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Mon, August 5 | Tues, August 6 | Wed, August 7 | Thurs, August 8 | Fri, August 9 | Sat, August 10 | Sun, August 11
(For more info on "Tapped," our permanent link, or to e-mail us, click here.)
Friday, August 9 Our friend Oliver Griswold, a frequent correspondent to Tapped, has launched his own blog. We wish him the best of luck and encourage you all to visit.
On a side note, visiting LiquidList (his site) reminded us of some friendly advice we wanted to offer on blog design. Many bloggers, including some of our favorites, choose to use "reverse" colors; that is, a dark background with light letters instead of the reverse. (They include Demosthenes and Matthew Yglesias.) Tapped is sure we are not alone when we say we find this format visually irritating even when the content is intellectually stimulating. Our suggestion: Flip your colors, or offer an option to view in the negative the
way Andrew Sullivan does. Please! Eye exams cost money! [posted 4:15 pm]
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INVESTORS BILL OF WRONG? A little bird points out an obvious problem with framing corporate corruption as "investor's rights": only some 60 percent of voters are investors. Framing it as an investors' issue limits the appeal. The New Republic's editorial on this general matter is pretty convincing:
Consider the reforms the Democrats have pushed in the wake of this summer's corporate scandals. The party has pushed for independent oversight of accounting firms, upped the penalties for CEOs who mislead investors, and tried to ban corporations from moving offshore to avoid taxes. These aren't efforts to destroy capitalism; they're efforts to make it work -- not only for millions of individual and institutional investors but also for the many companies that adhere to sound, honest business principles and have to compete with those that don't.[posted 3:00 pm]Far from demonizing corporate America, Democrats have been at pains to make exactly this point. As House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt put it in his speech at the DLC conference, "[M]ost American businesses, and most American businesspeople, are responsible and do run good businesses and do recognize opportunity and responsibility and community." Or as Gore reiterated in his recent New York Times op-ed: "`[W]hen powerful interests try to take advantage of the American people, it's often other businesses that are hurt in the process' -- most of all, smaller companies that play by the rules." This is the kind of balanced, reformist populism the Democrats need more of, not less. It's in their best tradition, and it might just win them back Congress, too.
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AT LEAST HE'S HONEST. "It's purely political, purely P.R." That's economic wonk Bruce Bartlett's take on Bush's upcoming "economic summit." (Via The Note.) Below we partly disparaged the summit as payback for Bush contributors, since the invitees do include some whose generosity to Bush is beyond question. But maybe that's that's not quite fair. After all, what kind of payback is it to drag a bunch of rich guys in suits to Waco, Texas in the middle of August?
Another possible theory is that the Bushies are conducting a loyalty test. After all, any top exec who's willing to put everything on hold to partake in this meaningless exercise in White House spin, which will produce nothing of substance and which will be mercilessly mocked by the national media, is a loyal Bushie indeed. [posted 2:45 pm]
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ISN'T THAT A LITTLE LATE? The White House has ordered up a new statewide poll in California to determine if Bill Simon's candidacy is "still viable," according to a staffer quoted in The Washington Times. [posted 2:25 pm]
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TERM LIMITS FOR JUDGES. Law gurus Akhil Reed Amar and Stephen Calabresi -- one a liberal, the other a conservative -- suggest a model for voluntary term limits for Supreme Court judges. It's well worth reading. [posted 2:15 pm]
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TWO GREAT ARTICLES IN SALON. One is Josh Marshall's insidery account of the war between the Pentagon's civilians and the brass. The joke is that the latter expected the Bush folks to be up their alley; instead, their relations with the White House are worse than under Clinton. Marshall makes the important point that civilians are supposed to prevent the brass from settling into a rut by forcing them to evolve -- in terms of strategy, equipment, aims -- in ways that they tend not to do on their own. But what happens when the civilians are ideologues of their own sort?
Anthony York also has a nice piece on Thomas Dorr, the Bush crony snuck past the Senate with a recess appointment this week. [posted 2:10 pm]
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THIS COULD GET UGLY. Congressman Jim Moran, the Democrat who represents Northern Virginia, may find himself under investigation for co-sponsoring the House bankruptcy reform legislation soon after receiving a huge personal loan from credit card giant MBNA. (Based in Delware, the worst state ever.) Sweet deal that loan. Sweetier still is the fact that Moran was apparently treated with all due deference when he had some financial setbacks that necessitated it. Too bad that under the legislation he champions, ordinary folks won't get the same treatment.
