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Obama Faces Super PAC Conundrum

2012-02-08T19:53:04Z

President Barack Obama's decision to give his "reluctant blessing" to a super PAC supporting him, Priorities USA Action, has created something of a low-grade mess for his campaign team, which has had to spend the past few days fending off charges of hypocrisy from the press. This is understandable! President Obama, after all, famously defamed the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision that has allowed these secretive organizations to flower and flourish. And the president has taken his share of shots from those on his side of the aisle as well: Russ Feingold characterized Obama's embrace of the super PAC system as "dancing with the devil."

Of course, the argument in favor of getting into bed with super PACs is equally compelling and typically involves the phrase "unilateral disarmament." Bill Burton, who runs Priorities USA Action, made the argument on MSNBC this morning, saying, "This is not a perfect system, and these are not the rules that we would have if we were able to just make them from whole cloth right now, but it's the rules that we have, and we are going into an election where Karl Rove and the Koch brothers and others have pledged millions of dollars against Obama ... we do not like the rules but we have to have a force against what they are doing."

In other words, Team Obama Re-Elect can fight according to the established rules of the game -- including those they do not care for -- and thus avoid going into a knife fight armed with a plastic spork, or they can stand on principle, get obliterated in the general, and everyone can spend the rest of their lives as private citizens, lamenting the corrupt campaign finance system with Buddy Roemer. As a tactical decision, it's the right one. It's the one I'd make, if I were in charge of tactical decisions.

But I'm not. It's my job to fret about the corrupt campaign finance system. Now, in terms of how this issue might impact anyone's electoral hopes, it's safe to say that at the moment, this is not going to be a matter that voters consider too deeply. With a fragile economy and high unemployment, I doubt it really even rates. But that could change. Sen. John McCain predicts that at some point, there's going to be some massive scandal that arises from all the money that's sloshing around. If something like that happens to Mitt Romney, it could end up costing him. But if it happens to Obama, it costs him double, because he's the guy in the race who took a principled stand against super PACs in the first place, and who is continuing to profess those principles, even as he fudges them.

My feeling is that if Obama is not going to unilaterally disarm, that's fine. But he's going to have to take some steps that might nevertheless place him at a disadvantage.

First, he will have to insist that his super PAC do the one thing it is legally entitled to abstain from, and offer absolute and total transparency. Priorities USA is going to have to disclose the sources of their funding -- the individual donors, the bundlers, right down to how the administrative costs of running the super PAC are funded. No part of this operation can be permitted to operate in darkness. What that means is that not only will the Obama campaign have to endure process stories about who is financing their effort, they'll also have to endure process stories about who is refraining from offering assistance. And shady money? That will have to be returned, no excuses.

Second, Obama is never going to be allowed to do what Mitt Romney has done during the primary season -- pass the buck. The main reason to have a super PAC in the first place is to have a campaign entity that can do all the dirty work -- the deceptions, the brutal attack ads, the low blows -- while giving the candidate something that looks like "plausible deniability." But Obama can't be the guy standing onstage at the debate, pretending to have no idea how it came to pass that his super PAC put out a controversial ad, and gosh golly if he had his way he'd put a stop to it ... but, you know ... that would be considered "coordination," so his hands are tied, shucks. If Obama is going to maintain some semblance of a principled stance, it's a luxury he can't claim for himself. In this way, someone like Mitt Romney is going to have a natural advantage over Obama, but what can you do? Romney never took a principled stand against super PACs!

Finally, Obama is going to have to find a way to convince voters that he's hot to reform the system he's using to win the election. Or at the very least, it's something that he should articulate, since many of his defenders are putting their principles on the line by making the argument that the only way to fight the system is to use the system, as Jonathan Chait argues:

Indeed, if you want to change the system, unilateral disarmament seems like a pretty bad way to go about it. Republicans are already pretty strongly opposed to campaign-finance reform. If keeping the current system means preserving a system in which their side gets unlimited outside spending and Democrats abstain, then the GOP is never going to agree to change it. Not that matching their money will force them to agree to reform, but eliminating the GOP's partisan self-interest in the status quo seems like, at minimum, a necessary step toward reform.

On a conference call with the Obama campaign yesterday, Greg Sargent and David Dayen attempted to get the president's aides to discuss how they might go about instituting reforms after the fact, should they win a second term. It doesn't sound to me like there's a lot of fervor for it:

"Should a constitutional amendment be necessary to reverse the worst aspets of the Citizens United law, he would support those efforts," the official said. "But ultimately as we look at what's possible this year, we recognize the reality of what the Republican Congress will and won't support."
"That doesn't mean his commitment to reform isn't there. But we're recognizing the reality of the political situation. We're going to need to elect a Democratic majority in Congress."

And there's the rub! Should the Democrats, with Obama as their standard-bearer, manage the feat of electing a Democratic Congressional majority in 2012, how inclined do you think the lawmakers who make up that majority will be to dismantle the mechanism they all used to win or retain their seats? I'd say it's not bloody likely that they would. And that's why, no matter how hard Obama and his super PAC try to walk with the angels, it's still a dance with the devil.

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Mitt Romney's Nomination Looks Inevitable

2012-01-17T21:34:17Z

For all of last night's fireworks, the window of opportunity for any of Mitt Romney's rivals to knock him out of the top spot is basically closing fast. Let's consider a few data points.

Think someone will mount a stand against Romney in South Carolina? Think again. The latest Monmouth University poll puts it bluntly: "Romney poised to go 3 for 3." The top-line results tell part of the story: There, Romney has an 11-point lead over Newt Gingrich, his closest rival. But let's dig deeper:

Gingrich (30%) does best among those who call themselves very conservative, leading both Romney (25%) and Santorum (21%) among this voting bloc. But Romney does particularly well among voters who see themselves as somewhat conservative (39%) and moderate or liberal (38%). Gingrich also does well among those who say they strongly support the Tea Party movement -- a group that represents more than one-third of the likely electorate -- with 31%, to 29% for Romney. However, Romney bests Gingrich among those who support the movement only somewhat (39% to 17%) and either oppose or have no strong opinion about the Tea Party (31% to 15%).

It's hardly surprising that Romney fares better than Gingrich among those who are only "somewhat conservative" or who "somewhat" support the Tea Party. What's important is that even among those who strongly support both, he's hardly getting dominated. If the third of likely primary voters who strongly identify themselves as being with the Tea Party give Gingrich only a 31 percent to 29 percent advantage, then this segment of the voting population isn't worth talking about.

And whatever support Rick Santorum might gain from the semi-unified front of national social conservatives is obviously arriving too late, if it arrives at all.

Romney is crushing all comers in Florida. When Florida decided to buck Republican National Committee rules and jump the primary calendar to January, it gambled that its contest was going to end up being the kingmaker. It looks as if that gamble is going to pay off. Today's Sunshine State News poll has Romney staking a 26-point lead, and there's been little evidence of vulnerability.

Up until now, one way of arguing against Romney's inevitability was to point out how few delegates he's already won. But once Florida's primary is in the books, we start playing with some bigger numbers. The Florida primary's move to January came with a cost -- its delegation was slashed from 99 to 50 in punishment for FUBARing the primary calendar. But Florida's prize amounts to the winner taking all, so Romney is poised to bank a big number of delegates on his tally, anyway. The failure to blunt Romney's momentum has essentially given him a better chance of winning bigger shares of larger piles of delegates.

By the time we're through with Florida, it looks like that old criticism that Romney can't win the support of more than 25 percent of the field will have fallen by the wayside as well.

Romney's rivalry with rivals rivaled by rivalry between rivals. Sure, at times during last night's debate, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich went after Mitt, and the conventional view is that Romney was finally knocked back on his heels once or twice. This has led the Washington Examiner's Byron York to wonder if Romney will keep participating in these debates, to spend four more evenings taking shots and attempting to "run out the clock."

