One of the more profound changes in American governance in recent years has been the normalization of the Senate filibuster–or, to be more precise, the threat of a Senate filibuster, since actual filibusters rarely occur. To make a very long story short, since 60 votes are needed to invoke cloture and cut off debate on any measure that doesn’t benefit from special rules (e.g., a budget reconciliation bill), a de facto 60-vote requirement has emerged for passage of legislation in the Senate. Hence, all the excitement about Al Franken becoming the 60th Democratic Senator.
In the train of this development has been a growing obsession with partisan ideological unity. If getting legislation through the Senate requires 60 votes, then no party can tolerate much in the way of defections. And by the same token, undecided senators in either party can exercise an enormous amount of power on close votes–as we saw when “centrist” Democratic and Republican senators reshaped the economic stimulus bill.
As J.P. Green noted a couple of days ago, there’s already a lot of agonizing going on about the relative willingness of Senate Democratic leaders to put the screws to “centrist” red-state Democrats on health care reform, including such specific measures as a strong public option. I say “agonizing” because many Democrats are loath to make demands on senators that could endanger their political careers, and because it’s often hard to know on any particular piece of legislation where to draw the line that separates party discipline from party bondage.
That’s why yesterday’s statement by Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin defining party discipline not in terms of support for the “public option” or cap-and-trade or any other substantive position, but in terms of unity on cloture votes, was potentially very significant if it represents the beginning of a serious and sustained effort. It serves as a reminder that 60 votes are not in fact required to enact legislation in the Senate, and that supporting cloture is not in fact the same as supporting passage of a given bill. Inversely, a vote against cloture is (except in the rare circumstances of a rushed Senate bill) a vote to do nothing–to obstruct any and all legislation in favor of the status quo. And unless I am missing something, no senator has ever been defeated for re-election solely on the basis of voting for cloture on a bill they intend ultimately to oppose.
Insisting on these forgotten facts day in and day out could have an effect, if only to undermine the sixty-votes-myth and force wavering Democratic senators to explain why heterodox views require them to obstruct any action on major challenges facing the country, as though their constituents pay any real attention to procedural votes (news flash: they don’t). That should be a given. The harder question is whether the next step should be to impose real sanctions on senators who rebel on cloture votes. My personal feeling is that supporting a filibuster against your own party and your own party’s president should be treated as a serious and rare measure on major issues of conscience where the sacrifice of some of the prerogatives of seniority are a small price to pay. So maybe that price really should be paid. But at a minimum, the practice of thinking of cloture votes as identical to substantive votes, and tolerating defections on the former as just the same as the latter, needs to come to an end. There is no sixty-Senate-vote requirement for the enactment of regular legislation in the Constitution or in the Senate rules. We don’t need lockstep Democratic unity on policy initiatives. We just need unity on the simple matter of allowing the Senate to vote.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist
Month: July 2009
The big news today on the health care reform front is a much-publicized rebuke delivered by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus:
According to Democratic sources, Reid told Baucus that taxing health benefits and failing to include a strong government-run insurance option of some sort in his bill would cost 10 to 15 Democratic votes; Reid told Baucus it wasn’t worth securing the support of Grassley and at best a few additional Republicans.
This was music to the ears of progressives who have been fretting for months that Baucus was going to crucially water down health care reform in the vain pursuit of bipartisanship. And more specifically, since Reid mentioned the risk of Democratic defections, the ukase is being cited as the first fruits of a “Progressive Block” strategy outlined recently by Chris Bowers, wherein supporters of a strong public option in health care reform would outflank “centrists” with a credible threat to take down the legislation entirely.
But in the rush by some observers to happily bury health care bipartisanship entirely, other possible motives for Reid’s tactic may be missed. As Jon Cohn notes today at TNR, Reid may simply be signalling to Republicans that they are exacting too high a price for their support:
As it happens, Reid’s tough talk could (that’s “could,” not “will”) end up making a bipartisan bill more likely. The more that Republicans believe Democrats are wliling to pass reform on their own–either by maintaining enough party discipline to break a filibuster or by trying to use the budget reconciliation process, in which legislation can pass with a simple majority vote–the more likely Republicans are to compromise. It’s possible Reid’s show of pique could actually strengthen Baucus’s hand for dealing with Grassley, while also strengthening the hand of those on the right–be they individual lawmakers or special interest groups–who would prefer a modestly unacceptable bill to one they really hate.
