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Why We Are Watching This Clown

Wednesday, February 2nd, 2011
Lee Drutman


Lee Drutman is a senior fellow and the managing editor for the Progressive Policy Institute.

by Lee Drutman

I normally try to stay away from this stuff, but the latest Glenn Beck blaze of paranoia on Egypt is just too much of a train wreck to miss. In 12 terrifying minutes, Beck outlines the contours of a Middle East that is ON FIRE, and promises to devote the next several episodes to giving his viewers the whole TRUTH, the TRUTH that “has no agenda,” the TRUTH that the mainstream media doesn’t want to tell you.

“I’m not going to give you the two minute sound-byte,” teases Beck. “I’m not going to treat you like you’re a moron. I’m going to treat you like you really do want to understand what’s going on in the world.”

Okay, we all know he’s crazy. But what I keep trying to understand, every time I catch a glimpse of Beck, is why do 2.5 or 3 million people tune in to watch this guy every night? Clearly, he’s figured something out. And as amusing as it is to gawk at the loop-de-loops of insanity, there’s got to be some deep psychological nerves that he’s satisfying.

Let me offer three hypotheses:

  1. The puzzle-solving boost. The neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran writes that “we are hard-wired to love solving puzzles.” In particular, we seem to most enjoy solving puzzles with sudden flashes of insight, “Aha” moments that give us a little flash of positive good feeling. This probably explains the appeal of conspiracy theories generally. Everybody loves a good mystery. And Beck’s most disturbing moments are kind of like that: he throws a bunch of oddly-sized puzzle pieces on the floor, and then promises to show how they will all fit together in an instant “aha” moment. It’s like puzzle-solving porn.
  2. The smarter than everyone else boost. What Beck is consciously doing is letting his viewers in on something exclusive, some privileged view of the world that allows them to feel superior to those who aren’t in the know. These are viewers who have probably spent much of their lives feeling intellectually insecure. But by providing a simple, secret explanation for what’s going on the world, Beck is peddling an ego boost.
  3. Anxiety needs some respect. Beck’s rants are fear-driven, and in that respect they must resonate with a sense of unease that seems to be plaguing too many Americans these days. But this is especially dangerous. Risk expert David Ropeik writes that “when it comes to perceiving and responding to danger, human brains are hard-wired to fear first, and think later.” Beck’s rants are fear-driven, and once the fear part of the brain is activated, the logic part of the brain just doesn’t function as well.

So, add it up, and what Glenn Beck is offering millions of anxious viewers is a chance to validate their fears and then illogically salve them by providing the psychological high of solving a puzzle that allows them to feel superior by being privileged to some secret, exclusive knowledge.

I’m not sure what the antidote is, but I’m guessing it’s not simply marginalizing Beck for his craziness, fun and ego-boosting as that may be. I do sincerely believe that the conspiratorial fear-mongering that comes out of the Beck empire is a serious, serious problem for our society, but it also taps into some serious psychological needs out there. More to think about here.

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Posted in Daily Fix, Fixing Our Broken Politics, Issues | No Comments »

How Can the Obama Administration Help Lebanon’s Pro-Democracy Forces? It Can Start By Supporting Their Media.

Friday, November 12th, 2010
Josh Block


Josh Block is a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, a partner in Davis-Block LLC (a strategic consulting and public affairs company he co-founded with Lanny Davis), and a fellow at the Truman National Security Project. He was previously the spokesman for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and for the State Department's U.S. Agency for International Development during the Clinton Administration.

by Josh Block

Just a few years ago, Lebanon appeared to be a foreign policy success for the United States. Outraged by the brutal assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri (likely at the hands of Syria and its allies), the Lebanese people, bolstered by international support, succeeded in expelling Syrian military forces and asserting Lebanese sovereignty in 2005 for the first time in decades. And again in 2009, the Lebanese affirmed their support for the pro-Western ruling coalition, awarding them a solid majority of seats in Parliament during the May general elections.

These days, however, the country looks headed for a frightening crisis. The March 14 coalition, as the ruling group is known, has been unable to capitalize on its popular mandate. This is due in large part to the overwhelming force wielded by Hezbollah – which is funded, trained, and armed by Iran and Syria. But it’s also because U.S. policy toward Lebanon has been unwilling to back up bold words with actions. Far from protecting America’s allies, consecutive U.S. administrations have not only failed the pro-Western government but also empowered its worst enemies.

