The Republican Party Can No Longer Blame Bush

Okay, I'm really turning that line back on the political right, specifically those factions that have tried to turn the War in Afghanistan into "Obama's War" and the slow economic recovery resulting from the Bush-era economic collapse into "Obama's economy". No doubt, memories of Bush did play a role in holding some voters in the Democratic column where they might otherwise have supported a Republican contender.

Nonetheless, when I read something like this, I think it's fair to say that it was the Republican Party that lost this election, not Bush. It is fair to say that Bush caused damage and that the Republican Party has not recovered from that damage, but I don't think that damage rises to the level that it either cost the party this election or, with more responsible leadership, would have remained a significant issue four years out.

But in reality the more pressing problem is that Republicans are still a party badly damaged by the George W. Bush years. The GOP has traditionally held huge advantages on foreign policy and the economy. That advantage is gone now. And Mitt Romney was the wrong candidate to give the party a refresh on those issues, particularly when the gettable voters were downscale whites. It isn’t that Republicans aren’t reaching enough voters; voters simply don’t believe the GOP is competent to govern.

The Republican Party has long held undeserved advantages on... I think it's more fair to call it "the military" as opposed to foreign policy, and on the economy. Past Republican Presidents did a good job portraying the Democratic Party as "tax and spend", while running up record deficits. They did a good job portraying the Democratic Party as "weak", while committing the U.S. to foreign military escapades that were of questionable value to national security, with sometimes disastrous results. Bush didn't depart from that formula - he simply kicked it up a notch.

But that's still not why the Republican Party lost. The Republican Party lost because it chose to nominate Mitt Romney. I'm certainly not convinced that any of the other declared candidates would have won, at least once the few who displayed any signs of "paleoconservatism" were drummed out of the pool, but let's recall a few things: Bush dreamed of an ethnically inclusive Republican Party. When he ran for office he favored immigration reform, albeit of a somewhat watered down nature. Senator John McCain was a champion of the DREAM Act. John McCain responded to anti-immigrant sentiments in his party by abandoning any support for immigration reform. Mitt Romney predictably tried to come down on multiple sides of the issue, but was not credible. And the Republican Party lost votes as a result - vote losses that cannot be blamed on Bush.

You want a party that is credible on foreign / military policy? Even though he chose to endorse President Obama, Colin Powell is still a Republican. No, I'm not saying run Powell, and I'm well aware of the positions taken by his critics, but I am saying that there are Republicans that continue to have credibility with the public. It was not the Democratic Party that chose to marginalize that faction of the Republican Party.

Obama did not really propose anything new on the economy or foreign policy fronts, but he did make contraception, rape, and Roe v. Wade a large part of this campaign. He constantly portrayed Romney as a man with “the social policies of the 1950s.” Apparently this worked.

I'm sure it played a role in President Obama's advantage among women, but again that's not something you can pin on Bush. G.W. ran as an unapologetically pro-life candidate, and implemented a lot of policies that made the pro-choice crowd angry, but he knew where to draw the line. He didn't come across as the type who wanted to ban contraception or who would make crackpot statements on sexual assault, and I don't think he would have left any ambiguity about where he stood on those issues. Romney tried to dance around the issues, and I doubt that anybody was left satisfied - the social conservatives he was attempting to appease, or the women who questioned whether he would stand up even for their right to access contraception.

The "back to the 1950's" issues, let's recall, arose in no small part from the statements of Tea Party candidates. In many ways the Tea Party is a reinvention of a certain bloc of Republican voters, but it was the Republican establishment and right-wing media that chose to amplify their voice and power. That helped the Republicans gain seats in 2010, but appears to have contributed to their loss in 2012. It definitely contributed to some of the Democratic victories in the Senate.

So let's say this: Right now it is fair to say that the economy is struggling back from collapse, and that the present economic conditions are in significant part an echo of the Bush Administration's mistakes, but that it would have been at least theoretically possible to have a more robust recovery had the President advanced (and if the Republicans would have allowed) certain recovery measures that were not tried, or were not strengthened when they proved inadequate. Right now it is fair to say that the echo of G.W. Bush played a role in why the public is suspicious of the Republican Party on foreign / military policy and economic issues, and probably contributed to the line-up of candidates from which Mitt Romney was deemed "the most electable".

