The Road Not Taken

Beware The Warrenator™, Scourge of Lazy Regulators & Greedy Banksters Everywhere

So today, I read this article. It’s a good article, as these things go. In fact, it’s difficult to disagree with anything in it:

How astonishing to have a public servant who actually cares to inform the public about the inner workings of the system of crony capitalism that has wedded big government with big business. This comes at the expense of the free market that corporate lobbyists delight in invoking as an ideal while they subvert it as a reality. 

Hell yes! Preach on, brother Scheer!

*ahem* Anyway, Scheer’s article echoed a lot of similar sentiments I’d been seeing around Twitter recently: how thankful liberals are to have someone like Warren in office who’s a wonderful, genuinely robust defender of the people against the power of corporations. To which I say, Amen. Warren is all of those things. And people have been noticing that she is because, since taking office in January, Warren keeps garnering press like this (“Elizabeth Warren Embarrasses Hapless Bank Regulators At First Hearing“) and this (“Elizabeth Warren Accuses Regulators Of Protecting Banks Over Homeowners“) and this (“Sen. Elizabeth Warren Questions Regulators’ Willingness To Prosecute Wall Street Banks“).

Seems like everybody on the left (including me) agrees: Elizabeth Warren’s great!

So, what’s the problem? Well, the paragraph I quoted above in the Scheer article was immediately followed by this one:

Those seeking to join Warren in taking a stand on behalf of students attempting to survive in an economy that the bankers have come close to destroying should get behind her bill. Unless Congress acts, student loan rates will automatically double in less than two months.

Yeah. They should join her. Because unless Congress acts, etc…

Unless Congress acts. But that’s kind of the nut of the whole issue, isn’t it? Unless Congress acts. Quick, what’s the one thing you can be dead-certain of regarding the current political climate? If you answered “that Congress will NOT take action, especially not on public-interest-over-corporate-interest legislation,” then congratulations: you’ve been paying attention to politics since the Democrats re-took Congress in 2006. If there’s one thing that best defines Congress since 2006 (especially the Senate), it’s that it won’t take action. Not with Mitch “Filibuster” McConnell circling over the Senate like a vulture waiting for something to die. And now, since 2010, not with a House that’s controlled by John Boehner. The GOP has simply decided “fuck all y’all” is going to be their legislative strategy for the indefinite future. Probably until they can get enough Americans so disgusted with the gridlock that they stupidly vote for a Republican, just to get the sensation that something’s getting accomplished, even if it is something bad.

That’s why all of the “isn’t Elizabeth Warren wonderful” paeans that are being tossed out lately just make me wonder why she was stovepiped by the party into the Senate last cycle? It’s not as if any of what I just said was a secret or even some obscure minority opinion during the last election. Every progressive and Democrat knows how broken the Senate is. If what is earning Warren those rave reviews and kudos today is her willingness to hold regulators’ feet to the fire and insist they protect consumers and citizens instead of the interests of the big banks…um…wouldn’t it have been better to continue along with Plan A and actually, you know, make Warren one of those regulators, instead of sticking her into the most dysfunctional, broken governing body in the developed world – the United States Senate?

As a regulator, Warren would have had the ability to actually affect the day-to-day business of protecting consumers and/or overseeing the banks. In the Senate, she’s one of a hundred voices, barely over half of whom must line up behind Harry Reid and hope they can get stuff past McConnell’s endless filibusters. Talk about frustrating – for progressives as well as (I imagine) for Warren. While it’s great to see her tear into banksters and regulators in hearings, everyone knows hearings are merely public spectacle if they don’t lead to actual legislation — and as I already mentioned, in this climate, they don’t.

I don’t know much about state-level politics in Massachusetts, but in a state that blue, I find it very hard to believe there were truly NO other credible Democratic candidates besides Warren who could’ve beaten Scott Brown and put Ted Kennedy’s seat back in the column in which it belongs. Maybe I need to be educated on that score, but that sounds far-fetched to me. Perhaps the administration believed (not without support from the facts) that Warren might have been simply un-confirmable as head of the CFPB (though, as I’ve written about before, there’s plenty of room to doubt Warren herself would’ve fared any worse than anyone else Obama might have nominated for that role, and if Obama could recess-appoint Richard Cordray, he could’ve just as easily done so with Elizabeth Warren). Even if so, it’s not as if there weren’t other slots she could have filled. One of the Dems’ recent bêtes noire, Ed DeMarco at FHFA, could have been at this very moment being replaced not by a questionably pro-consumer guy like Mel Watt, but by the scourge of Wall Street and defender of homeowners and consumers herself, Elizabeth Warren.

