Jamison Foser

After the State of the Union

President Obama’s State of the Union address tonight will reportedly emphasize “efforts to boost wages and mobility.” That’s welcome news, but I’m more interested in what the President and his fellow Democrats do and say after the speech. The last two years have not been encouraging.

Barack Obama, 2013 State of the Union Address:

Tonight let's declare that in the wealthiest nation on Earth, no one who works full-time should have to live in poverty and raise the Federal minimum wage to $9 an hour. [...] So here's an idea that Governor Romney and I actually agreed on last year: Let's tie the minimum wage to the cost of living so that it finally becomes a wage you can live on.

The United States Senate, controlled at the time by President Obama’s fellow Democrats, held zero votes on raising the minimum wage in 2013.

Barack Obama, 2014 State of the Union Address:

In the year since I asked this Congress to raise the minimum wage, five States have passed laws to raise theirs. [...] Of course, to reach millions more, Congress does need to get on board.

The United States Senate, controlled at the time by President Obama’s fellow Democrats, held one vote on raising the minimum wage in 2014.

After that vote failed in April, Democrats were supposedly going to make “raising the minimum wage the main weapon in their 2014 electoral arsenal” by “bringing the bill up for a vote again and again throughout the summer and fall.” It was a good idea -- one I’ve been urging for years -- but I never thought they’d act on it. And they didn’t. Democrats simply don’t do that kind of thing anymore. Instead of repeatedly forcing votes on incredibly popular policies that Republicans oppose, they hold one vote, then snicker as Republicans hold dozens of votes on repealing Obamacare. And, as a result, the national political debate for the past several years has been much more about repealing Obamacare than about raising the minimum wage.

And then the elections happened, and Democrats got routed -- and, at the same time, minimum wage increases passed in all five states in which they appeared on the ballot, including solidly conservative Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota. Which shouldn’t really surprise anyone: Raising the minimum wage is quite popular, just about all the time, just about everywhere. Democrats should behave accordingly.

The minimum wage is just one example. Economic policies that help the poor and middle class are better and more popular than economic policies that help the rich at the expense of the poor and middle class. But if Democrats don’t behave accordingly, they won’t reap the benefits -- and, more importantly, we’ll be stuck with bad economic policy.

Yes, Of Course It Matters Who You Vote For

The Washington Post’s Philip Bump mansplains why you shouldn’t worry your pretty little head about policies backed by Republican Cory Gardner that would outlaw contraception (pdf):

”[E]ven if Cory Gardner wins, it seems unlikely that he will be able to single-handedly ban birth control. Perhaps the guy’s complete lack of awareness of how basic politics works is why his partner thinks he’s too stupid to think of checking drugstores for condoms.”

The condescension just oozes out of Bump, like an open sore. Well, actually, Cory Gardner would just be a Senator, not wizard with a magic wand that would allow him to enact his every policy whim instantaneously.

Gee, thanks for the civics lesson, Plato. But here’s the thing: Literally everybody knows that, and it’s irrelevant to rational voting decisions. The rational thing to do is to support those candidates who hold policy positions you approve of, and oppose those candidates who hold policy positions you disapprove of, because the policy positions they hold are more likely to be enacted if they are elected. That's how "basic politics" really works. Alternatively, I suppose you could simply assume that nothing will ever change no matter who is elected and just flip a coin. Such an approach may win the approval of the oh-so-savvy people who write about politics for the Washington Post’s blog The Fix, but you may end up regretting it.

So while Bump is sneering at the rubes about “how basic politics works,” he’s also making just about the stupidest possible argument: That you shouldn’t consider what candidates want to do, as they will be unable to do them single-handedly. But, hey, people who write about politics make just about the stupidest possible argument all the time: What else is new, right? In this case, it’s the combination of condescension and utter stupidity that’s really impressive. Well done, Philip Bump!

Sadly, Bump isn’t alone in lecturing women not to worry about politicians who want to take away their reproductive rights. It’s something of an epidemic. The Oregonian editorial board — all men, by the way — mocked the “threadbare Democratic ‘war on women’ narrative” earlier this month.

