Archive for October, 2008
Quick warning for you all. This is a long post about Congress. If that doesn’t sound interesting to you, it is unlikely to get more interesting as you read on.
After Nov 4, we’re looking at around 60 senators and an 80 to 100 seat majority in the House. The makeup of each chamber is extremely important in determining what kind of proposals can even be attempted, and the devil is in not just the number of Dems, but what type of Dems they are.
Thus, it is helpful to view Congress through these two metrics; the total members a party has, and the number of strongly liberal or strongly conservative members in each party. The goal of hardcore partisans on either side is to elect enough moderates in semi-hostile districts to reach bulletproof majorities, and achieve a critical mass of heavy-hitters in friendlier districts/states. So lefty Dems want the Pelosis and Kennedys of the party crafting and hammering out legislation, and the more moderate members pushing it across the finish line, ideally with few revisions.
Toward those ends, 2008 looks to be a good year for Democrats, promising close to 10 freshman senators and 20 to 30 more seats in the House. They will likely add five strong progressives to the rolls in the upper chamber, and Republicans will lose about five fierce conservatives. That’s a big deal, when reelection rates in the senate are upwards of 80 percent and open seats are a rarity. For comparison, 2006 was also seen as a big deal, when a mere 6 seats went blue, and Dems added three strong progressives and Republicans lost three strong conservatives.
The biggest items on the agenda are going to be energy and health care reform, as well as economic stimulus legislation. Big deficits are bad things, but in times of financial crisis, you need deficit spending to prop up the economy. So the Dems have to get enough senators and representatives to realize that creating green energy jobs, making health care more affordable and offering mortgage relief actually boost the whole economy, and aren’t just do-gooder initiatives to be attempted when the weather’s fine.
This is not going to be easy. There will be close to the 60 Dems needed to prevent a filibuster, and that is a good thing. But I can’t stress this enough; not all senators are created equal. Landrieu, the two Nelsons, Baucus and Lieberman are all great examples of terrible senators. There are going to be a lot of lobbyists explaining to them what a terrible time this is for big spending on hugs for trees, and handouts for irresponsible borrowers.
And while I’m not weeping for any of the Republican losses, they’ve pretty much been whittled down to the uber-conservatives. The only likely cross-overs seem to be the two distinguished ladies from Maine and Arlen Specter from PA.
Now, there are some tricks Reid can employ to avoid always needing 60 votes. He could actually force the Republicans to filibuster, which he never does. He could attach health care reform to an appropriations bill that needs a simple majority to pass. Or he could have conservative Dems vote with their party for cloture to keep things moving, but then vote against the final version of a bill, when their vote isn’t needed for its passage.
But the bottom line is that Reid is much less effective than Pelosi at using that cane to reel in wayward sheep (and she has four times the sheep!). I think the most likely big agenda item to get the proper treatment is energy/climate change. I don’t see a health care reform bill passing without being significantly watered down, unless they hitch its star to one of those aforementioned simple majority spending bills. But as Yogi Berra says, that’s what we’ll play the season to find out.
October 28th, 2008
Ted Stevens was found guilty on all seven counts of corruption and lying today; a verdict which was by no means assured after prosecutors bungled the hell out of his case. During this trial, key evidence was stricken, jury members passed a note along saying that one juror was being violent during deliberations, and one juror had to be replaced by an alternate after a death in the family.
Stevens was running almost even in the polls with opponent Mark Begich, and it was widely believed that the verdict in this trial would decide the election. So now one of the two most anti-environmental senators (right along with Inhofe in Oklahoma) will be replaced in the senate by a man who is about as green as you can get and still be a viable candidate in Alaska.
Clearly, Stevens’ big mistake was neglecting to take the Sarah Palin route. That is, preemptively holding your own investigation of yourself and finding the defendant innocent and adorable. As a commenter on the Alaskan blog Mudflats noted, it’s a shame to see Stevens’ career go down the tubes. It’s going to be a good November, folks.
October 27th, 2008
An idol of mine, Paul Krugman, won the Nobel for economics today. As I’ve written before, he was one of the first people to point out the obvious but important mistakes Bush was making, and he also introduced me to alternative news sources that were picking up the slack for a truly pitiful mainstream media. Of course, he was awarded the Nobel for his theories on international trade, not his influence on Devin Castles.
