David Warsh: Hillary Clinton the Hawk
SOMERVILLE, MASS.
Victory in the New York State primary seems to have all but clinched the Democratic nomination for Hillary Clinton. I won’t be surprised if this week’s quintet of Northeast primaries puts Donald Trump so close to the top as to diminish the suspense surrounding the Republican convention.
So it is an auspicious time for Alter Egos: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the Twilight Struggle over American Power (Random House, 2016), by Mark Landler, to appear. The magazine of The New York Times published a scoop on April 24, under the headline, “How Hillary became a hawk.” The story says:
"Throughout her career she has displayed instincts on foreign policy that are more aggressive than those of President Obama — and most Democrats.''
The article, at least, reads like a campaign document, consisting mainly of vignettes that have been fed to the journalist: Clinton pivoting towards the center in preparation for the general election. “We’ve got to run it up the gut,” she exclaims to her aides after China warns against sending an aircraft carrier into the Yellow Sea to protest North Korean actions.
When visiting Fort Drum, in upstate New York, for the first time as a newly elected senator, she sits down, takes off her shoes, puts her feet on the coffee table, and asks, “General, do you know where a gal can get a cold beer around here?”
She reads “cover to cover” the counterinsurgency field manual General David Petraeus has given her
She befriends and receives the (qualified) endorsement of retired four-star Gen. John M. “Jack” Keane, Fox news military analyst and promoter of the Iraq “surge.”
And when reporter Landler surfaces a striking disagreement with former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry (and for two years previously U.S. commander there), a Clinton aide volunteers, “She likes the nail-eaters, [Stanley] McChrystal, Petraeus, Keane – real military guys, not these retired three-stars who go into civilian jobs.”
Landler writes:
"As Hillary Clinton makes another run for president, it can be tempting to view her hard-edged rhetoric about the world less as deeply felt core principle than as calculated political maneuver. But Clinton’s foreign-policy instincts are bred in the bone — grounded in cold realism about human nature and what one aide calls “a textbook view of American exceptionalism.” It set her apart from her rival-turned-boss, Barack Obama, who avoided military entanglements and tried to reconcile Americans to a world in which the United States was no longer the undisputed hegemon. And it will likely set her apart from the Republican candidate she meets in the general election. For all their bluster about bombing the Islamic State into oblivion, neither Donald J. Trump nor Senator Ted Cruz of Texas have demonstrated anywhere near the appetite for military engagement abroad that Clinton has.''
The book itself will be useful in the event Clinton becomes president, as seems increasingly likely. Whether she is a neo-con or liberal hawk or a conservative internationalist is an open question. In the interval, however, better to read America’s War for the Greater Middle East: a Military History (Random House, 2016), by Andrew Bacevich, a scathing assessment of US military policy since 1980.
David Warsh is a long-time financial journalist and economic historian. He the proprietor of economicprincipals.com, where this piece originated.
Isaiah J. Poole: Give 'tax and spend' a chance
via otherwords.org
This time of year, a whole lot of Americans are feeling taxed enough already.
But the astonishing momentum of Bernie Sanders’s presidential candidacy reveals something else: Millions of taxpayers are willing to entertain the idea that some of us aren’t taxed enough, and that it’s hurting the rest of us.
Sanders has propelled his race against Hillary Clinton on a platform that would ramp up government investment — in infrastructure, education, health care, research and social services — while boosting taxes on the wealthiest Americans and big business to cover the cost.
Clinton’s own vision is less ambitious, but it’s also a far cry from “the era of big government is over” days of her husband’s administration.
The old conservative epithet against “tax-and-spend liberals” hasn’t completely lost its sting, says Jacob Hacker, a political-science professor at Yale University who pushed the idea of a public option for health insurance during the Affordable Care Act debate. But “we are moving toward the point where we can have an active discussion” about why “you need an activist government to secure prosperity.”
Hacker’s latest book, with Paul Pierson of the University of California at Berkeley, is American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper.
Hacker and Pierson argue that it was “the strong thumb” of a largely progressive-oriented government, in tandem with “the nimble fingers of the market,” that created the broad prosperity of the post-World War II era. Conservative ideologues and corporate leaders then severed that partnership.
Anti-government activism replaced the virtuous cycle of shared prosperity that existed into the 1970s with a new cycle that’s reached its depths in today’s radical Republican-run Congress: Make government unworkable. Attack government as unworkable. Win over angry voters. Repeat.
But in today’s mad politics, growing numbers of voters seem to have gotten wise to the routine and how it’s been rigged against them. Some are gravitating toward Donald Trump, as Hacker puts it, out of “the need to put a strong man who you know is not with the program in Washington in charge.”
Sanders has the opposite vision. He’s looking to spark a people-powered reordering of what government can do, with the biggest wealth-holders paying the share of taxes that they did when America’s thriving middle class and thriving corporate sector were, together, the envy of the world.
That vision is embodied in "The People's Budget.'' a document produced by the Congressional Progressive Caucus as an alternative to the House Republican budget.
It’s based on the premise that America can break out of its slow-growth economic malaise through a $1 trillion infrastructure spending plan that would create more than 3 million jobs, increased spending on green-energy research and development, and universal access to quality education from preschool through college.
“There are two messages that come out of the progressive budget,” Hacker said. One is that “we can actually increase investment if we don’t cut taxes further on the wealthy.” The other is that “if we got tougher with the modern robber barons in the healthcare and finance and energy industries, we could actually achieve substantial savings without cutting necessary spending.”
Unfortunately, The People’s Budget won’t get close to a majority vote in Congress — and that’s if it gets a vote at all in the dysfunctional Republican House.
Yet together with the debate provoked by the Sanders campaign, Hacker says, it shows that now “we have a little bit more of an opening for the kind of conversation we should’ve had 20 or 30 years ago, when we were trashing government and abandoning all of these long-term investments that are essential to our prosperity.”
Isaiah J. Poole is the online communications director at Campaign for America’s Future (OurFuture.org).
Don Pesci: Confused public in Conn. and across America prey for political Babbitry
VERNON, Conn.
Connecticut’s presidential primary is coming up April 26, and the jockeying has begun. Governor of Ohio John Kasich, who has managed to corral a slender 145 delegates in a primary that a little over a year ago boasted 17 Republican presidential candidates, recently made his appearance in Connecticut and was warmly received by some legislators and editorial writers.
Mr. Kasich seems to be, at least here in the Northeast, the preferred candidate of what Trumpeters disdainfully call “the establishment,” meaning safe Republican politicians and, one supposes, Connecticut’s left-of-center media. In preparation for the arrival of Donald Trump, the Nutmeg Media – which has never understood or approved of the conservative movement – pulled out its critical party hats.
There may not be many surprises in the Connecticut primary mash-up. The delegate vote in Connecticut likely will be split between the three Republican contenders. As of April 10, the national breakdown is as follows: Cruz 545, Kasich 145 and Trump 742. Possibly Mr. Trump will leave Connecticut with a majority of delegates in his pocket.
The Boston Globe recently printed a “satirical” front page containing pre-fab stories covering a future Trump presidency. Screaming headlines on the mock front page included: “Deportations to Begin: President Trump Calls for Tripling of ICE forces, Riots Continue” – “Markets Sink as Trade War Looms” – “US Soldiers Refuse Orders to Kill ISIS Families” – “New Libel Laws Target ‘Absolute Scum’ in Press” – and so on. You get the idea.
Americans, Mr. Trump may hope, view satire as satire, and The Globe -- which, along with other left-of-center papers, has presided approvingly over the Democratic hegemon in the Northeast -- is The Globe.
