But in fact, McCain was a deeply psychologically damaged man, who legislated based upon 3 simple principles: 1) Who John McCain hates at any given time and how he can try and screw that person 2) What gets John McCain the most press 3) What is in John McCain's political interest.
Most of McCain's brief period of sanity, which extended from about 1999-2003, saw him join Democrats on everything from campaign finance reform to a patient's bill of rights, opposing Bush's tax cuts to opposing the Christian Right, supporting CAFE standards to supporting closing the gun-show loophole. But the reasons behind this transformation, as I laid out in my book, had little to do with his being a responsible man of the people, as he was portrayedvirtually everywhere.
So it all comes down to this. As schools across the nation are winding up their academic calendars, test scores are ruling the lives of educators and families to an unprecedented extent. Some kids -- especially those enrolled in special education programs or those whose primary language isn't English -- are having their futures forever altered by a score from a single test given on a single day. And teachers' lives are also being thrown into turmoil as "technical glitches" delay test results and sew confusion. From my own perspective, high-stakes tests meant that my child could take the last of school week off from classes so teachers could use that time to drill and retest students who failed end-of-year exams.
So as teachers dutifully marched through their orders to impose a test-driven approach to education that is antithetical to everything they believe to be in their students' best interests, they are nevertheless being told that that their jobs must be made harder and their work held to an ever tougher scrutiny.
Leading pundits such as David Brooks hailed this year as the year that public school teachers have rightly become "fair game." According to Brooks, the whole reason for 27 years of school reform failure is that we haven't been tough enough on teachers. What's needed is to get "Patton-esque" on these lay-abouts and adopt "stubborn, data-driven" policies that have a "low tolerance for bullshit."
The recurrent call to "get tough" on teachers and schools now dominates the discourse on education in our country. Time and time again, we are told that the solution to boosting student test scores is to ratchet-up the pressure on educators. Teachers are told that they have to work harder and for longer hours; their training has to be tougher, and their jobs made less secure.
From their cushy chairs and air-conditioned offices in DC thinktanks and corporate headquarters, education reformists chant the get-tough mantra to make standards "tougher" and make teaching more "rigorous." Addressing an audience of educators that is mostly female, their prose bristles with masculine exhortations to be tough-minded with teachers and "stiffen" requirements.
And some wonder why teachers feel they are being beat up on?
What is particularly irritating about crank complaints against "political polarization" is how utterly ineffective their proposed solutions to the "problem." The best available political science on the topic (PDF) suggests a major factor (the rise of a two-party system in the South) and a minor factor (increased income inequality):
Using National Election Study data from 1952 to 2000, we explore the relationship between income and voter partisan self-identification. We find that partisanship has become more stratified by income. We argue that this trend is largely the consequence of polarization of the parties on economic issues and the development of a two-party system in the South. The trend is much less a reflection of
increased economic inequality.
If the main cause for increased political polarization is the rise of a two-party system in the South, then a straightforward option to reduce polarization would be to entirely wipe out one of the two major parties in a large region of the country. I presume the pundits and pols who complain about polarization would not actually advocate for a one-party system in a large swath of the country (at least in public). Anyway, moving to a one-party system in one-third of the country is probably impossible anyway. As such, those complaining about this "problem" better get used to levels of polarization elevated above the 1932-1980 period indefinitely.
However, the secondary cause of political polarization, elevated income inequality, is actually a problem that many pundits and pols, including those in the center would desire to solve:
The problem is that both parties are not advocating for reduced income inequality. Barack Obama's call to "spread the wealth around" when he was a candidate became the most prominent attack ad used by John McCain in the 2008 campaign. This is some thick irony, given that John McCain has long been one of the favorites of anti-polarization pundits (McCain was the third most common guest on Sunday talk shows even before he ran for President in 2008) and anti-polarization pols, such as Joe Lieberman, who complain about political polarization.
To put it bluntly, the poster child for anti-polarization used an attack on the very concept of reducing income inequality as one of the main messaging points of his campaign, even though a reduction in income inequality is the only course of public policy that has been demonstrated to reduce political polarization.
