Conservative praise for Obama

Charles Krauthammer, the conservative pundit, writes in today's AJC: "Obama achieved what seemed impossible 2 months ago."

Not that he likes the results, of course, but his praise for Obama's accomplishment shines through.

Riding the lamest of ducks, President Barack Obama just won the Triple Crown. He fulfilled (1) his most important economic priority, passage of Stimulus II, aka the tax cut deal . . . (2) his most important social policy objective, repeal of "don't ask, don't tell"; and (3) his most cherished (achievable) foreign policy goal, ratification of the New START treaty with Russia.

Politically these are all synergistic. The bipartisan nature of the tax deal instantly repositioned OBama back to the center, and just when conventional wisdom decided the deal had caused irreparable alienation from his liberal base, Obama almost immediately won it back -- by delivering one of the gay rights movement's most elusive and coveted breakthroughs. . . .

Then came START, which was important for Obama . . . because treaties . . . carry the aura of presidential authority and diplomatic mastery.

Krauthammer goes on to detail what's wrong, from his perspective, with these actual pieces of legislation, but he then concludes:

The great liberal ascendancy of 2008, destined to last 40 years (predicted by James Carville), lasted less than two. Yet, the great Republican ascendancy of 2010 lasted less than two months. Republicans will enter the 112th Congress with larger numbers but no longer with the wind -- the overwhelming Nov. 2 repudiation of Obama's social-democratic agenda -- at their backs.

"Harry Reid has eaten our lunch," said Senator Lindsey Graham . . . . Yes, but it was less Harry than Barry. Obama came back with a vengeance. His string of lame-duck successes is a singular political achievement. Because of it, the epic battles of the 112th Congress begin on what would have seemed impossible just one month ago -- a level playing field.

And that is a conservative Republican speaking.

Disappointed progressives will not be assuaged, probably. Their retort is likely to be: why hasn't he done that sooner on other issues, or why hasn't he used that political power and skill to get better deals on these pieces of legislation?

Good questions. It may just be that Obama is smarter than us all and knows that you have to pick your times and your battles. It's pretty hard to argue with the overall achievement in 2010, especially given the crowd he had to deal with.

Ralph

Obama the Un-wimp

Obama has been criticized, particularly by disappointed and angry progressives, for not fighting for some of the issues he promised to get passed. At times, I have felt the same wish for him to make it happen and to not cave in so easily in compromise.

It was Keith Olbermann who put it so pithily in his scathing critique of Obama for agreeing to tax cuts for the wealthy: "This President negotiates down from a position of strength better than any politician in our recent history."

But along comes the New Start nuclear disarmament treaty, and we see a different kind of Obama performance. What makes the difference is hard to say: the issue? the way he's feeling that week? a vast complex array of other things being considered? I don't presume to know.

Here's what the New York Times' Peter Baker said in an article on 12-23-10:

Some aides counseled Mr. Obama to stand down. Losing a treaty vote, as one put it, would be “a huge loss.” But Mr. Obama decided that afternoon to make one of the biggest gambles of his presidency and demand that the Senate approve the treaty by the year’s end. . . .

Along the way, he had to confront his own reluctant party leadership and circumvent the other party’s leadership. He mounted a five-week campaign that married public pressure and private suasion. He enlisted the likes of Henry A. Kissinger, asked Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany to help and sent a team of officials to set up a war room of sorts on Capitol Hill. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. had at least 50 meetings or phone calls with senators. . . .

Even in the final 10 days, the effort appeared in danger of collapsing. The insistence of Democrats on passing unrelated legislation allowing gay men and lesbians to serve openly in the military upset the Republican conference and may have cost the White House five or more votes on the arms treaty. Administration officials worried last week that they did not have the required two-thirds majority in the Senate, and as late as Sunday, the president’s aides wondered whether to call off the vote. . . .

“The president made a gutsy decision that he was willing to lose it, and that was a gutsy decision,” said Senator John Kerry. . . . “Everybody said it wasn’t going to happen. Even colleagues on our side said it wasn’t going to happen.”. . .

