Jennifer Rubin Finds a Mirror

Jennifer Rubin, who people say is smart but who nonetheless rattles off a predictable set of talking points and often makes hare-brained assertions, comments on Ted Cruz,

Smarts don’t always equate to common sense. In the case of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), there is an inverse relationship between the two. I’m told by smart lawyers that he has a sharp legal mind, can think on his feet and has remarkable recall for facts, cases and even page numbers of the briefs. But his political judgment has become distorted by ambition.

Hm...

Her illustration of Cruz's 'smarts' reminds me of an anecdote about a lawyer who was similarly famed for his ability to provide pinpoint citations, on his feet, in court. Somebody asked him, eventually, how he managed to recall cases and even page numbers with such specificity. "I make them up. Nobody ever checks." But with a bit less cynicism, having a good memory - even an eidetic memory - is proof of good memory, not intelligence. Cruz may well be as smart as some people say, or he may be smart in the same sense that Newt Gingrich and Paul Ryan are touted as intellectual giants among their Republican peers. When the pond is that shallow, you don't need to be a particularly big fish to stand out - and sometimes all it takes is for you to be the one people see because it's sticking its head out of the pond with its mouth constantly open. I'm also reminded of a certain trial lawyer who once ran for President, who strikes me as having been deemed a great trial lawyer by virtue of having a well-rehearsed presentation of a particular type of big money case, and who retired into politics when that particular line of litigation dried up. Or a certain TV host who brags about her conviction rate for homicide prosecutions, never mind that homicide cases are often open-and-shut with defendants going to trial only because they have nothing to lose. You have to look beyond the surface to find out if somebody truly is as brilliant as he and his friends claim him to be.

Rubin notes that Cruz was spouting nonsense about how Mitt Romney was the greatest guy in the world before he lost, at which point she contradicted her prior claims about him and denounced his deep flaws without appearing to notice the contradiction. No, wait, that was Rubin. She notes that Cruz is pretending that the President might sign a bill defunding the PPACA/Obamacare, and purporting that the public won't blame the Republicans if they shut down the government.

Well, maybe he understands something else. Perhaps he is as smart as his admirers claim and he is wildly ambitious, hoping to draw attention and fundraising dollars for his windmill-tilting scam. Later in the CNN interview he made it clear he was playing to the base on this one... And who better to pull the tsunami to shore than Cruz, right? Send money! Come to his events! Become outraged when the “unprincipled” Republicans won’t support him!

Read his blog! Oh, wait...

Cruz is emblematic of a group of conservative hucksters peddling outrage and paranoia who contend that the strength of the political resistance they generate is equivalent to their own importance, and that one dramatic, losing standoff after another is the pinnacle of political success. Alas, they confuse their own fame with achievement and divisiveness with progress.

And if that doesn't work out for him in politics, maybe Fred Hiatt can give him a job?

Rubin suggests that Cruz would be better off following the lead of Speaker Boehner, and "trying to put the monkey on the Democrats’ backs (as the speaker of the House is doing) in the Obamacare fight". Nobody has ever accused Boehner of being a genius, but perhaps Rubin should take note of the fact that pretty much every aspect of Obamacare is popular, save for the mandate which is a necessary part of the popular provision that requires insurance companies to provide coverage without respect to preexisting conditions. Pushing a fantasy about defunding Obamacare is probably more sensible than crossing your fingers and hoping that the mandate proves so unpopular that people are willing to throw the baby out with a few inches of bathwater.

A political loner and man of rhetoric, not of action or achievement, he bears a striking resemblance to the current Oval Office resident. Each considers himself the smartest man in any room (inducing annoyance and resentment among his party members) and each fails to understand rhetoric is not effective governance.

Projection, much? Seriously, how many people other than Rubin look at Cruz and say, "Wow, he's just like President Obama"? This would be one of those "predictable talking points and hare-brained assertions" to which I previously alluded.

If I read more of Rubin's pontifications, I might know who she is pushing as the next Republican presidential nominee. Perhaps somebody who, unlike Mitt Romney, doesn't see himself as God's gift to the country and the smartest man in the room, who scurries away from his own record whenever it becomes politically inconvenient? Because Rubin doesn't seem to like those characteristics in candidates she doesn't support....