The matchless scorn of the Trumpeters is directed at thoughtless professional dunderheads, the left-of-center media, moderate Republicans who twiddled their thumbs as the prosperous Hartford of Mark Twain became the murder capital of New England, and other impedimenta to the coming Age of Trump. Their scorn is well deserved. Barry Goldwater said during his own presidential campaign “If you lop off New England and California, you’ve got a pretty good country.” For the past half century, New England and California have been proving him right. All this and more has come to a boil under Mr. Trump’s flag.
Criticism of Mr. Trump in Connecticut will ramp-up as the state primary approaches. Conservatives view Mr. Trump as a flawed leader of a continuing conservative revolution because a) he’s not a conservative, and b) he’s not a Republican, both attributes that have satisfied the political predilections of people who think parties are dispensable. Mr. Trump has big mouth, a thin skin, a glass jaw, and he’s far too big for his political britches.
One of his most ardent followers here in Connecticut has said in so many words: “Screw the Republican Party. We don’t need it. We have Trump,” which is on a par with saying “We don’t need water taps; we have water” or “We should go to war with the army we’ve got, minus weapons.”
There are only two ways to build a party: You can form it around a set of ideas or you can personalize it, build it around a magnetic personality. After one of the bloodiest centuries in the modern period, one would think the world would have grown weary of strongman government. Who needs a strongman president? We already have one in the current Napoleon. Our constitutional and formative ideas have already been set by all the non-loudmouth intellectual giants who have preceded Mr. Trump.
We need a restoration, not a revolution. And if that restoration must be brought about by fierce rebel patriots, we want to be sure they are on the side of the angels. Mr. Trump, many believe, does not and will not pass this test.
Following the Democratic national convention, Hillary Clinton almost certainly will emerge as the designated Party driver. Republicans will choose between Cruz and Mr. Trump at their national convention. One of them will prevail. In the northeast, Mr. Kasich will receive a sufficient number of delegates to keep his pretensions alive until the convention, at which point he will become a power broker of sorts.
Neither this writer nor anyone else knows who the Republican Convention nominee will be.
Republicans have two relatively seasoned candidates, Cruz and Kasich, and a greenhorn in Mr. Trump. Most polls show Mr. Trump losing to Hillary Clinton. Mr. Trump hasn’t any political experience, and he has successfully, so far, been beating experienced Republicans with their experience. Facing Mrs. Clinton, a formidable candidate with several Damoclean swords dangling over her head, Mr. Trump may regret his lack of experience. It does, on occasion, come in handy.
On the whole, this has been the queerest election in a lifetime of queer elections. Republicans seem to be on the point of nominating a man, Mr. Trump, who is neither a reliable conservative nor a reliable Republican. On the Democratic side, an aging socialist, Bernie Sanders, is racking up more votes than Mrs. Clinton among young people who have not yet been pushed out of the socialist college cocoon into the wicked world.
Moderates everywhere have disappeared. The general populace is confused and, as such, has become prey to dangerous political Babbitry. The Supreme Court has been revaluating the values of the U.S. Constitution for several decades. The Congress has been ceding its constitutional power to a run-away subversive president. The Middle East lies prostrate under the drawn sword of Islam. Newspapers have been replaced by twittering banshees. And – worst of all – God, who once showered blessing upon America from sea to shining sea, appears to be hibernating, not that anyone can blame Him.
Not good.
Don Pesci is a political writer.
Don Pesci: Senator Murphy's bizarre climate-Mideast brutality link
Only a few years ago a politician might have been laughed out of Congress for postulating that the troubles in the Middle East – Islamic irredentism; the emergence of Iran, still considered a terrorist state, as a regional Middle East power; the attempt by Shiites, rebuffed during the Iraq war, to establish a caliphate in northern Iraq and Syria; the threats against the United States and other Western nations that pour like a flood of mighty waters from the throats of its former enemies; the scurrying of foreign states once friendly to the United States from a U.S to a Russian protectorate; the sea of women, children and young men murdered, homeless and enslaved Christians, immigrant hordes persecuted by Islamic terrorists now flooding Europe’s shores, largely owing to the recession of U.S. power and influence in the Middle East; all this and more -- were traceable to global warming, the tocsin of a boisterous environmental movement.
The civil wars in Syria and Mali, U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, of Connecticut, noted in a New Haven Register interview “… were preceded by a ‘massive multi-year drought,’ which were consequences of global warming. ‘The instability that we are seeing in the Middle East and in Africa is today the result of climate change,’ with more challenges coming, Murphy said.”
The connection between global warming and world-altering disturbances in the Middle East, remote at best, is one of the CliffsNotes taken from the current Democratic Party campaign playbook. The global warming bell will be sounded ad nauseam during the coming political campaigns. Socialist presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has already warmly embraced the queer notion. Surprisingly, Mr. Murphy has thrown his support to Hillary Clinton, not Sanders.
Mr. Murphy’s current term in office ends January 2019, and so he can well afford to flourish ideological banners on behalf of movement progressives, which includes the environmental lobby. Nothing Mr. Murphy says, however absurd, will cost him a vote in the near future. Mr. Murphy’s present assertion entails no immediate political cost to him; it is a form of cheap grace. Mr. Murphy’s comrade in the Senate, Dick Blumenthal, is up for re-election in the current cycle, and the remote prospect of losing an election has made the always cautious Mr. Blumenthal wary. Off-election year senators are usually able to find their spines.
Mr. Murphy’s assertion – Middle East instability is caused by climate change -- is a near-perfect example of the post hoc fallacy, which may be stated as follows: A occurred, then B occurred; therefore, A caused B. The rooster Chanticleer crowed, then the sun rose; therefore, the crowing caused the sun to rise.
Messy thinking is the principal cause of a messy foreign policy, and the Obama administration is full of threadbare thoughts. Dangerous errors in foreign policy are the product of political procrusteanism, which occurs when politicians seek to fit the wide and various world into their narrow ideological beds: Feet are lopped off, fingers are sheered away, and one ends up with a dead and useless mutilated corpse, an apt description of U.S. foreign policy in the Age of Obama. Far-fetched claims such as those made by Mr. Sanders and seconded by Mr. Murphy obscure the wreckage. But these bizarre notions can be exploded by an application of “Occam’s Razor,” which holds that the most economical explanation of a phenomenon that accounts for all the important facts is usually the right one.
Here is an economical explanation that embraces real-world data in the Middle East:
Syria is ruled by Bashar Assad whose father, Hafez al-Assad, was only slightly more bloodthirsty than his son. In 2012, President Obama drew his famous “red line in the sand” in Syria. He said that the use of chemical weapons by Assad would cross “a red line” that would entail “enormous consequences” and “change my calculus” on American military intervention in Syria’s civil war. A year later, In August 2013, a rebel-held suburb of Damascus was attacked with sarin gas, and Mr. Obama’s red line inauspiciously disappeared.
Concurrent with Mr. Obama’s red line doctrine, American troops that had ousted Saddam Hussein in Iraq were withdrawn from that country, fulfilling an Obama campaign pledge. The improvident withdrawal of troops created a vacuum in northern Iraq and Syria that soon was filled with the soldiers of Allah, peace be upon him, whose ambition it was to recreate a caliphate. They expressed their fidelity to the Koran by capturing territory from the infidel, killing men who might oppose them, enslaving their children and making concubines of their wives. They also drew the sword of Allah, peace be upon him, across the throats of infidel Christians, which caused Mr. Obama to claim that the ruffians were not behaving in a manner that was faithful to Islam, the Koran or the prescriptions of Mohammed, peace be upon him.
Islamic scholars who are more faithful interpreters of the Koran would heartily disagree.
