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- I'm aware that it's not his style, but Barack Obama needs to move past the unity rhetoric and start playing some hardball politics. At a town hall in Ohio today, the president sounded a bit harsher and more defiant than usual but failed to specify what he feels Congress should do on health care, and failed to point out that Republicans are gleefully exploiting public anger for their own short-term gain. Nor do I believe the SOTU address next week will be the unveiling of a more, shall we say, partisan Barack Obama; giving the GOP the middle finger on national television is not quite his style.
- Word on the street is that Ben Bernanke's renomination to head the Fed is in jeopardy in light of the Democratic meltdown this week, with several members of the Senate Democratic caucus openly opposing him. There are a few dimensions to this development. One is that Bernanke has not been aggressive enough, and thus failing to give him a second term might actually be a good thing. Then again, there is no one with the right combination of experience, insider knowledge, and outsider's courage in existence, and thus Bernanke ought to stay. And finally, even if Obama found somebody suitable to take on Wall St. as a replacement, it's by no means certain that that person would be confirmed because confirming appointments in the Senate has become next to impossible.
- The Supreme Court's decision on Citizens United will spawn a wave of unintended consequences above and beyond disrupting local elections. The decision's proponents appear to have an extremely naive understanding of what motivates political actors. Are we really to believe that the only consequence of this decision is that the "marketplace of ideas" will expand, allowing equally well-informed, rational self-interested citizens to make even more well-informed, rational self-interested decisions? From John Roberts on down to the broader libertarian movement, the answer, apparently, is yes.
- Even though Democrats are melting in a pool of their own cowardice, the Republican brand isn't doing well either, suggesting pretty clearly that Americans are looking for something else. And so I ask again: what happens in a national midterm election when the party in power is seen as a group of pathetic losers, the Republicans are cash-strapped and loathed by the electorate, and tea partiers are turning widespread anger into a quasi-third party movement? Yeah, I don't know either.
- Remainders: This is precisely why chasing the dragon of bipartisanship is so ill-advised; Michael Bérubé engages in some lengthy satire; it's symbolic of the week that Air America is off the air for good; in my experience, people who claim to be "history buffs" know next to nothing about history, even less about historiography; conservatives are obsessed with their own brand of shallow identity politics; and are we to conclude that the GOP's use of false census mailers is an expression of their contempt for the United States Constitution?
--Mori Dinauer