Jennifer Rubin's 'Best' Isn't Good Enough

In what some might see as an attempt to defy a popular definition of insanity, I saw a link to Jennifer Rubin's comment, "How to Win the Debt Ceiling Fight" and decided to see if she actually had something useful to say.

Republicans are struggling to devise a formula that simultaneously holds the president’s feet to the fire and yet escapes the charge that the GOP is playing Russian roulette with the country’s credit rating. As a practical matter I simply don’t think Republicans have the fortitude to hit the debt ceiling. To avoid the inevitable march-up-the-hill-down-the-hill routine there are two strategies (probably more) readily available.

That is to say, without actually explaining what a victory would look like, Rubin perceives two potential "winning strategies" for the Republicans. The first?

First, following the lead of Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) in 2011, Republicans could pass legislation explicitly prohibiting default on our obligations and spelling out a sequence for paying our bills so that we don’t default on bond holders, stop Social Security checks or stiff the troops. However, this still might require shutting down other parts of the government, which the GOP has shown no stomach to do.

Should somebody point out to Ms. Rubin that if she admits, at the outset, that the Republicans have "no stomach" to implement her first idea, there's no point in pretending it's serious? Note, Rubin's objection is that the Republicans have no follow-through. She ignores the logistical issues: if she knows of a way the House of Representatives can "pass legislation" that becomes law despite being rejected by the Senate and President, I would love to hear about it....

At the heart of Leahy's proposal is, I suspect, a recognition of how much power Congress delegates to the President when it forces a government shut-down. The idea would presumably be to structure the shut-down to damage Democratic interests while protecting Republican interests over a period of months while the government is unable to pay its bills. The problem thus goes well beyond "stomach", and into the territory of naked partisanship. The Republican Party would have to show its hand - to let the public know exactly what the price would be for its brinksmanship, and how much worse things would get over the ensuing weeks and months until default became inevitable. And... then what?

When the blackmail is explicit, the President will be able to point directly at the blackmail - "They say that if I don't agree to budget cuts that they won't identify, they're going to keep me from paying your Social Security retirement benefits>". What would be the Republican response to that? Would they develop the "stomach" to identify the cuts that they want? Rubin doesn't think so. So the President's response can be, "You control the purse strings - pass a bill enumerating the cuts you want in order to get us out of this catastrophe you've created," and the Republicans have to choose between looking like (malicious) fools, identifying the cuts, or folding. Even Rubin can see the folly of that approach.

What's Rubin's other idea?

The other approach, the smartest I have seen so far, comes from Keith Hennessey, who explains that Republican leaders begin by “assuring [the president] that we will not allow the government to default on its obligations. The debt limit will be increased. The questions we must resolve are first, whether we will simultaneously cut government spending and second, who will cast the votes for the debt increase.” The Democrats then have a choice: either agree to significant entitlement reform in conjunction with a debt increase to get Obama through at least 2014 or the House Republicans will ”deliver 50 Republican votes for a three-month clean extension.

Basically, the Republicans will say, "We're up against the debt ceiling and we want you to make cuts." The President will reply, "What cuts would you like to make?" The Republicans will once again come up with nothing (as Rubin says, "no stomach"). The President will reply, "If you don't want to cut the budget, then you are going to need to approve the spending you've already authorized." The Republicans will then pass a debt ceiling increase approving that spending.

That is the smartest Republican strategy Rubin has seen? She provide's Hennessey's rationale,

[T]his strategy would tell the President, “Hey, if you want your terrible policy, you’re going to have to deliver House Democratic votes for it. Good luck with that.” Either the President accepts and Republicans pound on the “Democratic debt limit increase” message every three months, or he agrees to cut spending. Either way, default risk is eliminated. Republicans will look responsible because they will be acting responsibly, and the markets couldn’t care less about which Members take political heat for casting these unpopular votes.

So every three months the Republicans will say, "Cut spending or we'll raise the debt ceiling," the President will reply, "If you're going to raise the debt ceiling anyway... but, okay, I'll humor you, what cuts do you want me to consider?" The Republicans will reply, as usual, with "We got nothing." Then the public will get mad at the Democrats because the debt ceiling goes up? And it's "lather, rinse, repeat every three months for the next four years"?

Wow.

