Happy Constitution Day!

Recently, a friend on Open Salon asked how I managed to keep reading and writing about politics, when the last few months have been so full of disappointment and frustration. Part of my answer was simple dorkness:

I’ve been reading a lot about the American revolution — right now I’m working on an Alexander Hamilton biography — and everything about that time reminds me that everything we’re looking at now, all of the ugliness, all of the craziness — it was ten times worse back then, and the country was much shakier at the time, too. I mean, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both took over newspapers to essentially slander each other’s characters, Alexander Hamilton was killed by a former vice president in a duel, and now we remember them as wise heroes of a kinder age. And they fought all their battles when the country could’ve easily broken apart around them. So I spend some time telling myself, OK, things suck, people are getting crazy and illogical, but — at the end of this, even if things go as badly as they possibly could, we’ll still have the status quo, which is a functioning government, regular elections, and continued chances to change things every time we go to the polls.

I’ve kept thinking about this as time has gone on and as I’ve read more about the early years of the Revolution. Unlike now, every one of those early patriots had to go to bed with the fear that he would wake not to another day of controversy in America, but to a new day of no country at all. Anarchy and chaos were real possibilities. No matter how terrible things get — and yes, they’ve been pretty terrible of late — I have never gone to sleep thinking that, perhaps, tomorrow, there will be no more United States.

Maybe that’s terrible optimism. Governments rise and fall all the time in the world, in countries small and large, and people survive. I’d like to think that I’m not so blindly tied to my nationality that I could survive in a world without America, where an American identity was meaningless — but I’m not sure it’s true.

Thus today is of special import for me. It’s Constitution Day. Two hundred and twenty-two years ago, on September 17, 1787, the new Constitution of the United States of America was adopted by the Constitutional Convention, signed by the 39 delegates, and sent out to the states for ratification. The National Archives, where the original text still lives, headlines it as “a model of cooperative statesmanship and the art of compromise,” and that has continued to be true throughout its history. We may not agree upon its meaning, always, or its deployment, but Americans almost to a person seem to agree upon its value. Our stability as a country — and we are a shockingly stable union — rests most firmly upon the survival of this document.

That’s not to say that the Constitution is a stony, implacable thing. In fact, even its adoption didn’t really mark its birth.  It would take another three years before the Bill of Rights were added, in 1791, and it’s been amended another 17 times since then. Even now, there are several proposals for amendment before Congress. Sure, it’s been used for good and for ill, to justify moments of greatness and horrible errors, but it’s still there, binding us to a common set of purposes. Is it outdated? Moldy in language and, certainly, in its descriptions of who should be a citizen? Absolutely. But what do you expect from the oldest written national constitution in the world? Perfection? No — never in our Constitution. It is a document notable for its mistakes, but also for its ability to rise above them, to amend its own content without changing its real purpose. It is a truly American thing.

So — go forth and celebrate like it’s 1787. Lift an ale (Sam Adams, anyone?), try the Which Founding Father Are You? quiz (I’m James Madison), take a stroll about your free and enduring country, and meditate on the meaning of the document still holding us together:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

On Health Care, Now It’s Up to Us

The hardest argument the Obama administration has to make, and the one that I feel the president is still not making to the best effect, is that things must change. It’s evident to the 40 million uninsured Americans that we need a fix, and it’s evident to anyone who’s been dropped from their health insurance, denied coverage because of a preexisting condition, or reached that ever-dreaded cap and had to start paying out of pocket to survive. It’s also evident to anyone who’s studied national bankruptcy statistics or a breakdown of our national debt.

That’s still not a majority of Americans.

What we don’t talk about that often is that there are still over 100,000,000 Americans who are pretty happy with how things are. These are people who feel no personal urgency to get better health insurance coverage passed. They were the crowd the president started speaking to this evening, and they are the crowd that Republicans and those against a public option have been pursuing from the start.

That’s why the way this debate is framed is so crucial. We can tell all the stories we like about people dying and suffering because of insufficient health care — but it’s easier for someone who has health care to believe that those stories are exceptions than it is to believe they’re the rule. To accept that these stories are true and that they really can happen to anyone, you have to accept that bad health and bad fortune can happen to you.