In fact, one entire party isn't even advocating for reduced income inequality. The Blue Dogs, the exalted bearers of bi-partisan in the Democratic Party, prominently proclaim fiscal conservatism--which is largely synonymous with income inequality, and thus polarization--as their core value.
Until the cranks who complain about political polarization start actually advocating for a policy course that would reduce political polarization at its root cause--income inequality--then it is difficult to consider them anything except charlatans. Right now, most of the most prominent anti-polarization scolds take opposing a reduction in income inequality as their core value.
In a classic case of pundits projecting their beliefs onto the rest of the country, without citing anything except anecdotal evidence, David Broder thinks that voters are unhappy for the exact same reasons that he is unhappy:
Today, most opinion polls agree that fewer than 20 percent of voters approve of the job Congress is doing. Despite passage of a health-reform bill that will surely win a place in the history books along with economic stimulus and education aid measures that are large by any measurement, the prestige of the legislative branch has sunk to a historic low.
Why the failing grades? Part of it stems from the broad public reaction to the spectacle the lawmakers have made of themselves these past 15 months.... the partisanship on both sides was a turnoff to independents.
While Broder cited polls to show that Congress has a low approval rating, he conspicuously offers no polling to demonstrate his thesis that voters are unhappy over partisanship, offering up only anonymous anecdotes about conversations he has had.
That is all the evidence Broder can cite, because there is no evidence that voters consider partisanship to be a particularly high concern. In all of the "national problems and priorities" polls collected at Polling Report since the start of 2009, reducing partisanship only registered at to priority for 1% or the country of more in exactly one poll. That poll was conducted back in mid-January of 2009, and the result has never been replicated. People may say they want less partisanship in D.C. when polls ask them, but virtually no one outside of David Broder's circle of friends every tells pollsters that partisanship is a top priority for them without being prompted.
Even beyond evidence, if you spend anytime outside of D.C. it should seem baldly absurd to you that voters take partisanship in D.C. as an important concern. Most people do not spend a lot of time watching or thinking about politics. Most people won't even vote in 2010, just as most people have not voted in a mid-term election in several decades. Most people have real problems--like finding jobs, raising families, paying their bills--and are not particularly concerned if Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell are on friendly terms or not. Celebrity and sports drama is a helluva lot more interesting than congressional drama anyway
But what Broder is doing here is not just offering up an unjustifiable thesis statement, he is engaging in a form of projection that is common to a wide range of political pundits and commentators. Like so many others, he is offering up an evidence-free claim that voters are unhappy for the exact same reasons that he is unhappy. This can be seen not just when David Broder claims voters are unhappy about partisanship, but also when pundits state that younger voters have grown cynical because Obama hasn't delivered on change, when they claim that the country is upset because Obama is governing like a socialist, or any number of sweeping claims about the mood of the country.
It would be helpful if Gallup, or some other organization, would simply ask Americans some open-ended questions on major issues, and then publish the verbatim results. Just ask them why they think the country is moving in the wrong direction, why they approve / approve of President Obama and Congress, or why they are unlikely to vote in 2010. As Gallup did on health care, as CBS does on national priority polls, and as I did at MyDD on Iraq back in 2006, instead of prompting people with responses and concerns, just ask them and listen. In doing so, we all might actually learn something about what Americans are actually thinking, rather than just projecting our beliefs onto them.
I know for a fact that most polls rarely include these open-ended questions because open-ended questions on polls are much, much more expensive than other questions. Still, it would be nice to have some polls that could actually teach us something about what Americans are thinking.
Yesterday, I wrote a diary, "Why does Chris Matthews hate America?", focused on his utter cluelessness regarding basic civics, and the importance of defendant's and suspects rights in US history and the Constitution--something I was taught in grade school, then again in junior high, then again in high school.
