Pufferfish

Buy The Ticket, Take The Ride

Last week I attended an event at the White House. (Because that's how I roll.) When I called my dad to tell him about the ceremony and the experience, his first question was whether I had to produce my birth certificate before getting in. Why? Because Glenn Beck told him that even though Obama couldn't produced his own birth certificate, he was still forcing Real Americans to show their papers before getting into the White House:

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For those scoring at home, the answer to my dad's question was no. 

What If Political Reporters Provided Context?

I know. That sounds like a lot of work. But at least we wouldn't be inundated with variations of remedial MoDoism, when presidential mannerisms are viewed through the prism of an introductory philosophy class at Bunker Hill Community College:

Oddly, the good father who wrote so poignantly about growing up without a daddy scorns the paternal aspect of the presidency.

In the face of condensed triviality like this, I guess one could point out that getting the vapors because the president isn't, ignores that voters are getting what they wanted: a guy who stays calm in a crisis and doesn't suspend his campaign to go off in search of the ultimate pudding pop. But engaging the media for focusing on Obama's tone ignores the root cause of their impatience:

Chief among the criticisms of Obama was his response to the spill. Pundits argued that he needed to show more emotion. Their analysis, however, should be viewed in light of the economic pressures on the journalism industry combined with a 24-hour news environment and a lack of new information about the spill itself.

The press has become part of the oil spill coverage by projecting its bottom line onto Obama. The 24-hour news cycle compels the media to speak breathlessly, whether it's about a missing blonde teen or the unfolding pseudo scandal involving the de facto head of the Democratic Party attempting to influence Democratic primaries. Now it's oil.

This is the rare event that actually deserves provocative headlines, alarmist skepticism and Brian Williams knee deep in BP crude. But while the oil spill is a catastrophe it's also a very complicated problem in search of a solution. Left to do the obvious and explain to people the regulatory lapses or cost-saving measures used by BP to get us into this mess, the usual media suspects decided instead to fallback on their own cost-saving, corner-cutting measures: style without substance. And so Maureen Dowd and her cohorts are transfixed with Obama's unwillingness to exercise the powers of presidential awesomeness and become the protagonist their 24-hour narrative demands.  

Those Tar Balls Are Nothing More Than Freedom's Residue

BP engineers aren't the only folks working hard on the oil spill:

I think it’s actually right to say that the BP oil spill is something like Obama’s Katrina, but not in the sense in which most critics seem to mean it.

It’s like Katrina in that many people's attitudes regarding the response to it reveal completely unreasonable expectations of government. The fact is, accidents (not to mention storms) happen. We can work to prepare for them, we can have various preventive rules and measures in place. We can build the capacity for response and recovery in advance. But these things happen, and sometimes they happen on a scale that is just too great to be easily addressed. It is totally unreasonable to expect the government to be able to easily address them—and the kind of government that would be capable of that is not the kind of government that we should want.

Apparently not only can conservatism never be failed, but it's also perpetually self-serving.

The difficulty with trying to spin this into a Katrina-esque blunder—or a treatise on the shortcomings of a large, central government—is that not all disasters are made equal nor do they all fall under the purview of the federal government. A hurricane is the type of disaster that the federal government is specifically tasked with handling. And routinely does. Perhaps we should use this as a guidepost: You know the president is having a bad day when Sean Penn is one of the first responders to a national disaster.

Contrary to the Katrina-spin, what has become painfully obvious over the last month is that there is no federal agency trained in capping deep water oil blowouts. In a sop to conservatives, oil companies have been left to regulate themselves. And in the event something goes wrong, well, there remains a $75 million cap on what BP stands to lose. Our bizarro free market fetish of socialzing the loss and privatizing the gain is even more glaring when ecosystems and wildlife habitats are part of the loss.

But because the messenger matters, this is a missed opportunity for Republicans. Just take a look at Sarah Palin's Facebook page:

Listening to the President, you get the impression he is continually surprised by the inability of various centralized government agencies to get more involved and help solve problems. His lack of executive experience might explain this because he is apparently unaware that it’s his job as a chief executive to make sure they do their jobs and help solve problems.

