Paul & Eric's Bogus Journey

Deficit Reduction and the Next Budget Battle

Eric & Paul give Bill & Ted a run for their money

I am loath to tread in Paul Krugman's footsteps. Especially given that I just watched Peter Beinart lead a Q&A with him on Wednesday. But I choose to write about Congress, and this week the most interesting thing coming out of the legislature is going to continue to be House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan's proposal for 2012 and the decade beyond. Ryan, and Majority Leader Eric Cantor are about to embark on what they believe will be an Excellent Adventure in deficit cutting. They're calling it a Path to Prosperity. But I, like Krugman, fear they're going to be leading us all on a Bogus Journey.

Krugman's work in economics won him a Nobel Prize. And my work in economics is a shoo in for a Booby Prize. So when he says Ryan's budget plan is "a strange combination of cruelty and insanely wishful thinking," there's not a lot I can add to that. But that's never stopped me before.

Like it or not, Republicans -- Ryan and Cantor in particular with their positions of leadership in the House -- are setting the agenda for future budget negotiations. Even as they struggled with President Obama over how much government should spend in the next five months they were laying the groundwork for the next big budget battle, which entails cutting the deficit. And as nasty and protracted as cutting a few dollars here and there was recently, watching a Republican House tangle with the White House over how to reduce the deficit in the long term is going to be nastier and drag out even longer. And however cruel its logic and however wishful its thinking, the Budget Chair's plan represents the opening salvos in what will be a prolonged fight. It's the starting point for the negotiations; and how much, or how little of it remains when the dust has settled remains an open question.

Ryan's Path to Prosperity has no chance of surviving the rumble that's about to go down in one piece for a myriad of reasons, not the least of which is that it cuts funding for the Obama's health care reform law. The Budget Committee Chairman knows his proposal will never make it to the president's desk. And if he were under any delusions about it making through the Senate intact, never in Paul Ryan's wildest dreams would Obama sign it as is. And he doesn't care. 

"It really doesn't matter to me" if his approach is adopted and signed into law, Ryan said on NBC's Meet the Press. "What matters to me is that we try to fix the problem."

I take that as an explicit admission of the true goals of the Republican Party when it comes to the economy. Reducing the deficit and cutting America's debts would be fine. And if that's your stated preference, other folks are less likely to discover your true position. Because the important thing, what Ryan and the Republicans hope will result from his plan, is a rightward shift in budget policy, which is already pretty far right of the center.

Obama will unveil his plan for cutting the deficit this week, and it goes without saying that we'll wind up with something between what Ryan proposed and what the President plans on suggesting. I recently made an attempt to argue that Obama ought to engage in some issue uptake with respect to Ryan's emphasis on entitlement reform. It was my hope that if he took the lead on that issue he might be remembered as the President who saved Social Security from bankruptcy and from Republicans who wanted to hand it over to their fat cat buddies in private enterprise. 

I was apparently unconvincing. So rather than trying to defend the argument that the President should address Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security reform in his deficit cutting plan, I'll simply predict that he will do so. But I'm not yet willing to stick out my neck on whether he'll be successful at saving any of them, either from financial ruin or from the GOP vultures.

Bachmann's Money Machine Doesn't Make Her A Presidential Contender

But her latest contradiction shows how badly she wants to run

Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann's war chest had a great first quarter. Between the $1.7 million raised for her re-election and another half-a-million from a political action committee, the leader of the Tea Party Caucus finished ahead of every presumptive Republican presidential contender in fundraising for the first three months of 2011. And it shouldn't be surprising. She won re-election last year after raising $13.5 million, more than any other candidate for the House last season.

The Daily Mail wants to make out with her

As a quick aside, The Daily Mail ran the Bachmann fundraising story with this headline:

The lede and the first few grafs set up a story about how all other presidential hopefuls, including the President himself, should start preparing to tangle with her in 2012. But the story they deliver is that Obama -- who raised $1.5 million at a single fundraiser last week, has several similar events planned in the next few months, and raised $750 million in his 2008 campaign -- probably won't lose a money fight with Bachmann, if she runs in 2012.

But I digress. Where the Daily Mail failed, The Christian Science Monitor succeeded in explaining what exactly will determine whether she runs and how successful she will be if she does.