I had originally intended to say more about his lack of grasp about separation of powers as well, as a comment by comment by Thomas Twinnings reminded me, but the flow of the diary had a mind of its own, and I let it be. Now I'd like to say just a little bit about that as well. As Thomas rightly notes, military tribunals are part of the executive--as is all of the military. Trying suspected terrorists there is a violation of separation of powers. Separation of powers is the core of the constitution, its basic architecture. Separation of powers is the means by which government power is checked by being divided against itself. It's the structural key to preserving limited government--government with limited powers, as opposed to absolute government, government with absolute powers. Republicans--who claim to love "limited government," but don't even know what it means, and who claim to hate government tyranny--have been undermining separation of powers every which way they can when it suits them, at least sine the time of Richard Nixon. And Obama's willingness to continue blurring the lines himself show just what kind of "constitutional scholar" he is (no kind at all, just a teacher, as someone said in a comment I now can't find--Grrrr! Arrrgh!) But I'll have more to say about Obama on the flip. First, let's turn to David Broder.
This week, Broder wrote yet another career-ending op-ed. He's written more of them than most people have written words. But to have an elite pompous ass like Broder lecturing the rest of us about our pompous elitism for not seeing and appreciating Palin's "pitch perfect populism" on the same day that his own paper is out with a poll showing that "Forty-five percent of conservatives now consider her as qualified for the presidency, down sharply from 66 percent who said so last fall." Well, that's just priceless.
Matthews and Broder are beacons of Beltway Babbitry. They epitomize how things are done, undone and not down in Versailles. Obama supposedly ran to change all that, but instead he's shown himself to be the ultimate champion of it--even as it's strangling him politically. But don't worry too much about Obama getting strangled, worry instead about him strangling us, as with his plans for a deficit catfood commission to cut back Social Security and Medicare. As Dean Baker says:
This week, at Swing State Project, Crisitunity reminded us of what we've all learned from Alaska bloggers since last August, Sarah Palin is a natural born quitter. Not only did she quit college so often that virtually no one could be found last year who remembered her from any of the places she attended (for example, LA Times, "Sarah Palin's college years left no lasting impression" carried the tag line, "In the five years of her collegiate career, spanning four universities in three states, Palin left behind few traces. Not many professors or students even remember her." See also, AP, and Slate)--but quitting played a key role in laying the ground for her gubernatorial bid:
One other thought about Alaska that just about everyone in the tradmed seems to be missing. Sarah Palin did have a job in between being mayor of Wasilla and Alaska Governor: she was chair of Frank Murkowski's Oil and Gas Commission. How long was she on this Commission? Less than a year... until she quit in January 2004 with a big public huff (leaving the Commission in the lurch with only one member), saying "the experience was taking the 'oomph' out of her passion for government service and she decided to quit rather than becoming bitter." She publicly cited her frustration with being unable to be all straight-talky and mavericky about the corruption and backbiting on the Commission, but the resignation also came at a very convenient time for switching over to lay the groundwork for her successful 2006 gubernatorial run.
So how does someone with such a gift for strategic quitting come to portray herself at the exact antithesis? Well, pretty much the same way that secessionist southern conservatives convince themselves that they're super-patriots: self-delusion. And what's the Palin/Broder tie-in? Again: self-delusion.
David Broder has wasted some valuable space in the Washington Post urging President Obama to hold firm against torture investigations. No wait, that's wrong. Space in the Post isn't valuable anymore. That explains why they're willing to publish this brilliant conclusion:
Suppose that Obama backs down and Holder or someone else starts hauling Bush administration lawyers and operatives into hearings and courtrooms.
Suppose the investigators decide that the country does not want to see the former president and vice president in the dock. Then underlings pay the price while big shots go free. But at some point, if he is at all a man of honor, George W. Bush would feel bound to say: That was my policy. I was the president. If you want to indict anyone for it, indict me.
Is that where we want to go?
Yes. That's exactly where we want to go. But Broder, like Peggy Noonan, just wants to look the other way. So the precedent would be this:
President wants to do something illegal. Wants to really bad. Compliant legal aides rewrite rules for him to do so. Underlings break laws based on said legal advice.