Tell me THAT wouldn’t have been a win, at least in comparison to having Warren in the Senate?

Lastly, if Warren was installed (via regular process or recess appointment) at FHFA or CFPB or CFTC or any one of a number of other financial regulation agencies, and she was later thrown out in the future when a Republican or conservaDem took the White House, she could STILL run for Senate at that time. I guess I just don’t see what the loss would’ve been, nor what the rush was to get Elizabeth Warren into the Senate.

Fiscal NIMBYism

3/2 – see update at bottom*

Pew Research is out with another poll, this time focused on budgetary and financial issues, given the upcoming sequester, and the results are depressingly predictable. The title alone gives away the findings almost completely: As Sequester Deadline Looms, Little Support for Cutting Most Programs (pdf). The key graph is here:

Spending Cuts? Not In MY Backyard!

This is the quandary American politics – no, American policymaking – has found itself in for at least a couple of decades now. We on the left like to chuckle when Republican lawmakers are caught live on air being unable to name any specific projects they’d cut, but one can hardly blame the politicos. Their main job, in our money-driven political system, is to know what it takes to get re-elected. It takes money and it takes votes, in that order. Without money, you can’t attract enough votes, but – as people like Meg Whitman and Mitt Romney prove – without enough support from ordinary voters, no amount of money will get you elected.

What you’re seeing when you see a GOP politician caught stammering on TV, bereft of any answer at all to the question of which specific cuts to which specific programs they’d make is what happens when the interests of those two groups – the high-dollar funders and the voters who have to pull the actual levers to get the politicians elected – collide. It doesn’t happen often; usually the two groups interests are at least not in opposition, if not actually simpatico.

Even in the case of spending cuts, those groups’ interests seem at first to be at least superficially aligned. Starting in the early 1970s, forty-plus years of concerted faux-populist anti-tax rhetoric from a well-funded right wing determined to rise above the nearly permanent minority status it had enjoyed since the Great Depression have rendered the average American conservative certain that cuts must be made because spending is out of control and taxes are too damn high.

Yet ask these same Americans which particular programs they’d like to cut, as Pew did – and by how much, and the graph above shows what happens when well-funded, agenda-driven political propaganda collides with people’s own self-interest. I’m actually strangely heartened by the fact that not even most Republicans, apparently, feel like it’s a good idea to start cutting the benefits they or their loved ones or friends receive. Why? Because, to a greater or lesser degree, they know these programs work. They help pay medical bills and drug costs. They make the food budget go a little farther every month. They keep the bridges safe and the children well-educated. They do lots of things that are vital to the communities in which these poll respondents live. These things are called entitlements because voters – even Republican voters, apparently – feel entitled to them. These things are part of the social contract, what each of us is told our tax money goes to, what we agree to provide for ourselves and each other through the medium of government. Our civilization, in other words. And yes, even most GOP voters feel entitled to these things we’ve agreed upon.

That’s why, when you ask even most Republicans to really think about applying the rhetoric being discussed on their televisions by the pundits and the politicians to their OWN lives – when you ask them to think specifically about which programs they, the voters themselves, would cut, support drops away like support for Larry Craig dropped away among Senate Republicans after the “wide stance” issue.

I call this Fiscal NIMBYism because it represents the direct collision of those forty-plus years of well-funded GOP rhetoric about lower taxes and cutting spending and drowning government in a bathtub with the actual reality of what the lower spending parts mean. These same GOP voters who balk at naming any specific cuts they’d be willing to make were only too eager to accept the lower tax lollipop portion of the GOP rhetoric. They took the Bush tax cuts without hesitation, spent or saved it, and never looked back. It’s only when those same GOP agenda-setters come back to them and say “OK, now it’s time for the spending cuts” that people begin to say “hey, wait a minute…” when they begin to really think about what that’s going to mean in practice. A large deficit sounds bad in the abstract, but the scariness of an outsized debt-to-GDP ratio that Politician X is discussing on TV pales in comparison to the serious consideration of cutting one’s own benefits to bring that deficit down.

That’s why the only item on Pew’s list of potential funding cuts that even reached plurality support was cutting  aid to the world’s needy. That’s the perfect expression of the ambivalence and NIMBYism I’m referring to: cut someone ELSE’S benefits, but keep your stinkin’ government hands off my Medicare/Medicaid/Social Security/school funding/veteran’s benefits/etc…

To be fair, even cutting aid to the world’s needy didn’t reach actual majority support, probably because enough people realized just how heartless that sounded, as they checked the “don’t cut” box on all their own pet projects. All this may sound like a call for despair, that GOP or perhaps even just regular rank-and-file voters are too hopelessly selfish for redemption of any kind, but I see it as just the opposite. I think the fact that even most GOP voters can still at least recognize what their own self-interest is, is an unqualified good. It means they’re not completely delusional. It means that despite forty-plus years of Ayn Randian “you’re on your own” rhetoric and Reaganite “government IS the problem” rhetoric, not even most Republicans think government is so worthless that they’d be willing to throw away what it provides for them.