It would seem Palin wants Obama to a) realize the federal government isn't reliable, while b) owning up to the fact that he lacks the management skill to make sure the government handles the crisis. In the parlance of our times, I'm left to respond: "lolwut?"

That Palin manages to extend her mismatch of political sloganeering ("freedom," "security," "buck passing") for 1,300 words while failing to provide any advice on how to solve the problem is the telling detail.

It's a wonder to read about disaster response protocols from a grifter who routinely peddles the idea that government is the enemy. Palin's incoherence is a testament to the Right's inability to capitalize on the country's anger. This isn't an emergency that falls neatly into the GOP's wheelhouse. Not when the environment is the victim, Big Oil is to blame and greater regulatory oversight an obvious response.

Communism Is In The Details

Substance-lite reporter files substance-free article hitting Obama for talking about substance:

Even by President Obama's loquacious standards, an answer he gave here on health care Friday was a doozy.

Toward the end of a question-and-answer session with workers at an advanced battery technology manufacturer, a woman named Doris stood to ask the president whether it was a "wise decision to add more taxes to us with the health care" package.

"We are overtaxed as it is," Doris said bluntly.

Obama started out feisty. "Well, let's talk about that, because this is an area where there's been just a whole lot of misinformation, and I'm going to have to work hard over the next several months to clean up a lot of the misapprehensions that people have," the president said.

He then spent the next 17 minutes and 12 seconds lulling the crowd into a daze.

* * *

Halfway through, an audience member on the riser yawned.

It makes me a bit misty-eyed for the days when question and answer sessions with the president were pre-arranged, sprinkled with a condescending tone and punctuated by tight fitting jeans undoubtedly packed with a presidential cod piece.

To recap: Kornblut's mind takes a siesta during a long, detailed and comprehensive answer involving health care reform and that, as it turns out, is the president's problem, a politician plagued by his inability to connect with folks on the campaign trail. Kornblut can't be bothered helping readers better understand reform. And she'll be damned if Obama's going to get a pass for doing her job.

To The Crooks, The Spoils

Matt Taibbi's take down of Rubinites in control Obama's economic agenda is getting tough criticism from the usual suspects, which serves as a great lesson on how to mount a political counter attack: first, attempt to discredit the journalist and his article, then shift blame. But from my reading of Taibbi's article and the fairly weak critiques from administration apologists it looks like they've failed to discredit a fairly obvious charge: That Obama is beholden to the people who bear direct responsibility for the financial crisis.

While defending his piece, Taibbi makes a couple crucial points that illustrate just how top-down the economic thinking is in this country:

We could have paid off every subprime mortgage in America for about $1.4 trillion and instead shelled out at least ten times that to Wall Street, primarily to pay off derivative bets made by bankers on those assets.

Most of the bailouts came in the form of very cheap money lent out to the same banks that caused the crisis, who then took that money and lent it out at market rates, pocketing the difference. That’s where all these billions in bonuses for the major banks are coming from this year. It’s almost impossible to not make mountains of money when your cost of capital is next to nothing because you’re borrowing your money from the government basically for free.

Sure, Bush is responsible for the bailouts and Tarp program, but the Obama team has done little to deviate from that course, with the choreographed anger over bonuses being little more than political theater.

The upshot of all of this is that the co-optation of regulatory reform by Wall Street is a crucial story that deserves more attention. And Taibbi--because he's a great writer who can break down a complicated story into an accessible article--delivers big time. My only issue stemming from Taibbi's article (besides calling Obama's actions a "sellout" when really he's not deviating from the norm) is with liberal bloggers intent on shifting blame onto the left's favorite bogeymen: Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman (please don't read this to mean those two aren't completely insufferable tools). Sure, those two centrist yahoos have enjoyed garnering plenty of Sunday morning talk show attention for rear-ending the White House's agenda. But this scarecrow building doesn't work with regulatory reform. Taibbi is talking about Obama's economic team. That team has been in office for 10 months and hasn't done a damn thing to address the most glaring problem this country faced when it took office. And the inaction isn't to assuage the moderate tendencies of Ben Nelson.