No one gets punished.
David Broder turns 80 this year. He should use the occasion to retire and the Washington Post should use the occasion to put something more insightful in the vacated space.
Everyone knows that David Broder is (a) the dean of the Versailles press corps and (b) a doddering old fool. But he's just received the smackdown to end all smackdowns from world-renowned primatologist Frans de Waal.
It seems that Broder was trying to create a narrative whereby John McCain won the first presidential debate, in his not-quite-subtley-titled column, "McCain as the Alpha Male". Unfortunately, (1) he didn't just use "Alpha Male" in the title, (2) he tried to play amature primatologist in the body of his column, (3) Al Gore invented the Internet, and thus (4) a world class primatologist delivered the mother of all smackdowns at Huffington Post.
Broder:
That suggests an imbalance in the deference quotient between the younger man and the veteran senator -- an impression reinforced by Obama's frequent glances in McCain's direction and McCain's studied indifference to his rival.
Whether viewers caught the verbal and body-language signs that Obama seemed to accept McCain as the alpha male on the stage in Mississippi, I do not know.
de Waal:
A confident alpha male chimpanzee would never show studied indifference. I have seen such behavior only in males who were terrified of their challenger....
A self-confident alpha male just approaches his challenger and sets him straight, either by attacking him or performing a spectacular display of his own. No avoidance of eye contact: he takes the bull by the horns.
It rather is the hesitant or fearful alpha male who avoids looking straight at the other, sidesteps him as if nothing happened, ducks when objects fly, and just hopes that the other will give up and go away.
So, David Broder's studied indifference, unmasked after all these years.
Two weeks ago, I claimed we were reaching "Peak I Told You So's," where the progressive base was consistently proven to be right about everything. Well, maybe we haven't reach the peak just yet.
For one thing, in case there was any remaining doubt about Joe Lieberman functionally serving as a mouthpiece for the Bush administration and its policies, now Cheney is hanging out in Lieberman's office:
A source tells us that Vice President Dick Cheney was spotted entering Joe Lieberman's Senate office today.
The Veep's press office confirms it. We'll be bringing you more on what happened soon...
And the "dean" of Lieberman defenders, David Broder, is accepting huge speaking fees from corporate PAC's on policy issues that Broder focuses on, such as health care. Harper's has the gory details on this one, documenting Broder speaking before multiple corporate health care consortiums, the Northern Virginia Association of Realtors, the National Association of Manufacturers, The American Council for Capital Formation, and a holiday cruise company. This is even though, back in the 1990's, Broder wrote the following:
It's clear that some journalists now are in a market category where the amount of money that they can make on extracurricular activities raises, in my mind, exactly, and, clearly, in the public's mind, exactly the same kind of conflict-of-interest questions that we are constantly raising with people in public life. . . .
People think that we are part of the establishment and therefore part of the problem. I mean, what bothers me is the notion that journalists believe, or some journalists believe, that they can have their cake and eat it too, that you can have all of the special privileges, access and extraordinary freedom that you have because you are a journalist operating in a society which protects journalism to a greater degree than any other country in the world, and at the same time you can be a policy advocate. You can be a public performer on the lecture circuit or television. I think that's greedy.
And two years ago, he wrote the following:
"The murky area, the ones where I need to check are the ones where I get an invitation from a business group," says the Washington Post's David Broder. "We don't want to be involved with people who have too much of a stake in anything. For example, I'm doing a lot of stuff on health care so I would not speak to any group that's a major player in the health care thing."
The progressive blogosphere has a longstanding argument that so-called "bi-partisanship" is really just wealthy media and political elites drowning in the corporate trough while providing cover for conservative politicians and legislation. With Lieberman not only endorsing McCain but hanging out with Cheney, and with the ultimate proponent of non-partisanship, David Broder, mopping up huge speaking fees from corporate PAC's, it is hard to come out with any other reading other than the one we DFH's have long provided. The elite railing against partisanship is really just corporatism and conservatism sold with a better package. As the two biggest icons of elite, anti-partisan sentiment, Broder and Lieberman are proof of this thesis all by themselves.