And that means there’s a potential wedge there for Democrats to break the lockstep voting of ordinary Republicans for austerity, against their own self-interest.

***UPDATE***

I just got an email from a group whose mailing list I’m on, Operation Homefront. You may already know them; they’re one of the higher-profile groups that provides assistance to military families, especially (but not exclusively) the deployed. They’re a great group doing work that shouldn’t be left to outside organizations but instead should be a part of what our nation guarantees to those men and women who put their lives at risk to defend our country. Nevertheless, due to already-existing shortages in everything from VA benefits to simple cash-flow issues, groups like Operation Homefront have to exist, and they do vital work very well.

This email is titled “Sequestration and Our Military Families,” and the reason I’m mentioning it is not because – or not only because – it’s an example of how the recent failure of congress to act to avoid the blunt instrument of the sequester affects real people in the real economy. The email is certainly that, but it’s also an example of what I just got done talking about in this post: fiscal NIMBYism. The author, OH’s President & CEO Jim Knotts, begins by talking about what sequestration is and how it will negatively affect military families, but then in paragraph four, he gets around to this:

Personally, I fully understand and even support the notion that we need to cut our federal budget to get our national fiscal house in order. What you may not know is that the Department of Defense will bear more than 20% of the total budget cuts under sequestration.

[...]

Many military spouses have jobs as DoD civilians at local installations, which means the budgets of many military families just got a significant cut. Programs on the installations that support families and kids will be cut or curtailed due to staffing gaps. Schools for military kids on the installations have to figure out how they’ll complete the school year.

Knotts goes on to detail numerous other ways in which sequestration’s cutbacks will impact military families, none of which I’m trying to brush aside or take lightly by pointing this out. But it’s a bit of a nutshell summary of the ridiculousness of federal policy as well as current conventional wisdom that even a man in the position Knotts is in, who knows better than most just what kinds of harm funding cuts at this time will do in real terms still believes and agrees with the notion that we need to make cuts.

He’d just prefer they not be in HIS backyard, if at all possible.

Marco Rubio – Same Old GOP Swill, Shiny New Bottle!

So by now, everyone’s already discussed Marco Rubio’s gulp-heard-round-the-world to death. Many more words than necessary or advisable have been written about what wags almost instantaneously dubbed “watergate.” And in truth, even though our media and much of the electorate remains shallowly image-focused instead of issue-focused, Rubio’s odd tics and apparently severe dehydration were not the most important part of his response to the President’s State of the Union speech Tuesday night.

Rubio’s speech itself was.

It was tired, it was off-base (which wasn’t really Rubio’s fault, since he or his speechwriters had the unenviable task of trying to rebut the President’s speech without seeing what was in it first, which necessarily entailed some guesswork – much of which turned out to be quite wrong). Most of all, though, it felt familiar. Commentators from Rachel Maddow to Jon Stewart almost immediately noticed that, other than the person who was actually mouthing the words, the speech itself sounded like it could have been given by Mitt Romney on the campaign trail, circa last October. In fact, large chunks of Rubio’s speech sounded like they would have been at home in the Reagan era.

The GOP has spent a lot of hand-wringing time over the past few months since Romney’s trouncing in November speaking of “rebranding.” Americans, however, are still waiting to see any tangible results of all this collective rumination on the conservative side of the political aisle. Tuesday night, what started to dawn on not just the pundits but the people, is that when the GOP says “rebranding,” all they mean in practice is putting old wine – excuse me, water – in a new bottle. Marco Rubio’s PAC, Reclaim America, immediately began to attempt to capitalize on their leader’s awful, sweaty, fidgety performance by issuing a “Marco Rubio water bottle” (no, really!) to those who were “thirsty for conservative leadership.” Just take a look at the image from their donations page:

Dripping With Irony

Given how at home Rubio’s listless, twitchy speech would have sounded coming out of Mitt Romney’s mouth, or Ronald Reagan’s, or nearly any Republican in between those two, it seemed fitting (not to mention more accurate) to re-do Reclaim America PAC’s fundraising effort with the water bottle:

What Reclaim America SHOULD’VE Said

Election Eve Prediction

The Next Great Liberal Bete Noire?

No, not THAT prediction. There’s been quite enough of that already.