Not content to simply look foolish, Rubin has to embellish Hennessey's proposal with some terrible advice for her party:

I would add that under no circumstances should the negotiations (if the president chooses to entertain real entitlement reform) be in secret and/or between Republican leaders and the president. It’s time for regular business, with all lawmakers forced to cast votes. Shifting the focus away from the White House is hugely important in avoiding a (losing ) PR battle with the president and might actually deliver results.

Except this Republican grandstanding only works when they pretend it's the Republican Congress against an all-powerful President. If you reduce the role of the President, you make it obvious that Congress controls the proverbial purse strings - that the debt ceiling sideshow is irrelevant, and that the fundamental problem is that the Republicans in Congress keep authorizing the spending that necessitates government debt. You allow the President to point to the public, bipartisan negotiations and say, "When they come up with solutions, I'll be happy to review their budget reform bill, but for now they are running up the bills and it's my job to pay them." And then, per Rubin's proposal, the Republicans will raise the debt ceiling without condition. It's as if she wants her party to appear toothless.

A final word of advice: The Republicans should turn the president’s favorite class warfare game against him. He is the one defending Warren Buffett’s right to receive Social Security and free ride on Medicare; Republicans want to force rich people to pay more and get less so middle- and lower-income people have their benefits. Republicans may shy away from such arguments but unless the GOP captures the “fairness” argument and becomes the champion of the little guy, it will keep losing support and forever be outfoxed by the White House.

I am not sure that Rubin is going to convince more than a tiny handful of dimwitted people that somebody who pays FICA at the maximum rate for most of his career, and continues to do so well past retirement age, is getting a "free ride". If it needs to be explained, if you pay for insurance you are entitled to receive the coverage that you have paid for, even if you're rich - and Buffett, at age 82, is still paying into the system. Further, despite Rubin's eagerness to engage in what her party decries as "class warfare", even if you disqualify the top 1% from eligibility for Social Security and Medicare you will not materially affect the balance sheet.

Rubin apparently hopes that this form of Republican class warfare will confuse people. "We could cut Medicare spending by 1% if the richest 1% of the population were declared ineligible for Medicare. We, the Republican Party, don't think that's fair and to show that we stand for 'the little guy' we propose cutting everybody's Social Security and Medicare benefits."

Rubin's good at pouring out the snake oil, but if she wants people to actually buy it the trick is to confuse people into thinking they're getting something other than snake oil.

Straight Talk on the Budget....

I generally don't read Jennifer Rubin. I think she's smart enough to write something interesting or informative, but she has no apparent inclination to do so, and she lacks the capacity to spin her talking points into something less overtly partisan in the manner of David Brooks. In fact, she's so ridiculous in her partisanship, much of what she writes could pass for comic relief.

But one of her gazillion headlines (yes, she's prolific) in my news feed caught my eye: "Can anyone offer straight talk about the budget?" That's a fair question. Her opening is actually pretty good,

Republicans are touting a Battleground poll that finds:

Three in four voters want to “cut government spending across the board,” but 59 percent oppose making significant cuts to the defense budget and 46 percent support ending foreign aid. The slightest majority backs reducing Social Security and Medicare benefits for seniors that have higher incomes, but 64 percent oppose raising the retirement age to begin collecting Social Security benefits.

But, wait. The same poll finds “60 percent of respondents support raising taxes on households that earn more than $250,000 a year and 64 percent want to raise taxes on large corporations.” However, “69 percent of respondents oppose raising taxes on small businesses that earn more than $250,000 — a group that the GOP is trying to protect with its push to extend the Bush tax cuts.”

In other words, the American people want cake and ice cream for dinner – and a unicorn. They want contradictory things. They imagine the only taxes that need go up to sustain the entitlement programs as currently constituted are those of mega-millionaires. They don’t perceive the trade-offs between unrestrained entitlement spending and pressure to cut other spending (e.g., education). They apparently don’t understand that many small businesses pay taxes under the personal income tax code, making them “the rich.”

One wonders why Republicans would be touting a poll that, even when they try to spin it in their favor, doesn't do much to advance their agenda. I guess they don't have much else to work with. But where Rubin quite predictably falls on her face is in her failure to understand (or is it to admit) why voters operate under the misconception that we can cut taxes, increase military spending, sustain Medicare and Social Security at present levels, and somehow at the same time balance the budget by "cutting waste" and reducing public assistance directed at the "undeserving poor". Did she somehow miss that the mindset she laments, the one I just described, reflects exactly what Mitt Romney claimed that he could to if elected President?

