Why a Coward's Path to Medicare Reform Won't Work

I've made no secret of what I think of policy proposals that are not slated to take effect until after an election or, worse, after the next President is in office. Granted, sometimes the timing issues are a bit more complicated than they might appear at first blush. The "Bush tax cuts" were scheduled to expire after ten years not because Bush wouldn't have preferred to make them permanent, but because they were passed through reconciliation and thus had a ten year shelf life. Obamacare was implemented in phases not because there was concern about earlier implementation, at least on the part of the Democrats, but because of insistence that the bill be revenue neutral. The staged implementation allowed the financial projections to show revenue neutrality over a ten year period. Which is not to say that I don't think that the Obama Administration felt some relief when the least popular aspect of the plan was pushed to 2014, a happy side-effect of the bitter pill.

In stark contrast are policy proposals over issues that a President fears would be damaging. George W. Bush promised that his policies would lead to an independent Palestinian state during his second term because he didn't want to fall flat on his face trying to force a resolution before his reelection, taking advantage of any suckers who supported his reelection based upon his feigned interest in the issue then all-but-dropping it after his reelection.

The more difficult issues of our time, it seems, are placed on the coward's schedule. The ultimate cowards of our current election cycle are Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, who are deliberately creating a conflict between generations in order to try to grease their way into the White House. They have made clear that they want to turn Medicare into a voucher program and would prefer to do so immediately, but they don't have the courage to stand behind those convictions.

Instead they claim that they will pass legislation that will take effect a decade from now, long after their assumed second term ends, that will leave untouched the Medicare benefits of anybody over the age of 55 but will give any younger person a voucher inadequate to pay for equivalent coverage - and with the voucher structured to lose value over time in relation to the projected future cost of health insurance. They pretend that they will make up some of the shortfall by reducing the value of the voucher for wealthier seniors, but know full well that the amount they could save through such a measure would be a relative pittance.

You know what else? Other than the fact that health insurance companies don't care to insure seniors, with their unpredictable and often high medical costs as well as end-of-life care, their present proposal sounds an awful lot like "Obamacare for seniors, with a public option." Funny how they're not worried about "individual mandates", public competition with private insurers, and the like when it's their proposal. That's not really a big surprise, though, given that Romney still supports Romneycare - his real objections to "Obamacare" are that (a) objecting could help him defeat a Democratic president and (b) it might work.

Back to the coward's time line. As anybody who knows anything about how our system of government works can tell you, Congress passes spending measures on a year-by-year basis. Congress meets and passes new legislation each year. If this year's Congress passes a law that attempts to bind future congresses, a future congress is free to change or repeal that law.

Why do Romney and Ryan quiver in their boots at suggesting to today's older voters, those age 55 and older, as well as current Medicare recipients that their benefits should be transformed to a voucher program? Simply put, those voters have more money and influence as compared to most other voter blocs, they like and want Medicare, and they vote. Romney and Ryan are happy to try to scare those voters with demagoguery about bureaucrats deciding what care they will get, or budget cuts that don't directly affect benefits and which they, themselves, have endorsed. But when it comes to telling that population, "Medicare costs the nation too much, you paid for it but not enough as compared to what you're getting, and it's only fair that you share the burden of our reform," nope, not happening. They propose continuing what they claim to be an undeserved windfall to today's seniors, while imposing what they claim to be an unreasonable burden on everybody else.

So let's move nine years into the future. Assuming Romney and Ryan win the election, they'll be out of office. And their Medicare reform? It won't yet be in effect. The voters they're presently terrified of confronting will be 65 and older. And an entirely new population of voters will be between the ages of 55 and 65, and the new generation of politician will be every bit as terrified of those voters as Ryan and Romney are right this very minute.

It appears to be the hope of Romney and Ryan that, when confronted with that anger, rather than repudiating the never-implemented Medicare reform, politicians a decade from now will look at the budget picture and say, "Let's just put this voucher thing into effect for everybody." More likely, they'll either say, "Let's put this off another ten years." Faced with enough voter anger, as the deadline becomes real and the weakness of the replacement benefit becomes obvious, they'll say "Oh well, I guess we won't be implementing that plan after all."

Either way, the most likely impact of the cowardly reform schedule is that rather than making tough choices, politicians of the next decade (for most of which Romney and Ryan hope to be leading the pack) will slough off the idea that they need to do any hard work to fix Medicare for the long term because, "Several years from now our reform will come into effect and the markets will magically fix all of this stuff." That is, Romney and Ryan are giving themselves an excuse to do nothing constructive and to show no leadership on the actual issues facing Medicare, knowing full well that their cowardice on the issue could create immense difficulty for the administrations that succeed them.

Perhaps they hope that their fiscal policies will leave the government in such bad shape that it cannot afford to perpetuate Medicare. But if that's the case, they should admit up front that they are offering a recipe to harm and weaken our nation, not one that will give it an strong economic footing. If, on the other hand, they believe their budget plans will improve the nation's finances, what are the odds that their successors are going to take the heat for decisions Romney and Ryan were too cowardly to implement when, just like Romney and Ryan, they can push the issue off onto a future administration.

You Won't End Racism With Shallow Bromides

How would you describe the following statements:

• The way to stop deficit spending is to stop deficit spending.

• The way to stop the civil war in Syria is to stop the civil war in Syria.

• The way to stop overfishing in the ocean is to stop overfishing in the ocean.

• The way to stop climate change is to stop climate change.

• The way to stop our nation's dependency on foreign oil is to stop our nation's dependency on foreign oil.

Are any of those observations helpful? Useful? Insightful? Or are they banal? Circular? worthless? Mindless repetition unworthy of the label, "tautology"? How about this one:

• The way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.

I was reminded of that statement, made by Justice Roberts in opposition to the continuation of affirmative action, when Will Cain recited the line on Real Time as if it were a magic bullet solution to our nation's history of racial strife. (They way to stop talking heads from saying foolish things on television is to....)

Jim Lindgren provided a brief, albeit incorrect history of that assertion here, in a statement that I believe crystallizes the thinking of people like Roberts and Cain,

As general background on the history of the nondiscrimination ideal, the best place to start is Andrew Kull's prize-winning The Color-Blind Constitution (Harvard Press). Kull details the rejection of the color-blind version of the 14th Amendment in favor of what was viewed at the time as the weaker and less radical version that was adopted. And he details the rejection of color-blindness, just a few years after a consensus was finally reached in 1964 that American law was to be color-blind. His last main chapter describes the shift away from color-blindness toward what Justice Brennan called "benign racial sorting." In the course of that chapter he describes the idea that the special contribution of American law to reducing discrimination might be to embrace nondiscrimination.

There was nothing in the "less color-blind" version of the 14th Amendment that became the law of our land that compelled our nation to adopt legalized segregation, a doctrine of "separate but equal" that was anything but equal, anti-miscegenation laws, Jim Crow laws and the exclusion of minorities from certain jobs and educational opportunities based upon the color of their skin. There is nothing "color blind" in a body of law that explicitly divides the population based upon skin color and excludes one set of people from superior services available to the other. There is nothing "color blind" in declaring that formalized inequality to be permissible equality. You would have to be blind to history to not recognize "separate but equal" as a sham.

Lindgren is correct that the notion of the "color blind constitution" was rejected as we entered the civil rights era. What he fails to accurately describe is that the notion that the constitution should be "color blind" came in the wake of the civil rights movement, and that the argument was championed by people who had opposed the end of segregation. Why would advocates of segregation and Jim Crow call for a "color blind" constitution? Because they wanted to tie the government's hands in its implementation of remedies. It is that history that lives on in the remarks of Justice Roberts - not explicitly, but in the form of an echo. Roberts can reflexively issue a platitude, and the heirs to the Southern Strategy reflexively cheer, never mind the history.

Lindgren notes,

The idea that the best way to end discrimination is to stop discriminating was a common idea by at least the Reagan Administration.

And quotes Bill Bennett, then Secretary of Education,

What steps do you think should be taken to eradicate racial prejudice and discrimination? What steps should be taken, I guess, are the ones I laid out in my letter to the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission. That is, we should stop discriminating on the basis of race, sex, religion, and origin. Stop, stop, stop. That's where everybody wants to go. The best way to get there is to get there--that is, to stop. You do not eradicate an unfortunate legacy by perpetrating another unfortunate legacy.

You known, "Shucks, what an awful history, but it would be terrible to impose remedial measures." Case closed, we now return you to your original programming, "Welfare queens and young bucks who buy T-bone steaks with food stamps."

Admittedly, affirmative action has always worked better in theory than in practice. The name is born of the theory - the concept of the government taking affirmative action to end racism. But what action can the government take to even the playing field. To overcome generational disadvantage. The conceit of Justice Roberts is that the nation can be viewed as a single actor - and thus, that if the government becomes truly color blind, everybody will be truly color blind. Discrimination will end and we'll all wear Benneton and sing songs about Coca Cola.