No, what struck me (enough to toss down a “you heard it here first” marker by writing this post) when seeing the tremendous kerfuffle over Nate Silver and his predictive model of the Presidential race, was what’ll happen after this election, if/when the mood of the country shifts.

My prediction? A lot of the same people who are currently cheering Silver as a truth-teller and GOP fiction-slayer will HATE him, the instant the country’s mood turns conservative. Why? Because they’re partisan fans (to be generous), and Silver’s a statistician and odds-analyst. What he does right now is heavily favoring Obama because that’s what the math tells Silver is correct.

But the next time Silver’s model shows a conservative/GOP tilt to an election, he won’t sugar-coat or spin it. He won’t try to second-guess or “unskew” it, because Silver is not a partisan and he’s especially not a fan of any particular politician – at least not enough of a fan to let it cloud his professional judgment. Nate’s a numbers guy. So the result will be that he’ll continue telling the country whatever his model tells him is likely…and a lot of the Obama fans currently cheering Silver will cry “betrayal” or at least “he’s lost his edge.”

You heard it here first.

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Oh, and as long as I’m doing predictions, my SWAG for tomorrow is: Obama 294, Romney 244. Let’s see how wrong I am. Heh.

11/7 Update: happy to have been among the unders. Final total not yet in because Florida still isn’t official, but assuming it stays in Obama column, 323 is a decisive victory. )

How Much Does YOUR Vote Count?

No, this isn’t going to be one of those “don’t vote, it only encourages them” posts. Instead, I’m talking about the electoral college today.

This post was sparked by a segment on Rachel Maddow in which she pointed out that in addition to smaller states being able to exercise influence disproportional to their populations through representation in the Senate (every state gets two Senators, making states with under a million people like Alaska and North Dakota and Wyoming equal in power in the Senate to states with tens of millions like California and New York and Texas), the same holds true, albeit to a somewhat lesser degree, with the arcane system we know as the electoral college.

I won’t bother with the history of the electoral college, because it’s not really relevant: the electoral college exists today, whatever its origins were. If you’re not familiar, there’s a fantastic explainer on it at the equally fantastic Newsbound (check ‘em out!). The Newsbound explainer focuses on what sort of distorting effect having our Presidents chosen via this arcane and archaic system has on our political system. Even if you are familiar with the electoral college, you might learn something from their cogent and easy-to-understand presentation of the issue. Between that and Rachel Maddow’s brief segment on it, I got to thinking that it might be instructive to put together a spreadsheet of how exactly the electoral college skews our votes, depending upon the state in which we live.

An Open Question on Social Security

Right now, everyone’s in campaign mode. All the guns, all the cylinders are being fired at once. This is the quadrennial “big f*ckin’ deal” as Joe Biden would say. So perhaps it’s not the right time to pose this question…but then again, given that election times tend to represent unique opportunities to put pressure on candidates, perhaps it’s the perfect time.

On the subject of Social Security:

Bad:

First, for future generations of seniors, Mitt believes that the retirement age should be slowly increased to account for increases in longevity.
~ Mitt Romney, campaign website

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Worse:

All other workers will have a choice to stay in the current system or begin contributing to personal accounts. Those who choose the personal account option will have the opportunity to begin investing a significant portion of their payroll taxes into a series of funds managed by the U.S. government.
~ Paul Ryan, Roadmap for America’s Future

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MUCH Better! (not to mention VERY definitive):

I guarantee you, flat guarantee you, there will be no changes in Social Security. I flat guarantee you.
~ Joe Biden, 8/14/12

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…and finally, on October 3rd — a full six weeks’ after Biden’s very clear and reassuring statement — come on, Mr. President, bring it on home!

I suspect that on Social Security, we’ve got a somewhat similar position. Social Security is structurally sound. It’s going to have to be tweaked the way it was by Ronald Reagan and Speaker — Democratic Speaker Tip O’Neill.
~ Barack Obama (to Mitt Romney), first Presidential debate, 10/3/12

In a word, AAAAAAARRRRGH.

And yes, Obama fans, the President did hedge his remarks by mouthing the boilerplate used by all politicians who do not wish their career cut short from being electrocuted by the “third rail of American politics” (Obama said SS was basically “structurally sound”). But the operative words in Obama’s quote up there are in bold: he told 60 million Americans simultaneously that a) his position on Social Security was similar to Mitt Romney’s (who says his and Ryan’s are similar), and b) Social Security “will need to be tweaked.”

I’m sorry, Obama fans: “flat guarantee you: there will be no changes” just isn’t compatible with “will need to be tweaked.” Anyone else still wondering how (and how quickly) the administration will attempt to square this circle, assuming the Obama/Biden ticket wins another term?

