It's Official: Being White Destroys Brain Cells

A Quinnipiac University poll, released on Wednesday, found that a plurality of whites said that Obama has been a worse president than George W. Bush.

Screw Job - How Obama Became the Fall Guy

...So, while the positive effect of the stimulus is necessarily a guess, it’s a guess shared by nonpartisan government agencies like the Congressional Budget Office as well as all the leading macroeconomic forecasters.

If you look at a graph of jobs lost by month, it resembles a pyramid, with the stack building through 2008, peaking in January 2009, then dropping down around zero over the course of this year. No serious person could dispute that the rise in unemployment reflects anything but the aftershocks of an economic collapse that predate the Obama presidency.

...This likewise holds true of the rising budget deficit: CBO numbers show that approximately 100 percent of the long-term deficit increase results from Bush policies and the effects of the slowdown...

“The American people are a lot smarter than people in Washington think,". If the administration is dumb enough to actually believe that, it would help explain how they’ve let Republicans win the political argument over the economy.



President Obama is like a pilot who took the controls of the plane in mid-flight after the engines fell out. It’s obvious that he didn’t cause the problem. But the passengers are going to focus on the fact that the plane was still airborne before he took over, and now, he’s crash-landing in the ocean.

That’s Obama’s problem in the debate over the economy. His arguments are true. The trouble is, they don’t feel true, and they feel less and less true as time goes by.

Republicans focus relentlessly on the simple fact that the economy is in worse shape now than it was before Obama took office. The trajectory may have improved, but the level has worsened--more people are out of work now than on January 20.

The Obama administration predicted in January that, if its stimulus package passed, unemployment would stay below 8 percent, yet it has crossed 10 percent. You have probably heard this statistic if you have heard any Republican in elected or unelected office open his mouth at any point over the last half-dozen months. The implication of this statistic--sometimes made explicit--is that the stimulus failed to alleviate, or even caused, rising unemployment.

The more plausible interpretation is that the Obama administration’s January forecast, along with most private forecasts at the time, underestimated the depth of the recession. One bit of evidence for that view is that unemployment hit 8 percent by February, which was about the same time that the stimulus passed and long before it could take effect.

What level unemployment would have reached without a stimulus is, of course, a total guess. Republicans have ridiculed the administration’s efforts to tabulate the jobs that the stimulus saved. The implication here is that, because you can’t count something, it doesn’t exist. It’s true that there’s no way to actually count the number of jobs saved by the stimulus. Even if you could accurately tabulate the workers hired by federal grants, you’d be missing all the jobs saved by the money those workers are spending. Not to mention the impact of the tax cuts, which account for two-fifths of the cost of the stimulus. So, while the positive effect of the stimulus is necessarily a guess, it’s a guess shared by nonpartisan government agencies like the Congressional Budget Office as well as all the leading macroeconomic forecasters.

If you look at a graph of jobs lost by month, it resembles a pyramid, with the stack building through 2008, peaking in January 2009, then dropping down around zero over the course of this year. No serious person could dispute that the rise in unemployment reflects anything but the aftershocks of an economic collapse that predate the Obama presidency. (This likewise holds true of the rising budget deficit: CBO numbers show that approximately 100 percent of the long-term deficit increase results from Bush policies and the effects of the slowdown.)

The Republican strategy here consists of two nifty steps. Step one consists of affixing Obama with the blame for rising unemployment. Step two is, when Obama points out that the economic collapse occurred before he took office, pummel him as a classless blame-shirker. Columns by National Review editor Rich Lowry (“Obama the graceless”), Wall Street Journal columnist William McGurn (“The post-gracious president”), and numerous other conservative worthies have harped upon this theme. Obama must accede to the Republican campaign to blame him for the consequences of the 2008 economic collapse because to do otherwise would violate social etiquette. Obama’s pointing out that he inherited the recession is “graceless, whiny, and tin-eared,” complains Lowry.