The slow-burning confrontation is about to reach a boiling point over the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, charged with bringing Hariri’s killers to justice. The court, established by agreement between the U.N. Security Council and the Lebanese government, is expected to issue indictments against members of Hezbollah in the coming months. As the Wall Street Journal reported Monday, up to six members are slated to be indicted by the end of the year, including Mustafa Badreddine, a senior Hezbollah military commander and brother-in-law of the infamous Hezbollah mastermind Imad Mugniyah.

In an effort to preempt what would surely be a massive blow, Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah has launched a war against the tribunal, and U.S. officials believe that Hezbollah will stop at nothing to prevent indictments from being handed down. The risk of war is palpable, and if Hezbollah and its Iranian patrons — and their Syrian puppets — unseat the elected government and take control over Lebanon, it will be a grave blow to U.S. security and credibility around the world.

It would also bolster the reach and credibility of Iran. Fred Hof, deputy to U.S. Special Middle East envoy George Mitchell and point man on U.S.-Syria policy once put it bluntly: “Whether most of his organization’s members know it or not, and whether most Lebanese Shiites know it or not, [Nasrallah] and his inner circle do what they do first and foremost to defend and project the existence and power of the Islamic Republic of Iran.” (He was speaking to the Middle East Institute in the midst of the 2006 conflict between Israel and Hezbollah.)

The rise of Iranian influence in Lebanon is particularly dangerous at the present moment, when moderate Arab countries are desperately looking for the United States to contain Iran. From the perspective of the United States’ Arab allies, if the world’s superpower can’t contain the mullahs before they have a nuclear weapon, how could they be expected to contain them if they have the bomb?

Given the disturbing drift in American policy since the 2005 Cedar revolution, what is at stake, and the choices we must make to support those seeking our help, Hezbollah’s crimes against us bear repeating.

Accused of terrorism on virtually every continent, Hezbollah has killed more Americans than any terrorist group except Al Qaeda, and today they posses weapons of state.

They murdered 63 people, including 17 Americans and eight CIA officers in our Beirut embassy in 1982. They slaughtered 241 American marines in the Marine barracks’ bombing in 1983, and a year later killed another 18 American servicemen near the U.S. Air Force Base in Torrejon, Spain. Robert Stethem, a US Navy diver, was beaten to death and thrown on the tarmac when Hezbollah terrorists hijacked TWA flight 847. And of course the brutal kidnapping, heinous torture, and eventual murder of the CIA’s Beirut station chief Bill Buckley and Col. William ‘Rich’ Higgins were carried out by Hezbollah terrorists.

Fred Hof was a close friend of Col. Higgins and, at the time, part of a small team that worked every possible angle to free Higgins before his death. “I am one of a small handful of Americans who knows the exact manner of Rich’s death,” he explained years ago. “If I were to describe it to you now – which I will not – I can guarantee that a significant number of people in this room would become physically ill.  When [former Deputy Secretary of State] Rich Armitage described Hezbollah a few years ago as the “A-Team” of international terrorism and suggested that there was a “blood debt” to be paid, he was referring to a leadership cadre that is steeped in blood and brutality.”

It is that ‘leadership cadre’ of Iranian backed terrorists, who have been killing our allies and us for over 30 years, that is today working for Tehran, “maneuvering furiously”, according to the New York Times, to derail the tribunal, and destroy the native forces inside Lebanon seeking to restore self-determination for the Lebanese people.

Lebanon is again at a cross roads, and so is American policy.

How did the situation become so dire, so soon after the West finally helped the Lebanese people shake off the foreign forces driving thirty years of civil war and violence? Is it now too late to stop Iran from successfully exporting their revolution into a country as culturally diverse and multi-confessional Lebanon?

It’s difficult not to lay the blame at the feet of former President George W. Bush and his Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice. The Bush administration was eager to hold up Lebanon as an example of its successful Middle East policy: “We took great joy in seeing the Cedar Revolution. We understand that the hundreds of thousands of people who took to the street to express their desire to be free required courage, and we support the desire of the people to have a government responsive to their needs and a government that is free, truly free,” Bush said at the time.  However, when push came to shove, the president did little to help our Lebanese allies when they needed him most.

Judgment day came May 7, 2008. An emboldened Hezbollah, alarmed that the government was moving to control the group’s illicit private communications network, invaded the streets of Beirut and the Chouf Mountains to the south, forcing Lebanon’s democratically-elected leaders to accede to a power-sharing agreement at the point of a gun. The result was yet another capitulation by the Bush administration, which signaled its acquiescence to the Doha Agreement, signed on May 21 of that year, formalizing Hezbollah’s veto over any government decision, including its own disarmament.