But what's the harm? As Jonathan Martin of Politico points out, as long as Gingrich and Santorum jockey between themselves to be America's Next Top Not-Romney, they're fighting a grueling battle with Romney tucked neatly in the background:

In what's shaping up to be the decisive primary of the GOP race, Mitt Romney has two unwitting allies: Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich.
As they vie for the role of conservative alternative to Romney, Santorum and Gingrich can't help themselves from attacking one another, increasing the likelihood that the field remains too fractured to stop the front-runner from effectively claiming the nomination by notching his third consecutive victory.

And as I noted earlier, anytime that the debate conversation turns to Ron Paul battling the GOP establishment candidates over his unorthodox policy positions, Romney can put his hands in his pockets and enjoy the show.

Romney is now beating the Not-Romneys, anyway. The new Gallup Poll has Romney polling at 37 percent nationally among Republicans. Via Dave Weigel of Slate: "For the first time, support for Romney outpaces support for the three candidates running clearly to his right: Santorum, Gingrich, Perry. That conservative vote adds up to 33 percent."

But if the field got winnowed to just one of the Non-Paul, Not-Romneys, he would have a shot at defeating him, right? I'll confess that I've bought into the premise -- which I've borrowed from Rick Santorum -- that there is an "establishment primary" that Romney is winning, a "libertarian primary" that Paul is winning, and a "true conservative primary" in which the vote is getting divided up among Santorum, Gingrich, and Perry. The implication being that if all those votes could get consolidated around one rival, the lucky rival could potentially take Romney in a three-way fight.

Lynn Vavreck and John Sides, citing something I should have considered in the first place, says this premise is incorrect:

Why is the number of alternates important? Because many people are conflating two very different things: support for a candidate and disdain for another. Just because a voter prefers Rick Santorum for the Republican nomination does not mean that this voter would prefer any other candidate on the ballot to Romney. This false premise has led to a lot of faulty conclusions about Romney's support among the electorate.
In fact, Romney is the second choice of a quarter of the electorate who did not rank him as a first choice. Nearly 40% of Gingrich voters list Romney as their second choice. More than half of Huntsman voters do so.

This suggests that as the field narrows, Romney's support will grow, in contrast to the notion that the "anti-Romney" vote could coalesce around another, apparently more conservative candidate if there weren't so many conservatives in the race.

And this is just the evidence you pile up in advance of the contests that lie between Florida and Super Tuesday. Who's got the campaign in place right now to compete with Romney in Colorado, Nevada and Michigan? If you answered Perry, Gingrich or Santorum, you're wrong.

Miracle comebacks in South Carolina or Florida are still possible, I suppose. But it's a difficult haul. For Romney's rivals, a popular Dylan lyric sums it up: "It's not dark yet, but it's getting there."

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House GOP Caucus Could Do Better Than 'Braveheart' As Their Source Of Cinematic Pep

2011-12-21T17:16:33Z

When we look back on American history with our typical panglossian perspective, we tend to imagine that at every great moment, our nation was propelled into the future by the right person who had the right speech to stir our souls at the right time. Whether or not that used to be true, it doesn't seem to be the case anymore. At least if the House GOP caucus is any guide, anyway. For the second time in their first year as an assembly, they've relied on inspirational speeches from movies to inspire each other to go out and obstruct like the dickens! Hooray for Hollywood cliches, I guess.

Back in July, when the House GOP was trying to win the debt ceiling debate, they oddly chose a speech from the Ben Affleck movie "The Town" as their inspirado -- an odd choice, given the fact that the speech in question was used as a rallying cry for a gang of armed robbers to undertake violent revenge. They've stepped up their game, slightly, in recent days, using the climactic speech from "Braveheart" to motivate their members to, uhm ... leave 160 million Americans without tax relief.

Dana Milbank wasn't impressed, and neither was ThinkProgress culture blogger Alyssa Rosenberg, who thinks that the House GOP caucus should choose better movies, and maybe think things through a little further:

Now they're taking inspiration from Braveheart, which of course ends with its hero getting tortured and beheaded, perhaps a sign of psychological anxiety about their approval ratings?

Rosenberg suggests that the House GOP play things straighter, by turning to the sports movie genre for the most "unmuddled psych-up" speeches in film: "The speeches are martial without glorying in actual violence, a parallel way to set up climactic conflicts, and leave an out to feel good about yourself even if you lose." She includes a good mastercut of examples to draw upon:

The advantage to the sports movie genre is that it's pretty much instantly relatable to anyone. Your base is going to get it. But what's with all this "feel good about yourself even if you lose," stuff? I'm not sure that dog will hunt with Boehner's crew. And you have to be selective. If you pick the patriotic "Miracle," about the U.S. Olympic hockey team's 1980 victory over the Soviets, you'll be mining nationalist kitsch like a champ. Pick "Little Giants" and suddenly you're stuck with a movie about conquering adversity by being nice people who share their emotions and let women play football.

So, if you're interested in getting your caucus to wave the bloody shirt high in the air, you're drawn to the martial stuff. But, let's face it, "Braveheart" is pretty played out. And Mel Gibson comes with his own dysfunctional, self-torture baggage. Instead, you could go for something more beloved and less fraught, like Viggo Mortenson's speech at the Black Gate in "Return Of The King":

This has the right spirit, the right "us versus them" conflict, the right "might makes right" theme. But it's complicated somewhat by the fact that the real heroes are the pair of socialist agrarian Hobbits who save the day by destroying the weapon that effectively ends the arms race in Middle Earth and imbues its wearer with "American exceptionalism." You really just want something simple -- a speech against the tyranny of big government, urging your fellows, "If you would be free man, then you must fight!"

Well ... okay. I guess this is sort of a non-starter when it's a Muslim man urging people to support a group of forest-dwelling communists. I guess the martial stuff can be just as complicated. King Leonidas' oratory in "300" is wonderfully black and white, ceding no ground to any worldview other than the warrior code. But with everything so handsome and oiled-up and homoerotic, it could make for one extremely nervous and giggly caucus.

The famous "St. Crispin's Day" speech from "Henry V" is probably the best way to go -- provided everyone can handle iambic pentameter.

Of course, if you are John Boehner and you want to bring the entire conservative blogosphere to your side, there's an entirely different genre you should mine -- science fiction. One of the less well-kept secrets about political bloggers is that the Venn diagram between political wonk and sci-fi geek shows significant overlap. Long after we've passed from this earth and have ascended into the afterlife, where there will be no policy fights left to be had, bloggers from all political backgrounds will be arguing over the reboot of "Battlestar Galactica." But beyond that, the appeal of the genre is simple -- when the weight of the present begins to feel like a burden, it's inspiring to imagine yourself as someone helping to create a future.

Speaking of "Battlestar Galactica," this speech from Will Adama in that series is a fine example for the House GOP Caucus to use -- it's simple, martial, evokes heroism in defense of a cause thought to be lost, and best of all, it ends with a call for everyone assembled to move to the right (starboard):

If you're looking for something with a little more of a libertarian flavor, you can always opt for Malcolm Reynolds' "I aim to misbehave" speech from "Serenity":

Paper Video #1 - Malcolm Reynolds from Zombi Tard on Vimeo.

From time to time, I see a lot of blogger types citing Jean-Luc Picard's "The line must be drawn heeee-yeeeah" rant from "First Contact," but honestly, this is a better fit for Democratic legislators in this era of compromising and ceding ground in the never-realized hope for bipartisan consensus. (Appropriately, in the movie, Picard eventually gives in and compromises one more time after making a good show of standing his ground for a minute or two.)