Matt Yglesias Misses The Point

I think Yglesias is generally a decent read, but he’s also significantly hit-or-miss, regularly offering up some truly out-to-lunch takes on various issues. Today was one of those days. Yglesias writes a post at Slate about how voters “don’t want change.” It’s not as bad as it sounds; Yglesias isn’t bashing Obama for ever having promoted change. Instead, it’s more of a broadside against the silliness of any politician who thinks the voters want anything different than the status quo:

Roughly speaking, liberals and conservatives have the exact same “glass jaw” in American politics, which is that they want to change things and the voters don’t. The political press seems to have a hard time admitting this, but all evidence points to the complete opposite of a widespread hunger for change anchored by bold plans and courageous thinking. What people want, overwhelmingly, is a politician who’ll promise not to do anything.

As evidence of this thesis, Yglesias offers the Bush-era drive by Republicans to privatize Social Security (which failed miserably) and the polling which consistently shows a majority of voters reacting negatively to “Obamacare.”

Yet neither of these explanations satisfies. It’s true that the public soundly rebuffed the Dubya-led effort to privatize Social Security in the late aughts. But Yglesias’ explanation (that voters simply don’t want any changes to the welfare state) doesn’t explain why so much of the tea party and other groups (which presumably contain their share of retirees) are willing to listen to the idea of a “grand bargain” or Simpson-Bowles’ prescriptions for cutting entitlements. Yes, the overall sentiment in the public is that they enjoy these entitlements, but that’s not indicative of a simple abstract preference for no change, it’s merely a reflection of the fact that they’re entitlements: people are receiving benefits which help them and their loved ones and people they know. It’s a bit like wondering whether people are in favor of food.

In the case of Obamacare, Yglesias is too plugged-in to the political scene not to know that the reason a plurality, if not a majority of voters have a negative reaction to “Obamacare” is that the GOP did such a fantastic job of demonizing it with talk of “death panels” and “pulling the plug on grandma” and “creeping socialism” during the debate that the administration allowed to go on for far too long. Yglesias also surely knows that when polling is conducted on the individual specific portions of “Obamacare” (in other words: on what it actually DOES), the moving parts of the PPACA score individually much higher than the entire thing. That’s because people really do understand that something is broken and needs to change in the health care delivery (and especially financing) system. It’s too expensive, and it doesn’t work as well as it should. The disconnect between the popularity of the PPACA’s actual components and the prevailing unpopularity of the official measure “Obamacare” casts doubt on Yglesias’ notion of voters simply preferring no change as a policy.

Of COURSE voters (and consumers, and people in general) are skeptical of change. This isn’t a revelatory insight. But it also misstates the case in a slight but crucial way: skeptical isn’t the same as opposed. It isn’t that voters are dead-set against change (whether towards the right or the left), it’s that the bulk of them lack the ability to envision what that change might look like.

It’s no different from the world of consumers, really. People weren’t dead-set against tablet computers before the iPad, though some observers thought so. After all, tablets had been around for years and had never really caught on. Remember? “Netbooks” were supposed to be all the coming rage? And then Steve Jobs – a guy with vision – showed people what they didn’t know until he made it clear for them: that they did want (some even say need, these days) iPads.

The bulk of average voters may lack the vision to articulate exactly the form of the change they want, and observers like Matt may conclude this means that “all evidence points to the complete opposite of a widespread hunger for change.” But if people were really dead-set against any change, whether left or right, then they’d express a lot more satisfaction with the status quo. Do they? Of course not. Yes, there’s a certain “better the devil you know” aversion to the unknown…but let’s not get silly and mistake that for a hunger for stasis. Complaining about the status quo is nearly as much of a national pastime as baseball or football.

In 2012, after all the changes in retail politics and the media, elections are still won, in the end, the way they always have been: by competently articulating a compelling vision of what you would do if elected that’s better than what exists now (or what your opponent offers). They’re won by showing the public just enough of how you could improve things in a way they didn’t think of themselves that they want to go along for the ride, too. Sure, it’s a knack, doing all of that right. But doing it wrong doesn’t mean voters “want a politician who’ll promise not to do anything.” Barack Obama proved in 2008 that change could be a powerful motivating electoral force just as Steve Jobs proved that clear-headed innovation and a first-class job of explaining it to people could sell millions of units.

Sometimes I Despair of The Left

I don’t belong to an organized political party. I’m a Democrat.

- Will Rogers

Sometimes, I do get weary. Heh.