Or is it that her ideological blinders are up and fully operational?

It is not that politicians are bad communicators, although some are. It is that they do not want, as President Obama keeps instructing, to do the math. If they did, they’d have to concede, for example, that raising taxes on the rich raises a pittance compared to our $16 trillion debt.

This is an echo of a Republican talking point that I have often criticized. The argument is basically, "Taxes on the rich won't raise enough revenue to be worth it, so we shouldn't bother with a tax increase." Letting the Bush-era tax cuts on the wealthy expire would produce roughly $85 billion per year in tax revenue. What sort of "serious" spending cut proposal do we get from the Republican Party? Cutting the @$445 million contributed to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting? John Boehner has proposed changing the manner in which Social Security benefits are indexed to inflation in order to save $20 billion per year - if $85 billion is too little to be worthy of consideration, why is Rubin's party of choice intent on pursuing targets that are comparatively small, even trivial?

In particular — and this is critical in assessing the president’s moral obligation — Obama has not prepared the American people for the fiscal changes that are needed. He’d rather score political points than be honest with voters. He’s got the biggest megaphone and if he doesn’t level with voters, they aren’t going to get it. (So he doesn’t. And they don’t.)

Oh, no doubt, politicians of both parties don't want to "prepare the public" for the consequences of balancing the budget. But again, Rubin's complaint represents the Republican agenda - her party does not actually care about balancing the budget. There is nothing that stops Speaker Boehner from gathering the Republicans in Congress and passing a serious, balanced budget, save for the fact that they don't want to.

Presidents who try to level with voters about the state of the economy and the hard choices that lie ahead... That would be Jimmy Carter and... um... perhaps only Jimmy Carter. It's admirable that Rubin rejects the sunny but false optimism of Reagan and the fiscal incompetence of George W. Bush,² but the problem is twofold. First, the problems the economy faces from debt are exaggerated, and the politicians staging this "high stakes drama" know that. Second, politicians on both sides of the aisle want to be re-elected, so whenever possible they prefer to whisper sweet nothings in our ears over sharing harsh truths.

The net effect? In a few years a Republican will run for the White House, probably on a budget "plan" that sounds very much like Romney's, and Rubin (if she's still around) will be one of his primary cheerleaders. Lather, rinse, repeat.
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1. From NPR, "For High Earners, Expiring Tax Cuts Would Hit Hard".

"Virtually everyone in his income category will see their taxes rise an average of about $14,000," says Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. "That's about a 5 percent reduction in their after-tax income, and 5 percent is something that's, even at that income level, noticeable."

Yes, I agree. Having your monthly take-home pay drop from @$23,333 to @$22,166 is something that you're likely to notice. But if we are to compare relative hardships in the modern economy, having somebody in that income range complain "I will have to decide what to do for vacation. I may not be able to put as much away for purchasing a replacement car when my car dies" reflects a pretty significant disconnect from the daily experience of most families.

2. I know, I know, but let's pretend she's thought this through.

You Can't Expect Logic From Propagandists

Angrily responding to a tempest in a teapot over the date his parents emigrated from Cuba, per Jennifer Rubin, Mark Rubio presents what to me seems to be an evasive prevarication:

The dates I have given regarding my family’s history have always been based on my parents’ recollections of events that occurred over 55 years ago and which were relayed to me by them more than two decades after they happened. I was not made aware of the exact dates until very recently.

Forgive me, but I just can't see how the subject of whether Rubio's parents left Cuba before or after the revolution never came up. I have met lots of exiles from post-revolutionary nations, including Vietnam, Chile and Iran, and when they haven't made clear that they departed before or after the revolution, it has not been difficult to figure out. In claiming that his story is based on "my parents’ recollections of events that occurred over 55 years ago", is Rubio suggesting that his parents simply forgot that they left Cuba before the revolution? That wouldn't be credible. But if age and memory aren't at issue, what is the purpose of that statement other than as a smokescreen? Similarly, his claim that "I was not made aware of the exact dates", is reminiscent of "I never broke the drug laws of the United States." The issue has never been whether Rubio knew exact dates, but whether Rubio knew the general story well enough to know that he was deliberately misleading people when he suggested that his parents fled Cuba after Castro took power.