At any rate, sci-fi is a vital source for pep talks, as it combines inspiration fueled by future imaginings, a warrior ethos, mass appeal, and catnip for allied bloggers and wonks. But whatever you choose, remember, the effect you are trying to achieve in the hearts of those you've gathered together to play film clips at is this:

And if there's one thing I can teach you, it's that you need to always remember to have someone on hand who knows how to work the VCR. I can't stress this enough:

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The 2012 Speculatron Weekly Roundup For Dec. 16, 2011

2011-12-16T23:10:46Z

Let's see, what can we say about this week in the 2012 race? Frankly, we're tempted to just say, "What we said last week, except more intense, and maybe a twist ending in Iowa? Or not!" This was the week where the seesaw that sawed Newt Gingrich into the top spot in polls in Iowa suddenly was seen to be see-ing back in the opposite direction. To the benefit of Mitt Romney? Maybe.

Romney could not have possibly started this week worse. First, he gets into a manhood measuring test with Rick Perry over the part of his book he changed and its context and significance, by daring Perry to make a bet. It's a bet that Romney would have won, if the matter had been judged by Politifact. But it was the swaggering amount of the bet -- $10,000 -- that had everyone's jaws dropping, and every Romney opponent reaching to stamp him with the patrician elitist label. (Let's be clear, of course, Rick Perry could have covered that bet. He's not exactly a tenant farmer anymore.)

With that, Team Romney began The Campaign To Humanize Mitt, and it was announced in a Politico feature story that unfortunately came with a picture of Romney poised to envelop some poor gray-haired lady in his robot arms. "Let me gently grind you with my upper body grasping pincers, human female!" was the message the image conveyed. Later in the week, Romney accepted and touted the endorsement of Delaware political grifter Christine O'Donnell, who for some reason is a person who journalists talk to. Her praise sounded like an epitaph: "He's been consistent since he changed his mind."

And yet somehow, this was actually a much, much worse week for Newt Gingrich. Why? Because all of his Republican pundit friends just cannot stand him. They hate him like they hate a bowl of cream of tapeworm soup. The Washington Post allowed George Will to be the centerpiece of a "page of Newt Hate," in which the denim-hating columnist teed off on Gingrich for daring to denigrate capitalism. But the National Review, said, "Okay, WaPo, we'll see your page of hate and raise you by a whole magazine worth of anti-Gingrich venom." By mid-week, the polls suggesting that Gingrich's support in Iowa was starting to crumble had begun their steady march.

Also aiding in the crumbling of Newt? Ron Paul! And not getting damaged by the relentless negative attacks? Ron Paul! Paul's never been closer to winning the Iowa Caucus, and succeeding there would be a critical "proof of concept" test for his movement, and a sanity-wracking event for everyone else in the GOP. Chris Wallace went so far as to say that such a result would "discredit the Iowa caucuses." Most people simply figured the win would be a boon for Romney. A few probably sized up John Huntsman's sudden strength and darkly wondered about the possibilities of a brokered convention. Maybe we should re-read that Mayan calendar we heard so much about, and see if it predicted the Donald Trump debate. (Which is not happening, thankfully.)

In short, bonkers bonkers nuts bananas times infinity plus one! But remember, all rides soon come to an end, and after Jan. 3, it's likely that one or more of our beloved candidates will be joining Tim Pawlenty and Herman Cain in the sweet bye-and-goodbye.

But for the moment, we roll on. This week Michele Bachmann teed up the easiest entry that Politifact has ever posted in its life. Rick Perry's campaign jumped the shark with a comparison to a sports hero. Ron Paul saw an old scandal take new life. Rick Santorum waited by the phone for his evangelical friends to call him back. Gary Johnson mulled a destiny-changing decision, someone you wouldn't believe is ahead of a big-name contender in New Hampshire, and you will never guess what candidate suddenly might win a single delegate from the Iowa caucuses if he plays his cards right. To find out, please enter the Speculatron for the week of Dec. 16, 2011.

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Karl Rove-Funded Ad Says Elizabeth Warren Is In Bed With Wall Street

2011-12-08T20:40:21Z

Seems like only a month ago that Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS was running ads against Democratic Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren, darkly warning of her ties to the Occupy Wall Street movement. The ads pointed out that she had taken credit for providing the "intellectual foundation" for the movement and is generally supportive of the demonstrators, who Crossroads characterized as "extreme left protesters."

Something must have gone wrong with that message, however, because today, Crossroads returns with a new Warren attack ad that paints her as a champion of the bailed-out Wall Street banks. Which is pretty neat! Between the 99% and 1%, is there anyone who Karl Rove thinks doesn't have Warren's support? (Answer: Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.), probably.)

"Really?" queries the voiceover narrator, "Congress had Warren oversee how your tax dollars were spent, bailing out the same banks that helped cause the financial meltdown. Bailouts that helped pay big bonuses to bank executives, while middle class Americans lost out." The implication here, I guess, is that Warren was a happy enabler of Wall Street. Here's where you have to imagine Tim Geithner, crying out in pain, "If I had a dollar for every time I wished Warren would just quietly let me restore Wall Street to health, I could have funded even more banking lobbyists!" Instead, things sort of went like this:

What did Warren actually have to say about bank bonuses? Let's see ... oh, here you go: "I do not understand how it is that financial institutions could think that they could take taxpayer money and then turn around and act like it's business as usual. I don't understand how they can't see that the world has changed in a fundamental way, that it is not business as usual when you take taxpayer dollars."

And here's some more:

Warren roasted former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson for his handling of TARP, saying that he claimed the money would be funneled "into the banks to increase lending, specifically to increase small business lending, because that is the engine of our economy." But "that's not what happened with that money," and she said there is "no chance" there will ever be a full accounting of TARP funds because "we never asked on the front end."

And how did the oversight panel which Warren chaired view the bailout process? Glad you asked:

A scathing new report by a congressional watchdog panel blames the Treasury Department for failing to track how banks are spending taxpayer money provided through the government's $700 billion financial rescue package, also known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP.
The panel, which has been charged with overseeing TARP and is led by Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Warren, said in its report that it "still does not know what the banks are doing with taxpayer money."

By investing in banks that have refused "to provide any accounting of how they are using taxpayer money," the Treasury Department has "eroded" public confidence, the report stated.

The panel also asked whether the Treasury Department, which has allocated more than $350 billion from the rescue package so far, failed to comply with Congress' instructions to tackle the country's foreclosure crisis.

The department took "no steps to use any of [the $700 billion rescue package] to alleviate the foreclosure crisis," and that "raises questions about whether Treasury has complied with Congress' intent that Treasury develop a 'plan that seeks to maximize assistance for homeowners,'" the report said.

Simon Johnson vouches for Warren as well, and makes one point that rings out above all the others:

The idea that Elizabeth Warren would ever side with "big banks" against the middle class is preposterous. Time and again, she has stuck up for the middle class (and anyone who uses financial services) - even when it was deeply unfashionable to do so. The big banks have opposed her relentlessly and on-the-record, both directly and through various surrogates.

This is one of those ads that really should be precluded from even airing based on the fact that it's comprised of a bunch of utterly absurd, can-be-disproven-with-two-minutes-of-Googling lies. That said, it's great to know that Crossroads opposes big bonuses for banking executives -- file that under "biting the hand that funds our political ads."

UPDATE, 5:09pm: Warren campaign spokesperson sends along a statement: "Elizabeth was an outspoken critic of the bank bailout and it's blank check to Wall Street. And that's just one fact that makes these ads ridiculous. The Wall Street bankers financing these attacks are desperate to stop Elizabeth Warren because she's worked so hard to stop Wall Street from ripping off middle class families. Elizabeth's worked to keep both the banks and the government accountable. Those are the facts. The people of Massachusetts don't need more fast talk from Wall Street, they need a fighter like Elizabeth taking on Wall Street."

UPDATE, 5:36pm: Over at the Plum Line, Greg Sargent digs into the internals of the new UMass/Boston Herald poll and reads the tea leaves. Per the poll:

Asked who would do a better job of looking out for middle class families, 43 percent of voters cite Warren and 33 percent identify Brown. Nearly half of Massachusetts voters also say Warren would do a better job of regulating Wall Street institutions. And more than a third of Massachusetts voters say they are less likely to back Brown because of campaign donations from Wall Street, a main theme of the Democratic attack against the incumbent.