But if the Bush administration opened the door to Hezbollah’s takeover of Lebanon, Barack Obama’s administration is holding that door ajar, doing little to support America’s erstwhile allies in the March 14 coalition out of fear that such a move would damage any chance of engaging with Syria.

In an October 18 letter, Congressmen Gary Ackerman (D-NY) and Dan Burton (R-IN), chairman and ranking member of the Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Middle East, protested the administration’s lack of support for moderate elements in Lebanon: “We remain concerned that your strategy of offering diplomatic overtures to hostile regimes has done little to provoke Middle East peace, and has only taken away leverage from our democratic friends and allies.”

For its part, the Administration continues to put the emphasis on reaching out to Damascus, and has gone only so far as to indicate there are limits to America’s patience. “Syria and the United States have taken some modest steps to see if we can improve the bilateral relationship, but this cannot go very far as long as Syria’s friends are undermining stability in Lebanon,“ explained Assistant Secretary of State Jeffrey Feltman, on a visit to Syria earlier this month.

It is vital that the United States reverse these years of drift and act decisively to help the Lebanese people reassert their right to self-determination — because it is in America’s national interest.  The alternative is to give in to the foreign agenda of the Mullahs in Tehran and their terrorist proxy at time when containing Iran’s expansionist ambition is the paramount necessity in the region. So what do we do?

The Obama administration must decide to resist the “resistance,” and lead the West in a program to further empower Lebanese civil society and aid the dormant democratic forces in the country. It is these courageous actors, with the proven ability to lead successful political and media campaigns and expose the Syria-Iran-Hezbollah axis, who were specifically targeted by Hezbollah in May 2008 — exactly because they are effective. The Lebanese people need to know that the president of the United States supports their pursuit of freedom and democracy, especially as Hezbollah’s role in attacking the state is on the verge of being exposed.

President Obama should immediately look to Lebanon’s pro-democracy media, which has largely been silenced over the last year, intimidated not only by pro-Syrian, pro-Iranian, and Hezbollah foes, but hobbled by Saudi patrons who mistakenly thought they could pull Syria away from Iran’s influence. That strategy, like our own outreach to Syria, has proven a disastrous failure, for Lebanon, the region and US national interests. The Obama administration can help take the muzzle off of these Lebanese patriots—like Prime Minister Saad Hariri and head of the Lebanese Forces party Samir Geagea—whose courageous voices are the first defense against Hezbollah’s “resistance.” Let Lebanon speak.

And, the Obama administration must ensure that the Special Tribunal goes forward, prosecuting those it indicts.  America’s $10 million contribution last week is commendable, but it is not enough.  No problem, other than stopping Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, calls as urgently for international focus as does the effort to stop Iran from expanding its sphere of influence and overpowering another people.

The United States must be willing to work with its allies in Europe and the Middle East to support those democratic elements who want to save their country. This policy will not be easy. It may require making the tough decision to give up on forces and programs that have failed to serve as a bulwark against Hezbollah, or it may require a deep reform of the same, but tough choices are what we face.

It was Harry Truman who said “it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” Those words are as true today under President Obama as when they were uttered in 1947 by a young former Senator thrust suddenly into power, forced to make some of this nation’s most fateful, difficult and ultimately, successful decisions. America is no less the leader of the free world today than we were then, unless we act otherwise.

If the Obama administration takes a bold stand in favor of Lebanon’s independence and starts pressing the Saudis to support Lebanese civil society, it will find that many figures in Beirut, and other countries with a stake in Lebanon’s stability will enthusiastically follow its lead.

But whatever methods it chooses, the administration must make a clear public signal that the United States will not sit on the sidelines while Iran, through its satraps Syria and Hezbollah, successfully exports the Iranian revolution to Lebanon. President Obama has spoken eloquently about the need to support democracy and tolerance in the Middle East. The time of decision has come. The President must now put America’s words into action.

A shorter version of this article appeared at ForeignPolicy.com

photo credit: Patrick Makhoul

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Posted in A Progressive Security Strategy, Daily Fix | 1 Comment »

Health Care Lies Are Powerful

Wednesday, April 28th, 2010
Ed Kilgore


Ed Kilgore is a PPI senior fellow, as well as managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, an online forum.

by Ed Kilgore

One of the most unnerving aspects of the recent health reform debate was the extent to which opponents of various Democratic plans (usually lumped together as “ObamaCare”) embraced and promoted outright falsehoods, most famously the idea that the legislation would encourage euthanasia-by-rationing.

