Paul Ryan Jumps the Shark Continued

More evidence of my theory that Paul Ryan has "Jumped the Shark" emerged when that reliable mouth piece of beltway wisdom Dana Milbank wrote a column in the Washington Post that could have been written by Paul Krugman back in 2011.  Here's the money quote:

There are so many blanks in Ryan’s budget that it could be a Mad Libs exercise. But this is not a game. It’s black-box budgeting — an expression of lofty aims, with binders full of magic asterisks in lieu of specific cuts to government benefits. If this were a fitness plan, Ryan, a former personal trainer, would be telling Americans that under his revolutionary program, they could lose 50 pounds in 10 weeks without dieting or working out. 

Now of course this has been true of all of Ryan's budgets, the difference here is not so much that the new budget is "worse," it's that beltway pundits are finally starting to write about it this way.  Indeed, the Milibanks of the world were outraged when Paul Krugman described Ryan as a flimflam man way back when, and now they are actually using that word! "Tuesday’s flimflammery began when Ryan and his fellow Budget Committee members took the stage."

Again, I think this has more to do with pundits getting bored with Ryan than with any sort of moments of clarity appear in the minds of pundits about how his numbers really don't add up.  And too be sure, Milibank is criticizing Ryan, not ignoring him so I suppose Ryan could always make a comeback into the light of seriousness and BipartisanThink, stranger things have happened in Washington.  But from where I sit, it doesn't look good for him.   

Paul Ryan Jumps the Shark

Jonathan Bernstein pointed out an interesting controversy brewing over Paul Ryan, Steve Kornacki has argued that being the VP on a losing ticket is bad for your career while Ed Kilgore argues that's not the case.  It's an interesting argument and like all arguments that involve different courses in history it's fundamentally about a lot of things that are unknowable.  I'd probably come down on Kilgore's side and say the two main problems with Kornacki's argument is that he ignores Ed Muskie, whose later career was in many ways based on his VP selection in '68 and looks at "political careers" in the wrong way.  You can label someone a "failure" (insert a nicer word if you'd like) if they persue the White House and never make it there but that's not fair at all, the vast majority of people who seek the Presidency never succeed but that doesn't mean they flopped, it just means becoming president is really hard.  So if you take any sub-section of that group of office seekers, and most people who are on a national ticket for the VP slot have sought the Presidency, most are going to not succeed in the end.  Again because wining is hard, not because it was a bad choice.  Add in the fact that most people seek the Presidency in their political prime and by definition go into decline after that and you get a recipe for it looking like the spot on the loosing ticket did them in, but that's just not the case.

Throat clearing aside I'd say that Kornacki's piece made me realize something else, especially this passage:

On the plus side, he [Ryan] remains a very relevant figure in Washington and in his party. On the downside, you’d never know that just a few months ago he was the nominee of a major political party for the second most powerful office in America. Watching his latest budget rollout, there’s no evidence Ryan enjoys any additional clout or stature thanks to his vice-presidential campaign. He’s playing the same role he played before Mitt Romney drafted him onto the GOP ticket last summer. In fact, if his V.P. bid is affecting him now, it’s probably a net-negative, with some in the press taking a more critical view of his plans than in the past.

What struck me about this passage had nothing to do with failed VP bids, no what struck me is it looks like the first crack in the damn of Ryan's invincible reputation of past!

We, and reporters, like to think of Washington as this great palace of decision making and political intrigue.  It is of course both of these things, but I've always felt that is also influenced by the same whims of being "in" and "out" that play out in Hollywood or high school cafeterias.  People having been writing for a while about Ryan the flimflam man and for those years he's shown a remarkable tendency to never get stuck with with the fact that his math doesn't add up, his plan lacks specifics and his "deficit reduction plan" doesn't, ummm, actually reduce the deficit at all.  Lots of liberals got incredibly frustrated at this fact over the past two years.  But now a new threat to Ryan's career has emerged and it's worse than those three problems combined.  Paul Ryan has caught a much more dangerous Washington affliction: he's boring.  As Alex Pareene pointed out in Slate:

...everyone please just continue hammering away at Ryan and his ridiculous regressive fantasy budgets, but I think it’s worth noting what the non-liberal liberal media was paying attention to today [March 12th].

CNN spent the day talking about the pope. Joe Scarborough and his chums seemed more interested in the soda ban. Politico was still fixated on Obama’s “charm offensive.” The Senate Democratic budget actually got more play. Hell, the National Review Online devoted more digital ink to the pope election today than to Paul Ryan and his 10-year plan. I think the apex of mainstream Beltway press attention was when Luke Russert live-tweeted his own reading of the budget for like a half-hour.

