I’ve repeatedly bashed Barack Obama’s goo-goo tendencies, but this is ridiculous.
An email (PDF) sent to supporters on Friday contains this bizarre promise (my emphasis):
Barack believes that when the government makes a decision that affects your life, you deserve to know about it. When government officials meet with corporate lobbyists, you should be able to watch the meeting. When your tax dollars are appropriated for a government program, you deserve to know where they are going and who requested them.
Anything less is politics-as-usual.
Does Obama realize what it would entail to require that all meetings with lobbyists be open to the public? Who wrote this line? I can’t believe that it’s vetted policy.
With that said, the email does an effective job of turning Hillary’s supposed experience against her:
When asked several direct questions about the release of official records from her time in the White House, Senator Clinton gave a vague and dismissive answer.
These documents, according to Newsweek, include Senator Clinton’s “appointment calendar as First Lady, her notes at strategy meetings, what advice she gave her husband and his advisers, what policy memos she wrote, even some key papers from her health-care task force.”
It’s time to turn the page on this kind of secrecy and restore trust in our government.
If Senator Clinton is going to run on her record, the American people deserve to see it.
As TNR’s Jon Chait has noted, the Wall Street Journal editorial board has an amusing penchant for putting terms it questions in scare quotes even when doing so makes no sense.
“President Bush’s tax cut is running into trouble in the Senate, with opponents claiming they are worried about ‘the deficit,’” it sneered in a typical offering–as if the entire idea were some liberal bogeyman.
Back in February, I flagged a similar example in a WSJ editorial on fixing the Alternative Minimum Tax: “The estimated ‘cost’ of this fix to the Treasury over 10 years would be some $632 billion.” It’s not a cost, it’s a “cost”! (In this case, the use of scare quotes is correct — the WSJ doesn’t think there is any cost to cutting taxes — but the empirical argument is wrong because cutting taxes does, in fact, reduce revenue.)
Yesterday’s column on torture was particularly rich in this regard. Here is part of the first paragraph:
Now comes the latest flap over “torture” techniques during terrorist interrogations, well on their way to becoming little more than a friendly chat.
Yes, you may have to read the sentence three times because of the grammar, but this actually counts as a legitimate use of scare quotes; the editors don’t think the techniques being used are torture. But then they go on to continue putting torture in quotes every time they use the word, regardless of context. So, for example:
The notion that the U.S. goes around unnecessarily “torturing” people…
C’mon guys! Even you admit that the United States is “torturing” people; you just don’t think that we are torturing people. Still, it would be helpful to acknowledge that toruture does in fact exist. Or do I mean “exist”?
Here’s a similar example from yesterday’s editorial on the debate over Michael Mukasey’s nomination to be attorney general:
Democrats welcomed Michael Mukasey as a “consensus choice” for Attorney General only weeks ago, but incredibly his confirmation is now an open question. The judge’s supposed offense is that he has refused to declare “illegal” a single interrogation technique that the CIA has used on rare occasions against mass murderers.
Not illegal, “illegal”! As in the torture line, the WSJ doesn’t seem to understand what scare quotes mean. Mukasey refuses to say that waterboarding is illegal. The WSJ disagrees with the notion that waterboarding is illegal, but putting the word in scare quotes makes no sense.
“It doesn’t help when my cousin Dick Cheney is put in charge of energy policy,” he said, laughing. “I’ve been hiding this for a long time. Everybody’s got a black sheep in the family…. But I’m not going on that family hunting trip anytime soon.”
Ah, the promise — and the frustration — of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. I saw him speak at North Carolina Central University this afternoon to a multi-ethnic crowd of several thousand people who paid $15-$25 just to hear him speak. And he delivered — as expected, Obama is funny, dynamic, and moving on the stump.
But, as always, I have the same two objections. First, Obama will not let the goo-goo dream die. He said the reason he ran for president is to “change politics” — a goal that is, frankly, absurd and borders on the anti-democratic. The forces driving the trend toward increased partisanship won’t go away if he’s elected. Consider the only time in recent memory that the two parties “got along” and “worked together” — the aftermath of 9/11. During that period, President Bush’s high approval ratings silenced dissent among Democrats, providing the context for approval of the resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq in fall 2002. It’s not a great model.
I was also frustrated at Obama’s continued reluctance to go after Hillary Clinton directly on issues — a theme I’ve mentioned before (here, here, and here). Despite the local paper’s claim that Obama “[hammered] away at both President Bush and his chief rival, U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton, on the Iraq war,” I only heard him say her name when criticizing her vote on the resolution labeling Iran’s Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization. It’s a start, but not enough. I know he’s reluctant to go after her in front of Democratic audiences, but this is primary season.
