Can't We All Just Get Along?

Another short one.  This morning Jim Hightower did a commentary on President Obama's proposal to increase the minimum wage.

But then came the number: $9 an hour. Excuse me, Mr. President, but that means a person who "works full-time" would nonetheless "have to live in poverty." Yes, nine bucks is a buck-seventy-five better than the current pay, but it's still a poverty wage, and it doesn't even elevate the buying power of our wage floor back to where it was in 1968.

Of course I'd already heard this, and probably you have too.  What occurred to me was that Obama is up to his old tricks again.  You may remember that when he was putting together his first stimulus bill in 2009, he included substantial (and probably excessive) tax cuts, before the Republicans had even demanded any.  Later Obama conceded this wasn't the best idea:

Now in retrospect, I could have told Barack Obama in December of 2009 that if you already have a third of the package as tax cuts, then the Republicans, who traditionally are more comfortable with tax cuts, may just pocket that and attack the other components of the program. And it might have been better for us not to include tax cuts in the original package, let the Republicans insist on the tax cuts, and then say, O.K., you know, we’ll compromise and give you your tax cuts, even though we had already proposed them.

Has he learned anything since then?  Apparently not.  If you want to raise the minimum wage to an obviously inadequate, poverty-level $9 an hour, do you begin by declaring $9 as your goal, or do you start out higher?  Given the recent precedent of Obama's concessions on raising upper-crust tax rates, I think it's a good bet that he'll eke out some increase in the minimum wage -- maybe to $8.25 or even $8.50 -- blame the Republicans for their opposition, and then he and his devotees will tout whatever paltry increase is won as proof of Obama's great concern and care for the Middle Class.

No One Could Have Foreseen This Situation

(This photo appeared on Reuters (I think), which suggests it may be genuine.  I haven't been able to find it anywhere else, so it's suspicious.  But it sure fits.)

Today Avedon Carol linked to a recent post at The Nation by Rick Perlstein:

We have on our hands a President Groundhog Day ... [R]egularly, and regularly and regularly, Obama initiates a negotiation; finds his negotiating partner maneuvering him into an absurd impasse; then “negotiates” his way out of a crisis with a settlement deferring reckoning (in the former of further negotiation) to some specified time in the future, at which point he somehow imagines negotiation will finally, at long last, work—at which point the next precipice arrives, and he lets his negotiating partners defer the reckoning once more.

Perlstein thinks this pattern comes from Obama's personal psychology, which he promises to explore in a future post.  Avedon thinks it's conscious and deliberate: "Or, at least, that's the story we're meant to believe...."

Liberals and many leftists tend to agree with the far Right that Obama is really a diabolically clever rope-a-dope Eleven-Dimensional Chess master, manipulating his opponents to get what he really wants -- though they disagree as to what he really wants. I think both groups are giving him too much credit.  I also think it's irrelevant.  If I could know that Obama's totally sincere, I'd still criticize his policies and his ability to negotiate.  If he's a canny secret corporatist (I'd agree that he is, except it's not secret) or a wily secret anti-colonialist socialist, the question still arises of what to do it about it: elect more Democrats to Congress?  Or more Tea Party Republicans, to defeat the Kenyan Usurper?  It is to laugh.  The epithet "conspiracy theory" is thrown around by right-thinking people of both parties to dismiss explanations they dislike, whether the theory is supportable or not; but only for other people's conspiracy theories.

Perlstein also writes that in 2011

The president reportedly thought he and Boehner were working together—'to freeze out their respective extremists and make the kind of historic deal that no one really thought possible anymore—bigger than when Reagan and Tip O’Neill overhauled the tax code in 1986 or when Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich passed welfare reform a decade later.'

It's the bit about "their respective extremists" that's important here. Boehner's "extremists" are those Republicans who want to dismantle the Federal Government except for the military and the surveillance machinery, which is arguably an "extreme" position. Obama's "extremists" are those Democrats who want to preserve the New Deal and the Great Society, which is a conservative position in the strict sense of the word, and anything but extremist.  If anything is really "centrist" in the US today, it's opposition to cuts in social programs and support for higher taxes on the wealthy.  Which, among other things, goes to show how meaningless the word "extremist" is.  Insofar as the word applies to anyone, it applies to President Obama, Speaker Boehner, and their loyal supporters.