I think — and let’s all hope I’m actually right and not just being incredibly hopeful — this finally confirms that Ryan is “over” as a figure the Beltway press treats with incredible reverence.

I really couldn't agree more with Pareene.  We can't be sure as of yet, but it's looking more and more like no one cares what Ryan thinks or says.  He had his day in the sun and now journalists will look for more interesting topics than Ryan's quest to radically remake American society and massively transfer American wealth from the poor to the rich.  Just imagine how much more massive a story about Chris Christe getting stomach staple surgery would be that anything Ryan could ever do at this point.  This is the way a career ends, not with a bang but with a deluge of pope jokes on twitter.   

What Does "Worked" Mean?

Over the weekend I read the best rejoinder to the argument that the "surge" or the Iraq War as a whole worked.  It was written by former Army officer who served in the Vietnam War named Andrew J. Bacevich who is now a professor of history and international relations at Boston University.  As he pointed out:

The importance attributed to the surge by devotees such as McCain distracts attention from matters of far greater significance. It’s the equivalent of using the Battle of New Orleans as a basis for evaluating the War of 1812. Of course, in contrast to Petraeus, Gen. Andrew Jackson defeated his adversary. When the shooting stopped, it was the surviving Redcoats — not the surviving Americans — who packed up and left. Still, take your cues from Johnny Horton, and you might conclude that Jackson single-handedly redeemed an entire war. Take your cues from McCain, and you might conclude that, two centuries later, Petraeus did likewise.

In reality, the heroics at New Orleans proved irrelevant to the outcome of the war, which the Treaty of Ghent had ended two weeks before. The most that can be said for Jackson’s victory is that it distracted attention from the egregious failures of political and military leadership that had marked James Madison’s War. So, too, for a time Petraeus’s victory (if that’s what it was) might do the same for George W. Bush’s War, likewise marred by glaring errors committed at the top. It’s the oldest technique in the campaigner’s playbook: Inflate a glimmer of good news to divert attention from all the bad.

Exactly.  The idea that the Iraq War can be judged a success because the US Army decided to pay off Sunni militiamen so they'd stop fighting Americans and focus on even more extreme foreign fighters (the main strategy of the surge) misses the entire point.  Iraq was suppose to be made into a democratic and free market oriented utopia by the war, it wasn't.  And this failure occurred in spite of terrible losses to America and Iraqi society.  Indeed this strategy of American support for so called "Awakening Militias" was a direct result of earlier failures of the war.  The American Military had long since given up on the idea of creating a secular democracy and instead resorted to a tried and true method of feudal politics: if someone is causing you a problem bribe them to stop.  This might result in a reduction of roadside bomb attacks in your sector, but it's basically acknowledging that the plans for a democratic society with things like the rule of law are dead.   

Curious George

James Fallows has been writing great stuff about the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War and you should really check it out. He argued that Bush was such a terrible president, especially in the 18 months between 9/11 and the start of the Iraq War because:

I believe that the temperamental combination he brought to the presidency was lethal. I think of the big three elements of this mix as ignorance, incuriosity, and decisiveness.

-Ignorance was his low level of pre-existing knowledge of the complexities of the world.
-"Incuriosity" was his apparent lack of passion about learning what he didn't know.
-Decisiveness was his desire, nonetheless, to make big, sweeping choices quickly -- for instance, ten years ago that it made sense to invade Iraq.

In these matters of temperament, completely apart from political beliefs, you can see Bush as the opposite of Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, and also of Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson. I argued nine years ago that even if George W. Bush served only one term as president, his legacy would be large and disastrous.

I like this analysis, especially the idea that Bush was bad because of a combination of traits made him completely unsuited for the modern Presidency. So much criticism of Bush seems based on the idea that he is "stupid," or "evil" and this is pretty shallow. However, I'd argue that the curiosity or lack there of is the wrong way to think about these sorts of things.

A while ago political scientist Johnathan Bernstein (sorry I couldn't find the link) made a comment on his blog to the effect that one of Bush's worst flaws was that he didn't care about politics or policy outside of a narrow contest of "winning." Usually it took the form of winning the next election, hence the introduction of the Iraq War Resolution in the lead up to the 2002 elections to put Democrats on the defensive and try and shift the issues to Bush's "toughness" rather than the poor economy. As Frank Rich pointed out in his 2006 book "The Greatest Story Ever Sold:

To track [Karl] Rove's role, it's necessary to flash back to January 2002. By then the post 9/11 war in Afghanistan had succeeded in its mission to overthrow the Taliban and had done so with a death toll that the American public could accept. In a triumphalist speech to the Republican National Committee, Rover for the first time openly advanced the idea that the war on terror was the path to victory for that November's midterm elections. Candidates "can go to the country on this issue," he said, because voters "trust the Republican Party to do a better job of protecting and strengthening America's military might and thereby protecting America.

