the American public (and American nationalists in particular) escape their own culpability.

To back up, Mann does a good job laying out the basic intellectual foundations of neoconservatism, including its Straussian influences. Personally, I think the whole “Straussian noble lie” is a conspiracy theory too far. The real influence of Strauss upon modern politics was his Manichean worldview of absolute good and absolute evil. Evil (or tyranny) existed, Strauss believed, and strong action was necessary to confront it.

The Straussian legacy that matters, then, is his absolute certainty in “our” own goodness and in the “Other’s” evilness. That’s the true theoretical underpinning of neoconservatism — everything they espouse follows if you are certain that you are good and certain that you are fighting evil. If arms control treaties or the UN or torture statutes prohibit fighting evil, then they must be put aside. It’s as un-Burkean as you can get. As Andrew Sullivan has explained at length, doubt is a far better foundation for conservatives. [UPDATE: One point I should have stressed better is that the most practical harm of neoconservatism is its extreme over-reliance on military force to solve problems and to pursue goals. This militancy, in turn, is made possible by underlying certainty of one’s correctness.]

But back to the lecture at hand, the neoconservative certainty had a number of practical implications in both the Cold War and beyond. Pre-1989, excessive certainty about the evils of communism provided the foundation of the opposition to Kissinger’s détente (which also provided the impetus for Reagan’s challenge to Ford and his ultimate ascension). Post-Cold War, the same excessive certainty led to the Wolfowitz/Libby worldview that American foreign policy should consciously attempt to maintain a global monopoly on power. Even back in 1992, obstacles such as the UN were being theoretically jettisoned for ad hoc coalitions that some would later call “willing.”

All of these intellectual currents combined in spectacularly disastrous fashion in Iraq, with certainty being their theoretical foundation. The certainty of our own good allowed us to ignore obstacles to our desires (both laws and IAEA reports). Similarly, the certainty of the “Other’s” evilness allowed us to rationalize overthrowing a secular Arab nationalist regime in the name of fighting transnational radical fundamentalists who viewed them as infidels.

It’s all very depressing, and there’s a tendency to blame it all on people like Wolfowitz and Perle. But we can’t blame them alone. Ironically enough, blaming these individuals only makes it easier for the future Wolfowitzes of the world to start new wars. To see where the rotten apples came from, you have to turn back to the tree.

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by hilzoy

I’m late getting to John McCain’s speech on the housing crisis, in which he promised to do next to nothing to help homeowners, to convene a meeting of accountants, to cut taxes, and, in a surprising break with most economists here on planet earth, to respond to the present financial problems by cutting regulation [UPDATE: as von notes, this is McCain’s response to what he calls “an explosion of complex financial instruments that weren’t particularly well understood by even the most sophisticated banks, lenders and hedge funds” As von correctly notes, McCain does propose new regulation on mortgage lenders. END UPDATE.] The idea that overregulation is at the heart of our present predicament might seem counterintuitive. But the fact that McCain believes it is a lot easier to understand when you realize that his chief economic advisor and general campaign co-chair is Phil Gramm, who seems never to have met a financial regulation he didn’t want to destroy.

Gramm, who has been described as “McCain’s econ brain” and “the expert he turns to on the subject,” didn’t just oppose financial regulations in general. He helped to create the conditions for the mortgage crisis, and others, in quite specific ways. Lisa Lerer at Politico has more:

“The general co-chairman of John McCain’s presidential campaign, former Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas), led the charge in 1999 to repeal a Depression-era banking regulation law that Democrat Barack Obama claimed on Thursday contributed significantly to today’s economic turmoil. (…)

A year after the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act repealed the old regulations, Swiss Bank UBS gobbled up brokerage house Paine Weber. Two years later, Gramm settled in as a vice chairman of UBS’s new investment banking arm.

Later, he became a major player in its government affairs operation. According to federal lobbying disclosure records, Gramm lobbied Congress, the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department about banking and mortgage issues in 2005 and 2006.

During those years, the mortgage industry pressed Congress to roll back strong state rules that sought to stem the rise of predatory tactics used by lenders and brokers to place homeowners in high-cost mortgages.

For his work, Gramm and two other lobbyists collected $750,000 in fees from UBS’s American subsidiary. In the past year, UBS has written down more then $18 billion in exposure to subprime loans and other risky securities and is considering cutting as many as 8,000 jobs.”

The 1999 bill that Gramm sponsored overturned the Glass-Steagall Act, which (among other things) separated investment banks from ordinary banks. Gramm’s bill was an enormously important piece of financial legislation, and by allowing banks and brokerages to merge, it set in place some of the conditions that hampered scrutiny of mortgage-backed securities, and made the damage from the present meltdown harder to contain. As Paul Krugman wrote last week:

“I’d argue that aside from Alan Greenspan, nobody did as much as Mr. Gramm to make this crisis possible.”

Isn’t that comforting?

But Gramm isn’t just involved in this economic meltdown…

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