I Would Prefer Not To, Part 2

Vast Left kindly gave my earlier post a boost on Facebook, though he disagreed with my remarks about Obama's "competence".

IMHO, the competence argument presupposes things about Obama's objectives, or at a minimum tempts us to do so. I suppose one might reasonably imagine Obama sought some sort of braggable closure in the Grand Bargain negotiations, but even that is speculation. And, importantly, what objective did his incompetence cause him to fail at? It's only a failure if you sought a different outcome.

Two things here.  One is that VL evidently missed my reference to the negotiation, not of the deficit deal, but of Obama's 2009 stimulus package.  Maybe I should have put in a link, and I'll add one later, to Obama's own admission that he hadn't done such a good job on that one:

Now in retrospect, I could have told Barack Obama in December of 2009 that if you already have a third of the package as tax cuts, then the Republicans, who traditionally are more comfortable with tax cuts, may just pocket that and attack the other components of the program. And it might have been better for us not to include tax cuts in the original package, let the Republicans insist on the tax cuts, and then say, O.K., you know, we’ll compromise and give you your tax cuts, even though we had already proposed them.

Yesterday VastLeft tweeted "When the job is fucking over the most vulnerable people, the last topic that interests me is competence."  This is mildly alarming; it seems that VL can't grasp anything but the most direct ("Am too! Are not!") argument.  If what I wrote presupposed Obama's competence, it was only hypothetically, for the sake of argument. What I was getting at was not so complex: it was If X, then Y; if not-X, then not-Y: Even if Obama was trying to engineer an economic stimulus that would help the most vulnerable, he did a bad job of it.  He said so himself.  Just as Obama admitted that he did a poor job in his first debate with Mitt Romney.  Is it necessary to be a good debater to be a good President?  Not as far as I'm concerned; but it was still worth noting that he is not a good debater.  (And this is an easy, safe criticism to make, since almost all of his most devoted apologists agreed with it.)  It is, I think, important for a President to be a competent negotiator; it's a significant part of the job.

But it also follows from what I wrote in that post (that the principles you stand up for must be good ones) that it's not enough to be a competent negotiator, one must also be negotiating toward a good end.  If Obama was trying to push through a stimulus deal that would help the majority of Americans, he shouldn't have undermined it by offering tax cuts up front that would undercut its effectiveness.  (If not-X, then not-Y.)  This suggests that improving the economy for the 99% was not his goal, which seems likely, given his record.  This involved the real risk that an underperforming economy would hurt his chances of re-election, but Obama wouldn't have been the first president to run such a risk: Bill Clinton did just that by pushing through NAFTA in 1993, the Democrats lost control of Congress as a result, and Clinton might not have gone on to a second term; like Obama last week, Clinton won his second term by a relatively narrow margin.  Obama's re-election wasn't a foregone conclusion either, and the limping economy worried his partisans. On the other hand the economy was going well for the ultra-rich, with record high profits, but that crucial part of his base was strikingly ungrateful, despite the yeoman service he'd rendered them.  Fortunately for Obama, the Republicans fielded a stellar ticket of fools and bigots -- but even so, the popular vote was a close thing.  The gap between Romney and Obama in the Electoral College was much more dramatic, which is no doubt why those numbers have gotten so much display.  (Not that American Presidents ever need to worry for their well-being when they're turned out of office.)

Now that Obama is in the catbird seat, we'll see him negotiating a Grand Bargain to keep us from going over the Fiscal Cliff.  There's been talk of how good Obama's position is now, compared to 2009 or the debt ceiling battle of 2011.  But by now his goal is pretty clear, a destructive one, so it doesn't matter whether he's a competent negotiator or not.  Whether Boehner or Obama emerges the victor in the Grand Bargaining, most Americans (and most of the world) will lose.  But don't worry: Neither Obama nor his lovely wife nor his beautiful little girls will ever miss a meal, and isn't that what really matters?  What Obama fan wouldn't be happy to go hungry to keep them comfortable?