The quoted text following this paragraph is an excerpt from the text of a very earnest and serious email sent to me today from MoveOn’s email blast servers. I subscribe to these email blasts from MoveOn, just like I do from several other lefty-activist groups (as well as, clandestinely, a few wingnut organizations – hey, gotta keep tabs on what the competition is doing, especially when the competition is bug-fuck insane, as is today’s Republican party). So I see a pretty broad spectrum of what’s motivating the activist community to action at any given time. Here’s the one that landed in my inbox today:

Victims of “legitimate rape” can’t get pregnant because a woman’s body will shut down and prevent the pregnancy. Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO) actually said that—in other words, he’s saying that if a woman does get pregnant, she must not have been raped. Even scarier? He’s running—and leading—in the race for Missouri’s senate seat.

What he said was bad, but it was hardly a gaffe or poor choice of words. In 2011 he and Rep. Paul Ryan led the push in the House of Representatives to redefine rape as “forcible rape” in order to further restrict rape survivors’ access to abortions. As a state senator, Akin questioned whether anti-marital rape laws would be abused by women in messy divorces.

Anyone who doesn’t understand basic biology and tries to create more hurdles for rape survivors seeking justice doesn’t belong in the United States Congress.

Well, obviously, Ms. Kat Barr (the name associated with this petition on MoveOn’s email blast): Akin doesn’t belong in the United States Senate. For my money, he doesn’t belong anywhere near anything that affects policy regarding women. I’m with you that far. But let’s talk tactics here for a moment. Instead of signing Ms. Barr’s petition, this is the reply I sent to the MoveOn mail server. Not because I’m a crank who sends reply emails to anonymous, automated bot servers out of frustration (who, me??), but because, well…here:

Have you lost your minds? Todd Akin is the best thing that could have happened to Clare McCaskill! Don’t believe me? Ask her. McCaskill is THRILLED that, in very  purple Missouri, the GOP primary electorate – in their wisdom – chose Akin instead of one of the far more eminently reasonable (read: less extreme) candidates they COULD have chosen on the recent primary ballot. Akin represents McCaskill’s best comparative chance at retaining her Senate seat. So, while I agree that Todd Akin must go, let’s remember that he hasn’t actually arrived yet, and thus calls for him to “go” are premature. Right now, there’s every likelihood that he will “go” all on his own, through the already-existing mechanism we call “November’s election.” Let’s not spoil that by trying to remove him prematurely from the ballot, which would only result in McCaskill facing a tougher opponent this November.

That’s why I sometimes despair of the left: of COURSE Akin should no more be allowed near the levers of power – based on the strength of this lone, thuddingly awful, retrograde comment itself – than Wile. E. Coyote should be hired as a security guard at the Roadrunner Motel. But trying to have Akin thrown off the ballot or otherwise disqualified NOW, with the election that would determine his fate anyway coming up in less than three months, strikes me as misguided at best. Missouri is a deeply divided (“purple”) state. It’s home to both Harry Truman and current darling of the wingnut blogosphere, Jim Hoft (Gateway Pundit — too stupid for me to waste a link on). Had McCaskill drawn any of the other, less insane opponents out of the GOP primary, she would currently be in a much tougher race than she already is. As of the end of July, McCaskill trails Todd Akin by five points. These neanderthal comments by Akin will certainly have a negative effect on his poll numbers against McCaskill, especially among Republican women who might otherwise prefer the daddy-figure in this year’s Senate race, but who perhaps have daughters and/or a personal history with unplanned pregnancy, and who will conclude, after Akin’s disastrous remarks, that a woman like McCaskill is preferable to a troglodyte like Akin who understands literally nothing about them.

All of which means that to do anything to preemptively remove Todd Akin from the Missouri Senate ballot for November is to ensure that Claire McCaskill faces a more difficult-to-beat opponent this fall. And that’s the last thing we want to do. Claire McCaskill may have her faults, but right now it’s either her or whoever the Republican party of Missouri coughs up like a cat with a hairball. I’ll take McCaskill any day, warts and all.

The Julian Assange Saga Continues

If you’ve read or watched the news today, other than the usual chatter about the various facets of the Presidential race, the one story you won’t have been able to escape is the almost spy novel-like drama surrounding Julian Assange and the Ecuadorian embassy. In the end, Ecuador turned out to really not enjoy being bullied and threatened, even in that inimitable, jolly-good sort of inoffensive manner in which the Brits did so, and ultimately offered Assange asylum. The high-handed and imperious tone taken by the British government, along with the serious violations of international diplomatic convention they both committed and implied they were willing to commit, got me to thinking.

