Over the weekend, Thomas Frank wrote, Right-Wing Obstruction Could Have Been Fought: an Ineffective and Gutless Presidency’s Legacy Is Failure. Nothing that Frank ever writes should be dismissed, but sadly, the article doesn’t live up to its title. It is actually about what Obama’s legacy will be, and he takes what I think is a rather naive view. Reading it, one would get the impression that Frank actually believed all Obama’s wonderful rhetoric during the 2008 campaign. And I don’t think that’s true; Frank is far too clearheaded a political observer.

In 2008, I was far too involved in creating devices to hung on airplanes to stream realtime video to a computer on the ground 15 km away to be paying too much attention to politics. Maybe it was because I wasn’t terribly involved that I could see that Obama was just another New Democrat—a centrist who was as revolutionary are George III. It was only in 2010 that we found out that Obama actually thought of himself as a “blue dog” Democrat—a conservative democrat, and given how conservative the Democratic Party has become over the last 25 years, that’s pretty conservative.

What’s sad—tragic really—about Obama, is that in his mind, he probably really did think he could bring the parties together. After all, he truly was a centrist! Unlike with Frank who can’t be as naive as he implies, I do think Obama was that naive. But I could have told him before he got into office. During the Clinton years, I was a libertarian. And I was shocked, but amused, that conservatives ranted about how he was a socialist. It didn’t matter that Clinton was the most conservative Democratic President since Woodrow Wilson, the Republicans were going to pretend that he was Joseph Stalin, even as they would have embraced him had he been a Republican.

So I know just how Obama’s presidential library is going to talk about him. It will focus on Obamacare. It will focus on the huge deficit when he came in and how much lower it was when he got out. It will talk about how the economy improved. And there will be the other minor accomplishments like Dodd-Frank. What there won’t be is a lot of talk about fundamentally transforming Washington. And there won’t be that for two reasons. First, Obama never meant by that what the people who voted for him thought it meant. To him, the two parties were going to meet in between Obama who was already in the middle and the far right; no one voted for that, but that was what was in Obama’s mind. Second, Obama didn’t even manage to accomplish that because however lowly I may think of Obama, the Republicans really are just a crazy, power for power’s sake party.

Unfortunately, Kevin Drum responded to Frank’s article with his own, If the Left Wants Scapegoats, Just Look in the Mirror. Drum is a very good and insightful writer; I like him a lot. But as wrong as Frank is, Drum is even wronger. He argues that Obama did only what he could because America just isn’t that liberal, and the fault goes to people like Drum and Frank who couldn’t convince them of the rightness of our cause. Well, that’s an argument I hear a lot. And it just isn’t true. I care about economics, but let’s look at a social issue: same sex marriage. That’s an area where Obama just followed along behind public opinion. Thomas Frank is right to characterize the last six years as “an ineffective and gutless presidency.”

Then, after the 2010 election, Obama acted as though it were an indication of what “America” wanted. What it was, was what the conservative base wanted. Obama’s young and diverse base didn’t show up at the polls in high enough numbers. This is Political Science 101 stuff. But he at least pretended that he didn’t know this. He pretended that the nation had sent him a message. And he allowed the catastrophic Budget Control Act of 2011, which is a big reason our economic recovery is so anemic to this day.

Ultimately, by 2011, I don’t think that Obama was naive. He really did want a Grand Bargain. He really was a Blue Dog Democrat all along. He really was more concerned about the budget deficit in 2011 than he was 9% unemployment. But I think he did about as well as could be expected. And on bad days, I think he is about the best we can expect from a president in a time of billion dollar campaigns.

In the end, it doesn’t matter. Obama will get his library and it will say he was great, just like all the other ones say that their presidents were great. And none of it matters. Because after he leaves office, Obama will have a great life. Why shouldn’t he? They all do. Bush the Younger had a catastrophic presidency, but he is still admired by huge numbers of people, he’s still invited to all the best parties, he’s still rich and powerful. All the same will be true of Obama. It won’t matter to him.

As for how “the people” will remember Obama? I wrote about this last year, Obama and Buono and Christie:

And it’s because of that that Thomas Frank is mostly right about Obama and Kevin Drum is totally wrong.

