Ah, to be a neocon hack — to keep all of your sinecures and publishing outlets you need only to either 1)be disastrously wrong about new things, or 2)keep being wrong about things you’ve been extensively and disastrously wrong about in the past.
I wanted to elaborate on what I think is the biggest error being made by Greenwald and Taibbi — namely, the idea that Mitt Romney is a “centrist.”
It’s worth noting here that the original Gush-Bore argument was made by a variety of people across the ideological spectrum, with a presumably wide variety of evaluations of the Clinton/Gore record. Not just Naderites but prominent centrists and Manhattan liberals advanced the argument that the 2000 election was a boring affair with nothing much at stake, helping lead us on the road to Iraq, Sam Alito, massive upper-class tax cuts, and many other terrible and highly consequential things that wouldn’t have happened with Al Gore in the White House. That people are making the same transparently foolish error with a Democratic candidate who has governed to the left of Clinton/Gore and a Republican running to the right of George W. Bush is mind-boggling. But the key error, like last time, seems being inexplicably suckered by the fake “moderation” of the Republican candidate.
To start with the trivial and unknowable question first, I have no idea why so many people are convinced that the Romney who was governor of Massachusetts is the “real” Romney. If I had to guess, I would speculate that instinctively Romney is substantially more conservative on social issues than Reagan or either Bush and no better on economic issues. But, anyway, even if I’m wrong about that it’s completely irrelevant. He’ll govern as the head of a very right-wing Republican coalition and will be working with a Republican Congress that will send him plenty of terrible legislation. He’ll be working with the Republican foreign policy apparatus that will be urging him to attack Iran and will probably succeed. We don’t even want to think about what will happen to the federal courts. What Romney really thinks about this stuff is beside the point. John Tyler isn’t a successful leadership model for someone who wants to run for re-election.
And for that matter, it’s not correct to say that Romney’s record as governor as Massachusetts is meaningfully “moderate.” Sure, it was moderate for a national Republican…but for a Republican who wanted statewide office in Massachusetts it was about as wingnutty as he could get away with. As a commenter astutely noted, Ronald Reagan had by national standards a relatively moderate record as governor of California. Who cares? If you think Romney will govern as a moderate because of his record as governor, your number must be very valuable to people who sell lists to telemarketers.
There’s nothing “centrist” about Mitt Romney, 2012 Republican presidential candidate. He’s be worse-to-far worse than the Obama administration on most issues and better on absolutely none. If you’re bored by the 2012 elections that’s your privilege (in more ways than one), but if you think the stakes are trivial you’re out of your mind.
…By the way, I should mention Rob found a Matt Stoller classic where he pledges his life savings and house to Bernie Maddoff: “Trying to figure out whether I think [Romney winning] would be modestly good or modestly bad. Romney’s more liberal than ppl think.” Jeez, at least Bush had to make some vague gestures towards moderation to convince the rubes. Anyway, if you think that 1896 was a huge win for progressive politics, you will indeed love the Romney administration.
Glenn, as if wanting to provide ammunition for the least charitable interpretation of his earlier Paul-curiosity, recommends this silly Gush-Borism from Matt Taibbi. Both premises of the argument — 1)that Romney can’t win and 2)it doesn’t matter, so boooooring — are too transparently wrong to require elaborate argument. If you think that, just for starters, something like the Ryan budget being passed by the Republican Congress he’d be working with* and a median vote on the Supreme Court to the right of Antonin Scalia don’t matter — nothing I say is going to convince you otherwise. And if you think Romney can’t win you are either way too optimistic about the economy or don’t understand voting behavior. I will add, however, that claiming that Mittens is a “calculating centrist” is a classic example of the “what he really believes” fallacy. Is the Mittens who governed Massachusetts the “real” Romney and the Republican candidate for president the “fake” one? I have no idea! But whatever he really thinks, the latter would actually be the president, and as head of the actually existing Republican coalition he’d govern somewhere to the right of George W. Bush.
*Just to pre-empt fantasies that Mittens would be constrained by a Democratic House, here is an exhaustive list of the previous cases of a party taking over the White House from an incumbent president while losing either house of Congress:
…UPDATE: In comments, Greenwald says that he didn’t mean to endorse the whole piece. Fair enough, although 1)my argument is with Taibbi, 2)I don’t know why Glenn thought his argument was worth citing, and 3)the specific point Glenn cites is profoundly wrong. He discusses the piece here; I get off the bus when he talks about “how trivial are most of the differences between the two candidates.” They really aren’t. This is classic Gush/Borism — whether in its centrist or Naderite variant, when pushed very few people would say that Gore and Bush were exactly the same, only that Bush was harmless and moderate enough and Gore conservative enough that it wouldn’t be a big deal either way. Wrong, and as applied to Obama/Romney wrong again.