Any student of history, hell any baby boomer, should know that a long protracted occupation and war in a foreign country can destroy a Presidency, but Bush seemed to not even consider this concept. He wanted to "win" in November just like "winning" in Iraq seemed to be composed of getting to Baghdad with no plan for what comes next.

The "winning" factor explains a lot. Bush pushed massive unpaid expansion of Medicare through Congress to make a "permanent majority;" he saw his Attorney General try and base US Attorney positions on ideological loyalty to "win" the Justice Department; he tried to respond to Katina with photo ops and congratulating the reliably conservative idiot who oversaw the carnage with "you're doing a heck of a job Brownie" and seemed to think for much of his time in office that since Cheney was on "Team Bush" he must be right and by supporting him they could "win" together. This list could go on for pages.

Curiosity can be a helpful trait in office, whats in this bill I'm about to sign is a good question for a president to ask. Nor does a president doesn't need to be motivated by altruism to be effective, Johnson supported Civil Rights because he thought doing so would make his reputation that of a second Lincoln for as much as anything else. What a President does need to care about is if policies will work and if their political strategy will be sustainable. If they just care about winning the next election, disaster looms.

Leadership!

Political scientist Seth Masket pointed out yesterday that while it is a shame Obama foolishly mixed up the Star Wars and Star Trek universes in his press conference the other day, the bigger folly was the silliness of the question. To review:

Q Mr. President, to your question, what could you do -- first of all, couldn’t you just have them down here and refuse to let them leave the room until you have a deal?

THE PRESIDENT: I mean, Jessica, I am not a dictator. I’m the President. So, ultimately, if Mitch McConnell or John Boehner say, we need to go to catch a plane, I can't have Secret Service block the doorway, right? So --

Q But isn’t that part of leadership? I’m sorry to interrupt, but isn’t --

THE PRESIDENT: I understand. And I know that this has been some of the conventional wisdom that's been floating around Washington that somehow, even though most people agree that I’m being reasonable, that most people agree I’m presenting a fair deal, the fact that they don't take it means that I should somehow do a Jedi mind-meld with these folks and convince them to do what’s right. Well, they're elected. We have a constitutional system of government. The Speaker of the House and the leader of the Senate and all those folks have responsibilities.

Masket goes on to point out that the "leadership" Jessica Yellin is calling for is problematic to say the least:

So what did she mean? Did she mean that the President should literally invite the Speaker of the House into the Oval Office and physically prevent him from leaving until an accord is reached, violating the law and the Constitution in the process? Are we to believe that that's what Reagan or LBJ would have done? Is holding people against their will part of "leadership"?

Or did she mean this figuratively? If so, what would that mean? After all, if you only figuratively prevent people from leaving the room, you're not really preventing them from leaving the room. Which means that if they decide it's not in their interest to be in that room, they can leave. Which is exactly where we are right now.

I have to agree, this is a terrible question on the merits, but I do think it points out how a lot of journalists think about the Presidency and politics in general, or at least how they chose to report it to us.  I've written before about how the office and powers of the Presidency are misunderstood and this obsession with "leadership" as a way to get the GOP to compromise is a great example of what some people call "The Cult of the Presidency."

In addition, I'd guess that there is another reason why reporters and pundits are calling for arm twisting like "refuse to let them leave the room" because you have "leadership" as a good way to get out of this impasse.  It seems to me that everyone in Washington is obsessed with image and wants appear to be smart and "in the know."  A great way to appear "in the know" seems to be going around referencing big scholarly tombs, that you haven't read, that supposedly support your argument.  The guys who wrote "Game Change" kept referencing all sorts of Washington insiders in 2007 and 2008 being obsessed with appearing to have read Doris Kerns Goodwin's Team of Rivals so they could argue the fact that the Clinton campaign was plagued by mismanagement and infighting was a sign of their genius, just like Lincoln!  When the movie Lincoln came out (based on Team of Rivals) there seemed to be a resurgent of referencing the book by beltway insiders.  As well as the idea that Obama could ply legislators with food and drink, or something.  Who knows if that's true about Clinton, but it does certainly seem possible to me.  

