It’s reflection time at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. When the inhabitants of the white house and their minions are not milking their fading authority to smash and grab as much as they can, they are busy spinning history to describe their positive accomplishments. All they have is the fact that we have not had a major terrorist incident “on U.S. soil” since 9-11. For this, they figure, Americans should be expansively grateful to the lamest duck.
And a very weak hand it is. It’s sort of a perverse variation on “Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?” Other than 9-11, we have been pretty safe during the Bush years, huh?
Challenging the “Bush made us safe” meme is not merely a matter of partisan squabbling. The meme is intended as cover for an astoundingly broad range of failed policies, arguably the worst of any presidency. If the GOP revisionists have their way, it would become the common wisdom that justifies a mind-boggling array of bad decisions, encompassing letting the neo-cons define our mid-east policy, trashing our cred abroad, drowning the federal budget in red ink, the disastrous deregulating of the financial sector, etc. etc. ad nauseum.
The meme collapses quickly when we ask how safe we are when the head perp is still not apprehended, and that fact alone has encouraged wanna-be terrorist groups. America has never had so many enemies willing to do us harm, thanks to the Bush Administration. And the “on U.S. soil” qualification evades the troublesome facts that thousands of Americans have been killed in Iraq and American civilians have rarely been in more danger abroad.
Digby has a good response to Peggy Noonan’s parroting of the GOP meme “At least Bush Kept us Safe.”

Can someone explain to me how it is that Peggy Noonan can claim that Bush kept us safe? Didn’t we have the worst terrorist attack in US history while he was president? Didn’t his team brush off warnings ahead of time and didn’t the president himself tell tell the CIA briefer on August 6th, 2001 that he had “covered his ass” by telling him that Bin laden was planning to attack inside the United States? Why should he get credit for “keeping us safe.” (I won’t even go into Katrina or the financial meltdown as measures of how well he did at other measures of security.)
Noonan and her friends are searching madly for some kind of bright spot in Bush’s otherwise epically failed administration. This is the best they can come up with. But while the government certainly did tighten security after 9/11 — as any president would have done, by the way — his foreign policy and military exacerbated the threat many times over.

And, as Blue Texan asks at Firedoglake,

But anyway, why does Bush get a total freaking pass on the first worst attack in US history that killed 3,000 people on his watch, especially since the 9/11 Commission concluded that 6 of the 10 major missed opportunities to prevent 9/11 occurred under Mr. Kept Us Safe’s watch?…We’re just supposed to give him a mulligan on that?

David Neiwert, also reacting to Noonan’s screed, has a post at Crooks and Liars on the topic of pre-9-11 negligence on the part of the Bush Administration. Says Neiwert:

What was never excusable was that Bush and Co. were asleep at the wheel on 9/11 regarding their duty to “keep us safe” — and no amount of historical revisionism by wistful dolphin ladies will erase that fact…In other words, Bush botched the job of keeping us safe, both during his tenure and for the foreseeable future.

Safe indeed. As Mark Mazetti wrote about the 2006 National Intelligence Estimate in his New York Times article (flagged by Neiwert) “Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terrorism Threat,”

The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe…. An opening section of the report, “Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,” cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology…The report “says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse,” said one American intelligence official.

The Obama and subsequent administrations will be dealing with the fallout from Bush’s Iraq war for many years to come. Digby also writes about how U.S. torture policies helped to multiply the number of terrorists willing to do harm to the U.S. and our soldiers.
Noonan says Dems are afraid that two words will be added to the “President Bush Kept Us Safe” meme: “unlike Obama.” The GOP would have us blame Bush’s predecessor, President Clinton for setting the stage that lead to 9-11 (there was one foreign terrorist attack ‘on U.S. soil’ during the Clinton administration, also on the World Trade Center — see correction in comments). But should a terrorist attack happen during the Obama Administration, they will attribute none of the blame to the Bush gang. “It’s your fault when it happened on our watch, and it will be your fault when it happens on your watch.” But they can’t make a convincing argument that President Clinton encouraged terrorism, “unlike Bush.”
There is a tendency to let bygones be bygones when government changes hands, and to try and say something nice about the old regime. But I would urge Dems everywhere to not let the “Bush kept us safe” meme pass unchallenged, even in a casual conversation. Unchallenged bullshit has a way of snowballing, which is how we got stuck in the Iraq quagmire, as well as the economic meltdown — at a cost of trillions of taxpayer dollars.