I have started a habit of most nights quickly checking out what was on the MSNBC primetime lineup. Normally, it doesn’t take more than ten minutes, because all the shows are pretty much the same, and they are just reporting stuff that I’ve already read about. But in doing that last night, I came upon the image at the left. It was from yet another anti-immigrant protest. It is notable that most of the people in it were African American. It reminds me of a parallel universe Dean Martin, “Everybody Hates Somebody.”

That wasn’t what caught my eye, however. I was shocked to see that sign, “You Can’t Fix Stupid!!” I know the line. It is from stand-up comedian Ron White. Now, I really don’t much like him. I admire his skill. Much of his material is funny. But I don’t like the whole, “whisky-soaked, cigar smoking, redneck who got rich and smokes pot” routine. For one thing, it strikes me the way most country music does: inauthentic. And not only does his audience seem to eat up the act, they think he’s wise. (And just to offend educated liberals too: I have a similar problem with Louis CK.)

Despite my general problems with him, White’s “You Can’t Fix Stupid” routine is actually kind of sweet—or as close as he comes to it. He’s saying that you shouldn’t marry for looks (actually “looks alone”). He says that you can fix pretty much any physical defect (all referred to females, of course; he looks like he might be getting to lap band surgery territory himself); but you can’t fix stupid. I have my own problems with this because I think the whole idea of intelligence is kind of a myth. But the overall idea is that you should marry someone because of what’s inside, not what’s outside. So hooray!

But what on earth is a sign that reads “You Can’t Fix Stupid!!” doing at an anti-immigration demonstration? I really don’t know. I fear that it is saying that people from Mexico and Central America are stupid. I hate to think that. In addition to everything else, it is demonstrably false. An unaccompanied 7-year-old who makes it all the way from El Salvador through Mexico to the United States boarder, is not stupid. And in general, the people who come here illegally are the most intelligent and motivate of people. I have far more respect for them than some random American whose only brilliance was that he was born here.

The problem is, I can’t find another compelling explanation for the sign. It could refer to the government’s response to the crisis. But I really think that’s reaching. If we can’t fix the stupidity of the government, then why are these people demonstrating. And barring any truly bizarre explanations, like the protesters also selling tickets to an upcoming Ron White appearance, I can’t think of anything else. If anyone else has any ideas, I’d appreciate hearing them. Because I really don’t like to think of my fellow Americans like this.

There has been an issue that has been making its way through the courts. Because of some sloppy language in the ACA (Obamacare), it would appear that people who live in a state that has not set up its own healthcare exchange are not qualified for the federal subsidies that are one of the cornerstones of the new law. The fact that people are attacking the law from this position just shows how low conservatives will sink. All it means is that poor and middle class people in red states will be harmed. And it is done simply to make a statement that they don’t like Obama—it really has nothing even to do with the law.

Clearly, this was not the intent of the law, but a pedantic reading of the law would indicate this. So I wasn’t at all surprised to learn this morning of a “2-to-1 ruling by a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.” Now that’s not the whole court, so it will undoubtedly be appealed to the full court. And then it will be appealed to the Supreme Court. It didn’t bother me, because I’m actually pretty optimistic (maybe just naive) that the “originalists” on the court will look at the law and say, “Clearly the intent was to provide subsidies for everyone.” What’s more, there seems to me to be issues of equality. A federal law applies differently to you depending upon what state you live in?!

Well, The New York Times reported that within hours, another appeals court ruled the other way, Courts Issue Conflicting Rulings on Health Care Law. According to it, “The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, upheld the subsidies, saying that a rule issued by the Internal Revenue Service was ‘a permissible exercise of the agency’s discretion.'”

The one dissent on the DC panel was Judge Harry Edwards, who said that the only reason for the suit was an “attempt to gut” Obamacare. He also said that the White House’s broader reading of the law was “permissible and reasonable, and, therefore, entitled to deference.” This is pretty much what the Richmond Court found as well.