[When key Republican senator on arms control, John Kyl, signaled that he wasn't going to support it after all] “There were people here who thought that was it, we were going to call it a day,” recalled one White House official. There was no Plan B. But Mr. Obama, who often disappoints supporters by not responding to Republicans more aggressively, decided this was a moment to fight. “He decided that he would settle on nothing short of full Senate ratification,” said another official.

Starting in that meeting, they laid out a strategy. Mr. Biden was supposed to meet two days later with several Republican luminaries. Instead, Mr. Obama would host the meeting and make a public pitch for the treaty. The White House ripped up plans for the weekly radio and Internet address to make it about New Start. Then Mr. Obama flew to Lisbon for a NATO meeting, where he encouraged European leaders to speak out for the treaty. . .

[Instead of continuing to press Mr. Kyl, they went after other Republicans.]

“It was very tricky, and it almost broke it apart,” Mr. Kerry said. “That was part of the overall high-stakes poker. A lot was hanging on different things.”

In the end, the gamble paid off on Wednesday with a 71-to-26 vote in the Senate to approve the treaty, called New Start, with Russia, culminating what turned out to be the biggest battle over arms control in Washington in more than a decade.

Some will give the credit to Joe Biden, scoffing at the idea that Obama fights for anything. Biden was a key player in persuading reluctant Republicansl but, if Baker is telling the truth, it was Obama who made the decision to fight for it out and out, and it was Obama who kept them to the task when nearly everyone else was ready to give it up.

So, why not do it more often? I don't know.

Ralph

Barney Frank

Barney Frank has the distinction (some say) of being the brightest person in Congress. He's also the funniest. Today there is a clip of a reporter interviewing him about how the repeal of DADT is going to impact the troops -- asking what about straight soldiers having to shower with homosexuals?

How shocking, Barney mocked. "What do you think happens in gyms all over the United States. In the Congress? In colleges? People shower with homosexuals everyday. . . We don't get ourselves dry cleaned; we tend to take showers when we go to the gym, when we play sports."

"The idea that there's something new about showering with homosexuals . . . remember, under Don't Ask, Don't Tell, the policy was that you would be showering with homosexuals. You just weren't supposed to know which was which. So there was no change in that. The notion that knowing that someone is gay, as opposed to knowing that there are gay and lesbian people, you just aren't supposed to know who they are, that somehow that makes a difference, is a bit silly."

The reporter persisted, and Barney finally retorted: "Do you think that gyms should have separate showers for gay and straight people?"

Good point. Game. Set. Match.

Ralph

Irresponsible

Funny how conservative people want to denounce something and profit from it at the same time.

There have been numerous examples of governors who denounced the stimulus bill -- and turned around and took the stimulus money for their states.

Also there are many stories of Republicans' new-found outrage at earmarks, who vowed to get rid of the practice -- even while sneaking their earmark requests into the tax cut bill.

Now comes along She Who Shall Not Be Named. On Nov. 29th she denounced the Obama administration for laxity that led to the WikiLeaks release of all those tapes. Just awful, how they let all that secret information get out there !!

But she's not opposed to using that secret information (most of which wasn't really all that secret). Today, she has an op-ed in USA Today in which she criticizes the Obama administration for not being tougher with Iran and its nuclear ambitions.

And what source does she use to back up her claims about Iran's plans? Why, the leaked diplomatic cables: "We suspected this before, but now we know for sure because of leaked diplomatic cables."

Ah, well, if you're a quitter and finish only half of your elected term as governor, you can sit back and criticize your opponents without having to be held responsible for anything yourself.

But it does seem a bit gratuitous to denounce the means through which you obtained the information you're so happy to use.

Ralph

Take that !!!, Sen. McNothing

Senator McNothing looked like nothing so much as a petulant child having a temper tantrum when, having delivered his last angry tirade against it, he stormed out of the Senate chamber when he saw that DADT repeal was going to pass. He called it a sad day and predicted serious trouble that could put soldiers lives at risk.