The best way to square the circle is to link Obama’s desire to change politics with Hillary’s negatives, which, he could argue, will prevent us from making progress on issues. Wouldn’t this be a more effective argument than what he said at the debate?
Senator Clinton has served our country and our party with distinction for more than two decades, but we can’t move forward on the issues that matter to this country if she is the Democratic nominee. Like it or not, the baggage she brings with her into the race will mire us in the tired politics of the 1990s, make it harder to take back the White House, and prevent us from making progress on issues like health care and energy independence. I ask Democrats to give me the chance to start a new political era in this country.
Comments are open.
Update 11/4 1:51 PM: I should note that Obama came reasonably close to this pitch during an exchange with Hillary at the end of the most recent Democratic debate
One last point I want to make: Part of the reason that Republicans, I think, are obsessed with you, Hillary, is because that’s a fight they’re very comfortable having. It is the fight that we’ve been through since the ’90s. And part of the job of the next president is to break the gridlock and to get Democrats and independents and Republicans to start working together to solve these big problems, like health care or climate change or energy.
And what we don’t need is another eight years of bickering. And that’s precisely why I’m running for president. Because one of the things I’ve been able to do throughout my political career is to bring people together to get things done.
For those who are interested, FactCheck.org is holding an event at the National Press Club a week from Friday where they will release data on an apparent increase in media fact-checking:
FactCheck.org and the Annenberg Public Policy Center Present:
Pants on Fire
Political Mendacity and the Rise of the Media Fact-Checkers
Why do candidates lie to voters or twist the facts?
Are campaigns less truthful now than before?
What are mainstream journalists doing about it?
Are they doing any good?
When:
Friday, Nov. 9, 2007, 9 a.m. – 11:30 a.m.
Where:
National Press Club
Holeman Lounge (13th floor)
14th and F Streets NW
Washington, D.C.
New data show print and broadcast journalists are becoming more aggressive about exposing falsehoods and factual distortions in political campaigns. The St. Petersburg Times’ “Politifact.com” and the Washington Post’s “The Fact Checker” feature are only the latest manifestations of a journalistic trend that has been gathering momentum in recent elections.
This conference will present new, exclusive data that document a rise in “adwatch” and “factcheck”-type stories among major newspapers and also among local TV news departments. It will bring together journalists who are at the cutting edge of this trend. Two veteran political consultants will discuss how much truth-squadding affects candidates, both Democrat and Republican.
As I wrote back in March, Barack Obama’s campaign is based on the false hope that we can all get along. As a result, he’s been frustratingly reluctant to go negative on Hillary Clinton. Even when he did start to criticize her directly a few days ago, he focused on her failure to be sufficiently forthcoming with the American people — a process-based critique that is not likely to resonate with Democratic primary voters.
In Tuesday night’s debate, Obama finally challenged her directly, but even then it was more process criticism:
But look, we have big challenges. We’re at war. The country is struggling with issues like rising health care. We’ve got major global challenges like climate change. And that’s going to require big meaningful change, and I’m running for president because I think that the way to bring about that change is to offer some sharp contrasts with the other party. I think it means that we bring people together to get things done. I think it means that we push against the special interests that are holding us back, and most importantly, I think it requires us to be honest about the challenges that we face.
It does not mean, I think, changing positions whenever it’s political convenient.
And Senator Clinton in her campaign, I think, has been for NAFTA previously, now she’s against it. She has taken one position on torture several months ago and then most recently has taken a different position. She voted for a war, to authorize sending troops into Iraq, and then later said this was a war for diplomacy.
I don’t think that — now, that may be politically savvy, but I don’t think that it offers the clear contrast that we need. I think what we need right now is honestly with the American people about where we would take the country. That’s how I’m trying to run my campaign. That’s how I will be as president.
It’s just not feasible to take down a frontrunner who is perceived as a strong Democrat and reviled on the other side by criticizing her for flip-flopping. Democrats are sick of their candidates being called flip-floppers (Bill Clinton, John Kerry). More importantly, it recapitulates the failings of previous “wine track” reform candidates like Bill Bradley, who had little success accusing Al Gore of not being honest (though it did tee up Republicans for the fall campaign).
The big question is simple: Where are the issues? On what issues is Clinton wrong? If Obama doesn’t have a strong issue-based critique, he won’t win.
