One of the complaints conservatives level at Obama is that he acts like a (liberal) ideologue, but says he's merely a pragmatist.
It occurs to me that the problem with Trump is just the reverse: he acts like a pragmatist, with no particular values, but says he's a conservative (ideologue).
A good night for Romney, as everyone seems to agree. The post-debate CNN poll was 67%-25% pro-Romney, a margin of victory rarely seen. Surely that 25% is only the hardest of hard-core Obama supporters, which means the independents must have sided with Romney in truly overwhelming numbers.
Still, a few tricks were left on the table. I wish Romney had held Obama's feet to the fire more on his record. For example, all those times Obama talked about how Romney would horribly cut the budget and throw grandma out on the street, all Romney had to say was: "For the sake of argument let's say we went back to the spending levels of 2000. Did Clinton throw grandma out on the street? No. But we had a balanced budget and spending was far below its current level. Obama's spending far more, and are you any better for it?" But he continually argued that he wouldn't cut X, wouldn't cut Y. It's OK, Mitt! Cut some stuff!
Also, Romney threw out some talking points without really explaining them. That's something that McCain did four years ago, and it's infuriating. In response to Obama's absurd claim that domestic oil and gas production is up due to his administration, Romney scored a telling blow by explaining that production is up on private lands, but not public lands, but then he just said Romney would (in contrast) "build that pipeline". I know he's talking about the Keystone Pipeline, of course, but it would have made sense to spend 20 seconds explaining this, because many people out there don't know about it.
I'll take it, though. Good performance out there. Next up is the VP debate on October 11, and that should be a joy to watch, kind of like watching your favorite NFL team face your worst football rivals... from high school.
I listened to an interview with Michael Chabon on NPR a few days ago. Most of it, of course, was about the book, but one segment had political interest. Chabon was a big Obama supporter in 2008, to the point of hosting fundraisers for him.
NPR host Michael Krasny asks him (around the 10:00 mark) whether he's still as enthusiastic about Obama. The answer, pretty obviously, is no, but Chabon doesn't want to say so outright. His careful response is: "All we wanted by working so hard for him was to have the chance to be disappointed by him." I'm not naive enough to think we're supposed to take this literally. If Obama's first acts as President had been to eliminate income taxes, private Social Security, increase the size of the military, and bomb Iran, I don't think Chabon would just say: Oh, well, all we wanted was the chance to be disappointed... and now we are! No. Obviously he means that all politicians disappoint you to some degree or another, and so getting him elected would simply provide the opportunity to be disappointed.
But I find the response revealing in another way: it shows that the person Chabon (and by extension, many other highly motivated liberals) supported was important as a personality, not as a policy figurehead. Obviously Obama's policies were important as well, but the idea of electing the first black President was foremost in their minds. I don't think, for example, that too many people think back on the Carter Presidency with the same wistfulness: no one was just hoping for the chance for him to disappoint them. No, they voted for a set of policies, of which he was their driver. In 1980, Reagan was elected as the driver of a set of opposing policies when Carter's had been shown to be a bust.
If someone as motivated as Chabon can't muster up any more spirited a defense of Obama than that, on as friendly territory as he's ever likely to find (a public radio station based out of San Francisco!), liberals must be quite demoralized this year. That can only redound to the advantage of Mitt Romney. If only he can capitalize on it.
This is pretty interesting, not to mention damning, if true:
The day after this video went public, I (and millions of my closest friends) received an email from Jim Messina at Obama Campaign HQ, directing me to a blog post defending the President.
I invite you to look it over, bearing in mind a dog not barking. You will note that the blog post contains no actual defense. Rather, it is nothing but ad hominem attacks on OPSEC and the various people involved in making this video.
It's possible, of course, that the video is a lie. But the Administration would mount a more credible defense by explaining that, rather than just telling us we can't trust the video producers.
President Obama's recent decision to use executive order to bypass immigration laws is a lawless act, but it may end up being politically successful because it does raise uncomfortable questions for his opponents.
First, let's quickly dispense with any doubt about its lawlessness. The order was defended as "prosecutorial discretion" by Janet Napolitano, but discretion cannot meaningfully apply in this case. Suppose a Republican president issued an executive order directing federal authorities to stop enforcing penalties on capital gains tax collection (as John Yoo suggested) or federal assault weapon laws. Would there be any doubt that such an order would be interpreted (correctly) as an attempt to bypass Congress? The Obama order should be viewed identically. Prosecutorial discretion is when a prosecutor uses discretion in an individual case. The executive order applies to an entire class of people.
The problem for Republicans, though, is that many of the people who would be helped by the executive order are sympathetic figures. The media has predictably singled out the straight-A students and success stories among them, but one can easily sympathize with any kid brought to the U.S. at a young age and now facing deportation through no fault of his or her own. However, it's for just such stories that prosecutorial discretion was invented. If the DHS chose - on an individual basis - not to deport in such cases, only the most hard-hearted would balk. Republicans need to emphasize this: that the problem isn't one of sympathy, but of Obama's naked politicization of the problem by ignoring the law and issuing the order.