It seems in the end he had little influence; the vote was 2 to 1 for repeal. His sometimes buddy, Lindsey Graham, and others joined him in vocal opposition. Graham, himself the subject of persistent rumors that he is gay, seems to be treading on risky waters there; although there's really no need to out him now that repeal has passed.

But the real blow to this pair, whom one blogger refers to as "the mean girls" of the senate, must have come on the day Obama signed repeal into law, when the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine service chiefs all have said that they are ready to move forward on implementing the change -- and they will do so expeditiously. Even those who opposed the change.

In his press conference, President Obama addressed this. He had talked with each of them separately, and he reported "all said that we are going to implement this smartly and swiftly, and they are confident that it will not have an effect on our military effectiveness."

Let me suggest that McNothing and Graham, both of them ex-military men, exert a little of this same military discipline and start respecting the orders of the commander in chief. A little more inflammatory prediction of disorder and risk to the troops -- and they could be accused of inciting rebellion and helping to bring about the trouble they're warning against.

Think about it, you "mean girls."

Ralph

This lame duck is a pretty good duck

This has been a very good week for President Obama and the Democrats in Congress.

Once the logjam was broken with the compromised (and to many, odious) tax bill that extended obscene tax cuts to the wealthy, but also extended unemployment benefits and other measures that benefit middle class Americans, it seems Obama had a charmed touch on getting his bills passed.

Howard Fineman (Huffington Post) wrote:

But through dogged patience, and adaptable style and a refusal to panic, the president has piled up the longest list of new laws, treaties and administrative actions anyone has seen here in decades.

Fineman's new-found respect for the president is evident between the lines of the article.

Obama lost on the immigration reform bill but then went on to pass: food-safety and child nutrition bills, a Korean trade bill, repeal of DADT, the New Start nuclear arms treaty, and aid (albeit reduced in amount) for first responders.

These wins are doubly significant, because they do not represent the GOP leadership having a change of heart. Except for the tax cut compromise, the leaders still opposed most of these bills. It was that Obama and the Senate Democrats were able to get an increasing number of moderate Republicans to break with their leaders and vote for sensible legislation. That bodes well for the future. Some of them will not be back, of course, like Voinovich of Ohio and Bennet of Utah. But it did show a new willingness to break ranks with the GOP leadership and party line that began to have a feeling of momentum toward sanity.

Add these to the health care reform and the tax cut/unemployment benefits bills -- and this has been quite a year for the president and the democrats in Congress.

Now, here's my question: if he had not compromised as he did on the tax cut/unemployment bill -- would these other bills have gotten passed?

This is what I argue with Richard about: if you hold out for what really ought to be, do you not sometimes evoke a backlash in your opponents that keeps you from getting other things as well? I think the past few weeks in the Senate suggest we would have not gotten all these things this week had we held out for letting the tax cuts expire for the wealthy. And I don't like that any better than anyone else does -- but I do like what was accomplished.

Ralph

Pontifical incoherence

Maybe it's time for Pope Benedict XVI to retire. He is becoming incoherent -- or at least his conflicting statements and retractions and "clarifications" add up to . . . well, incoherence.

Take the now-fatigued issue of what he said about male prostitutes using a condom -- maybe, sort of, might not be so bad -- or, rather, it might be a step in the direction of taking moral responsibility, or something like that. That doesn't make it right -- just sort of, maybe, all right as the lesser of two evils.

Of course, that is, as long as the reason for using it was to prevent the spread of HIV -- not to prevent pregnancy, heaven forbid. I guess the trick is, as you unroll the condom over you-know-what, you must repeat: this is to prevent HIV, not babies; this is to prevent HIV, not babies. That's why he used the example of male prostitutes (apparently not realizing that women also employ male prostitutes and, ahem, women do get pregnant. Hadn't you heard, Sir?

As an example of how committed the pope and the Vatican are to the non-prevention of pregnancy, they won't even address this in the light of an HIV + man and his wife -- can he use a condom to prevent infecting her? They won't say, except to repeat that the position has not changed. Using any form of birth control is evil. Evil, do you hear?

