More comments on John Kasich

There's a column by a Cincinnati journalist entitled “How John Kasich could win.” And the more I learn about John Kasich, the more I like him as a Presidential choice. But he has one major problem. Certainly the author of that post knows a lot about Kasich; after all, he writes for a newspaper in Cincinnati, in a State where Kasich has been Governor for over 5½ years. But who, outside the State of Ohio, knows much about him? I had been aware of his work with Jack Kemp in 1997 to balance the Federal budget, but most people are not as politically aware as I am (and even I had to look up the information to determine that this was in 1997). To most people in 49 states, the name “John Kasich” draws a blank. In Ohio he's popular. He was first elected Governor in a squeaker of an election, in 2010; four years later, he won all but two of the 88 counties in Ohio in his re-election fight. His approval is even now at 60% in Ohio. (Chris Christie, who also won re-election big after a weak beginning, seems to have lost the support of a lot of New Jersey residents, though I do not know what happened between 2013 and now to cause this.) I would say that if Kasich can make himself and his accomplishments known to the public, he could be an excellent candidate for the presidency. The things which have led me to support Christie mostly apply to Kasich as well.

Who won? Who lost?

I am amazed when I look at the things being written about the recent shenanigans over the budget. On the one hand, there are people like the editors of The Nation, who wrote an editorial dated October 16, 2013, entitled “Even When the GOP Loses, It Wins,” whose thesis is that it was in fact a Republican victory because:

The GOP now goes into budget talks with sequestration as the new baseline, primed to demand longer-term cuts in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. And they still hold the gun of a US default to the nation’s head in the next debt ceiling showdown.

But on the other hand, Obamacare is still in place, and we read such things as Timothy Noah's posting on MSNBC's site:

[W]hat the GOP’s right flank is experiencing right now, in government and the court of political opinion, is failure.

Both these posts come from the political Left, so it is not a case of the Left seeing it as a Right win because they had to give up some and the Right seeing a mirror image of this. It is clear that John Boehner feels that he lost:

“We fought the good fight. We just didn't win,” Boehner told Cincinnati radio station WLW on Wednesday after the Senate stepped in to effectively end the legislative impasse.…“Every time I've gotten into a discussion with the President, the Vice President, the Democrats here in Washington, and talk about entitlement changes, trying to make these programs sustainable, all they want to do is raise taxes. Well we can't do that,” Boehner said.

“If they're going to hold onto their position that we're always going to raise taxes, then we're not going to come to an agreement.”

As I said in a previous post, they just kicked the can down the road. Who will come out ahead in the long run, I just don't know.

A British view of the recent happenings

An interesting blog post on the site of the British newspaper, The Telegraph, recently appeared. It was written by Tim Stanley and dated October 16^th, 2013, and entitled: “US debt ceiling crisis — Barack Obama has won the shutdown. His prize is a lame duck presidency.” It is quite interesting to see how the events of the last week or so are viewed by others; of course, The Telegraph is a conservative paper, so this needs to be taken into account. But the title alone makes it clear that, to Mr. Stanley (who is a historian whose area of specialty is the United States) at least, President Obama has won a battle, but at a serious cost to his own ability to govern:

The shutdown is basically over and the President has won. Or, at least, he's won because the Republicans have definitely lost. Not only did they not get what they wanted — that “life or death” delay on Obamacare implementation — but they've given the impression of dragging partisanship to new lows. Obamacare had been passed already, the Supreme Court had okayed it and Obama had won an election on it, yet the GOP was still prepared to bring the country to the brink of ruin to cripple it. When Grover Norquist is saying that the Right went too far (he of the “drown government in the bath tub” fame) then the Right probably went a bit too far.

So much for the “won a battle” part. Then, however, he continues:

But there are caveats to that narrative. First, the Republicans aren't the only ones who ought to hang their heads in shame. It was the Democrat-controlled Senate that first rejected the House's bill and so sparked the crisis. It was the President who refused to talk to anyone about it (and went campaigning instead). It was the federal government — even when in shutdown — that behaved like a spoiled child, covering war memorials in fences and trying to stop military priests from saying Mass. And it was the mainstream media that took the side of the President and helped foster the impression that the GOP is run by a bunch of blowhard crazy people. For example, Dave Weigel points out that, contrary to reports, wild child Ted Cruz actually had “no intention” of delaying the critical final vote in the Senate. His image of being Sarah Palin 2.0 is entirely a media myth.