Brendan Nyhan now has an important article at The Forum that not only looks at the role of deliberate misinformation in the “ObamaCare” debate, but compares it to a similar Big Lie that “stuck” during the earlier debate over the Clinton administration’s health reform proposal (i.e., the claim that the proposal would eliminate the ability of Americans to choose doctors). He notes the seminal role of pseudo-wonk Betsy McCaughey in both episodes of disinformation, and the importance of partisan conservative media in reinforcing fabricated claims.

Nyhan’s conclusion is sobering:

The evidence presented in this article suggests that misinformation played an important role in the two most recent debates over health care reform. While some critics have faulted the response of the Clinton and Obama administrations to these charges… the argument presented in this article suggests that political myths are extremely difficult to counter. For instance, proponents of reform might attempt to address concerns in the bill-writing process, but Betsy McCaughey’s 1994 article suggests that such disclaimers can be distorted or ignored. And false claims with no actual basis in legislation such as the “death panel” myth are especially insidious precisely because they cannot be addressed in the bill itself. As a result, until the media stops giving so much attention to misinformers, elites on both sides will often succeed in creating misperceptions, especially among sympathetic partisans. And once such beliefs take hold, few good options exist to counter them—correcting misperceptions is simply too difficult.

A particularly depressing finding of Nyhan’s is that belief in Big Lies about health reform actually increased among those Republicans who thought of themselves as well-informed on the subject. This reflects the experience many have had with conservative talk radio or Fox News fans who feel “empowered” by the “truth” about liberal policy ideas or politicians, and are exceptionally resistant to contrary facts or “objective” referees of the facts. Any progressive who’s done conservative call-in shows (or had extended discussions with conservative-activists friends or family) and dealt with inquisitors who perpetually suggest they are “on to you” and have divined your secret plans and motives knows exactly what I am talking about.

It’s almost certainly unfair and counterproductive, and in any event a waste of time, to criticize consumers of deliberate misinformation as ignorant. When it comes to complex topics like health care, even extremely well-informed people filter information — or misinformation — via ideological presumptions, partisanship, and the “trust factor” of where they turn to become informed.

The better course, as Nyhan argues, is to focus on the elites who invent and disseminate misinformation, and relentlessly undermine their bogus credibility. Serial offenders like McCaughey should be hooted off the public stage when they pop up again (as did, to some extent, happen during the ObamaCare debate). And politicians who retail misinformation should be held accountable just as much. Personally, I wish that much of the vast progressive sea of contempt for Sarah Palin’s rhetoric and mannerisms would instead be channeled into a relentless focus on her huge and unrepentent role — via a Facebook post, no less — in turning the lie about government-encouraged euthanasia into the Big Lie of “Obama death panels.” This despicable act, aimed at terrifying seniors and the families of those with disabilities, not her general lack of intellectual curiosity or her inexperience in governing, is what should disqualify her from any elected office at least until she confesses and seeks absolution.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/andrewaliferis/ / CC BY-ND 2.0

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End of a Delusion

Monday, April 5th, 2010
Ed Kilgore


Ed Kilgore is a PPI senior fellow, as well as managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, an online forum.

by Ed Kilgore

It’s certainly taken a while, but as we head towards the Tea Party Movement’s holy day of April 15, it seems to finally be sinking in among the commentariat that these people did not come out of nowhere or arise spontaneously from an aroused populace, but are instead simply the same old conservative Republicans who used to be so boring back in the day. A new poll of the Tea Folk by Gallup seems to have spurred this realization along, though some gabbers may persist in being baffled by the high number of Tea Partiers who self-identify as independents. The Atlantic‘s Marc Ambinder explains it to them:

[I]t’s true that just half of those Tea Partiers surveyed called themselves Republicans. Yes, the lion’s share of the other half say they’re independent. But they’re not: they’re Republican-oriented conservative voters who are dismayed by the direction of the GOP and who don’t want to identify with the party’s brand. That’s not surprising, given how tarnished that brand is. Only 8% identify as Democratic; 7% identify as liberal; 70% percent identify as conservative; two-thirds are pro-life; nearly 90% were opposed to the health care bill.

This is a very old story, one that arguably goes all the way back to the 1940s. At any given moment, a significant number of conservative Republicans don’t want to call themselves Republicans because their leadership is not, in their view, conservative enough. This is one reason why Republican self-identification numbers have chronically undershot Republican votes in actual elections. At particularly difficult moments, conservative Republicans have even threatened to form a third party — as in the mid-1970s, when National Review publisher William Rusher argued that conservatives should leave the GOP to it’s “elitist” establishment and make common cause with Wallacites and other social conservatives in a “producer’s party.” Such threats today are no more unusual, or credible, but do help encourage Republican office-holders to follow their own inclination to hew to the Right.