I had a lot of other things I wanted to say, but I don’t have time to say them as well as I’d like. So you can read this by Krugman himself, or check out what others had to say about him. Too many public intellectuals became public intellectuals for the wrong reasons, so it’s nice to see that Krugman has gotten so much acclaim in recent years for branching out of his comfort zone in academia for the right reasons.
Politicians are often smart people, but that doesn’t mean they understand all aspects of policy, especially something as complicated as economic policy. You see a lot of dumb conventional wisdom floating around both at high levels in Washington, and in the rare instances where the punditry actually discusses the issues. We need more smart folks like Krugman, who attempt to spread knowledge to those outside of academia, and also refuse to mold their message to reinforce the things politicians and pundits want to hear.
October 13th, 2008
To hear some pundits tell it, millions of voters switched their allegiance to Ronald Reagan right after he uttered the words “There you go again.” These debates are important in part, simply because we say they are. As I’ve said, I don’t think they tell us much about any of the players and issues involved (I already knew Brokaw was a blowhard, already pretty sure I liked Obama’s health plan better than McCain’s, etc).
Some people mentioned the visual juxtaposition of a young, energetic candidate standing next to an old man. I thought it was even more disturbing to listen to to McCain’s labored breathing into the mic (Tony Soprano, anyone?), and he also sounded scatterbrained on a number of answers. Obama was pretty strong for the first few minutes — when the most people are watching — and they both seemed to get lost in uninteresting, meandering answers during the middle innings.
I still worry about all the Americans who think Obama is Muslim, or unpatriotic, or who just don’t want to vote for the black fella. I think the polls are likely to tighten before November. But I’m pretty sure he’s going to win, and he’s going to have close to a 60-seat majority in the senate as well.
With the markets in free-fall, home foreclosures continuing to cripple the economy, and more and more Americans fearing for their futures, a lot of other things just seem really unimportant. I think McCain and Palin are disrespectful and dishonest, but I only take that seriously because they are the second-most likely duo to waltz into the Oval Office in January. But McPalin isn’t really a serious ticket; it doesn’t discuss serious issues, and it doesn’t offer serious solutions.
What matters now is how forceful Obama and the Democrats are willing to be in taking the necessary measures to address the economic woes of the country and the world, and then working to create more efficient and sustainable ways of doing things. That is going to mean putting a lot of the cleanup cost for this on the backs of the rich. It’s going to mean offering real relief to a lot of home owners with unmanageable mortgages — because the economy is not going to recover without a less toxic housing market. It’s going to mean reforming health care so it isn’t nearly as big a drain on the average paycheck.
And it’s going to require serious investment in alternative energy, infrastructure rebuilding, job creation, effective regulations on financial institutions, and almost assuredly, it’s going to require temporary nationalization of the banks.
You may disagree with the solutions I propose, but most of you will probably agree with the diagnosis; we’re in deep shit. Even a more damning juxtaposition than McCain’s age and Obama’s youth, is McCain’s petulance and selfishness contrasted with the serious times we’re living in.
October 8th, 2008
Duh Bate Analysis:
I thought Gwen Ifill was pretty bad. She’s “fair and balanced”, but she just isn’t good at getting at the heart of an issue. This is a criticism I have of her show and her political coverage in general. A “Where’s the beef?” critique, if you will.
A lot of people called Hillary a bitch. Haven’t heard that word much in reference to Palin. But she’s pretty flippant about calling Biden a liar, calling Obama un-American and anti-troops and she makes some rather nasty, back-handed statements, ever-so thinly masked with this folksy veneer. Hillary could never get away with half of the shit Palin pulled tonight.
To boot, a lot of her answers sounded like the mildly awkward rephrasing of rehearsed talking points — yeah, I know, that’s what everyone does — with a lot of passive voice tossed in. No amazingly embarrassing gaffes, although I’m pretty sure General McClellan was a Civil War general (and a pretty bad one at that), and that General McKiernan is who Palin meant to refer to. And it’s clear she doesn’t know what the conservative position is even supposed to be on a number of issues.
I felt Biden’s answers varied from “meh” to better than I had expected.
I wanted to stab Palin with a moose antler a couple times, but a rather uneventful debate overall. If the Cubbies game had been close, I would have had a serious Sophie’s Choice on my hands. That is, if Sophie hadn’t been especially fond of either of her children. With Meryl Streep’s gift for understatement (like crying in every flipping movie she’s in), who can really tell what she thought of those buggers.
October 3rd, 2008