On the minus side for Bachmann, she has a fairly thin political resume... She can be polarizing. And she has a tendency to misspeak... Still, she has nothing to lose by running for president, analysts say. She can liven up the debates and carry a torch for the small-government, low-tax tea party movement. And if she falls short of the nomination, she can still run for reelection to the House. “She will be a well-funded candidate; that isn’t her problem,” says Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. “Her problem is that most Republicans are going to understand that if they nominate her, they have a small chance of winning in November.”

Her staunch opposition to President Obama makes her a logical choice to run against him in 2012. Her fundraising abilities make that a possibility. But her chances of actually beating him, even if she puts up a really good fight, seem insurmountably slim -- unless you write headlines for The Daily Mail.

But the real reason I chose to write about Bachmann today is the speech she gave at a Tea Party Express rally a few days ago. It was at the Robert A. Taft Memorial on Capitol Hill. Don't feel ashamed that you don't know who that is. He was the son of President William Howard Taft, but that's not why he got a memorial. Seventy years ago Taft, a Republican Senator from Ohio, was a conservative poster-boy who earned his bona fides by opposing the New Deal.  Bonus Trivia: The "A." stands for Alphonso.

But Taft really represented the same kind of conservatism embraced by Bachmann and her Tea Party supporters. So the location was apropos, the audience was friendly and the mood was just right for one of Bachmann's trademark contradictions to get ample applause and the odd whistle. And it also illustrates just how much she wants to run against Obama, or at least "Obamacare."

She promised to vote against any budget proposal that doesn't defund the healthcare reform law, a vote which in effect is a vote in favor of a government shutdown, and then warned the crowd that if government were to grind to a halt over the budget, the Democrats would try to blame the Tea Party for causing it. She's playing "a cynical game," hoping for a shutdown and then blaming the other side, while preemptively accusing the other side of doing the same. And the crowd loved her for it.

"They want to shut the government down and they want to turn you into their scapegoat and say it's the Tea Party's fault for shutting the government down.... They're afraid of you because you're powerful," she said.

The eight minute video of Bachmann's speech is posted below. Most of the good stuff is in the last minute and a half, so I encourage you to listen to at least that much of it.

Angle-ing for a House Seat...she's baa-aaack

Tea Party darling Sharron Angle

I'm tempted to ponder the merits of enforcing a no-fly-zone over Lybia, whether President Obama was right to commit U.S. troops to battle without asking Congress for permission, and whether "Odyssey Dawn" is a cool name for a military action -- but that's foreign policy talk, which is just a little outside my bailiwick. Plus, those are difficult subjects to tackle, and I feel like going after the low hanging fruit.

It's easy to squeeze out a few hundred words about Reno Republican Sharron Angle, who announced this week that she'll be running for a Nevada House seat in 2012. You remember Angle. Just a few months ago she went toe-to-toe with heavyweight Harry Reid and managed to stay on her feet with the Tea Party movement in her corner.

Angle punches above her political weight class. At best, she's a bantamweight fighter, but she isn't afraid to get in the ring with the big boys. And she talks trash. She told Harry Reid to "man up." I like that about her. But that's as close to praise as I'd like to get. Mostly, I see Angle as a necessary evil of American politics. But before I get into that, take 90 seconds and watch this announcement video posted by Angle's campaign this week:

This announcement, along with Angle's other campaign communications, represent the bulk of what mainstream media outlets get directly from the candidate. She's more comfortable on right-wing radio programs, where the hosts are friendly and the audiences are receptive to her brand of conservatism. When Nevada newspapers write about Angle it's often about something she said on the radio. It's not surprising. She's right to believe that most newspaper and television journalists are suspicious of, and even hostile to, her policy positions. The stances she has taken deserve scrutiny, perhaps most importantly because they are so polarizing. The following is a list of the choicest cuts:

• She opposes abortion even in cases of rape and incest
• Given her 'druthers, Angle would dismantle the Department of Education, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Internal Revenue Service
• She wants to end Social Security and Medicare and has referred to both programs as "welfare"
• The Constitution does not require the separation of church and state, if you believe her
• If it were up to Angle, the U.S. would withdraw from the United Nations

Then, of course, there are outrageous claims Angle made during her campaign against Reid last year, such as her assertion that the 9/11 hijackers entered the U.S. through Canada, that sharia law is "taking hold" in Dearborn, Mich. and Frankford, Texas, and those cryptic comments about Second Amendment "remedies," that some folks interpreted as a call to armed revolution.