In a sidebar to the article, there is a quote from David Klemencic, the owner of a carpet store in West Virginia. He is one of the plaintiffs in the case. He said, “If I have to start paying out for health insurance, it will put me out of business.” It’s an interesting thing to say when the case has absolutely nothing to do with his business. But as I said: this is how far conservatives will sink. And this is how ignorant conservatives are, because Obamacare doesn’t apply to Klemencic’s small sole proprietorship. So basically what he’s saying is that even though he doesn’t have to provide healthcare for his employees, he’s really angry that they might be able to get it without his help. (Assuming he even has employees and if he doesn’t, I don’t know what he’s talking about.) There so should be a special level of hell for people like that.

Klemencic also wrote an OpEd in Inc, Why I Am Fighting the Health-Care Law. It’s just a bunch of Republican talking points, ending with, “For me, though, the loss of liberty is Obamacare’s real threat.” Jeez! Based upon some of the statistics he quotes, I assume he either didn’t write it, or got lots of help.

So overall, I’d say this is a good day for Obamacare. It’s even a good day for David Klemencic, although he may never realize it.

I understand someone like Josh Barro who is a conservative (Neoliberal?) and does usually act as an apologist for the Republicans. But I’ve never seen him intentionally misrepresent the facts. He has his ax to grind, just like I do. But he would never make a statement like, “Raising the minimum wage will cost jobs.” He knows the data. The research on the subject is all over the place. I don’t actually know where he is on that issue, but I know from experience that he’s much more likely to say something like, “The studies are inconclusive. The truth is we don’t know the effect; it will probably depend upon the time and place and the size of the increase.” That’s an honest man—or at least a man who is trying to be honest about issues that matter to him.

But as a result of being so honest, Barro is pretty much left out of Republican discourse. If you see him on television, it will be MSNBC and not Fox News. Because the truth of the matter is that to be taken seriously in the conservative movement, you have to be either ignorant or deceptive. This isn’t because conservatism is inherently indefensible. But in this country, the conservative movement has gone off the rails. And actually, the Democrats have too: they are now halfway on the old Republican tracks, while the Republicans will soon be taking out homes a couple blocks away from the railroad. So in order to keep complaining about the same stuff conservatives are always complaining about, you can’t be like Josh Barro. You have to cherry pick numbers in such a way as to completely deceive your readers.

And that brings us to Robert Samuelson at the Washington Post, where it doesn’t ever matter what the numbers say, the United States economy is on the verge of collapse! Although wrong year after year, Samuelson still manages the headline, Budget Policy as Prayer. The CBO produced one of its long-term budget outlooks last week, and most people think it looks pretty good—better than it has in years. William Gale at The Brookings Institute provides a very middle-of-the-road assessment in, Six Takeaways from CBO’s New Long-Term Budget Outlook. And his first point is, “The size of the budget deficit today isn’t a problem, and it’s not much of a problem for the next few years either.”

Samuelson doesn’t see it that way! He claims that, “Its themes are distressingly familiar.” That’s right: bread lines, roving biker gangs, no parties, no discos. You know the way it is. To give you an idea of just how bad it’s going to get, Samuelson says, “Under favorable assumptions, the CBO projects deficits of $7.6 trillion from 2015 to 2024.” Well, by favorable assumptions, we mean current law. You know: assuming that the Republicans don’t take over the government, cut taxes for the wealthy, start a few more wars, and increase subsidies to every large corporation in the world.

The problem is that Dean “Pundit Slayer” Baker, actually read the report (pdf). While it is true that the CBO projects $7.6 trillion in deficits over the next decade, because of economic growth, this will cause the Federal Debt held by the public as a percentage of GDP to go up just four percentage points: from 74% now to 78% in a decade.

Now, I’m not going to lie to you, the CBO projects the debt to go up from 78% to 106% during the 15 years after that. But there are a couple of issues to bear in mind here. First is that even ten year forecasts are simply bad; 25 year forecasts are complete fantasy. And as Baker points out, the only reason the deficit is 74% now, is because of the financial crisis and the bursting of the housing bubble. In the first quart of 2008, it was 36%. Remember: that ain’t Obamacare or any other new “liberal” laws, since they’ve all been paid for; that is reduced tax revenues and increased welfare programs because people are poorer. So if the Republicans would help the government to grow the economy instead of hinder its growth, we could see a boom that would cause our debt to GDP ratio to go down—way down.