I have no idea whether Julian Assange is guilty of the charges of sexual assault and rape that have been leveled against him. It’s not my intention to try to dig up what feels like the bones of those arguments (because they are now almost two years old, despite the issue not having been actually resolved yet), and certainly not my intention to draw charges of complicity with rape culture or making excuses for yet another entitled-ish white man. It’s undeniable, though, that the evidence has been steadily amassing that several governments really, REALLY want to get their hands on Assange, for reasons having nothing at all to do with any sexual crimes Assange may have committed in Sweden. Several in our own government have said, flat-out, they want to apprehend/prosecute him for his work with WikiLeaks.

Today’s Ecuador/Britain dust-up over Assange and the larger issues of diplomacy and sovereignty was a clear demonstration of the lengths to which the Brits at least are willing to go to apprehend Assange — and it’s far outside what they would ordinarily do or have done in similar cases where the only charges against a person are sexual in nature. Rape is a serious thing, no question…but charges of rape are not typically something that functions on the level of geopolitics, unless it’s something like the systemic rape of a whole population by invading armies or occupying forces. Criminal charges against one person for rape, though? You just don’t see a country as old and civilized as Britain – one of the founders of modern diplomacy and national dialogue – threatening to, without warning or precedent, summarily void the ambassadorial privileges of another sovereign nation that has long had an embassy on British soil. Hell, with Assad in Syria desperately and despicably turning his guns recently on his own people indiscriminately, Britain’s reaction was merely to formally expel the top Syrian diplomat (a measured, proportional response). They didn’t threaten to summarily alter the relationship between the countries in a hostile manner.

Yet when the subject turns to one lone man wanted for questioning in two separate rape/sexual assault cases (and not even in Britain!)…all bets are suddenly off, and the representatives of the empire on which the sun shall never set are suddenly behaving like tin-pot third world dictators of yore. That made me revisit the charges against Assange already in place. Again, and for the record, I have no idea if the charges Assange stands accused of by the Swedish women are accurate. If they are, he should be punished according to Swedish law. But I couldn’t help thinking that if I really wanted to ruin a political actor like Assange, not just on a personal level, but to sideline him, destroy his credibility and make all aspects of his continued work, from fundraising to press interviews to acquiring new sources and being seen as a credible, trustworthy outlet, I would do EXACTLY what has been done to Julian Assange. You don’t attack a man like Assange by calling him a terrorist or a criminal for his work with Wikileaks – that just increases his cachet and makes the alternate story his supporters tell – that Assange is a fearless whistleblower/truth-teller – all the easier to tell and easier to swallow. Instead, you destroy him on a personal level: make him seem sleazy, untrustworthy, dirty – above all, base. A pervert. A rapist. Perhaps even more than charges of Dahmer-type serial murder/cannibalism, these are the types of charges that will well and truly ruin the ability of a man like Julian Assange to do what he’s been doing for the past several years.

And it’s worked, in large part: WikiLeaks continues to operate, but Assange has spent the better part of the last two years in hiding, fighting an opaque and somewhat dull, private fight against legal maneuverings, instead of continuing with the ascendancy into changing the way we think about and maybe even practice journalism in the twenty first century. His star is tarnished by clouds of doubt, even in the minds of people who have and would otherwise support him. Uncertainty has been created. And if Assange did all this to himself by actually having committed the crimes he stands accused of, then he deserves every bit of the fall from grace as well as the actual criminal punishment. But, for the governments of Britain and the United States and other countries who desperately would like to shut WikiLeaks up, it’s awfully convenient that just raising this issue and these charges has had the effect it already has had on Assange.

Britain’s behavior today shows just how far at least one of these governments is willing to go outside the bounds of what would normally be expected in such a case, because this is NOT a normal case. This is Julian Assange, founder and principal of WikiLeaks. If one of the world’s oldest and most civilized governments was ready, on literally a moment’s notice, to summarily void their diplomatic ties with an entire country in pursuit of Julian Assange, is it really so unlikely that one or more interested actors might fabricate or embellish charges of a sexual nature against him?

About Mitt Romney’s Tax (Disclosure) Evasion

So lately, as everyone who reads blogs or watches left-ish TV pundits knows, much hay has been made about Mitt Romney’s seemingly-inexplicable refusal to release more than two years worth of his tax returns – the last two, when he knew for certain he was already running for President in 2012. Actually, Romney hasn’t even fully released all of those two years, but close enough. Speculation has focused on the previous, well, all of the years between the time Romney left the protective umbrella of his dad’s finances and forged out into the world on his own and the present. Many a commentator, up to and including President Obama’s oppo-research team, have speculated – not without reason – about why Romney continues to refuse to disclose tax returns from years prior to 2010.