That Moran is in deep doody is entirely his own fault. But we still have to point out that the involvement of the National Legal and Policy Center, a conservative legal group that spends its time harassing Democrats
and unions, makes us a little sympathetic. To get a sense of what a joke this organization is, you only have to read this furiously spinning press release: "Plaintiff in Suit Against Hillary's Task Force Says There is No Comparison With Cheney Energy Task Force: NLPC Successfully Sued Hillary in 1993." [posted 2:00 pm]
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NOT JUST HUFFING. Tapped really enjoys Arianna Huffington's punditry. Irreverent and funny -- as only one who has turned on her own kind can be -- she calls it like she sees it. And this current column is a real beaut. [posted 9:45 am]
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WON'T GET FOOLED AGAIN. Tapped doesn't think that the public is going to be taken in by President Bush's latest corporate accountability PR gimmick -- the convening of an "economic summit." Nice reporting this morning by Mike Allen of The Washington Post reveals that some of Bush big financial backers will be there offering advice along with the requisite window dressing of a few workers. If the Democrats are hosting an alternative state of the economy meeting, we haven't heard about it. [posted 8:45 am]
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Thursday, August 8
TAP's Harold Meyerson is worried about the integrity of the Oscar ballot counting process. And he's got good reason. To find out why, click here. [posted 5:20 pm]
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CELEBRATION TIME. Just when Tapped was getting all depressed about the state of campaign finance reform efforts, here comes some really good news. A 2-to-1 ruling by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit found that a 1997 Vermont law that mandated campaign spending caps is constitutional. The decision directly challenges prevailing wisdom and revisits the Supreme Court's 1976 decision, Buckley v. Valeo, that struck down mandatory Congressional campaign spending limits.
This is the first such federal appellate court ruling in nearly three decades. If upheld (and it could be appealed to the Second Circuit court as a whole and further to the Supreme Court) it opens the way to new reform efforts that can focus directly on limiting what can be spent on campaigns across the country. It also opens the door to a re-examination of the "money equals speech" paradigm that reform opponents have so trumpeted in their efforts to fight campaign finance reform.
Circuit Judge Chester J. Straub, writing for the majority, made a sweeping and dramatic statement: "Absent expenditure limitations, the fundraising practices in Vermont will continue to impair the accessibility which is essential to any democratic political system. The race for campaign funds has compelled public officials to give preferred access to contributors, selling their time in order to raise campaign funds." Wow. We never thought we'd hear that from a judge!
The decision sent shudders down the spines of protectors of the status quo. According to the Washington Post, James Bopp, general counsel to the James Madison Center for Free Speech, said "It's the most unprecedented assault on core First Amendment values of any decision I know of ... If a candidate can't spend what he can lawfully raise to advocate his own election, we have no freedom in elections other than what the government gives us."
But Bonnie Tenneriello, an attorney with the National Voting Rights Institute which is helping to defend the Vermont law, said, "This ruling changes the landscape for elections across this country. More than 25 years of experience demonstrates that campaign spending limits are constitutionally justified." Take that, Mr. Bopp. [posted 5:00 pm]
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MORE ON MOORE. Immigration ultrawonk Paul Donnelly sends us another example of Moore's problems with arithmetic. Not only can he not count; he can't tell a subsidy from a tax. [posted 3:15 pm]
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MORE ON KRUGMAN, KAUS, ETC. Spinsanity nails Bob Novak for defending the OMB. Josh Marshall comments here. [posted 3:10 pm]
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BRING ON THE STEREOTYPES. Texas governor Rick Perry has unveiled an ad that is almost sure to cost him the election. It accuses Democratic challenger Tony Sanchez of being unfit to govern because drug dealers used his savings and loan to launder money. Forget the fact that it just isn't true. Many Hispanics in Texas view Sanchez as a likely possibility to be the first Texas governor of Mexican descent. Think they'll take kindly to Perry's casting Sanchez as a friend of drug dealers? Seems ham-handed to us. [posted 2:55 pm]
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IT ONLY GETS WORSE. The Wall Street Journal today has some worrisome news on civil liberties (registration required). Not only is the Bush administration refusing to agree to a federal court's order to turn over information on Yaser Hamdi. They're also trying to get his public defender removed from the case! They also have stated flat-out that they chose to imprison the U.S. citizens in brigs in South Carolina in part because they fall under the jurisdiction of conservative courts hoped to be sympathetic to the administration -- and are trying to get the Jose Padilla case transferred to Charleston, S.C. for the same reason.
Tapped doesn't have a ton of sympathy for these guys. And we know that this is a new kind of war that requires new thinking on criminal justice. But what it doesn't need is for that thinking to be formulated in secret by the White House and handed down by fiat. This is a matter for the legislative process to decide. Not a secretive, imperial, arrogant presidential administration. [posted 2:45 pm]
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CORZINE, ETC. Minuteman responds here. He asks what the specific allegations against Bill Simon, the GOP candidate for governor in California, were that made it incumbent on him to release his tax returns. The specific allegation was this: Gray Davis claimed Simon wasn't paying his fair share of taxes. Sure, it's kind of a cheap ploy, but Davis did release his tax returns, and it was a specific allegation. Minuteman's rhetorical question is beside the point, so we won't answer it; from now on, as a senator, Corzine is bound by the Senate's disclosure laws, same as every other senator. Ooh, one more thing: To say the Harken case was "closed" and isn't worth the media attention it's been getting is highly misleading. It ended with no formal action taken against George W. Bush, but the final report (written by a guy whose boss at the SEC was a former lawyer for Dubya and a pal of Bush the elder) specifically stated that it should not be considered an exoneration.