Most of us have a lot of difficulty accepting that until it happens to us or to someone close to us. Young, healthy Americans will struggle with this. Americans who still say, “my dad ate bacon every morning and never saw a doctor in his life, and he lived to be 90” will struggle with this. Americans fortunate enough to have certain employment or personal wealth will struggle with this. Yet every one of those groups is in danger of facing a sudden reversal of fortune — one catastrophic car crash, one debilitating stroke, one fight with unpreventable cancer, and your mind will change.

Short of 3-D horror films, what will overcome this adherence to the status quo? Two things: first, honesty from our political leaders about what their plans aim to do and what they cost. I hope the President was serious about calling people out when they misrepresent his plan; I hope the media will also dig in and call out both sides when they exaggerate. If those who like the status quo are convinced that they can basically keep it — that they can have “status quo plus,” — they will be less likely to be frightened, and more likely to be supportive.

Second, in the same way that a person’s mind is most likely to be changed about the wisdom of gay marriage when they know someone who’s gay, a person’s mind is most likely to be changed when they know someone who has faced physical or financial ruin because of a health problem. This is one time when anecdotes are helpful.

I think there’s a lack of open discussion about health problems in America. Sure, older Americans might make their daily aches, pains, and medications the centerpiece of their lunch chatter, but it’s pretty rare for younger Americans to talk with their friends about these things. Yet if you know someone who’s having her life turned upside down by unpaid medical bills, you’re more likely to start wondering seriously whether that could ever happen to you. If you have a friend at work who isn’t on the offered plan because her pre-existing condition — something as insidious as, say, pregnancy — didn’t allow her to enroll, wouldn’t you be tempted to check and see what, exactly, you’re covered for? And if you made that investigation — wouldn’t you (like many, many, many Americans) be very likely to find out how vulnerable you are?

I say, for the next month or so, the personal story is the best weapon. If you have a story, tell it — tell it here, tell it at the watercooler, tell it at your family reunion, your church picnic, your book group. More than speeches and town halls, I think from here out, stories can be what will save us.

Election 2009: New Jersey’s Got Somethin’ For Ya

Just when you thought it was safe to go outside again, there are elections looming.  Not just the 2010 elections that are suddenly being chattered about: actual elections, coming up in November.  Both New Jersey and Virginia hold their gubernatorial elections in “off” years, and if ever there was an off year — here we are.  (There’s also an election coming up in the Northern Mariana Islands — who wants to volunteer to do some on-site reporting with me?)

For those who don’t live with the New York Times constantly imprinted on their eyeballs, I thought I’d do a quick run-down of who’s who and what’s what in these two races, starting with New Jersey this Tuesday and moving to Virginia next Tuesday, with a promise to revisit, at least briefly, each week until these contests get decided.

So: On to the Garden State!

In New Jersey, weighing in at an estimated personal net worth of $300 million dollars (in 2005 money), we have current governor Jon Corzine facing off against Republican challenger Christopher J. Christie¹, a former U.S. Attorney under  Corzine is pretty unpopular in New Jersey right now, where hard times have forced, well, hard budgeting. 

The seminal quick-read piece on Corzine is New York Magazine’s 2005 profile, “The Deal He Made,” which describes Corzine both as one of the most liberal, idealistic members of the Senate, when he was there, and as a guy who’s learned fast and well about the dirty realities of New Jersey politics.  In his first term as governor, Corzine has had to deal with a budget deficit that forced him to cut 3,000 state jobs, raise taxes on the wealthiest Jerseyites, and institute a sales tax increase (and a government shutdown in 2006).  Imagine how popular you’d be in New Jersey if you’d cut that many state jobs (and therefore, state services).  Now imagine you’re also the guy who once proposed dramatic increases of toll-road fees, and you’ll have the dismal re-election prospects of Jon Corzine pretty well pictured.  He currently trails Christie by 10 percent (47-37) in a Quinnipiac poll.