But the world is not that simple, and the government was trying to act to prevent and correct a history of private discrimination through public measures. That's inevitably going to be unfair to some people, and is inevitably going to provide a benefit to some who don't need it while denying the same benefit to others who do. There are plenty of valid criticisms that can be made of affirmative action programs, both in terms of the big picture and in terms of the details. The issue being, and the Supreme Court historically recognizing, that sometimes a deeply flawed corrective measure is better than doing nothing. And certainly that you don't eliminate racism by pretending it no longer exists.

I've commented on this before, but one of the recurring themes over at the Volokh Conspiracy, the group blog where Lindgren posts, is that affirmative action is harful to minorities. That they would be more likely to excel at school, t graduate, to earn high incomes if they went to lesser schools better matched to their assumed academic talents. But they never present that same argument about legacy admissions, nor do they apply the same reasoning to kids who are at the margins of admissions standards and get bumped down to their second choice school based as a result of affirmative action. Why would a Harvard legacy be harmed if his school said, "You don't meet our academic standards?" Why would an applicant to any school be harmed if they received the "benefit" of being denied admission to a more difficult school for which they were barely qualfied, and instead ended up in a less academically rigorous setting where they would be closer to average? The reasoning should be the same, but obviously the politics are different.

Ending affirmative action won't end racial discrimination any more than its creation started discrimination. The way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to come up with effective mechanisms that will stop people from discriminating on the basis of race, and then to implement those solutions. If you believe racism no longer exists, then great - the last step is to eliminate race-based corrective measures. But if you know better and care about ending racism, while it's fine to say "Affirmative action is deeply flawed and we can do better," you need to at least try to define the programs you would implement in its stead or attempt to explain why you see the cure as being as bad as or worse than the disease. If you don't care, however, Roberts' quote makes for a great sound bite, doesn't it.

Working With The Other Party is Only "Bipartisanship" When You Have a Choice

Jamelle Bouie takes a look at one of the themes of the Romney campaign, that he has "proved" himself capable of working in a bipartisan manner because he was a Republican governor working with a Democratically controlled legislature. While Bouie explores the fundamental dishonesty of using this theme to attack President Obama, there's something else that we should note:

It's not "bipartisan" to work with the other party when you have no choice. When a Democratic legislative majority passes a bill, the Republican governor who signs it cannot claim that in doing so he is "reaching across the aisle". The compromise of the governor's agenda is inevitable. The same is true when party control is flipped - Jennifer Granholm doesn't have a proud history of bipartisan accomplishment, but instead struggled for eight years to push back against a Republican-controlled legislature. It's what the people voted for, but I would not argue that the result was good for the state, nor would I accept a Romney-type argument that Granholm proved her ability to reach across the aisle merely by showing up for work and signing bills that were invariably passed by Republican majorities, no matter how many state Democrats also signed on.

It's difficult to address these issues without inviting a glib response, "You're right, I had to work with the other party, and I did, successfully, time and time again." But when you cannot pass a single piece of legislation without the support of a large number of legislatures from the other party, that is simply not evidence of how you would work in a polarized environment, where your party shares or holds control of the legislature.

The Burdens of Debt

Dean Baker shared a thought-provoking post on the nation's debt, challenging conventional wisdom:

A moment's reflection shows why the debt is not a measure of inter-generational equity. At some point everyone alive today will be dead. At that point, the bonds that comprise the debt will be held entirely by our children or grandchildren. The debt will be an asset for the members of future generations that hold these bonds. This can raise distributional issues within a generation. For example, if Bill Gates' grandchildren own the entire U.S. debt there will be important within generation distributional consequences, however this says nothing about inter-generational distribution.

I agree with Baker that, right now, the government can borrow money at virtually no interest. Arguably an effective negative interest rate when inflation is taken into account. Were it possible to discuss debt in rational terms, Mitt Romney would talk about the strategy his company used to lard up acquired businesses with debt, supposedly forcing them to become more efficient but also enabling his firm to extract its massive fees and profits on its transactions.

Does Romney believe debt is always bad? Far from it, his personal history indicates that he is very concerned about household debt, but sees business debt as an entirely different animal. If he wants to run government "like a business", at least any business he's actually run, he would be declaring it foolish to not be grabbing up as much of that free money as we can stuff into our pockets.

Romney complains about and deliberately overstates the nation's debt to China, because it's a poll-tested, fear-based argument that works with his base. However, if he knows anything about trade, he knows that we run massive trade deficits each and every year, and that the trade deficit must be paid for with either public or private debt. If China is willing to give us free money to cover the difference, in essence paying us to buy its exports, does businessman Romney truly see that as a bad thing?

My problem with Baker's argument is not that I think that the money disappears, it's that I seem to place a higher value than he does on the "distributional issues" raised by servicing debt. That is, the more debt the nation holds, the more money it must raise from future taxpayers to service that debt. The balance sheet will say that the same amount taxpayers spend to service the debt is received by the holders of the debt, but if my personal experience holds I'll be the one writing that check not the one receiving the payment. Also, there's a tipping point at which the cost of servicing the debt becomes disproportionate, consuming revenue that is needed for other government activity, necessitating either cuts or additional borrowing.

I am more sympathetic to Baker's argument that the present deficits are largely a product of the recession, that there's no evidence that government borrowing is interfering with private borrowing, and that government imposes costs on people (often to the great joy of businesses) in many ways other than through deficit spending. I'm sympathetic to the argument that recessions are the times when you should worry less about deficits, and that the boom times are when we should be balancing the books. I'm convinced, both by logic and by the many failed austerity programs in Europe, of the argument that if they can be avoided a recession is not the time for austerity measures. I'm sympathetic to borrowing money to pay for the infrastructure we need to help our economy grow and flourish. At the same time I'm not able to disregard the "distributional consequences" for future generations. I might feel different if it were going to be my grandchildren who were receiving the payments as opposed to the ones making them but, alas, it won't be.

Promising the Moon then Passing the Hard Work to Congress Isn't Leadership

A central theme of the Romney/Ryan campaign is that they don't have to be specific about the more difficult aspects of their otherwise pie-in-the-sky plans because they're simply going to delegate the task to Congress.

"Here's our specific proposal for a $4 - $5 trillion tax cut, inuring largely to the benefit of the wealthy. Now it's your job, Congress, to find the loopholes to close and deductions to eliminate to make our plan revenue-neutral.

I have forgotten. Which branch of government controls the purse strings again? Which branch of government is infamous for its pork and earmarks, for not wanting to cut anything that might alienate a constituent or wealthy donor? Which branch of government has two-faced "budget experts" who publicly decry stimulus spending while privately pleading for stimulus dollars to be sent to their districts? Which branch of government delegates its difficult budgetary tasks to committees and forces "up or down" votes on committee reports, because that allows its members to avoid taking personal responsibility for any resulting pain? (Give me a "C", give me an "O", give me a "N"....)

This would be the same Congress that created those deductions and loopholes? This would be the same Congress that passed, with "budget expert" Paul Ryan's support, authorization for two unfunded wars and the massive unfunded entitlement expansion, Medicare Part D? This would be the same Congress that has passed each and every budget that has added to our national debt? When he's not campaigning, and professing deep regret for his career of deficit-expanding votes, Paul Ryan is very much part of the problem.

If Romney and Ryan believe what they're saying, they're fools. But you know what? They're not fools. They're hoping that the rest of us are fools, and that a pliant media continues to go along with their game.

To be leaders in this context, Romney and Ryan don't have to take a "my way or the highway" approach. They simply need to put together a credible proposal and say, "If Congress can improve on this, that would be great, but as you can see this really can work." You know what else? If they're deferring to Congress, with Paul Ryan being the GOP's "budget expert" in Congress, Ryan should be able to speak for the House majority right now. If this proposal were to come before the Republican majority in the house, what would Ryan endorse right now? It's a fair question, and one a leader would not be afraid to answer.

Were they honest, they would admit that they're not willing to risk their political futures by telling the truth - that even if we assume there are enough loopholes and deductions to close, there is simply no way that Congress is going to take responsibility for inflicting that kind of pain. If they were courageous they would stand behind their convictions and state exactly what their plan entails, accepting the political consequences. Were they leaders they would produce an actual plan and present it to Congress and the nation. But alas, they're none of the above, so they pretend that its enough to pass the buck to Congress, knowing full well that Congress will demur.

When a Politician Talks About Reproductive Choice

If a politician is directly asked whether, in the event of his election, people should be worried about the loss of reproductive choice, and he answers anything but "no", whatever else he may appear to be saying his answer is "yes".

Whether you find that disturbing or reassuring is an entirely separate issue.

Will Paul Ryan's Budgetary Lies Haunt Romney

They will, if the media does its job. The media should hold Romney's feet to the fire until he identifies enough loopholes and deductions he will ask Congress to close to make his "budget" work.

Ryan was repeatedly challenged to identify the tax deductions he and Romney propose to eliminate to "pay for" their massive tax cut. Predictably, Ryan refused to identify a single one. Even when asked if he would protect the mortgage interest deduction for households earning less than $100,000, he refused to answer.