At first, in a fit of naïveté, I assumed that the conservative belief in the impropriety of a president blaming his predecessor must be a deeply held principle unrelated to the partisan identity of the presidents in question. Sadly, after a quick search of the recent historical record, the scales fell from before my eyes. President Bush repeatedly asserted that he “inherited a recession”--the one that began in March of 2001--from Bill Clinton. He also charged that Clinton’s weakness in the face of terrorism emboldened Al Qaeda to strike on September 11, which I would argue is even ruder than anything Obama has said about Bush. That particular theme also features prominently in Lowry’s 2003 book, Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years.

Obama’s trickiest dilemma is that the public does not agree with--or, to put it less charitably, understand--the basis for his anti-recession strategy. Whatever your view of deficits, they clearly make more sense during a recession than during an expansion, when deficit spending can help fuel overheated growth. The trouble is, public opinion tends to get loose with the purse strings during boom times and tight during recessions, which is the opposite of what you want. During the 1990s boom, the public favored expanded social spending and tax cuts over paying down the national debt. Today, by overwhelming margins, they favor an immediate balanced budget, even in the face of economic catastrophe.

That is, of course, insane. But Republicans have taken full advantage of the public’s fiscal insanity. President Bush used to scoff at proposals to pay down the national debt, saying, “The surplus means the government has more money than it needs.” Nowadays, Republicans like John Boehner say things like, “American families are tightening their belts,” and, therefore, Washington should “lead by example and show the American people that the government can go on a diet as well.”

What sounds to the American people like simple common sense is economic malpractice, and vice versa. Thus the Democrats’ predicament: High unemployment is making them unpopular, but the only steps they can take to reduce unemployment are themselves unpopular. If the Democrats actually gave the people what they say they want--$1.4 trillion in spending cuts and/or tax hikes to eliminate the 2010 deficit--Republicans would capture approximately 100 percent of Congress in the next election.

“The American people are a lot smarter than people in Washington think,” White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer said. “They understand we have to deal with jobs and deficits in a coordinated strategy.” If the administration is dumb enough to actually believe that, it would help explain how they’ve let Republicans win the political argument over the economy.

~Jonathan Chait

Bad Choices

The botched war in Afghanistan, like the economic crisis and the broken health-care system, is an inheritance from which Obama is trying to extricate the country. In each case, the institutional, historical, and political constraints under which a President must operate mean that the solutions—or, if there are no solutions, the ameliorations—are doomed to be nearly as messy as the problems.

...George W. Bush proclaimed...“Our war on terror is only begun, but in Afghanistan it has begun well.” In truth, it had not begun so well...the perpetrator of 9/11 had been allowed to escape...the American forces that could have captured him were held back by an Administration already planning its misguided invasion of Iraq. The evidence, a Senate Foreign Relations Committee report concluded last week, “removes any lingering doubts and makes it clear that Osama bin Laden was within our grasp at Tora Bora.”


There are no good options for the United States in Afghanistan. That has been the conventional wisdom for some years now, and this time the conventional wisdom—the reigning cliché—happens to be true. President Obama did not pretend otherwise in his address at West Point last week. His grimly businesslike speech was a gritty, almost masochistic exercise in the taking of responsibility. What he had to say did not please everyone; indeed, it pleased no one. Given the situation bequeathed to him and to the nation, pleasure was not an option. His speech was a somber appeal to reason, not a rousing call to arms. If his argument was less than fully persuasive, that was in the nature of the choices before him. There is no such thing as an airtight argument for a bad choice—not if the argument is made with a modicum of honesty.

In November, two months into the grueling, three-month review of Afghanistan policy that culminated in last week’s address, the Pentagon offered the President four options, each accompanied by a number, with each number representing an increase in the American troop commitment. But these were variations on a theme. As Obama seems to have realized, his true choices, of which there were also four, were wider and more fundamental: to begin immediately to wind down the American military presence; to maintain the status quo; to commit to a more or less open-ended, more or less full-fledged “counter-insurgency” war; or to pursue some version of the course he has now charted, in which a fresh infusion of military force and civilian effort is paired with a strong signal that America’s patience and resources, on which there are many other demands, are not unlimited.