I mention all that so I can say no matter how repugnant her policy positions may be, and however foolish -- even dangerous -- her gaffes might have been during the last year's campaign, it's basically a good thing that American politics has polarizing candidates like Angle. They're a necessary component of the basic dynamics of the whole system.

First, they're perfect targets for politicians on the other side of the aisle. If not for Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid (and Obama), who would the conservatives have singled out as enemies of of the electorate last year? If not for John Boehner and Paul Ryan, who would the left be squealing about now?

Second, as fringe candidates they promote centrism within their own parties, by giving their contemporaries extreme points of view to distance themselves from and ludicrous comments to "refutiate." 

Finally, they give journalists, pundits and bloggers something easy to talk about. Imagine if I had waded into that whole Libya thing.

In Defense of Peter King...Sort Of

Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.)

I hate to put myself in the position of defending Congressman Peter King. So I'm not going to. But he needs a defense attorney, or the wits of one, to explicate why he's holding hearings on the radicalization of Muslim-Americans in the United States. As soon as King's critics caught wind of his plans they charged him with McCarthyism and accused him of leading a witch hunt. I won't defend his hypothesis or his methods, those are both bogus. But King has correctly identified a problem, his heart is in the right place, and the charges against him are trumped up. You can watch King explain his reasons for bringing the issue up in Congress, which critics worry will stoke anti-Muslim sentiment in the public, in the video below. He did a nice job sticking up for himself this week on MSNBC's Morning Joe when he squared off against The Washington Post's Eugene Robinson, a formidable opponent by any standard.

Every time a member of Congress holds a hearing that singles out a group of Americans as being a potential threat it's tempting to call that McCarthyism. But it's not always so. When King suggests Muslim-Americans should have to sign loyalty oaths to keep their jobs I'll concede that he's crossed the threshold of McCarthyism, but until then suggesting that Peter King is as bad Joe McCarthy indulges in revisionist history that underestimates just how bad McCarthy was. As for the charge of leading a witch hunt, that's also tempting but not always so. If there were no such thing as Muslim-American radicals planning attacks within the United States and the Congressman was going from mosque to mosque rounding up suspects, giving them "trials" and burning them at the stake, then I would say there was a convincing case to be made on the witch hunt indictment. But Muslim-American radicals planning attacks within the United States are real.

That may be the only agreement the Congressman and I have on this issue. Our viewpoints diverge sharply immediately thereafter. King correctly identifies the problem of Muslim Americans becoming radicalized in their local communities, but he seems to believe that Muslim Americans who aren't plotting attacks aren't doing enough to rat out the ones who are. And the shoddy method he's chosen to prove that phony hypothesis is by inviting Dr. Zuhdi Jasser to testify about a supposed code of silence within the Muslim-American community. The Nation's Sarah Posner sums up Jasser's argument nicely:

Jasser is undoubtedly part of a strategy to deflect widespread criticism that King’s hearings are an attempt smear all Muslims with a broad brush. That’s an accusation that Jasser and others in the anti-Muslim agitprop stable are accustomed to averting. And they do so with a sleight of hand: that it’s not individual American Muslims who are radical, it’s their leaders—Muslim charities and civil rights groups, imams and a religious leadership that is dominated by radicals, who in turn dupe the gullible masses.

Zaid Jilani, left-wing blogger for Think Progress, appearing on Russia Today also gave a searing indictment against Jasser and his claims. You can see his take on the hearings in the video below.

The Wacky World of Wu

Congressman David Wu (D-Oregon)

Oddball Oregon Congressman David Wu, despite having successfully sidestepped several political pratfalls during his first six terms in the House, is apparently not very convincing in his apologies.

Editorial boards at community newspapers across the state's First Congressional District called for Wu's resignation this week after the Congressman confessed to mostly unspecified regrets over "inappropriate" and "unprofessional" "things" he "said" and "did" during his most recent campaign on Good Morning America Tuesday.