But from this point forward, it's ownership time. It's Obama's job to keep the nation on a path to recovery. It's the Republican Party's job to find a candidate who is credible on foreign policy and economic issues. (As was obvious some months ago, Jeb Bush was already seeing the handwriting on the wall and has long been positioning himself to be that candidate four years from now.) Acknowledge his actual contribution if appropriate, but from this point forward the only politician who is entitled to say "It's G.W.'s fault" is Jeb, if he cannot get his own quest to be President back on track.

Is the Problem a "Brain Drain" or a Lack of Sincerity

Richard Cohen is shocked that, in his opinion, the level of "talent" among the Republican candidates for the presidential nomination was lacking. His analysis reminds me a bit of how audiences react to Saturday Night Live - during most seasons, you'll hear people complain about how SNL was much funnier when [former cast member] was still on the show. If they're still watching the show three, five, eight years down the line, odds are that they'll be issuing the same lament but naming a member of the current cast. Call it nostalgia.

When Cohen complains about the lack of Republican talent, declaring that Ronald Reagan beat "a future president,... two future Senate majority leaders... and two lesser-known congressmen", he's judging the cast of characters based upon their future résumés, not their qualifications at the time, and is also expressing a degree of nostalgia for a campaign that didn't seem all that impressive at the time.

Cohen's comment reminds me of the critique of the 1988 Democratic Party candidates, "Gary Hart and the seven dwarfs", a list that included a future House Majority Leader and a future Vice President and a number of others who were fundamentally decent men. But easy to make fun of at the time. And hey, why didn't people like Mario Cuomo, Ted Kennedy or Bill Bradley throw their hats in the ring? And let's not overlook the "you gotta be kidding me" candidates like David Duke and Lyndon Larouche. Michele Bachmann's not looking so bad now, is she?

Cohen also seems to want to have it both ways, criticizing candidates for being foolish enough to run after engaging in bipartisanship, dismissing Jon Huntsman as "a former appointee of the Obama administration", and in almost the next breath complaining that candidates felt that they had to cater to the right. Cohen complains, "The list of Republicans who looked at Iowa’s daunting demographics and did not run is more distinguished than those who did", without naming any of the candidates he believes would have been better. He laments "None of these candidates were remotely qualified for the highest office in the land", but doesn't state what he believes to be sufficient qualification, let alone explaining if and how they fail to measure up to past presidential nominees.

He's also convinced that Mitt Romney "espouses extreme positions he does not for a moment believe", but does not provide any evidence that Romney does not in fact believe his present positions. The courtroom cliché, "Were you lying then or are you lying now," comes to mind? How are we supposed to know what Romney believes, and why dos Cohen believe he holds the answers. A column in which Cohen lays out Romney's actual beliefs and presents a convincing case for why the beliefs he describes are the ones Romney actually holds? That would be worth reading.

The focus on personality and presentation reminds me of Cohen's principal criticism of President Obama - that "he's dreadful as a schmoozer". Part of the problem we're seeing is the product of a modern class of commentators who love the horse race aspect of elections, who love being given special access to politicians, being flattered, but treat policy as an afterthought. If you have a national platform and are truly concerned, you can complain about the vapidity of a slate of candidates while the primary is underway. You don't have to wait until large numbers of your fellow commentators are (prematurely) dancing on the casket of the nominee produced by that primary process.

I don't want to dismiss an important element of Cohen's argument, that after decades of holding itself out as the champion of religion and social conservatism, the Republican Party has reached a point where... well, not quite where the inmates run the asylum, but where the groups to whom that pitch is appealing are both demanding results and turning out in force in primaries. It is difficult to pander to those groups while giving a wink to the business community, "we don't really care about that stuff, but we'll take good care of you," while not turning off large numbers of voters who find that level of extremism to be disturbing or those who no longer believe the wink - who believe that if elected you'll cater to the social extremists because they've gained so much power within the party.

At the same time, I can't help but wonder how George Romney would have fared. A man whose credentials were a lot like his son's, but who would likely have approached the race with a sense of humility instead of entitlement, of candor instead of obfuscation. To look at it another way, Mitt Romney is unlikely to carry Michigan, but Michigan twice elected his father as governor, and recently elected a Republican governor who ran on his success in business. But for Romney's past positions on a number of Republican litmus test issues, I think he could have run a far more moderate campaign and prevailed while retaining greater appeal to moderates and swing voters. I may be wrong - and unfortunately it's impossible to test my hypothesis - but I think Romney's biggest problem has nothing to do with a perception that he is not qualified to be President, but is instead the fact that he's widely perceived as a phony.