As Jamie Dimon says, we need less regulation of banks who take taxpayer-backed money to the casino:
And then, last night, JPMorgan Chase announced it had lost $2 billion on some very big, very dumb hedges. For proponents of stricter financial regulation, Dimon’s giant loss is a huge gift. The final version of the Volcker rule is scheduled to be released in the coming months. Dimon swears that these trades would have been compliant with the previous drafts of the Volcker rule. That will give regulators a strong incentive to make sure future trades like these aren’t.
Clearly, the problem is one of executive compensation. If JP Morgan would just double the CEO’s salary, I’m sure they could get somebody competent. Meritocracy can hardly be expected to function at a measly $21 million a year.
Elizabeth Foley upholds the standards one would expect of a poster at Instapundit. According to Foley, a civil rights lawsuit filed against Joe Arpaio shows that liberals hate free speech:
Let me get this straight. It’s a violation of federal civil rights law now to use derogatory slang or express your opinion about things? Hmmmm….. First Amendment anyone? Oh, that’s right: progressives think “hate speech” is outside the ambit of the First Amendment. The present Administration’s culture of intimidation continues…..
First of all, Foley fails to understand that, at least in the United States, liberals generally see “hate speech” as being protected by the First Amendment. (cf. the recent Supreme Court decision protecting the rights of Fred Phelps, in which the only dissenter was that well-known radical liberal Sam Alito.) So if Arpaio was being sued for saying racist things, this would indeed be problematic.
But what is Arpaio actually being sued for? Why don’t we do what Foley definitely doesn’t want you to do, and click the link she provides:
Federal authorities allege that Arpaio and his office have unconstitutionally and unlawfully targeted Latinos during traffic stops and during crime suppression operations. DOJ alleges that MCSO unlawfully detained Latino drivers and passengers and conducted unconstitutional searches and seizures in addition to illegally targeting Latino workers during worksite raids.
So, in fact, Arpaio is not being sued for saying racist things. He’s being sued for racist conduct that violates federal civil rights law and the 4th and 14th Amendments. Laws cannot be enforced in a racially discriminatory manner. This conduct is, to state the blindingly obvious, not protected by the First Amendment. The fact that Arpaio has written racist things can be used as evidence that he has violated the civil rights of individuals, but the racist writings themselves are not illegal and nobody is saying otherwise. And the neoconfederate stuff about how enforcing civil rights laws and the Constitution reflects a “culture of intimidation” is a nice touch.
In other words, Foley is definitely somebody who should be posting at Instapundit.
Speaking of Josh Trevino, he tries out a line that I’ve seen in a few places — including some liberals who should know better: “Forgot to congratulate Barack Obama for arriving at the same policy position on gay marriage as Rick Perry, Dick Cheney, & Barry Goldwater.” The idea here is to both diminish the significance of Obama’s statement and to pretend that Republicans aren’t actually on the wrong side of history, but it’s a transparent failure on both counts. First of all, with respect to Perry — the only one of the Republicans mentioned who might actually run for something again — he favors a Federal Marriage Amendment, so he and Obama are in fact diametrically opposed. And even before he conformed to Republican orthodoxy Perry never suggested that states should grant same-sex marriage rights even if nothing could stop them, so he and Obama still didn’t agree. Obama, it apparently has to be said, didn’t just say that states should be able to grant marriage equality; he said that they should. As for whether Obama now agrees with the post-2008 Cheney and Barry Goldwater, so what? They have/had progressive views on same-sex marriage! Views, it seems worth noting, that would disqualify anyone from being a Republican candidate for president, which is why one of Trevino’s examples is retired from political life and the other had been dead for nearly 15 years. Even for a “both parties are really the same” argument, this is feeble stuff. Why, if the Supreme Court declared that the 14th Amendment requires marriage equality and Obama praised the decision (which he would), that would mean he agrees with Ted Olson and Anthony Kennedy. I should care about this why? Almost any progressive position is presumably supported by some random non-office holding Republican somewhere.
Another way of explaining how stupid the “but he just agrees with Dick Cheney” line is: Pierre Laval Log Cabin Republicans are using it to explain why they’ll endorse someone who thinks same-sex marriage should be permanently illegal in all 50 states instead. I rest my case.