But let's not distract ourselves from the original question, which is whether it's incumbent on Jon Corzine to release his tax returns just because he wants to pass a bill preventing preventing accounting companies from selling investment services to their audit clients. The answer is still: No. However, in the interest of fairness, we must disclose that Noam Scheiber of The New Republic has gently guided us towards his article on Corzine's, er, many apparent conflicts of interest -- although none, we note, having to do with accounting double-dipping.
Having now descended into blogger self-parody, we will write of this topic no more. [posted 12:30 pm]
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FACT-CHECK STEPHEN MOORE! Courtesy of reader A.Y. Last week on Crossfire, Stephen Moore -- that dour guy from Cato who Jonathan Chait keeps whuppin' in The New Republic (well, not for awhile now...Chait, do your thing! He still can't do arithmetic!) -- said this:
MOORE: "Do you think Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Payne [sic] were being unpatriotic when they dumped the tea into Boston Harbor because they didn't want to pay excessive taxes?"
The Boston Tea Party was on December 16th, 1773. Tom Paine arrived in America on November 30th, 1774. They didn't have the Concorde then, either. And Thomas Jefferson did not participate in the Boston Tea Party.
Finally, A.Y. also says Moore gets the history wrong:
[It was] a kind of anti-dumping boycott/protest against the British East India Company who intended to monopolize the tea market in the colonies by underselling and bypassing many colonial merchants for the sole benefit of the financially stuggling British company. EIC arguing of course, that this cheap tea dump on behalf of themselves would all be a jolly-good thing for the colonial consumer.
Further Googling on our part revealed that, in fact, the Tea Act -- which precipitated the Boston Tea Party -- did not impose any new taxes on tea.
So there. Yep, it's mailbag day at Tapped. [posted 12:20 pm]
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A NATIONAL STRATEGY FOR THE DEMS? The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee recently unveiled their new website...www.investorsbillofrights.com. Ta-da! Sounds like Jim Grossfeld, who recently contacted us about this, might have been working on this effort and wanted to stir up a little pro bono P.R. Was Tapped spun???? Some substantive comments: You'll note that "investor's rights" is a theme both the New Dems and liberal Dems can get behind, whereas the former were a little wary of "corporate accountability." [posted 12:10 pm]
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THANKS, HOWIE! The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz was nice enough to include some of our posts on the Gore/Lieberman dustup in his online column. Here's the link. [posted 12:00 pm]
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Wednesday, August 7
Tapped just had an interesting exchange with Washington, D.C. communications consultant Jim Grossfeld, who suggests that it's high time that Democrats put forward an "Investor's Bill of Rights." Grossfeld, a former staffer for ex-House Democratic Whip David Bonior and Clinton HHS Secretary Donna Shalala, worries that right now the talking points many Dems are using make them sound like they're speaking to an accountant's convention. "Millions of working families and retirees have just been robbed of their dreams. If there was ever a time for Democrats to talk about standing up and fighting back this is it," Grossfeld told us. "Talking about corporate accountability isn't bad, but being the party of investor's rights is better." Hmm. We're all about the Dems getting fired up, bashing chests, etcetera. We like it. [posted 5:00 pm]
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MICKEY KAUS RESPONDS. Apparently, lots of other Kausfiles readers besides us wrote in asking what Paul Krugman's mistake was. Kaus posts his explanation here. We're still not convinced. How does Kaus know if the faulty numbers in an OMB press release were an honest mistake or not? We don't know for sure, either. But this administration has a pretty long record of using bogus or deceptive budget numbers. Just because Glenn Hubbard admitted the correct numbers in a July 17th congressional hearing doesn't mean OMB wasn't lying in the July 12th press release. Who knows? Maybe it's because lying to Congress is considerably more dangerous -- especially if you're under oath; was Hubbard? -- than lying in a press release.