In four years, assuming Romney loses, Jeb Bush is likely to be running for the nomination. He's likely to be taking a more moderate position on social issues, and to be endorsing a mixture of spending cuts and modest tax increases to balance the budget. I'm not sure that Bush represents some form of secret Republican brain trust, and I see no reason to believe that he has any meaningful qualification for the White House that the better candidates of this year's Republican primaries lacked. But if he's perceived as sincere, and people can sufficiently distance him in their minds from his brother, he has a real shot. Even if he takes a moderate approach on immigration.

If You Won't Be Honest, You Won't Stop the Extremism

It's always a disappointment to read Michael Gerson, because even when he opens a column with an idea that appears promising he inevitably reverts to the weak, partisan thinking that exemplifies his... entire career. Gerson used Jeb Bush's testimony before the House Budget Committee as a launching point, and I am fully prepared to give Jeb Bush credit for pushing back against anti-tax pledges, a stance Gerson appears to support. But Gerson quickly resorts to stenography, plucking out the more ideological components of Bush's testimony without relating them to actual facts. Why? Because, in my opinion, Gerson knows the facts and knows that they refute some of the arguments that Bush was making. To advance his own ideological agenda, Gerson uses Bush as a proxy to advance an argument he knows to be false.

For example, Gerson plucks out some choice phrases and strings them together as follows:

Bush insists that responsibility for dysfunction in Washington is shared, but not equally. “I’m disgusted by the system. But Democrats are more to blame, because they control the Senate and the presidency. They have not led.” At least Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget, he argues, “put a down payment on the problem. But congressional Democrats are using it as a tool to plug Republicans and don’t even offer a budget.” The president received the report of his deficit reduction commission, but, Bush said, “hasn’t uttered the words ‘Simpson’ and ‘Bowles’ in the same sentence again.”

We can start by asking, where was Jeb Bush when his brother was in the White House? Why did he remain silent during the glorious period when the Republicans controlled all three branches of government? I understand why Gerson doesn't want to mention the history or legacy of Jeb's brother, G.W., as (a) that history reflects terrible Republican governance, (b) it undermines Jeb's present assignment of blame, and (c) Gerson was employed by the G.W. Bush Administration and was thus part of the problem. But still, an honest man would acknowledge at least some of that reality.

It's quite easy to understand why we're not reaching "grand bargains" on important issues when we're looking at gridlock created by the ideological rigidity of the minority party and its extraordinary use of procedural rules to block the progress of important - and even unimportant - legislation. But if we are to say that the Democrats aren't showing enough "leadership" to get the Republicans to come across the aisle and support legislation addressing major problems, what are we to make of the failure of the Bush Administration to fix the nation's problems - or of the fact that it's policies served to worsen some of the nation's problems - in an era when it was able to obtain sufficient Democratic support to pass most important legislation?

Paul Ryan's plan can be said to "put a down payment on the problem" if that means sneaking a credit card out of somebody's wallet, using it to put a down payment on an item you want, and chuckling about "the look on that guy's face when he gets the bill," but as actual economic policy it's a bad joke. Jeb Bush might respond, "at least it's something", which is not actually a defense of his argument or support for his position, but his endorsement was pretty thin. Gerson has no similar excuse. He knows better. He prefers to let a Republican talking point stand and imply that Ryan's plan is somehow "serious", than to address the facts.

Finally, as Gerson surely remembers, the G.W. Bush Administration was big on the notion of privatizing Social Security until it found out that people hated the concept, so it changed its terminology - and started to complain that the use of the term "privatization" was unfair even though they were the ones who introduced it. Gerson knows that President Obama attempted to broker a deficit reduction deal with the Republicans that largely followed Bowles-Simpson. The fact that he didn't expressly reference the unpopular, unsuccessful deficit reduction commission or the report of its leading members does not change the substance of the proposed "grand bargain", and it's simply dishonest of both Jeb Bush and Michael Gerson to pretend otherwise.

As previously mentioned, Gerson acknowledges President Obama's effort to broker a "grand bargain" on deficit reduction:

Republicans in Congress are led by House Speaker John Boehner — who attempted a budget deal including tax increases — and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. These are hardly the four horsemen of the tea party apocalypse.