Many of these things, particularly regarding the Senate, the President, and the media, coincide with my own recent posts, so naturally I was happy to see someone else in agreement.

Continuing, Mr. Stanley writes:

Second, what has Obama really won? He keeps his precious healthcare reform and he gets government open again — but tomorrow morning he'll still have the same gridlocked political system that he had the night before. The shutdown is a rare example of him winning, but remember that this lame duck president has not only had a very simple (and, frankly, inoffensive) gun control bill killed in the Senate but was so spooked by bad poll numbers that he tried to dump responsibility for military action in Syria onto the Congress — before quietly dropping the idea altogether. Any thought that the shutdown payoff will be that he can sail an immigration reform package comfortably through Congress is pure fantasy. This is a broken presidency living out its last few years either holding off Republican attacks or lazily cruising the country on some pointless, endless, fatuous campaign trail. Obama's administration is politically bankrupt.

Very interesting. The media in general are unwilling to concede this, but I believe Mr. Stanley is right. The House of Representatives must approve any new legislation, and after this débacle, the House will be less inclined than before to pass anything with Obama's stamp of approval on it.

And finally, Mr. Stanley writes:

The talk for the next week will be about how the Tea Party is dead and Republicans must elect a politically correct, middle-of-the-road, unimaginative, establishment, compromising candidate in 2016 (preferably a singing sloth, cos the polls show that Americans just love those). But the reality is that US politics right now is a mess for both Left and Right, and the country is stuck in partisan limbo until the 2014 midterms or even the 2016 presidential election. This is not a Republican problem, it is an American problem.

Here, I part company to some extent with Mr. Stanley. A “middle-of-the-road, … compromising candidate” is necessary. There is no way a Rick Perry or Rick Santorum could get elected in this country in 2016. This, of course, is why I have been pushing Chris Christie. He will show, in three weeks, how he can get votes even in a deep blue state like New Jersey. This is clear. And no Republican can win unless he can get at least some people who are not convinced Republican voters to pick him. This is an important factor, which Mr. Stanley does not point out, and perhaps which he does not realize to be the case.

Kicking the can down the road

The Senate has put forth a bill to avert the crisis for now, by the overwhelming majority of 81-18. And the House has accepted the Senate bill, by a substantial, nearly ²/₃ margin, 285-144. President Obama has signed the bill. Nothing much has happened, except that the Government reopens, and the debt limit is raised. Under the terms of the bill, we will go through the same situation in a few months.

What this shows is that it's a great advantage to control the media. The Democrats could portray the Republicans as unwilling to compromise, despite it being that they were the ones unwilling to compromise. And the American public, according to polls, believed the Democrats' charges.

Where do we go from here? I don't know. Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Rand Paul were among the 18 Senators who refused to support the Senate bill. This means all three will have solid Tea Party credentials. But while, on this issue, the Tea Party had a lot of logic on its side — Obamacare is killing the economy and needs somehow to be derailed — the American public (which agrees that Obamascare is a bad thing, in poll after poll) does not want the Government shut down, or the debt limit increase threatened, or anything that might prevent the inexorable march forward of Obamacare. It's probably the media's fault, as I said. The media can't sell the public something as awful as Obamacare, but it can paint the GOP's attempts to stop it as so bad that the party is hurt. And that's really what the media want.

And I have no clue how to combat this.

Paul Krugman's idea of "compromise" — what world is he living in?

A lot of the time, when I quote a column or a blog at length, it's because I agree with it, and would like to echo the sentiments posted there. This time, however, I wish to quote one which I think is so far from making sense that it boggles the mind to think that there are people who actually think that way. The column I am discussing was one dated October 13, 2013 on The New York Times' site, called The Dixiecrat Solution by Paul Krugman. He begins:

So you have this neighbor who has been making your life hell. First he tied you up with a spurious lawsuit; you’re both suffering from huge legal bills. Then he threatened bodily harm to your family. Now, however, he says he’s willing to compromise: He’ll call off the lawsuit, which is to his advantage as well as yours. But in return you must give him your car. Oh, and he’ll stop threatening your family — but only for a week, after which the threats will resume.

Not much of an offer, is it? But here’s the kicker: Your neighbor’s relatives, who have been egging him on, are furious that he didn’t also demand that you kill your dog.