It's also odd that VL is still hammering away at a point that isn't central to the post he praised so generously; but now I've devoted too much attention to it myself, so on to other matters.  The elections are finally over, and America's best minds can turn their attention to really important subjects: football and basketball.

I Would Prefer Not To

The former (she's still working, I've retired) co-worker who posted this commented, "so true, if our elected officials did this a lot more would get done!"  I see variations on that theme a lot, on Facebook, in the letters to the editors of newspapers, in the comments sections of online newspapers, and in the magnanimous victory speech of His High Mightiness, our newly-elected President of the United States and Protector of Their Liberties .  And it makes no sense at all.

I don't dispute that Republicans in Congress and elsewhere have done their best to obstruct President Obama's agenda for the past four year for mainly partisan reasons.  One reason I consider this obvious is that they refused him courtesies they've freely granted to Republican Presidents, like raising the debt ceiling.  Like Democrats who suddenly embraced policies under Obama that they denounced under Bush, they were clearly motivated solely by party hatred.

It should be remembered, however, that bipartisan cooperation brought us the Vietnam War, Don't Ask Don't Tell, the Hyde Amendment, the North American Free Trade Agreement, welfare "reform," the Defense of Marriage Act, the repeal of Glass-Steagall and other dismantling of important protective regulations, the invasion of Afghanistan, torture and indefinite detention, the invasion of Iraq, the attack on Libya, drone warfare, No Child Left Behind, the current murderous sanctions against Iraq, and the Bowles-Simpson Commission, and many other wonders.  It looks poised to bring us a further assault on Social Security and Medicare, and more austerity generally (except for the top 1%) in the name of deficit reduction.  I doubt that my co-worker, or the many other people I've seen calling for "working together", would think that all of those were positive developments.  (That's assuming that they know what most of them are, which I also doubt.)

A dozen years ago, the now-late Alexander Cockburn wrote after the defeat of Al Gore:

First a word about gridlock. We like it. No bold initiatives, like privatizing Social Security or shoving through vouchers. No ultra-right-wingers making it onto the Supreme Court. Ah, you protest, but what about the bold plans that a Democratic-controlled Congress and Gore would have pushed through? Relax. There were no such plans. These days gridlock is the best we can hope for.

Alas, this time around there's a good chance that Barack Obama, Harry Reid and John Boehner will sit down and reason together over the deficit, with disastrous results.  Maybe not -- Boehner has hinted that he's still not on board with higher taxes for the rich -- but I expect Obama will be ready to waive that demand if it gets him cuts in Social Security and Medicare.  We'll see.

There are times when refusal to cooperate is a good thing.  I supported the Democratic state legislators in Wisconsin and Indiana who fled their states to try to block destructive Republican initiatives.  Would I support Republicans who did the same thing?  Yes, if (but only if) they were really opposing bad legislation.  It's not enough, as I've said before, to stand by your principles: your principles have to be good ones.  And who decides what are good principles?  I do.  You do.  We all do.  But we don't necessarily agree.

And that's the trouble with JFK's bromide above.  Who could possibly disagree that we should work together for the common good, rising above cheap partisanship for the good of the country and the world?  Has anyone ever disagreed?  Certainly not many.  Most people are sure that their position, their answer, is the right one.  So where do you go from there?  Most people have no idea.  I think that reasoned, informed debate is one tool.  I have learned a lot by watching intelligent, informed, rational opponents articulate their disagreement.  The outcome may not establish the right position or the right answer, but it often establishes that at least one is wrong, and that is a good thing to know.

But a lot of people hate debate.  Like Lady Augusta Bracknell, they dislike arguments, which are always vulgar and often convincing.  Or as too many people have said, "Arguing on the Internet is like competing in the Special Olympics -- even if you win your [sic] still retarded!  LOL LMFAO! ROFL!!!!"  (This canard seems to imply that these people would approve of debate elsewhere than the Internet, but I don't think so; at least, when I've asked them where debate and argument should happen, they don't have an answer.)