One of the most annoying aspects of the MSM’s false-equivalency habit in political commentary is the assumption that both major political parties have their “ideological purist” and “moderate” wings, which are of similar sizes and influence. It’s been obvious for a long, long time that the conservative movement has a hold on the GOP that cannot be remotely compared with any development among Democrats, and this disequilibrium has become if anything more apparent during the period of Republican decline over the last two election cycles.
I’ve already written at considerable length (most recently here and here) about the virtual unanimity in influential Republican circles that there’s nothing wrong with their party that a more rigorous conservatism–perhaps supplemented by use of new technologies and recruitment of a new generation of activists and candidates, but not new ideas–can’t solve. Sure, there are tactical disputes, and generational rivalries, and different loyalties to different conservative politicians, but nothing like real dissent, and thus nothing like real tolerance or openness to debate.
A good example is the call issued yesterday for a movement-conservative-sponsored debate among candidates for the RNC chairmanship battle, which two candidates eagerly accepted within hours, with the others sure to follow.
The original convener is, unsurpringly, the godfather of conservative litmus-testers, anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist. But he immediately reached out to the most active fellow-conservative critics of the Bush-era Conservative Establishment by saying: “We’re going to work with bloggers to develop the questions, and it will be open to CSPAN.”
Conservative warhorse Morton Blackwell of VA quickly chipped in with a suggested questionnaire that RNC chair candidates would have to fill out before participating in their public inquisition. Most of his questions seem to revolve around insuring that the RNC becomes completely sanitized of any sympathy for “non-conservative” opinions or candidates.
Imagine if you will what would happen if any self-styled left-progressive group made similar demands of candidates for the DNC chairmanship (and that’s hard to imagine, since such groups typically demand no more than a well-earned seat at the table, not total dominance). You can be sure that one or more of the candidates would spurn the instruction and run on a Big Tent platform, probably successfully. That couldn’t occur in today’s GOP.
The most interesting immediate objection I’ve read about Norquist’s call for a conservative-sanctioned debate was at the web page of hard-right Human Events magazine. A commenter named Mark said:

NO, it should NOT be televised. Not to the general public. Find a way to restrict viewing to registered Republicans only, and only THEN should it be televised.

Ah yes, that’s the spirit.

So: you think you have it tough with your adjustable-rate mortgage, your credit card balances, your skyrocketing health insurance premiums, and those neat little notes in your pay envelope threatening layoffs? Thanks to Vanity Fair’s Michael Shnayerson, we can now all feel better by feeling the pain of the former Masters of the Universe on Wall Street, who have lost far more than the rest of us will ever have.
Focusing especially on the big wheels of the now-defunct Lehman Brothers, Shnayerson provides a lot of snarkily delicious details about the painful lifestyle adjustments of the newly defunded:

Only months ago, ordering that $1,950 bottle of 2003 Screaming Eagle Cabernet Sauvignon at Craft restaurant or the $26-per-ounce Wagyu beef at Nobu, or sliding into Masa for the $600 prix fixe dinner (not including tax, tip, or drinks), was a way of life for many Wall Street investment bankers. “The culture was that if you didn’t spend extravagantly you’d be ridiculed at work,” says a former Lehmanite. But that was when there were investment banks. Now many bankers, along with discovering $15 bottles of wine, are finding other ways to cut back—if not out of necessity, then from collective guilt and fear: the fitness trainer from three times a week to once a week; the haircut and highlights every eight weeks instead of every five. One prominent “hedgie” recently flew to China for business—but not on a private plane, as before. “Why should I pay $250,000 for a private plane,” he said to a friend, “when I can pay $20,000 to fly commercial first class?”
The new thriftiness takes a bit of getting used to. “I was at the Food Emporium in Bedford [in Westchester County] yesterday, using my Food Emporium discount card,” recounts one Greenwich woman. “The well-dressed wife of a Wall Street guy was standing behind me. She asked me how to get one. Then she said, ‘Have you ever used coupons?’ I said, ‘Sure, maybe not lately, but sure.’ She said, ‘It’s all the rage now—where do you get them?’”