New Jersey is supposed to be a pretty safely blue state, right?  Well, not if Chris Christie has his way.  Democrats have a strange, dirty history in NJ, and it’s finally time to clean house — at least, this is the former prosecutor’s platform.  He had a 130-0 win record for convictions against public officials, bolstering his credibility as a corruption fighter.  It doesn’t hurt that Corzine was in office during a very memorable sweep of corrupt officials — 44 people were charged in July, including “three New Jersey mayors, two state assemblymen and five rabbis.”  A member of Corzine’s staff had his home raided.  (I don’t hold Corzine responsible for the rabbis, but the others — keep an eye out, Jon, eh?).  Christie v. Corzine, in that context, starts to look like David vs. the guy who mugged David at gunpoint with a Saturday Night Special.

Christie defeated conservative Steven Lonegan in the primaries and has had a pretty easy road for a while, attacking an unpopular governor whose party is mired in corruption (just today, a former state senator received a 2-year prison sentence on corruption charges).  He is, however, a New Jersey politcian himself, and his résumé is not without the predictable black marks: as U.S. Attorney, Christie got into the habit of handing out monitoring jobs, which are amazingly lucrative, to friends and family.  Essentially, after a firm was convicted of corruption, someone had to be appointed to watch over the firm.  Christie frequently appointed his friends or political contributors, including such luminaries as John Ashcroft (heard of him?), who won a $52 million no-bid contract to monitor a medical prosthetics company under Christie’s watch.  Christie’s response has been pretty dumb: since the money is actually paid by these companies, not by the government, there’s no conflict, he says.  Sure.  Sounds like business as usual.

The news of the last few weeks has been about Mr. Christie’s apparently improper loan to a close aide.  The loan, which Marcy Wheeler argues was below market value and therefore counts as a gift, was given to Michele Brown, an assistant U.S. Attorney during and after Christie’s tenure.  The controversy about the loan is two-fold: first, Christie failed to report his interest payments on his taxes (which, since they totaled a couple hundred dollars a year, isn’t terribly sexy); second, he continued to receive payments from Ms. Brown even after leaving the office, establishing a financial tie between a candidate for governor and a woman in a leadership position in an office pursuing dozens of legal cases against state officials, including some in the current governor’s office.  Brown has resigned her position, and Christie has apologized.  So far, the controversy doesn’t seem to be taking much of a bite out of his lead, but expect Jon Corzine’s relentless campaign ad machine to make the most of it.

Where does that leave us?  Well, we’re two full months (oy! where’s my summer gone?) from Election Day, and Jon Corzine’s trailing.  Corruption is not the worst charge one can level at a New Jersery politician, so the recent Christie scandal may not do anything to narrow the gap.  Corzine’s big advantage — his ability to spend his way to the top — may not be as big as it used to be, since one assumes he’s been hit hard in the market over the last year or so.  Yet it seems implausible that a Republican will end up governing New Jersey, so — I expect a turn around, late this month.  I expect Corzine to hitch his star to a major proposal — maybe even to try and make the national health care debate a part of the story in New Jersey — and to have a surprisingly positive appearance at the gubernatorial debate in October.  He has the money to pay for coaches, after all.  Oh, and he’s got one more thing going for him:

A sitting president willing to join him on the campaign trail.

So that’s where we stand.  Tune in next week for a tour of Viriginia, which is for lovers and, in this race, a guy whose name always makes me think of “The Office.”

^{1 Question: Why do parents do this?  Chris Christie?  It’s not like he married into that name.  What happened, one of his parents turned to the other and said, “How about Michael?” and the other went, “Gee, I dunno, make it something easier to remember.”  See also: Dave Davies, John H. Johnson, and my high school principal, whose name I’ll withhold so my detention records never hit the big time.}

Palin’s Death Panels: Crazy, True Belief, or Watching Torchwood?

So.  I really meant to come back and comment further on the meaningful news of the day, but, well, death panel.

Death panel?  DEATH PANEL!  Really, Sarah Palin?  Here’s what she posted today on noted news site Facebook (emphasis added):

The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

^{“The Death Panel is coming!  Save me, Sarah Palin!”}

I have three theories about this.  The first is that Sarah Palin, with all of her copius free time of late, sat down and watched “Torchwood: Children of Earth” this week, as I did, but somehow missed the part where that’s all fiction.  I won’t post spoilers, but — if you’ve never seen any of Torchwood (and I hadn’t, prior to this five-hour mini-series), check it out from Netflix, then come back and let’s discuss.  (Seriously.  Message me.  I need to talk this one out.)