If Cohn’s speculation is correct, then this may not be a simple morality tale in which progressives finally start emulating Republicans by showing some spine (a favorite injunction in the progressive blogosphere), and roll on to victory, but a more complex dynamic involving pushes and pulls aimed at various factions in both parties. In particular, those who view the progress of health care reform as purely a matter of “spine” or “strength” should remember that public opinion is a big factor in all these senatorial calculations. It’s noteworthy that Reid called not only for preservation of the public option, but for stopping all the talk of paying for health care reform by taxing some portion of employer-sponsored health care benefits, which many progressives (though typically not those in the labor movement) strongly support. The public option is popular; taxing benefits is not.
It’s clear (as Cohn also notes today) that taking the benefit tax option off the table is going to complicate the process of “paying for” and hence enacting health care reform. But it also removes yet another stick-in-the-eye to Republicans, who can’t forget that the Obama-Biden campaign savaged John McCain for proposing elimination of the tax benefit (albeit in the pursuit of very different health care policies that can hardly be described as “reforms”).
So who knows exactly what Reid is up to or where the process will go next? I’m not sure even he knows, but one thing is for sure: progressive “strength” is best exerted in concert with public opinion, and in the service of a workable strategy.
Seems like a lot of the ink, bytes and air time being lavished on coverage of Sarah Palin’s latest stunt are focusing on the wrong question, which is” Why did she quit?” The more interesting question is “Is Sarah Palin over?”
Yes, we will be seeing lots of her in the months ahead, as she cranks up her campaign and runs around the country trying to raise dough for her legal fees and Republicans whose support she hopes to win. And the media will give her lots of play, just because she is a political bomb-thrower. But it seems to me that she has just added a lethal dose of doubt to her narrative. In his CNN.Politics.com commentary, “The Politics of Self-Destruction,” Paul Begala nails it nicely:
For all her whining about the ethics complaints brought against her, Sarah Palin is not the victim of the politics of personal destruction. She’s the victim of the politics of self destruction.
I have no idea why Palin decided to quit, so let’s just pretend she was telling the truth: She believes she can make more of a difference on the issues she cares about as a private citizen than as the chief executive of the Last Frontier. My guess is a lot of Alaskans wish she’d said that when she was trying to become governor, but what the heck.
…The speculation is that, rather than returning to being a private citizen, Palin aspires to the presidency. Good luck. She quit her job as city councilwoman to run for mayor of Wasilla. She quit her job as mayor of Wasilla to run for lieutenant governor. She quit her job as the head of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission to run for governor. And now she’s quitting her job as governor to … be a private citizen? Right.
It appears Palin just handed her opponents — in both parties — a powerful meme, that she is a quitter, and one much more interested in her own career than public service. Sure, they could make the argument before, but now it is a slam-dunk. Hard to see how she can fashion a credible answer to the question that will surely dog her at town hall meetings, along the lines of “Why should we believe you will be a good President when you never finish the job?”
True, the American public has a short memory, as Nixon proved. Speaking of Nixon, Palin’s “I’m not a quittter” is disturbingly reminiscent of Nixon’s ‘I’m not a crook,” as will undoubtedly be depicted in creative YouTube clips before long.
Palin’s theatrics don’t do her party any favors, as Begala points out:
It is a paradox of the modern Republican Party: If they hate government so much, why don’t they leave it to those who can use it as a tool for national renewal? Republicans say government would screw up a one-car parade, and then when they get into government, they set about proving their theory right (e.g., Katrina, Iraq, the economy, etc.).
DLC president Bruce Reed affirms the observation in his current SLATE.com article, “Quitters Never Win: In Sarah Palin’s GOP, the leaders keep quitting and the troubles don’t“:
Look at the 2009 toll so far. One 2012 Republican wannabe, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, announced he would not seek re-election next year. One of the top woulda-beens, Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, quit his job to join the Obama administration and left the country and the hemisphere.
Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter quit the party. Last month, Nevada Sen. John Ensign had to resign his Republican leadership post to spend more time with his sex scandal. South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford resigned as head of the Republican Governors Association. After this week’s disastrous AP interview, Sanford soon may have to step down as governor as well. As his Argentine mistress said, you can’t “put the genius back in the bottle.”