P.S. Minuteman's suggestion to Kaus that Krugman should do a piece on Jon Corzine's tax returns is bogus. He describes Corzine "opining about corporate reform," but
references an article from nearly two months ago in which Corzine is talking about accounting reform -- specifically, a bill that forbids accounting firms from selling consulting services to their auditing clients. Corzine's
old company, Goldman Sachs, does not provide auditing services. So it would be impossible for Corzine to be earning profits (via his shares in Goldman Sachs) from the same kind of arrangement that he's trying to outlaw. On the other hand, if any reporter can find Corzine getting on his high horse about off-shore tax havens for rich people and such, whilst discovering that some of Corzine's own considerable personal wealth is stashed in the Caymans, that might be a good story. But you need a more specific charge to make the hypocrisy angle stick. You can't just blather vaguely about "corporate reform" and "tax and accounting schemes" and then demand
Corzine's tax returns. And since 97 senators voted for the Sarbanes bill, you should really be asking for a whole lotta tax returns... [posted 2:25 pm]
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GIVE'EM HELL, HOLLINGS. Democrat Fritz Hollings, reports The Hill's "Omens and Portents" newsletter (no link we're afraid), has sent a letter to Office of Management and Budget director Mitch Daniels "asking that the Bush Administration follow the same requirement recently imposed on CEOs of 947 companies and file a sworn statement attesting to the accuracy of the government's financial books."
Hollings pointed to the use of budget deficit numbers that are lower than the true deficit because they don't take into account government borrowing from Social Security and Medicare and other trust funds. "The government appears to be keeping multiple sets of books, the problem that did in Enron and other companies," Hollings wrote.
There is no doubt that the administration's wiggles on Social Security and the trust fund can be accurately described as Enron accounting. This should be a major talking point for the Dems. Every time a Dem goes on TV, they should be comparing the Bush's handling of Social Security to Enron accounting.
P.S. The Hill's Alex Bolton has another outstanding piece in today's edition on Congress's outrage over the Bush administration's refusal to share even
"routine and basic" information from the executive branch. [posted 2:00 pm]
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IS DICK MORRIS WORKING FOR GEORGE W. BUSH? How else to explain the president's decision to launch a White House conference on missing, exploited, and runaway children? It's a classic Morrisian micro-issue, one that people seem to care about but that is totally divorced from the day-to-day of partisan politics. There's just one big difference. Unlike, say, television violence, child abductions are not a real national problem. As Michelle Cottle pointed out when the Samantha Runnion case became national news, the only child abduction crisis is on television. Real child abductions have actually been shrinking steadily for some years.
So why did Bush get up in the Rose Garden this month and claim that "America's children and parents are also facing a wave of horrible violence from twisted criminals in our own communities"? Two possible explanations. One is that whereas Clinton, under Morris, looked for real local issues that could be readily addressed from the bully pulpit, this is just Karl Rove ginning up a faux crisis to distract American families from other crises -- like, say, the economic one. The other is that the president is running out of things to do, a fate the war on terrorism save him from last summer. His tax cut and education bill have passed; aside from that, his Social Security plan is in shambles, his energy bill is going nowhere, and he has no idea what do to in the Middle East. There's no there there. [posted 1:00 pm]
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KING GEORGE. You have to carefully read this Washington Post piece -- on the
Bush administration's refusal to accede to a judge's request that it provide information justifying the military's classification of Yaser Esam Hamdi, an
American citizen, as a combatant -- to really be chilled by the arrogance the Bushies display towards the constitutional separation of powers. It's scary. They just don't care. [posted 11:55 am]
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WHERE'S THE OUTRAGE? When the Clinton administration used a recess
appointment to put Bill Lann Lee, a man of impeccable credentials, in a top post at the Justice Department, the GOP howled. (They had blocked him
because they didn't agree with his interpretation of a certain civil rights law.) Now, the Bush administration has used a recess appointment to put Thomas Dorr in a top slot at the Agriculture Department -- even though he was found to have violated federal farm subsidy rules in the 1990s and has the support of only half the Republicans on the relevant Senate committee. [posted 11:45 am]
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THIS IS WHY THE WASHINGTON TIMES CAN BE SO LAME. You put a political hack, Tony Blankley, in charge of your editorial page, and what do you get? This lousy,
I'm-on-vacation-without-Nexis-Lexis-so-I-thought-up-this-column-while-taking-a-dump screed about...yep, Bill Clinton. [posted 11:30 am]
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FACT-CHECK KARL ROVE! Tapped reader A.H. contributes the following thoughts to our post on Ruy Teixeira and John Judis's New Republic story, "The Emerging Democratic Majority":
Right off the bat, in sentence number three, we are treated to a quote by Karl Rove which contains two glaring historical inaccuracies which the authors accept at face value. Rove is quoted saying "I look at this time as 1896, the time where we saw the rise of William McKinley and his vice president, Teddy Roosevelt," and "[t]hat was the last time we had a shift in political paradigm." The historical record shows that in 1896 Teddy Roosevelt was still the New York City Police Commissioner (McKinley's running mate in 1896 was Garret A. Hobart of New Jersey, who died in office in 1899, thus clearing the way for Roosevelt to join the ticket in 1900) -- it is a complete inaccuracy to put 1896, McKinley, and Roosevelt in the same sentence.