Sargent adds:

In other words, Warren's broader message -- that she's on the side of the middle class, and will battle Wall Street on its behalf, while Brown is in Wall Street's corner -- may be be resonating. Also key from the internals: Only 25 percent say Warren's views are too liberal, versus 40 percent who say they're about right. Only seven percent say Warren's work as a Harvard professor -- a major theme against her -- will make them less likely to support her. And only 23 percent say Warren's support for Occupy Wall Street makes them less likely to back her -- significantly less than the 37 percent who say Brown's acceptance of donations from Wall Street make them less likely to support him.
Those findings cast doubt on whether the right's efforts to push those old cultural buttons are working.

The poll does find that Warren's negative rating has gone up by nine points, but it's still down at 27 percent, while Brown's is up at 35 percent.

The implication: previous attempts to tie Warren to #OWS had the opposite effect than was intended, so now Crossroads is taking a new approach. The opposite approach! But, charitably, it's a stretch.

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Romney Dumps Trump Debate -- But Still Runs Risk Of Receiving Trump's Endorsement

2011-12-07T21:04:32Z

Tuesday, presidential hopeful Mitt Romney became the third invited candidate (after Ron Paul and Jon Huntsman) to turn down the offer to appear in a GOP debate moderated by Donald Trump. That was a good decision. Unfortunately for Mitt, he does not appear to have sufficiently angered The Donald with the way he went about declining the invitation, and this means he is still eligible for Trump's endorsement. That's too bad!

As Christian Heinze reports over at The Hill, Trump was on MSNBC this morning discussing Romney's decision, and by all appearances, the amount of ill will sowed by Romney was insufficient to disqualify him from Trump's support:

"I'm surprised that Mitt Romney said 'no.' He was very nice. He called me yesterday, and he said he's very busy, he's so busy, and I was a little bit surprised at that.
.... I think he's a very nice guy, actually, I've known him for awhile, and I've gotten to know him pretty well, lately.

Frankly, I'm surprised because he really wants my endorsement. I mean, he wants it very badly."

That's a pretty terrible assertion to have out there, that you in some way "want" Trump's endorsement, because the possible outcome is that you may get it, and -- as polling data indicates -- it is something of a kiss of death. Romney's team should be shooting this down, right now.

Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) and former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman have avoided this fate largely because of the smart way they went about pulling out of the debate. Huntsman told Fox News, "I'm not going to kiss his ring and I'm not going to kiss any other part of his anatomy," and went on to suggest that Trump lacked "courage." Jesse Benton, speaking for Ron Paul, issued a statement in which he said, "The selection of a reality television personality to host a presidential debate that voters nationwide will be watching is beneath the office of the Presidency and flies in the face of that office's history and dignity."

Trump responded bitterly to these snubs, declaring both Huntsman and Paul to be "joke candidates." "That's great, please keep saying that, Donald Trump," is what I imagine unnamed sources close to the campaigns of Huntsman and Paul to have thought to themselves, in response.

The essence of Trump's delusion here is that he somehow has a powerful brand name that can lend a certain amount of prestige to a presidential candidate, but I think the fact that Trump's not willing to rule out endorsing Romney proves Huntsman's point about "courage": Trump would like to leave the door open to endorsing Romney, if Romney re-asserts himself as the frontrunner, because Trump is actually in need of a powerful political brand to lend him some prestige.

If you're Mitt Romney, you'd rather not have much part of this. Think Romney believes that Trump has anything to teach him about technocracy or high finance? Ha ha, no. And as we noted yesterday, Romney's taken great pains to keep a distance from Trump -- when the two men did meet earlier this year, Romney was careful to avoid being photographed with him.

That's something that an ordinary person might correctly perceive as a diss, but Trump's either not perceptive enough to notice or he's willing to let it slide. So, this morning, he held open the possibility of getting behind Romney despite the fact that he'll be a no-show at this debate: "That doesn't necessarily affect it [endorsement] one way or the other, but he really wants my endorsement."

In short, Romney was right to reject the Trump debate, but he didn't do it hard enough. Now he runs the risk of garnering Trump's support. That's too bad.

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Huntsman Shifts Stance On Climate Change

2011-12-06T20:31:36Z

Back when former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman was trying to make a name for himself, he fired off a tweet that sought to separate him from the rest of the 2012 GOP field: "To be clear. I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy." Suddenly, a lot of people were interested in Jon Huntsman again! But his nominal support for scientific reality only took him so far with primary voters. And by "so far," I mean, "almost nowhere." Now, mired in the low single digits as per usual, Huntsman offered a different take on the matter Tuesday in remarks to the Heritage Foundation. Here's Politico:

Scientists "owe us more in terms of a better description or explanation" on climate change before we decide whether climate change is real, Huntsman said, per POLITICO's Juana Summers.
He said that "there's not enough information to formulate policies" to address it.

It's sort of tough to reconcile Huntsman's remarks with his "Call me crazy" tweet of yesteryear. If scientists haven't done enough to "describe" or "explain" what's going on, consequently leaving Huntsman unable to "formulate policies," then why did they have his "trust" in the first place? Did he just mean to say that while science hadn't done enough to convince him, he still felt scientists were really nice people?

Somewhere between robust support for policies based on climate change and outright denial of its existence is the territory where Huntsman is now perched: everyone else needs to do a little bit more to convince him to do something, so for the time being, he's going to kick the can down the road. And the truth is that this isn't something new for Huntsman: as Rachel Weiner wrote in the Washington Post back in August, Huntsman did, as governor of Utah, support a "regional cap-and-trade program." He no longer backs such a program, citing the 2008 economic collapse as the reason: "Much of this discussion happened before the bottom fell out of the economy, and until it comes back, this isn't the moment."

But the more prescient observation that Weiner made back in August was that Huntsman's shaky stance on the issue wasn't that much different from that of two other candidates in the race:

[Mitt] Romney has long argued that climate change is at least in part man-made. "I believe the world is getting warmer, and I believe that humans have contributed to that," the 2012 candidate said in June. "It's important for us to reduce our emissions and pollutants and greenhouse gases that may be significant contributors."
But in July, Romney said, "The EPA is getting into carbon footprints and I think we may have made a mistake ... I don't think carbon is a pollutant in the sense of harming our bodies." (When Romney was governor of Massachusetts, he initially backed a regional greenhouse gas reduction initiative before withdrawing support in 2005, saying the program would hurt the economy.)

Meanwhile, Gingrich has long argued that global warming is a problem, saying in 2007 that "there is a consensus that for the last 100 years the planet's gotten somewhat warmer. The second consensus is that humans have contributed to that." But he opposes regulation.

And what candidates are now seen as vying for the top spot in the polls? Romney and Gingrich. That explains Huntsman's deviation today. He trusts scientists, but -- call him crazy! -- he'd really, really like to win the nomination now.

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Will The Senate's 'Secret Santa' Effort Solve America's Problems?

2011-12-01T16:53:36Z

The U.S. Senate hasn't enjoyed much acclaim of late. Mired in gridlock and saddled with record-low approval ratings, Senators need to demonstrate that they are capable of doing something that won't disintegrate into a dust cloud of rancor and incompetence. But what can they do? Well, the holiday season is upon us -- should they maybe try doing one of those "Secret Santa" things that epitomize Yuletide-forced fun? Sure, why not. But will it fix everything? Shockingly, it may not!

According to this Reuters report, Sens. Al Franken (D-Minn.) and Mike Johanns (R-Neb.) are trying to set up a "Secret Santa" gift exchange with the members of their august body, and while "no one predicts" the effort "will unleash unprecedented bipartisan tidings of comfort and joy," it's still seen as a "political test" of whether senators can do anything at all that does not end in everyone setting fire to one another. So far, Franken and Johanns have signed up 58 members, so this is still two votes short of cloture.

