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Ken M
Mountain climber
Los Angeles, Ca
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Dec 10, 2010 - 03:04am PT
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Interesting perspective
From NY Times
Obama’s Very Good Week
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: December 9, 2010
Over the past week we’ve seen the big differences between cluster liberals and network liberals. Cluster liberals (like cluster conservatives) view politics as a battle between implacable opponents. As a result, they believe victory is achieved through maximum unity. Psychologically, they tend to value loyalty and solidarity. They tend to angle toward situations in which philosophical lines are clearly drawn and partisan might can be bluntly applied.
Network liberals share the same goals and emerge from the same movement. But they tend to believe — the nation being as diverse as it is and the Constitution saying what it does — that politics is a complex jockeying of ideas and interests. They believe progress is achieved by leaders savvy enough to build coalitions. Psychologically, network liberals are comfortable with weak ties; they are comfortable building relationships with people they disagree with.
This contrast is not between lefties and moderates. It’s a contrast between different theories of how politics is done. Ted Kennedy was a network liberal, willing to stray from his preferences in negotiation with George W. Bush or John McCain. Most House Democrats, by contrast, are cluster liberals. They come from safe seats, have a poor feel for the wider electorate and work in an institution where politics is a war of all against all.
Barack Obama ran for president as a network liberal, and entranced a Facebook nation. But in office, Obama, like George W. Bush before him, narrowed his networks. To get things done quickly, he governed like a cluster liberal, relying on partisan leaders.
The results were predictable: insularity, alienation and defeat. So now we are headed toward divided government. But there is a whiff of coalition-building in the air. Dick Durbin and Tom Coburn boldly embraced the bipartisan fiscal commission process. Obama opened up a comprehensive set of negotiations with Republican leaders to handle the Bush tax cuts.
The big story of the week is that Obama is returning to first principles, re-establishing himself as a network liberal. This isn’t a move to the center or triangulation. It’s not the Clinton model or the Truman model or any of the other stale categories people are trying to impose on him. It’s standing at one spot in the political universe and trying to build temporarily alliances with people at other spots in the political universe.
You don’t have to abandon your principles to cut a deal. You just have to acknowledge that there are other people in the world and even a president doesn’t get to stamp his foot and have his way.
Cluster liberals in the House and the commentariat are angry. They have no strategy for how Obama could have better played his weak hand — with a coming Republican majority, an expiring tax law and several Democratic senators from red states insisting on extending all the cuts. They just sense the waning of their moment and are howling in protest.
They believe nonliberals are blackmailers or hostage-takers or the concentrated repositories of human evil, so, of course, they see coalition-building as collaboration. They are also convinced that Democrats should never start a negotiation because they will always end up losing in the end. (Perhaps psychologists can explain the interesting combination: intellectual self-confidence alongside a political inferiority complex).
The fact is, Obama and the Democrats have had an excellent week. The White House negotiators did an outstanding job for their side. With little leverage, they got not only the unemployment insurance, but also an Earned Income Tax Credit provision, a college scholarship provision and other Democratic goodies. With little leverage, they got a package that could win grudging praise from big-name liberal groups like the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Center for American Progress.
Moreover, Obama has put himself in a position to govern again. The package is popular. According to the most recent Gallup numbers, 67 percent of independents and 52 percent of Democrats support extending all the tax cuts. Higher numbers support extending the unemployment insurance. Obama is reminding independents why they liked him in the first place.
He only needs to work on two things. He needs to explain his method better than he did in his press conference. It is entirely consistent to support a policy and be willing to move off of it in exchange for a greater good or a necessary accommodation. That’s called real life.
Then he’s got to bring this networking style to the larger issues. It’s easy to cut a deal that explodes deficits. It’s harder to cut one that reduces them. But there are more networks waiting to be built: to reform the tax code; to reduce consumption and expand productivity; to reform entitlements.
Washington doesn’t know how to handle coalition-building anymore; you can see consternation and confusion all around. But did anybody think changing the tone was going to be easy?
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Ken M
Mountain climber
Los Angeles, Ca
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Dec 10, 2010 - 03:32am PT
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Actually, they would have had the don't ask don't tell repeal, too, if they'd not balked on the economic package.
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Gary
climber
Desolation Basin, Calif.