With the supposed failure of President George W. Bush’s policy towards Iraq before her and the imprecations of Democratic politicians ringing in her ears, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, now the leading Democratic candidate for president, simply repeated the so-called “policy errors” of Mr. Bush and persuaded Mr. Obama to oust Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi from power. The ouster was a success: “We came, we saw, he died,” boasted Mrs. Clinton. Libya descended into chaos, and the Obama administration – refusing steadfastly to let a crisis go to waste – began shipping war material from a Libyan compound to American-supported, anti-Assad forces in northern Syria. The American compound in Benghazi, Libya, soon was destroyed by Islamic terrorists. It is no exaggeration to say that the terrorists who murdered Christians, among others, in the newly established caliphate and in Paris and Brussels and the United States and Canada and London and the Netherlands were, all of them, faithful followers of Mohammed, peace be upon him.
This is only a thimble full of real-world data that should be included in any assessment of the origin and causes of the bloody mess in the Middle East, a good part of it attributable to Mr. Obama’s failed foreign policy. Mr. Murphy’s fanciful theory that Middle East instability is the result of climate change is little more than a head-fake designed in an election year to draw public attention from inconvenient truths. Mr. Murphy, who certainly is no Joe Lieberman, has until 2019 to get it straight before he comes up for re-election, plenty of time for visions and revisions that time will soon erase.
Don Pesci is a political writer based in Vernon, Conn.
Jill Richardson: Believe it or not, no candidate is perfect
Let me tell you something people don’t often say when arguing about presidential candidates on Facebook: No candidate is perfect.
But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth choosing to support one.
For example, you can support Bernie Sanders because you believe he’s the best all-around candidate, while simultaneously accepting that he tends to be clumsy when it comes to matters of race.
It’s also possible to support Hillary Clinton while noting that you dislike her vote in favor of the Iraq War, or are concerned about the millions of dollars her family’s foundation accepted from Saudi Arabia.
The same goes for Republican candidates. Each of those contenders comes with advantages and disadvantages.
In other words, whatever your leanings are, you need to weigh each candidate’s pros and cons. How well do their proposals match your values? Do you believe they have a shot at actually getting something done?
It’s a balancing act.
Hillary has more foreign policy experience than Bernie, although you might not consider that a good thing if you don’t like the decisions she made as a senator and secretary of state. Bernie doesn’t have a history of supporting pro-corporate economic policies like Hillary, and that’s a perk if you share his economic populism.
A ridiculous way to choose a candidate, by the way, is by selecting the one whose genitalia matches your own. And it’s an insult to women to suggest that any of us ought to, as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright did when she said there’s a “special place in hell” for women who don’t support Hillary Clinton.
Even if you make your choice based on the issues, however, whomever you choose is still imperfect. In fact, it’s dishonest to claim that your preferred candidate is, by virtue of being the best person running in your eyes, without flaws.
And it’s dumb.
If you want what’s best for America, then it makes sense to pick the best candidate — and then push them to become even better.
On the flip side, it’s also foolish to abstain from supporting any candidate because no contender perfectly matches your views.
The death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is a good reminder of one of the most enduring legacies that any president can leave: Supreme Court justices. President Ronald Reagan appointed Scalia, who carried on Reagan’s values long after he left office.
Our next president will remain in office for up to eight years, but his or her Supreme Court nominees will probably shape our legal system for decades to come. No matter your feelings on the individual candidates, a win for your party in November could create an opportunity to nudge the Supreme Court in the direction of your choice for the next 20 or 30 years.
In other words, we should behave like rational, logical grownups as we select the next leader of our country. All candidates have their own flaws. Our job as citizens is to pick the best one and push them to become even better after we vote.
Jill Richardson is the author of Recipe for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It.
Hilary Cosell: Sanders an egomaniacal spoiler
What is almost amusing about Bernie Sanders and his “revolution” is how
non-revolutionary he and his message are. He’s old school New Deal, he’s
Sixties revolution/protest, and he could be a character out of Clifford
Odet’s play Waiting for Lefty.
Sanders and Clinton are from basically the same era, the same formative
politics, the same up-against-the-wall, anti-establishment point of view.
But while Hillary Clinton’s graduation speech at Wellesley drew national
coverage, Bernie was – Where? Doing what? Apparently hanging out in
Vermont, starting up left-wing political parties that flamed out, eeking
out a living, and occupying not Wall Street or Main Street but his own head.
Meanwhile, Secretary Clinton went on to Yale Law School, worked for the
Senate Watergate Committee, went undercover in the South for civil rights,
worked for the Children’s Defense Fund…need one continue?
Since Sanders finally made it to the U.S. House and then the Senate, after a stretch as mayor of Burlington, Vt., what has he accomplished?
Almost nothing of note --- no important legislation enacted, no speeches on the floor of
Congress that made him a senator to “watch.” Clinton has been on the front
lines of the battle for health care, women’s rights, civil rights and so
much more -- and has won some battles --for as many decades as Sanders has been ineffective.
Even the description of him as anti-establishment could be amusing, except
that he takes this description, and himself, so seriously. So retro, so
Sixties, one can almost hear Bernie shouting through a bullhorn at a University of Chicago protest in 1965. God knows, many of us shouted and protested a great deal back then.
How dispiriting to watch college kids seemingly innocent of history cheer
him on, and pundits rave about his “authenticity.” Where has he been all
these years?
Why now, Bernie? At age 74? A one-termer, if you win. What’s motivating
you, besides your one-issue, income-inequality obsession? Where's your head
at? What's your thing? You remember the McGovern debacle in 1972 as well as I do.
Do you want to repeat it?
You’re an authentic, ego-driven spoiler.
Go, Hillary. You’ve earned it.
Hilary Cosell is a Connecticut-based writer.
Voters hiding from the world
The insularity of that minority (i.e., “the base’’) of the electorate that tends to dominate presidential campaigns’ first innings explains much of the current nasty race, especially on the Republican side.
These people seek to protect themselves from the anxiety of hearing a viewpoint they might not like by holing up in echo chambers in which the same fact-thin opinions are repeatedly shouted day after day. The epicenter is the oratorical masturbation known as political talk radio.
You’d think that listeners would get bored and occasionally want to hear something different, but that would make them uncomfortable. Talk radio does not encourage curiosity or research. The point is to soothe listeners by reinforcing their well-entrenched prejudices and satisfy their desirefor simple solutions to their problems – and clear villains.
The majority of talk-radio fans are middle- and lower-middle class white people aggrieved by their downward socio-economic mobility and upset about changing social mores as seen, for example, in gay marriage, and the changing ethnic and religious mix of America. That’s understandable.
But their refusal to listen to all sides in order to become better informed citizens also suggests a disinclination to make the changes, be it training for new work skills or bringing disorderly personal lives under control, necessary to address these tougher times for many Americans. Too many of them are both angry and passive.
That makes them prey to such demagogues as Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. Mr. Trump may be an especially fitting candidate for our times: People who avoid reading and obtain most of their “news’’ from TV and talk radio like him the most.
No wonder (relatively) scandal-free people of great executive and policymaking accomplishment who would have been very plausible presidential candidates in the past – say former New York Republican Gov. George Pataki and former Democratic Sen. Jim Webb -- don’t have a prayer. And such competent chief executives as Ohio Gov. John Kasich, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley haven’t gotten much traction either.
And it’s hard to see Hillary Clinton, despite her long CV, intelligence, ambition and persistence, as a person of great executive and policymaking success. Bernie Sanders, for his part, is an eccentric fringe high-tax candidate in a nation whose citizens hate taxes. His only executive experience has been as mayor of Burlington, Vt.: pop: 42,000.
(A possible spanner in the works of a Hillary Clinton marchto theDemocratic nomination: indictment stemming from her “top-secret’’ home-server e-mails.)
You’d think that voters would want the nation’s chief executive to be or have been a successful elected executive of a government body. And no, running a business is not the same as running a government body.
