Lev is a software developer and political observer/sometime activist in the East Bay region of California, with a great interest in the game of politics and many areas of policy. He started a personal blog in 2006 and loves the form for its author/reader interaction.
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But What Sort Of Pragmatism Are We Talking About?

by Lev on 4 May 2012

I typically react viscerally against titles like, “The Republican Party is more pragmatic than you might think,” but there’s actually not that much to object to in the actual piece:

Over the past few years, it has hardened into something approaching conventional wisdom that the conservative/Tea Party wing is in the process of taking over the GOP. But while the right has certainly asserted itself – particularly in the 2010 midterm elections, with mixed results – the reality is that the Republican Party is now in the process of nominating an establishment figure with a moderate reputation for president. Again.

And just like in 2008, when Sen. John McCain was the nominee, there has not been a significant conservative revolt to the pending nomination of Mitt Romney. Indeed, this week brought an endorsement for Romney from self-anointed Tea Party champion Michele Bachmann, as well as a semi-endorsement from Newt Gingrich, who spent the primary season thundering that Romney does not represent his party. Conservative journalists and commentators, meanwhile, held an off-the-record confab with Romney, and while he reportedly didn’t win them over completely, they certainly don’t seem to be in the process of mutiny.

Pragmatism is one of those words that can be used in different ways, and means different things to different people. To me, it means emphasizing practicality, argument, evidence and reason over abstraction, ideology, overfixation on process and pie-in-the-skyism. It’s not a term I would associate with Republicans in general, but when it comes to matters of gaining and holding power the GOP has often proven to be very pragmatic. Sure, occasionally they shoot themselves in the foot in pursuit of purity, but it’s not as often as is commonly believed. Policy is another matter entirely–Republicans during the debt ceiling drama were so obsessed with process and with not compromising at all that they let the chance of a very sweet deal (from their perspective) slip through their hands, one which could have obliterated Barack Obama’s presidency had it been enacted by causing a deep split between the Administration and progressive supporters. It would have been a masterful stroke, but Republicans were too rigid to do it. This here is the opposite of pragmatism.

Why has Romney been accepted by the right wing, despite his past? It’s not because of his popularity. It’s not because of his “steadfastness”. Many people have derisively compared him to John Kerry, but I sort of wonder if that isn’t working for him. Romney does indeed recall Kerry, who most Republicans simply saw as weak, lacking conviction, unable to lead. But among Republicans, that’s a feature, not a bug. The true leader of the GOP at this point in time is Paul Ryan, as we’ve discussed. Romney has signaled repeatedly that he supports Ryan’s plan, and some of the right’s biggest powerbrokers have argued that this essentially makes Romney beside the point, a means to an end (case in point). This is, to be sure, some pretty stiff pragmatism.

But there is reason to believe that Norquist and others do not get the dynamics at play here. Sure, Paul Ryan is the Republicans’ informal leader now and has been for the past year and change, but that’s really because the party’s formal leadership isn’t all that strong. John Boehner is a largely powerless and unpopular figure, Mitch McConnell isn’t all that likable and is a cynical pol who tends to be strangely honest about his cynicism. Neither one possesses the recognition, charisma or authority to become the de facto Republican leader, and in our system of government there is no formal Leader of the Opposition. Ryan has been able to lead despite not possessing any formal post of leadership, but what happens when the GOP gets a formal leader? Norquist and like-minded conservatives underestimate the authority and prestige of the office and its ability to set the parameters of the discussion. It’s worth noting that President Obama was able to alter the discussion after the debt ceiling drama last year back toward jobs and economic growth, despite the fact that his popularity was at extremely diminished levels at that point.