-- Update --

For more bomb throwing check out the work of Dylan Ratigan.

Nobel Stuff

 

While managing to piss everyone off with his Afghanistan move, Obama made everyone happy with his Nobel speech. Weird. Here's what peeps are saying:

Clive Crook:

He did not glide around the awkwardness of the occasion. He acknowledged it and dealt with it. He was straightforward and unembarrassed about his lack of achievements--no taint of false modesty in the way he expressed it. The award was a "call to action". A little more to my surprise, he confronted head on the oddity of the peace prize going to a leader who had just announced a major escalation of a war. Still more to my surprise, he dwelt on this at some length, putting his decision in the context of "just war" theory. He defended his approach more forthrightly than he had at West Point. A good part of the speech was a lecture on why wars still have to be fought. Not an obvious theme when you're accepting the Nobel peace prize.

Green footballs:

Yes, that’s right — he acknowledged that there is true evil in the world, and made a strong case for the United States as a defender of freedom. Not exactly the words of an America-hating commie traitor, are they?

Kevin Drum:

Given that he was, after all, accepting a peace prize, it was a surprisingly robust defense of war and America's military role in the world. Surprisingly Bushian, really, with one obvious caveat: among the many wars he mentioned as necessary and justified, there was one that was deliberately conspicuous by its absence: Iraq. So neocons have that to gripe about if they're in a griping mood.

James Fallows:

Those trademark elements include: The embrace of contradictions (in this case, a defense of war as a means to peace); the long view; the emphasis on institution-building; the concern about the distortion of religious and ethnic loyalties; and above all a consciousness that was once called Niebuhrian and at this rate will someday be "Obamian," which emphasizes the importance of steady steps forward in an inevitably flawed world.

Gawker:

Because George W. Bush so brazenly co-opted the utopian rhetoric of liberal internationalists, no current politician can speak of the courage and heroism of those who protest oppressive regimes without unintentionally evoking that jackass in all his smirky vainglory.

Joe Klein:

How does a rookie President, having been granted the Nobel Peace Prize, go about earning it? Well, he can start by giving the sort of Nobel lecture that Barack Obama just did, an intellectually rigorous and morally lucid speech that balanced the rationale for going to war against the need to build a more peaceful and equitable world.

Sarah Palin:

I liked what he said. I talked too in my book about the fallen nature of man and why war is necessary at times.

Freedom!

Jane Hamsher goes all William Wallace:

It’s time that people took off the rose colored glasses and faced the fact that Obama’s “leadership” on health care was empty and passive. He went for the corporate-friendly “win” that enriches the insurance and drug companies, just as he has enriched the banks and failed to hold them to account. Those who look first to others as scapegoats for his actions have apparently not come to grips with the fact that as President of the United States, he’s a very powerful man who is not using that power to advance the progressive agenda they attribute to him.

Best part of the "passive" complaint is that Hamsher states a few graphs earlier that Obama has been "intimately involved in the process of crafting the health care bill." So, uh, apparently he's passively orchestrating the whole thing.

Anyway, I find it odd that someone positioned as a steely-eyed realist is continually let down by candidates once they get into office. I get that Hamsher has her shtick: a) get Democrats elected and b) get better Democrats elected. But we're getting close to poisoning the well here. From the outset this entire process has been an elaborate dance to figure out how to pay for reform without significantly cutting into the profits of private industries. Yet people who know this continually act betrayed every time a Blue Dog member of Congress leg humps an industry talking point. I guess its what you have to do to rile up the troops. But count me out. I'm fine with a reform package that covers everyone while laying the groundwork for expanding cheaper insurance in the future. (Lowering the Medicare age is an obvious Trojan Horse on that front, which is why it's probably not happening.)

Like it or not, politics is the art of the possible. And Obama is on the cusp of accomplishing what was previous not possible. Liberals screaming reform should be done in one fell swoop and that anything short of Obama and Emanuel throwing on war paint and charging up Capitol Hill on a suicide run need to dial it down. We elect presidents, not kings.