Globalization and technology, both of which will continue to eat away at the American middle class, require a panorama of responses, including reducing our plutocracy’s ever-increasing power, more job training and rebuilding the nation’s decayed physical infrastructure to create jobs and make the nation more internationally competitive.
Cheapening labor and technology-based automation, which so far have mostly destroyed the jobs of blue-color workers, are now eating away even at what had been well-paying upper-middle-class jobs. Andsenior business execs show little desire to share more of their gargantuan compensation with underlings.
The candidates generally avoid presenting and emphasizing programmatic details because details don’t do well on TV and talk radio. And so many journalists have been laid off that the surviving ones almost entirely focus on the easiest and more marketable stuff in the campaigns - - the daily insults, faux pas and hour-by-hour opinion polls -– the horse race.
Apparently that’s fine with the people who hide in the silos of talk radio.
Once the candidates of the two major parties are chosen, perhaps more substance will appear as the candidates reach for support from moderate and independent voters. We can hope they’ll then explain with considerabledetail and precision what they’d do and, as important, how they’d do it.
Meanwhile, most of the electorate, the large majority of whom only bother to vote in November, can look into the mirror to see who is most to blame for our predicament.
Robert Whitcomb (rwhitcomb51@gmail) oversees newenglanddiary.com, is a partner at Cambridge Management Group (cmg625.com), a former Providence Journal editorial-page editor and a former International Herald Tribune finance editor,
David Warsh: Kasich's time may have come
SOMERVILLE, Mass.
Readers have wondered when I might back off the hunch I voiced a year ago, and reiterated as recently as December, that Jeb Bush still could eventually win the presidency. Here goes:
Bush clearly no longer has a chance of winning the nomination. It is Ohio Gov. John Kasich who appears ready to seize the role of a plausible competitor to the eventual Democratic nominee. There appears to be almost no political difference between the two men, except the heavy baggage connected with the former’s name. Kasich is running second to Donald Trump in New Hampshire in the polls.
Nobody said it would be easy, but the logic of Kasich’s candidacy is simple: If he polls strongly on Feb. 9 in New Hampshire; if he gains enough traction in February to score some successes in the Super Tuesday primaries on March 1; if he wins Ohio’s winner-take-all primary on March 15; if he gains the nomination of the Republican Party at its convention in Cleveland in July – then he stands a good chance of being elected president in November.
Why? Because he is good at appealing to voters who consider themselves independent of either party’s establishment. And it takes 270 votes in the Electoral College to win the presidency. And it’s a stubborn fact of present-day U.S. politics that most states are virtually certain to wind up in one column or another.
Kasich would seem to be competitive with the Democratic nominee, whether it is Hillary Clinton or someone else, in all 10 states that seem likely to be up for grabs in the fall – Nevada, Colorado, Iowa, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, Florida and New Hampshire.
I have been as surprised as everybody else by events of the last year. Let’s review:
It was barely a year ago that Mitt Romney announced that he was mulling a third presidential bid. The establishment wing of the Republican Party swiftly overruled him, indicating a preference for Jeb Bush, who in December 2014 had mentioned on his Facebook page that he was considering a run. Supposedly preemptive sums of money flowed to Bush’ s Super PAC, Right to Rise, run by political consultant Mike Murphy. Romney quickly steered off.
What happened next was that, unfazed, 15 other persons declared their candidacy for the Republican nomination, one after another, along with Bush: Ted Cruz (March 23), Rand Paul (April 7), Marco Rubio (April 13), Ben Carson (May 4), Carly Fiorina (May 4), Mike Huckabee (May 5), Rick Santorum (May 27), George Pataki (May 28), Lindsey Graham (June 1), Rick Perry (June 4), Bush (June 15), Donald Trump (June 16), Bobbie Jindal (June 24), Chris Christie (June 30), Kasich (July 21), and Jim Gilmore (July 30).
Among the Democrats, Hillary Clinton declared her candidacy on April 13, Bernie Sanders on April 20, former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley on May 29, and former Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee on June 3. Sanders has recently swept ahead of Clinton in polls in both Iowa and New Hampshire.
Why such pandemonium? The over-arching explanation seems to be Bush-Clinton fatigue after so many years of their presence in presidential politics.
Without a single vote being cast, real-estate baron and reality-television star Trump vaulted to front-runner status in most polls of Republican voters. It’s getting a little late to explain U.S. outcomes in terms of the aftermath of the 2007-09 financial crisis; Europe is another matter: most likely the Trump phenomenon is an expression of ephemeral contempt for dynastic politics.
Trump is not the first self-financed celebrity candidate to seek the presidency. He’s just the one with the fewest principles. Software entrepreneur H. Ross Perot ran as an independent candidate in 1992, upstaging incumbent George H. W. Bush and enabling Bill Clinton to win the presidency with just 43 percent of the vote (Perot received 19 percent and Bush 37 percent, but electoral vote totals were 370, 168, and 0.)
Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is threatening to enter the race as an independent if Sanders gets the better of Hillary. An interesting questions have to do with Trump’s options once his star begins to fade. Eventually he presumably will become a commentator. Better for everyone if it were sooner rather than later.
Bush could do everyone a favor by quickly stepping out of the campaign if his New Hampshire totals are disappointing and urging his massive organization to support Kasich. As far as I can tell, his politics are little different from those of the Ohio governor, except on foreign policy. Still, Bush would make a very good secretary of state in a Kasich administration. The silly negative ads with which the two campaigns are attacking one another in the final days of New Hampshire should stop.
I have no idea how likely any of this might be. I do know an incredibly interesting political season looms. There is a real possibility that the election of a moderate Republican would be good for the country, mainly for the obvious reason: Kasich’s success would dampen the amplitude of extreme opinion on the right.
You might wonder, whence stems my license to pronounce on these matters? I have, after all, never covered a campaign. All I can say is that these arguments are deeply grounded in concern for economic affairs over the long run, and you will never hear them from my old friend and fellow economics columnist, Paul Krugman, of The New York Times. He thinks that there are no moderates in the Republican Party primaries, and that even if there were, they wouldn’t stand a chance.
David Warsh, an economic historian and a long-time financial journalist, is proprietor of economicprincipals.com.
Philip K. Howard: How to bring parties together to fix infrastructure mess
Fixing America’s decrepit infrastructure shouldn’t be controversial—it enhances competitiveness, creates jobs, and helps the environment. And of course, it protects the public. Repairing unsafe conditions is a critical priority: More than half of fatal vehicle accidents in the United States are due in part to poor road conditions.
After years of dithering, Washington is finally showing a little life for the task. Congress recently passed a $305 billion highway bill to fund basic maintenance for five years. But the highway bill is pretty anemic—it barely covers road-repair costs and does nothing to modernize other infrastructure. The total investment needed through the end of this decade is actually $1.7 trillion, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers. Further, the highway bill does nothing to remove the bureaucratic jungle that makes these projects so slow and costly.
But these two failures—meager funding and endless process—may actually point the way to a potential grand bargain that could transform the U.S. economy: In exchange for Democrats getting rid of nearly endless red tape, Republicans would agree to raise taxes to modernize America’s infrastructure.
Stalled funding. The refusal to modernize infrastructure is motivated by politics, not rational economics. By improving transportation and power efficiencies, new infrastructure will lower costs and enhance U.S. competitiveness—returning $1.44 for every dollar invested, according to Moody’s. That’s one reason why business leaders, led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers—normally on the same page as congressional Republicans—have been pleading for robust public funding. As an added benefit, 2 million new jobs would be created by an infrastructure-modernization initiative, jump-starting the economy. That’s why labor leaders and economists have joined with the business community to advocate for it.