The second is that Sarah Palin truly believes this.  If that’s true, well, I’m glad she’s taking to the series of tubes, as they call the Internet in Alaska, to tell the world.  What troubles me is that she and thousands of her followers seem able only to forward messages like these to their closest associates, but are not able to direct these same energies toward searching out the veracity of the rumor itself.  For all of these people, and for those who love them despite getting their my-head-is-going-to-explode e-mails, I would like to introduce/remind you of two of the best inventions on the Internet: Let Me Google That For You and Snopes.  If you have crazy and/or conservative relatives, I cannot recommend bookmarking these two sites enough.  They provide quick, easy solutions to the problem of lack of thinking for oneself that seems to completely encapsulate the strategy of the GOP and their e-mail chains.

The last I’m stealing from someone else: “Maybe she’s just bat-shit crazy.”  Occum’s Razor does point me in this direction, because how far divorced from the reality of our current society must you be to believe that the current president is about to institute DEATH PANELS via a system designed to improve health care availability nationally.  Please, Mrs. Palin, point to a place on Earth with a government-managed health system where something like this has happened.  And if you’ve been using the BBC as your source, well, make sure it’s BBC News, not Drama, that you’re watching (and message me if you want to know the difference).

^{Run, kiddies!  Socialism is coming!}

Speed Bump: Supreme Court Puts Hold on Chrysler/Fiat Merger

It seems the marriage of Fiat and Chrysler has hit a speed bump (NYT):

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who handles emergency matters arising from the United States Appeals Court for the Second Circuit, issued a stay of the sale, preventing Chrysler and Fiat from completing the transaction immediately.

There’s a slim possibility this could become a serious roadblock to the merger, which was set to conclude at 4 p.m. today after the Second Circuit denied the stay and allowed the expedited path to merger to proceed.  Now, instead, there could be a delay of weeks, as Ginsburg and possibly the full Court decide what to do.

The arguments being made by the pension funds — the Indiana State Teachers’ Retirement Fund, the Indiana State Pension Trust, and the Indiana Major Moves Construction Fund — are pretty interesting and could have wide-ranging consequences, should Ginsburg choose to pass the issue up to the full Court.  The mostly likely argument to get them anywhere, as the Wall Street Journal’s law blog summarizes, is that they’ve had their constitutional rights violated by this deal, because junior creditors were privileged over senior lenders in Treasury’s deal.  The funds might have standing to argue that, but will need to prove existing, specific harm.

The trickier charge, and the one that makes me more uneasy, is this:

The United States Department of the Treasury (“Treasury”), purporting to  utilize powers conferred upon it by the Troubled Asset Relief Program (“TARP”) established under the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, 12 U.S.C. 5201 (“EESA”), will have been permitted to structure and finance the reorganization of Chrysler without any judicial review of its authority to do so (the Bankruptcy Court incorrectly disposed of the issues by deciding that Appellants lacked standing);

Full text of the Pensioners’ Application is here, in PDF.  I’m not uneasy because I think that’s a bad charge — rather, it certainly seems like it’s true.  TARP hasn’t undergone any significant judicial review, and it seems like, if challenged, the authority of Treasury and the Fed to intervene in rescuing companies like G.M. and Chrysler, particularly when their decisions have involved the kind of leverage that comes close to outright threats, could crumble.  Beyond that, my faith in the lawyers at Treasury in particular is pretty thin, so I’m not sure I believe that they drew this up in an unassailable way.

I don’t think the Constitution prohibits the government from intervening in business in the U.S.  But I can certainly see how the current methods, which have at times felt slap-dash, might be unraveled by the Court.  Is that for the better?  I don’t know.  I don’t completely buy anymore the argument that Chrysler needs to be turned around in 30 days to survive, though I do believe that its workers will suffer more and harder for each day that the merger is delayed.

I’m actually hoping Eric Holder will have to issue a statement about this.  In fact, I find myself suddenly wishing that Holder was part of that Auto Task Force surrounding the president last week.

Two U.S. Journalists Sentenced to 12 Years’ Hard Labor in North Korea

Euna Lee and Laura Ling, journalists working for the Current TV network, have been sentenced to 12 years of hard labor for allegedly crossing into North Korea’s territory while doing a story on human trafficking.  The trial has been going on since Thursday — but it’s also been news since the two women were detained in mid-March.