Obama did the best he could to make a positive case for the path he has chosen, but—chillingly, bleakly—the principal virtue of his choice remains the vices of the others. Withdrawal, beginning at once? The political and diplomatic damage to Obama would be severe: a probable Pentagon revolt; the anger of NATO allies who have risked their soldiers’ lives (and their leaders’ political standing) on our behalf; the near-certainty that a large-scale terrorist attack, whether or not it had anything to do with Afghanistan, would be met at home not with 9/11 solidarity but with savage, politically lethal scapegoating. Even so, if “success,” however narrowly defined, is truly an outright impossibility, then withdrawal may still be the most responsible choice. But it is not yet obvious that a better result is out of the question. “To abandon this area now,” the President said, “would significantly hamper our ability to keep the pressure on Al Qaeda and create an unacceptable risk of additional attacks on our homeland and our allies.” The consequences could also include a second Taliban emirate, a long, bloody civil war, and a sharp, destabilizing increase in Islamist violence, not only in Pakistan but also in India and elsewhere. The status quo? To “muddle through and permit a slow deterioration,” the President said, “would ultimately prove more costly and prolong our stay in Afghanistan, because we would never be able to generate the conditions needed to train Afghan security forces and give them the space to take over.” Or a full-scale counter-insurgency war—in the President’s words, a “dramatic and open-ended escalation of our war effort, one that would commit us to a nation-building project of up to a decade”? That, too, must be rejected, “because it sets goals that are beyond what can be achieved at a reasonable cost and what we need to achieve to secure our interests.” Such a war—such a project—would be hugely out of proportion to whatever marginal security gains it might yield. And it wouldn’t just be beyond “a reasonable cost.” It would be beyond our political, institutional, and material capacity, and therefore impossible.

A dismal process of elimination has left the President to design a strategy that he believes is the only one that offers a chance, in his words, “to bring this war to a successful conclusion.” Or, at least, a bearable one. Deliver a hard punch to the Taliban, break its momentum, and welcome its defectors; throw a bucket of cold water on the hapless and corrupt central government; carve out space and time for projects of civilian betterment and the development of Afghan forces that are capable of maintaining some semblance of security; forge “an effective partnership with Pakistan”—to list the elements of Obama’s strategy is to recognize its difficulty. It is full of internal tensions, most prominently between the buildup of troops and the eighteen-month timeline for beginning their withdrawal. (To the extent that the troop surge weakens the enemy while the timeline focuses minds in Kabul and Islamabad, however, that tension could be a creative one.) The plan does not, of course, guarantee success. The best that can be claimed for it is that it does not guarantee failure, as, in one form or another, the alternatives almost certainly do.

At West Point in June of 2002, George W. Bush proclaimed to the graduating cadets, “Our war on terror is only begun, but in Afghanistan it has begun well.” In truth, it had not begun so well. Six months earlier, the first Taliban emirate had indeed been routed from power. But, at the same time, the perpetrator of 9/11 had been allowed to escape from his mountain hideout; the American forces that could have captured him were held back by an Administration already planning its misguided invasion of Iraq. The evidence, a Senate Foreign Relations Committee report concluded last week, “removes any lingering doubts and makes it clear that Osama bin Laden was within our grasp at Tora Bora.”

That was the speech in which the then President—no doubt with Iraq in mind, though he made no mention of that country—expanded what was already being called the Bush Doctrine to embrace the notion of preventive war. Obama, in the aftermath of his West Point speech, was widely condemned—and grudgingly praised—for allegedly adopting “what sounds like the Bush Doctrine” (Rachel Maddow) and “a rehash of the Bush Doctrine” (Mary Matalin). Not so. Whatever the Afghanistan war’s origins (and they were retributive, not preventive, except in the sense that every war, and every act of statecraft, is aimed at “preventing” something), this is not a preventive war. It is an actually existing war, and Obama’s purpose is clearly to bring it to a non-disastrous end.