When did the GOP become such a bunch of quitters? What ever happened to the party of Larry Craig and his you’ll-never-take-me-from-this-stall-alive spirit?
…Time after time, quitting has turned out to be the “worthless, easy path” that Sarah Palin insists it isn’t. What makes her sudden resignation especially troubling, though, is not the flawed strategy so much as her jubilation and relief in putting the statehouse in her rear mirror. Palin’s resignation is a symptom of what’s crippling the Republican Party of late: Governing has become an unwelcome distraction.
Palin should have learned from McCain’s fiasco in threatening to withdraw from the Fall debate with Obama that voters don’t have a lot of respect for politicians who reneg on their agreements. Certainly it’s another reminder that, as Begala puts it “The Republican Party was once a solid, serious, stable group of people…Now it’s got more flakes than Post Toasties.” At the very least, Alaska’s Democratic Party just got a huge gift.
The Palin resignation saga has refocused some media and insider attention on the early field for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. And the latest data, from Rasumussen, has reported the usual tight three-way contest among Palin (the favorite of 24% of self-identified Republicans), Romney (leading at 25%), and Huckabee (a close third at 22%).
But the poll also checked out favorable and unfavorable opinions of these putative candidates, and here’s where the numbers get a little wacky: Romney 73/19; Palin 76/21; Huckabee 78/17; Gingrich 65/39. That’s all very predictable. But then there’s Haley Barbour at 34/37, and Tim Pawlenty at 38/33. Only a fifth of Republicans have issues with Palin, while about half of those who seem to have an idea who Haley Barbour and Tim Pawlenty are don’t like them.
Barbour’s controversial nature is somewhat understandable; he was a Washington insider for decades before returning to govern one of the less admired states, and his Foghorn Leghorn speaking style doesn’t appeal to everybody. Still, the things about Barbour that might repel Democrats–say, his lobbying career–don’t usually bother Republicans. And what on earth has Tim Pawlenty done to offend so many Republicans?
Maybe the answer is that this is a Rasmussen poll, and shouldn’t be taken that seriously. Or maybe the perpetual competition among Republican candidates to outperform each other in ideological posturing has evolved into a mandatory exercise. If you are not out there every day shrieking about socialism or promising to end the “Holocaust” of legalized abortion, then something must be wrong with you. That’s the only thing I can think of that would make a tapioca politician like Pawlenty so much more disliked, even among Republicans, than Sarah Palin.
Note: this item by Ed Kilgore was originally published on July 6, 2009
Whatever you think of Sarah Palin, you have to hand it to her: what other politician this side of the White House could commandeer national attention on a major Holiday weekend, and even override all the Michael Jackson retrospectives? Better yet, her confusing jumble of rationales for the decision to quit her job, and her refusal to reveal her own future plans, have kept the buzz and speculation going strong, for God knows how long.
FWIW, I posted my own speculation back on Friday at The New Republic site, suggesting, with a lot of qualifiers, that her action may just mean she’s gotten too big for Alaska, in her own mind and in the minds of her avid followers around the lower 48.
But I don’t, of course, really know what’s going on, and neither does anyone else other than Herself and maybe the First Dude.
Unsurprisingly, in the absence of hard information, the speculation has largely varied along partisan and ideological lines, and the most interesting thing is that Palin fans are extremely focused on the reaction of her “enemies.” Here’s Kellyanne Conway at National Review:
It may confound old men and spinsters in the media that a mother of five would want to stop the madness and protect her brood from the relentless and vicious attacks by people who literally don’t know anyone like her, but, at some level, Governor Palin should be taken at her word: She’s had enough.
The advent of the blogosphere means there is not a single unexpressed thought left in America. And one would be challenged to find someone more singularly excoriated by people whose opinions, issued from poison keyboards, matter so little (except perhaps to their cats).
Conway has nicely exhibited, in just three sentences, all the fascinating self-contradictions of the Cult of Palin: isolated and irrelevant critics have driven poor Sarah to distraction, and perhaps to retirement. A click away at The Corner, Jim Geraghty takes the same thought a step further into martyrology:
The lesson that the ruthless corners of the political world will take from the rise, fall, and departure of Sarah Palin that if you attack a politician’s children nastily enough and relentlessly enough, you can get anybody to quit.