The great hope for the trial was that the women would receive stunning (but smaller than this) sentences, and then the sentences would be commuted in exchange for some act toward North Korea by either the U.S. or South Korea.  That the sentence is greater than expected (and having been handed down by the highest court, it can’t be appealed) doesn’t bode well.

The sentence was delivered the same day that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton mentioned the administration is considering interdicting North Korean air and sea shipments that could carry weapons.  The administration is also, apparently, considering placing North Korea back on the list of states who sponsor terror — the old Axis of Evil list, if you will.

Secretary Clinton who apparently sent a letter personally apologizing for the Lee and Ling’s possible border crossing and requesting the two women be released, also said today that the administration is working to keep the Lee/Ling issue separate from its own political work with North Korea, calling their detention an issue of “human rights,” not politics.  I agree that this should be separate from political actions, but it’s ridiculous to think that it can be.  These women are American journalists, working on a piece that would have doubtlessly cast North Korea in a dark (and deserved) light.  That their sentence came down — and that it was so harsh — at the same time the U.S. is considering harsher consequences for North Korea’s bad behavior must be part of the whole picture.

So it comes down to that movie-tested line: The United States of America does not negotiate with terrorists, or with kidnappers.  There are arguments that can be made that North Korea’s detention of Lee and Ling makes the government a sponsor of both.

Now we wait.  We wait to see if it’s true that the U.S. doesn’t negotiate.  We wait to see if this is in any way a ruse on North Korea’s part, an attempt to get more attention, an attempt to seem merciful if the women are let go, an attempt to scare other journalists away from its borders.  We wait, and we hope — which is precisely the position that is most frustrating in these situations, and precisely, I suppose, the position that a mature democracy has to take.

None of that helps these two women.  None of it helps their terrified families, none of it shortens the gut-wrenching sensation that must accompany a sentence of 12 years’ hard labor.  My thoughts are with them, and the many hundreds of journalists who risk similar fates every year to bring us valuable stories from the darkest reaches of the world.  Theirs is work that should be honored, and protected, worldwide.

Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Toxic Assets

The Legacy Loans program, a sizable chunk of the Geithner Plan, is dead, reports the New York Times.  The FDIC has “called off plans to start a $1 billion pilot program this month that was intended to help banks clean up their balance sheets.”

I’ve used my car before to explain this program, so maybe I can use it to explain the death.  In this scenario, the role of the Bad Bank is played by me; the Toxic Asset is my car; and Tim Geithner and Sheila Bair, Treasury Secretary and FDIC chair respectively, play themselves. 

^{By CatKaoe}

Remember, if you will, that in our last scenario, my accountant, Tim, had offered to partner with his friend Sheila to offer potential buyers of my car a pretty sweet deal: Sheila would loan 80 percent of the money to any potential buyer, and Tim would invest up to half of the remaining cost of the purchase, which meant someone could buy my car for about 10 percent of its auction price.  That would give me extra money to spend in the economy (hooray!).  It would also allow the dealer that bought my lemon the chance to fix it up and hold onto it until the market for bad cars goes back up.  Win-win, with the possibility of Tim and Sheila taking a big hit (taxpayer lose).

But what’s happened since this initial offer is that I, holder of the toxic car, have fallen back in love with it.  That burning oil smell — it’s the scent of nostalgia, of summers spent on hot tar highways.  The scratches and dents merely make the car more hip, like a worn pair of jeans.  I’m starting to think I could convert it to bio-diesel.  In short, I’m no longer willing to sell for anything less than the original $1,000 I thought it was worth.  I am not willing to put it up for auction, as Tim said I had to do.

Now, maybe I’m being honest about that.  Maybe I really do think the car’s gonna make it.  But maybe I don’t want to put the car up for auction because last month, I applied for a new apartment, and as part of my credit check I listed the car as an asset when I did that — an asset worth $1,000.  Now, I don’t want to put the car up for auction, because it will become clear pretty quickly that the car is only worth $700, and I could lose my apartment. 