Here's the thing: There's no way on God's green Earth that Romney and Ryan are the know-nothings they pretend to be on this subject. They're cowards, not idiots. They have specific deductions in mind - probably not enough to make their proposal work, but they do have ideas. They won't name them - beyond some lame demagoguery about Obamacare (which is projected to decrease the deficit) and PBS (whose federal funding is less than a rounding error) - because they're afraid that specifics will cause their bad arithmetic to turn them into budgetary laughing stocks, that their proposed cuts will prove so unpopular that candor costs them the election, or more likely both.

It was fascinating to hear Ryan complaining that the CBO wasn't able to score a speech by President Obama, because they had neither been asked to score anything nor given data to score, and because the speech itself was short of specifics. You know what? To the extent that a politician is making a budget or spending proposal I agree with Ryan that the specifics should be shared, and I agree that when those specifics are produced the CBO should score them. Where I don't agree with Ryan is that the rule should only apply to Democrats. Man up, Mr. Ryan, and submit your latest, detailed budget proposal to the CBO for scoring.

You have to appreciate the audacity, presenting a caricature of Obama's tax proposals then whining that taxes on the wealthy won't be sufficient to close the deficit (as if anybody claimed they were), and in almost the next breath pretending that you can pay for Medicare at its present levels by trimming benefits for the wealthy. You know what? When you target the wealthy it's either class warfare or it isn't, and you promise on top of that "class warfare" to fix the most significant budgetary problem we face, projected Medicare costs, by reducing benefits for wealthy people you are engaging in the very act you misattribute to the other side - because as you've already admitted, the dollars aren't there.

And to keep resorting to the tired distortion about the "$716 billion cut" to Medicare that Ryan included in his own budget, pretending that in Democratic hands a cut he explicitly endorsed through that adoption will devastate seniors? Talk about chutzpah.

Ryan kept complaining that accurate descriptions of his proposals would scare people, suggesting that it was wrong to scare voters. Clever, really, and I expect some people will actually fall for it.

The Latest News from Planet Douthat

When it comes to politics and political commentary the "fools or frauds" question often arises. When somebody makes an assertion that reflects badly on their intelligence, you have to wonder are they truly that foolish or are they knowingly advancing a fraudulent argument. Some columnists appear to believe that "fool or fraud" is a false dichotomy, far too constraining - you don't have to be one or the other when you can be both? And then, alas, you at times see somebody who is attempting a fraud so clumsily that he reveals himself to be a fool.

For some reason my thoughts now shift to Ross Douthat. Douthat opens by assuming that last week's debate was between "the flaws in contemporary conservatism" and "the weaknesses in Obama-era liberalism", and suggests that flawed contemporary conservatism carried the day. I am wondering at this point if Douthat watched the same debate I saw, but alas, he offers no analysis to support his conclusion. We then move into fantasy land:

Four years ago, the Obama presidency was hailed as the beginning of an extended liberal renaissance – a new New Deal, a resurrected Camelot, a return to the glory days of Lyndon Johnson before Vietnam wrecked his presidency. Health care reform was the highest priority, but it was only supposed to be the beginning.

The glory days of Lyndon Johnson.... wasn't that the Obama team's tag line going into the election? Seriously, other than a handful of first time voters already exhausted by eight years of Bush ineptitude, few of whom would get the "Johnson/Vietnam" reference, who does Douthat imagine he is describing?

The most common reaction I was hearing from Democrats was, "I hope the Democrats in Congress don't **** this up." A close second place went to, "I wonder how the Democrats in Congress are going to **** this up?" Perhaps Douthat is confused and believes that Democrats live in opposite land, and if he and his circle of confederates were crying about how Obama was going to ruin the world it could only mean that Democrats believed the opposite. It appears that he needs a bit more grounding in what the Bush Administration deemed "the reality based community."

He goes from there to worse:

With the Democrats enjoying huge congressional majorities, everything seemed to be on the table: Immigration reform, a program to combat climate change, card-check legislation, a wave of trust-busting in the banking sector – and at the least, the very least, a return to Clinton-era tax rates.

Immigration reform. You know, that ridiculous "liberal" concept that George W. Bush wanted to make part of his first term agenda, and that "liberals" like John "DREAM Act" McCain used to champion.

A program to combat climate change. You know, like the cap and trade approach that John McCain guy used to advance, in the past also endorsed by that other ridiculous, naive liberal, Newt Gingrich.

Advocacy for "a wave of trust-busting in the banking sector"? Earth to Planet Douthat? Where did he get the idea that President Obama supported whatever he imagines "trust-busting in the banking sector" to mean? Perhaps Douthat has President Obama confused with Teddy Roosevelt? In the real world, Obama was praising Jamie Dimon while letting Larry Summers and Tim Geithner spearhead financial industry reforms.

A "return to Clinton-era tax rates"? Republicans continue to feign concern about deficit spending and the need for lower deficits and balanced budgets, so it would not be unreasonable for Obama to allow the "Bush-era tax cuts" to expire. I am sure Douthat has erased the facts from his memory, but the cuts passed through reconciliation and were scheduled to expire after ten years. But I digress. No member of the Democratic Party advocated "", and in fact taxes were cut. There is talk about "a return to Clinton-era tax rates" for the wealthiest wage earners, but that's entirely different from what Douthat is pretending to have been Democratic Party policy.

Card check legislation? Well, obviously the modern Republican Party isn't going to help labor unions, so at least he is correct in terms of associating it with the Democratic Party, but it was not the priority Douthat would have us believe. Why pull it out of mothballs? Because it remains a Republican talking point.

In other words, Douthat complains that the Democrats wanted to pass a "weak" form of "liberalism" which, for the most part, had previously been at the core of campaign rhetoric and policy proposals of the prior President and Obama's 2008 election opponent. Well, yes, adopting Republican policies can reasonably be described as a weak form of liberalism, but that's obviously not what Douthat meant.

And... whoah... we're only too paragraphs into Douthat's foolishness.

Douthat pontificates,

Sometimes Obama-era liberalism has disappointed because it has failed outright. The defeat of cap-and-trade legislation and the stillborn push for immigration reform exposed the deep fissures within the Democratic party, and particularly the divide between the enlightened do-goodism of the party’s upper middle class supporters and the economic interests of its remaining blue-collar constituents.

It should be unnecessary to say this, but McCain/Gingrich style "cap and trade" measures, and McCain/Bush-style immigration reform aren't the best examples of "Obama-era liberalism" or its failure. Immigration reform failed because of right-wing demagoguery, a strategy of xenophobia that remains remarkably effective at scaring and dividing people. John McCain could have demonstrated some backbone and picked up at least one of his old causes, rallying the tiny number of Republican votes it would have taken to see his dreams (no pun intended) become reality. But no, politics were more important, and as Mitch McConnell said, their number one job was to beat Obama in 2012.

How about that little sneer at the Democratic Party's elites who are out of touch with "the economic interests of its remaining blue-collar constituents"? Because, you know, 95% of Democrats are rich, urb9o0anites, doing something other than working in the financial industry but, you know, otherwise that rich and out of touch. Were Douthat an honest man, he would admit that he's using a euphemism here for "working class white males who have not attended college", but... he's not. Even if we assume that there remains no lingering effect of the Republican Southern Strategy, which we should not, the Republican Party has engaged in shameless demagoguery on a wide variety of issues to keep that group of voters largely in its corner. And yes, it reached the point where John McCain had to scamper away from his own long-held beliefs in support of policies that Douthat purports to be "Obama-era liberalism".

Douthat next launches into the standard Republican double message on Obama's first year in office - having just told us how the President should have been able to resolve pretty much every major, unresolved issue facing the country, we get "but he simultaneously should also have tried to do less".

Then came the White House’s failure to sell the public on its health care bill, which exacerbated the stimulus’s underperformance – by leading to months of wrangling when Washington should have been reckoning with the economy instead – and then cost the Democrats dearly at the polls in 2010.

You see, there was no issue with Republican obstructionism and demagoguery, the whole "death panels" thing never happened, Republicans didn't (and don't) criticize the President for supposedly cutting Social Security (to give money to undeserving people who haven't "paid for" Medicare), and the like. No, all the President had to do was give speech and the nation would have magically understood the entire bill. You have to ask, why didn't he think of that. Oh yeah, because he doesn't have the good fortune of living on Planet Douthat.

This failure of salesmanship doesn’t in and of itself discredit the bill’s provisions.

That's an interesting admission, Ross. Funny how you didn't have enough space in your blog post (which does not have any limitations on its length) to better explain that one.

But at the very least it demonstrates that the redistributive policies liberals favor will only be accepted if they’re founded on a secure base of economic growth – growth that Obama’s policies, unlike F.D.R.’s or L.B.J.’s, have conspicuously failed to produce.

And just like that, we're beamed back up to Planet Douthat. The planet where seniors won't take a penny of Social Security or Medicare unless they're sure they paid for everything they receive (and more!) over their working lives. The planet in which Medicare Part D, a gargantuan, unfunded expansion of Medicare wasn't spearheaded by a Republican President, passed by a Republican Congress, and eagerly accepted by a panoply of senior citizens who vote Republican. With Paul "Mr. Fiscal Responsibility" Ryan himself voting for the expansion. Because... redistribution. Ew.