And if I have learned one thing from the past election season, it's that an election campaign isn't the right place for a debate either.  Not even the official Presidential and Vice-Presidential debates.  On their own account, Democrats no less than Republicans have no idea what to do when someone disagrees with them about the issues or the positions of the candidates, so they fall back on abuse.

But I've written about that enough in the past several weeks.  The main point is that negotiation isn't about debate, though it may include some along the way.  Nor does it promise "the right answer," perhaps especially in politics.  This is a point that party loyalists will make when their own side is criticized, though they will abandon it when they're criticizing the other party.  And I don't believe it would make any difference at all if party labels were set aside, because in politics other factors are at least as influential as party: money, seniority, the coming elections.  And more than two sides are usually involved.

If two parties sit down to negotiate in good faith, the result will not necessarily be good.  It's like voting: there is no reason to believe that voters will make the "right" choice, but the point is that they have a say (at least in theory) and therefore some accountability, if only to themselves.  In the real world it's likely that both sides are negotiating in bad faith.   It might be quite bad, but principles aren't involved.  I have to keep reminding myself that this applies to negotiations in government.  Remember Barack Obama's failure in bargaining for his stimulus package, where he unilaterally offered tax cuts to the Republicans before they'd even asked for them.  That's a lack of basic competence, which should be borne in mind by those who think of Obama as their mighty shield against the Republicans.  Obama can't even play ordinary chess very well.  In service of his corporate donors and cronies, he knows how to strongarm his fellow Democrats and to a slight degree the Republicans, but that's not chess-playing, that's main force.  Which is also a factor in negotiations.

But still, one thing we should have learned from the past four years is that Obama isn't as smart as he thinks he is.  (Do I think I'm smarter?  I really have no idea.  What I think is that years of hanging around with America's elites has made Obama less smart than he used to be.  In his place I might have made the same mistakes.  But the point is that he made them.  I've noticed that some former high US officials have admitted that they did the wrong thing while in office.  Either they said so explicitly, or did so tacitly by adopting different positions after they were out of office.  And they can't be accused of not knowing what real politics is like (a popular attack on non-politicians when we dare to speak up).  The key question then is how to make those different positions feasible or workable for politicians while they're still in office.  There's much talk of what is "politically possible" and "politically impossible."  The pressures on politicians to get rid of social programs, to cut taxes on the rich while maintaining social programs for them, to wage wars of aggression and terror, are obvious enough.  So what kind of pressure will make them do the opposite?

You can't blame him for doing that, a politician's apologists protest: Look at the pressure he was under.  To me it has long been obvious that the remedy is to put pressure on him (or her) to do something else.  If nothing else, it would remove the excuse.  One could say to the politician in question: you'll be voted out of office whatever you do, so you might as well do what you yourself agree is the right thing.  It might not be the right thing; he might just be telling me what he thinks I want to hear.  But that's not important here: the important thing is to take away the excuse.  Probably he has more excuses up his sleeve, but enough pressure should force him to acknowledge that they are excuses.   And then, to quote the psychoanalyst at the end of Portnoy's Complaint, we may perhaps begin.

Hey, Big Spender: Still Fit to Eat With the Hogs

Here's a good example of the inadequacy of our political discourse.  The image above turned up on Facebook, though the Talking Points Memo article it references was published in May; I think it was spread around at the time.  A couple of people I know linked to it on Facebook today.  I was going to write a post about calls I've been seeing lately for more critical thinking, and I may finish it after I post this, but let this one serve as an overture to the bigger question.

It's good to refute Obama's Republican critics when they accuse Obama of being a big spender, but it's not enough.  In an alternate universe, say the Bizarro World, where facts would matter in election campaigns and political discussion, Obama's relative thrift would be embarrassing to the Democrats, as it should be.  After a catastrophe like the 2008 crash, the government needs to pump lots of money into the economy to increase demand.  Far from cutting government jobs as Obama has, the administration should add more.  Obama's stimulus bill was the right idea, but inadequate thanks in part to Obama's pre-emptive surrender to the Republicans on the Bush-era tax holiday for the rich.