The simple fact is that presidents set the agenda in American politics, not committee chairmen from the lower house of Congress. Ryan’s agenda is honey to men like Norquist, who relish the idea of gutting pretty much every function of government, with the possible exceptions of the military and the border patrol. But are Republicans following Ryan’s banner because they truly identify with his cause, or because nobody else is providing leadership? Norquist’s reasoning has a certain sort of counterintuitive flair to it, just like the best (and worst) Washington arguments, and it’s certainly possible that Romney would make a push to enact the Ryan Budget. But the notion that Romney is too weak and shifty to stand up to intramural pressure, and that this will trump his being too weak and shifty to stand up to pressure from the national electorate, should be regarded as a risky gamble. Certainly, it’s not an especially pragmatic one. But Romney’s presidential bid has been backed by conservatives with these sorts of arguments from the start on the one hand, and has mostly been backed by more moderate voters who don’t believe Mitt is half the radical he says he is on the other hand. If he wins, at least one of these groups is going to look awfully foolish.

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Words To Take To Heart

by Lev on 4 May 2012

This song really struck me when I heard it this week:

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Don’t Make Me Laugh

by Lev on 3 May 2012
Politico parodies itself (via):
The Senate, once the chamber of deliberation and reason, is getting its own extreme makeover. Moderates such as Maine Republican Olympia Snowe and Democrat Ben Nelson are bolting an institution that barely resembles the one they entered as idealistic deal makers.
Ben Nelson? Idealistic dealmaker? These are words that should not be in the same sentence, unless “not” or “in no way in hell is” or “could only ironically be referred to as” is separating them. Do I really need to elaborate here? (Also, Nelson didn’t voluntarily leave, he had no chance to win again due to his own corruption. It’s not like he did what Snowe did.) Come on, Politico. Don’t Friedman this. If you’re going to do this centrism-nostalgia thing, put your whole heart into it. That’s all I ask.
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Pointless Prize

by Lev on 2 May 2012

Alec McGillis makes some sense here on the odd battle to secure NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s endorsement:

My guess is that it’s about Romney’s attempts to reclaim the center. If Romney were to land a smooch from Bloomberg, I doubt it would have much direct effect anywhere he has a chance to win. But it would buy him some favorable coverage from the elite media—suffice it to say that the Times would play it high—and the refracted glow could help him among certain upscale voters nationally.

And Obama, of course, would rather not have tons of stories featuring “Romney” and “moderate” in the same sentence, basically. I understand why he’d make the effort, as it doesn’t really cost Obama anything, but it’s not exactly high-stakes.

The larger issue here, is that Romney very much wants the media the people to believe that he’s a moderate, and preferably without his having to actually become one. Obama is a moderate who a lot of people have been convinced is some sort of radical, and if Romney somehow does convince the center that he’s one of them, the game is over. Good news is that Romney has a number of radical positions that it will be difficult to shed. One could easily imagine Team Obama countering every new Romney position with an ad showing Romney making a much more extreme and strident point on the same topic, which our media betters will no doubt decry as incivil or demeaning the conversation, but which will make it very difficult for the public to get any read on who Romney is, get to trust him, or feel comfortable voting for him. Mitt’s best hope, really, is to find actual moderates to vouch for him–Bloomberg, Colin Powell, various Bushes and hangers-on, conceivably Evan Bayh, etc. These are strong possibilities for Romney supporters. Then again, I hardly think any of these guys has the juice to shake Romney’s Etch-a-Sketch hard enough to fully reset it.

Also worth noting: the media scoffed at the idea that John McCain could ever be regarded as the “same as Bush,” despite having supported virtually every policy initiative that really mattered to right-wingers, because McCain probably held onto some lingering resentment to Bush personally and occasionally criticized him for being not hawkish enough. Normal voters decided there wasn’t much of a difference after all. The media’s take on Romney is not yet entirely clear, but I suspect Obama will be well able to convince people that Romney is a hard-right dude despite the media’s scoffs.

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On The Road Again

by Lev on 1 May 2012

I must say that the discussion over whether or not Mitt Romney would have pushed the button on Osama bin Laden is mostly uninteresting to me as a matter of policy. There’s really no way of knowing for sure–my guess is that Romney would not have done it so as to avoid the risk of it backfiring, but who really knows. Overall, though, I can’t get too worked up about it because it’s so obviously about making the guy Look Weak. See Josh Marshall for the specifics on this angle. Me, I know he’s weak. He has no demonstrable values, only a dense shell of self-satisfaction that you tend to find in the most disastrous figures in political history. There’s no real strength because there’s nothing to lean on when things get tough, which is why Romney does the easiest thing imaginable when that happens. Every. Time. That is what weakness is. So I’m bored by all this.

