Ken Grant slammed NBC News’ Mark Whitaker the other day for displaying particularly pronounced vacuity after Obama’s speech on the economy and his stimulus package.* Apparently, the new Senior Vice President and Washington Bureau Chief for NBC News took to the screen to evaluate Obama’s speech. What did he say “in response to this serious and important speech on the direction that [Obama] plans to take regarding said economic turmoil”?

Did he comment on the substance? Perhaps quibble with the details?  Offer a trenchant critique on the merits of the plan?

Please.  [..] No, Mr. Whitaker decided to flog Obama for his speaking style.

He blathered on for a bit on how he was surprised that Mr. Obama’s speech pattern did not sound like the soaring uplift as heard on the campaign trail.  He wondered why Mr. Obama sounded more like a con-law professor.

Grant’s pissed and goes on the same rant all of us have indulged in at some point in the election season: “This is the problem with our news today, as they are far more concerned with the ‘optics’ or the ‘tone’ or any number of other completely superfluous bits of fluff and ephemera.” Right. As for why though, he offers one straightforward explanation to go in the mix:

You see, he has a job that pays him an extraordinary amount of money, and thus he really doesn’t seem to see that there is a problem.  “Yes, yes, the ‘help’ is feeling a bit pinched, these days [..] Ah, well, hopefully that nice Mr. Obama can do something, if only he would do exactly what we want him to do, and in the manner in which we have become accustomed.”

I think people like Whitaker are more concerned with the manner in which things are done being what they are accustomed to than Obama doing what they want him to do – I don’t think they necessarily have much in the way of specifics on that anyway, other than that he shouldn’t rock the boat too much. But regarding the money thing, is at least part of it really that simple?

T-shirt made by a bar in Georgia

I’m starting to see Obama being held up as an indication of how advanced America is compared to other countries when it comes to race relations. On the one hand that’s so awesome! Yay us! I do still get this little shock every time I realize that it’s actually true, and what it means.

On the other hand, it’s a bit too easy and pat. The fact that Obama was elected doesn’t mean that America no longer has any problems with race.

No, seriously – how cute is this? Nancy Pelosi has a cat-cam video on her YouTube channel (and yes, it’s really her). But – do watch it till the end though! (Via Donkeylicious.)

Aren’t the next two years going to be fun? :-)

I took this photo of a voting information flier on the ground on election day.

I’ve been interested in politics forever but this election year was one for the ages. And all of that excitement wasn’t even crammed into a single election year — candidates announced that they were running for president about two years before election day (of the major candidates, John Edwards was first in December of 2006, and Barack Obama was last in February of 2007), and there was speculation and buzz well before anyone announced anything.

All told, this election cycle took up about three years of my life, with the intensity ratcheting up and up and staying at fever pitch from about the Iowa primaries (January 2008) through election day.

So perhaps it’s unsurprising that after the initial euphoria of election night, I’ve settled into a period of politics detox. I no longer obsessively click on the acronymed sites crowding my bookmarks toolbar (TPM, FR, DD, WM, 538) — several of them haven’t been touched since November 4th. I still read my daily New York Times but I glide over the politics and intrigue and pay more attention to the arts section and special sections like Science Times. The TV stays away from CNN and MSNBC and C-Span.

I believe this has been better for my mental health — but man, that was sure a fascinating election cycle.

I can sense that things are starting to change already. For one thing, I am so watching the inauguration. My daughter has the day off of school (hooray!) and we’re gonna make a day of it. That’ll invite CNN back into my living room, and I’ll want to see what Kevin Drum and Andrew Sullivan and Matt Yglesias and Hilzoy and everyone are saying about it. And I’ll disagree with some of it, probably, and write them emails and write stuff here and then see the counterarguments and that’ll probably be that. Detox completed, politics part of my brain re-engaged.

But for now, I’m still really enjoying ignoring politics in favor of things like the Science Times. Did you know that it’s been proven that lack of sleep is closely related to catching a cold? I thought so…

Yesterday, President Elect Obama pulled off what I think is one of the hardest political acts to perform; he admitted he was wrong.  From back in the campaign, Obama suggested that part of his stimulus package would be a tax credit to businesses who create jobs.  In 2007, Obama was one of the senators pushing the “Patriot Employer Act”.  That bill would try to designate businesses who hire more US workers and reward them with tax credits.  Last week, that policy started to take the form of a $3,000 tax credit for each job in Obama’s stimulus package.  But the cry against this came from all quarters.  Republicans, economists, business writers and members of his own party brought up their concerns that this plan won’t work.  It’s like eliminating the tax on gasoline when prices are high: lots of politics, no benefit. 

In the category “horrifying yet somehow unsurprising,” the NYT had this on Thursday:

As His Inmates Grew Thinner, a Sheriff’s Wallet Grew Fatter

Alabama has an unusual statute on the books that “allows the state’s sheriffs to keep for themselves whatever money is left over after they feed their prisoners. The money allotted by the state is little enough — $1.75 a day per prisoner — but the incentive to skimp is obvious.”