Gerson knows that it was Boehner, not President Obama, who refused the deal. Gerson's boss, Fred Hiatt, recently wrote a missive complaining that it was somehow the President's fault that Boehner walked away, apparently because Obama was serious about balancing the budget and wanted a sufficient tax increase to actually achieve that goal. So when Gerson argues,

Addressing this vast structural problem will require a grand bargain that includes entitlement reform and higher revenue. Those who rule out the possibility of compromise as a matter of ideology are undermining the public interest.

he should include a correction of Bush's pretense that the failure resulted from Obama's failure to lead. Although I agree with Gerson that if anti-tax zealots dictate policy "all hope is lost", there is no evidence that the Republican Party is willing to stand up to the likes of "[Grover] Norquist and [Rep. Debbie] Wasserman Schultz". Pretending that the Ryan Plan is credible, that John Boehner is prepared to stand up to that type of pressure, or that Mitt Romney should be expected to do so? At best, naive.

Ross Douthat's Fantasy Primary

Ross Douthat defends the fact that Santorum is still afloat in the Republican primaries,

Even the elevation of Rick Santorum as the last not-Romney standing testifies to the Republican electorate’s relative sobriety. For all his follies and failings, Santorum is a more plausible presidential candidate than most of this season’s alternatives — more experienced than Cain and Bachmann, more substantive and eloquent than Perry, more principled than Gingrich.

Douthat's damning of Santorum with faint praise reminds me of the old joke, "In heaven, the food is French, the police are British, the engineers are German, the lovers are Italian...." Douthat would be making pretty much the same claim no matter who else was left in the race (except Gingrich). Douthat also reveals his dream candidates, purporting that other than Jeb Bush, whose disastrously incompetent brother "tarnished [his] (last) name", the only reason they're not running is that "the current presidential campaign arrived too soon for them to be entirely seasoned."

If the current race pitted Jeb Bush against, say, Mike Huckabee and Mitch Daniels, nobody would be talking about how the party has gone off the rails.

Why not? To borrow from Douthat's style book, Huckabee has all of the economic sense of Herman Cain, and all of the aptitude for foreign policy of Michelle Bachmann. Mitch Daniels seems to inspire all of the enthusiasm of Jon Huntsman - Douthat lectures, "Republican voters probably should have given Jon Huntsman more consideration", but fails to explore why they did not. Jeb Bush has what... two terms as governor in Florida in which he didn't mess anything up too badly and the family name? What's not to love.

If it were being held two years hence, and featured Chris Christie, Bobby Jindal, Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio, the excitement on the Republican side would rival what the Democrats enjoyed in 2008. But those four, and others like them, decided they weren’t ready yet.

Although I understand why Douthat wants to fetishize those four as wonderful up-and-coming leaders, fantasy often collides with reality in a most unpleasant fashion. Rick Perry was a great presidential candidate, the guy who was going to clear the field of the weaklings, until he actually started a campaign:

As The New York Times's Ross Douthat said when Perry first entered the race, quoting a Texas competitor, "Running against Rick Perry is like running against God."

I suspect Douthat in part wants to build a Frankenstein candidate - Christie's bombast, Jindal's wonkishness, Paul Ryan's ability to spout absolute nonsense and be taken seriously, and Marc Rubio's assumed charisma. But had they run, I would not be half surprised if Douthat were writing the very same editorial, but damning Santorum with somewhat modified faint praise, something along the lines of, "For all his follies and failings, Santorum is a more plausible presidential candidate than most of this season’s alternatives — more experienced than Christie and Rubio, more substantive and eloquent than Jindal, more principled than Ryan."

Romney's Inevitability

For those of us who have seen Romney as inevitable, pretty much from the time the candidate pool was established, answering the question, "How did it happen", has been easy: The rest of the candidate pool was not very good. Most of the candidates had serious flaws, baggage, or credibility problems that made it seem pretty obvious that they would fail. The fact that many within the party want an alternative to Romney has been obvious, also from the outset. But there are two problems: First, the various people who did not enter the race who have been ballyhooed as possible saviors of the party are also seriously flawed, and second, the number of litmus tests imposed on Republican candidates make it very difficult for a candidate to enter the race without seeming as empty-headed or two-faced as the candidates who are already running. Romney is in a unique position in that to the extent that he fails to meet litmus tests he is nonetheless a known quantity - he failed those tests four years ago.