Now you know. [posted 10:20 am]
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FROM THE MAIL BAG. Also, many readers correctly identified the source of an earlier
post title ("The Didn't Like 'Dances With Wolves' Club"). That would be a classic cartoon from Gary Larson's The Far Side. [posted 10:20 am]
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THE CASE AGAINST JED BARTLET. You read it here first. [posted 9:45 am]
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Tuesday, August 6 In this week's issue of the New Yorker, Peter Boyer profiles Texas Democratic Senate candidate Ron Kirk. It's a good profile, revolving in large part around one of Kirk's central dilemmas: How to raise money from big-name out-of-state Democratic donors -- which is essential to his effort to beat Republican candidate John Cornyn -- without giving Texan Republicans too much room to attack him as being out of touch with Texas values. Tapped found the following bit especially interesting. Boyer is describing how Kirk was in New York City for a fundraiser featuring Bill Clinton:
[S]everal Texas newspaper reporters and television crews stood outside the restaurant with the dogs. There was also a one-man crew from Fox News. When Kirk reached them, the first question was the one he clearly expected: "Mr. Kirk, considering that Bill Clinton is radioactive in Texas, does it hurt you to be seen with Bill Clinton?"
Later in the piece, Boyer describes how he caught a glimpse of the Fox News cameraman's notepad:
Kirk stepped in to greet his guests, but the reporters were kept outside. The Fox News man's assignment sheet had the instruction "Ideal pix try to get Bill Clinton and Kirk in one frame."
It's pretty standard for a campaign to assign a staffer with a video camera to follow around the opposition, in the hopes of generating gaffes, bloopers, or seemingly compromising images (remember Hillary Clinton kissing
Suha Arafat on the cheek?) for later use in campaign ads. But it's very unusual to find a television network -- even so fair and balanced a one as Fox News -- doing it for them. Doesn't the GOP have its own people for
this kind of thing? [posted 5:00 pm]
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CUCKOO, MR. ROBINSON. Sadly, Jack E. Robinson, the onetime GOP "challenger" to Senator Ted Kennedy, now wants to run against Senator John Kerry. See this article for an explanation of just why Tapped finds this so funny. [posted 4:00 pm]
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LOCAL BLOG MAKES GOOD. Believe us when we tell you that spending hours combing through Ann Coulter's new book, Slander, wasn't the most rewarding way to spend the summer. Still, it looks like our hard work is paying off. Salon's Joe Conason reports that Coulter's editor, Doug Pepper at Crown Publishers, is considering publishing a correction in the next printing of one of Coulter's many shots at The New York Times. She claims they didn't report Dale Earnhardt's death on the front page until two days after the fact. Tapped isn't responsible for this particular fact-check, but we like to think we helped create an online culture that was conducive to critical examination of Coulter's many, many false statements. Especially about the Times.
Conason also points out what should be obvious to Tapped regulars: "This could be the beginning of a heavy workload for the Crown clean-up crew, assuming that they sincerely intend to amend Coulter's text to reflect facts rather than prejudices." If so, we'd be more than happy to pass the torch on to the editorial team at Crown. Our advice? Beware of the footnotes. [posted 3:40 pm]
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WE DON'T BAIL OUT FOREIGN COUNTRIES' ECONOMIES. That, too, is what Bush argued in 2000. But now Paul O'Neill is bailing out Uruguay. What's with this cabinet? [posted 3:15 pm]
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THE U.S. ARMY IS NOT A POLICE FORCE. That's what Bush argued in 2000, anyway. But now Donald Rumsfeld wants U.S. soldiers to be better trained at conducting manhunts. [posted 3:10 pm]
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THE REAL BUSH IS BACK. With the signing of the trade bill, Bush can lay down that ill-fitting good-cop uniform. Maybe he'll think nobody's noticed, signing that bill today when Congress was out of town, but fast track is the big bidness jackpot -- an enormous boost to corporate power and a blow to the authority of governments. (We could go on and on.) Anyone who thought the president had changed his mind about those people who attend his $1000-a-plate fundraisers should now think again. Consider: Fast track authority. A month at the ranch. Mornings on the fairways. Afternoons dreaming up a war in the Gulf. Bush is definitely back in his element. [posted 2:00 pm]
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DID KRUGMAN LIE? Mickey Kaus points up several supposed errors made by Paul Krugman. We're not familiar with all of them, but Kaus does seem to mischaracterize the one we are familiar with. He writes that Krugman "corrects -- under cover of renewed accusations -- the error in his column that's pointed out in this letter to the editor." Here's the link to the Times letter in question. The writer, a flack for the Office of Management and Budget, alleges that Krugman quoted an OMB press release that included mistaken information that was later retracted but that Krugman called a "lie". Kaus seems to think that Krugman then more or less conceded the error in this new column.
But he didn't! Instead, he pointed out -- with an assist from Spinsanity's Brendan Nyhan -- that the OMB didn't "retract" anything, because they never replaced the incorrect number with the correct number. (The correct number in question, which would have had to do with how much of the growing deficit was attributable to Bush's tax cut, would have made Bush look very bad indeed.) The OMB simply erased the lie -- er, the incorrect figure -- from the press release. So Krugman had nothing to retract, and retracted nothing.