But these benefits largely accrue to society at large—not to the public entities funding the infrastructure. Because tolls and other user charges, where applied, rarely cover all the capital costs, the federal government often must subsidize public works if the United States wants modern interstate transportation, water, and power systems. As a matter of party ideology, however, Republicans have steadfastly refused to raise the gas tax and other taxes needed to fund infrastructure. This line in the sand was drawn in the 1990s because of the Republican conviction, widely shared by the public, that government is wasteful.
So when the highway trust fund expired this year, Congress found itself in an ideological struggle over how to fix potholes. Unfortunately, Washington’s answer is an inadequate funding plan that is also basically dishonest, resorting to gimmicks like selling oil from the nation’s strategic petroleum reserve at more than $90 per barrel (when the market price is closer to $40).
Red-tape waste. The Republican frustration about government waste is illustrated by the inefficiencies of infrastructure procurement and process. The arduous procedures by which public infrastructure gets approved and built shows that total costs could be cut in half by dramatically simplifying the environmental review and permitting processes—which can often consume a decade or longer. The water-desalination plant in San Diego, for example, which is vital for water-parched California, began its permitting in 2003. It finally opened in December 2015, after 12 years and four legal challenges.
Even projects with little or no environmental impact can take years. The plan to raise the Bayonne Bridge roadway, which spans a strait that connects New Jersey to Staten Island—in order to allow a new generation of post-Panamax ships into Newark Harbor—had virtually no environmental impacts because it used the same foundations and right of way as the existing bridge. Yet the project still required five years and a 20,000-page environmental assessment. Among the requirements was a study of historic buildings within a two-mile radius of the Bayonne—even though the bridge touched no buildings. Once approved, the project was then challenged in the courts based on—you guessed it—inadequate environmental review.
All of this process is expensive. The nonpartisan group Common Good (which I chair) recently published a report on bureaucratic delays, Two Years, Not Ten Years, which found that decade-long review and permitting procedures more than double the effective cost of new infrastructure projects. Delay increases hard costs by at least 5 percent per year. Delay prolongs bottlenecks and inefficiencies, which totals 10 to 15 percent of project costs per year (depending on the infrastructure category). A six-year delay, typical in large projects, increases total costs by more than 100 percent.
Careful process, the theory goes, makes projects better. But the U.S. approval process mainly produces paralysis not prudence. America’s global competitors don’t weigh themselves down with these unnecessary costs. Take Germany: It is a far greener country than the United States, yet it does environmental review in a year not a decade. Germany is able to accomplish both review and permitting in less than two years by creating clear lines of authority: A designated official decides when there has been enough review and resolves disputes among different agencies and concerned groups. The statute of limitations on lawsuits is only one month, compared with two years in the United States—and that two years is only because it was shortened under the new highway bill. Following Germany’s lead, Canada recently changed its permitting process to complete allreviews and other infrastructure decisions within two years, with clear grants of authority to officials to meet deadlines.
Like most laws, America’s infrastructure process has its supporters. Any determined opponent of a project can “game” the procedures to kill or delay projects it doesn’t like. And, just as most Republicans are adamant about not raising taxes, many Democrats are adamant about not relinquishing the effective veto power environmentalists currently wield. After all, who knows when a new Robert Moses might appear to flatten urban neighborhoods?
Spending years arguing about if the project is worthwhile rarely improves the decision.
The tragic flaw in this position, however, is that lengthy environmental review is dramatically harmful to the environment. Prolonging traffic and rail bottlenecks, the Common Good report found, means that billions of tons of carbon are unnecessarily released as officials, environmentalists, and neighbors bicker over project details. America’s archaic power grid—not replaced in part because of permitting uncertainties—wastes electricity equivalent to the output of 200 coal-burning power plants. At this point, the decrepit state of America’s infrastructure means that almost any modernization, on balance, will be good for the environment. Water pipes from 100 years ago leak an estimated 2.1 trillion gallons of water per year. Faulty wastewater systems release 850 billion gallons of waste into surface waters every year. Overall, America’s infrastructure receives a D+ rating from the American Society of Civil Engineers. For every project that is environmentally controversial, such as the Keystone pipeline, there are scores of projects that would easily provide a net benefit to the environment.
In some vital projects, adhering to rigid legal processes could even lead to catastrophe. For example, the proposed new rail tunnel under the Hudson River must be completed before the adjoining tunnel is shut down to repair damage caused by Hurricane Sandy. Any delay in approvals would cut rail capacity to Manhattan from New Jersey in half, with unthinkably bad consequences on traffic, carbon emissions, and the economy.
Environmental review is important, but the tough choices required can usually be understood and aired in a matter of months not years. The trade-offs for the most part are well known: A desalination plant will produce one gallon of briny byproduct for every gallon of clean water; the new rail tunnel under the Hudson River will require dislocating homes and businesses at either end; a new power line will emit electromagnetic energy and mar scenic vistas. But California’s fresh water must come from somewhere, New York needs to eliminate rail bottlenecks, and new power lines will carry clean electricity to cities from distant wind farms. In each case, the relevant questions are whether the new project is worth the costs and, sometimes, whether there’s a practical way to mitigate the effects. Spending years arguing about if the project is worthwhile rarely improves the decision—it only makes projects more expensive while prolonging pollution.
A new bargain. There’s a way to break the logjam caused by a lack of needed funding and an overabundance of process. Conservatives concerned about wasteful government should agree to raise taxes to fund infrastructure if liberals agree to abandon the bureaucratic tangle that causes the waste. This deal will cut critical infrastructure costs in half, enhance America’s environmental footprint, and boost the economy.
Adequate funding will get America moving with safe and efficient infrastructure. And abandoning years of process need not undermine environmental goals or public transparency. The key, as in Germany and Canada, is to allocate authority to make needed decisions within a set time frame. Public input is vital, but it can be accomplished in months. Plus, input is more effective at the beginning of the process, as adjustments can be made before any plan is set in the legal concrete of multi-thousand-page environmental-review statements.
Politically, of course, getting Republicans and Democrats to strike a bargain—more funding for less bureaucracy—won’t be easy. Special interests on both sides have their claws deep into the status quo. It is notoriously difficult to raise taxes, and curbing review timelines can sound like cutting corners. But America can’t move forward on infrastructure built two generations ago. Eliminating traffic jams, electricity outages, airplane delays, and unnecessary tragic accidents will be more than worth the small increase in taxes and a shorter review period.
Congress knows there’s a problem. The new 1,300-page highway bill tiptoes toward streamlining decisions. Unfortunately, these good intentions may actually make matters worse. The bill creates a new 16-agency committee to review projects and defines elaborate procedures on how to set a permitting timetable. But the timetable can be waived, and the new procedures assiduously avoid the one indispensable element for enforcing deadlines: a final decision maker. Indeed, the reluctance to grant anyone the ability to resolve disagreements is almost comical. The director of the Office of Management and Budget is supposedly in charge, but the director’s ultimate grant of authority amounts to no authority all: “If a dispute remains unresolved … the Director … shall … direct the agencies party to the dispute to resolve the dispute.”
But a new bipartisan bargain doesn’t require complicated drafting. It only takes a few words for Congress to approve a gas tax or other taxes to fund infrastructure-modernization programs. And the radical change needed to reduce permitting from ten years to two years will not be made in substantive law—underlying environmental requirements, for example, would remain the same—but rather in authorizing specific officials to make and review decisions. Creating clear lines of authority is much simpler than defining the intricacies of a procedural labyrinth. The law can give the chair of the Council on Environmental Quality responsibility over deciding when there has been enough environmental review, and it can give the OMB director responsibility over resolving disputes among squabbling agencies. They will both be accountable to the president and, if necessary, to the courts. Common Good, at the request of relevant committees in Congress and with the help of two former Environmental Protection Agency general counsels, has already drafted proposed amendments that establish these lines of authority as well as oversight standards for the president and the courts.