Speculation has focused specifically on the notion that perhaps Romney may have paid no taxes at all in some years. The Obama campaign released an ad to that effect not long ago, to great fanfare and speculation on the left (as well as some deflection and outrage on the right). More recently, Senate majority leader Harry Reid dropped the bombshell that a former Bain investor with knowledge of the matter told him directly that in some prior years, Romney indeed paid no taxes whatsoever.

If these allegations are true, they are indeed a bombshell, for exactly the reasons Romney would be wise to keep such news private if he possibly can: because although the American electorate tends not to begrudge people wealth – even great wealth – we also have a stubbornly persistent anti-elitist streak, as well as an enduring sense of fair play. In short: while few voters will look upon the simple fact of Romney’s enormous wealth as a detriment (indeed, it may even be seen as an asset by many, on its own), those feelings would almost certainly change for many voters if it was revealed that Romney’s millions were accumulated at the expense of fellow Americans (hence the offshoring ads), or that Romney utilized strategies available only to the wealthy to avoid paying his fair share of taxes like most of the rest of us must. And if it were revealed specifically that Romney really did pay NO taxes whatsoever during some of the years he was raking in his millions – even only one or two years – such a revelation would be a candidacy-ending event. Mitt Romney would not be able to be elected dogcatcher in the wake of such a disclosure.

This dynamic is already well-understood by political observers, both professional and amateur. Certainly, both campaigns are aware that would be the case. And indeed, the Romney campaign’s continued stonewalling on the issue of the candidate’s pre-2010 taxes does lend itself to ever-wilder speculation along these very lines. Unfortunately, that’s exactly where the Democrats, the Obama campaign and progressive commentators may be making a serious tactical political blunder.

Let me be clear: if someone on the Democratic side knows for a fact the most-severe of the allegations about Romney’s taxes are true (not just suspects they might be true), then full speed ahead: up the pressure on the tax issue until Romney has no choice but to release the returns. That would be the equivalent of holding four aces for the Obama campaign, and it would be difficult to overplay or blow such a great hand.

But here’s the thing: if no one except the IRS and Mitt Romney (and, I suppose, John McCain) know what’s really in Romney’s previous-year tax returns – in other words, if Reid isn’t certain of his source and/or the Obama campaign is just speculating for political effect, then publicly and repeatedly speculating about a worst-case scenario such as Romney having paid no taxes at all may very well work against Obama and Democrats.

Why? Because although the pressure applied is the same, the end result almost certainly would not be. One of the lines of reasoning most often given (to fairly good effect) to explain Romney’s continued refusal to release any more of his taxes is that it must mean whatever’s in those tax returns would be so politically damaging to Romney that it’s better to take whatever damage comes from not releasing them, compared to the damage that would be incurred from disclosure.

If Romney really did pay no taxes, then that suspicion would be correct. But what if the Romney campaign’s refusal to release other tax years’ returns is nothing more than the stiff-necked authoritarianism and “you people” dismissiveness of a man not used to having to answer to anyone? What if those old tax returns show some chicanery, but not much worse than the 13.9% rate he’s already disclosed for the 2010/11 years, and nothing close to the bombshell of having paid no taxes at all?

In that case, ratcheting up the pressure on Romney to intolerable levels may very well backfire. If the Obama campaign and liberal commentators and journalists make the Romney team believe that the political cost of remaining silent has exceeded the likely damage of disclosure, the result could easily be that the public’s reaction to the actual revelations (having been set SO high by loose – and, it turns out, unsubstantiated – claims of total tax avoidance by Romney) is a big yawn. After such a build-up, moderate tax-avoidance may well seem like no big deal, at least in comparison.

Worse, Democrats, journalists and the Obama campaign will appear to have been embarrassingly hyperventilating in their accusations (not to mention wrong), and Mitt Romney will be easily portrayed by any competent campaign staffer as the aggrieved, unjustly-accused party, even though there may be issues the voters would otherwise care about in what Romney revealed.

Obviously, I have no idea either what might be lurking in Mitt Romney’s tax returns from, say, the Bain years or why his campaign is declining to release more than two years of returns even in the face of mounting pressure to do so. So I’ll repeat: if someone in the Obama’s oppo team or elsewhere in the Democratic establishment really does have the goods regarding what’s in Mitt’s old tax returns that’s making him so apprehensive about releasing them, and if that reason really IS that Mitt Romney paid no taxes in at least one year, then the current, wildly speculative strategy is exactly the right strategy.

But if this is all just guesswork on the part of the Obama campaign, Reid and lefty pundits, and an attempt to score points against an opponent’s seemingly-inexplicable refusal to disclose past tax data, then it might be worth trying to avoid overshooting the target with all that speculative outrage, and risking a let-down in reality. The stakes are too high for this kind of a bet if you’re not actually holding those four aces.