Did we just spend ten minutes of our too-short lives participating in this not-extremely-important debate? Um, yes. Yes we did. [posted 1:45 pm]
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WHO YOU CALLING POPULIST? We didn't agree with Will Saletan's Al Gore piece in Slate much more than Josh Marshall did. Like Josh, we thought Saletan was oblivious to the question of whether Gore's op-ed did, in fact, accurately depict the terrain of American politics. (We think it did, in a broad but important sense.) And like Josh, we also suspect Saletan is a little too mired in Washington's neoliberal journalistic groupthink to understand the appeal of Gore's message -- or, for that matter, the enormous popularity Gore retains among the Democratic base, which will probably ensure that he once again wins the Democratic nomination should he choose to run. (Like it or not!) Finally, like Josh, we think blaming his election loss on "populism" is incredibly simplistic -- especially since, had the Supreme Court not thrust itself into the election decision, we wouldn't even be having this conversation.
There are a couple of other things, too. As we've said before, it's just a fallacy to accuse Gore of waging "class warfare." We're surprised that a smart guy like Saletan, who used to write a spin-dissecting Slate column called "Frame Game," would fall so hard for such ridiculous Republican spin. (In a previous life, we would have expected him to write a "Frame Game" on how "class warfare" charges are designed to cow Democrats into shying away from even the most mildly redistributional government programs.) We also think Saletan makes a selective reading of this post-election Stan Greenberg poll with his claim that
Buried in their survey report and separated by nine pages were a pair of findings that underscored the failure of Gore's business-bashing. Given a list of 15 reasons to vote for Gore, of which each respondent could choose three, 12 percent of respondents chose "his willingness to stand up to the HMOs, drug and oil companies." Meanwhile, given a list of 16 reasons to vote against Gore, 17 percent chose "his attacks on HMOs, drug and oil companies."
Well, 17 percent chose that as a reason. But when asked for reasons to vote for George W. Bush, the top answer, with nearly one-third of the electorate agreeing, was "Restoring honor and dignity to the White House." Our point? People had a lot of reasons for voting against Gore. But disgust at Bill Clinton was at least as important, and probably more important, than dislike of Gore's "populism."
Finally, Saletan, like a lot of people, thinks that a monkey could have won the 2000 election as a Democrat, given the record of prosperity and growth the Clinton administration left behind. In response to this, we'll leave you with one more number from that Greenberg poll. When asked whether "After eight years of the Clinton-Gore Administration, it's time for a change," or "With the nation at peace and the economy as strong as it is, we should continue with the Democrats in the White House," the electorate was actually evenly divided -- 48 percent to 48 percent. [posted 1:10 pm]
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WHEN THE GOP LOVES GOVERNMENT. This AP report on how federal spending shifted during the last few years as Republicans have dominated Congress offers a fascinating glimpse of how the GOP takes care of its own. The analysis shows that in 1995, an average Republican House district received $3.86 billion in federal dollars. By 2001, the spending jumped to $5.8 billion, more than a 50 percent increase.
This money is not being used to support "pork" projects but to support policies that work for people in these districts. So who loses out? Well, the people who need government help the most, but (presumably) live in Dem districts. They saw a slashing of housing subsidy and food stamp programs. Dick Armey is quoted in the story as saying, "To the victor goes the spoils," but we're more than a little worried about the folks out there who depend on government services. Most of all, though, this is pretty stunning proof that Republicans really only deplore government when it helps people who don't vote for them. Incidentally, check here if you want the details of how the study was done. [posted 10:05 am]
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NOT LIKE EVERYBODY ELSE. Did someone say we live in a democracy where everyone has equal access to lawmakers to make their case? If this Hill report on Congress's desire to give special access to lobbyists pans out, you can kiss that quaint notion goodbye. Seems a couple of lawmakers, including Senate Rules Committee chairman Chris Dodd, are in favor of granting special access to lawyer lobbyists. (A little payback for one of their largest contributors?) Call us hard-hearted, but we just don't feel sorry for American League of Lobbyists president Jim Albertine, who complains:
When a lobbyist goes to the zoo, he doesn't mind standing in line...But when we're working, and trying to represent the interests of the people that we are sent to represent, and we can't get from one side of the hill to the other ... then there needs to be a reconsideration of the issue.
Just get in line. [posted 9:50 am]
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Monday, August 5 In the latest Weekly Standard, Hayes, a Standard staff writer, accuses Democrat Joe Biden of politicizing the upcoming war on Iraq. "Words matter," huffs Hayes. He continues:
And the presumption behind Biden's question is clear: President Bush would consider committing troops to boost Republicans politically. Although Democrats on Capitol Hill had been whispering their concern that Bush might try to distract voters from his economic troubles by attacking Iraq, no one had dared raise this possibility aloud. Until Biden.