The good news is that the political winds are shifting. Hillary Clinton recently proposed a $500 billion infrastructure initiative that included a call to radically streamline permitting and review processes. And Jeb Bush recently called for permits to be granted “within two years instead of ten.” With strong leadership, the nation can get there: If the Democrats cut waste and the Republicans provide funding, Americans will have better rules and better roads.
Philip K. Howard is chairman of Common Good, a regulatory and legal reform organization, a New York-based lawyer and civic leader and the author of several books, including The Death of Common Sense and The Rule of Nobody.
Llewellyn King: In search of the real Elizabeth Warren
I went to Boston last week in pursuit of the real Elizabeth Warren. You see, I don’t think that the whole story of Warren comes across on television, where she can seem overstated, too passionate about everyday things to be taken seriously.
Like others, I've wondered why the progressives are so enamored of the Massachusetts senator. Suffolk University (in Boston), mostly known for its authoritative polls, gave her platform as part of an ongoing series of public events in conjunction with The Boston Globe. But whether the dearest hopes of the progressives will be fulfilled, or whether the senior senator from Massachusetts has reached her political apogee is unclear.
What I did find is that Warren has star power. She is a natural at the podium, and revels in it. At least she did at Suffolk, where the cognoscenti came out to roar their affirmation every time that she threw them some red meat, which she did often.
Here's a sampling:
On student loans: “The U.S. government is charging too much interest on student loans. It shouldn’t be making money on the backs of students.”
On the U.S. Senate: “It was rigged and is rigged [by lobbyists and money in politics]. The wind only blows in one direction in Washington ... to make sure that the rich have power and remain in power.”
Warren's questioner, Globe political reporter Joshua Miller, led her through the predictable obstacle course of whether she was angling to be the vice-presidential candidate if Joe Biden runs and becomes the Democratic nominee. She waffled this question, as one expected, admitting to long talks about policy with Biden and declaring herself prepared to talk policy with anyone. She said the subject of the vice presidency might have come up.
Short answer, in my interpretation: She would join the ticket in a heartbeat. This is not only for reasons of ambition -- of which she has demonstrated plenty, from her odyssey through law schools, until she found a perch at Harvard as a full professor -- but also age.
Warren is 66 and although her demeanor and appearance are of a much younger woman, the math is awkward. There are those in the Democratic Party who say that she needs a full term in the Senate to get some legislative experience and to fulfill the commitment of her first elected office. But eight years from now, she'll probably be judged as too old to run for president.
Clearly, Warren didn't fancy the punishment and probable futility of a run against Hillary Clinton. But the vice presidency might suit her extraordinarily well, given Biden’s age of 72.
Warren has stage presence; she fills a room. She is funny, notwithstanding that you can be too witty in nation politics, as with failed presidential aspirants Morris Udall and Bob Dole. She reminds me of those relentlessly upbeat mothers, who were always on-call to fix things in the children’s books of my youth.
Although Warren comes from a working-class background, years of success at the best schools has left her with patina of someone from the comfortable classes -- someone for whom things work out in life. She counters this by stressing the plight of the middle class, the decline in real wages and her passion for fast food and beer -- light beer, of course.
Warren's father was janitor in Oklahoma who suffered from heart disease and her mother worked for the Sears catalog. The young Elizabeth did her bit for the family income by waitressing.
However, it's hard to imagine her at home at a union fish fry. My feeling is that she'd be more comfortable -- the life of the party, in fact -- at a yacht club.
Progressives yearn for Warren and she speaks to their issues: lack of Wall Street regulation, and federal medical-research dollars, and the need for gun control, student-loan reform, equal pay for equal work, and government contracting reform.
She is a classic, untrammeled liberal who is less dour than Bernie Sanders, and less extreme. So it's no wonder that so many Democrats long for her to occupy the presidency or the vice presidency.
All in all, I'd like to go to a party where she is the host: the kind where they serve more than light beer.
Llewellyn King (lking@kingpublishing.com) is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS.
"White House Chronicle" on PBS
Chris Powell: Stop honoring the genocidal Andrew Jackson
Manchester, Conn.
Congratulations to Connecticut's Democratic Party for landing Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren as keynote speaker for the party's annual Jefferson-Jackson-Bailey fundraising dinner in June. Unlike the party's presumptive next presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, Warren at least poses as the scourge of Wall Street, though conveniently for Wall Street she also opposes auditing its great enabler, the Federal Reserve.
But another big irony in Warren's appearance should be addressed too. That is, many years ago, possibly to obtain ethnic hiring preferences, Warren claimed Cherokee Indian ancestry, and the “Jackson” of the dinner is President Andrew Jackson, perpetrator of a disgrace of the country's history, the genocide of the Cherokee Indians, the expropriation of their land in the southeastern part of the country, though they were living at peace with their neighbors, and their deadly forced march to wastelands beyond the Mississippi River.
In part because of that disgrace, there is a growing movement to replace Jackson's portrait on the 20-dollar bill with the portrait of a woman, women being unrepresented on U.S. paper currency. The best candidate seems to be Eleanor Roosevelt, the great advocate of human rights, politically incorrect in her time but vindicated by history.
So why keep honoring Jackson at the Connecticut Democratic Party's biggest event? Eleanor Roosevelt's husband, President Franklin Roosevelt, the greatest Democratic president, did far more for the country than Jackson did and could ably replace him as a dinner honoree. (While Roosevelt's internment of U.S. citizens of Japanese descent during World War II was a disgrace too, at least nobody died from it and it was a consequence of war.)
Like the Democratic Party's subservience to Wall Street, Andrew Jackson has become just a bad habit. It would be good if Warren could persuade the party to dump both. At least dumping Jackson won't cost the party any campaign contributions.
xxx
As he seems about to be sent to prison a second time for political corruption, former Gov. John G. Rowland is becoming an ever-easier target for any grievance involving his 9½ years in office, and now the state employee unions are claiming a great if bitter triumph over him in the settlement of their federal lawsuit challenging what turned out to be Rowland's temporary layoff of 2,500 union members amid state budget difficulties in 2003.
The unions call Rowland's action a great crime. But the lawsuit got to the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, where the unions won, only because the state had prevailed at the federal district court level, so it's not as if the state had no case. An appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court might have gone either way, and the unions figured, as did Gov. Dannel Malloy and Atty. Gen. George Jepsen, that the parties would do best to settle rather than go for broke.
While the nominal value of the settlement is said to be $100 million, the attorney general says it has been structured so that most of the money will be paid to the state employees over many years as vacation and personal days off and thus not require special appropriations.
The unions say the settlement's structure demonstrates their generosity amid state government's latest budget difficulties under an infinitely friendlier governor. But the structure seems more like an admission that state employees are not much missed when they don't show up for work, as they didn't show up a few weeks ago on Good Friday, one of their already innumerable paid holidays, which closely followed Martin Luther King Day in January and Washington's Birthday and Lincoln's Birthday in February.
If, as the unions' posturing suggests, state employees spent those days mostly steaming about their oppression, they'll be able to do it again in October on Columbus Day, when, for some reason, Connecticut will honor the destroyer of the Indians of the Caribbean.
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, based in Manchester, Conn.
Don Pesci: The Blumenthal/Clinton alliance
Yalies stick together, especially in the case of Yale Law schoolmates Hillary Clinton and Connecticut’s senior U.S. senator, Richard Blumenthal. Blumenthal gushed last Friday over Clinton’s political stock, ahead of the former secretary of state’s announcement Sunday that she is running for president in 2016.
“She literally can make history,” Blumenthal told Hearst Connecticut Media. “How many people have been a presidential spouse, a senator in her own right and a distinguished secretary of state with a record of representing of major state (New York) and our nation abroad? By any measure, she is very seriously and significantly qualified, especially as compared to some of the other contenders.”