Or maybe I don’t want to sell the car because I no longer need to sell it.  The market’s getting a little better, I’m feeling more flush, and I think I can afford to pay to maintain it until the time comes when it will be worth what I’m willing to sell it for.  It will be vintage soon, you know?

Now, Tim and Sheila — Tim in particular — have an interest in making sure I’m telling the truth about my motivation.  Because if I’m not selling because selling will make me look insolvent, well — that means I’m already insolvent.  If I’m not selling because I’m ready to spend, spend, spend anyway, then that means the market is improving, and the healing has begun (and quick, Tim says, let’s get some posters printed about that one, and make sure we send one to Paul Krugman).

Ezra Klein outlined both of these reasons as why the banks might not be willing to jump into the Geithner plan.  Kevin Drum at Mother Jones says it’s probably the insolvency problem, and that’s really, really bad, because it means that not only did the Geithner plan not solve the banks’ problems, but the banks are being allowed — and maybe, post-stress test, encouraged — to live on in denial that will eventually come back to bite us all.

To extend the metaphor: there exists a danger to the community if I continue to drive around a broken car while swearing that really, it’s fine.  Not only am I not spending as much as I could be, since I’m constantly worried about my toxic asset, but I might be actively making the whole community less safe by showing them that it’s cool to keep broken cars.

I think there’s also a third option, here.  Banks might be deluding themselves; they might be healthy enough to afford hanging onto their loans; and they might actually be afraid to deal with the government.  Several banks, post-stress test, raised a bunch of capital in advance of leaving TARP.  If they get re-entangled with the Geithner Plan now, they’ll also get pulled back into the shady land of government regulation over compensation.

In short: am I unwilling to sell the car because I still love it, because I still need it, or because you’re not the boss of me, Tim Geithner?

It could be all three (and none of these are particularly good reasons, really).  But whatever it is, I hope there’s a plan B.  I hope Tim and Sheila and Ben Bernanke have a better idea of what to do next than just what Sheila Bair said they’re going to do, which is wait and see if the PPIP might be needed later.  That’s only an OK plan if the assets don’t get worse — and I am not at all encouraged by our jobless rates, the rise in foreclosure and bankruptcy claims, and the continued need of companies with terrible mortgages on their books (yesterday GMAC got another $7.5 billion).

At some point, Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Toxic Assets.  Apparently the banks still want to keep the keys — but at some point, Tim, Sheila, or Ben might have to step up and say, no way, man.  The PPIP was the gentlest possible way of doing that, so I’m sorry to see it die.

^{By wireheadinc / CC license}

The New G.M.: A Green G.M.?

So, G.M. is going into bankruptcy, and the government’s going to own a big slice. Yep.  Please raise your hand if you’re surprised.  OK, seeing no hands up, let’s move on to what’s really interesting here: who exactly is going to be running G.M.

I think the answer lies in the video above.  No, not just in the president’s remarks, where he says that he won’t be making the decisions — in the people who are in attendance at the remarks.  Namely, in his auto task force.

So who are all these people standing with him?  Well, from left to right, I spot:

Christina Romer, Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers
Stephen Chu, Secretary of Energy
Hilda Solis, Secretary of Labor
Barack Obama — what’s that guy do?
Gary Locke, Secretary of Commerce
Ray LaHood, Secretary of Transportation and Natty Handkerchiefs
Peter Orszag, OMB Director

Next row:
Austan Goolsbee, member of the Council of Economic Advisers
Larry Summers, director of the National Economic Council
Carol Browner, assistant to the president for Energy and Climate Change
The Mayor from Spin City Jared Bernstein, Economic Adviser to VP Joe Biden

Back row:
Ron Bloom, senior adviser at Treasury
Gene Sperling, counselor to Geithner and member of the CEA
Ed Montgomery, Director of Recovery for Auto Communities and Workers
Steven Rattner, who I believe to be the Car Czar and possibly also the Worst Tie Picker in history

Not pictured: Tim Geithner, who’s in China, and about six other second-tier members of the auto task force, including the 31 year old that the New York Times seems to think is running this show, Brian Deese.  I guess there’s only so many people you can fit in the Grand Foyer.

Image means a lot in Washington.  Obama may be saying, today, that the government is going to keep its nose out of the new G.M., but we’re still a few months away from that new entity, and everyone standing behind him will have a say in what it looks like.