Whatever Sells

Yglesias has this completely backwards:

Fred Hiatt Wants The Washington Post to Go Out of Business. What other explanation could there be for deciding that he wants to run an op-ed by Sarah Palin about how Obama should “boycott” the Copenhagen conference?

Sure, the WaPo's decision to publish an op-ed by Sarah Palin's ghostwriter—that can charitably be described as misleading and more accurately categorized as total bullshit—isn't good for journalism. Palin is rolling with the premise that the "the radical environmental movement appears to face a tipping point" after "leading climate 'experts' deliberately destroyed records" and "manipulated data to ‘hide the decline’ in global temperatures." This of course isn't true. The science community agrees the earth is getting warmer and people are to blame. Hiatt undoubtedly knows this but he'd much rather garner the attention, Web hits and verbal sparing a Palin editorial creates than worry about the accuracy of her opinion. I happen to think that fact-checking in a newspaper should extend to the editorial page. Hiatt clearly does not. But in a perverse way he wins, because here I am talking about his green-lighting propaganda under the guise of journalistic opinion writing.

Communist On Communist Crime

Over the past couple of days, Andrew Sullivan has posted a few protests from liberals distraught that "the left" is giving President Obama the dirty hippie business. No shocker that Greenwald isn't buying it:

Those who venerated Bush because he was a morally upright and strong evangelical-warrior-family man and revere Palin as a common-sense Christian hockey mom are similar in kind to those whose reaction to Obama is dominated by their view of him as an inspiring, kind, sophisticated, soothing and mature intellectual. These are personality types bolstered with sophisticated marketing techniques, not policies, governing approaches or ideologies. But for those looking for some emotional attachment to a leader, rather than policies they believe are right, personality attachments are far more important. They're also far more potent. Loyalty grounded in admiration for character will inspire support regardless of policy, and will produce and sustain the fantasy that this is not a mere politician, but a person of deep importance to one's life who -- like a loved one or close friend or religious leader -- must be protected and defended at all costs.

I happen to think Greenwald is being a bit too hard on those who still defend Obama's overall performance, even if they don't agree with several key policy decisions. But what's really worth pointing out is that the left is actually having this debate instead of flooding the echo chamber with a cottage industry of apologists and spinners intent on making every decision Obama makes sound like preordained common sense. That's the difference between liberals falling in love and conservatives falling in line. Right now Greenwald is most likely working on a post accurately cataloging another transparent Obama Justice Department decision that covers-up misdeeds by the Bush crew or embraces the lame "state secret" line, John Aravosis is no doubt furiously pounding out another screed on the importance of immediately turning over DADT, and you can bet Jane Hamsher is once again fitting Harry Reid's testicles into a sling over his handling of health care reform. When it comes to blind devotion within the ranks of the two warring factions, there really isn't a comparison. Engaged liberals are clearly more likely to think for themselves. And if conservatives want to take exception to that then first explain what was going on from 2001 to 2008 when the only internal dispute seemed to be over who could give the sloppiest rhetorical blowjob to a Bush decision and how quickly a boycott of the Dixie Chicks could be organized.

How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Politico

And no, I'm not making this up. The Politico's editor in chief has been elected to the Pulitzer Prize Board:

“In many ways, the Pulitzer Board is on the same mission as POLITICO: to embrace new media while fighting to protect the highest standards for writing, reporting and accuracy. I am honored to be a part of this effort,” VandeHei said.

Also, this:

Politico reporter Daniel Libit sends me this query:

Working on a story with another reporter about the increasing similarity between Barack Obama’s policies and Hillary Clinton’s primary platform and whether Democrats might have viewed the primary differently if they knew then what they know now. Would love to get your thoughts on the state of buyer’s remorse. Might you be able to send me something before day’s out?

There are two types of stories: those written following hours (if not weeks) of cold calls and talking to sources on background (which is occasionally referred to as "reporting") and those with narratives dreamed up while bullshitting in an editor's office in the desperate hours before an impending deadline. Libit's piece would be the latter. It's also Politico's pièce de résistance. Which is apparently Pulitzer material.

Sometimes I miss journalism. Then I read something like this.