Blumenthal downplayed the recent email retention scandal that has dogged Clinton, who used her personal e-mail account to conduct official business as secretary of state inside of a protected government server.
“She has addressed it in a thoughtful and serious way, as she should,” Blumenthal said. “It’s not going to be the decisive factor in whether people vote for her.”
The prospect of appearing on the same ticket with Clinton must be particularly salivating to Blumenthal, who is up for re-election in 2016.
“I think the more people can see Hillary the person, I’m tempted to say the real Hillary Clinton, the more that they will develop very deep and genuine affection and admiration for her,” Blumenthal said. “It will be a demanding and difficult campaign, as every presidential campaign is. She has extraordinary breadth of experience and balance and temperament and intellect and insight on issues.”
In 2008 when he was still state attorney general, Blumenthal was co-chairman of Clinton’s campaign in Connecticut, which went to then-U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, of Illinois, in the Democratic Super Tuesday primary. Blumenthal is an active member of the group Ready for Hillary.
“I’ve urged her to take this step and I’m just delighted she’s doing it,” Blumenthal said.
Blumenthal wasn't in attendance for Clinton’s debut as a candidate. He was in Hartford for Sunday’s parade celebrating the 10th national championship for the University of Connecticut’s women’s basketball program.
Blumenthal’s decades-long alliance with Clinton could pay dividends for the freshman senator, whose name has often been connected to Cabinet jobs in a hypothetical Clinton administration.
“I think that’s kind of way ahead of where anyone is thinking at this point,” Blumenthal said. “My focus is on working and fighting for the people of Connecticut in a job that I love, and I hope to continue to serve them.”
Don Pesci is a Vernon, Conn.-based political columnist.
David Warsh: Health economist reaps whirlwind from his irony
Irony – the tendency to underscore a point by stating the opposite of what is meant – has been the downfall of many an advocate. It’s an often powerful technique. In political speech, though, it is prone to backfire, because it can easily be taken out of context. It’s more dangerous than ever in the age of YouTube and opposition research. Accept that “oppo” has greatly damaged the effectiveness of Jonathan Gruber, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the economist who in 2004 framed the financial strategy that, over a twisted course, led to the adoption of the Affordable Care Act, in 2010. Gruber is a leading healthcare expert, much in demand. For two weeks he’s been at the center of a firestorm because of three video clips in which he seems to give comfort to enemies of Obamacare.
The story of how investment adviser Rich Weinstein, angered because he was forced to search for a new policy under terms of the ACA (he found one), turned amateur sleuth, searching through hundreds of online videos, radio interviews and podcasts to find three damaging ones, makes interesting reading. We owe it to reporter David Weigel, of Bloomberg Politics.
The ACA requires those who don’t receive health insurance benefits from their employer or from the government to buy their own insurance, much as licensed drivers must purchase automobile insurance, with government subsidies for health insurance for those who earn less than a certain amount.
According to Gruber, the bill was written in a “tortured” way to avoid describing its mandates as taxes. He told a health care conference at the University of Pennsylvania last year that ''Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage, Call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass.''
Gruber was being ironic. Addressing an audience of healthcare professionals, he meant that, for good reasons or bad, in extending insurance to those who couldn’t afford it or even obtain it, that Americans had done the right thing. Sleuth Weinstein found two other clips in which Gruber seemed to buttress Republican argument that insurance obtained on a federal exchange is not eligible for subsidies because the legislation anticipated that all states would form exchanges of their own. Twenty-four states, all with Republican governors, refused to form such exchanges. The federal government formulated a marketplace in their stead.
“Health Adviser Logged White House Visits,” headlined The Wall Street Journal. “Fallout From Gruber’s Remarks Spreads: Economist’s Comments on Affordable Care Act’s Passage Prompt Vermont to Cut Ties, Michigan Lawmakers to Seek Probe.” .
In an editorial, “The Impolitic Jonathan Gruber,” The New York Times came to the ACA’s defense:
''Republicans are crowing over Mr. Gruber’s remarks because he has been portrayed as a major architect of the health reform. In truth, his role was limited. He had a big contract with the White House to use his econometric model to calculate the financial and coverage effects of proposed measures. And he was one of thirteen experts who advised the Senate Finance Committee. His comments should not be taken as evidence that the reform law was hatched in secrecy and foisted on the public by trickery.''
It depends, I guess, on what is meant by “truth.” In truth, Gruber’s role in devising the mandate strategy of the ACA was absolutely fundamental. The idea had originally been proposed in the early 1990s by the conservative Heritage Foundation as an alternative to Hillary Clinton’s much farther-reaching plans. Gruber dusted it off and broached it in 2004, at the request of then-Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. Romney was in the early stages of preparing a presidential bid. His plan was adopted by Massachusetts’ s heavily Democratic legislature, with apparent success.
The mandate idea was taken over by the Democrats in the campaign for the 2008 presidential election. By now a leading expert on its operation, Gruber first advised John Edwards, then Hillary Clinton, and finally Barack Obama on the details of the plan. In early 2010, President Obama relied on Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate to pass the measure into law.
Was it a good idea? Some Democrats have begun to voice their doubts. Sen. Charles Schumer (D.-N.Y.) said, last week: “It wasn’t the change we were hired to make.” The party should have found a way to raise wages and create jobs, instead of focusing on the uninsured, he continued, whom he described as “a small percentage of the electorate.”
David Axelrod, a close adviser to President Obama in both campaigns countered (in a another story in the WSJ ), “If your calculus is solely on how to win elections, and that is your abiding principle, it leads you to Sen. Schumer’s position. But that’s precisely why big difficult problems often don’t get addressed in Washington, and why people have become cynical about that town and its politics.”
The ACA will continue on its perilous course in the courts, this time in King vs. Burwell, a challenge to subsidies for those policies obtained from the federal exchange. The 2016 elections come after that.
With much rule-changing still to be done before the huge medical sector becomes stable, U.S. healthcare reform is like global warming: Further measures are not a matter of if but when.
David Warsh, a longtime financial journalist and economic historian, is proprietor of economicprincipals.com
Chris Powell: In Conn., the real family problem
VERNON, Conn.
Contriving their daily dose of campaign hysteria, leading Connecticut Democrats gathered at the state Capitol the other day to denounce the Republican nominee for governor, Tom Foley, for accepting the endorsement of the Connecticut Family Institute. "Candidate Foley gives few details but now we know the company he's keeping," state Sen. Beth Bye, D-West Hartford, said. State Comptroller Kevin Lembo added, "The endorsement of the Family Institute is or should be the kiss of political death in this state. It is outside of who we are as a people." Bye and Lembo are liberals and a few decades ago liberals denounced such attacks as "guilt by association." But that was when liberals were the ones guilty of associating. Foley is hardly a conservative -- Bye condemned him not just for accepting the Family Institute's endorsement but also for having few positions at all -- but his election would change the locks on the candy store Democrats have made of state government. So Foley must be demonized. The Democrats' problem with the Family Institute is that it opposes same-sex marriage. That is, they argue that the Family Institute should be disqualified from politics and decent society forever for taking today the same position that the country's two leading Democrats, President Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, themselves took until a few years ago. But somehow Obama and Clinton have been forgiven. They were never going to change the locks on the candy store. The Family Institute says it endorsed Foley not because of his position on homosexuality and same-sex marriage -- those things don't seem to have ever bothered him and he is striving not to give offense even to those who deserve it. Rather, the institute got Foley to say he opposes legalizing assisted suicide, which the institute believes could lead to the euthanasia or murder of the disabled. Assisted suicide is not among Connecticut's big political issues, though if the Democratic state administration is re-elected those who work in the private sector will have less reason to go on living, or at least to go on living here. But then homosexuality isn't a big issue for Connecticut either. The state decriminalized it decades ago, hadn'tprosecuted it for decades before that, and was among the first states to authorize same-sex "civil unions" and then same-sex marriage itself. The state long has been and remains overwhelmingly indifferent to such entirely personal matters even as homosexuals here continue to clamor as if they are somehow oppressed, since such clamor wins them political deference as a recognized special interest. As the old joke notes, what was, in the last century, "the love that dares not speak its name" cannot, in this one, shut up. The problem with the Family Institute's obsession with homosexuality is not that it has any chance of impairing anyone's rights but that it distracts from Connecticut's real family problem, which is also the state's biggest problem -- the decline of the family itself. This isn't the doing of homosexuals but of heterosexuals, who increasingly have children outside marriage and raise them neglectfully in fatherless homes, a catastrophically destructive phenomenon made possible mainly by the welfare system. The welfare system's destruction of the family is responsible for most of Connecticut's education, crime, drug, mental health and child-abuse problems and for many of its physical illness problems. The human, financial and governmental costs are incalculable. But the Family Institute has little to say about this and the Democrats, so sensitive to any lack of enthusiasm for homosexuality, have nothing to say about it, since their party, the party of government, sustains itself only by increasing dependence on government. Unlike the Family Institute, the Democrats are politically relevant, so their silence on the bigger issue is a far bigger threat. Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn.