On the issue of whether Obama’s support was too qualified — stated in its least defensible form here — I recommend Chris Geidner. Look, marriage is primary state issue; legislation requiring states to issue same-sex marriage licenses would be of dubious constitutionality and would have no chance of passing, and proposed constitutional amendments are rube-running we should leave to anti-choicers. The primary example of federal intervention into marriage is the abominable DOMA, whose constitutionality Obama is refusing to defend consistently with the position he took anyway. The only space for legitimate federal intervention would be an equal protection holding by the Supreme Court. The only thing Obama can do about this is appoint judges, and the judges he’s selected are overwhelmingly likely to vote this way. Nothing Obama can say will change Kennedy’s vote. There are, as always, many things Obama can actually be criticized for, but this critique is fundamentally misguided.
…obviously, Glenn Greenwald is in the tank for Obama.
Since Mann and Ornstein have written a book that tells truths inconvenient to high Broderism, their numbers have fallen out of the Sunday talk show rolodex.
Relatedly, the late Dick Lugar wishes to inform you that both parties are equally guilty, and he has some self-refuting evidence for this.
Andrew Cohen has an excellent tribute to the late Nicholas Katzenbach, a key Justice Department official in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations for whom the term “best and brightest” wouldn’t take on a pejorative connotation after the fact. A steadfast supporter of civil rights, Katenbach left a couple of historical traces in addition to the ones Cohen discusses.
Fittingly, he was a named party in several crucial civil rights cases: Katzenbach v. McClung, which upheld the Civil Rights Act of 1964 against a states’ rights challenge, as well as South Carolina v. Katzenbach and Katzenbach v. Morgan, cases sustaining the Voting Rights Act. As Cohen says, it was Katzenbach who pushed for the “pre-clearance” provision that put a stop to states finding creative, formally neutral ways to disenfranchise African Americans. Some of you may also remember the dry wit and insight Katzenbach lent to Eyes on the Prize, the terrific civil rights documentary.
R.I.P.
Obama coming out for marriage equality today was obviously the right thing on the merits. But will it hurt him politically? I argue that 1)such claims are extremely implausible, and 2)arguments that same-sex marriage cost the Democrats in 2004 are empirically wrong:
But I don’t think there’s any reason to believe that Obama doing the right thing today will help Romney in November. It’s important to remember that Obama and Romney were substantially different on gay and lesbian rights before this afternoon. To believe that Romney will benefit significantly from Obama’s embrace of same-sex marriage rights, you would have to believe that there’s a group of voters who 1) care enough about same-sex marriage to make it their top priority in a federal election, but 2) are willing to ignore Obama’s pro-LBGT rights record as long as he doesn’t nominally support same-sex marriage. The number of people who fit into this class is too trivial to be worth worrying about. It’s likely that some-risk adverse advisers cited the argument that same-sex marriage cost John Kerry the election in 2004. But there’s no evidence that this is true. Given that same-sex marriage is significantly more popular now than it was eight years ago, it’s even more unlikely that same-sex marriage would damage Obama now.
And, to reiterate, I don’t mean this as a criticism of Obama. Whatever the effects of Obama’s position-taking. what motivated him to do so is beside the point.
See also E.J. Graff, Greg Sargent, and Ed Kilgore. Benen has a video excerpt.
For reasons I stated earlier this week, the policy and political effects of Obama’s precise stated position on same-sex marriage are relatively trivial. Still, if he’s going to say something about the issue in the context of the dismaying North Carolina vote and Biden’s comments I agree with Jamelle that the right thing is the right thing to do. The pragmatic point cuts both ways; Obama’s incoherent hairsplitting isn’t accomplishing either. (Granted, he can reconcile his opposition to the relatively extreme North Carolina initiative with his stated position, but not his opposition to Prop 2, which tracked his stated position precisely.) It’s time for Obama to explicitly support marriage equality.
…good for him — a historic moment. More soon here.
Jonah Goldberg’s resume-padding might be the funniest example of the phenomenon since William Hammesfahr, nominee for the Nobel Prize awarded annually for Excellence and Erroneous, Politically Convenient Long-Distance Diagnoses. You might call it a National Review tradition. (I’m surprised that K-Lo didn’t write a letter so they could call William Cheshire a “Nobel Prize nominee” too.) Surely he deserves to be a Nobel nominee just as much as Rush Limbaugh!
They should send some webcam footage of the NRO offices to a random AMPAS member so every visible member of the staff can subsequently be referred to as an “Academy Award nominee.”
Paul Campos, Above the Law 2011 Lawyer of the Year
Erik Loomis, HNN Cliopatria 2011 Best Series of Posts