Not being big on internal consistency, Douthat explains the biggest fault of "Obama-era liberalism" - it's designed to advance the ends of powerful interest and industry groups, instead of the people.

More broadly, all of Obama’s signature accomplishments have tended to have the same weakness in common: They have been weighed down by interest-group payoffs and compromised by concessions to powerful insiders, from big pharma (which stands to profit handsomely from the health care bill) to the biggest banks (which were mostly protected by the Dodd-Frank financial reform).

One wonders how Douthat defines "conservatism", or if he has ever heard either the expression, "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" or "business as usual". He can't possibly be that clueless about how Washington works.

A small dose of reality: The legislation the President passed could have been made significantly better had a handful of responsible Republicans signed on. The President would have been able to avoid making unseemly deals with the likes of Mary Landrieu and Ben Nelson, the nation would have been better served, the special interests might have been pushed back at least a few inches. But no, Mitch McConnnell was focused on creating a context for Obama's defeat, and it makes for much better demagoguery to whine about "The Louisiana Purchase" than to admit that one responsible Republican could have voted in favor of the bill and obviated the need for that deal.

It may have been an empty rhetorical gesture, but the fact that Romney could actually out-populist the president on “too big to fail” during the last debate speaks to the Obama-era tendency for liberalism to blur into a kind of corporatism, in which big government intertwines with big business rather than restraining it.

The President was, of course, handicapped by the facts. Romney can do his usual, embracing both sides of the issue: "I love Dodd-Frank, except for the parts that I hate and will repeal, and no I'm not going to tell you what parts I'm taking about," and pretend that he would do more than the President to take on the financial industry. May have been an empty rhetorical gesture? Once again, "Earth to Planet Douthat...." The financial sector is openly seething about what they see as an attack by the President. Bailing them out so that they could pay their bonuses with taxpayer dollars and borrow for next to nothing, and get right back to business as usual? You can only imagine their horror. You can rest assured that Romney is presenting a very different message behind closed doors. Those are, after all, his people.

And hm... what word is it that anti-Obama demagogues like to use to describe Obama, and what does it have to do with "big government intertwine[d] with big business"? (Something that Douthat has apparently never noticed before. Seriously?) Perhaps he's been hanging out with Jonah Goldberg. Yeah, Obama's that brand of socialist-communist-fascist that is always ignoring the needs of the people in favor of serving powerful industries.

How can you follow up on such a wonderful analysis? How about by... lying?

But what we don’t see in this campaign cycle is much soul-searching from Democrats about the ways in which their agenda hasn’t worked out as planned.

Instead, in a country facing a continued unemployment crisis and a looming deficit crunch, liberals have rallied behind a White House whose only real jobs program is “stay the course” and whose plan to deal with long-term deficits relies on the woefully insufficient promise to tax the 1 percent.

You know, job bill? Blocked by Republicans? Because they want Obama to lose? Apparently no similar effort was made on Planet Douthat? You can criticize it on substance - Matt Taibbi thinks it's a handout to Wall Street, Richard Epstein thinks it would create a socialist nightmare - but you cannot pretend it does not exist. What does Mitt Romney promise to do, again? Oh, that's right... "create" the exact number of jobs that are projected to be created if we vote a turnip into the White House.

It’s not that Romney offered some detailed, brilliantly persuasive alternative. He didn’t, and couldn’t, because his party has at best a sketch of a policy agenda rather than a blueprint.

Actually, as Douthat knows, if Romney's party thought Romney believed half of what he said in the debate they would pull the plug on his campaign. The same interests that Douthat whines are too influential in the Obama Administration consider Romney to be bought and paid for.

But Romney isn’t running for re-election, and this was a case where merely seeming forward-looking, energetic and reassuring was enough to remind Americans of all the ways that the Obama era has disappointed them – and in so doing, sent shivers down liberalism’s glass jaw.

Wow. For mixed metaphors of that caliber I usually have to read Thomas Friedman.

Frankly, if a Republican presidential nominee can win an election by serving up a steaming dose of Rafalca leavings, but doing so in a "forward-looking, energetic and reassuring" manner, we have bigger problems than trying to figure out how to make glass jaws stop shivering. Douthat may come to realize that, should he ever move back to Planet Earth.

Should Douthat venture beyond his peer group and into the world at large, he will find that Democrats are very concerned about what might happen in a second Obama term. That they're aware of the institution impediments politicians like McConnell are happy to utilize to damage the President, even when he knows he's also harming the country, because power is more important than policy. But I suspect I"m now getting into stuff that's beyond Douthat's ability to grasp, harder and nowhere near as much fun to write as a blog post that echoe's Republican talking points, and not at all likely to fill Douthat's pockets through speaker fees and book contracts.

Update: Ethan Gach is far more charitable to Douthat than I. Responding to Douthat's claim that "liberals" have "rallied" behind the President and his lukewarm second term agenda, Gach comments, "What makes Douthat’s chiding so unbearable isn’t that it’s untrue: it’s that it completely misses the point."

When Douthat complains, "we don’t see in this campaign cycle is much soul-searching from Democrats about it seems that he missed his own political party's inability to "soul search" following various election losses. But more than that, he's presenting a hollow man argument. In his bifurcation of society, Douthat whines about "liberals" as if there's a single, unified "liberal" mindset, and that "liberals" are all cheering for the President. He can only believe that if... he never ventures outside and limits his media exposure to Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. It would be more true to accuse conservatives of mindlessly cheering for Mitt Romney despite his offering what Douthat charitably describes as "at best a sketch of a policy agenda rather than a blueprint". Seriously - Douthat defends that on the ground that Romney is not the incumbent, but it's much easier to run on a fantasy when your campaign is not firmly grounded in facts on the ground.

Gach believes that Douthat is expressing a clever form of contrarianism, that "The very thing that liberals love to accuse Romney of being, well, it’s actually true of their guy". Except the concern about Romney is not that "his agenda going forward is insubstantive" - the concern about Romney is that he has an agenda that he refuses to disclose, but that he may nonetheless be elected.

Gach continues his charity work,

I can understand why Douthat doesn’t want to look at the entire context in which the people, philosophies, and political parties he’s discussing are operating. That would be difficult, complex, and inconclusive. It certainly would not lend itself to the kind of “actually THIS is what’s going on” blogging that professional pundits are expected and encouraged to turn out.

If you say, though, that Douthat "doesn’t want to look at the entire context" you have the choice of stating that his blindness is not willful (fool) or that he's deliberately omitting the context in order to present an argument he knows to be deeply flawed if not false (fraud). Yes, if you can see through the charade this approach "makes what he says kind of silly", but his pontifications weren't intended for somebody like Gach who can see through the charade.

Confusing Science with Magic

Arthur C. Clarke once observed that any sufficiently advanced technology can seem indistinguishable from magic. Many TV shows and situation comedies have presented time travel, where present technology appears magical to an earlier population, or even where a technologically sophisticated alien presents herself as a god. It's a fair observation.

At the same time, it can be easy to lose track of how we perceive the development of technology, particularly if we lack a sufficient understanding of the science underlying the technology. Watch an episode of the original Battlestar Galactica series and much of the technology seems antiquated - voice recognition software putting your dictation on a low resolution CRT? How about the communicators from the original Star Trek series? Why don't they upgrade to iPhones? And a separate tricorder? Why isn't there an app for that?

Quite a few years back I was involved in a discussion about food shortages and distribution issues, regional overpopulation and the like. Somebody who was reasonably well-educated popped in with the comment that she didn't worry about food shortages because it was only a matter of time before we had food replicators, as seen on Star Trek, the Next Generation. If Jean-Luc Picard could turn to a hole in the wall, say "Earl Grey, hot", and have a cup full of tea magically appear, clearly it is only a matter of time before we all have such a wondrous device creating and serving our favorite foods in unlimited quantity, right?

Well, wrong. I pointed out the physics involved - development of the device aside, the extraordinary amount of energy it would take to replicate food in that manner. My comment fell on deaf ears. "Scientists will figure it out."

There's nothing new in that attitude. Charlatans have, for centuries, promised that they can find ways (figuratively or literally) to turn common items into gold. Even in this age of modern pharmaceuticals, we're always hoping for a magic pill or potion that will allow us to live forever, to overcome the effects of inactivity, overeating, aging. We are primed to hope, and there will always be somebody looking to capitalize on that fact.

On Real Time this past weekend, Bill Maher criticized a Member of Congress, John Shimkus, for making the insipid suggestion that we don't need to worry about climate change, because God had promised Noah that he would never again destroy the Earth with a flood. Never mind that the promise wasn't, "I'll stop you from destroying the Earth."

One of Maher's guests, Will Cain, expressed skepticism that climate change was as serious as some suggest. He employed the traditional had waving defense of many climate change deniers, pretending that there's a meaningful disagreement among climate scientists about the reality of climate change. He then launched into what I expect he believes to be a discussion of science, reciting that the world had been predicted to run out of food but that the development of fertilizers proved that theory wrong.