Well, not quite. In this July 12th column in the New York Post, leading conservative pundit John Podhoretz encourages Bush to use the war to distract Americans from economic concerns. Podhorez is not a Democrat. But doesn't that make it worse? After all, Biden was simply arguing, correctly, that the Bush administration should not cynically exploit the war for political advantage. Podhoretz is actually arguing that the Bush administration should exploit the war for political advantage:
Go on, Mr. President: Wag the dog.It would be good for the world, it would be good for America and it would be good politics as well.
You've made it clear for 10 months now that you want to rid the world of Saddam Hussein's rule in Iraq. It is vitally important that the rogue states seeking to blackmail the world by acquiring weapons of mass destruction be taught a dramatic lesson.
There are all kinds of signs that the military is actually ready to go, or close to it.
But conventional wisdom has said you'd wait until after the November elections to start the war. After all, how can members of Congress be expected to do any political campaigning with troops in foreign lands?
If the conventional wisdom is right, then the decision on when to go to war is already being made with domestic political considerations in mind. That's a practical, Machiavellian calculation.
So be even more Machiavellian, Mr. President.
Why would it be acceptable to delay a war to make it easy on Congress -- which is what you're planning on doing, according to the conventional wisdom -- but unacceptable to begin a war to make it easy on yourself and the Republican Party?
Podhoretz isn't just anybody. He's a co-founder of Hayes' own magazine and remains a contributing editor there. So we're left with three possibilities. One is that Hayes doesn't read Podhoretz's column, which we can certainly sympathize with but, in this instance, not condone. Another is that Hayes didn't do any real research before writing his screed (aside from calling, or taking a call from, a sympathetic administration official; see below). The third is that Hayes knew of Podhoretz's column but decided to ignore it in the interest of good Biden-bashing.
But that's not the worst part of Hayes' article. He lets an anonymous administration official bash Bill Clinton in the most self-serving way:
"It's a sad day when President Bush is held to a standard of irresponsibility that Bill Clinton set," says an administration official, suggesting that Clinton used airstrikes in Sudan to distract the country from his Monica Lewinsky ordeal in 1998. "Just because Clinton did it doesn't mean Bush would."
So let's get this straight. According to Hayes, it's wrong for Biden to suggest that Bush might wag the dog even when prominent conservatives are openly urging him to do so. But it's okay for an anonymous Bushie to accuse Clinton of wagging the dog when he has no evidence that Clinton actually did, and when the available evidence suggests that he didn't. (We now know that by 1998 the Clinton administration had a standing order to take out bin Laden, and that the failed cruise missile strikes were based on credible intelligence as to bin Laden's location.)
Hayes' final ignomy is this baloney quote from Ari Fleischer:
"The president has said all along that all options are on the table," says White House spokesman Ari Fleischer. "This is not the type of administration that runs around telling people about the timing of military action."
Please. Is there anything the Bush administration hasn't leaked about the timing of this particular military action? [posted 5:35 pm]
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YES AND NO, BUT MOSTLY YES. This letter to the editor to the New York Times today says that when it comes to the prescription drug debate last week,
The most important cause [for the failure to enact a reform] was the weakness of campaign finance reform enacted earlier this year. In spite of promises that the new law would free members of Congress from the influence of special interests, the health and pharmaceutical industry lobbyists can still be counted on to disable any effort at health care reform.
Um, Tapped gets the sense that the crew at the Times let this letter slip through and maybe shouldn't have. You see, the new campaign finance law hasn't actually hasn't kicked in yet, which makes it unlikely that that law had any appreciable effect on the recent prescription drugs debate.
Still, the spirit of the letter is hard to contradict. Once it does actually kick in, the new campaign finance law isn't going to stop the influence of political donations by the pharmaceutical companies or any other industry. To see why, click here. [posted 5:15 pm]
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SOMETIMES HE AIN'T SO BAD. We here at the Prospect have criticized Tom Friedman before, sometimes for his near-fanatical faith in free trade, but primarily for his occasional lapses into bigfoot access journalism. ("So I was chatting with my friend King Hussein...") But he's always been consistent and intellectually honest. So it's a special pleasure when we agree with him. This column -- on the Bush administration's refusal to support democracy and secularism in the Arab world when it doesn't suit their immediate strategic needs (in this case, we think, because it would interfere with plans to invade Iraq) -- is excellent. [posted 3:50 pm]
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BUT WHO WILL REPLACE HIM? Steve Rosenthal, ace political director of the AFL-CIO, is stepping down to become an outside consultant to the federation. Tapped thinks his stated reason -- "We've gotten very good at mobilizing union members to participate in elections and electing more pro-worker candidates," he tells the New York Times, "but we still have to improve dramatically on how we can create an environment so workers can organize" -- makes a lot of sense. Basically, in the past six years the unions have perfected the art of leveraging their small share of American voters into an influential share of the American electorate. But that share is still relatively small. The trick is to stop the continuing decline in union membership -- something AFL-CIO head honcho John Sweeney set out to do in 1995 but has so far not been successful at. Rosenthal is supposed to make it happen. [posted 2:55 pm]
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YEAH, RIGHT. The White House is disputing Michael Elliot's fair but devastating Time cover story on the Bush administration's inability to pick up the terrorism ball from the Clintonites. What's funny is, they don't present countervailing evidence. They just have some anonymous official bluster and deny everything.