But given that Samuelson seems to think that high debt is just going to kill us, Baker noted that there just isn’t any evidence for that:

The truth is that Samuelson will do anything to push his policy preference, which is to slash Social Security and Medicare. And there isn’t much of a Social Security problem at all. There is a Medicare problem, but that is due primarily to the fact that we pay twice as much as other advanced countries for our healthcare. And even Medicare isn’t looking as bad as it was a few years ago. Plus, there are lots of ways to deal with any shortfalls in these programs: we could raise the Payroll Tax cap and make that tax slightly less regressive. But that is exactly the sort of thing that Samuelson wants to avoid.

Samuelson writes pretty much this same column once or twice a month. He is always freaking out that we are going broke. Today is just special because it shows that even when the data are positive, he’s still freaking out. He carefully pulls out data and quotes from the CBO report to make his case. There is no way that he is unaware of what he’s doing. His intent is to deceive his readers. Robert Samuelson is a liar, which should come as no shock because most conservatives are liars.

Actual economist Nick Rowe points out that I am wrong about Monetarism. It too is demand based. Some thought has shown this to be true. By lowering interest rates, the government (or Fed if you want to be technical) makes borrowing more attractive and thus increases demand. This has left me with some questions about what actual “supply side” economics is. I’m sure I’ll bring that up in later posts. It also should be noted that the current crop of crazy conservatives don’t like Monetarism because they think it to is a kind of tax. If you talk to libertarians, they usually think that the Fed is just a conspiracy to devalue the dollar and thus steal money from hard working people. Regardless, my error about the nature of Monetarism doesn’t affect the point of this article. However, I greatly appreciate that Professor Rowe took the time to correct me. I’m a generalist and need as much of that as I can get. -FM

There are a lot of loony ideas in economics. The reason, I think, is because even though a particular economic policy might not be best for the economy overall, it can be very good for a particular group. And when that group is rich and powerful, there are going to be a lot of people using all their brain power to justify why such a policy is really good for everyone. But in the macroeconomics world, there really are only two serious approaches to fix an economy that is under performing. The first is for the government to spend extra money to increase demand and thus get the economy moving again. Much of this kind of stuff happens automatically: unemployment insurance works this way. We call people who believe in this kind of intervention in the economy Keynesians.

Whereas Keynesians look at propping up economic demand, the second group looks at propping up economic supply. They do this with money flow. By allowing businesses to borrow more cheaply, they will invest more and expand, thus putting money into the economy. We call people who believe in this kind of intervention in the economy Monetarists. They tend to be a more conservative lot than the Keynesians.

Matt Yglesias is always saying that if you want to help poor people, give them money. This is a response to neoliberal and conservative policies that want to do everything indirectly. Rather than just give an unemployed person money or a job with the government, we give a tax break to employers, hoping they will hire the guy. This is kind of how I see the Monetarists. I think what their real fear about the Keynesians is that more government spending will lead to higher taxes. That is a big concern. But the main thing is that the Monetarists just seem to have an ideological problem with the government spending money.

So there has been a small argument between Monetarist Nick Rowe and Keynesian Paul Krugman. And while Simon Wren-Lewis has nothing but nice things to say about Rowe, he makes a really important point in an article yesterday, What Annoys Me About Market Monetarists. And it gets right to the heart of the liberal-conservative divide in this country. (I don’t mean to say that Rowe is a conservative; I don’t know; and these days, the thinking of people like Rowe are considered terrible by conservatives; so even if he is a conservative, he isn’t a crazy one.)

The point that Wren-Lewis is making is that Keynesians don’t say that only fiscal policy will work; they believe in monetary policy too. It is just that when monetary policy isn’t working, Keynesians believe fiscal policy should be used. The Monetarists are rigid and I think it all comes down to ideology. They don’t want to use government spending so they come up with reasons why government spending would be terrible. (Again: Wren-Lewis isn’t talking about Rowe here—just the Monetarists generally.)

My take on American politics is that conservatism has ossified into a strictly ideological movement. So when approaching any problem, they start with a long list of things that can’t be done. For example, if they are looking at inequality between school funding, the solution cannot be federal funding to equalize them. Instead they push more testing or ending teacher tenure or neoliberal policies like providing tax incentives to manufactures to give computers to low income schools.