During the primaries, there were a lot of Obama supporters in the blogosphere we accepted his "post-partisan' argument, and scolded many bloggers for continuing to be partisan. However, when many of us bloggers hear about the need for anti-partisanship, bi-partisanship, or post-partisanship, for years the likes of David Broder and Joe Lieberman have been held up as the highest examples. I haven't heard much of this talk from Obama recently, but for a long time it sounded uncomfortably similar to what we have heard for years from Lieberman and Broder. If one heard Obama but lacked the recent historical context of how anti-partisan rhetoric has been used, hopefully these further revelations about Lieberman and Broder make it much clearer.
If you haven't yet done so, go read Digby's Bipartisan Zombies, a thoroughly enjoyable attack on the preachy musty meddling Broderites 'threatening' to back Michael Bloomberg's Presidential bid if the next President doesn't pledge to put in place a 'unity' government. As Chris Bowers and Matthew Yglesias among many others have pointed out, what this bipartisanship is really about is undermining the public's ability to participate in policy-making. One example illustrates this very clearly.
The first time the public showed opposition to the war was during the Congressional fight over the $87 Billion supplemental request in 2003. Bush very cleverly manipulated this into a negative for Kerry (I voted for it before I voted against it), but the actual request was remarkably unpopular and could have been used for electoral gain if Kerry had run a savvy progressive campaign. Here's what the public thought at the time:
"Earlier this year, Congress approved spending 79 billion dollars to help pay for the war in Iraq and the rebuilding effort there. George W. Bush has now called for spending 87 billion dollars more. Do you support or oppose this additional spending for the war and rebuilding in Iraq?"
Support
Oppose
Unsure
10/26-29/03
34
64
2
9/26-29/03
36
62
2
9/10-13/03
38
61
1
So that's what the public thought. And yet it passed the Senate 87-12, and the House by 303-125.
Senate Democrats voted by 37-12, or 76%-24%, to pass this bill opposed by 60-65% of the public. House Democrats were better, with a 83-118 vote against the bill. Still, 41% of Democrats in the House voted for this bill, and 59% voted against it, which is still less than the percentage of the public at large that opposed this bill. And that's the Democratic Party. In fact, the overall margin in the House was 70-30 for the bill, which is actually less conservative than the vote among Democratic Senators themselves.
I chose the first supplemental to examine, but the nature of these bipartisan votes is basically the same. It goes like this. The public is against a policy idea, and the bipartisan elites push it through anyway, and then, because it's bipartisan, no party can be held accountable for their choices. If everyone's at fault no one can be blamed, right? I chose the first funding bill to go through rather than the initial vote for war. The initial vote for war was popular, though public opinion was always more complicated than just 'yay war', so that was not exactly the right case to examine. But the same dynamics were obviously in play with the war vote.
Clearly, we are dealing with an extremely conservative set of decision-makers in DC within both parties and a public that is completely cut out of the process. That is bipartisanship, by the numbers. The vote authorizing the war in Iraq was a bipartisan vote, and partisanship would have stopped it. Five years later, wiretapping authority has been expanded and legalized by a bipartisan majority; partisanship would have stopped it. The Military Commissions Act which destroyed habeas corpus and legalized torture passed by a bipartisan vote; partisanship would have stopped it. Every attempt to reign in the national security authoritarian state has been beaten back by a bipartisan majority; partisanship would have pushed to roll it back. In fact, if we could just get Democrats to consistently vote the way the public would like on issue after issue, this would be a progressive country. Partisanship in other words would mean a progressive country responsive to the public, and bipartisanship means an authoritarian country where the public is cut out.
This time, Osama Bin Laden is telling insurgents in Iraq to cut the partisanship and come together to find centrist middle.
After all these years, I never suspected that Bin Laden was camped out in David Broder's office, but it sounds as if they've been drinking from the same Kool-Aid.
I literally laughed out loud when I saw the headline for this come up on Drudge. What a great story to finish the day!
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