As the (apparent) novelty of the Tea Party wears off, its familiar outlines should become apparent, except to those with a strong bias in favor of misunderstanding the phenomenon. In an interesting column today, Mark Schmitt of The American Prospect discusses those left-progressives who persist in helplessly hoping for a “populist” alliance with the Tea Folk. Part of the allure, he suspects, involves some progressive self-loathing:

[F]inding allies among Tea Partiers is the equivalent of what finding a black friend was to liberals in the 1960s. It’s a way to get in touch with the real America, to feel a little superior, a little less elitist or isolated, less wimpy, less conformist.But the real America is at least as likely to be found in the 205 million voting age adults who aren’t Tea Partiers as the few hundred thousand who are. And the rest of that real America, with its own passions and anger and economic pain, is probably a more fruitful area to look for allies on real liberal goals that include inclusion and fairness.

In any event, I’m with Ambinder: If pollsters want to keep examining the Tea Folk, it’s time for them to drill a little deeper:

Next time, I’d love for Gallup, or any other pollster, really, to ask self-identified Tea Partiers for their vote histories, for their views on immigration and race, for their views on questions about Obama attributes (is he a socialist?), for their specific views on policy matters (do they support a “fair tax?”).

Moreover, instead of asking Republicans and independents over and over if they might be tempted to vote for a hypothetical Tea Third Party candidate, pollsters might want to focus on the actual major-party preferences of Tea Partiers, since in all but a few scattered contests, that’s what they are going to face at the polls. I say that mainly because of all the delusions surrounding the Tea Party Movement, the one that suggests Democrats will be saved by a mass of third-party candidates associated with said Movement is among the most fanciful. The Tea Folk are systematically dragging the GOP to the Right, and that’s the development that Democrats need to think about exploiting in November and beyond.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/theqspeaks/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

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Frum Flung from Fox-Run GOP

Friday, March 26th, 2010
Mike Derham


Mike Derham is chair of PPI's Innovative Economy Project.

by Mike Derham

I’m not a political strategy guy. The only time I ever ran for office (class president, sixth grade) I came in third. But I was surprised at some of the response I got from my piece highlighting some legitimate concerns about health care raised by former Bush speechwriter David Frum. A liberal buddy responded to my suggestion that we follow the president’s vision of bipartisanship and work with Republicans when they seem to be making a good-faith effort to improve policy with a “Were you just trolling?” But I wasn’t — not only is it good policy, it’s good political strategy.

Yesterday afternoon, neoconservative bastion American Enterprise Institute showed Frum the door for his critiques of Republican strategy. Frum is no moderate, and it is a sign of how far the Republican Party has moved to the right that the guy who coined the phrase “Axis of Evil” gets defenestrated for not being tough enough. Or — more likely — for being too tough on the real power source of the conservative movement: Rush Limbaugh, Fox News and what Frum called the “conservative entertainment industry.”

But this is an encouraging sign for progressive causes and the Democratic Party. As long as the conservative movement is dominated by Tea Party orthodoxy and spin-job martinets disciplining wonks and the rank-and file, it will continue to shrink its tent. The president’s willingness to sit down and negotiate with reasonable interlocutors across the aisle provides an instructive contrast. On the other side, bipartisan cooperation is verboten and heretics are cast out from the party. On our side, the president sets the tone by continuing to preach bipartisanship. Which of those approaches will play well with independents?

In much the same way as the Obama’s “open hand before the closed fist” foreign policy — an approach that has gotten Europe to line up with us against Iran and is likely soon to achieve a new START Treaty — has been more successful than W’s “with us or against us” cowboy ideology, so will a continued willingness to listen to constructive critiques provide better policy and better political results than refusing to listen to the opposition.

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The Capricious CW

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010
Elbert Ventura


Elbert Ventura is the managing editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. He formerly served as the managing editor of the Progressive Policy Institute.

by Elbert Ventura

Amazing what a little history-making legislation can do for your image. As others have already pointed out, the media narrative of the Obama presidency has undergone a wholesale revision in the wake of the House’s passage of health care reform legislation. Gone are the accounts of a flailing presidency and a Democratic Party headed for doom in November. In their place are breathless stories about an administration pulled back from the brink, and a presidency on its way to becoming one of the most consequential in the nation’s history.