There are thousands of words more about the real estate crisis in Manhattan and the Hamptons, and the personal sagas of Lehman potentates who borrowed heavily against suddenly worthless stock compensation. And there’s even a poignant passage about the shadow being cast on the Xmas festivities of the newly not-so-rich:

Usually, December is the year’s most festive time in New York. Wall Street bankers either have their bonuses or know what they will be. Their wives have bought new gowns for the season’s charity balls—the Metropolitan Museum’s acquisition-fund benefit and the New York Botanical Garden’s Winter Wonderland Ball, and more, at ticket prices ranging from $400 to $15,000. Then it’s off to St. Barth’s for sun worshippers, Aspen for skiers.
But not this year.
Privately, some New York benefit organizers wonder if even half the stalwarts will show up. On St. Barth’s, rental villas are usually booked by early fall; this year, many were available as of early November. At Aspen’s St. Regis hotel, Christmas week was still available, at $13,920 for two.

And so the pain spreads from New York to Colorado and even to St. Barth’s.
There’s some rough justice in the fact that those who leveraged the entire U.S. economy into unsustainable debt also leveraged themselves into trouble, however manageable by most standards. But the real lesson to be learned, for the umpteenth time, is about the fatuity of the hardy American myth, born of a sort of corrupted Calvinism, that personal success is a sign of personal virtue or even of divine favor. As former Rep. Dick Gephardt once inelegantly but accurately put it: “A market is not a morality.” And unregulated capitalism does not create some sort of natural aristocracy of merit.

Those who think Barack Obama–who lest we forget, hasn’t taken office yet–is moving too slowly to deal with the economic crisis should look at Germany and count their blessings. As Clay Risen explains at The New Republic, German Prime Minister Angela Merkel seems to have been paralyzed by recent events:

Of all Europe’s leaders, no one has suffered from the economic crisis quite as much as Merkel, because no one has mishandled the crisis quite as badly as Merkel. Germany is facing its biggest economic challenge since World War II–the Bundesbank is predicting GDP to shrink by at least, 0.8 percent in 2009; many think that’s overly optimistic–and economists, politicians, media and the public across the spectrum are calling for tax cuts and stimulus spending of the sort being rolled out in France and other EU states.
But Merkel prefers to play the Dutch uncle–er, aunt–in this situation, telling a recent party congress that the crisis called not for government action but personal belt-tightening. Doing her best Jimmy Carter impression, she told the German parliament that her goal “is not to overcome the crisis” but “to build a bridge so that we at least can start recovering in 2010.”

She’s also, in a stand that will certainly separate her from every other leader in the industrialized world, determined to balance Germany’s budget within the next four years.
No wonder Risen says of Merkel:

When she came into office, fans said she would be Germany’s Margaret Thatcher. Now she’s looking more and more like Germany’s Herbert Hoover.

After watching a media appearance by Fred Thompson, Josh Marshall poses a very good question: do conservatives and/or Republicans actually favor a deep recession as a way to purge the economy of speculative excesses and debt?
While I am quite sure that Republicans are not about to hoist banners reading “Deflation Now!” a look back at the conflicts over the first “bailout” package and some of the GOP rhetoric surrounding the presidential campaign should make it clear that there is in fact a strong undercurrent of conservative hostility to any sort of relief measures that don’t simply involve tax cuts or deregulation. Those who convinced themselves that the mortgage crisis was caused by ACORN and poor and minority borrowers certainly are in no hurry to succor such Obama-supporting miscreants. More generally, there’s always been a large faction of conservatives who favored the occasional “healthy” recession to wring “excess demand” out of the economy. One of the innovations associated with the GOP’s embrace of supply-side economics was a partial abandonment of that point of view as “root canal” or “Hooverism.” But in the face of an actual recession, like the one St. Ronald Reagan presided over in 1981-83, there was no notable conservative support for any economic stimulus that didn’t focus on high-end or corporate tax cuts.
At Open Left today, Matt Stoller argues that conservatives aren’t that interested in economic stimulus because creditors actually benefit from debtors in a deflationary climate. That’s true so far as it goes, though it’s not clear the rank-and-file base of the GOP can currently be described as the “creditor class.” But I think there is a large and important kernal of truth in Matt’s analysis, not on economic grounds, but on moral grounds: conservatives like to think of themselves as sober and self-reliant people who don’t get themselves into the kind of financial trouble that merits government intervention. For those who don’t immediately face personal financial calamity in the current economy, it’s easy and very seductive to think of “economic stimulus” as identical to moral hazard, and deeply resent the use of tax dollars to relieve less worthy citizens of the consequences of their risky behaviors, particularly if a recession is thought of as good for the economy in the long run.
This is an old, old story in American politics. Go back to the convulsions of the populist era of the nineteenth century, and read what “hard-money” advocates had to say during deflationary periods. Economics aside, “goldbugs” constantly justified their views as synonymous with honesty and integrity and the sanctity of contracts. And that was a tradition that long predated Wall Street’s support for a gold standard. One of the bedrock principles of the Jacksonian Democrats was an identification of hard currency policies (and for that matter, opposition to general taxation) with the sturdy folk virtues of American farmers and artisans, who shouldn’t be fleeced by capitalist predators demanding easy credit for their wicked and greedy designs. Jacksonians viewed the Second Bank of the United States with a moral and even religious horror, as a Moloch sapping the vital instincts of the citizenry.
Stir into this ancient tradition the quintessentially American habit of treating financial success as proof of moral worth and even divine favor (the latter being a staple of today’s “prosperity gospel” preachers), and you certainly have the raw material for a robust conservative hostility to any government-enabled economic recovery, particularly now that it will occur under the auspices of a “liberal” Congress and administration.
Perhaps the deepening of the current recession will soon quiet such talk, as the damage spreads beyond the financial sectors and debt-ridden industries and encompasses millions of people who never took out a risky loan or ran up the credit cards (or more likely, for one reason or another, never had to). But just as Republicans like Phil Gramm couldn’t stop themselves from calling economically distressed Americans “whiners” a few months ago, even in today’s crisis there will be a significant group of Republicans betraying an affection for the bracing moral “lesson” being taught to the afflicted.