And at RedState, Erick Erickson throws the cloak of martyrdom over all conservatives:
Unfortunately, by resigning, I think the left and national media will be emboldened to ritualistically engage in the metaphorical gang raping of conservative politicians, particularly those who are female and have children. They’ll decide savaging Palin’s family drove her from office, so the sky’s the limit on the next conservative with kids.
Never mind that the “savaging of Palin’s family” was limited to a stupid Letterman joke and one or two stupid blog posts. It’s all the evil, evil work of “the left and national media,” which has also arranged for the “frivolous lawsuits” and ethics claims that have entangled Palin in Alaska. (There’s a nice parallelism here to the “frivolous lawsuits” that conservatives believe to be the primary source of high health care costs, despite the brave and selfless efforts of private health insurers to compete with each other to hold costs down).
It’s not hard to figure out that some conservatives are talking themselves into attributing anything and everything bad that happens to Sarah Palin to her detractors. That plenary indulgence may well even extend to indictments or other damning events that would sink any other politician. So maybe resigning her office really was a smart move, assuming that St. Joan of the Tundra wants a political future. To her fans, she can do no wrong, and criticism from outside the Cult of Palin simply supplies fresh evidence of her martyrdom.
Note: this item by J.P. Green was originally published on July 3, 2009
While the basic principles of health care reform should be simple enough for progressive political leaders to frame as opposing forces gird for the battle over health care reform, American voters are being presented an ever-expanding range of complex issues and policies . As WaPo‘s Dana Milbank put it in his July 2nd column,
…Americans are passionate and confused about it — and their opinions are all over the lot.
A CNN-Opinion Research poll found that 51 percent of Americans favor Obama’s health-care plan, but a Wall Street Journal-NBC poll found that only 33 percent think it is a “good idea.” A New York Times-CBS News poll found that nearly six in 10 would be willing to pay higher taxes so that all could be insured, but a Kaiser poll found that 54 percent would not be willing to pay more to increase the number.
A Quinnipiac University poll found that a majority — 54 percent — believe that reducing health-care costs is more important than covering those who lack coverage, while the Times-CBS poll found that 65 percent thought that insuring the uninsured was a more serious issue. A Washington Post poll found that 57 percent of Americans are dissatisfied with the health-care system — but 83 percent are satisfied with the quality of their own care.
In short, when it comes to health care, the state of the union is confused. The confusion won’t be cleared up by the complexity of the debate, with all the jargon about community ratings and insurance exchanges and risk adjustments and guaranteed issues…
A point made also in Mark Blumenthal’s July 1 post at Pollster.com:
Let’s start with what is hopefully obvious: Democrats in Congress are drafting multiple proposals, and the Obama administration has not specifically endorsed any of these. So a well informed respondent ought to have trouble evaluating “Obama’s plan,” since Obama has not yet committed to a specific plan. Even more important, very few Americans are following that debate with rapt attention. Last month’s CBS/New York Times poll, for example, found only 22% of Americans saying they have heard or read “a lot” about the health care reform proposals (50% said they heard or read “some,” 23% not much, 5% nothing).
“Softness” of responses is also a concern with analyzing polling data, particularly regarding health care reforms. As Blumenthal notes of the difficulty of overgeneralizing about polling responses:
When pollsters push as hard as CNN/ORC for an answer, a lot of the responses are going to be very soft, often formed on the spot and based on very superficial impressions. Nonetheless, if I were charged with conducting a benchmark survey for a candidate over the next few months, and I had room for only one question about health care reform, I would be tempted to ask a very general question about “President Obama’s plan to reform health care” (though I’d strongly lean to the NBC/WSJ version that explicitly prompts for “no opinion”).
Yes, public opinion on health care reform is multi-faceted. Americans come to the debate with a rich set of values and attitudes about what they like and dislike about the health care system, what they would change and what they worry about changing. Most have not yet focused on the details of the legislative debate. Many never will. So questions about specific policy proposals can produce results all over the map. As Slate’s Chris Beam puts in an excellent summary this week, “health care polling is especially variable, depending on the wording, the context, and the momentary angle of the sun.”