In other words, "Don't worry about the facts. Don't worry about what science can actually do. Because, magic."

When religious people respond to criticism of faith-based argument by asserting that a lot of argument that is supposedly based on science is in fact based on faith, they can point to Will Cain as their poster child.

It was not scientifically wrong to look at the world's capacity for food production and, based upon the amount of food an average individual requires to survive, projecting a maximum carrying capacity for the planet. Although the development of nitrogen-based fertilizers did significantly increase the planet's capacity for food production, it remains possible to do exactly the same thing: to calculate the Earth's carrying capacity based upon current levels of food production. It's also possible to examine how regional or global shortages will change that number.

Beyond confusing science with magic, and adding a generous topping of faith and self-centeredness - never mind where science hasn't worked out so well for past or present populations, if Will Cain needs science to fix something it will deliver and it will do so in a timely manner - Cain demonstrates confused thinking.

The fact that the world once faced an issue that was (partially) overcome by science does not mean that the world, facing that same issue again, will experience a similar scientific breakthrough. It certainly does not mean that, faced with a completely different issue, we can count on science to provide the necessary solution within the necessary time frame.

Cain's resort to "science", really science fiction, as a solution to a real problem is scarcely more intellectually sound than Shimkus's reliance on God's promise not to again flood the world. While they practice their respective forms of faith, the rest of us need to keep working on a back up plan.

Sandusky's Sentence - Bad Joke of the Day

Jerry Sandusky gets 30 - 60 years. He had been hoping for 10 - 12.

(What a... sociopath.)

Daylight Between the U.S. and Its Allies

Daniel Larison comments on Mitt Romney's election rhetoric that there should be no "daylight" between America and allied governments:

Grant is correct that Romney’s criticism and understanding of U.S.-client relationships are nonsensical, but this isn’t the first time Romney has said this sort of thing. It has been true of Romney’s statements on this subject for months. Whether he has described it in terms of “no daylight” or “not an inch of difference” or “locking arms” with allied and client governments, Romney has made this nonsensical, unworkable idea a pillar of his foreign policy.

Larison goes on to state what should be obvious:

A major part of managing these relationships successfully is acknowledging disagreements when they exist, finding ways to work around them, and keeping them from derailing constructive relations in other areas. There will also be cases where different allied and friendly governments will have competing or contradictory interests. When that happens, the U.S. can’t be expected to side entirely with one party over another, and it certainly can’t support both states in their goals at the same time. Romney’s “not an inch of space” view would fail badly if it were put into practice, and the fact that Romney thinks this is a clever position to take suggests that he hasn’t given the matter much thought.

If a Democratic candidate were issuing similar statements, it is difficult to imagine that the Republicans would not (justifiably) ridicule it as weakness. We would hear about how when U.S. interests are at stake, if our allies want no daylight between their position and ours, our allies should do the moving. "You're either with us or against us."

There are reasons both parties at times, and with certain countries, make statements about special relationships, a near-perfect alignment of interests, and the like, no matter what the U.S. might do in the event of a direct clash of interests. With Romney we have the difficulty of having little sign that he has given any thought to foreign policy, and even less evidence that he has any real appreciation of the issues he addresses. He'll have some poll-driven talking points for the foreign policy elements of the upcoming debate but what does he actually believe? How could you possibly know?

My sense of Romney is that he genuinely believes in U.S. exceptionalism, and that his beliefs play into why he has given the issue so little thought. If God guides America's hand, you don't have to spend much time thinking about whether God is right or wrong. But by the same token, that would mean that his "daylight" comments, like pretty much everything else out of his mouth, is poll-driven demagoguery.

George Will's Question for the Wrong Candidate

George Will, who has long been an opponent of campaign finance reform, has penned a "questions for the candidates" column, in which he imagines asking the President,

President Obama, you deplore the court's Citizens United decision. What is your constitutional basis for rejecting the decision's principle that Americans do not forfeit their First Amendment rights when they come together in corporate entities (mostly nonprofit advocacy corporations such as the Sierra Club) to speak collectively? You say you would “seriously consider" amending the First Amendment to empower Congress to regulate political speech. Explain why you choose to make the Bill of Rights less protective.

As Will knows, the President would likely respond with a rather scholarly commentary on the history of corporations, corporate speech rights, and campaign finance jurisprudence, that historically there has been bipartisan support for restrictions on campaign spending by both individuals (something that doesn't appear anywhere near as bothersome to Will) an corporations, point out that the question was narrowly decided by the court in a decision that reversed recent precedent, and that there are valid reasons to be wary of excessive contributions from any interest group. The fact that the First Amendment, at least as interpreted for the greater part of the last century, would have us err on the side of speech rights does not change the fact that there are competing interests at play.

But although Mitt "Corporations are People" Romney might be superficially sympathetic to Will's argument, his actual thoughts on the subject turn out to be an incoherent mess.

Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney said Tuesday that he thinks teachers unions should be banned from making political contributions because union leaders often negotiate contracts with Democratic politicians they’ve helped elect, a situation he called “an extraordinary conflict of interest.”

“I believe that we simply can’t have a setting where the teachers unions are able to contribute tens of millions of dollars to the campaigns of politicians, and then those politicians, when elected, stand across from them at the bargaining table, supposedly to represent the interest of the kids,” Romney told host Brian Williams in a 45-minute appearance at NBC’s Education Nation Summit in New York.

He said it is “a mistake” to allow unions to make such donations, which he argued represent “an extraordinary conflict of interest.”

“I think we’ve got to get the money out of the teachers unions going into campaigns,” he said. “It’s the wrong way for us to go. We have got to separate that.”

I doubt George Will needs to be reminded of this, but unions are corporations, which in the eyes of both Will and Romney makes them "people" with First Amendment rights. As posed to the President, Will's question comes down to how our nation should interpret legal precedents, apply constitutional language and weigh competing interests - and that's a discussion we should have.

For Romney, though, the question becomes, "Why do you want to completely shut down the speech rights of organizations that you have previously stated are 'people' who are entitled to constitutionally protected speech, including in the form of unlimited campaign contributions, based upon the content of their speech - what you believe they might say? Do you understand anything about First Amendment jurisprudence, content-based restrictions on speech, or equal protection under the laws? Does your defense of corporate free speech rights translate into a self-serving, unprincipled philosophy, "Speech should be free if it fills my campaign's coffers and helps me get elected, but if it might help my opponent it should be banned"?

(I'm also again left wondering, does George Will read his own newspaper?)

Romney on the Middle East

Mitt Romney penned an editorial for he Wall Street Journal, criticizing the President's Middle East policy and pretending to offer an alternative.

OK, so what do we have here? America needs to support our partners. We need to restore our credibility with Iran, by making them believe that we really, really don't want them to have nuclear weapons. We need to place no daylight between ourselves and Israel. And we need to encourage liberty and opportunity. That line about "the dignity of work" is a little odd—maybe the problem they have in the Middle East is too many 47 percenters? So where's the new policy again?

But in the next paragraph, he says he's going to give us "a very different set of policies." So here it comes, right? The answer is ... "American strength in all its dimensions." Ah yes. Strength. Resolve. If you ask "How, precisely, will you achieve these goals?" then you're obviously a weakling who can't grasp the full majesty of Mitt Romney's chin, which when jutted in the direction of our adversaries will make them quake before us and submit to our demands.

Ed Kilgore provides a more detailed analysis.

Put aside for a moment the arguments about Iran’s ultimate intentions and its alleged historically unique indifference to nuclear deterrence, or about the actual balance of military power in the Middle East. Forget if you can the calamitous consequences, not only to regional peace and stability, but to the U.S. and global economies, of war with Iran.

Think about this: Mitt Romney is running for president on a platform of indistinguishable and conjoined exceptionalism for the U.S. and Israel. And because Israel faces a vastly greater military threat, this means America would abandon its own independence of action and consign its fate to Bibi Netanyahu, a man whose views on peace and security are highly controversial in Israel itself.

The problem is not so much that Romney wants to eliminate daylight between the U.S. and Israel - it's that he cannot actually articulate a policy reason to do so, and if he knows anything of the region (and I suspect he knows very little) he has to understand that a U.S. embrace of Netanyahu's policies and of its stance on Iran is not going to help us work with the region's nascent democracies or endear us to the man on the street.

Good gravy, does Romney believe this in relation to the Middle East?

The first step is to understand how we got here. Since World War II, America has been the leader of the Free World. We're unique in having earned that role not through conquest but through promoting human rights, free markets and the rule of law. We ally ourselves with like-minded countries, expand prosperity through trade and keep the peace by maintaining a military second to none.