It’s far too early to make a judgment of Obama’s legacy, of course. But the stories of triumphant Democrats are all too real and affirm what those who’ve been advocating for reform have been saying: winning does a party good. November may still look ugly for Democrats – historically, the out party has gained seats in a new president’s first midterm election – but passing their top domestic priority will rally the base and give them a fighting chance to keep losses to a minimum.

More than firing up a disillusioned base for the election, the passage of health reform also gives the American public an image of a triumphant Democratic Party. And if there’s one thing Americans like, it’s winners. Before the passage of health care reform, polls showed a majority viewing it unfavorably. In the wake of Sunday’s historic win – and, no less important, headline after headline about that historic win – the first Gallup poll to come out on health care now has the numbers flipped: 49 percent now call reform a “good thing,” versus 40 percent saying it was a “bad thing.” As the president is poised to go on the road to do some more barnstorming for the plan, expect those numbers to inch up some more.

One of the healthiest effects health care’s passage will have on Democrats politically is that it will likely give President Obama’s approval rating a boost. According to Nate Silver’s analysis, the correlation between a president’s approval rating prior to the midterms and his party’s performance at the polls is actually very strong. Today, President Obama’s approval-disapproval rating on Gallup’s daily tracking poll sits at 51 percent-43 percent; just a few days ago, it was at 46 percent-47 percent.

It’s early yet, of course, and capricious as the CW machine is, the narrative could change at any time. The bounce may prove to be evanescent. But compared to where the Democrats were before Sunday, it’s fair to say that health care reform was not just good policy but good politics as well.

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It’s Not Over Yet

Monday, March 22nd, 2010
Elbert Ventura


Elbert Ventura is the managing editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. He formerly served as the managing editor of the Progressive Policy Institute.

by Elbert Ventura

They took the scenic route, but they got there. After a year of negotiations, town halls, summits and shouting, Democrats have passed comprehensive health care reform legislation. The reform measure passed by the House Sunday now goes to President Obama’s desk for his signature. The House’s fixes inscribed in a separate bill will now be taken up by the Senate, and is expected to pass via the budget reconciliation process.

The outcome certainly affirms President Obama’s reputation as a clutch player – someone who’ll come through when you need him the most. Of course, the game probably wouldn’t have been that close if he hadn’t sat out for so long. This is where I hope the Obama administration has learned its lesson. Throughout the process, the president decided to take a hands-off approach, letting Congress do much of the work. It was a strategy borne of the failure of President Clinton’s plan, which was seen as a case of a White House completely oblivious to how Congress works. But Obama overcompensated, and the result was a process that seemed rudderless.

Worse, the hands-off approach extended to the bill’s selling. Confident that it was the right policy, the administration was complacent that the media and the public would see that it was the right thing to do as well. What we got instead was tea parties and town halls and “death panels.” In the absence of a permanent campaign to enlighten the public, misinformation ruled the day — and continues to infect public understanding of what just passed.

Which is why this is a good sign:

President Obama is set to begin an immediate public relations blitz aimed at turning around Americans’ opinion of the health-care bill.

Planning inside the West Wing for the post-vote period has proceeded quietly, even as the president and his allies on Capitol Hill were fighting for the measure’s passage.

Reshaping the legislation’s image will take place in three phases, White House aides said: the immediate aftermath; the seven months until the November midterm elections; and the several years that follow, during which many provisions in the measure will gradually take effect.

The plans for a PR blitz to sell the bill post-passage suggest an administration that has learned its lesson. Polls show that support for health care reform, particularly among Dems, began inching up the more Obama threw himself into its passage. It was a powerful reminder: when Obama commits himself to firing up the base, the base tends to get fired up. The promise of an all-out publicity campaign by the White House probably also assuaged a lot of wavering Democratic congressmen. As Nate Silver points out, one of the best predictors of whether a congressman would vote for the bill was whether they thought Obama would be an asset to them.

He may be known as No Drama Obama, but the president supplied plenty of it these last few weeks, with a bipartisan summit, rousing public appearances and quiet one-on-ones with recalcitrant Dems, culminating in a tour-de-force address to House Democrats on Saturday. The result was a pitch-perfect campaign that rallied progressives, bucked up public opinion, and emboldened lawmakers.

This administration has the best salesman in the country at the helm. When he talks, people – at least the converted and the persuadable – tend to listen. It seems like they’re finally starting to figure it out.