This may be one of the only pieces of political reporting you'll read all year that doesn't hang mostly on the "on background" remarks of anonymous sources, so that's nice. You'll therefore learn that Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) is "cynical" about this, and that Senator Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.), "at first," was worried that the effort was "too gimmicky." But my favorite part of the story, by far, is this section:

Paul Sracic, a political science professor at Youngstown State University, does not expect much from the initiative.
"This conflict between the two parties is not just a misunderstanding that can be solved by them getting to know each other a little better," he said.

Wonderful. Typically, political reporters pore over every insignificant twitch in every insignificant poll as if they were ancient practitioners of augury, make blithe assertions (such as: negative campaign ads turn off independent voters) that are not founded in fact, and chase down every little bit of speculative befuddlement at the constant expense of basic electoral fundamentals -- all of which demonstrates a basic level of contempt for political science. But when it comes to finding out whether a Christmas gift exchange might be the key to alleviating all of Congress' problems, now we've got to get a political scientist on the phone!

At any rate, I wish our senators all the best in their attempt to manufacture Christmas cheer, but what I'd really like to know is how I can get hooked up with the Federal Reserve's "Secret Santa" exchange, which seems much, much cooler.

[Hat Tip: Jim Newell]

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How New Coke Explains Why We Should Celebrate The Super Committee's 'Failure'

2011-11-29T22:15:00Z

Over at the Atlantic, Derek Thompson has a fun piece up titled "When Good Companies Have Bad Ideas." Riffing on the magazine's recent "Killer Ideas" issue, it includes a slideshow of some of the most celebrated examples of product innovations that crashed and burned upon entry to the marketplace. (Anyone remember Coors Water? Actually, you are probably reminded of it painfully every time you have the misfortune to drink Coors "Beer.")

Of course, no compendium of bad ideas is complete without New Coke, and Thompson does not disappoint:

As Malcolm Gladwell recounted in his book Blink, Coca-Cola responded to Pepsi's eponymous "challenge" by trying to make a sweeter soft drink that could actually win the Pepsi Challenge. This turned out to be a wild misreading of its own strengths. In retrospect, Pepsi was probably winning the taste-test battle for the same reason that Coke was winning the soda war. Coke's milder, prune-y flavor goes better with a steak over dinner. At the end of the day, the only people drinking soda in shots were the handful of young people filmed playing the Pepsi Challenge.

By pure coincidence, the recent inability of the so-called 'super committee' to come to an accord about what to do about curbing the federal deficit has had me thinking about the 'New Coke' debacle quite a bit. See, as the super committee deliberated throughout the fall, I feel like the media got us locked into this notion that if they were unable to come up with a plan that all of its members could agree to, this constituted a "failure," while an approved-by-super-committee strategy for curbing the debt constituted a "success."

The problem with that thinking is that there was never any indication -- or even a shred of evidence -- that suggested the super committee was in any way poised to deliver a competent plan, let alone an intelligent one. So it's difficult to understand why anyone was actually looking forward to the product they might have produced with optimism, or imagined for even one minute that those 12 members of Congress had the capacity to alter our longterm budget trajectory in some sort of optimal way. What's been deemed a "failure," for all anyone really knows, may have actually been a dodged bullet.

The New Coke comparison is useful in this situation because while the product that the Coca-Cola Company produced in 1985 is now considered to have been an unalloyed failure, there was a hot minute or two when the folks that conceived and executed the idea were thought of as geniuses and company saviors, and the product was deemed a self-evident success. As Mark Prendergast documents in his book, "For God, Country and Coca-Cola: The Definitive History of the Great American Soft Drink and the Company that Makes It," when CEO Roberto Goizueta was asked if he'd be changing up Diet Coke's formula "assuming [New Coke] is a success," he replied, "No. And I didn't assume that this is a success. This is a success." Sounds to me like a guy who got himself prematurely locked into a concept of "success."

Of course, Coca-Cola's course correction was to reintroduce the old formula (sort of -- cane sugar was swapped out for high-fructose corn syrup) to the marketplace. That move, by contrast, was deemed a success -- so much so that it wasn't uncommon to hear people theorize that this marketing debacle was actually a genius bit of misdirection. Whether you believe those conspiracies or not, the simple fact of the matter is that it sure was a complicated way of succeeding by changing nothing at all.

Happily, here is another useful super committee comparison, because at the moment, changing nothing at all remains a superior policy option than anything the super committee would have likely devised. So, I suggest we all celebrate their inability to do something as a pause that refreshes, and get down to the business of doing nothing about the deficit.

Flickr photo by Like_the_Grand_Canyon.

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Mitt Romney's 'Peculiar Anger' Seems Vastly Overstated And Overanalyzed

2011-11-29T18:09:39Z

Having read Alec MacGillis' take on the "peculiar anger of Mitt Romney" in the New Republic, I can't help but note that the most peculiar thing about it is that there don't seem to be compelling examples of either "anger" or "peculiarity." This assessment isn't exactly unique to me, either. Kevin Drum writes: "There's a lot of theorizing about where Romney's anger comes from, but there's not much evidence of this supposed anger in the first place." But, hey, let's consider the examples of Romney's "anger" cited in the New Republic piece.

There was that time at the debate where Rick Perry kept interrupting him.

MacGillis says "Romney's temperature shot skyward," he "barked" at Perry and "reached out and condescendingly put his hand on Perry's shoulder." I guess? Seems to me that Romney was complaining about Perry talking over his assigned response time, and when Perry finally shut his trap, Romney backed off and calmly zinged him with "Rick's had a tough couple of debates," and then it was Perry who looked like he was leashing his emotions.

Brian Lees, the former GOP leader in the Massachusetts State Senate says Romney's not a "stoic."

But few people are! Per Lees: "He got very animated about lots of things, impassioned, and sometimes angry." Is that outside the relatively normal parameters of standard human emotion?

He sometimes got cross with his kids.

As fathers are wont to do, trust me. His kids called Mitt's occasional bursts "Mitt-frontations," which is not a name you give something that's particularly scarring.

He once got in trouble at a boat launch in Massachusetts.

Romney was advised not to launch his motorboat, because "the boat's registration number was painted over" and launching it into Lake Cochituate would incur a $50 fine. Romney said, whatever, I'll pay the fine. He was handcuffed by a park ranger and "booked for disorderly conduct." Romney's defense was that he was not being disorderly. And indeed, it sure sounds like he wasn't!

"It was not the last time Romney would clash with a law enforcement official."

That's how MacGillis begins an account of how Romney, during a traffic tie-up at the 2002 Olympics, jumped out and started trying to direct traffic "over the objections of a sheriff's deputy." He also yelled at some kid, and may have even used the "F-word." This is hotly disputed, apparently -- whether or not a grown man used a curse word, like the vast majority of adults in America.

"Though the incident in Salt Lake City and the 1981 arrest at Lake Cochituate are the most extreme indications that Romney might have a temper, there are, scattered in his past, a handful of other occasions on which his anger seems to have flared."

Oh, well, if these are the most extreme examples, I'm afraid this thesis (Mitt Romney has "peculiar anger") is not off to a good start! But let's fill the rest of them out.

He once got "impassioned" about the Massachusetts GOP's failure to win seats in an election.

He got mad at a talk radio host.

He repeatedly failed to get mad at people who disparaged his religion.

He calmly took abuse from two students at The Cranbrook School who ganged up on him at a student government meeting.

He gets "agitated" sometimes when people are "screaming or using profanity or not being a nice person, being abusive or obstinate in a kind of nasty way." (It's somehow abnormal now for these behaviors to cause agitation.)

And then there is this whole confrontation that happened on an Air Canada flight last February between Romney and Skyler "Sky Blu" Gordy ("of the party-rock duo LMFAO") that occurred when Gordy reclined his seat before takeoff and Romney asked him to restore his seat in the upright position. This led to a huge fooferaw, all of which has been documented by the Wall Street Journal. There are two sides to the story, but I tend to actually favor Romney's version, because Skyler Gordy's "party rock" is an unforgivable stain on his father Berry Gordy's otherwise superlative musical legacy.