The botched war in Afghanistan, like the economic crisis and the broken health-care system, is an inheritance from which Obama is trying to extricate the country. In each case, the institutional, historical, and political constraints under which a President must operate mean that the solutions—or, if there are no solutions, the ameliorations—are doomed to be nearly as messy as the problems. If there is no Obama Doctrine, there is an Obama approach—undergirded by humane values but also by a respect for reality. The most telling signpost in Obama’s speech may have been neither his call for more troops nor his timeline for removing them but his use of a quotation from another President who inherited a seemingly intractable war: “Each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs.” That was Dwight D. Eisenhower, in one of the homelier passages from his canonical farewell address, delivered the year Barack Obama was born. President Eisenhower’s point was that a nation’s security is all of a piece—that military actions do not inhabit a separate universe but must be weighed on the same scale, and be subject to the same judgments, as a nation’s other vital concerns. That seems to be President Obama’s point as well.


~Hendrik Hertzberg

A Tragic Mistake

I keep hearing that Americans are concerned about gargantuan budget deficits. Well, the idea that you can control mounting deficits while engaged in two wars that you refuse to raise taxes to pay for is a patent absurdity. Small children might believe something along those lines. Rational adults should not.


“I hate war,” said Dwight Eisenhower, “as only a soldier who has lived it can, as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.”

He also said, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.”

I suppose we’ll never learn. President Obama will go on TV Tuesday night to announce that he plans to send tens of thousands of additional American troops to Afghanistan to fight in a war that has lasted most of the decade and has long since failed.

After going through an extended period of highly ritualized consultations and deliberations, the president has arrived at a decision that never was much in doubt, and that will prove to be a tragic mistake. It was also, for the president, the easier option.

It would have been much more difficult for Mr. Obama to look this troubled nation in the eye and explain why it is in our best interest to begin winding down the permanent state of warfare left to us by the Bush and Cheney regime. It would have taken real courage for the commander in chief to stop feeding our young troops into the relentless meat grinder of Afghanistan, to face up to the terrible toll the war is taking — on the troops themselves and in very insidious ways on the nation as a whole.

More soldiers committed suicide this year than in any year for which we have complete records. But the military is now able to meet its recruitment goals because the young men and women who are signing up can’t find jobs in civilian life. The United States is broken — school systems are deteriorating, the economy is in shambles, homelessness and poverty rates are expanding — yet we’re nation-building in Afghanistan, sending economically distressed young people over there by the tens of thousands at an annual cost of a million dollars each.

I keep hearing that Americans are concerned about gargantuan budget deficits. Well, the idea that you can control mounting deficits while engaged in two wars that you refuse to raise taxes to pay for is a patent absurdity. Small children might believe something along those lines. Rational adults should not.

Politicians are seldom honest when they talk publicly about warfare. Lyndon Johnson knew in the spring of 1965, as he made plans for the first big expansion of U.S. forces in Vietnam, that there was no upside to the war.

A recent Bill Moyers program on PBS played audio tapes of Johnson on which he could be heard telling Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, “Not a damn human thinks that 50,000 or 100,000 or 150,000 [American troops] are going to end that war.”

McNamara replies, “That’s right.”

Nothing like those sentiments were conveyed to the public as Johnson and McNamara jacked up the draft and started feeding young American boys and men into the Vietnam meat grinder.

Afghanistan is not Vietnam. There was every reason for American forces to invade Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001. But that war was botched and lost by the Bush crowd, and Barack Obama does not have a magic wand now to make it all better.