Chris Powell: Clinton's vast fee and UConn Foundation slush fund
MANCHESTER, Conn.
Hillary Clinton, ex-presidential spouse, former U.S. senator, secretary of state and likely presidential candidate, came to the University of Connecticut a few weeks ago and prattled about equality -- for which the university's foundation paid her $251,000.
As the extraordinary speaking fee has come under criticism, the university's defense has been that Clinton wasn't paid with state tax money or even with the university's own, that the foundation used money donated for a speakers program by a family in New Haven with various business interests. This defense is pathetic:
-- While the foundation is nominally separate from the university, it consists largely of university administrators and former students and the university pays it $8 million a year for fundraising. The foundation does nothing that the administration doesn't want it to do.
-- The foundation exists only to use the university's name and to support its mission. If the foundation does something that can be defended only by purporting to separate the foundation from the university and state taxpayers, it disparages the university as well.
-- Somebody at UConn decided that paying Clinton $251,000 for one banal presentation was better than paying $50,000 each for five lecturers or $25,000 each for 10 or $5,000 each for 50. Since UConn President Susan Herbst spent much time on the stage in conversation with Clinton, it's a fair assumption that the decision ultimately was Herbst's and that her vanity figured in it.
-- Exactly for whom was it better for UConn to use all that money for just one speaker? Was it better for UConn's students, to whom the event was limited, giving them a look at the likely Democratic presidential nominee in 2016, as if presidential candidates don't eventually hold many campaign events in public?
Or was it better mainly for the university administration, Connecticut's Democratic state administration, and Fusco family business interests, all of which got to ingratiate themselves with someone who has a good chance of becoming president, just as investment houses like Goldman Sachs and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts have ingratiated themselves with Clinton, paying millions to her and her family's foundation as advance bribes?
After The Washington Post reported this month that she recently had taken extravagant speaking fees from eight universities, including UConn, Clinton told ABC News that she had donated all the money to her family's foundation, "so it goes from a foundation at a university to another foundation."
That is, the money went from a foundation Clinton did not control to a foundation whose disbursements she can control, a foundation she can staff with her friends and campaign associates, a foundation that can be used in part as political patronage.
Clinton's speaking fee at UConn is still more evidence that the UConn Foundation is largely a slush fund for university officials, the mechanism by which they get to do what they wouldn't dare do with official government money.
Before the foundation paid Clinton's extravagant fee, it was employing two presidents at once, the old one being paid nearly a half million dollars per year while the salary of the new one was kept secret; it was spending $600,000 to buy a mansion in Hartford for Herbst so she might continue to schmooze and overawe state officials when inviting them to the president's mansion on the Storrs campus a half hour away might seem too burdensome; and it was even paying for Governor Malloy's international travel.
The foundation should be deprived of its exemption from Connecticut's freedom-of-information law and its board should be separated from university officials and made more independent.
Or else the foundation should start offering Republican presidential candidates a quarter million dollars to speak. At least some of them might be politically incorrect and thus interesting or even outrageous rather than merely banal and corrupt.
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.
Richard J. Eskow: What Democrats can learn from Cantor's defeat
Cartoon by KALIB BENDIB for OtherWords.org
David Brat, the man who unexpectedly defeated Eric Cantor in a recent Republican primary, is an ideologue. That should be a source of encouragement for candidates on the populist left — but not for the reasons that you might think.
Brat is a professor whose college chair is endowed with libertarian money and ran a campaign rife with Tea Party slogans. Yet it would be wrong to minimize Brat’s victory, as Hillary Clinton did, as solely the result of his across-the-board opposition to immigration reform. That theory deflects attention from the populist side of Brat’s campaign, thereby minimizing a movement that presents a potential threat to Clinton and a number of other Democrats.
Brat made Cantor’s Wall Street ties a key campaign theme by tapping into a frustration with corrupt Washington politics that spans the political spectrum. “I’m an economist. I’m pro-business. I’m pro-big business making profits,” Brat declared on the campaign trail. “But what I’m absolutely against is big business in bed with big government. And that’s the problem.”
It’s no wonder that reporter Ryan Lizza described Brat in The New Yorker as “the Elizabeth Warren of the right.” When Brat says “the Republican Party has been paying way too much attention to Wall Street and not enough attention to Main Street,” he echoes the Massachusetts senator’s theme that “the system is rigged for powerful interests and against working families” — and the argument that progressive Democrats are making about their party’s dominant wing.
That’s why Brat’s candidacy doesn’t belong in the standard Tea Party basket. Cantor more closely fit this mold, with his fiery Tea Party-like rhetoric belying the fact that he was very much part of the Beltway elite, a Republican apparatchik, and a friend of the corporate class.
When Brat called Cantor out — “the crooks up on Wall Street and some of the big banks…they didn’t go to jail. They are on Eric’s Rolodex” — the underdog garnered enough votes to win a race against a top dog.
His mix of messages comes as no a surprise to people such as me who track polling data on economic issues. It’s been clear for years that anti-corporate populism appeals to voters across the political spectrum.
Inside-the-Beltway consensus thinking tends to dismiss voices on both the left and the right as unimportant to the political process. The mythical “truly undecided centrist voter” — that legendary creature situated precisely halfway between the Republican and Democratic parties on key issues — has led the political class to ignore the electoral power of ideological voices.
Many Democrats are making the mistake of embracing the same pro-corporate positions as their Republican opponents while losing touch with what’s happening back at home.
Far-right media personalities, including Laura Ingraham and Mark Levin, gave Brat a tremendous leg up among conservative-populist true believers, stoking their enthusiasm and fueling both organizational efforts and turnout.
The left has its voices, too, and insurgent Democratic politicians shouldn’t be reluctant to rely on them just because they’re afraid that the “in crowd” in Washington will marginalize them. As Brat’s victory shows, distancing yourself from the in crowd can pay off.
Ideology has gotten a bad name from members of both parties who would rather push a Washington-corporate consensus than have a real debate on the issues and principles that should drive our nation’s decision-making.
What will happen if Republicans like Brat, with their anti-immigrant populism, face off against Democrats like Elizabeth Warren imbued with a populism grounded in economic justice? We might finally have a real debate about how to break the corporate stranglehold on politics and the economy.
Richard J. Eskow is a fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future and the host of "The Zero Hour'', a nationally syndicated radio show. He wrote this for OtherWords.org.