Similarly, the Denver Post endorsed Gardner for the Colorado Senate seat, calling opponent Mark Udall “obnoxious” and “tedious” for talking about Gardner’s opposition to reproductive rights because “Gardner’s election would pose no threat to abortion rights.” Why? The Post didn’t bother to explain, apparently believing it self-evident that United States Senators have no influence over public policy. There, again, is that combination of condescension and stupidity. Notice how often it shows up in claims that women shouldn’t worry about their rights?

Then came a Colorado Senate debate in which the two (male) moderators and the (male) Cory Gardner took turns lecturing Udall for talking about women’s rights too much. The lowlight of that particular exchange came when one of the (male) moderators said, essentially, But enough about women, let’s talk about voters who matter: Men.

When was the last time you saw journalists lecture a candidate for talking too much about budgets or national security? Never, right? For some reason (male) moderators only seem to do that when they think candidates are talking too much about women’s rights.

Why are so many men so insistent that we stop talking about women’s rights — and that women shouldn’t worry about politicians who want to take those rights away? Maybe because our laws and culture are rigged in favor of men, and they want to keep it that way?

Charles Koch Is No Martin Luther King

Quick, Nobody Apologize to Dylan Byers! (His 2013 Piece About Jill Abramson Is Still Awful)

In the wake of Jill Abramson’s abrupt dismissal as executive editor of the New York Times, Politico’s Mike Allen suggests people owe his colleague Dylan Byers an apology:

WOULD ANYONE LIKE TO APOLOGIZE to Dylan Byers for attacking his April 2013 story, "Turbulence at The Times," as sexist? In retrospect, it's clear that it was reporting (and even understating) the reality.

I can’t speak for everyone, but I stand by my criticism of Byers’ article, and find it laughable that anyone would suggest that Abramson’s firing negates the central complaints lodged against it.

Byers’ article was about alleged problems with Abramson’s “temperament,” yet it began and ended with anecdotes about two separate instances of Dean Baquet (then the Times’ managing editor and now Abramson’s replacement) punching newsroom walls in anger. In the opening anecdote, Baquet “burst out of Abramson’s office, slammed his hand against a wall and stormed out of the newsroom” and didn’t return for the rest of the day, skipping a daily editors’ meeting. Here’s how Byers concludes the opening anecdote:

[O]nce the story had made the rounds, it wasn’t Baquet the staffers were griping about. It was Abramson.

That tells you everything you need to know about Byers’ piece: From his reporting, he learned that some Times staffers didn’t like Abramson’s temperament and said she was “difficult to work with.” He also learned that Baquet had on multiple occasions punched newsroom walls in anger. And yet he chose to write an article about Jill Abramson’s alleged temperament problems, without addressing in any way the sexist double-standard that leads people to describe a woman as temperamental and difficult while they “fondly” recall examples of a man punching a wall.

That was the problem with Byers’ article: Nobody thought he made up his sources (though some, myself included, wondered how representative they were of the newsroom as a whole.) Instead, people criticized him for not recognizing that a key part of the story, if not the central focus, was the extent to which sexist attitudes played a role in the criticisms of Abramson he was hearing. (See examples here, here, here, here and here.)

In short, the criticism of Byers was that he failed to recognize and address the strong possibility of sexist attitudes driving complaints about Abramson, and that this kind of failure helps perpetuate those sexist attitudes (and likely demonstrates them.)

That hasn’t been undermined by this week’s news. (It’s hard to imagine how it even could be.) Just the opposite, in fact. While we don’t (and won’t) know the “true” or “full” story behind Abramson’s tenure and its sudden end, this week’s developments actually reinforce the critique that Byers missed a glaring question of sexist attitudes and double-standards.