Indeed, and skimp he did. While “the prisoners in the Morgan County jail here were always hungry,” sheriff Greg Bartlett pocketed $212,000 over the last three years. A Redditter does the math:

‘Tis. The judge called the Alabama law “almost an invitation to criminality,” and sent the sherrif to jail – “until he indicated a willingness to comply.” Meaning just for one night, because as Sir Charles at Cogitamus put it: “In a startling display of the rehabilitative powers of incarceration, after only one night in jail Bartlett came up with the creative idea of not skimming any of the food money going forward, and the judge released him.”

As Charles concluded: “One is struck once again with the casual sadism that we seem to find appropriate in our criminal justice system.”

"Soup line", part of Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial (Image used under CC license from Flickr user Gabriel Millos)

If the erupting economic crisis hasn’t already led to soup lines and double digit unemployment, Kevin Drum argued yesterday, it is only thanks to the safeguards that were put in place since the crash of 1929.

Without Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance and deposit insurance; without the Treasury pumping capital into the banking system and the abandonment of the gold standard, we would already have reached that point.

So “thanks, FDR,” Drum writes*, “thanks, modern mixed economy” – and thank you LBJ as well, Eisenhower too, and all their counterparts here in Europe for that matter. Add those to your reasons to be cheerful. If it had been up to the Goldwater-Reagan ideology, this crisis would already have incurred much more suffering.

_____

* Though it’s an interesting afterthought that Roosevelt, “concerned about the moral hazard” involved, actually opposed creating the deposit insurance system, along with banking industry groups. Seems like the idea actually came from his left: he thought it went too far and even threatened to veto the legislation.

The New Yorker is a pricey purchase here in Central Europe, but every so often I make it anyway, because its in-depth reportage is often unparalleled. One such piece of reportage I still vividly remember one or two years later dealt with valiant efforts to reform the education system in Denver. Nominally, at least. In truth, it was a both heart-wrenching and challenging panorama of how deep the roots are of the inequality of educational opportunity, and the problems of poverty, exclusion and ghettoisation that underlie it.

Even as the article covered chunks of policy debate, it didn’t get abstract and made you feel the human challenges involved. It resonated with personal experience, and I felt like forcing people to read it. Foremost those with glib answers about poverty and how people should just get themselves to work and pull themselves up by their bootstraps. It sounds stupid when you try to explain that even just getting yourself to another part of town for a job or better school can be an insurmountable obstacle if you’re – well, fill in your cliché – on the outside. But this article made you feel it.

Reading it you couldn’t help identifying with the Schools Superintendent who was trying so strenuously to make sense of it all, and to undertake a daunting effort, from the ground up, to make changes that would spread the benefits of education beyond the middle class.

Michael Bennet with family and, behind him, Governor Ritter. (Image used under CC license from Jeffrey Beall)

Well, that Superintendent, Michael Bennet, last week was selected by Colorado Governor Ritter to take Ken Salazar’s seat in the Senate.

All I know about him is that New Yorker article. Taniel at Campaign Diaries, however, explains that “Bennet looks to be among the most centrists of Ritter’s potential choices” and that “Ritter himself emphasized Bennet’s centrist politics, describing him with the “postpartisan” terminology that has become the cloak of the ideological center.” Practical, pragmatic, not dogmatic, that kind of thing.

Bennet himself pledged to follow in Salazar’s “bootsteps”, which are distinctly conservative for a Democrat. In short, the Bennet pick will “be frustrating progressives”, and he might oppose card check. Not exactly encouraging stuff.

And yet I can’t help feeling happy about the pick. Such is the power of good journalism. Happy except, of course, for the fact that the man will now no longer be heading Denver’s school system. When one of the major problems with the efforts there have been to improve the school system is inconsistency. The lack of follow-through: a burst of activity as the latest reform model is implemented, and just as effects start moving some of the intractable problems, a change in regime or a new model. Maybe you should make Schools Superintendent as prestigious a position as US Senator …

Yesterday, that is. Commenting on a TNR blog post about Terry McAuliffe’s “pre-announcement announcement video” for Virginia Governor, Ken Grant writes:

Kevin Drum explains an arcane-seeming bit of “parliamentary minutiae” driving business in Congress, which can be used to bury a bill at the last moment. The trick is to use a rule, which allows the minority party one last motion before the final vote on a bill, to send it back to committee – where “given the fact that it’s already probably been in committee for months, and the calendar is packed full of other stuff, [..] the bill dies”.

So here’s what happens with these recommittals. The minority party proposes an amendment that will make great campaign fodder. On the reauthorization of the AmeriCorps volunteer program last March, for example, Randy Kuhl proposed language requiring criminal background checks on prospective volunteers. If he were genuinely concerned with background checks, he would have accepted “forthwith” language and allowed a vote on his amendment, which probably would have passed. But he didn’t. He insisted on “promptly” language instead. Why? Because he knew that the majority would resist delaying the bill by sending it back to committee, and that’s what he was really after. He wanted to force them to vote down his motion so that Republicans could all go home and claim that Democrats had voted against background checks on AmeriCorps volunteers.