The analogy that Krugman seems to be making assumes that President Obama and the Senate Democrats have a right to all they want to do with our government, that any attempt to oppose those plans is spurious, and that the Republican attempts to try to arrange a compromise is a phony compromise — in other words, that they are asking for everything and yielding almost nothing. In fact, if anything, it is the Democrats who have insisted they get everything they want — President Obama has even said that first they need to give up everything and only then will he talk! So when Krugman says:

And now you understand the current state of budget negotiations.

Stocks surged last Friday in the belief that House Republicans were getting ready to back down on their ransom demands over the government shutdown and the debt ceiling. But what Republicans were actually offering, it seems, was the “compromise” Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, laid out in a Wall Street Journal op-ed article: rolling back some of the “sequester” budget cuts — which both parties dislike; cuts in Medicare, but with no quid pro quo in the form of higher revenue; and only a temporary fix on the debt ceiling, so that we would soon find ourselves in crisis again.

it is clear that Krugman's idea of “compromise” is a weird one. As he himself puts it:

I do not think that word “compromise” means what Mr. Ryan thinks it means. Above all, he failed to offer the one thing the White House won’t, can’t bend on: an end to extortion over the debt ceiling.

But this so-called “extortion over the debt ceiling” is the only weapon the Republicans have in the face of Democratic insistence that their entire program be allowed to go into force and the sequester rolled back. Krugman's idea of “compromise,” in short, is to allow the Democrats to have the whole of their wish list, without any give-back. This is a compromise? I certainly think not. And so, when he continues:

Yet even this ludicrously unbalanced offer was too much for conservative activists, who lambasted Mr. Ryan for basically leaving health reform intact.

it is clear that he considers Ryan's offer “ludicrously unbalanced,” without the slightest realization that it is his supposed compromise that would better be described in those terms.

I'm not going to continue further with his column, because it is easy enough to see how wildly out of touch with any notion of fairness Mr. Krugman is. And I assume he is not stupid. So my only question is, how can anyone take his ideas seriously?

Who is insisting on 100%?

There seem to be a lot of people assailing the Tea Party for refusing to compromise. President Obama is quoted as saying,

I cannot remember a time when one faction of one party promises economic chaos if it can't get 100 percent of what it wants. That's never happened before, and that's what happening right now.

But it's not the Republican Party, or even the Tea Party, that's insisting on “100 percent of what it wants.” It's Obama and the Senate Democrats. When the Republicans passed a bill that simply delayed for a year some of the more objectionable features of Obamacare — scarcely 100% of what the Republicans want, which is an outright repeal of the act — the Senate turned it down. The Republican House of Representatives has passed bills to fund particular parts of the Government and avert some of the negative effects of the Government shutdown, but the Senate refuses to go along. And President Obama has echoed the Senate, saying he'd veto this type of bill if it comes to his desk. Who is insisting on 100%?

Who is trying to get their own way without compromise?

An interesting post was made on The Federalist.com site by David Harsanyi, dated October 2, 2013, called “Guess What? History Didn’t Begin The Day Obamacare Passed: Trying to erase the past to dictate the future.” It deserves reading, and I quote it:

Hitting legend Stan Musial once allegedly declared that the “first principle of contract negotiations is don’t remind them of what you did in the past; tell them what you’re going to do in the future.” That neatly sums up how liberals would like to treat these budget /debt ceiling showdowns. Take for example: (from Greg Sargent @ThePlumLineGS 8:06 AM - 2 Oct 2013)

Serious Q: Has any R explained cogently *why* Ds should give Rs unilateral concessions in exchange for funding gov at sequester levels?

Now, if history had kicked off five minutes ago this would be a reasonable question, but since politics is a continuum and Obamacare doesn’t exist in a vacuum it’s a misleading one.

In reality, the only characteristic of the Affordable Care Act that’s “unilateral” is the manner in which it was passed; without consensus and without the minimal compromises that would have rendered long-term Republican opposition to Obamacare untenable. If Democrats had, back in 2009-2010, capitulated on one or two conservative objectives – out-of-state insurance markets or tort reform, for instance – this moment would be impossible.

Today, left-wing pundits wring their hand about partisan inflexibility and conventional wisdom of the media has coagulated around the “hostage taking” storyline. Back then, they were less concerned the health of Washington. Any alleged concessions made by the Administration in 2010 were aimed at corralling wayward Red State Democrats, resulting in the removal of the public option and the adding of bogus guarantees on abortion funding. And any concessions on bringing the price tag below a trillion dollars – a claim that was a specious even then – was necessary to try and close the deal with the public. When one party dictates every term of a massive reform effort, the inevitable result is what we’re seeing today.