MR. RUSSERT: I’m going to ask Senator Obama a question in the same line.
The three astronauts of Apollo 11 who went to the moon back in 1969 all said that they believe there is life beyond Earth. Do you agree?
SEN. OBAMA: You know, I don’t know, and I don’t presume to know. What I know is there is life here on Earth — (laughter) — and — and that we’re not attending to life here on Earth. We’re not taking care of kids who are alive and, unfortunately, are not getting health care. We’re not taking care of senior citizens who are alive and are seeing their heating prices go up. So as president, those are the people I will be attending to first. (Laughter.) There may be some other folks on their way. (Applause, laughs.)
This event might be interesting if you’re interested in the state of public debate today — I hope someone points out the damage that Luntz, Lakoff, and Westen are doing to contemporary discourse:
On Wednesday, November 7, a major public conference will feature philanthropist George Soros; political consultants Frank Luntz, George Lakoff, and Drew Westen; New York Times media critic Alessandra Stanley; journalists Nicholas Lemann and Orville Schell; and FCC Commissioner Michael J. Copps, along with other influential commentators in a daylong series of panels and debates titled “There You Go Again: Orwell Comes to America.”
Kicking off a hotly contested campaign year, the discussion will address the corrosion of public dialogue and the widening gulf between truth and politics in America, and what can be done about it. Taking inspiration from the work of George Orwell, whose influential essay “Politics and the English Language,” appeared some sixty years ago, the panelists will explore the history and present practice of political propaganda and discuss the latest developments in political communication and manipulation. They will also address the role of the media and consider whether it is promoting an honest public debate.
The event will be presented by LIVE at the New York Public Library in collaboration with three leading journalism schools, the University of California, Berkeley, Columbia University, and the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication, with support from the Open Society Institute. Current and former deans of the participating journalism schools will moderate the discussions.
The Wall Street Journal’s Pete DuPont offers more supply-side nonsense that even Bush administration economists reject:
Tax rate reductions increase tax revenues. This truth has been proved at both state and federal levels, including by President Bush’s 2003 tax cuts on income, capital gains and dividends. Those reductions have raised federal tax receipts by $785 billion, the largest four-year revenue increase in U.S. history. In fiscal 2007, which ended last month, the government took in 6.7% more tax revenues than in 2006.
These increases in tax revenue have substantially reduced the federal budget deficits. In 2004 the deficit was $413 billion, or 3.5% of gross domestic product. It narrowed to $318 billion in 2005, $248 billion in 2006 and $163 billion in 2007. That last figure is just 1.2% of GDP, which is half of the average of the past 50 years.
Lower tax rates have be so successful in spurring growth that the percentage of federal income taxes paid by the very wealthy has increased. According to the Treasury Department, the top 1% of income tax filers paid just 19% of income taxes in 1980 (when the top tax rate was 70%), and 36% in 2003, the year the Bush tax cuts took effect (when the top rate became 35%). The top 5% of income taxpayers went from 37% of taxes paid to 56%, and the top 10% from 49% to 68% of taxes paid. And the amount of taxes paid by those earning more than $1 million a year rose to $236 billion in 2005 from $132 billion in 2003, a 78% increase.
I know the Wall Street Journal has a blithe attitude about torture, a word it often puts in scare quotes, but did their editorial complaining about the attorney general nominee’s treatment in Congress really need to be headlined “Torturing Mukasey”?
I’m not a big fan of the Wall Street Journal’s John Fund, but he is absolutely right about this Al Franken quote:
Al Franken, the liberal former Air America host who is now running for the Senate in Minnesota, is already slipping into the role of potential legislative censor of his old industry. “You shouldn’t be able to lie on the air,” he told Newsweek’s Mr. Fineman earlier this year. “You can’t utter obscenities in a broadcast, so why should you be able to lie? You should be fined for lying.”
In fact, you can be “fined” for lying, if the person you lie about successfully sues for defamation. But the First Amendment makes it exceedingly difficult for defamation plaintiffs to prevail, especially if they are public figures–and for good reason. Under a more pro-plaintiff legal regime, “the pall of fear and timidity imposed upon those who would give voice to public criticism is an atmosphere in which the First Amendment freedoms cannot survive,” Justice William Brennan wrote in New York Times v. Sullivan (1964).
I have obviously devoted a lot of effort to fighting misinformation, but government-imposed fines for “lying” would silence speech and lead to the prosecution of political minorities. Views like that have no place in the US Senate.