As they say, read the whole thing … and expect a lot of this kind of obstruction from the Republican opposition in the next couple of years.

The “corruption rate” mapped below is calculated as the total number of public corruption convictions from 1997 to 2006 per 100,000 residents. The rates by state were compiled by Corporate Crime Reporter, based on Department of Justice statistics. Surprise: Illinois is not at the top; it’s pushed into the second tier by the Deep South. The ‘cleanest’ states, meanwhile, are in the West.

On The Monkey Cage, Prof. Sigelman first posted these data in tabular form, and Prof. Sides then followed up with a graph. That just left Prof. Gellman wishing for a map to better show the regional patterns. Well, this is my attempt at using the impressive-looking Many Eyes features to provide one. It’s a first attempt at using Many Eyes: I saw Nick Beaudrot use it to map out data before and I had to also give it a try.

The map may take a while to load, but is interactive: hover your mouse over a state and its corruption rate is shown. Clicking on a state highlights it; click on an unused area of the map to return to nationwide colour – and for some reason you may have to do this right at the beginning as well. On the version on the Many Eyes site itself, selecting a range of corruption rates in the legend highlights all states that fall within that range on the map.

Oddball observation of the day: at first glance I see a similarity between this map and the one showing where Obama did relatively best and worst, in comparison with the Democrats’ presidential score in 2004, among whites at least. Some parallel cultural elements at work?

This is Josh Moulitsas-Soros, acting CEO of Observationalism.com.

Most readers know that the views expressed on this blog are…

OK, just joking.

Ezra Klein uses the progressive blogosphere’s shitstorm in a teacup of the day to reflect on the agenda of the Third Way think tank, and how events since 2004 have overtaken it and made it irrelevant. It’s a good way to consider just how different things could have gone – and while we’re at it, to consider the looming reversal of roles between US liberals and European lefties.

It’s just four years ago, when Third Way was announced on November 11th, 2004, that this seemed like a good idea:

This was a week after John Kerry lost the presidential election, and the young organization was sold as a DLC for the next-generation. “As Democrats continue to stagger from last week’s election losses, a group of veteran political and policy operatives has started an advocacy group aimed at using moderate Senate Democrats as the front line in a campaign to give the party a more centrist profile,” wrote The Washington Post.

In other words, Third Way was formed under the theory that the Democrats’ problem in 2004 was that they were too far to the left, and as such, had lost middle class voters. The organization focused on upper middle class voters and followed the Mark Penn strategy of machine gun bursts of small, bite-sized policies meant to attract professional whites and rural voters.

Ezra does a good job in briefly sketching how quickly the Third Way’s strategy became an anachronism:

This year, Barack Obama was, on domestic policy, the most moderate of the major Democrats, which put him substantially to the left of every major Democrat running for president in 2004. His health care plan was more universal than Gephardt’s, his Iraq plan was more aggressively focused on withdrawal than Dean’s, and he was a black liberal from an urban center. Clinton and Edwards ran on similar platforms. None of them bore any obvious resemblance to the office park bait Third Way advocated. [..]

Third Way [..] were built as the vessel for a particular argument about the path to a Democratic resurgence, and their side of that debate lost. [..] Democrats have won atop something like the opposite of their advice and very different from their predicted majority coalition, which may explain why they’re acting so defensive.

All of which provides a good Zen moment to consider, even amidst my kind of bellyaching about Obama’s appointees, the blessings there are to count. You could have ended up with the Third Way recipe. Instead, the Democratic Party’s has moved left even as it gained political dominance.

This doesn’t just hold up in comparison with what the future looked like in 2004, either. Take the 850 billion euro economic stimulus plan the Democrats are preparing. That’s 6% of America’s GDP, more or less. Now compare the €200-billion stimulus plan that EU leaders eventually agreed on last week that involves the member states pumping the equivalent of 1.5% of GDP into their economies.

Alternatively, consider the £20-billion British stimulus package that Gordon Brown is proposing. On the eve of the EU summit, it stirred the German finance minister into a frenzied tizzy in Newsweek about “tossing around billions,” a deplorable “breathtaking switch” to “crass Keynesianism,” and the “breathtaking and depressing … speed at which proposals are put together .. that don’t even pass an economic test” – and that’s a plan that involves, if I’m getting the numbers right, all of 1.6% of British GDP.

Basically, after years in which European lefties like me groaned about a Democratic Party so milquetoast it would be a right-wing party in our countries, we’re suddenly faced with American peers who are moving more boldly to tackle the economic crisis than any EU government seems able or willing to do. While Obama’s party appears to be prepping a rapid shift of perspective to rediscover the wisdom of Keynesianism, the European governments are shackled by the EU’s deficit rules. It might not be long before we actually cast a jealous eye on those American peers we disdained just a few years ago.