Please let this become a little mini-controversy. Somebody, please make Ari Fleischer answer questions on the record about this. Because you know that if they stick with the spin, Fleischer's going to say something verifiably untrue. [posted 2:20 pm]
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THIS IS A WINNING CAMPAIGN THEME? Minnesota Republican Senate candidate Norm Coleman is hoping to get traction using the following slogan: "Paul Wellstone doesn't listen to business." Clearly that won't be a problem if Coleman gets elected. Money and politics aficionado Greg Gordon reports that the cash rolling into Coleman's coffers -- some $5.5 million thus far -- is mostly from corporate types and business PACs, and even includes money from Worldcom and Andersen (which Coleman later returned after getting nailed for it by the Wellstone campaign). The largest corporations in the state have all contributed to Coleman -- and to various committees that he and the Republican national and state parties have formed to funnel money around the edges of the law. We're shocked! (Okay, not really...) Most of Coleman's contributors have legislation of interest pending in Washington. [posted 1:10 pm]
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WHY GRIDLOCK? The latest Brookings Review has an excellent short article by Sarah Binder explaining why the U.S. Congress today is so unproductive. (Tapped is interested in this subject because we're working on a story that asks some of the same questions she does.) Some of Binder's data is fascinating. She debunks some of the conventional wisdom -- gridlock is not always inevitable, for instance, when a presidential election is near -- and sheds some light on the particular problem of our current political moment. One of her answers is that moderates make progress possible:
The number of moderates is important because it affects the ease with which policy compromise is reached. When the two major parties are polarized -- with few centrist legislators bridging the gap -- parties have little incentive to agree and every incentive to distinguish their records and positions.
But while Binder's explanation seems sensible, it also takes a neutral view of public opinion. The two parties may be ideologically very different. But because many Democratic proposals tend to have majority support across the board -- Social Security, prescription drugs -- Republicans spend a lot of time camoflaging their true ideological tilt while hoping to avoid producing substantive advance on those issues. It creates a very peculiar (but also very familiar) kind of gridlock -- one where everyone claims to be on the same page, but where no progress is actually ever made. [posted 12:50 pm]
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STICK TO CHESS, BUDDY. Every once in awhile, newspapers publish op-ed columns by random famous people with no discernible expertise on the topic being written about. The latest example is Garry Kasparov writing in the Wall Street Journal about why we must invade Iraq (registration required):
Baghdad remains the next stop but not the last. We must also have plans for Tehran and Damascus, not to mention Riyadh. The tactics will vary, but the goal -- total defeat of terrorism -- is clear. Once American ground troops are in Iraq, the message must go out to all terrorist sponsors that this game is up.
Well, that settles that. Gee, what were we thinking all this time?
Of course, at least Kasparov isn't as clueless as wonderkidiot Ben Shapiro. [posted 12:25 pm]
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I TOLD YOU SO. Al Gore's op-ed in Sunday's New York Times is the most important thing you'll read today. (Or yesterday.) Let's say a few things about the piece itself -- and then about how it's playing politically.
First, in Tapped's opinion, it's very hard to take issue with the substance of what Gore had to say. The truth is, everything Gore told voters about the Bush administration came true. "This struggle between the people and the powerful was at the heart of every major domestic issue of the 2000 campaign and is still the central dynamic of politics in 2002," Gore writes -- correctly. Granted, Gore's critics at the Democratic Leadership Council -- who were intimately involved with every aspect of the Gore campaign, and turned on him like snakes as soon as he conceded -- cavil over tone and gesture, saying that during the campaign Gore was too negative, too anti-business. But Gore now argues, as Tapped has argued, that his campaign was in no genuine sense "anti-business" or "class warfare." In other words: Just because the GOP spun it as such was no reason for Democrats to cave; the GOP spins every Democratic economic proposal as either anti-business or class warfare. In Tapped's humble opinion, there was little wrong with Gore's message; it was the messenger that voters had a problem with. Tapped has still never seen a satisfactory answer to the question of why Gore had his only poll lead over Bush during the week after his barnbusting, people v. powerful convention speech in Los Angeles.
But the most important thing to take away from Gore's op-ed, folks, is this: Gore thinks he was right the first t