Which of our close relationships in the Middle East does Romney believe demonstrates our promotion of human rights, free markets and the rule of law? With the exception of Israel, where our lack of support for Palestinian rights has done anything but endear us to the rest of the Middle East, the best we can point to is Egypt, with the successive dictatorships of Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak and a mediocre human rights record, and the monarchy in Jordan. We used to have the Shah of Iran, for what that's worth - was he one of the "like-minded" leaders Romney has in mind. We have the monarchs of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. We really don't want to spend much time talking about Iran, Syria, Lebanon.... So, no, we don't have a good track record in the Middle East, we're not viewed by the Arab and Persian populations of the Middle East as champions of human rights, and our notions of governance and the rule of law remain alien to the day-to-day lives of most of the region's populations.

Given that Romney feigns umbrage (from Rush Limgaugh's mouth to Romney's ear) about the President's off-the-cuff statement that Israel is "one of our closest allies" in the region, I would be interested to hear Romney explain our alliances with key nations in the region, most specifically how our alliance with Israel compares to our treaty-based alliance with Turkey. I would also like to hear him explain how he would have avoided the mistakes of the Bush era and created a government in Iraq that he would comfortably include as "one of our best allies in the region", or how he would have kept a post-dictatorship Egypt within that category.

If Romney truly believes that the path to good relations with the nations of the Middle East lies in more than bellicosity toward Iran, involves supporting "governments and individuals who share our values" and requires asserting influence through "our economic strength, our military strength and the strength of our values", I would be interested to hear him explain in concrete terms how his proposed actions won't constitute a setback for our Middle East efforts, what governments other than Israel's he believes to share our values, and the concrete steps he plans to take to improve our standing and increase our influence with the people and governments of the region.

Obviously I won't be holding my breath.

Fee-For-Service Isn't "Market-Based"?

It's that time of year, when pretty much every columnist is tempted to phone in a column, putting words in the mouth of the President or his challenger that supposedly represent the truth, a message that they are convinced will win the race, or... allows them to easily meet a deadline. Among today's examples was this lazy example by David Brooks, his usual effort to put his own spin on the present set of Republican talking points. It's banal, and I was ready to ignore it until I hit Brooks' criticism of the Obama Administration's attempt to control healthcare spending by evaluating the efficacy of treatments,

The second approach, favored by me, is to scrap the perverse fee-for-service incentives and use a more market-based approach. I think there’s ample evidence that this could work, but, to be honest, some serious health economists disagree.

As expressed, the statement is an incoherent mess. In our market-based economy, if you want goods you pay for them. If you want services you pay for them. What does Brooks imagine to be more market-based than paying the fees required by people who is selling you their services.

In an effort to make sense of Brooks' argument, I headed over to Romney's website, and found this:

• Medicare is reformed as a premium support system, meaning that existing spending is repackaged as a fixed-amount benefit to each senior that he or she can use to purchase an insurance plan....

• “Traditional” fee-for-service Medicare will be offered by the government as an insurance plan, meaning that seniors can purchase that form of coverage if they prefer it; however, if it costs the government more to provide that service than it costs private plans to offer their versions, then the premiums charged by the government will have to be higher and seniors will have to pay the difference to enroll in the traditional Medicare option

In other words, Brooks is distorting Romney's proposal - rendering it incomprehensible in his retelling - to avoid disclosing that what Romney wants to do is replace Medicare with vouchers. Romney doesn't care whether health insurance is offered on a fee-for-service basis or on some other basis - he simply wants seniors to purchase it from private insurance companies, while constructing a premium structure that will discourage seniors from buying - or leave them unable to afford - traditional Medicare coverage.

Brooks goes from incoherent to insipid:

I’m willing to pursue any experiment, from any political direction, that lowers costs and saves Medicare. Democrats are campaigning as the party that will fight to the death to preserve the Medicare status quo. If they win, the lesson will be: Never Touch Medicare. No Democrat or Republican will dare reform the system, and we will go bankrupt.

The Democratic Party worked very hard to reform Medicare, hampered not by a lack of willingness to make the effort but by lockstep Republican opposition. Brooks knows that the Republican hope was that, between demagoguery, obstructionism and , the reform effort would fail. The goal was not to offer a better alternative - that can be seen from the fact that the "best" Romney is willing to do is propose vouchers for a future set of seniors - but to prevent a reform that would strengthen and perpetuate the program. Through "Romney", Brooks whines that "Congress wrote provisions in the health care law that have already gutted the power of the advisory board", but the Republicans in Congress could have prevented that from happening or could help fix that problem right now. Instead they demagogue about "death panels" and "bureaucrats deciding your care."

When it's private plans, the Republican complaint is that Obama's reforms were going to make you change your insurance plan, put bureaucrats between you and your doctor, make you change your doctor.... But when it's Medicare, the goal is to strip seniors of their present plan, Medicare, and subject them to the vagaries of market forces rather than guaranteeing a predefined set of services in the tradition of comprehensive health insurance. There's no attempt at consistency, but that's only a problem if columnists like Brooks aren't willing to post incoherent nonsense to spackle over the cracks and holes in the healthcare policies his preferred candidates want to impose upon the nation.

If the Democrats win, it will be that much harder for the Republicans to voucherize Medicare, but it is absurd to pretend that the only party that displays any serious interest in reform and cost containment will suddenly stop working on those reforms. Given Romney's effort to distance himself from his own health insurance reform plan, there's simply no credibility to Brooks' suggestion that he would "pursue any experiment, from any political direction". The only plan he's openly favored is voucherization, walking it back only when he realized the backlash that plan was about to create. Under Romney, we're not going to be looking at ideas from Japan, Europe or Canada, or even Massachusetts. If he gets his way, we'll be looking at vouchers.

The charitable interpretation is that Brooks is trying to put the best spin - the least offensive mendacity, inconsistency and incoherence - on what Romney might say about Medicare, and that Brooks is not himself attempting to hide the facts of Romney's plan. But given Brooks' history, there's little reason to view his column as anything other than an attempt to burnish Romney.

Update: Dean Baker addresses a number of the factual errors and faulty assumptions Brooks includes in his "speech".

Foreign Policy? What's That?

David Ignatius presents what on one hand is a fair criticism of the President for his failure to articulate clear policies on foreign policy issues, and is on the other hand an unfair implication that this failure is both unique to President Obama and not a predictable consequence of our political system with its rigidly scheduled elections, presidential term limits, shallow political commentary and larger public disinterest in foreign policy.

Let's be blunt, our nation's Middle East policy has been a disaster for pretty much as long as the Middle East has had geopolitical significance. For much of that history, the United States has backed dictators and monarchs, even if that meant suppressing secular democratic movements and turning a blind eye to the rise of Islamic radicalism and the impact our policies have on popular opinion. We have been consistent in our support for Israel, but that's a one-off, not a coherent regional policy. The most articulate Middle East policy I can recall is the Carter Doctrine, "An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force." But that's more about hegemony than about creating a Middle East that, if not aligned with our interests, is at least not in large part openly hostile.

I have commented for years on what is obvious, that Presidents shy away from doing anything important prior to elections. And I'm not just speaking about the months or year leading up to an election. I'm talking about any major policy proposal or change that is expected to be difficult or potentially unpopular. To the maximum extent possible many of those issues are postponed until after the President is elected to his second term, or are implemented on a time table that delays important policies and benchmarks from being implicated until a year or two after the election.

Ignatius complains that a comment by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a "laugh line" that reflects "President Obama’s risk-averse refusal to engage on foreign policy issues", but I find it to be neither a laugh line nor even about Obama.

“I do believe that some conversations and key issues must be talked about again once we come out of the other end of the political election atmosphere in the United States.”

It's a candid statement of the reality faced by any nation hoping to effect foreign policy change in the United States. If it's controversial, the President is likely to put it off until after the election. If it's both difficult and controversial, there's a good chance any given President will punt, or take late action that leaves his successor to deal with any problems or to clean up the mess.

Ignatius complains,

The “come back after Nov. 6” sign is most obvious with Iran. The other members of the “P5+1” negotiating group understand that the United States doesn’t want serious bargaining until after the election, lest Obama have to consider compromises that might make him look weak.

It's fair to ask, what does Ignatius believe that the nation will gain by pushing ahead with negotiations right now, and trying to come to some form of deal with Iran in advance of the election? Will we suddenly be able to breathe a collective sigh of relief, end all sanctions against Iran, and live forever as a big happy family? Of course not. If and when an agreement is reached, things will continue to carry on pretty much as they are.

Ahmadinejad and some of his aides let slip during their visit to New York that they may be willing to offer a deal that would halt enrichment of uranium above 5 percent. Is this a good deal or not, in terms of U.S. and Israeli security? Sorry, come back later.

Why does Ignatius pose that as a rhetorical question rather than sharing his opinion, or the opinion of any of the other nations in "" who aren't burdened by pending elections? In case he needs the reminder, Netanyahu, bomb chart in hand, just gave the U.N. a somewhat condescending lecture about Iran. I missed the part when he said, "But if Iran says they won't enrich past 5%, peace will break out all over." If, consistent with the consensus view of their plan, Iran hopes to be the turn of a key away from becoming a nuclear state, does it matter if they "only" enrich uranium to 5% if with a few taps on a keyboard the very same centrifuges can enrich uranium to 20%?