So, that's the case for Romney's "peculiar anger": he hates people who scream, he gets impassioned, he had two exceedingly minor brushes with law enforcement officials, he may have used a curse word at some point in his life, and he courageously took a stand against "party rock" while many good men sat back, did nothing, and allowed that evil to flourish.

And he hates being interrupted, which we know from some of his appearances on the trail. Now, whether or not someone "loses their shit" is sort of in the eye of the beholder. Romney clearly dislikes being heckled, but it's plain that his response -- strained politeness -- isn't quite at the "peculiar" level of say, Joe Walsh, who frankly has a hard time coping with life.

You may beg to differ, but I don't find any of these instances to be compelling examples of a "peculiar anger." Frankly, I don't think MacGillis does either, as most of the heavy lifting being done in this piece comes in the form of paragraph after paragraph of armchair psychoanalysts straight up speculating on what might be going on inside the dark recesses of the mind of the first ever American to ever get upset about a traffic jam.

There is nothing particularly special about this form of political analysis. As Ben Smith points out, the New Republic wrote the same piece about Mike Huckabee four years ago. What do Hillary Clinton's tears really mean? What can we divine of Al Gore's domestic policy agenda from the fact that he had a "daredevil streak" when he was fourteen years old? Nobody even cared, until your political scribes came along to make a big deal about it. Of all the methods that political writers use to pointlessly mystify the political process, the amateur therapist act is probably the most pointless. And in the history of political journalism, none of this dumb speculation into the psychology of politicians, undertaken universally by non-board certified nobodies, has ever amounted to a hill of beans.

At this very moment, if you go to read MacGillis' lame piece on Mitt Romney's non-existent seething anger, you'll likely see a link at the top of the page for another piece, penned by Justin Frank, titled, "The Psychological Foundation of Obama's Political Problems." What, is the practical foundation of Obama's political problems -- the ongoing economic crisis that's grinding thousands of ordinary Americans to a wet pulp -- not compelling enough to write about? Jesus wept.

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Jadakiss Has Some Questions For Siri

2011-11-22T20:30:38Z

As most of you no doubt already know, the new iPhone 4S includes a new feature -- a loyal digital assistant named "Siri," who has a comforting voice and will make it so you never have to actually enter search terms in Google or use the maps app ever again. Eventually, humanity will stop evolving and lose the Dolphin Wars of 2031, but until then, Siri is available to answer all of your hard-hitting questions. So, I decided to put Siri to the test and ask her all of the questions that Jadakiss asks in his 2004 single, "Why?"

The song, which Wikipedia calls a "protest song" -- whatever, we'll go with it! -- featured Jadakiss asking a series of questions that are primarily about contemporary life and issues that concern both the music industry and the African-American community. But Jadakiss presses beyond those borders, seeking some enlightenment on issues of his own identity ("Why is Jadakiss as hard as it gets?") as well as some larger, philosophical concerns ("Why are you even alive?").

As you can see in the video, the unanswerability of these questions had a particular salience back in 2004, at which time ordinary people on the streets did not have the smartphone technology that they do today. (Also, apparently many people still had televisions from the 1970s.) Bridging the gap between the uncertainty of the immediate moment and a state of clarity is one of the challenges that Siri was designed to address. Though, it should be said that surely Jadakiss has, in the intervening time, gotten an answer to many of these inquiries. For example: "Why at the bar you ain't take straight shots instead of poppin Crist'?" Study your Jay-Z, Jadakiss: "I used to drink Cristal, muthaf-----s racist, so I switched Gold Bottles on to that spade sh-t."

Nevertheless, Jadakiss asks many questions that still matter in 2011. And Siri...well, she did her best. It should be noted that at times, Siri took to this task like a duck takes to a hot river of tar. I did what I could to pose the question in a way that Siri could understand, and it wasn't always simple to do.

But for the most part, this experiment yielded some positive results. It's clear that Jadakiss would find Siri quite useful -- especially in the service of locating various services that are in his area. In fact, Siri takes a holistic approach to providing her services -- she'll point you in the direction of an area bar one minute, and attempt to divine the location of an addiction treatment center the next. And she'll do so without judgment.

In fact, it seems pretty clear that Siri would be a good friend and companion to Jadakiss. We occasionally just need someone to tell us that sometimes there are no easy answers to many of life's questions, but if there's one certain thing we can cling to, as we scrabble through our lives, seeking out what meaning we can as we fill the numerous empty days until we are returned to the dust from whence we came, it's that there's probably a restaurant serving wrap sandwiches just a few blocks away. We'll get there together, somehow.

What follows is the loose transcript between Jadakiss and Siri, with me acting as an interpreter. Special thanks to HuffPost's researcher/office manager extraordinaire Brad Shannon, who lent me the use of his phone. Brad, I'm very sorry that your phone now thinks that you wanted to engage the services of a prostitute.

----

JADAKISS: Yo, why is Jadakiss as hard as it gets?

SIRI: Let me check on that. How about a web search for "Why is Jay to kiss as hard as it gets?"

JADAKISS: Why is the industry designed to keep the artist in debt?

SIRI: I found a number of art stores. 22 of them are fairly close to you.

JADAKISS: And why them dudes ain't ridin' if they're part of your set?

SIRI: Let me think about that. I can't answer that.

JADAKISS: And why they never get it poppin' but they party to death?

SIRI: What kind of place are you looking for? Parks or parking lots?

JADAKISS: Yea, and why they gon give you life for a murder, turn around only give you eight months for a burner?

SIRI: Checking my sources. (Sources are apparently the iCarly Wikiquote page.)

JADAKISS: Why they sellin' niggas' CDs for under a dime?

SIRI: I found a number of music stores, 22 of them are fairly close to you.

JADAKISS: If it's all love daddy why you come wit your nine?

SIRI: This gun shop is a little ways from you.

JADAKISS: Why my niggas ain't get that cake?

SIRI: I found 11 pastry shops, 10 of them are fairly close to you.

JADAKISS: Why is a brother up North better than Jordan, that ain't get that break?

SIRI: Let me think. I don't know that.

JADAKISS: Why you ain't stackin' instead of tryin' to be fly?

SIRI: I'm sorry, I'm afraid I can't answer that.

JADAKISS: Why is rattin' at an all time high?

SIRI: I found nine police stations. Seven of them are a little ways from Sticks, Pennsylvania.

JADAKISS: Why are you even alive?

SIRI: Why, indeed.

JADAKISS: Why they kill Tupac n' Chris?

SIRI: I'm on it.

JADAKISS: Why at the bar you ain't take straight shots instead of poppin Crist'?

SIRI: I found a number of bars fairly close to you.

JADAKISS: Why them bullets have to hit that door?

SIRI: I don't know what you mean.

JADAKISS: Why did Kobe have to hit that raw?

SIRI: Sorry, I can't provide maps and directions in Japan.

JADAKISS: Why he kiss that whore?

SIRI: OK. One of these escorts looks fairly close to you.

JADAKISS: Why would niggas push pounds and powder?

SIRI: I didn't find any addiction treatment centers.

JADAKISS: Why did Bush knock down the towers?

SIRI: Let me check on that.

JADAKISS: Why you around them cowards?

SIRI: No comment.

JADAKISS: Why Aaliyah have to take that flight?

SIRI: I can't answer that.

JADAKISS: Why my nigga D ain't pull out his Ferrari?

SIRI: I've found two Ferrari dealers a little ways from you. I've sorted them by rating.

JADAKISS: Why he take that bike?

SIRI: I found 18 bicycle shops.

JADAKISS: Why they gotta open your package and read your mail?

SIRI: I found 25 emails. I can't read them to you. Sorry about that.

JADAKISS: Why they stop lettin' niggas get degreez in jail?

SIRI: I found a number of colleges fairly close to you.