Liberals, on the other hand, are open to all policies. That is, for example, how we got the conservative healthcare reform law now known as Obamacare. But even on education policy, I don’t see liberal resistance to the elimination of tenure as not being open to the idea. It is rather that elimination of tenure has little is anything to do with helping children, and everything to do with the conservative desire to destroy teachers’ unions.

It seems that even a reasonable academic like Nick Rowe falls into his own kind of false equivalence. He seems to think that just because Monetarists are against fiscal policy, that means Keynesians are against monetary policy. But that’s not true. It goes along with the claim by conservatives that they want small government as an end in itself. (They don’t actually want small government, but that’s what they claim.) Thus they assume that liberals want big government as an end in itself. That’s simply not true. We want certain things to be done, and it really does matter to us if it uses a little government, a lot of government, or no government.

This can’t be said enough: liberalism is practical. Liberals are not trying to turn the United States into a socialist utopia. This is in stark contrast to conservatives who are ideological. They are trying to turn the United States into a utopia, although they disagree as to whether it would be a theocracy or an anarchy. This difference between the ways that liberals and conservatives see policy is our fundamental problem. Liberals can’t compromise with conservatives who won’t even consider any ideas outside their tiny ideological box. And as we saw with Obamacare, even when liberals do squeeze into that tiny ideological box, the conservatives make the box even smaller.

And if fairly reasonable Monetarists can’t agree that when monetary policies aren’t working, we should use fiscal policies, how can we possibly get Ted Cruz to admit that tax loopholes for oil companies ought to be closed?

I made the mistake of posting a kind of silly comment on a Google+ political post. That meant that I got updates on every comment made to the post and it wasn’t pretty. And I wasn’t interested. It was a comparison of Obama and Bush the Younger, and as you can imagine, there wasn’t a great deal of thought on either side. But one person on the Republican side made a comment about the need for Congressional term limits, and I lost it: I replied. I actually went out of my way to be nice, so no one responded. But it got me thinking about the issue of term limits and I figured that now is as good a time as any to explain my thoughts on the matter.

In general, terms limits are something that appeals to both conservatives and to people who don’t think much about politics. The reason is that it is built on the idea that governing isn’t a skill; anyone can do it! Well, we in California got a chance to try that out. We made Arnold Schwarzenegger governor for four years. Say what you will about the man, he is smart and capable. And he was a disaster. Then in came Jerry Brown—a career politician—and he showed how it is done. Politics is a skill. And we need as many skilled professionals in government as possible.

Imagine having the equivalent of term limits for auto mechanics. After eight years—generally when someone has finally become really good at his job—we don’t allow him to fix cars anymore. That would make no sense. Yet that is what we do with politicians, even though they get better at representing their constituencies over time. Yet, in the recent Mississippi Republican primary, a big argument against Thad Cochran was exactly that he was good at bring federal money back to his state. That’s nonsense!

I understand the corruption issue, of course. But that isn’t solved by term limits; that’s solved by taking money out of politics and not turning our politicians into corporate whores. If anything, term limits make politicians more dependent upon campaign money. At least established politicians have high name recognition. But what conservatives are really concerned about is “ideological corruption.” What they don’t want is for politics to be politics. They want politicians to stay ideologically pure so that no compromises are ever made. This is not the problem what most people worry about.

What’s more, inexperienced politicians are more dependent upon lobbying groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). So the question really is, who do you want writing your laws: career politicians and their own trusted support staff, or special interest groups who are totally unaccountable. Additionally, politicians who know they are out after two terms (or whatever), have a huge incentive to do special favors for people who can give them good paying jobs after they are out of office. And yes, yes, yes! This problem too already exists, but term limits would only make it worse.

Above all, the problem with term limits (and I’m against them even for president) is that they are anti-democratic. They are a way of limiting the voting choices of other people. Congress is rightly disliked. But most people are pretty happy with their own members of Congress. So there isn’t a single reason that Congress is disliked; in fact, the reasons are largely completely at odds with each other. Republicans don’t like Congress because the Democrats control the Senate and Democrats don’t like Congress because Republicans control the House.