The Kaiser Family Foundation adds in its wrap-up of some recent public opinion polling on‘Footing the Bill’.
What the public thinks about health care reform from this point will depend on what they learn about any proposals over the course of the summer – whether it be the actual details of any plan that might emerge or the spin on such a plan that will inevitably come from ideologues on both sides, the health care industry itself, and interested advocacy groups. Our surveys have repeatedly found that opinion on most specific proposals is quite malleable and can be moved in both directions. Expect this to happen.
It’s not hard to see why framing is critical to the success of any health care reform package. President Obama has settled on a current strategy of framing the debate in terms of cost. In his article in The Atlantic on “Obama’s Inversion Of Harry And Louise,” Mark Ambinder notes of the President’s framing of the health care reform debate:
His basic message: your health coverage will be taken away if we don’t reform health care this year.
His arguments for reform have focused heavily on rising costs and the unsustainability of the current system. His public remarks on the matter are rife with figures about how much costs have risen and will rise in the future, and how soon the nation won’t be able to pay them.
“In the last nine years, premiums have risen three times faster than wages. If we don nothing, they will rise even higher. In recent years, over one third of small businesses have reduced benefits and many have dropped coverage altogether since the early ’90s,” Obama told the audience at his town hall meeting on health care in Annandale, Virginia Wednesday.
“If we do not act, more will lose coverage and more will lose their jobs. Unless we act, within a decade, one out of every five dollars we earn will be spent on health care,” Obama said.
Obama’s economic rhetoric is all about how things can’t remain the same. It’s the same point the Harry and Louise ad made, but backward, and in Obama’s version, the “naysayers” who oppose health reform are the ones who play fast and loose with the coverage Americans currently enjoy. And as polling indicates that Americans are concerned heavily with costs, the president has, in turn, stuck to telling people about the costs of not passing his plan…And so part of his rhetoric is about shaking people with fear into supporting his reforms. If Harry and Louise made people afraid of passing Clinton’s reform plan, Obama is making people afraid of not passing his.
President Obama is undoubtedly right that cost-containment is a critical element of any successful health care reform pitch. But any successful pitch is also going to have to explain in simple terms how the reforms will improve health security for millions of Americans. Ruy Teixeira argues in a TNRtv clip that the public option of health care reform proposals has surprising bipartisan appeal in recent polling, which suggests it could have merit as a key messaging/framing point.
Note: this item by Ed Kilgore was originally published on July 2, 2009
In a Financial Times column that congeals a number of complaints heard in various quarters of late, Clive Crook blasted Barack Obama for “choosing to be weak” on climate change and health care legislation.
Some progressives who are upset by the watered-down contents of the House climate change bill, or worried about where the Senate’s going on health care, might scan Crook’s column and nod their heads in agreement. Actually, though, Crook seems less concerned about the precise nature of climate change and health care provisions than about Obama’s refusal to flat out defy not only Congress but public opinion:
Congress offers change without change – a green economy built on cheap coal and petrol; a healthcare transformation that asks nobody to pay more taxes or behave any differently – because that is what voters want. Is it too much to ask that Mr Obama should tell voters the truth? I think he could do it. He has everything it takes to be a strong president. He is choosing to be a weak one.
While political leadership does generally require the shaping of public opinion, few successful leaders “tell the truth” to constituents in the form of telling them they are ignorant louts who are either too stupid to understand the choices involved in big challenges, or too selfish to make sacrifices in the national interest. That seems to be what Crook would have Obama do to look “strong.”
In terms of dealing with Congress, moreover, Obama has simply learned from the lessons of past presidents (particularly Bill Clinton) that success almost never involves my-way-or-the-highway presidential edicts, and that choosing the right moment for presidential interventions is as important as how much pressure is exerted. In other words, “strength” is no substitute for “strategy.”
Like most supporters of climate change legislation, I’m not happy with the compromises that were made to get the Waxman-Markey bill out of the House. But instead of despairing like Crook, I’d listen to another unhappy camper, Bradford Plumer, who has a good column that details all the reasons that passage of a bill like this is worthwhile and perhaps crucial (one of them being the disastrous effect that a failure to enact anything might have on the international climate change negotiations this December). And I might listen to Al Gore, hardly a man adverse to telling “inconvenient truths,” who worked the phones to keep progressive Democrats on board in the House when many were tempted to bolt over their disappointment in the final product.