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Posted in A New Framework for Growth and Equity, Daily Fix | 1 Comment »

Inverted Hubris

Friday, March 19th, 2010
Ed Kilgore


Ed Kilgore is a PPI senior fellow, as well as managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, an online forum.

by Ed Kilgore

As we count down towards the health reform vote(s) in the House, it’s clearer than ever that there are two distinct but mutually reinforcing conservative takes on the bill. The most obvious, of course, is the bizarre construction of “ObamaCare” that the Right has been building for nearly a year now, based on distortions, fear-mongering, a few outright lies and sweeping smears, all in order to make legislation pretty close to what moderate Republicans have promoted for years seem like a socialist revolution if not a coup d’etat. This is the hard sell, and it will continue up to and well beyond this weekend’s votes.

But then there’s the soft sell, beloved of today’s model of “moderate” Republicans, such as they are, which involves lots of tut-tutting at the unedifying spectacle of the health reform debate, constant if unsupported claims that there are plentiful opportunities for a bipartisan “incremental” approach, and above all, phony concern for what Barack Obama is doing to his party and his country. This approach typically ignores or rationalizes the hard sell that most conservatives have undertaken, and the lockstep obstructionism of the congressional GOP, and blames Obama and Democrats for all the problems they are encountering in getting this legislation done.

A pitch-perfect example of the soft sell is Peggy Noonan’s latest Wall Street Journal column, presumably her final pre-vote expression of contempt for the president in the guise of respect for the presidency, which alas, isn’t what it used to be when her mentor, Ronald Reagan, stood astride Washington and the globe like a colossus.

The column begins with an extended expression of horror that Obama would postpone a trip to Indonesia and Australia in order to lobby for this little domestic bill that would deal with the trifle of health coverage for 40 million or so Americans:

And to do this to Australia of all countries, a nation that has always had America’s back and been America’s friend. How bush league, how undisciplined, how kid’s stuff.

It’s characteristic that Noonan does not mention that Obama is trying to give Americans the universal health coverage that Australians have and take for granted, or that final passage wouldn’t have been delayed until now if Scott Brown hadn’t come to Washington pledging to kill “ObamaCare.”

Noonan then engages, with the air of someone examining an especially loathsome insect, in a lengthy attack on the procedural issues involved in House passage of health reform, asserting that Obama’s trying to hide something in the legislation via the “deem and pass” (which she suggests sounds tellingly like “demon pass”) mechanism that House Democrats are apparently going to deploy this weekend. She endorses as self-evidently correct the complaint of Fox News’ Bret Baier, in his obnoxious interview of the president last week, that “deem and pass” means nobody will know what’s in the bill that’s “deemed” and “passed.” Like Baier, Noonan doesn’t seem to understand the simple fact that the underlying bill we are talking about here is exactly the same bill passed by the Senate in December — long enough even for Peggy Noonan to have gotten wind of it. The changes in the bill — namely, the reconciliation measure — were made available, along with a CBO scoring of their impact, before the votes were scheduled, and will be voted on explicitly by the House (and later the Senate). Yes, this is complicated, but you’d think someone with Noonan’s experience and pay grade would be able to figure it out, and again, Democrats would have never resorted to this approach if Republicans weren’t using their 41st Senate vote to thwart the normal process after a majority in the House and a supermajority in the Senate had already passed similar legislation.

But whatever — Republican obstruction is never much mentioned in Noonan’s stuff on health reform. And so it is entirely in character that Noonan concludes her column by blaming Obama for the rudeness exhibited by Baier in last week’s interview, and hence for diminishing the presidency! Ah, if only we had a real president like you-know-who:

[W]e seem to have come a long way since Ronald Reagan was regularly barked at by Sam Donaldson, almost literally, and the president shrugged it off. The president—every president—works for us. We don’t work for him. We sometimes lose track of this, or rather get the balance wrong. Respect is due and must be palpable, but now and then you have to press, to either force them to be forthcoming or force them to reveal that they won’t be. Either way it’s revealing.

I’d say it’s hardly as revealing as Peggy Noonan’s inveterate habit of not only ignoring conservative hubris, but attributing it to its victims.

This item is cross-posted on The Democratic Strategist.

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Erick the Red

Thursday, March 18th, 2010
Ed Kilgore


Ed Kilgore is a PPI senior fellow, as well as managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, an online forum.

by Ed Kilgore

There’s been a lot of buzz, mostly in the progressive blogosphere, over the news that the proprietor of the notable right-wing RedState blogging site, Erick Erickson, of Macon, Georgia, has been given a perch on a new CNN show hosted by John King.