Which bring us to a related talking point: Embedded in one of the most painful misinterpretations of the Federalist Papers you may ever read, James Downie of the Washington Post writes:

Here are the facts, Republicans: The legislative branch passed the Affordable Care Act. The executive branch signed it into law. The judicial branch upheld it as constitutional. The American people voted to reelect the president who championed it. Since the act was passed, Americans who favor and/or want the law expanded have consistently outnumbered those who oppose the law. And now Americans are already clearly opposed to Republicans’ shutdown tactics. If this were a game, we’d call the result a blowout.

No doubt many of you may quibble with Downie’s assertion about the law’s popularity, but generally speaking he’s right — and none of it matters.

DOMA passed with a 342–67 margin in the House and a 85–14 margin in the Senate, yet it was consistently challenged in the courts and by politicians. Citizens United was found constitutional and almost immediately the president attacked the Court. (As you know, some decisions are more sacred than others.) Americans twice elected a president who championed the Iraq War and yet progressives never stopped opposing it. In 2001, No Child Left Behind passed the House by a 384–45 and the Senate 91–8 margin. Yet, almost immediately liberal groups, and soon after elected officials, began their attempts to dismantle it.

Democrats had every right to engage in those pursuits. In fact, it’s healthy that they did. Health-care legislation isn’t chiseled into stone tablets and it’s not enshrined in the Constitution. The entire Obamacare legislation was a “concession” by conservatives. So even if Republicans tactics are unwise politics, trying to renegotiate and undo the majority’s will is not unprecedented. And to argue about what’s going without perspective is unrealistic.

It's a valid point. And one worth keeping in mind during this budgeting impasse.

Who's holding the American public hostage?

Some of the Democrats are trying to blame the Republicans in Congress for making the continuing resolution depend on defunding “Obamacare,” saying that they're holding the American public hostage to their goal of gutting the health act. (And the mostly partisan Democratic media are abetting them in this charge.) But I think it's equally true that the Democrats in Congress have to take the blame for making the continuing resolution depend on keeping “Obamacare.” So who's holding the American public hostage?

The Republicans would be willing to pass a CR that funds everything else, just not “Obamacare,” but such a bill apparently will not be passed by the Democratic-controlled Senate. And since the American people are, by a strong majority, opposed to the act, it seems to me the Senate would be better advised to give in. But it's a big game of “chicken.” And the American people are the losers.

The worm has turned

Back at the end of last year, the Republicans found themselves in a bad spot. If they did nothing, the Bush tax cuts would all expire Jan. 1. Even President Obama wanted to preserve many of them, so there was bipartisan agreement that doing nothing was unacceptable. And thus, John Boehner and the House Republican caucus ended up surrendering too much to President Obama. There was no better choice.

Now, on the other hand, it is the President who is in the same pickle that the Republicans were in back then. If nobody does anything, the sequester kicks in — the spending cuts go beyond what the GOP wants, but certainly Obama gets none of the tax increases he wants. So the only compromise possible is for the President to give up on some of the tax increases. We are seeing his allies — Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the House Democrats — making wild statements to try to curry favor with the American people. But they cannot win — and President Obama knows it. Finally, he is talking with the GOP leaders in Congress — something he refused to do last December. My, how the worm has turned!

Bob Woodward's new book points out how incompetent President Obama is!

According to Bob Woodward's book, “The Price of Politics,” (reported by ABC News) there was almost an agreement between President Barack Obama and Speaker of the House John Boehner that would have established the kind of budget compromise that some moderate blogs have advocated: a mixture of spending cuts and revenue enhancements.

The book … shows how close the president and the House speaker were to defying Washington odds and establishing a spending framework that included both new revenues and major changes to long-sacred entitlement programs.

But at a critical juncture, with an agreement tantalizingly close, Obama pressed Boehner for additional taxes as part of a final deal — a miscalculation, in retrospect, given how far the House speaker felt he'd already gone.

President Obama, obviously, had no impression how much pressure Speaker Boehner was under from his own conference — or at least from the “Tea Party” wing — and ended up exerting more pressure than the Speaker could take. He tried to call the Speaker, but Boehner took his time replying.

When Boehner finally did call back, he jettisoned the entire deal. Obama lost his famous cool, according to Woodward, with a “flash of pure fury” coming from the president; one staffer in the room said Obama gripped the phone so tightly he thought he would break it.

“He was spewing coals,” Boehner told Woodward, in what is described as a borderline “presidential tirade.”