JADAKISS: Why you gotta do 85 percent of your time?

SIRI: Good question.

JADAKISS: And why do niggas lie in 85 percent of they rhymes?

SIRI: OK, here you go:

JADAKISS: Why a nigga always want what he can't have?

SIRI: I don't know, maybe the Genius Bar folks can answer that for you.

JADAKISS: Why I can't come through in the pecan Jag?

SIRI: Okay, I give up.

JADAKISS: Why did crack have to hit so hard?

SIRI: Sorry, I couldn't find any addiction treatment centers.

JADAKISS: Why niggas can't get no jobs?

SIRI:

JADAKISS: Why they come up wit the witness protection?

SIRI:

JADAKISS: Why they let the terminator win the election?

SIRI: I found three places matching "terminator" a little ways from California, MD.

JADAKISS: Why sell in the stores what you can sell in the streets?

SIRI: Sorry, I couldn't do that.

JADAKISS: Why I say the hottest shit but we sellin' the least?

SIRI: Ask nice, now.

JADAKISS: Why Halle have to let a white man pop her to get a Oscar?

SIRI: [No answer.]

JADAKISS: Why Denzel have to be crooked before he took it?

SIRI: I couldn't find that in your music.

JADAKISS: Why they didn't make the CL6 wit a clutch?

SIRI: Checking my sources [Sources are apparently the Sue Sylvester character page on the Internet Movie Database.]

JADAKISS: And if you don't smoke why the hell you reachin' for my dutch?

SIRI: A fine question. Now can we get back to work?

JADAKISS: Why rap, cause I need air time?

SIRI: I found a number of restaurants whose reviews mention wraps fairly close to you.

JADAKISS: Why be on the curb wit a "why lie I need a beer" sign?

SIRI: I found a number of bars fairly close to you.

JADAKISS: Why all the young niggas is dyin'?

SIRI:

JADAKISS: Why they ain't give us a cure for AIDS?

SIRI: Let me check on that.

JADAKISS: Why my diesel have fiends in the spot on the floor for days?

SIRI: I found a number of gas stations fairly close to you.

JADAKISS: Why you screamin' like it's slug, it's only the hawk?

SIRI: I'd blush if I could.

JADAKISS: Why my buzz in L.A. ain't like it is in New York?

SIRI: Okay, one of these bus lines is in Los Angeles, California.

JADAKISS: Why you forcin' me to be hard?

SIRI: I am what I am.

JADAKISS: Why ain't you a thug by choice?

SIRI: Sorry, I couldn't do it.

JADAKISS: Why the whole world love my voice?

SIRI: I really have no opinion.

JADAKISS: Why try to tell 'em that it's the flow son?

SIRI: Here's your message to Brad Shannon: "It's the flow, son." Ready to send it?

JADAKISS: Why they made the new twenties?

SIRI: Cause they got all your old ones, that's why. (Ha, just kidding, but wouldn't that have been awesome?)

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Pretend Democrats Rewrite Column Advising Obama Not To Run For Re-Election

2011-11-21T17:05:21Z

Douglas Schoen and Patrick Caddell, who pretend to be Democrats even though they do not support Democratic politicians or causes or policy platforms, have a column up in the Wall Street Journal advising President Barack Obama to quit now and not run for re-election, even though the only GOP candidate that seems to pose a consistent challenge to him in the polls is Mitt Romney, and the Obama re-elect team has sort of started raising money to run for re-election and everything. Democrats should never follow the advice of Schoen and Caddell, because they always seem insincere. But what's truly pitiful here -- and I mean, so pitiful that I am quite literally embarrassed for everyone involved in the writing and publication of this piece -- is that this is an op-ed they've already written for the Washington Post. So, screw it, here's what I said about this back then, since my argument still stands.

The only thing that's "new" in this most recent regurgitation is that Schoen and Caddell suggest that Hillary Clinton run because "she has the ability to step above partisan politics, reach out to Republicans, change the dialogue, and break the gridlock in Washington." To Schoen and Caddell's mind, if you turn back the clock to the era of President Bill Clinton, you get "a break in gridlock." But this is not how politics works -- this isn't the Republican party of the 1990s. If it were, when President Obama offered to cut $4 trillion in spending, add $1 trillion in revenue, and adjust the Medicare eligibility age as a part of his "grand bargain," there would have been immense support for Obama's proposal. The GOP of 2011 wanted to hold the country hostage over the debt ceiling, and threaten default.

This notion that Hillary Clinton would somehow be able to penetrate the gridlock of today is magical thinking. Let's remember, first and foremost, that the GOP truly hates the Clintons -- and as of this moment, the GOP base is flirting with taking the Clintons' nemesis, Newt Gingrich, to the White House. And let's have some real talk -- the only way she'd fare better in the current state of gridlock is the same way Obama would fare better: she could wholly abandon all of the Democratic party policy positions. Which is really what Schoen and Caddell advise all the time. They just usually have to work a lot harder at disguising the fact that they just rewrite the same thing.

PREVIOUSLY, on The Huffington Post:
Pretend Democrats Advise Obama Not To Run For Re-Election

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Bank Of America Thought He Was A Good Idea

2011-11-17T19:02:00Z

As loyal readers probably know, Bank of America has been having problems of late, owing to its serial awfulness and constant mistakes. As Bloomberg reported in October, the beleaguered bank was ranked the "lowest in a 24-bank survey of small business customer satisfaction from J.D. Power and Associates." And recently it achieved the distinction of being named the country's second-worst company by Consumerist.com after BP Plc, the firm blamed for the worst U.S. offshore oil spill.

So, what's Bank of America to do? Well, it could make a company-wide commitment to offering better customer service and undertake a systemic reform of its business practices. But instead, the bank hired Malcolm Gladwell as a shill and put him in front of small-business owners to get 'em all riled up.

According to a press release, Bank of America delivered "quality education and actionable advice to small business owners in various markets throughout the country." At these meet-ups, which "attracted close to 200 small business owners in Los Angeles, Dallas and Washington, D.C.," Gladwell was the closing act for a moderated "panel discussion on relationship capital." All of which sounds like a furtive stab of pre-crash nostalgia. In fact, the notion of having Malcolm Gladwell provide happy talk for the banking industry channels the year 2006 so hard that it's amazing this guy wasn't invited back to reprise his U2 karaoke act:

Gladwell, of course, is best known as the author of The Tipping Point and Blink, the latter book being a treatise on how "spontaneous decisions are often as good as -- or even better than -- carefully planned and considered ones." It seems pretty clear that Bank of America has fully embraced this premise in its foreclosure practices, which is a big part of the reason why the bank's brand has taken a beating in recent years.

But concerns that Gladwell's teachings don't exactly pair well with the current state of the banking industry and what we've learned about the practices that nearly brought the economy to a crashing halt in 2008 don't end there. As Chris Lehmann wrote in his book Rich People Things:

Regardless of whether Gladwell is describing the way we actually behave and absorb new ideas and social trends, he is clearly offering a very appealing picture of how his readership wishes the world works. The chief hero in his work is the intuitive manager -- a new millenial upgrade of the plucky upward-striving protagonists in the Gilded Age fiction of Horatio Alger. But where Alger stressed the character-building individualist virtues of thrift, hard work, and self-sacrifice -- themselves already endangered traits in the new industrial order of the robber baron age -- Gladwell is preaching an entirely consumption-driven model of the gospel of success. The idea in his market fables is not to light out for new economic territory with grit and invention; it is, rather, to establish a mystical bond with market forces and to surmise how the market most wants you to behave.

Yeah, you know, given the fact that U.S. taxpayers donated several trillion dollars to failed banks under the (apparently fraudulent) premise that they would "light out for new economic territory" and begin lending money to the productive side of the economy again, thereby stirring the economy from its recession-induced torpor, it doesn't exactly fill me with confidence to hear that Bank of America is pimping out an author who'll only reaffirm its faith-based belief in the infallibility of the quantitative models it believed provided a risk-free environment in which to sell synthetic crap-derivatives to everybody.