On Tuesday Ed Kilgore made a case that the “center-right nation” meme is “ridiculous.” In a good companion piece posted the same day in his Blog for Our Future post (via Alternet), “Clues Obama Won’t Govern Center-Right“, Robert Creamer called it “complete baloney”. Creamer adds:

Should progressives beware? Has Barack Obama suckered them into supporting a President who will really govern from the “center-right”? The short answer is no….Right wing pundits can comfort themselves with the fantasy that America is a “center-right” nation but it just ain’t so. In fact, all of the polls show that the November election represented a complete repudiation of right wing Bush-Cheney top-down economics and their Neo-Con foreign policy. Over 80% of voters indicated they wanted fundamental change. The polling shows massive majorities in favor of policies that would guarantee health care for all. It shows overwhelming support for policies that give tax relief to middle income Americans and increase taxes on the wealthy. Polls show complete rejection of neocon notions about “preemptive” war and unilateralism. And Americans strongly favor bold government action to stimulate the economy – not the failed laissez-faire economics that have lead to the current economic meltdown.

And echoing one of the points James Vega had some fun with in his Sunday TDS post “A New Slogan for a New Day,” Creamer continues:

…How many more bailouts does someone need before he stops believing that the unfettered “free market” will always lead the “private sector” (meaning those who control giant corporations and Wall Street Bankers) to act in the public interest. How many times can corporate CEO’s emerge from their private jets with tin cups in Washington before people begin to question the “center-right’s” claim that the private sector is inherently more efficient that the public sector. Let’s face it, it’s getting pretty tough to justify why Wall Street’s “masters of the universe” deserve to be paid hundreds of millions of dollars while middle class incomes tank; or why a CEO should make more money before lunch on the first day of the year than his minimum wage worker makes all year long.

Creamer explains that Obama’s cabinet picks

…do not in any way diminish the fact that America is demanding — and Obama intends to enact — a sweeping progressive program the likes of which we have not seen since the New Deal…Barack Obama will not govern from the “center right”, but he will govern from the “center”. That’s not because he is “moving to the center”. It’s because the center of American politics has changed. It has moved where the American people are. It once again resides in the traditional progressive center that has defined America’s promise since Thomas Jefferson penned its founding document over 200 years ago.

Fair enough. It’s well and good for Dems to root for their preferred cabinet choices and rail against the ones we don’t like as they come up. That’s part of the fun of being Democrats. Before uncritically embracing the “personnel is policy” argument being bandied about, however, Dems might be wiser to wait for the policies to appear before we start wholesale trashing of our team.