“He was pissed…. He wasn't going to get a damn dime more out of me. He knew how far out on a limb I was. But he was hot. It was clear to me that coming to an agreement with him was not going to happen, and that I had to go to Plan B.”

But this may be a result of Obama's unwillingness to even contemplate the possibility that people might think differently from him. The ABC News article notes:

The failure of Obama to connect with Boehner was vaguely reminiscent of another phone call late in the evening of Election Day 2010, after it became clear that the Republicans would take control of the House, making Boehner Speaker of the House.

Nobody in the Obama orbit could even find the soon-to-be-speaker's phone number, Woodward reports. A Democratic Party aide finally secured it through a friend so the president could offer congratulations.

The problem was that Obama was learning on the job how to be President — the problem with having a President with so little experience. Obama simply has not got the kind of understanding of how Washington works to make compromises:

Obama found that he had little history with members of Congress to draw on. His administration's early decision to forego bipartisanship for the sake of speed around the stimulus bill was encapsulated by his then-chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel: “We have the votes. F--- 'em,” he's quoted in the book as saying.

The article continues:

Obama's relationship with Democrats wasn't always much better. Woodward recounts an episode early in his presidency when then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid were hammering out final details of the stimulus bill.

Obama phoned in to deliver a “high-minded message,” he writes. Obama went on so long that Pelosi “reached over and pressed the mute button on her phone,” so they could continue to work without the president hearing that they weren't paying attention.

As debt negotiations progressed, Democrats complained of being out of the loop, not knowing where the White House stood on major points. Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee, is described as having a “growing feeling of incredulity” as negotiations meandered.

“The administration didn't seem to have a strategy. It was unbelievable. There didn't seem to be any core principles,” Woodward writes in describing Van Hollen's thinking.

Now, Chris Van Hollen (who just happens to be my Congressman) is hardly someone I agree with on many things. But it's clear (although he'd be unlikely to say so now, in this election year, of course) that he thought that Barack Obama was simply clueless. And this passage in the report casts further aspersions on Obama's competence:

Woodward portrays a president who remained a supreme believer in his own powers of persuasion, even as he faltered in efforts to coax congressional leaders in both parties toward compromise. Boehner told Woodward that at one point, when Boehner voiced concern about passing the deal they were working out, the president reached out and touched his forearm.

“John, I've got great confidence in my ability to sway the American people,” Boehner quotes the president as having told him.

But after the breakthrough agreement fell apart, Boehner's “Plan B” would ultimately exclude the president from most of the key negotiations. The president was “voted off the island,” in Woodward's phrase, even by members of his own party, as congressional leaders patched together an eleventh hour framework to avoid default.

The supercommittee fails

It looks as though the debt-reduction supercommittee has failed to reach an agreement. And the reason is clearly this: Nobody is willing to compromise. The Democrats insist on a “soak-the-rich” policy. They cannot realize that in a recession, raising taxes is not going to help. And the Republicans, not surprisingly, are not going to accept a Democratic insistence that new taxes are a sine qua non of the deal.

The Republicans, of course, have the better of the argument. But with a Democratic President in a position to veto any pure Republican bill, they probably needed to accept some revenue enhancements.

I don't know how this will end. The automatic across-the-board budget cuts which will follow this are sure to get some negative responses from those whose pet areas are going to be cut. The question is, will the across-the-board cuts trigger some real efforts to look at where money is needed and where it is just somebody's pet project? The answer to this question is the key.

The shutdown that wasn't

Well, the shutdown that threatened to happen Friday didn't. And how you want to classify the result depends on whether you're a "glass half-full" or "glass half-empty" type.

The Republicans started off trying to cut over $60 billion. The Democrats responded with $33 billion, and they ended up with about $40 billion. Looks like the Republicans caved. But look at the other side. The Republicans had only the House of Representatives. The Dems had both the Senate and the White House. There was just no way the Republicans could have won a total victory against those odds. And it's pretty likely that the Dems would not have cut anything if they hadn't been prodded by Republican "tea party" types. So in a sense, the Republicans got about ²/₃ of what they wanted. That's not so bad.

From my point of view, there was another thing I liked. The "social conservative" wing of the GOP wanted to use this budget process to push their anti-abortion agenda. And that totally failed. Using the threat of shutting down the government to advance a "social conservative" agenda is, fortunately, a non-starter.

But this process has only pushed the thing forward another six months. So let us see what happens then. Stay tuned for the next episode of "The Perils of Pauline and the Federal Budget."