Daniel Larison suggests,

Conservatives did not rally behind any one candidate to oppose Romney months ago because I think many of them expected Romney to falter or implode long before this, so they thought they had the luxury of time to choose from among the alternatives. Romney didn’t implode, and conservatives frittered away valuable time on various long-shot and incompetent candidates.

I think, more accurately, Jeb Bush chose not to run because he would still be dragged down by his brother's disastrous record, and he is young enough to wait four or eight years to try for the nomination, Rick Perry revealed himself to be a woefully incompetent candidate, and the rest of the names that get tossed out don't reflect candidates any better qualified or more appealing than the better half of those who were already running,¹ and some are just plain unelectable.

But there's more to the analysis than people being used to Mitt Romney, or pundits waxing romantic about how presidential he looks. If you examine his record it's fair to say that the man has no core beliefs, that he's willing to bend and compromise on anything in order to gain power, that he stands for nothing but himself. But that would be completely wrong. There is one issue for which Romney has been 100% consistent, as far as I can tell, from the day his daddy bought him his first copy of the Wall Street Journal: He's 100%, unequivocally on the side of Wall Street and the financial industry. Josh Marshall finds it weird that "Romney surrogate and former New Hampshire Governor John Sununu" has "suggested that the investor community might punish Newt-backer Sheldon Adelson for funding Newt’s anti-Bain Capital movie".

Does he think that people don't remember when you attack them and pay for the attacks in a primary, especially when one ever the parties receiving that attack is a party he likes to go to to finance his expansions?

The "King of Bain" movie may be an attack on 1980's style corporate raiders and leveraged buyouts, and it's certainly an attack on Mitt Romney, but it's only arguably an attack on Wall Street by proxy - when you go after their boy you go after them.²

I believe that concern about Romney comes from two directions:

First, from Republicans who believe that he cannot be trusted to hold to the party line on anything, given that he has a history of political compromise. Quite notably, the compromise that led to his health insurance program being implemented in Massachusetts reveals not only his support for a plan almost identical to the Affordable Care Act, it reflects how he will orchestrate a compromise bill that cedes a lot to his political opponents in order to position himself for his next anticipated election.³ That is, once in office Romney's concern will be to be reelected, and probably also to try to rank as a great President, and he knows full well that the gridlock and partisanship of the past few years will do nothing but tarnish his presidency.

Second, there appears to be a genuine concern that Romney will prove to be a wooden, uncharismatic candidate whose past waffling, and present advocacy for wealth and power, will lead to his self-destruction on the campaign trail. The Bain stuff is coming out now, some say too early. But he seems intent on maintaining his tax returns as a campaign issue - not wanting to disclose how much he earns as an "unemployed" person, the comparatively tiny amount he pays in taxes on his millions in passive income, or confirm that he exploits overseas tax shelters to further reduce his tax obligations.

Romney is subject to attacks on his personal integrity - and he doesn't do much to help himself on that front with his own dubious commitment to facts and truthfulness - and to political attacks from the right ("He's a phony, he will compromise with Democrats") and the left ("Why should we worry about President Romney? Sure, he'll fight tooth and nail to prevent reasonable regulation of the financial industry or steps to hold them accountable, and will bail them out in a heartbeat, but on pretty much every other issue he has at one time or another staked out positions to the left of President Obama.")

Concerns that Romney is not sufficiently in line with the religious right? As long as no third party candidate runs to draw off the most ardent of religious conservative voters, it will be Republican politics as usual: Say what it takes to get the religious right to come out and vote Republican, toss them a few bones once in office, talk a good game, but deliver little of substance. To a degree it's better to keep the religious right unhappy, because if their issues were actually addressed they might lose the fire in their collective belly and stop performing as such a reliable Republican voting bloc. But no danger of that - the Republican Party is personified by Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum - public piety, perhaps in Santorum's case actually believed, but advancing an agenda that benefits wealth and power, and helps them obtain and maintain wealth and power once they leave office. it's called lip service - they should be used to it by now.
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1. Common suggestions are Chris Christie, Mitch Daniels, Bobby Jindal, Haley Barbour, Paul Ryan, Mike Pence, and John Thune.

2. (Added) Since I wrote this, it has been observed that Romney appears to have prepared to respond to attacks on his record by Democrats with childish, misleading name-calling - and he has not changed his tactics, so his hacks and proxies are now accusing other Republicans of being socialists or "sounding like" Occupy Wall Street.