In short, if heaven is a place where horned demons are laying the foundation for a "Gymnasium of the Damned" for Jerry Sandusky in bottomless pools of red-hot magma, then Gladwell and Bank of America are a match made in it.

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Thomas Friedman Needs Someone To Help Him Access Widely Available Facts About Politics

2011-11-16T17:46:52Z

Would it be too much to ask for someone -- perhaps one of his New York Times colleagues -- to give famously airheaded columnist Thomas Friedman a bit of an explanation of what is actually going on in the world of politics? Or just provide him with some sort of real world mooring point to which his precious barnacles of thought could cling? I ask because of this part of his most recent column:

Here we are in America again on the eve of a major budgetary decision by yet another bipartisan "supercommittee," and does anyone know what President Obama's preferred outcome is? Exactly which taxes does he want raised, and which spending does he want cut? The president's politics on this issue seems to be a bowl of poll-tested mush.

Here we are in America on the eve of a major budgetary decision that Friedman wants to write about, and he's somehow unaware of the fact that the President's preferred outcome is publicly available, and a mere Google search away. But Matt Yglesias, who steps up today to serve as Friedman's intern on the matter, has made it very easy. Here is Obama's preferred outcome in depth and here it is in brief.

Here is the telephone number for the Office of Management and Budget's "media inquiries" department: 202-395-7254. Thomas, you should "unlock" your iPhone, press the "phone" icon, then press "keypad," then type in those numbers in order, and finally press "call." (Oh, and put your ear to the phone! You will hear some noises, but try not to panic: eventually they will sound like a recognizable language.)

Now, the hilarious thing about all of this is that when Friedman actually reads these widely available documents, he's going to feel a little chagrined. Greg Sargent explains why:

The amusing thing is that Friedman himself has said in column after column that the deficit must be balanced through the approach Obama has offered -- a blend of spending cuts, including entitlements cuts, and tax increases.
How does Friedman deal with the fact that he and Obama roughly share the same vision? There's the above approach -- pretend Obama hasn't been clear about what he wants. Friedman has adopted other dodges, too. He has claimed that Obama's version of the Grand Bargain doesn't go far enough, because a Grand Bargain absolutely must contain entitlements cuts. Again, Obama and Dems have signaled a willingness to cut entitlements, dismaying many on the left. And even when Friedman admits that Republicans are more to blame for the lack of compromise, he makes up for it by somehow simultaneously claiming that "history" will hold Obama more accountable for failure to reach a deal.

Oh, lord, I almost forgot about Friedman's whole "Grand Bargain" fetish. Someone should also take it upon themselves to alert Friedman to the precise terms of the "Grand Bargain" that Obama actually offered. Let's take the wayback machine back to July of this year:

Obama had proposed to Republicans a "grand bargain" that accomplished a host of individual things that are unpopular on their own, but that just might pass as a huge package jammed through Congress with default looming. Obama offered to put Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid cuts on the table in exchange for a tax hike of roughly $100 billion per year over 10 years. Meanwhile, government spending would be cut by roughly three times that amount. It's no small irony that the party's dogmatic opposition to tax increases is costing the GOP its best opportunity to roll back social programs it has long targeted.
Republicans are now banking on a smaller deficit reduction deal that would still make major cuts, somewhere in the range of $2 trillion.

So, let's review: that offer combines "spending cuts, including entitlements cuts, and tax increases." Furthermore, what the President offered was rejected by House Republicans, who instead wanted a "smaller deficit reduction deal." So it's illogical to complain that the administration's position "doesn't go far enough" when the opposition's position goes even less far. Finally, the key sentence there that might help Friedman finally untangle the Great Mystery Of Why There Hasn't Been A Grand Bargain is this one: "It's no small irony that the party's dogmatic opposition to tax increases is costing the GOP its best opportunity to roll back social programs it has long targeted."

Sargent writes that Friedman seems incapable of "admit[ting] the obvious." The Obama administration and the Democrats are essentially standing in the "ideological middle" -- to their tremendous detriment, as lefty activists tend to critique this as the "sell out" position -- and Friedman "agrees with them on the broad strokes of what need to be done." He just doesn't seem to understand it!

I haven't the foggiest idea why Friedman hasn't yet grasped how annoying he's being by constantly arguing that the people who share his point of view and actually have to pay the cost of acting on it aren't really doing the things that they're doing. My guess is that these facts simply inconvenience his desire to spin alternate histories or remark upon the Kevin Costner movie he just watched. But if you're in the position to lend Friedman a hand, print these things out and give them to him, please. Better yet, print them out, kick down the door and tell him, "Suck on this!"

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The 2012 Speculatron Weekly Roundup For Nov. 11, 2011

2011-11-11T23:21:00Z

If you've been suffering through the coverage of this week on the campaign trail, you've probably already figured out that this was the week when we learned about more women who claimed to have run afoul of what Herman Cain would call his "charms," and that everyone was super excited about that until the CNBC debate, when Rick Perry ended up completely flummoxed by the opportunity to count to three. In fact, we can represent all of that graphically, by making just a few adjustments to last week's visual guide to the race.

But the big difference between this week and last week was that this week, no one got handed a free pass because Herman Cain was putting out multiple fires. In fact, by week's end, the GOP landscape had almost completely inverted itself. The midweek CNBC debate put the rest of the field back in the spotlight and tasked with the mission of exploiting Cain's woes and pushing themselves forward in the race to be the alternative to Mitt Romney.

Most didn't make up much ground. Michele Bachmann hasn't found anything new to say about her candidacy in months. Jon Huntsman stowed away the lame quippiness that he's been using in previous debates to ingratiate himself and opted for a turn as the "adult in the room," but his calls for Wall Street reforms were pitched to the wrong audience. Rick Santorum, as usual, was the best debater in the room, but his presence at these festivities is now largely symbolic -- he's the throwback jersey for Team GOP.

Newt Gingrich ended up having the best of what was left, and this week moved into second place in the latest McClatchy-Marist poll. (Other recent polls have Cain as the leader, with Romney and Gingrich in a dead heat for second.) Congratulations go out to everyone who worked so hard. By which we mean, the media elites who sowed the seeds of the Gingrich-surge narrative. We aren't referring to the Gingrich campaign team -- they quit, remember?

And Rick Perry? Well, his 53-second brain fugue was just the sort of fortunate happenstance that Herman Cain needed. After 10 days of nonstop coverage of past accusations of sexual harassment, suddenly the media had something newer and shinier to play with, and Cain got a chance to breathe. And now, it's suddenly kind of okay to be Herman Cain again. Sure, one never knows how long that will last, but based on the way the debate audience supported Cain and derided the CNBC moderators for even bringing up his sexy allegations, it's reasonable to think that Cain's efforts to paint himself as the victim of a media drive-by-shooting have largely succeeded.

Nevertheless, Mitt Romney remains in the best possible position. He may have Cain and Gingrich nipping at his heels as far as polling numbers are concerned, but all that means is the two people he's fighting with are two people who, ultimately, are on high-concept book tours, not authentic runs for the White House. And the clearest sign that Romney is winning this thing is that President Obama and his political allies continue to train their fire at the former Massachusetts governor.

But this is just a bit of what happened this week on the campaign trail. Michele Bachmann proposed changing a piece of Americana. Gary Johnson said he'd ditch a presidential tradition to save taxpayer money. Barack Obama parted ways with a close confidant and a hunk of political deadweight. Ron Paul went off on the wealthy, Buddy Roemer took to Twitter, and Rick Santorum had pundits battling over "Why?" and "Why not?" And which candidate is disappointing Ezra Klein this week? To find out, please enter the Speculatron for the week of 11/11/11.

[Would you like to follow me on Twitter? Because why not? Also, please send tips to tv@huffingtonpost.com -- learn more about our media monitoring project here.]