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Dec 10, 2010 - 11:08am PT
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Norton
Social climber
the Wastelands
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Dec 10, 2010 - 01:55pm PT
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So do I, but only when the ten year note exceeds 4 percent, and not until.
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shut up and pull
climber
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Dec 10, 2010 - 02:06pm PT
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GO NADER!
RALPH NADER TELLS IT LIKE IT IS RE OBAMA:
“He has no fixed principles,” Nader said, of Mr. Obama. “He’s opportunistic — he goes for expedience, like Clinton. Some call him temperamentally conflict-averse. If you want to be harsher, you say he has no principles and he’s opportunistic.”
“He’s a con man,” Nader continued. “I have no use for him.”
GO NADER!
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shut up and pull
climber
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Dec 10, 2010 - 02:13pm PT
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RALPH NADER THINKS OBAMA IS A CON MAN. CLASSIC.
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shut up and pull
climber
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Dec 10, 2010 - 02:14pm PT
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Did you see those global warming (oh, I mean "climate change") idiots signing a petition to ban water? Oh my god that is so classic. Watch the video posted above from the Cancun redistribute-our-wealth festival, where they are experiencing a 100 yr cold spell. Classic.
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Ken M
Mountain climber
Los Angeles, Ca
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Dec 10, 2010 - 02:17pm PT
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Swindle of the year
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, December 10, 2010
Barack Obama won the great tax-cut showdown of 2010 - and House Democrats don't have a clue that he did. In the deal struck this week, the president negotiated the biggest stimulus in American history, larger than his $814 billion 2009 stimulus package. It will pump a trillion borrowed Chinese dollars into the U.S. economy over the next two years - which just happen to be the two years of the run-up to the next presidential election.
This is a defeat?
Swindle of the year
Democrats have no choice but to accept an irresponsible tax deal
If Obama had asked for a second stimulus directly, he would have been laughed out of town. Stimulus I was so reviled that the Democrats banished the word from their lexicon throughout the 2010 campaign. And yet, despite a very weak post-election hand, Obama got the Republicans to offer to increase spending and cut taxes by $990 billion over two years. Two-thirds of that is above and beyond extension of the Bush tax cuts but includes such urgent national necessities as windmill subsidies.
No mean achievement. After all, these are the same Republicans who spent 2010 running on limited government and reducing debt. And this budget busting occurs less than a week after the president's deficit commission had supposedly signaled a new national consensus of austerity and frugality.
Some Republicans are crowing that Stimulus II is the Republican way - mostly tax cuts - rather than the Democrats' spending orgy of Stimulus I. That's consolation? This just means that Republicans are two years too late. Stimulus II will still blow another near-$1 trillion hole in the budget.
At great cost that will have to be paid after this newest free lunch, the package will add as much as 1 percent to GDP and lower the unemployment rate by about 1.5 percentage points. That could easily be the difference between victory and defeat in 2012.
Obama is no fool. While getting Republicans to boost his own reelection chances, he gets them to make a mockery of their newfound, second-chance, post-Bush, Tea-Party, this-time-we're-serious persona of debt-averse fiscal responsibility.
And he gets all this in return for what? For a mere two-year postponement of a mere 4.6-point increase in marginal tax rates for upper incomes. And an estate tax rate of 35 percent - it jumps insanely from zero to 55 percent on Jan. 1 - that is somewhat lower than what the Democrats wanted.
No, cries the left: Obama violated a sacred principle. A 39.6 percent tax rate versus 35 percent is a principle? "This is the public option debate all over again," said Obama at his Tuesday news conference. He is right. The left never understood that to nationalize health care there is no need for a public option because Obamacare turns the private insurers into public utilities, thus setting us inexorably on the road to the left's Promised Land: a Canadian-style single-payer system. The left is similarly clueless on the tax-cut deal: In exchange for temporarily forgoing a small rise in upper-income rates, Obama pulled out of a hat a massive new stimulus - what the left has been begging for since the failure of Stimulus I but was heretofore politically unattainable.
Obama's public exasperation with this infantile leftism is both perfectly understandable and politically adept. It is his way back to at least the appearance of centrist moderation. The only way he will get a second look from the independents who elected him in 2008 - and abandoned the Democrats in 2010 - is by changing the prevailing (and correct) perception that he is a man of the left.