But damn if it isn’t fun watching Barack Obama playing for keeps. I like this too. He’s showing definite signs of the intelligence, idealism, passion, toughness, and strategic judgment that convinced me that he was the guy in 2008. Obviously he couldn’t have maintained that level of intensity (or adulation) for four years–that would have been exhausting–and I understand that he felt he needed to conduct himself a certain way as president. But I think he overreacted in being so self-consciously adult, neutral, and withdrawn. I realize that might have been tactically best for passing stuff, but it was crap for morale, and you have to give the American people something if you want them to get excited about what you’re doing. It’s not as if that were the only (or most important) reason why Obama’s presidency hasn’t quite lived up to expectations–part of that has to be the expectations themselves, and part of it has to do with trying to be responsive to Washington expectations and norms rather than truly trying to change them. But when I see the guy catching Romney in the solar plexus with a well-timed proverbial elbow (what was his message for the week again?), or standing up for women’s rights in eloquent fashion, it just puts a twinkle in my eye. I’m not naive and I fully know that a second term will most likely consist of more preemptive concessions, “grand bargains,” and joyless, unsatisfying governance, only without the consolation of actually getting through flawed but still decent legislation through since Republicans aren’t likely to be swept out. But that’s something to worry about next time (and it sure beats the mental image of Mitt Romney signing the Ryan Budget into law).

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A Statement In And Of Itself

by Lev on 30 April 2012

news

In other words, CSM has good information, FOX is nonsense, WaPo has some reliable blogs, and The Atlantic loves mainlining junk. Same as it ever was.

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Mitt Romney: Still Not A Technocrat

by Lev on 30 April 2012

I’d like to answer this question:

The perception of Bush as inexperienced and unprepared on this front was not wrong. This is arguably more worrisome in Romney’s case because he appears to have no firm principles, which makes him more vulnerable to influence from his advisers, and because he usually has a reputation for being very detail-oriented in his understanding of other subjects. Bush was poorly informed about foreign affairs, but that was a function of his lack of intellectual curiosity. What accounts for Romney’s apparent lack of interest in a subject that he still can’t seem to stop bringing up? I don’t know, but I submit that it’s not a good sign.

I propose that this can be entirely explained by what we already know about Romney. We know already that Romney switched from being pro-choice to being pro-life due to a political need, but that process (as this Slate piece I’ve linked to before suggested) wasn’t one where Romney just decided one day that he wanted to be president and that he was changing his position to win votes. The piece makes it clear that ambition was the driving factor in the change, but not on a conscious level–it’s almost as though Romney supplied the goal and delegated the job of getting there to his brain, while still being able to maintain a consistent throughline.

Why couldn’t he have done the same with foreign policy? Daniel frequently notes that Romney’s complaints against Obama are all from 2009, but doesn’t this make sense if Romney was keyed into FOX News in 2009–a fair assumption–and heard over and over again that Obama was the worst foreign policy president ever and was using rapidly-forgotten detritus like, who knows, the Churchill’s bust incident, and that that was the goal he set his brain to get to? Obama’s foreign policy has hardly been perfect, but it has been perfectly bipartisan, and it’s hard to come up with a single action Obama took on foreign policy that ought to infuriate Republicans on general principle. The only thing that comes to mind are Obama’s intermittent attempts to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, which do deserve credit from us liberals as they count as one of those points where Obama was willing to swim upstream to accomplish a key progressive goal. But those efforts have not been entirely successful, and thus are of limited propaganda value. What else are you going to bash Obama about? His bipartisan Afghanistan policy? Repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell? Ending the Iraq War? Hell, there aren’t even very many obvious ways to hit Obama on not intervening in other nations’ affairs. He went into Libya, after all. He didn’t go into Iran or Syria (thank God!), so Romney has attacked him on those, of course. But after that, the pickings get thin.