So what I’m most interested in here is that two people — Chu and Browner — are present from the energy/environment side.  The way the administration has tied the success of the automotive industry to the cause of the environment is kind of fascinating.  Chrysler is being pushed toward smaller, more eco-friendly models, and now it seems inevitable that G.M. will be pushed that way, too.  These people — this task force — is built to do exactly that.

In case you’re wondering, as I did, who President Bush brought out with him when he announced the auto bailout, here’s the answer:

Bush stood alone and couched his discussion of the loans in almost completely business terms.  He made no mention of the companies changing to fuel efficient models or of any goal to achieve energy independence, as Obama did in his speech.

I kind of like the new crowd.

VP vs. VP: Speak Up, Dick Cheney

^{By Simone.Brunozzi, via Flickr/CC license}

I love Al Gore.  I’ve spoken of this before.  I am almost irrationally attached to the man, and his 2000 loss was as crushing to me as… some great, crushing thing, like an anvil — no, like 50 anvils falling on your dreams of justice in the world, if you’d decided to store those dreams in a hollowed-out egg. 

But he’s currently making an argument, and being used as the basis for an argument, that I disagree with: he’s saying Dick Cheney should lay off because he laid off the Bush administration from 2000-2002. 

Wait wait wait.

First, to make that argument, you have to believe that it was valuable for Gore to lay off Bush for those first two years.  These were terrible years.  The election left the country divided (and half of us very, very hopeless).  Then came 9/11, which left us scared and hopeless, and vulnerable not just to external threats, but internal threats under the guise of protection.  The Patriot Act passed — and it took Gore three years to call for its repeal.

But throughout 2002, the Bush administration was planning — sometimes quite publicly — a war with Iraq.  And Gore was silent.  He was silent until September 23, 2002 — well after war planning had gone public.  (I assume that someone with Gore’s government contacts would or could have known more about the planning earlier than nearly anyone in the press).  Everyone hid behind a “we support the Commander in Chief” banner, probably partly from fear that to do differently would hand the GOP the chance to question their patriotism.  When Gore did speak out, his speech was factually quite fiery — but also of the typical, tepid Gore-ese, a dork-wonk’s paradise, but not the kind of rhetoric that was going to overcome the “you’re either with us or against us” line popular at the time.

 Six weeks later, the GOP took control of both parties of Congress.

How were we served by Al Gore’s silence?  Poorly.

So, then, let’s make the opposite argument.  I read Dick Cheney’s speech today [.pdf], and predictably, I disagreed with almost every word of it.  I would love to never hear anything from Dick Cheney again.  I’d love to see him retire peacefully to Wyoming, or Texas, or anywhere he wants, to fly fish and write scary letters to his grandchildren.  In fact, I’d be happy not to hear from him again until the day he’s called to testify before the Leahy Truth Commission.

But if he wants to talk — if he feels it’s necessary to talk, and to talk over the current president — then I think he should go for it.  I don’t think it’s particularly damaging to President Obama’s efforts for Dick Cheney to make the talk show rounds or speak at friendly think-tanks.  Obama has a much bigger platform to speak from — and, hey, he has a Vice President of his own that he could send out to meet Cheney on these shows.

What I really don’t understand is why the Obama administration isn’t using these opportunities to openly debate Cheney’s positions.  Send Joe Biden — or better yet, Hillary Clinton — to every think tank and talk show and radio station and newspaper reporter to whom Dick Cheney speaks with.  Make a standing offer that the administration will gladly answer any charges Cheney makes.  This guy is wrong, but ignoring him doesn’t prove that.  Wishing he would go away — or suggesting that he has a duty to do so — doesn’t prove it, either.  And since the media is clearly still willing to give him attention — the Washington Post, for instance, is letting him share the front page with President Obama at the moment — it seems like it’s time for the administration to step up and answer.

If Gore had made a similar tour in 2002, if he’d aired his complaints on TV, if he’d shown just how wrong the administration’s stances were on any number of issues, if he’d insisted he be heard… would we be where we are today?  If we’d had an open debate on whether the Iraq invasion was a good idea instead of long, obvious silence from the only party leader Democrats really had — what would America look like today?