On a larger scale, the reason for the problem in the first place is the ease with which illegal immigration has occurred. It's because there are 800,000 such sympathetic cases that this is such a massive problem. If it were 800 it would never even be noticed. And the reason there are so many is that we have a major illegal immigration problem. It's temporarily been reversed by a stagnant economy, but that will change. Unless reform is implemented to stop future illegal immigration, eventually the problem will recur. One reason it's been difficult to create reform is that neither the left nor the right is willing to make many concessions: the left views illegal immigration as, frankly, good politics (immigrants in general trending leftwards) and the right wishes to avoid the aftermath of the Reagan Amnesty, which promised to legalize many immigrants with the quid pro quo that future illegal immigration would be enforced. The actual result of the amnesty was even more illegal immigration.
Romney has taken a pretty good line in his responses, avoiding fire-breathing while pointing out the legal problems with the President's order. That needs to continue. The best way to avoid this in the future is to make sure the current President is no longer in office come January 20, 2013.
However, one great advantage of the Presidency is the so-called "bully pulpit", a term coined by Teddy Roosevelt, who meant "bully" in the sense of "great" or "terrific". My generation might called it an "awesome platform", a great place from which to advocate for an agenda or position.
President Obama seems to have taken "bully" to mean something else: to harass or coerce. His preemptive attack on the Supreme Court over Florida v. HHS cannot possibly have any populist effect: the legislative work, after all, is done. The only effect it can possibly have is to try to cow the Supreme Court justices to decide in favor of the government. That is the other form of bullying.
Whether he'll get away with it is another matter. I would hope not. Everyone expects the case to be decided 5-4, with Justice Kennedy, as usual, the swing vote.
So the Obama campaign has a new site to report "smears" or "attacks" against the President. Interesting. Setting aside for the moment how this looks (an enemies list? informing on your friends and family?), I get why someone thought this was a good idea. The President is currently pretty unpopular, down in the high 30s or maybe just touching 40, and trending down. There's an avalanche of bad memes out there, so this looks like an attempt to collect some of them, so that staffers can sift them and maybe put out some counter-memes.
That's probably all this is. But my gosh, how can we ignore how it looks? I'm trying to imagine the response on DailyKos if President Bush had done this. (Fairly similar to what I'm seeing on Ricochet, I imagine, but with more expletives and a lot more hate and Hitler allusions.)
Just for the heck of it, I'll report this post and see what happens. If you hear nothing further from me, tell my wife I love her.
Those who claim that the “individual responsibility” provision exceeds Congress’ power to regulate interstate commerce because it penalizes “inactivity” are simply wrong. Individuals who choose to go without health insurance are actively making an economic decision that affects all of us.
This was authorized by the U.N.
Please explain how the President has committed a crime.
Insurers say the blame for their withdrawal lies not with them, nor even with the Obama administration’s general desire to extend health coverage, but rather with a single, hastily written provision of Obamacare. As the bill was being negotiated, insurers accepted that it would prevent them from denying coverage to those with pre-existing conditions, but they assumed that other means of managing risk — such as pricing, co-payments, and restrictions on coverage — would still be available. So insurers were surprised to discover that the law essentially required full “guaranteed issue” and banned price discrimination across the child-only market, regardless of clients’ risk profiles.
[...]
[Health Care for America Now (HCAN) communications director Avram] Goldstein thinks that argument is misleading. “When the industry expressed reservations about the rules, the Obama administration accommodated them,” he explains. “HHS Secretary Sebelius and her staff added in the ability for insurers to create open enrollment periods, so that a child who suddenly developed a health problem could not just rush over and buy a policy that would be guaranteed issue. Instead you have to say during the year, when you don’t know if you’re sick, whether you’ll enroll. They tried to accommodate insurers.”
This is true, but insurers still have good reason to be skittish. [America’s Health Insurance Plans] explains insurers’ uncertainty with a thought experiment: Suppose twelve different insurers each had an enrollment period in a different month of the year; then parents could still wait until kids got sick to purchase insurance, because they could simply pick the insurer that was enrolling that particular month.
If an alien enemy combatant, such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, mass-murders 3000 Americans and is then captured outside the U.S. in wartime, we need to bring him to the United States and give him a civilian trial with all attendant due process rights. If an alien enemy combatant is sending emails from outside the U.S. to an al Qaeda cell inside the U.S., the commander-in-chief needs a judge's permission (on a showing of probable cause) to intercept those communications. If an American citizen terrorist outside the United States — say, Awlaki in Yemen — is calling or emailing the United States (or anyplace else), the commander-in-chief needs a judge's permission to intercept those communications. If we capture an alien enemy combatant conducting war operations against the U.S. overseas, we should give him Miranda warnings, a judicial right to challenge his detention as a war prisoner, and (quite likely) a civilian trial. But, if the commander-in-chief decides to short-circuit the whole menu of civil rights by killing an American citizen, that's fine — no due process, no interference by a judge, no Miranda, no nothing.
Odious as Awlaki is, this seems to me to be setting an awful and reckless precedent. Consider how "interstate commerce" has been redefined over time to cover that which is neither interstate nor commerce, for the sake of political expediency. It is easy to imagine "national security" being treated the same way, particularly in an open-ended conflict against a loosely defined enemy. And we aren't assassinating U.S. citizens under the rubric of interstate commerce.