Paul Ryan and Jack Kemp, Storytellers

At the annual Conservative Political Action Conference yesterday, House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) told a story intended to illustrate the evils of free school lunches for poor children:

“The left is making a big mistake here. What they’re offering people is a full stomach and an empty soul. The American people want more than that. This reminds me of a story I heard from Eloise Anderson. She serves in the cabinet of my buddy, Governor Scott Walker. She once met a young boy from a very poor family, and every day at school, he would get a free lunch from a government program. He told Eloise he didn’t want a free lunch. He wanted his own lunch, one in a brown-paper bag just like the other kids. He wanted one, he said, because he knew a kid with a brown-paper bag had someone who cared for him. This is what the left does not understand.” Now, there are a couple obvious problems with Ryan's worldview.

The first is the implication that a kid without a brown-paper bag lunch doesn't have anyone who cares for him. But parents too poor to feed their children can still care about them. Money and affection are not the same thing.

Second, taking away a poor kid's lunch doesn't do anything to fill his soul or ensure he has a loving family. It just leaves her hungry and hurts her ability to learn, making it harder for her to escape poverty. As MSNBC's Ned Resnikoff explains, Ryan's anecdote accidentally makes the case for a guaranteed minimum income, rather than for the let-them-eat-cake policies Ryan prefers.

So, it wasn't the most successful anecdote you'll ever encounter. But the fun's just getting started: As it turns out, the story isn't true. Not the way Ryan told it, anyway.

The kid in question never spoke to Eloise Anderson, Secretary of Wisconsin's Department of Children and Families. Instead, his story was told in a book titled “The Invisible Thread,” by Laura Schroff. A spokesperson for Anderson says she misspoke when she re-told the story during a July 31, 2013 congressional hearing, and that she actually "was referring to a television interview which she had seen with Maurice Mazyck," the now-grown boy.

The actual story is quite different from the Ryan/Anderson version. It doesn't involve a child saying he didn't want a free lunch, or talking about a school lunch program in any way. In the actual story, Schroff encounters Mazyck, a panhandling 11-year-old whose mother was in jail, and offers to make him a lunch he can pick up on his way to school each day. Mazyck asks her to put the lunch in a paper bag "because when I see kids come to school with their lunch in a paper bag, that means someone cares about them."

So what does the now-grown Maurice Mazyck think about school lunch programs? The Washington Post notes "Schroff and Mazyck are partnering with a group called No Kid Hungry to help end childhood hunger in the United States. One key part of the program is connecting hungry kids with federal programs such as school lunches and food stamps."

Oh.

Now, one last little wrinkle. One of Paul Ryan's early mentors was then-Congressman Jack Kemp, another supply-side alchemist with an undeserved reputation for intellectual prowess.

As the Republican Party's vice presidential nominee in 1996, Kemp repeatedly told the story of a conversation he supposedly had with a young child in a Chicago public housing project. "I was in Chicago at a public housing community. I asked a little boy what he wanted to be when he grew up," Kemp would say before expressing dismay at the child's conditional reply: "He said, 'Mr. Kemp, if I grow up...'" In fact, Kemp had never spoken to the child, whose story had appeared in a book.

Paul Ryan was a speech writer for Jack Kemp during that campaign.

Memorial Day

Memorial Day weekend 2010, Santa Monica, CA

Quote of the Day

"The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies 'something not desirable.'"

-- George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," 1946

And Orwell never had the misfortune of seeing Glenn Beck standing at a chalkboard.

Third verse, same as the first

Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) explains what will happen if Republican gain control of congress:

According to Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., the House Republicans should exercise their power to subpoena and hold continuous hearings. Speaking to a gathering for the GOP Youth Convention on July 22 in Washington, D.C., she emphasized this point.

“Oh, I think that’s all we should do,” Bachmann said. “I think that all we should do is issue subpoenas and have one hearing after another. And expose all the nonsense that is going on. And it’s very important when we come back that we have constitutional conservative leadership because the American people’s patience is about this big.”

Think she's bluffing? She isn't. Republicans, led by Newt Gingrich, were saying much the same thing in 1994, and we know how that turned out: An endless distraction of overlapping, unnecessary, and increasingly inane congressional investigations led by the likes of conspiracy theorist Dan Burton, all designed to do nothing other than tear down political opponents and make it impossible to govern, and culminating in the shameful decision by the House GOP to impeach a president for having an affair -- which, of course, the Republican Speaker of the House was doing, too. Good times. And that's what's in store if Michelle Bachmann gets her way.