3. The insurance reform he achieved as governor was supposed to be a cornerstone of his campaign for the presidency as the man who could bring a conservative, free market reform to the nation's health insurance market. The frenzied, reactionary opposition to the Affordable Care Act turned his success into something of a liability, but one to which voters have become accustomed - perhaps it was voter opposition to a Massachusetts/ACA-style reform that has proved to be overstated.

Jeb Bush Flatlines in the WSJ

Jeb Bush seems to be trying to set himself up as the candidate people wish had run for the Republican nomination. It's a "Don't pay any attention to what I did as governor (or what my brother and father did as Presidents, or what my grandfather did as a Senator) - I've discovered Ron Paul and libertarianism, and regret "succumbing" to the temptation to "do something" about economic problems.

The short version is that Jeb has supposedly been moved by Ron Paul's allusion to "The right to rise" as a "core concept of economic freedom", and as a result wants to free businesses of regulation and to free individuals from any form of government assistance.

We have to make it easier for people to do the things that allow them to rise. We have to let them compete. We need to let people fight for business. We need to let people take risks. We need to let people fail. We need to let people suffer the consequences of bad decisions. And we need to let people enjoy the fruits of good decisions, even good luck.

You know, like being born to a family that has been fabulously wealthy and politically connected for more than a century. The sort of fortunate birth that many people confuse with qualification for public office, but that's apparently something we are now supposed to celebrate rather than regret in the wake of a duopoly of increasingly disastrous Bush presidencies. (Anybody wanna go for a trifecta?)

The primary target of Jeb's editorial is regulation, which he tells us "abridge our own economic freedoms". He paints with an incredibly broad brush, but fails to identify any actual regulation that he sees as harmful, or to identify any actual harm. I don't think that's because he could not identify a regulation in which the costs and benefits were out of balance. I suspect that it's because to do so would reveal that this is penny ante stuff - that he could not identify any significant impediments to big business arising from regulation and that people would very easily identify the need for the regulations he specifically described even if agreeing that they should be modified.

It is fair to say that regulation of business impairs the ability of small businesses to enter highly regulated markets, and to compete with larger businesses that have legal departments that allow them to navigate or bypass regulation. But it's also fair to observe that as much as businesses rail against regulation, they recognize that complexity can be their friend - a clear regulation must be obeyed, while labyrinthine regulations are inevitably full of loopholes. Simple regulation also doesn't serve as a barrier to entry, while complexity may deter competitors from entering their markets. A similar phenomenon can be seen with newer high tech companies complaining about patents as a barrier to their success, and then not seeming so bothered by them after they build their own catalog of patents to use to threaten or negotiate with competitors.

But Jeb is speaking about personal freedom, and he provides no link between the regulation of businesses and the freedom of individuals. Having supposedly been inspired by Ron Paul, perhaps he has been listening to some of Paul's inanities on libertarian markets. As much as a certain faction of right-winger would like to pretend otherwise, history's lesson is clear: In the absence of regulation, business and wealth run roughshod over individual rights and freedoms.

Jeb offers some stump speech-style rhetorical questions,

Have we lost faith in the free-market system of entrepreneurial capitalism? Are we no longer willing to place our trust in the creative chaos unleashed by millions of people pursuing their own best economic interests?

If you succumb to the temptation to answer the questions, they're easily revealed as simplistic and inane. But that's not the point. Jeb is suggesting that there's a horrible "other" at work in our government that is out to undermine "entrepreneurial capitalism" and individual economic freedom and, implicitly, that it's men like him who are the answer... that is, now that they're out of power and no longer "succumb" to the temptation to pass the regulations that they would not dream of passing if they are returned to power.

When Jeb says, "We see an industry dying and we demand it be saved," I expect that he's speaking of the domestic auto industry, more specifically of GM and Chrysler, that both his brother and President Obama thought necessary to save within the context of a massive economic meltdown. Except the auto industry was not going to fail - just two of the three domestic manufacturers. Do you believe for a second that, had Jeb been President, he would have stepped back and allowed GM to collapse rather than providing funding to keep it afloat while pushing it through a structured bankruptcy? I suppose he could be referring to the financial industry, as that industry might have collapsed pretty much in its entirety had it not been bailed out by the government, but the chance of President Jeb not stepping in with a bailout package would have been zero percent. Let's be real. The "right to fail" is an individual right, and provides a context in which Jeb would have no difficulty distinguishing large corporations from real people.