Hence that news-conference attack on what the administration calls the "professional left" for its combination of sanctimony and myopia. It was Obama's Sister Souljah moment. It had a prickly, irritated sincerity - their ideological stupidity and inability to see the "long game" really do get under Obama's skin - but a decidedly calculated quality, too. Where, after all, does the left go? Stay home on Election Day 2012? Vote Republican?
No, says the current buzz, the left will instead challenge Obama for the Democratic nomination. Really now? For decades, African Americans have been this party's most loyal constituency. They vote 9 to 1 Democratic through hell and high water, through impeachment and recession, through everything. After four centuries of enduring much, African Americans finally see one of their own achieve the presidency. And their own party is going to deny him a shot at his own reelection?
Not even Democrats are that stupid. The remaining question is whether they are just stupid enough to not understand - and therefore vote down - the swindle of the year just pulled off by their own president.
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HighDesertDJ
Trad climber
Swimming in LEB tears.
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Dec 10, 2010 - 02:20pm PT
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SUAP I think your IQ is probably as high as TGT's son's.
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shut up and pull
climber
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Dec 10, 2010 - 02:25pm PT
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LOW CLASS OBAMA, AGAIN:
There was an extraordinary scene at the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo Friday morning. The prize went to imprisoned Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, who was barred by the Chinese government from attending the ceremony. It was the first time since 1935 -- when the prize went to a winner imprisoned in one of Adolf Hitler's concentration camps -- that the Peace Prize winner or his repesentative did not appear personally to accept the award.* Liu's absence was symbolized by an empty chair on stage.
So on this notable occasion, the White House released a statement from President Obama on the awarding of the prize to Liu in absentia. And this is how Obama's statement began:
One year ago, I was humbled to receive the Nobel Peace Prize -- an award that speaks to our highest aspirations, and that has been claimed by giants of history and courageous advocates who have sacrificed for freedom and justice.
Critics have often said of Obama that "it's all about him," that he has a tendency to reference himself no matter what subject he is discussing. Could he do any more to prove them right? But just to show that he is, in fact, humble, the president followed his opening sentence with this:
"Mr. Liu Xiaobo is far more deserving of this award than I was."
Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/beltway-confidential/2010/12/obama-honors-nobel-winner-statement-about-himself#ixzz17jnViNrG
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JEleazarian
Trad climber
Fresno CA
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Dec 10, 2010 - 02:45pm PT
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I said the same thing on December 7, in a different thread -- except I added my belief that it is a compromise:
Actually, the compromise is a very clever way to enact Paul Krugman's prescription -- more stimulus. All the parties have agreed on is to increase spending, and keep income tax rates where they've been for almost a decade. The fact that loyalists of both parties don't like it means it's a real compromise.
I've see nothing since Tuesday to change my mind.
John
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HighDesertDJ
Trad climber
Swimming in LEB tears.
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Dec 10, 2010 - 03:05pm PT
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News flash: Republican politicians don't really care what happens to the budget so long as it is pumping dollars to rich constituents. If the Tea Party had any credibility they would be in the streets screaming about this bill. Why is up with them? Can they only feel true outrage at imagined problems instead of real ones?
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JEleazarian
Trad climber
Fresno CA
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Dec 10, 2010 - 04:13pm PT
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fattrad,
I guess the national voters are as unrealistic as the California ones. It's a good thing the U.S. can print money.
John
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Norton
Social climber
the Wastelands
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Dec 10, 2010 - 05:36pm PT
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BAWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHA
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Norton
Social climber
the Wastelands
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Dec 10, 2010 - 05:39pm PT
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Pull the butt plug out, Fatty.
You will lose 40 pounds.
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Norton
Social climber
the Wastelands
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Dec 10, 2010 - 06:20pm PT
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Norton
Social climber
the Wastelands
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Dec 10, 2010 - 07:43pm PT
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Idiot wind blowing through the flowers on your tomb
Blowing through the curtains in your room
Idiot wind blowing every time you move your teeth
You're an idiot babe
It's a wonder that you still know how to breathe.
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Norton
Social climber
the Wastelands
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Dec 10, 2010 - 07:57pm PT
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Butt plug lube.
It's all Fatty knows about.
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Norton
Social climber
the Wastelands
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Dec 10, 2010 - 08:17pm PT
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