So maybe the new hot scholarly tombs to associate yourself with, but of course not actually read, is Robert Carro's The Years of Lyndon Johnson.  Carro is great with the anecdotes about Johnson's strong arm tactics and such, but of course the larger lesson of the Johnson years is that those tactics only really work against your own party and while they may work out in the short term they will ultimately destroy your presidency.  Which, along with Vietnam (which was started via strong arm tactics in many ways) was exactly what happened to Johnson.  Anyway, that might explain why Yellin thinks "leadership" or more properly "Leadership!" involves locking people in rooms. 

Party Factions and Protests

Ta-Nehisi Coates has a nice piece looking back on the 10 year anniversary of the Iraq War.  However, I think he gets a major lesson about the war wrong when he lionizes the original anti-war protestors a decade ago:

In fact it meant a lot. It meant that you got to firmly and loudly say, "No. Not in my name." It meant being on the side of those who warned against the seductive properties of power, and opposing those who would bask in it. It also meant pragmatism...And finally it meant the election of the country's first black president whose ascent began at an anti-war rally in Chicago.  I say all this to say that if I regret anything it is my pose of powerlessness -- my lack of faith in American democracy, my belief that the war didn't deserve my hard thinking or hard acting, my cynicism. I am not a radical. But more than anything the Iraq War taught me the folly of mocking radicalism. It seemed, back then, that every "sensible" and "serious" person you knew -- left or right -- was for the war. And they were all wrong. Never forget that they were all wrong. And never forget that the radicals with their drum circles and their wild hair were right.

While he is right that the protestors may have been right about some things (they were wrong about others) he completely misses the story of how the war actually ended.  It's pretty clear that neither the Iraqi Government or some other third party could have ejected us from Iraq and that because the war was financed by deficit spending and fought by an all volunteer military that an ongoing presence in Iraq was completely possible.  Indeed John McCain campaigned on a promise of US troops in Iraq through 2013 at least.  Furthermore, the Presidency of George W. Bush shows us that a determined political party, the GOP, could keep an unpopular war going for years.  In short, public protests and public opinion neither stopped the war nor shortened it, making their effectiveness pretty doubtful.

So why did the war end?  Well the answer is that a determined faction inside the Democratic Party made opposition to the Bush's Iraq policies a mandatory position for elected Democrats to stay in good standing in their party.  This in term meant that the election of a Democrat in 2008 ensured the end of the presence of American Armed Forces in Iraq.  As I recall, in the lead up to the war there were three main faction inside the Democratic Party, Hawks like Joe Lieberman who supported war, Doves like Paul Wellstone who opposed it and people who punted like then House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt who refused to vote categorically against a war but didn't seem to care too much one way or the other and deferred this matter of foreign affairs to the Presidency.  Between 2003 and 2004 it was the Deaniacs that advanced the anti-war cause by making opposition to the war a viable position for a Democratic presidential nominee, even though Dean lost for othereasons.  After that it was the anti-Lieberman people who turned support for the war into a political liability rather than a political strength (remember who voting for the authorization for use of force in 2002 was seen as the "smart" political move?)  So that by the time the race for the 2008 nomination was on, all the major candidates for the Democratic nomination were for some withdrawal strategy.  We might remember that Obama was anti-war as opposed to Clinton but in reality their positions on how to move forward were very similar, even if their record from 2002 was not.  In short, what ended the war was a faction of a political party working inside that party to make their views, end the war, the position of their party through the daily grind of politics and elections.  That's about as unradical as you can get.      

Andrew Sullivan: Forever Is A Long, Long TIme

Andrew Sullivan has a post where he basically calls for the Supreme Court to overturn the Voting Rights Act because:

I have to say I am not one of those who thinks that this kind of federal oversight, essential once, must necessarily be essential for ever. And I cannot quite grasp the logic of liberals’ insistence that the bigotry of 1964 is no less a danger today. It’s obviously a much less bigoted society with respect to race than then – in part because of the very Act that liberals are rightly proud of...Societies change. It’s crazy to take no notice of this, and wherever possible the government, in my view, should be race neutral.

I suppose he's right in the narrowest sense possible, yes societies do change but what on earth does that have to do with the Voting Rights Act?  As a reminder, this law was passed because for 100 years certain places in this country responded to freed slaves and their descendants trying to vote with thing like this.  The point isn't that the South is bad, its that this legacy is very much real, and historically we are in fact much closer to these sort of events than the Freedom Riders were to the the passage of the 13th Amendment.  No one is arguing that the South "can't be trusted" or is somehow inherently evil, what they are arguing is that this history is very much real and any gains we have made exist in the face of the reality of the problem that hasn't vanished because Barack Obama won some elections.  As Faulkner says, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."  Having the Voting Right Around "forever" is something completely different than having it around for another 15 years.  Forever is a long, long time.