This is pretty amazing:

Will Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu keep his gun in the holster until after the polls close? The White House certainly hopes so. But someone should check the odds with Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate who is one of Mitt Romney’s biggest financial backers.

What we saw over a period of months was Netanyahu's open effort to influence the outcome of U.S. elections, despite a growing criticism of his tactics by other political and military leaders, right to the point he flew to the U.S. to grouse about being snubbed by the President and to appear on Meet the Press, but then... oh, those polls. Time to be contrite, stay out of U.S. election politics, distance himself from any claim that he hopes for a Romney victory. Looking at Adelson's bet on Romney and their joint visit to Israel earlier this year, it isn't the President who looks like the loser in that round of high stakes gambling.

Ignatius then complains that, although the President has implemented programs in Egypt and Syria that Ignatius seems to regard as promising, the President isn't talking about those programs. So the problem isn't that the President is failing to form good policy, or is making bad bets, it's that he's not flashing his cards? How would public attention improve Obama's policies? How might Republican demagoguery affect their implementation? Given Romney's embarrassing demagoguery on Russia and New START, it's difficult to believe that it would be helpful.

Ignatius proceeds to complain, not about Obama Administration policies as such, but about the fact that the Obama Administration isn't discussing its policies.

I’m told that the talk in the Libyan underground is about a “global intifada,” like what the new al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri has been preaching for the past five years. But ask U.S. officials about that subject, and you get a “no comment.”

I expect that pretty much every al-Qaeda sympathizer on the planet talks about a "global intifada" and a resurgent al-Qaeda, but politics aside, that doesn't mean it's good policy for the Obama Administration to talk about those groups and their goals, to give those groups publicity and attention that they may not merit in order to vindicate Ignatius's sources. Ignatius complains, "The administration has a lot invested in the public impression that al-Qaeda was vanquished when Osama bin Laden was killed", but I think it's more accurate to say that the media has chosen to treat al-Qaeda as an old story, perhaps even a non-story, and the Obama Administration sees no benefit in trying to inspire the media to again cover the story. It's not just the media - it's also the Republican Party.

The same is true with the war in Afghanistan. Ignatius may wish that the President were giving him a play by play on troop levels, but when you hear Romney talk about Afghanistan - if he even remembers to bring it up - he'll flip between criticizing the President for setting a firm date for withdrawal and giving the enemy too much information, and insisting that he'll have Afghanistan be fully responsible for its own security by the end of 2014. Why no mention of that incoherence?

Ignatius complains about the President's off-the-cuff candor with Dmitry Medvedev that, on certain issues, he would have more flexibility after being reelected. Well, no kidding. To those who pay even slight attention to U.S. politics, the story was that the comment was caught on microphone, not that the President stated something that is blindingly obvious. So why is Ignatius trying to turn that comment into something more than it is? Into something that makes Obama's putting off issues until after the election any different than Bush's pushing off his plan for Palestinian statehood until his second term, claiming a mandate to privatize Social Security after forgetting to mention it during his reelection campaign, having his tax cuts expire two years after he was out of office....

This strategy of avoiding major foreign policy risks or decisions may help get Obama reelected. But he is robbing the country of a debate it needs to have — and denying himself the public understanding and support he will need to be an effective foreign policy president in a second term, if the “rope-a-dope” campaign should prove successful.

That's the wishful thinking of somebody who places a high priority on foreign policy. As Ignatius knows, the average American has little interest in foreign policy and even less knowledge. Has he forgotten Bush's embarrassing lack of knowledge during the lead-up to the 2000 election, "but it's okay, because he'll surround himself with really good advisers." And the public, buying into that argument, bought into the conceit that nations like Pakistan aren't really relevant to our interests, so why should they care if the President can name their leaders or even find them on a map.

I don't disagree with Ignatius that timing foreign policy actions around elections is unhelpful, and that our nation would benefit from finding a way to avoid the problem, but unlike Ignatius I'm not willing to pretend that the phenomenon is new or unique to Obama. I also find Ignatius's comments to be, in large part, style over susbstance. I am perfectly happy to have the Obama Administration refrain from commenting on every hyperbolic claim of every group that sympathizes with al-Qaeda, even if it means that Ignatius can't win confirmation for whispered rumors form his sources.

Let me take you back roughly a year to when elections weren't on Ignatius's mind.

Barack Obama got elected president in part because he promised to change the foreign policy priorities of a Bush administration that was unpopular abroad, had strained relations with key allies and was facing a growing Iranian challenge and a continuing menace from al-Qaeda.

So what’s happened over the past 32 months? There have been a lot of bumps and bruises, especially in the global economy. But if you step back from the daily squawk box, some trends are clear: Alliances are stronger, the United States is (somewhat) less bogged down in foreign wars, Iran is weaker, the Arab world is less hostile and al-Qaeda is on the run.

Back then, Ignatius concluded, "Obviously, it will take awhile to accept that quiet American leadership is still leadership." I hardly dare ask whether Ignatius's change of position on the Obama Administration's successes and "quiet leadership" is itself a creature of this being an election year. David Frum quotes Ignatius,

David Ignatius of the Washington Post described Mitt Romney as a man having "no grasp of foreign affairs" whose approach to the subject amounts to a "series of sound bites" all of which portray a candidate who knows little about a subject of the utmost importance.

I'll be interested to see whether those thoughts percolate through to his pre-election commentary, as so far, he's pulling his punches.

The Truth From Robert Samuelson

“The Washington Post didn’t hire me to tell you what they wanted you to hear. The Washington Post elected me to tell you the truth.”

- Robert Samuelson at the... Okay, he never said it.

Today, Robert Samuelson plays the game that "If only the presidential campaigns told the truth, they would agree with me on everything" game. He asks, "Is anyone in America gullible enough to believe this?" Assuming he's speaking of his spin, I expect that he believes so. Let's revisit the words he puts into the candidate's mouths, recognizing both that they're Samuelson's words and that, for all of his talk of truth serum, Samuelson could use a dose of his own medicine.

"Fellow Americans. For years, your beltway pundits — including me — have misled you. We insist that your government has made more promises than it can keep, even if the economy returns to full employment. We then tell you that even if your taxes go up, your public services are going down.

"As you know, the great driver here is that we live in a bubble in which septuagenarians can tap out two columns a week and make a six to seven figure annual income, with gold-plated employer sponsored health insurance. We are likely to complain that between 2011 and 2025, the number of retirees on Social Security will grow by nearly 50 percent to 66 million people; Medicare experiences a similar rise. We insist that resulting spending surge will perpetuates huge budget deficits. We tell you that the Congressional Budget Office estimates that if nothing changes, the budget picture will only get worse.

"I have no credible plan to control Medicare and Social Security spending. That is to say, there is a credible plan to control Medicare costs, but my biggest fear is that it will be implemented and I will no longer be able to advocate an end to Medicare. I'm a smart man, I know how things work in the rest of the world, and I know that the people of every other developed nation pay far less money for health care with similar, sometimes better, outcomes. I know that even if all we did was adopt one of those programs to replace our current government-sponsored insurance plans, or even better if we took the best elements and combined them into a new, American plan, we would see an immediate, massive reduction in healthcare expenditures.

"If we reduced our per capita health care spending to levels similar to those of Canada, Japan, or the better health plans of Europe, we could save more than a trillion dollars per year. You heard that correctly. It would not all come in the form of reduced government spending, it would also benefit businesses that provide insurance to employees and individuals who purchase their own insurance coverage. But I would rather waste that trillion dollars every year than endorse a system that contradicts my personal philosophy that our society owes its members no duty to ensure access to adequate medical care, and that the government should simply defer to market forces.

"You have probably noticed that I always speak of Medicare and Social Security. In fact, if you read nothing but my columns you might believe that I'm talking about a single program called 'Medicare and Social Security', even 'MedicareAndSocialSecurity', rather than two distinct programs. The reason for this is simple: healthcare inflation in this nation ensures that, absent reforms, Medicare spending is likely to continue to grow at an unsustainable rate. On the other hand, it would take modest adjustments to Social Security to have it be fully funded for another seventy-five years or century, even with conservative estimates of economic growth. I address the two issues together, as I want to use the budget projections for an unreformed Medicare program to take out Social Security, and I'm deliberately trying to confuse you about the relative financial stability of the Social Security retirement program.

"By cutting programs I oppose, I can ensure that there will always be money for programs and government ventures I support. You hear people complain about corporate welfare? Excessive military spending? The high cost of wars of choice? Pocket change, I tell you. And it's my firm belief the government should pick that change out of your pockets so that the programs and military adventures that I support can continue unabated.

"Also, frankly, I can keep tapping out two columns a week until the day I die, so I don't understand why everybody else can't do the same thing, even if they're manual laborers. I mean, typing is manual, so in a sense I'm a manual laborer, right? Ask any of my friends: Work isn't hard and as far as we're concerned people don't need to retire.

"You can disagree with me if you would like, but I will never cede an inch.