The word is that Mr. Obama will tell the public Tuesday that he is sending another 30,000 or so troops to Afghanistan. And while it is reported that he has some strategy in mind for eventually turning the fight over to the ragtag and less-than-energetic Afghan military, it’s clear that U.S. forces will be engaged for years to come, perhaps many years.

The tougher choice for the president would have been to tell the public that the U.S. is a nation faced with terrible troubles here at home and that it is time to begin winding down a war that veered wildly off track years ago. But that would have taken great political courage. It would have left Mr. Obama vulnerable to the charge of being weak, of cutting and running, of betraying the troops who have already served. The Republicans would have a field day with that scenario.

Lyndon Johnson is heard on the tapes telling Senator Richard Russell, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, about a comment made by a Texas rancher in the days leading up to the buildup in Vietnam. The rancher had told Johnson that the public would forgive the president “for everything except being weak.”

Russell said: “Well, there’s a lot in that. There’s a whole lot in that.”

We still haven’t learned to recognize real strength, which is why it so often seems that the easier choice for a president is to keep the troops marching off to war.

~Bob Herbert

Corporatism vs. Capitalism

When I heard the word "corporatist" a couple of years ago, I laughed. I thought what a funny, made up, liberal word. I fancy myself a die-hard capitalist, so it seemed vaguely anti-business, so I was put off by it.

Well, as it turns out, it's a great word. It perfectly describes a great majority of our politicians and the infrastructure set up to support the current corporations in the country. It is not just inaccurate to call these people and these corporations capitalists; it is in fact the exact opposite of what they are.

Capitalists believe in choice, free markets and competition. Corporatists believe in the opposite. They don't want any competition at all. They want to eliminate the competition using their power, their entrenched position and usually the politicians they've purchased. They want to capture the system and use it only for their benefit.

I don't blame them. They're trying to make a buck. And it's a hell of a lot easier making money when you don't have competition or truly free markets or consumer choice. All of these corporations would absolutely love it if they were the only choice a consumer had.

Blaming the corporations for this is a little silly. It's like blaming a man for breathing or a scorpion for stinging. That's what they do. In fact, they are legally bound to make their best effort at not just crushing the competition, but eliminating it. Lack of competition will lead to making more money (presumably for their shareholders; though realistically it winds up being for their executives these days).

As the saying goes, "Don't hate the player, hate the game." We have to understand how this system works and then account for the abuses that are likely to arise out of it. I don't hate the scorpion for stinging but I also wouldn't put a bunch of them in my bed. And I wouldn't take kindly to someone else putting them there, either.

Politicians are very cheap to buy (and senators from smaller states are even easier to buy - great bang for your buck). So, obviously corporations are going to look to buy them so they can pass laws to kill off their competition. If you don't understand this, you're being at least a little bit dense.

You should lose significant credibility as a journalist if you're naïve enough to believe that corporations would not do this out of the goodness of their hearts. Come on, can anyone really believe that? Yet, in today's media atmosphere, saying politicians are in the back pocket of the corporate lobbyists who raise the most money for them is seen as an unacceptable comment. Anyone who challenges the system is portrayed as an outsider, fringe element who must be treated with scorn and shunned. We are told in earnest tones we must trust the corporations and not question the motives of the politicians.

The sensible approach would be to recognize the problem and figure out a way to avoid it the best we can. Money always finds a way in, but we can at least be cognizant of the issue and try to combat it as much as possible. We must do this as citizens who care about our democracy, but we must also do it as capitalists.

I believe in the capitalist system. I think it makes sense and it is attuned to human nature. People do not work to the best of their ability and take only as much as they need. They work as little as humanly possible and take as much as humanly possible. Capitalism helps to funnel these natural impulses in a positive, hopefully productive manner.

But in order to have capitalism we must have choice. If consumers do not have different companies to choose from, if the markets aren't truly free and there is no real competition, then you kill capitalism. Corporations are a natural byproduct of capitalism, but as soon as they are born they want to destroy their parent. Corporations are the Oedipus of the capitalist system.