I liked this line:

The right to rise does not require a libertarian utopia to exist.

Have you ever paused to wonder what a libertarian utopia would look like? Were you to smoke opium you might dream up something along the lines of Ron Paul's fantasy:

The regulations are much tougher in a free market, because you cannot commit fraud, you cannot steal, you cannot hurt people, and the failure has come that government wouldn't enforce this. In the Industrial Revolution there was a collusion and you could pollute and they got away with it. But in a true free market in a libertarian society you can't do that. You have to be responsible. So the regulations would be tougher.

I once heard a sarcastic, but much more likely vision of a libertarian utopia: anarchy with lawyers. You only have rights to the extent that you can privately enforce them, meaning that you need lawyers and money (or guns) on your side to prevail. Once you start allowing the government to regulate such things as what you do with the toxic sludge you dump on your own land, such that it doesn't leach into the groundwater or create toxic runoff onto neighboring parcels, you're creating the "collusion" that Ron Paul assures us will only serve to ensure that the polluter will get away with it, or the "loss of personal freedom" that Jeb implies will inevitably arise from the regulation of industry.

Jeb, as a politician, saw his party cater to the legal drug dealers of his state - pain clinics that rake in millions of dollars legally selling pain medications to addicts from around the country - and failed to pass legislation that would have created a state system for tracking the prescription of scheduled medications. Such a database is an imperfect tool, but is one that can help the state track both doctor shopping by patients and the doctors who are most obviously selling prescriptions as opposed to practicing medicine. Perhaps, having seen the "folly" of such regulation, Jeb has come to believe that people should have the freedom to get intoxicated on the substance of their choice. More realistically, he came to understand that it's sometimes the most immoral, most repugnant businesses who have the deepest pockets for lobbyists and to find ways to buy off government officials who might otherwise limit their harmful practices.

Within that context, I have a difficult time not being cynical about Jeb's call for "Rules that sunset so they can be eliminated or adjusted as conditions change". The non-cynical interpretation is that he's proposing that we test how regulations work in practice and only renew them if they work as planned, and return benefits that exceed their cost. The cynical interpretation is that if you set a sunset period of, let's say, four years, every four years you get to return to the trough to be fed by the industry's lobbyists.

Meanwhile we are to pretend that regulations are never revisited, that nobody ever looks at costs and benefits, and that nobody can figure out how they work. Great hyperbole, and like any good lie containing a kernel of truth, but a lie nonetheless. Sure, there's always an element of uncertainty in the creation and passage of new regulations, and there are always regulations that continue long after their original goals are fulfilled. But it's absurd to pretend that industry doesn't figure out how to operate in a regulated environment, that its lobbyists are not consistently working to amend or revoke unwanted regulations, and that some of the zombie regulations live on because they benefit an industry, directly or indirectly subsidizing certain activities and operations. We can also easily look back on episodes of deregulation and see direct, negative consequences on industries, public welfare and the economy. For example, although Jeb would probably prefer that we not recall his brother Neil, whose reputation was shattered by his role in the Savings & Loan debacle, or how the more recent financial industry collapse was a repeat of the S&L collapse, on steroids, but it would take a fool to not see how deregulation played a significant role in both financial disasters.

With no apology for his hyperbole, Jeb tells us the horrors that will inevitably come from regulation:

We either can go down the road we are on, a road where the individual is allowed to succeed only so much before being punished with ruinous taxation, where commerce ignores government action at its own peril, and where the state decides how a massive share of the economy's resources should be spent.

You might believe from Jeb's first statement that, since his father was in the West Wing and Oval Office, taxes have been on the rise. But then there are those nasty facts - taxes went down significantly under big brother G.W., and have again been reduced under President Obama. If Jeb wants us to believe that we're on an inescapable downward spiral of regulation that can lead to nothing but higher taxes, the facts have a cruel way of raining on his parade. Now it is fair to say that our course is unsustainable - that the damage the G.W. Bush years, with their unfunded wars, entitlements and tax cuts, bloated budgets, stagnant wages and out-of-control spending did to the economy leaves us with no choice but to raise taxes. But none of that has a whit to do with regulation. And, as a good Republican, Jeb prefers to pretend that we can magic away all of that harm by eliminating regulations and cutting entitlements.

