Pufferfish

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.

Company We Keep

  

The few, the proud, the unenlightened: Cuba, China, Egypt, Iran, Jamaica, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, United Arab Emirates, Uganda, United States, and Yemen.

Conservative policies have grouped us with countries the civilized world generally loathes. 

More here.

Then And Now

The Bush years:

Even beyond the immediate political manipulation there was always a drive to push the country back into a 'high-fear' climate, with a presidential statements, always with some new leaked intel to dramatize the threat, even what you might call the iconography of terror -- color coded threat levels and the like.

But that isn't totally right:

Eight years ago, "a terrorist bomber's attempt to blow up a transatlantic airliner was thwarted by a group of passengers, an incident that revealed some gaping holes in airline security just a few months after the attacks of September 11. But it was six days before President George W. Bush, then on vacation, made any public remarks about the so-called 'shoe bomber,' Richard Reid, and there were virtually no complaints from the press or any opposition Democrats that his response was sluggish or inadequate."

Obviously the Bush administration used terror threats as a political weapon. It's a convenient extension of the conservative worldview which sees aggressive grandstanding and heightened anxiety as a genuine strength. Issuing a threat warning was also a form of foreplay for Dick Cheney. The common thread between the Shoe Bomber and the Underpants Bomber is that both administrations avoided a terrorist attack on their watch through sheer luck. Our best defense was operator error. Because that's clear, neither administration could make a claim to competence or control. So the attacks were spun as non-events. That's the expected reaction by the Obama folks, who downplay everything related to terrorism ("Keep Calm And Carry On" might as well be the mantra, as Marshall notes). For the Bush administration, the Shoe Bomber was a terrorism threat that couldn't be used for political gain. But this one is on Obama's watch. Thus the silence then and the furor now, with the upshot being the GOP will always play the fear card—except when it can't.

Crazy Train

It once was conventional wisdom that Alan Greenspan was the smartest man alive:

And this brings us to Alan Greenspan, whom I've known for over 50 years and who I regarded as one of the best young business economists. Townsend-Greenspan was his company. But the trouble is that he had been an Ayn Rander. You can take the boy out of the cult but you can't take the cult out of the boy. He actually had instruction, probably pinned on the wall: "Nothing from this office should go forth which discredits the capitalist system. Greed is good."

Not that we're showing any inclination of learning from our mistakes. (I'm finding it difficult to write this post while saluting Time Magazine with a double middle finger salute.) Here's Greenspan's disciple in May, 2007:

"Importantly, we see no serious broad spillover to banks or thrift institutions from the problems in the subprime market," Bernanke said. "The troubled lenders, for the most part, have not been institutions with federally insured deposits."

He was wrong. Five of the 10 largest subprime lenders during the previous year were banks regulated by the Fed. Even as Bernanke spoke, the spillover from subprime lending was driving the banking industry into a historic crisis that some firms would not survive. And the upheaval would shove the economy into recession.

And he was wrong again:

The Fed let Citigroup make vast investments without setting aside enough money to cover its eventual losses. The company would need more than $45 billion in federal aid.

The Fed watched as National City made billions of dollars in subprime loans that were never repaid. Regulators would arrange its sale to a rival, PNC.

And the Fed approved Wachovia's purchase of a California mortgage lender shortly before California mortgage lenders led the nation into recession. Wachovia, on the verge of collapse, was bought by Wells Fargo with government help.

And again while serving on the Fed's Board of Governors:

The dangers of securitization were underscored the very next month by the collapse of energy giant Enron, which had abused the same accounting rules to conceal losses from investors. But in 2003, the board that writes accounting rules backed away from planned reforms after banks protested that Enron was an exception. The Fed sided with the industry, telling the board that securitization was safe and important to the economy, according to people familiar with the deliberations.

And how about one more time:

In January 2005, National City's chief economist had delivered a prescient warning to the Fed's board of governors: An increasingly overvalued housing market posed a threat to the broader economy, not to mention his own bank and others deeply involved in writing mortgages.

The message wasn't well received. One board member expressed particular skepticism -- Ben Bernanke.

"Where do you think it will be the worst?" Bernanke asked, according to people who attended the meeting, one in a series of sessions the Fed holds with economists.

"I would have to say California," said the economist, Richard Dekaser.

"They have been saying that about California since I bought my first house in 1979," Bernanke replied.

Woops. Apparently "they" were right. Routinely. Not that Bernanke's resume is going to keep the senate from rubber-stamping his bid for a second term as Fed chairman. He did the only thing that matters: left bankers alone and bailed them out when they fucked up. If only we could all be coddled for our incompetence.

The Mod Squad

Barack Obama took a break from punching hippies in the face over health care to knock some international heads together in Copenhagen:

The deal eventually came together after a dramatic moment in which Mr. Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton burst into a meeting of the Chinese, Indian and Brazilian leaders, according to senior administration officials. Mr. Obama said he did not want them negotiating in secret.

The intrusion led to new talks that cemented central terms of the deal, American officials said.

Give 'Em A Little Chin Music

Ten years ago Democrats decided they were sick of watching Wall St.'s campaign contributions flow directly into GOP coffers. It was time to get in on the action. One of the legislative results was John McCain voting for and Bill Clinton signing the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act that repealed Glass-Steagall, the 1933 law separating commercial and investment banking. That move helped make last year's economic implosion possible. Well now McCain—the same Maverick who had arch-deregulator Phil Gramm riding shotgun on the Straightalk Express and served as a useful tool for big business—is all about the do over. Yesterday, the Arizona senator partnered up with Sen. Maria Cantwell to introduce a bill aimed at bringing Glass-Steagall back from the dead. It's not every day you get a politician backing legislation to erase a law he worked to put on the books. Credit where it's due.

While McCain is again reinventing himself (this time in a good way), Joe Lieberman has a better chance of being caught by TMZ cameras doing body shots off of Jane Hamsher at Hawk & Dove than this bill has of being signed into law. Despite Republicans and Democrats telling anyone who will listen that they're opposed to "too big to fail" they haven't demonstrated any willingness to actually do something about it. But sometimes picking a fight you know you're going to lose can be a political winner, as Kevin Drum points out. And with the liberal netroots throwing an epic tantrum over the latest turn in the health care debate, Obama could stand to engender a little good will:

Why not pick a signature issue or two and really hammer away? Make a few fire-breathing speeches about how you agree with Alistair Darling about taxing banks that hand out huge bonuses and will be sending legislation to Congress to make that happen. It'll probably fail, but at least it moves the conversation forward and gets the public engaged. The fact that you fought the good fight won't really hurt you (the nation's bankers obviously don't think much of you already), and far from sinking the whole reform effort, it might actually help keep the rest of the bill(s) from getting watered down even more. A couple million postcards has that effect sometimes.

McCain is providing Obama an opening to sprinkle a little bit of that hopey, changey feeling around that has been missing. Not that he'll bite.

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.

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.