The way I see it is that I want representatives who work for the interests of my district and my state. If voters in Mississippi feel differently, that’s fine: throw the bums out. But making me throw out my representatives just because you think they are bums sounds a lot like tyranny to me. But even if it isn’t quite that bad, it is anti-democratic and it promotes bad government.

I’m very fond of Martin Longman. He is an excellent writer and commentator. But he is having a bad day today over at Political Animal. First, he completely misread Ron Fournier’s recent National Journal article, “We Don’t Suck As Much!” a Motto Your Party Can Honestly Embrace. Longman actually gave Fournier credit for making some progress on false equivalence, The Democrats are the Least-Lousy Party.

Fournier had written, “To those on the far right and far left who will accuse me of ‘false equivalence,’ I beg your pardon and say, OK, the other side sucks a bit more. Feel better? The rest of us don’t.” Far from making progress, Fournier is embracing false equivalence. He’s saying that’s something that only extremists think about and all the good people like himself in the “middle” know that the Democrats and the Republicans are equally bad.

What I find interesting is that false equivalence coming from Fournier is an indication of just how bad the Republicans are. As you can see from his Wikipedia page, Fournier is a consistent Republican with a history of bashing Democrats from a supposed centrist position. One commenter called him a “Republican apparatchick.” I don’t think that’s quite right, because apparatchicks didn’t pretend to be disinterested centrists. Fournier is something far more loathsome. And the fact that the best he can say is that “both sides suck” shows he doesn’t have anything real to complain about the Democrats nor anything good to say about the Republicans.

So Longman messed that up. It happens. Doing a blog is a lot of work, and as the “weekend guy” at Political Animal, I don’t think he gets an editorial help. And to be fair, Fournier’s article does claim that on the boarder crisis, Obama was “a little less bad than the Republicans.” But the point of the article is broadly: both parties are exactly the same! After I read the article, I was just going to discuss Fournier with a hat tip to Longman. But then I read a later article.

Longman wrote, Movement Conservatism is Dead as a National Ideology. This is where we get into dangerous territory. As I discuss a lot around here, Ted Cruz or even Michele Bachmann could become president under the right economic conditions. Many liberals were thrilled when the Republicans nominated Reagan in 1980 because of his extremism. The truth is that the Republicans could have nominated anyone that year and he, she, or it would have been elected.

This is why I found it so upsetting when Longman wrote:

No. No. No! There is absolutely no way that any Republican could have won the presidency in 2008. The economic conditions for a Democratic victory in 2008 are the best of all races back through Carter-Ford in 1976. And that’s just because I haven’t looked any further. The case for 2012 is not as strong, but it is still quite strong. Romney’s problem was not that he ran as a movement conservative; it was that he ran on the economy. If you are the challenger and the economy is improving, you don’t run on the economy. See Lynn Vavreck’s The Message Matters for details.

What most bugs me about this idea that the Republicans might have won if only they had moderated their views is what it implies about the Democrats. Now I’ve been reading Longman for a long time and I know he doesn’t think this, but it implies that the Democrats have won the presidency because they have moderated. The standard line is that Clinton and Obama won because they are New Democrats—you know, economically conservative Democrats. And this just isn’t the case.

Just look at how stupid the Democratic Party is. In 1980, when the economy said the Republicans were certain to win, they nominated their most conservative headline candidate. In 2008, when the economy said the Democrats were certain to win, we nominated a milquetoast moderate. And what do we get for not sticking it to the Republicans as they stuck it to us? Cries of “Socialism!” and “Tyranny!”

Like I said, Martin Longman is an excellent writer and commentator. But he’s only human (despite his image above). He just had a bad day.

Update (20 July 2014 8:05 pm)

Longman noticed my tweet. I still don’t know how that happens. Anyway, it turns out that yesterday, he wrote, My Day Could Have Gone Better. It is about his mistake of buying baseball tickets for his son and him, but for the wrong day—a work day. And so it ended mostly with sitting in traffic. It sounds a lot worse than discovering my little article. But how bad could this article be when I twice refer to him as an “excellent writer and commentator”? Dave Weigel should get such plaudits!