So, the basic problem here for Romney is that he’s tried to perfectly mimic the Republican brand, particularly the FOX News variety. This includes a liberal amount of ignorant hawkery, and constructs a narrative of how Obama is, like, Jimmy Carter times a thousand, unable to face our enemies (USSR Iran), not being nice to our friends (The Shah Israel), and just won’t stop apologizing for America (when?). This narrative only makes sense if you ignore substantial portions of Obama’s record on foreign policy (and add a few things to them that didn’t happen), and the key themes of his record are (1) following through on winding down America’s wars, while (2) essentially continuing all of Bush’s security policies and building on them in several ways (e.g. drones, Libya), and (3) working with Republican and Democratic hawks, rather than, I don’t know, just outright saying we won’t bomb Iran. That’s a mixed bag, though it’s relatively hard for Republicans to argue with on the whole. Ultimately, I suspect Romney cares very little about this on an intuitive level because, as Larison notes, he hasn’t taken even the most basic steps to understand the situation or formulate any real vision. But he will keep shouting about it because he’s talked himself into thinking that the Honduras coup is one of the most important historical events ever, because the pundits on FOX were yammering about it right when he was forming his critiques of Obama for 2012, and he’s responsive to what his electorate wants, to say the least. Sure, Mitt Romney might not feel it matters deep down in his soul, but how could you? Honduras resolved all that years ago, it’s the deadest of horses. But Romney will shout about it for as long as he can. This is just a reminder that the idea that Mitt Romney will be some sort of sober, low-key technocrat in office is quite simply fanciful–a guy who can convince himself of the cosmic importance of such ephemeral twaddle is not someone you want anywhere near power.

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Fun Friday: When FDR Defended The White House Armed Only With A Pistol

by Lev on 27 April 2012

I was thrilled to find out that Chris Elliott’s classic one-man show about FDR is available on these here intertubes. It’s a gleefully inaccurate account of the president’s life, and a brilliant skewering of the silly conventions and pretensions of one-man shows. I completely lost it when Roosevelt escaped the Japanese attack on the White House by slipping away to a deserted island:

Glad to see Elliott is having some success with Eagle Heart. He’s long been one of my favorites.

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Lugar To Lose

by Lev on 26 April 2012

It looks as though the Teahardists really are going to take down Dick Lugar. I have to say that I’m unclear as to what their grievances are with him. With Bob Bennett I had a pretty good sense of whey they were angry with him: he voted for the TARP Bill and supported the principle of health care reform (though not, of course, the ACA). Lugar voted yes on TARP as well, but other than that I have no clue (and not everyone who voted yes on TARP has been purged, by any means).

I suspect Lugar has been doomed just by having been around for a long time, and he’s on relatively friendly terms with Obama and worked with him on START and other arms control measures. Which doesn’t seem like much to me. To be honest, I don’t really understand the strategy of the Tea Party in these primary contests, if there even is one. Taking down Bennett made some amount of sense–election for a Republican in Utah is guaranteed, and if you can get in someone more right-wing, why not? But dumping Lugar turns a cakewalk Senate election into a dead heat, complicating Republicans’ Senate dreams even further, just like taking down Mike Castle ruined the GOP’s chances with that seat. Yeah, yeah, I know, better to have 30 pure Republicans than 70 fake ones or whatever Jim DeMint said, but these days the fake ones almost never abandon their party on big votes. Just like “pro-choice” Republican Senators all voted for the Blunt Amendment to limit contraception. The Tea Party doesn’t really have a firm grasp on the dynamics of their own party–dynamics they largely created by taking down even mild dissenters like Bennett, Bob Inglis, Castle, and so on–and thinks that they need to take down even more randomly-chosen Republicans to scare them into submisison. And that’s potentially a good thing for Democrats. Looks like Joe Donnelly made the smart call to run for the Senate, he appears to have a real chance to reclaim an Indiana seat for the Blue Team.

For Lugar I have some sympathy, as he’s one of those Republicans who are Good For Something (specifically arms control). But then again he limited his dissent during the Bush years to mild murmurings of disapproval. Much like Chuck Hagel, he was uncomfortable with how things went on Iraq and other things but never actually did anything about it. You don’t get points for attempted courage. So I’m not really that broken up.

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