Which gives me the chance I've been looking for to provide a source and a link to something I've mentioned before: Obama's admission that he had failed as a negotiator by offering the tax cuts himself, instead of making the Republicans demand them.

Now in retrospect, I could have told Barack Obama in December of 2009 that if you already have a third of the package as tax cuts, then the Republicans, who traditionally are more comfortable with tax cuts, may just pocket that and attack the other components of the program. And it might have been better for us not to include tax cuts in the original package, let the Republicans insist on the tax cuts, and then say, O.K., you know, we’ll compromise and give you your tax cuts, even though we had already proposed them. 

And if you recall, when we initially unveiled what the Recovery Act would look like — in fact, that a third of it was tax cuts — Mitch McConnell actually was, as he phrased it, pleasantly surprised that sort of traditional Republican idea had been included. But very quickly that pleasant surprise turned into attacks on the infrastructure or the aid to the states or what have you.

As Avedon Carol pointed out, one of the fundamental principles of bargaining is that you ask for more than you want, so the other party will have to make concessions to get you to lower your demand.  As I've pointed out before, even if Obama (an alumnus of the supposedly tough Chicago political scene as well as a couple of years in the Senate) had never learned this, he had plenty of advisors with more experience who could have pointed it out at the time.  There was no need for the far-future Obama of 2010 to invent a time machine so he could advise his much-younger 2009 self in the basics of political rough-and-tumble.  This same pattern has been played out repeatedly in Obama's term, as when he tried to show his reasonableness by appointing two fanatical deficit hawks to run his deficit-reduction commission, and when he put cuts in Social Security and Medicare benefits on the table during the absurdly mismanaged debt-ceiling debacle.  To say nothing of putting off that fight until the Democrats no longer controlled the House of Representatives -- was that "I can beat them mugs with one hand tied behind my back" bravado?  I wouldn't be surprised.

And you know, this isn't a "Gotcha!" kind of criticism: the US economy is still stagnant except for the rich (including President Obama, who will never have to stand in an unemployment line nor will his family ever miss a meal).  Real people are suffering because of the incompetence of the Obama administration, and his smug dismissals of his "professional left" critics are the more despicable because of that.  This should be remembered when Democratic loyalists talk about the stupidity of the voters, who don't understand how politics works and should just sit back and let the experts drive.  Far from playing a genius-level game of eleven-dimensional chess with his opponents, Obama can't even play normal two-dimensional chess.

Obama's supporters are worthy of their President.  Does Dinesh D'Souza accuse him of being a Kenyan anti-colonialist?  They retort that the President is following boldly in the steps of the "original anticolonialists," the Founding Fathers -- who in reality were exemplary colonialists.  D'Souza accuses Obama of rejecting American exceptionalism?  His defenders reply that he accepts it, with all the aggression and bloodshed that entails.  Do the Republicans claim that Obama is weak on foreign policy and defense?  His defenders brandish Bin Laden's head on a pike, and the corpses of dead "militants."  Do the Republicans accuse him of reckless spending?  Au contraire, the President is a miser, the biggest cheapskate to occupy the White House since Jimmy Carter turned down the air conditioning and ordered lights to be turned off.  Not that I blame them: there but for the lack of Barack's grace go I.

Ironically, the logical conclusion to draw from the graph above is that we need to elect a big-spending Republican president in Obama's place.  That's not a good idea either, since Republican spending is aimed at the neediest of the top 1% of the wealthy, which doesn't increase demand; the Bush years aren't far enough behind us that any adult should have forgotten that.  It wasn't out-of-control spending or soaring deficits that brought on the crash of 2008, it was unregulated financial speculation, which continues to the present.  Why should the wealthy worry?  If they get into trouble, the government will bail them out.  But the really rich aren't hurt by depressions, and despite their constant poor-mouthing, the rich are doing quite well under Obama.  Profits are up.  It's the rest of us who aren't fit to eat with the hogs at the corporate trough.