As for health care, it’s entirely too early to make any real judgment on Obama’s congressional and public-opinion strategy. Yes, the president will need to strongly deploy the bully pulpit, probably more than once. But Crook’s assertion that Obama is abandoning the idea of health care cost-control or major changes in the incentive system for health services because he’s not out there right now demanding big public sacrifices in the middle of a recession either an overstatement of the facts or an impolitic demand that health reform be made as unsavory as possible.
Even by Crook’s standards, Obama would obviously be “stronger” if the financial system and then the economy hadn’t melted down just before he took office. But that’s the hand he was dealt, and he should be allowed to play it.
One of the more alarming developments of the last couple of weeks of bad economic news has been the calm assertion by a lot of highly reputable progressive economists (e.g., Paul Krugman here and Laura Tyson here) that we obviously need another economic stimulus package from Washington. It’s alarming because the political climate for another (actually, the third of this recession counting the one that was enacted in 2008) batch of stimulus legislation is really bad, particularly with battles over critical climate changes and health care initiatives fully underway.
The first plausible idea I’ve heard for resolving this dilemma comes from Noam Scheiber at TNR’s The Stash:
Why not pair a second stimulus with the cap-and-trade legislation now working its way through the Senate? That is, you could cut several hundred billion dollars worth of payroll taxes for low and middle-income workers, the argument being that they’re the ones who’d be hit hardest by energy-price increases under cap-and-trade. As my colleague Jon Chait points out, it’s hard to imagine the GOP opposing a tax cut. And you wouldn’t need to have an entirely separate stimulus debate–you just piggyback on the cap-and-trade debate. Better still, it probably makes it easier for Democrats to pass cap-and-trade, since this defuses a key GOP criticism, which is that the resulting energy price increases will act as a tax on hard-working Americans.
As you may recall, lots of conservatives talked about a payroll tax “holiday” during the last stimulus debate. It’s one of the few tax cut ideas with a progressive impact. As as Noam and Jon say, it would at least create some problems for Republicans, who are slavering at the prospect of another “big government spending” bill to attack at a time when the last stimulus package’s impact seems to be relatively small.
Maybe the administration and congressional Democrats should just hang tough and hope that the existing stimulus spending will kick in at the right time, and that health care and climate change legislation can be enacted even if the economy’s strugging and shrinking revenues make the deficit picture look steadily worse. But if another stimulus bill truly is an economic necessity, it would be smart to get off the dime preemptively and ask Republicans if they’ve really given up their tax cut mania in favor of the green eyeshade of deficit hawkery.
One particularly distasteful aspect of the recent neoconservative attacks on President Obama’s cautious strategy regarding the Iranian protests has been the incredibly smug self-assurance with which they assert that they know vastly more about what participants in movements for social justice are thinking and what they really need then does the “naïve” and “gullible” Barack Obama.
This is, to say the least, a somewhat odd view because not a single one of the leading neoconservatives – not a single one – has ever walked a picket line, much less felt what a policeman’s nightstick feels like when it cracks the thin layer of skin on the top of your skull and sends blood pouring into your eyes. Not a single one of them ever served in any position of any kind in the leadership or even the rank and file of any movement for social justice. Even in the privileged ivory-tower world in which they live, not a single one of them has ever published an article which seriously analyzed the strategy and tactics of any popular mass movement for social justice or basic democratic rights.
But this doesn’t seem to bother them at all. In their view, leading a mechanized tank brigade into battle is a complex task that requires a tremendous amount of specialized knowledge, field experience and study. Advising movements for social justice, on the other hand, is like Karaoke singing – some people may happen to be better at it than others, but anyone has a right to grab the mike.
Several days ago this arrogant attitude reached its intellectual reductio ad absurdum with the publication of an op-ed piece by John Bolton advocating the Israeli bombing of Iran’s nuclear installations. It contained the following assertion:
Significantly, the uprising in Iran also makes it more likely that an effective public diplomacy campaign could be waged in the country to explain to Iranians that such an attack is directed against the regime, not against the Iranian people. This was always true, but it has become even more important to make this case emphatically, when the gulf between the Islamic revolution of 1979 and the citizens of Iran has never been clearer or wider. Military action against Iran’s nuclear program and the ultimate goal of regime change can be worked together consistently.