I'm not sure when we were last in a world in which commerce could avoid paying attention to government action. It appears that Jeb is unfamiliar with the U.S. Constitution and how it empowers the federal government to regulate interstate commerce, or how that regulation has facilitated commerce between the states. Or how he can be unaware that treaties and negotiations have facilitated commerce between nations. Even so-called "free trade" agreements are a form of regulation, not deregulation - rules and policies that both sides must follow in order to avoid tariffs. You don't believe me? Read NAFTA and... in a few hours, or perhaps tomorrow, when you're done, come back and explain to me how little it regulates.

As for Jeb's concern that the state "decides how a massive share of the economy's resources should be spent", well, let's take a look at the budget. The biggest expenditures are for Social Security and the military. Social Security is an insurance program, perhaps a redistribution of wealth but not the government deciding how the money is to be spent - the government may write the check but, as a beneficiary, you're free to spend your check as you please. (The same is true for income security programs such as unemployment). So is Jeb railing against military spending? Unquestionably, the government controls how every penny of the military budget is spent. But we know what would happen if we were to directly ask Jeb about military spending as the state deciding how a massive amount of money should be spent - we would get a word salad that boils down to "That's different."

But I'm (cough) beating around the bush. Jeb is talking about medical spending, and is implying that the Affordable Care Act's shifting around of the deck chairs on the Titanic amounts to deciding how the nation's healthcare dollars are spent. Never mind that for most people there will be no discernible difference between their health care or health insurance expenditures before and after 2014, or that the plan pushes money into the hands of private health insurance companies. Never mind that if "free markets" inevitably brought the efficiencies that people like Jeb promise, we would already have the cheapest, most accessible health care system in the world, while instead we have the highest costs in the world without a corresponding level of access or performance. Never mind that the ACA at least attempts to reign in medical inflation, and that without corrective action the present system will collapse.

The alternative to Jeb's imaginary parade of horribles is the "return" to a world that exists only in his imagination:

Or we can return to the road we once knew and which has served us well: a road where individuals acting freely and with little restraint are able to pursue fortune and prosperity as they see fit, a road where the government's role is not to shape the marketplace but to help prepare its citizens to prosper from it.

Would that be a road through which the son of a millionaire can become a millionaire Senator, and have a millionaire son who becomes President, and have a millionaire grandson who despite a track record of non-achievement can also become President while his more accomplished (but still not all that impressive) brother can become a governor who obviously hopes to also become President? Because the road is a lot tougher for the rest of us, and the Horatio Alger myth remains a myth. Jeb speaks of choice between "the straight line promised by the statists" (an allusion, perhaps, to equality?) that turns out to be "a flat line" and "the jagged line of economic freedom" (where you and I have our ups and downs, while brothers like Tripper and Tumbler - the Secret Service code names Jeb and George respectively earned as they staggered through their drunken young adulthood - emerge from their wastrel youth float into adulthood, buoyed by an inherited name, family fortune and political connections... but in fairness, Jeb did let us know, up front, that we need to let people enjoy "the fruits of... good luck".

So let's pretend that a return to the era of the robber barons, the age in which the Bush family fortune was first accumulated, will be an era of equal opportunity, of a rising middle class. Let's ignore that the greatest innovations in the world's history occurred in no small part through public-private partnerships of the modern era - NASA, ARPAnet, the Manhattan Project, military technology, etc. - and pretend that we would be better off in the era of child labor, violent union-busting, rampant inequality, and corrupt government. Because it would appear that to Jeb Bush, those are the good old days. Make the pie lower.

For the diminishing number of people who still believe that a new candidate can enter the Republican primaries and save the party from Mitt, sorry, it won't be Jeb. It's far too late for that. So why emerge from the woodwork now? To attempt to position himself as relevant and, should the economy stagnate for another four years, to point back on his essay with an "I told you so". Why offer an essay that is so lightweight, weakly reasoned, devoid of examples? For the same reason - in the event that the economy turns around, by leaving the meat off of the bones he's not making any statements that his future opponents might use against him.

Election Fairness In Florida? But Where's The Profit?

The Times today takes on the partisan hack who is presently Florida's Secretary of State, and is thus in charge of its electinos. Comparing the present Secretary of State, Glenda Hood, to her predecessor in partisan hackery, Katherine Harris, the Times suggests, "The nation cannot afford another tainted election. Governor Bush should quickly find an elections professional or academic of unquestioned neutrality to run Florida's elections." But where's the profit in that?