In order for capitalism to work, they must not be allowed to succeed. We must guard capitalism jealously.

So, it is of the utmost importance that we watch politicians with a very wary eye. Campaign contributions are a tiny expense to a large corporation. And the politicians treasure them too much. It is an easy sale. So, beware of politicians receiving gifts.

The perfect example of this is the health care reform debate going on now. And perhaps there is no better example of a politician who works for his corporate overlords than Max Baucus, who has received nearly three million dollars from the health care industry.

I don't blame the health care companies. I would do the same thing in their position. In fact, it is their fiduciary responsibility to buy an important (and cheap) senator like Max Baucus (he's cheap because he comes from the small state of Montana, where it is far less expensive to buy ads and crush your political competition with money they cannot possibly match).

If the health care companies can eliminate their competition, they'll make a lot more money. That is why there is so little competition among corporations in so many parts of the country now and why they are desperate to avoid the public option. They'd have to be stupid and negligent not to buy Max Baucus. He is the head of the Finance Committee and in charge of writing the most touted and awaited version of the health care bill.

I don't blame them, I blame us. How stupid and negligent are we to let that guy write this bill? The media should be treating Baucus and many of the other senators (who all get millions from the health care industry) with enormous skepticism. Instead, they are treating them as if they are honest actors who would never be affected by all that money.

They treat their concerns as if they are legitimate issues. The Republicans and the corporatist Democrats pretend to be fiscal conservatives who care about the budget when they are trying to kill the most important cost constraint in the whole bill - the public option. If you're a budget hawk, that's the last thing you'd kill, not the first. That's what keeps our costs down.

You see, these politicians betrayed their real motives in this debate. They made it crystal clear that they are not, in fact, conservatives or moderates or centrists or even capitalists. They are corporatists. They look out for the interests of the corporations that pay them above all else. Capitalists believe in competition. They believe it lowers costs and gives consumers better choices.

So, I would ask the media to please stop calling these politicians conservatives or even capitalists. And could you please look out for the rather obvious fact that they might not be working for us but for the people who pay them?

Of course, the media outlets might be able to better recognize this if large corporations didn't also own them. But that probably wouldn't affect their judgment either, would it?

~Cenk Uygur

Pining for the Fjords

"To allow private insurance companies to let private profit maximizing decisions get in between a patient and a doctor is close to unethical for us."


A Real Socialist State

As a Norwegian, looking at the U.S. health care debate from the outside, I cannot help but laugh sometimes. It seems like the word “socialism” has become a swear word. In Norway, we just re-elected a “socialist” government. That does not mean that we live in a communist state. We have full-fledged capitalism over here, and we are just about the richest country in the world, per capita. But we have chosen to let the state supply world class health care to all inhabitants.

To allow private insurance companies to let private profit maximizing decisions get in between a patient and a doctor is close to unethical for us. In Norway, you get the same care no matter if you are a homeless drunk or the C.E.O. of one of the biggest companies. And that’s how it should be. They say that the measure of a country’s success lies in how it treats its most unfortunate citizens.

— Gjert Myrestrand

Snake's Navel

I used to know a carnival man turned preacher who said the key to his success was understanding the people of what he called Snake's Navel, Arkansas. He said in Snake's Navel, the biggest thing going on Saturday night was the Dairy Queen. He said you could get the people there to do damn near anything --pollute their own water, work at five-dollar-an-hour jobs, drive fifty miles to a health clinic-- as long as you packaged it right. That meant you gave them a light show and faith healings and blow-down-the-walls gospel music with a whole row of American flags across the stage. He said what they liked best, though --what really got them to pissing all over themselves-- was to be told it was other people going to hell and not them. He said people in Snake's Navel wasn't real fond of homosexuals and Arabs and Hollywood Jews, although he didn't use them kinds of terms in his sermons.

~James Lee Burke