Seems that the Vatican has a commission studying the question of married couples where one is HIV+. But suddenly their work has been suspended, indefinitely. It's really hard, you know, trying to make sense out of nonsense.

Well, now, months later, the issue still seems unclear -- er, incoherent? So the Vatican released yet another statement to clarify that, of course, the pope did not "recommend the use of condoms under any circumstances." So, what did he say then?

"An action which is objectively evil, even if a lesser evil, can never be licitly willed," the Vatican said. Silly me. That makes it entirely clear. How did I ever misunderstand something so simple?

Now, if that weren't incoherent enough, Pope B. told Vatican officials in his traditional end-of-year speech on Monday that the church needs to look at its own culpability in the child sex-abuse scandal. OK, good start -- but, he hastened to add, he also blamed a secular society in which child pornography "is seemingly considered normal by society."

Say what ???? Which planet are you inhabiting, Benedict?

Never have laws against child pornography been as stringent as they are, at least in the U.S., where it is a felony simply to possess child pornography. A man who has never even touched a child may go to prison for years and years because he downloaded some videos.

I'm not saying it's wrong to go after child pornographers so aggressively. But simple viewers, curiosity seekers? The reasoning, of course, is that any video depicting sex between adults and children means that a child was actually sexually abused in making the video. And possession of the video is aiding and abetting the crime.

What I am saying is that the pope is wrong. It isn't in secular society where child abuse is condoned. It is -- or was -- in the back rooms of the churches and the rectories -- and in the Vatican itself -- where abusive priests were "forgiven," quietly transferred to other parishes where they might work with children again, and their records sealed to protect the priests, not the children.

So, please, Mr. Pope. Don't blame the church's failures on a secular society. Clean your own house; admit your own laxity and culpability. Sir.

Ralph

The census

Preliminary reports from the release of the 2010 national census today suggest a big shift in population (and thus representation in the House) toward the more conservative Southern and Western states.

Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, and Washington will gain at least one seat each, with Texas the big winner, adding four.

Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania will each lose at least one.

Definitely an overall blue to red shift -- at least it seems on the surface. And that will probably be the effect overall.

However, it won't necessarily mean that all those individual seats will shift from blue to red. First, some of the losers have conservative reps already.

Second, we shouldn't assume that people moving from Massachusetts to Texas suddenly become conservative. So the effect may be mitigated a little by a few seats here and there shifting from red to blue within a red state.

Also some of the buildup in population of the southern and western states is a growing Hispanic population. They tend to vote more liberal.

Wishful thinking? Sure. But there's some truth, too.

Probably the biggest effect is going to be felt, not in the actual population shifts, but in the fact that the governors and legislatures in those states gaining will be in charge of redrawing the district lines -- and they will magnify the effect by creating districts that favor their own party. Most of the gainers have Republican governors, probably legislatures too.

Ralph

Here, here !!

Joel Klein used his space as Time magazine political columnist to say what he thinks about John McNothing.

I used to know a different John McCain, the guy who proposed comprehensive immigration reform with Ted Kennedy, the guy--a conservative, to be sure, but an honorable one--who refused to indulge in the hateful strictures of his party's extremists. His public fall has been spectacular, a consequence of politics--he "needed" to be reelected--and personal pique. He's a bitter man now, who can barely tolerate the fact that he lost to Barack Obama. But he lost for an obvious reason: his campaign proved him to be puerile and feckless, a politician who panicked when the heat was on during the financial collapse, a trigger-happy gambler who chose an incompetent for his vice president. He has made quite a show ever since of demonstrating his petulance and lack of grace.

I disagree with one thing. I'm not sure he was ever an honorable man. Perhaps when he was being the independent maverick, that was also a calculated image that he thought, at that time, would gain him the most traction. How does someone with real integrity lose it so completely?