Maybe it would be the same.  But maybe things would be better.  And if the Obama administation believes in what they’re doing, that they’re making the world safer, that they’re trying the right things, then they should welcome Dick Cheney’s criticism, because it can only make us stronger, as a country and a party.

Better Angel or Bushian Demon? Is Obama Another Bush?

I’ve left the detainee abuse photo scandal alone this week, because my basic rule of blogging has been if you don’t have anything new to say, don’t say anything at all.  I’ve now reached a limit, though, of how many posts I can read that are taking this presidential decision as a sign of the coming Obamapocalypse, where, apparently, the Better Angels that Obama appealed to in his speech in Chicago have, instead, turned to hidden conservative Demons, bent on hiding information from the public, concealing torture, supporting evil regimes, and generally being as Bushian as possible.

To everyone making that argument, I say: Knock it off.

At least ten times in the past week I’ve read declarations by liberal bloggers about how they’ve lost faith in the president, how they’ve been deeply disappointed, how they’re disillusioned by his conduct, because he’s turned out to be just like his predecessor.

Seriously?  It’s taken fewer than 120 days to forget how bad things were?  Is the GOP that slick?

Let me remind you:

Barack Obama is nothing like George W. Bush.  Nothing.  Argue this any way you want, but his 120 days so far have so widely diverged from what we’ve seen in the last eight years that it’s almost a new country.  Take the photo scandal: We have a president who, having seen these photos, says releasing them into the world would only enflame anti-American sentiment.  That, my friends, is a debatable point — but what it isn’t is an endorsement of what’s in the photos.  Instead, it’s an admission that what’s in the photos is terrible, horrible stuff — not just embarassing stuff, as seemed to be the position at times of the last administration, but stuff that would make other people want to kill Americans.

That’s a leap forward from the previous president’s position that everything we did in Iraq and Afghanistan made America safer.  Bush left office still smiling, still saying that Operation Iraqi Freedom had helped not just Iraq but America and the entire world to become a safer place.  Our new president — the guy some would like to brand “Bush-lite” — has a pretty firm grasp on how unsafe things are for Americans in the world.  He understands there’s a balance to be struck.  He seems to also understand, if the switch of military personnel in Afghanistan this week is any sign, that our two on-going wars may not be winnable in conventional terms.

Think back to those shocking days in 2004 when the photos from Abu Ghraib were first released.  Think back to the administration’s reaction.  Donald Rumsfeld eventually testified before Congress that he took “full responsibility” for the events at that prison… and then continued to serve in the same job for another two years, during which he was frequently congratulated and celebrated by the president for the good job he was doing.

This president asked for the resignation of a guy who missed an e-mail about a plane making a photo-shoot pass by the Statue of Liberty.

We have an administration that is committed to greater accountability.  We have a president who comes out and explains his decisions, who takes responsibility, who seems focused on not just results but on the nuances of world diplomatic opinion.

Every time someone starts down the “just like Bush” path, it minimizes the tangible harm that Bush and his administration did to our country, by suggesting that the differences of opinion we have over how Obama is treating the clean-up are of similar magnitude to the differences of opinion we had over the things George W. Bush decided were OK: invasion of other countries without cause; abuse of the environment; rampant restriction on personal liberty; and an almost isolationist stance with friends and enemies alike that reduced America’s influence diplomatically worldwide.

Barack Obama is nothing like George W. Bush, except that he must now deal with issues that George W. Bush left behind.  The left is likely to disagree with his tactics for dealing with these things, but to say that the clean-up crew is in any way as responsible or reprehensible as the parties who made the mess in the first place is despicable and damaging.  Is it the maid’s fault that you didn’t make your bed?

I’m not saying Obama is above criticism.  I think many of his early moves have been questionable, particularly in the area of civil liberties.  But I’m tired of seeing the debate continue without context.  You can’t say, like the New York Times did, that Obama is acting like George W. Bush if you’re accurately remembering Bush’s positions at all.  When the Bush administration pushed to limit civil liberties, they did it to protect themselves; so far, the arguments that the Obama administration has made in court and in public have seemed more focused on actual points of security.

Criticism of the president is welcome.  But comparison to Bush, though tempting, is so far undeserved.