"I have also misled by suggesting that a modest, progressive tax increase to a level that history tells us won't impede economic growth represents some form of class warfare against millionaires and billionaires pay their fair share will solve much of the problem. It isn’t. I complain that modest tax increases on the nation's wealthiest earners, such as the President's plan, is estimated to only raise $440 billion over a decade. I complain that a modest increase in the capital gains tax, a tax Republicans used to argue should be taxed at the same rate as wages, will 'only' raise $236 billion over a decade. Now if we were achieving that type of boos from cutting Medicare or Social Security, I would be all over it. But we're not picking your pocket here - we're picking mine.

"I have repeatedly attempted to mislead you by pretending that we're not in a recession, and that the only possible source of new government revenue over the next decade would be that modest tax increase. I don't mention a return to a healthier economy and lower unemployment, because I want to complain that taxes on people like me won't be sufficient, in and of themselves, to balance the deficit and thus should not be imposed. I expect you not to notice that if we can save $70 billion per year by cutting Medicare benefits, no cut is too small. When I complain that 'projected deficits total $10 trillion' I expect you not to figure out that I'm talking about less than we could save right now by transitioning to what would still be a high quality national health insurance plan.

"You may have noticed that my argument isn't based in much of anything other than not wanting to have my tax bill go up. I offer no reason why I can't pay more. If I tried, you would probably start laughing. So instead I'll insist that even if we substantially raise taxes on the rich we still won't balance the budget, and hope that you don't notice that I'm still begging the question.

"I argue that we should reduce benefits for healthier retirees, hoping that you won't pay attention to the fact that retirees are more likely to maintain their health when they have access to quality health care. I argue that we should reduce benefits for wealthier retirees because I expect that once people of my class are getting less it will be easier to convince them to cut benefits for everybody else. And as we're keeping our pocket change - and trust me, we have a lot more than you - and often have gold-plated supplemental health insurance policies to cover the difference, none of us will have go to without. The point being, I'll argue that I want to minimize deficits, but my primary goals are to avoid other program cuts and tax increases."

Next we can revisit Samuelson's "President Romney" speech....

"Fellow Americans. The budget outlook is not as bad as I like to claim. Here's the truth: I want to cut programs that benefit you, because I don't need them. I'm rich, I'm well insured, I have a phenomenal income for a job I can easily perform for many years to come, and I thus simply don't care about programs like Medicare or Social Security. Yet if we preserve those programs without adopting the cost-saving measures taken by every other developed nation, even if my taxes go up a few percent, something I find unacceptable, we cannot balance the deficit without cutting programs that I believe to be important programs — military spending, including the ability to spend hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars on wars of choice in the Middle East and South Asia, and... I'll list a few programs that I would prefer not to cut and pretend that they're my real focus: the FBI, highways, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Border Patrol and others. The cost of cutting spending that I like the would be too great, whereas it's no skin of my nose to cut the programs you like but I don't care about. You've figured me out: I talk a lot about having to make 'tough choices,' while quietly chucking to myself, 'tough for you.'

"Did I forget to include education in that list of programs that I don't want to cut? The EPA? Nope. I'm perfectly happy to cut them. If I complain about school funding, you can expect that my argument is against teachers' unions or how to shift spending from state-run schools to the private sector where my peers - and my employer - can extract profits. My peer group loves to talk about the failure of public schools, but for the most part we send our kids to private school. Sure, we want some basic level of environmental protection, but we don't much care if coal mines destroy landscapes or pollute remote parts of the country we'll never visit, if brownfields in the inner city remain toxic, or even if the planet warms. We do genuinely care about global competitiveness, but we don't like to admit that where you see pollution we see a potential expense that could lower profits - and thus lower share prices and dividends. When we balance your interests against ours, we want to maximize the growth of our portfolios and profits.

"For the past 40 years, federal spending has averaged 21 percent of GDP, so I'll pretend that the world is static and that we can arbitrarily cap government spending at a slightly lower level than that average without examining what government actually does. And by imposing that arbitrary cap, I have grounds to arbitrarily cut other programs that have a low-priority for me, such as Amtrak. Unfortunately it's not enough to cut small programs that don't benefit me, as those savings will be more than offset by an aging population and health costs.

"As you know, I roll Social Security and Medicare into what sounds like a single program so I can pretend that they both must be slashed. For example, I make comments like, 'From 1972 to 2011, Social Security and major federal health programs averaged 7 percent of GDP; in 2020, they’re estimated at 12 percent of GDP.' I use that as the foundation for making hyperbolic statements like, 'Unless we control these programs, they will strangle the rest of government.' Truth is, I oppose reforms of Medicare and health insurance that could save our nation a trillion dollars a year on ideological grounds, and I know that some modest tweaks will leave Social Security solvent for the indefinite future, but I don't want to fix these programs - I want to slash them and, ideally, burn them.

"I will tell you that you should forget tax cuts, but don't let that fool you: I want the so-called 'Bush tax cuts' extended, so that I don't have to pay more taxes. I may demagogue that the scheduled expiration of that temporary tax cut represents a tax increase, imply that it's 'soak the rich' class warfare, or that the amount of money it would raise is insufficient to justify the burden on me, but don't get distracted. It's your tax cut I don't care about. I care very much about mine, and I intend to keep it.

I will argue that it is obvious that we should try to simplify the system and spur economic growth by cutting top rates and ending tax breaks, because that sounds good even though I can't make the case that it would work. Frankly, the biggest problem with my wish to cut taxes on people like me is that would require cutting tax breaks that provide a significant benefit to people like you, such as the mortgage interest deduction — and you'll probably object. But to balance the budget, we’ll still need to raise more, not less, tax revenue from the income tax or other taxes and, as the saying goes, better you than me. Since 1972, tax revenue has averaged only 18 percent of GDP and I should have been more honest with you over my tenure as a columnist that I want you to feel the pain of the tax increases and benefits cuts necessary to bring the budget into balance because the unacceptable alternative would be that I and my wealthy, insulated peer group feel some of that pain.”

A revision to Samuelson's closing:

As long as their remains a chasm between my Op/Ed rhetoric and governing realities I will do my utmost to haunt whoever wins. My traditional positions highlight a dilemma of democracy. People want their opinion leaders to tell the truth, but they are often misled by carefully crafted, deliberately misleading rhetoric. Somebody who is truly interested in helping our government form good policy might escape this trap by persuading public opinion to acknowledge distasteful problems. For example, it's much easier to demagogue against 'socialized medicine' and complain that Medicare - or should I say MedicareAndSocialSecurity - are going to bankrupt the country, but the truth is that adopting a quality program of national health insurance could bring the budget to near balance while giving us many more years, even decades, to work on ways to tame healthcare inflation. I'm not arguing that a national health insurance plan, even one that utilizes private insurance companies, private hospitals, and privately employed physicians, is an ideal solution, but I am going to abandon my lie by omission - those programs do exist and they represent a real solution we could implement right now.

"Alas, in my line of work, that level of candor in commentary is rare. Most pursue self-interest over truth even if this deepens long-term public mistrust. Sure, if you work hard for the people and point out the truth behind my brand of 'tough choices' sensationalism, you can be the big man on campus, and I literally mean on campus. But some of us didn't work hard enough to get Ph.D.s, let alone write textbooks or win Nobel prizes. You won't normally hear it from us, but there's a lot of luck in getting a nationally syndicated column, most of us don't actually have special qualifications that make us any better at analyzing these issues than you are. And once you have this job, if you play your cards right you'll be topping up your 'six figures for two columns a week' salary with five to six figure speaking fees, promises that your next book will be purchased in bulk or distributed through partisan book clubs such that you can command massive retainers and royalties, and you can rub shoulders with the most powerful political and business leaders in America.

"If I appear to favor Wall Street over Main Street, and Main Street over you, that's in part because that's the culture in which I'm immersed - that's actually the way my friends and I think. But when my values and priorities conflict with the wealthy and powerful interests whose favor I seek or want to keep, I'm going to be on their side. And that, pretty clearly, is why I'll tell you that we 'must' slash programs that benefit you, in order to preserve tax cuts and programs that benefit us, and won't mention alternatives that would work to your advantage and advance my stated goals but really, truly antagonize the people who keep columnists like me afloat on a giant sea of cash.

"You've surely noticed that my arguments on what government should do focus on dollars and deficits, not how we should evaluate and weigh competing priorities, certainly not on the human cost of the type of spending cuts I favor. Honestly, it's easier to get you to swallow this type of argument when I leave that stuff out, and my argument tends to fall apart when I have to start defending my priorities in concrete terms." If I scare you it's on purpose, because if you start thinking you're going to start seeing the holes in my arguments.

Update: Roger Cohen's latest column reminds me of a combination of what Ignatius was saying a year ago, combined with the comments Frum referenced. I criticized Cohen a few weeks ago for what I believed to be an unfair criticism of Obama; this column seems a bit soft on Obama. I want to be fair, myself, but it really is time for our nation to form and articulate a coherent policy on the Middle East and South Asia, as well as moving our formalized relationship with Europe out of the cold war era.