Ralph

Lie of the Year

PolitiFact.com, which monitors the factual truth of public statements, has selected for its "Lie of the Year" designation the Republican mantra that brands Obama's health care reform plan as "government takeover of health care."

And who deserves the dishonor for coining and selling that phrase as the Republican talking point? None other than Frank Luntz, the word-smith darling of conservatives. His self-described specialty is “testing language and finding words that will help his clients sell their product or turn public opinion on an issue or a candidate.”

Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with that. Our friend and colleague Drew Westin does the same thing. It's how you use it. Drew, I'm convinced, tries to help Democrats get across their positive programs in a way that people will get the truth. Luntz and his clients seem to me to use language to obscure the truth, misrepresent the facts, and fool the voters.

What a difference.

Quoting from PolitiFact:

PolitiFact editors and reporters have chosen "government takeover of health care" as the 2010 Lie of the Year. Uttered by dozens of politicians and pundits, it played an important role in shaping public opinion about the health care plan and was a significant factor in the Democrats' shellacking in the November elections. . . .

By selecting "government takeover" as Lie of the Year, PolitiFact is not making a judgment on whether the health care law is good policy.

The phrase is simply not true. . . .

PolitiFact reporters have studied the 906-page bill and interviewed independent health care experts. We have concluded it is inaccurate to call the plan a government takeover because it relies largely on the existing system of health coverage provided by employers.

It's true that the law does significantly increase government regulation of health insurers. But it is, at its heart, a system that relies on private companies and the free market.

OK. But let's go a step further. What is so wrong with government run health care? I, for one, would welcome it in some form, because we could have a better health care system at lower costs -- just like in France, which is considered in most cases to be the best in the world.

In fact, I do have it now, in the form of Medicare. Along with my AARP supplement, I am totally satisfied with it, as a patient. As a physician, I would have complaints because they reimburse too little, often not even meeting actual expenses of the doctor's office, and maybe require too much paperwork.

Sure, for the wealthy, the U.S. probably offers the best health care. But if you look at a system and at the overall health of a nation, we are way way down the list. At a much higher cost than anywhere else.

So -- "government takeover of health care"? Bring it on.

But then I am not your average Joe six-pack who just wants to prove his masculinity and protect his insecure sense of autonomy -- and is easily manipulated with clever word-smithing by the likes of Frank Luntz and his Republican clients.

Ralph

Congress seems to be working again

After two years of frustrating gridlock, as the losing Republicans "just said no" about everything, it seems like maybe Congress is working again. I don't mean working, as in putting in the hours. I mean doing effective legislative work. Passing DADT repeal is an example.

As much as I am ecstatic about what this means for the gay community -- to say nothing of thousands of military gays and for the military itself -- I am almost as excited by the fact that the administration and congress did something together that worked.

Even on the tax/spending bill -- as much as we hate the tax cuts for the wealthy and the too-low estate tax -- look at it in a broader perspective. The more conservative groups hate it, the more progressive groups hate it, but those near the middle think it's great. So maybe that's where it needs to be in a congress that's almost equally divided. Both sides got some of what they wanted; both sides gave in and accepted some of what they hated.

It feels like maybe the system has been restored. There's now even talk of growing bipartisan support for changing the senate rules -- at least on the anonymous "holds" and perhaps some changes in the filibuster rule as well.

My message to the progressives whose disappointment turns them against Obama: elect him a congress that agrees with you. I'm all for that -- but until we have that, let's take the best deal we can get with what we've got.

And give him some credit for leadership too. Leadership is not just getting up on a soapbox and yelling, or twisting arms in back rooms like LBJ. Leadership also is carefully laying the groundwork, bringing people together, getting them talking, empowering others to do their jobs, giving them the opportunity, and then helping apply pressure to close the deal.

Mickey Nardo says Obama is essentially a congressman. His failing may be that he sometimes should be a president instead. But there are times -- like this -- when what the president needs to do is facilitate the restoration of a functioning congress. I think that is what is happening now. And that in itself is a remarkable achievement, given that his party just lost control of the House and now has only a marginal majority in the Senate.

Ralph