As the new administration and policymakers generally mull over options for a Great Big Stimulus Package to be enacted perhaps as early as next month, the role of state governments in impediing or speeding recovery needs more public attention than it’s currently getting. To make a long story short, states administer and partially finance a variety of federally-created programs and services that are intentionally counter-cyclical–costs rise as the economy sickens–but also labor under balanced budget requirements and borrowing restrictions that force them to cut those and other programs and services as revenues decline. So they are potentially working at cross-purposes from the feds.
I’m glad to see Matt Yglesias focus on this problem in the context of a column by Paul Krugman that suggests direct stimulus to consumers–e.g., tax rebate checks–or long-term infrastructure investments won’t stimulate the economy deeply enough or quickly enough. Here’s Matt:

This is one reason why I think it’s important for a stimulus package to have a heavy element of aid to state and local government and related agencies. The federal government contains a lot of automatic stabilizers (spending keeps going even though revenues fall) that should act as stimulus, but those stabilizers are offset by the pro-cyclical nature of state and local budget practices. A federal promise of aid will forestall state and local budget cuts, and thus allow the automatic stabilizers to work. All that can be mobilized on a rapid time scale.

I’d go further than Matt on this subject and observe that states have significant control over some of the “automatic stabilizers” that he’s attributing to the federal government (e.g., Medicaid, SCHIP and transportation programs); without some new assistance, states may not only counter-act the “automatic stabilizers” but could actually subvert them. That’s clearly what some Republican governors like Mark Sanford have in mind when they call for abolition of federal “mandates” rather than federal assistance: let us completely decimate Medicaid beyond what we are already allowed to do, and we’ll be fine!
So an effective stimulus package must not only provide heavy assistance to state and local governments; it must also be sufficiently conditional to ensure that the Mark Sanfords of the world don’t use the money to cut taxes as well as services.
As someone who worked for three governors back in the day, I can confidently point to another temptation facing state and local leaders that needs to be taken into account: the natural but completely absurd pretence that they can somehow turn their own economies around in the current global crisis. Sure, states and localities can critically influence their long-range economic prospects through a variety of policies such as educational and infrastructure investments. But their counter-cyclical clout is limited, and any “stimulus packages” enacted in the states, whether it’s Democratic service expansions or Republican tax cuts, will probably only make things worse unless they are carefully coordinated with federal policies.
You can’t take the politics out of politics, so don’t be surprised to see some governors and mayors talk and even act as though they can accomplish economic miracles far beyond their reach. After all, a whole generation of Republican governors and state legislators in the 1990s boasted of their fiscal and economic genius as they cut taxes and expanded services during a national economic boom that they and their own party did virtually nothing to produce. But federal policymakers need to ensure that their friends and enemies in state capitals and city halls are pulling in the same direction, particularly if they are to become, as they should be, the beneficiaries of vast new levels of federal relief.

As plans are made for the new administration and the next Congress, there’s an issue in the background that would have been considered important, oh, say, a bit over a month ago: election reform. Now, as Ben Adler reports in the New Republic, it’s not getting much if any attention in Washington:

[T]he 2008 election was rife with the same problems that have bedeviled others in recent years. It was only because Barack Obama’s margin of victory was so healthy that the country was not waiting with bated breath to see how many provisional ballots were counted. So while the White House will soon be filled with someone who has been a leader on addressing voting rights in the Senate, the public pressure needed to move legislation through the meat grinder on Capitol Hill is noticeably absent.

Adler goes on to provide a useful summary of steps Congress might take to regularize rules for voter registration, including national Election Day registration, and to finally resolve accountability concerns about voting machines. He also notes that the trend towards more stringent state registration requirements might call for national action to protect voting rights.
The time is right for election reform legislation in Congress, for the simple reason that Republicans no longer have the power to block it; some GOP members might, given their political problems, even be reluctant to oppose election reform.
But with all the competing priorities in Washington right now, it would require some serious public support to make election reform anything like a front-burner issue. That could happen, but only if it happens soon:

Seeing as most of these types of disenfranchisement disproportionately hurt Democrats, voting rights advocates are hoping that full Democratic control of Washington for the first time in 14 years will allow some of the recent bills to finally pass. But whatever options the new Congress and White House pursue, they’d be smart to do it soon. Even people who dedicate their lives to studying electoral reform admit that it is not an issue that captures the popular imagination for long. “When it comes to election administration,” says Hayward, “The public cares about it for three weeks out of every four years.”

Democrats should strike while the iron is hot, or at least tolerably warm.