Rubio's defense continues in a manner that suggests that he knew the actual facts, but chose to dance around them in order to confuse his audience:

What’s important is that the essential facts of my family’s story are completely accurate. My parents are from Cuba. After arriving in the United States, they had always hoped to one day return to Cuba if things improved and traveled there several times.....

They were exiled from the home country they tried to return to because they did not want to live under communism. That is an undisputed fact and to suggest otherwise is outrageous.

In other words, Rubio follows up an initial dubious denial that he was being deliberately misleading by suggesting that it wouldn't matter if he was being deliberately deceptive because the "essential facts" are the same - Castro's revolution occurred and to return would mean living under communism.

Rubio is implicitly admitting that he misled audiences about when his parents left Cuba. He is suggesting that he did not intentionally represent that his parents fled after the revolution but instead made assumptions based upon a few conversations and a lack of knowledge of "exact dates", and that even now that he knows the actual dates they don't matter because the larger story is not changed. Perhaps out of recognition of how thin that defense is, Rubin tries to magic up the additional defense that "Rubio has previously stated that his parents left before Castro’s rise". To do that she points to an editorial that argues that Rubio never explicitly stated that his parents fled Cuba after the revolution. That editorial minces and parses Rubio's words to demonstrate how, despite what any person listening to him might think he's saying, he never actually stated "that his parents fled Cuba".

To back up the lead, the Washington Post excerpts from a 2006 address in the Florida House where Rubio said, “In January of 1959 a thug named Fidel Castro took power in Cuba and countless Cubans were forced to flee. . . . Today your children and grandchildren are the secretary of commerce of the United States and multiple members of Congress . . . and soon, even speaker of the Florida House.”

The catch: If you listen to the speech, Rubio isn’t just talking about those who specifically fled Cuba after Castro took power. He doesn’t say that his parents fled Cuba. Instead, he was talking about “a community of exiles.” That is: He was talking about all the Cubans who live in Miami. . . .

In other words, Rubin cites an editorial in which Rubio is quoted as giving a highly misleading statement that does everything but make clear when his parents fled Cuba, and is pretending that Rubio therefore disclosed that his parents left before the revolution. Incredible....

The editorial Rubin finds so persuasive argues,

In one interview, he said "my parents and grandparents came here from Cuba in '58, '59." In another interview, he said his parents came over in 1959. He wasn't asked if it was before or after the revolution. Fox Business host David Asman just presumed "they were exiles from Fidel Castro's Cuba after he took over."

Rubio didn't correct him.

So, to a degree, Rubio could be guilty of failing to correct something in the news media that inured to his gain (he and his people are quick to to criticize inaccuracies they don't like almost the second they hit the internet).

Well, yeah, that's kind if the heart of the matter, isn't it? Rubio has a long history of making misleading statements about his family background that lead his audience into drawing erroneous inferences, but has never, ever complained to a reporter after-the-fact that they needed to correct their story. The editorial claims that Rubio has recently (as in, within the past month) started to give an honest answer to the direct question of whether his parents came to the U.S. before or after the revolution, but as the Washington Post pointed out,

Rubio — now considered a prospective 2012 Republican vice presidential candidate and a possible future presidential contender — mentions his parents in the second sentence of the official biography on his Senate Web site. It says that Mario and Oriales Rubio “came to America following Fidel Castro’s takeover.”

Let me guess.... Somebody else wrote it, they didn't check the facts with him, he never looks at his own online bios or Senate page, he didn't know what his website said? Seriously, if Rubio believed that he had a track record of truthful statements about his parents' emigration from Cuba, he would not be giving evasive, internally inconsistent "defenses" of his conduct, or making nebulous statements about "family lore,"

In a brief interview Thursday, Rubio said his accounts have been based on family lore. “I’m going off the oral history of my family,” he said. “All of these documents and passports are not things that I carried around with me.”

He would be pointing to his history of clear, truthful disclosures and asserting, "I was always clear on this, and have never misled a soul."

I would respect Rubio a lot more if, rather than hiding beind the skirts of useful idiots, he would simply man up: "At times I have made statements that were deliberately vague about when my parents left Cuba, because I felt that it would work to my political advantage if people assumed they emigrated from Castro's Cuba. Apparently my statements were more misleading that I thought, to the extent that somebody on my staff made a mistake in my official Senate biography, and I am sorry for that. This subject is close to the hearts of a lot of Americans, and I should never have danced around the facts."