Bolton is not alone in this view. Writing in Commentary magazine, Max Boot quoted this precise paragraph, describing Bolton’s article as a “compelling and courageous analysis.”
Most people’s first reaction to this notion is a kind of mental double-take. What? Wait a minute — is he really saying he thinks Iranians can be “effectively” convinced to accept the bombing of their country as something that is not directed at them and is even ultimately done in support of their struggle for democracy?
One possibility, of course, is that neoconservatives don’t honestly believe this idea at all. They consider the bombing of the Iranian nuclear sites to be necessary regardless of any collateral consequences it may have and they are simply tossing this notion out to deflect one major objection.
Unfortunately, that’s the optimistic scenario.
Even worse is the possibility that they actually do believe that Iranians can be convinced to view the bombing of at least some 6-14 major nuclear installations – many within 150 miles of Tehran – as ultimately supporting and helping them in their struggle to win greater democracy.
To get some sense of how wildly implausible this notion actually is, it is only necessary to read any of a number of recent commentaries that detail the extraordinarily complex divisions within Iranian society that have emerged since the recent election. These divisions include those within (1) the clerical establishment, where there are at least four major divergent political forces at work, (2) the regular military, elite military, paramilitary and police forces (3) the business community (4) the young (5) the secular nationalists, (6) the urban working class (whose level of support for Ahmadinejad now much less certain than before the election) as well as other social groups and then to try to imagine how the bombing of their country by Israel would strengthen or weaken the position of each of these groups in the struggle for democracy.
Don’t read Battochio’s post, “Diagrams on Conservatism: Visualize the Insanity” at Vagabond Scholar (flagged by Digby), if you don’t want to be caught smirking, chuckling or laughing out loud at the office. What Battochio does is channel a little bit of The Rude Pundit‘s bluntness through an erudite filter, and comes up with a perceptive, sharp-tongued exploration of the values that undergird modern conservatism. Here’s a sample:
Modern conservatism can be summed up many ways, from “You’re on your own” to “Good luck” to “Screw you, I’ve got mine” to “Screw you, I don’t have mine, but you ain’t getting anything either.” It’s a twisted worldview, impractical and even unrealistic, generally self-serving, sometimes self-destructive, but almost always destructive to others. Rather than recognizing and trying to minimize unnecessary suffering, as an ideology it seeks to justify cruelty and callousness. Movement conservatives seldom feel responsible for their own actions or the horrible consequences of their policies. It’s unquestioned dogma for them that they represent the “natural” order, that unearned privilege within their group is proof of merit or God’s favor, and the real problem with America is the uppity heretics who question all that and don’t mind their place.
Battochio breaks Conservative movements down and offers this consideration of libertarians:
For “mistaken,” it’s hard for me not to think of libertarians, and all other conservatives who have nice-sounding, self-serving theories that aren’t fully thought out, are divorced from empirical data, and show little understanding of basic human nature…They epitomize confirmation bias, and tend to ignore data and major events disproving their ideas. Their crackpot theories can be harmless – as long as they’re not in power and acting on them. (I’d say the smartest libertarians realize their approach’s limitations, view libertarianism itself mostly as a cautionary check, and are “thoughtful.” Meanwhile, the full-blown Randians are typically callous, ignorant or worse.)
And this on “movement conservatism,”
…which is in authoritarian in nature and has been a major strain in America since at least Richard Nixon and Joe McCarthy. It got a major boost under Reagan, went into overdrive with his many myth-making acolytes, and achieved a perfect storm of belligerent idiocy and ruthless incompetence in the astonishingly arrogant George W. Bush administration. The base exemplifies its unreflective, displaced anger…the conservative base is a toxic mix of callousness, ignorance, spite and zealotry.
Battochio provides some amusing charts, with overlapping circles, diamonds and ovals featuring terms like “cloistered,” “devious,” “Spiteful, “ignorant” and “assholes.” He’s also got a funny, link-rich round-up of conservative pundits and how they fit into his schema. Battochio points out that the decline of rational conservatives has coarsened the debate between Americans across the political spectrum, and progressives would be better off being challenged by more thoughtful, articulate conservative adversaries now in increasingly short supply.