Wu didn't exactly apologize for anything. It was more like hearing excuses. Good excuses. But excuses nonetheless. Campaigns are stressful. Divorce is no picnic. Single parenthood ain't no walk in the park. And caring for one elderly parent while coping with the loss of the other is emotionally draining as well.

During the six-minute interview with George Stephanopoulos, Wu denied that his former staffers had staged what they described as an "intervention" to get him a bed in a psychiatric hospital near the end of the campaign. He did admit to deciding against committing himself to an inpatient mental health program during the campaign because of his family obligations. Since then, however, the Congressman said he has sought psychiatric help, both "counseling" and "medication."

Those revelations were damning, according to The Register-Guard newspaper in Oregon, not because he sought mental health treatment, but because he concealed his problems from the voters:

"It’s easy to understand why Wu and his staff wanted to keep questions about his condition quiet until after the election....Yet at the same time, the congressman’s silence, and that of his staff members, led voters to make their decision without knowing important facts about the leading candidate....Candor might have been costly...Whatever the price of candor, the price of its absence is higher. Wu can recover his health, but public trust is lost forever. He should step down."

Similarly, The Beaverton Valley Times called on Wu to take a leave of absence to focus on his mental health issues, House rules permitting, or resign altogether:

"This week, Wu has emphatically said he is fully capable of representing Oregon’s 1st Congressional District. We don’t agree. Wu’s recent behavior is no longer about odd, eccentric or embarrassing outbursts or actions. It’s about trust. It’s a call for Wu to restore his own mental health and personal well-being. It’s about what Oregon needs from a member of Congress.

We believe that until Wu is able to fully prove his mental health, control his erratic behavior and restore the public’s trust, he should take a leave of absence from Congress."

The Daily Astorian stopped short of calling for his resignation, opting instead only to predict it by comparing Wu to former Oregon Senator Bob Packwood who was forced to resign in 1995 after The Washington Post revealed allegations of sexual harassment against him.

"It would be the better part of smartness for Wu to resign, but political decisions are more often emotional than rational. While The Oregonian has been itching for Wu’s scalp for several terms, an editorial page from this vantage point has to acknowledge that the congressman has served Clatsop County well. Certainly Wu is becoming an embarrassment. So was Packwood. We know how this ends."

Wu in a family snapshot a few days before Halloween, just before his re-election last year. Wu sent this photo and other "bizarre" emails to staffers who became concerned about his mental health and attempted to have him hospitalized.

In political circles,Wu has long been known to be "socially awkward," a condition that has consistently put him in hot water. But according to Jeff Mapes, senior political reporter for The Portland Oregonian, he's always been able to "talk his way out of it." Mapes expounded on how Wu had survived a number of gaffes, political missteps and revelations of bizarre, inappropriate and even criminal behavior during a discussion with Oregon Public Broadcasting's Political Analyst Bill Lunch on Friday. Lunch noted that because Wu won't be up for re-election anytime soon, he'll have plenty of time to "potentially recover...or make things worse for himself."

And it could go either way. If he sticks to his story and doesn't have a meltdown, maybe voters will be willing to give him the benefit of the doubt by next fall. But it might be hard for him to win back the public's trust if he does the kinds of things he's prone to do. Like the brief tirade against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan he gave on the House floor in 2007. He stood at the dais and went on a rant filled with Star Trek references, claiming that there were no Vulcans in the Bush White House, only Klingons, who unlike "real" Klingons from the fictional television show, never had to fight a battle. It culminated with Wu jabbing his finger into the podium and pronouncing: "Don't let faux Klingons send real Americans to War! It's wrong."

The Beaverton Valley Times editorial referenced an incident last fall at a business event in his district when Wu stood up to address the group and "he frantically yelled out a quotation in German made almost a century ago by Prussian Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm II. And then he promptly sat down."

Congressmen as brilliant as Wu can get away with that kind of behavior as simply eccentric. But only until they confess to having mental problems. His brilliance is not in dispute. Wu attended both Harvard Medical and Yale Law school. But now that his mental health has been called into question, the same kinds of things that used to pass without much notice by the voters will be informing their decisions at the polls in 2012.