Politico's misdiagnosis

More than 2,000 words on Barack Obama’s political troubles, and Politico’s top editors never once address this basic truth: The economy isn’t any good and unemployment is high, and as long as those two things are true, the president isn’t going to be very popular -- and many economists and liberals (Paul Krugman, for one) said last year that the stimulus package needed to be much larger in order to provide the needed boost to the economy. There is plenty of reason to believe they were correct.

That’s fairly simple, really. Yet in purporting to explain Obama’s political trouble, and dissatisfaction among liberals, Politico’s top editors touch on everything except this obvious truth. His speeches aren’t good enough! His staff isn’t nice enough to reporters! He’s a “big-government liberal”! The White House failed to clear Senate primaries for its favored candidates!

No. It’s fairly simple, really: President Obama and the Democrats are struggling politically because the economy isn’t any good and unemployment is high. What should they have done differently? They should have done more to improve the economy; last year’s stimulus should have been bigger, for one thing. Speeches, kindness to reporters -- basically, everything Politico focuses on -- that’s all comparatively insignificant.

Back in January, Politico's John Harris (co-author of today's piece) demonstrated the same lack of understanding of what matters, as I noted at the time:

Harris writes that a key lesson of [Bill] Clinton's [post-'94] comeback is to "Find a way to talk about the economy." Strangely, he makes no mention of a more important lesson: Find a way to fix the economy. Indeed, he ignores the concept that actual economic conditions have something to do with electoral results.

One question this raises: What exactly is the value of a publication that calls itself “Politico” if it is blind to such obvious realities about politics?

It's time for Obama's dog to lawyer-up

Remember this?

"[M]aybe Newt Gingrich & Co. will someday be as earnest about private sector oversight as they are about embarrassing the administration. But it's hard to believe that, since Gingrich told lobbyists before the election that he intended to establish a select committee on corruption to investigate the Clinton administration. 'Washington just can't imagine a world in which Republicans would have subpoena power,' he said. It can now. But so far, Republican scrutiny has been about embarrassment more than enlightenment." -- Gloria Borger, 7/31/95

Keep in mind, Borger wrote that before Dan Burton's clown-show of an investigation repeatedly issued subpoenas to the wrong people and before the Republican House of Representatives impeached a president for having an affair.

Now, Republican Rep. Darrell Issa wants to make clear that if you liked the Republican investigations of the White House cat, the armed assault on vegetable gardens Dan Burton waged in a delusional attempt to disprove Vince Foster's suicide, the endless distractions and wasted money of partisan investigations of non-scandals, you'll love what the GOP has in store for Barack Obama if they win control of Congress:

Rep. Darrell Issa, the conservative firebrand whose specialty is lobbing corruption allegations at the Obama White House, is making plans to hire dozens of subpoena-wielding investigators if Republicans win the House this fall. 

The California Republican’s daily denunciations draw cheers from partisans and bookings from cable TV producers. He even bought his own earphone for live shots. But his bombastic style and attention-seeking investigations draw eye rolls from other quarters. Now, he’s making clear he won’t be so easy to shrug off if he becomes chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in 2011.

...

Issa has told Republican leadership that if he becomes chairman, he wants to roughly double his staff from 40 to between 70 and 80. And he is not subtle about what that means for President Barack Obama. 

At a recent speech to Pennsylvania Republicans here, he boasted about what would happen if the GOP wins 39 seats, and he gets the power to subpoena. 

“That will make all the difference in the world,” he told 400 applauding party members during a dinner at the chocolate-themed Hershey Lodge. “I won’t use it to have corporate America live in fear that we’re going to subpoena everything. I will use it to get the very information that today the White House is either shredding or not producing.” 

In other words, Issa wants to be to the Obama administration what Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.) was to the Clinton administration — a subpoena machine in search of White House scandals.

Assuring the BPs and Blackwaters of the world that they won't be the target of GOP investigations is a nice touch, isn't it? Good to know Issa's focus will be on the things that really matter -- like whether someone offered a 30-year Navy vet a job.