Most of the talk has featured some of Erick’s more colorful utterances, particularly his description of Supreme Court Justice David Souter as, well, a child molester who also enjoys carnal knowledge of certain barnyard animals, and his reference to First Lady Michelle Obama as a “Marxist harpy.” As a fairly regular reader of RedState, if only to get the juices going on slow days, I can say I’m most impressed with the casual cranky extremism of Erick’s stuff on a day-in, day-out basis, and particularly his bully-boy determination to play a role in Republican primaries around the country. His obsession, for example, with the defeat of Republican Sen. Bob Bennett of Utah, a pretty conventional conservative by most standards, has long since passed Carthago delenda est levels and must be viewed as a matter of sheer ego, if not a clinical disorder. The sheer-ego interpretation finds support in another recent Erickson encyclical, wherein he judiciously gave Mitt Romney a partial indulgence for his endorsement of Bennett upon the news that the Mittster had also endorsed RedState favorite Nikki Haley, a candidate for governor of South Carolina (in the real world, Romney predictably endorsed both for the obvious reason that they both endorsed him in 2008).

Last month I spoke at a municipal association meeting in Georgia, and was asked by a lot of people there how seriously Erick, a city councilman in Macon, was taken by national political types (much as Georgians used to ask me the same question about Newt Gingrich when he first exploded on the national scene). Seems he was already letting it be known that he was entertaining various national media offers, and was about to go big-time. I have a hard time begrudging any blogger a shot at mainstream media exposure. But it’s a sign of the times that CNN filled a mandatory conservative slot with a guy like Erick, who seems to alternate between moods of blind rage and smug triumphalism, and who (like me) also has a face made for radio.

We’ll see how ol’ Erick handles the transition to a national audience composed of people who don’t already agree with him. But he couldn’t have been happy with CNN’s press release, which lauded him as a spokesman for small-town values “who still lives in small-town America.” This will not go over well in Macon, a proud old city whose metropolitan area has a population of close to a quarter million people.

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The Furor Over “Deem and Pass”

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010
Elbert Ventura


Elbert Ventura is the managing editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. He formerly served as the managing editor of the Progressive Policy Institute.

by Elbert Ventura

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the ridiculous attention that the media — cued by the GOP — lavished on process in general and budget reconciliation in particular:

Regardless of the outcome of the Democratic health reform push, one point is obvious: at every turn, they lost the messaging battle to Republicans and the Tea Party. The latest reminder came this morning, as the umpteenth story on budget reconciliation came on the radio. These days, to talk about health care reform is to talk about process — exactly where the GOP wants the conversation to be.

Replace “reconciliation” with “deem and pass” and the same post pretty much applies to today. “Deem and pass” is the procedure by which Democrats are reportedly planning on using to pass health care reform, allowing House members to “deem” the Senate bill passed while voting on the bill fixing it. The reasoning is that this would enable House Democrats to say that they didn’t technically vote for what they see as a flawed Senate bill. Let me repeat that: they’ll be voting for the Senate bill but can claim that they didn’t vote for the Senate bill. Really, what could go wrong with that strategy?

Republicans have pounced, and the media have been right there with them. Today’s Washington Post headline: “House Democrats’ tactic for health-care bill is debated.” From a New York Times on the “controversy”: “Democrats struggled Tuesday to defend procedural shortcuts they might use to win approval for their proposals in the next few days.” Clearly Dems did not think through the politics of this move.

But its head-slapping idiocy notwithstanding, is “deem and pass” really all that controversial? Congressional scholar Norman Ornstein, hardly a lefty advocate, calls out Republicans for their hypocritical rending of garments over its anticipated use for health reform:

In the last Congress that Republicans controlled, from 2005 to 2006, Rules Committee Chairman David Dreier used the self-executing rule more than 35 times, and was no stranger to the concept of “deem and pass.” That strategy, then decried by the House Democrats who are now using it, and now being called unconstitutional by WSJ editorialists, was defended by House Republicans in court (and upheld). Dreier used it for a $40 billion deficit reduction package so that his fellow GOPers could avoid an embarrassing vote on immigration. I don’t like self-executing rules by either party—I prefer the “regular order”—so I am not going to say this is a great idea by the Democrats. But even so—is there no shame anymore?

Steve Benen sums up my thoughts on the latest demonstration of GOP faux outrage and media complicity nicely:

Let me get this straight — the single biggest story in the political world yesterday was over consideration of a House procedure, used many times before by both parties? Republicans decided they don’t like “self-executing rules” anymore, so the matter dominated the discourse?

As with the moronic furor over reconciliation, the same dynamic is at work: a relentless GOP messaging machine that puts process ahead of substance — canny on their part because it’s the process, rather than the policy, that voters are fed up with; a tone-deaf Democratic caucus (They really thought that adding a layer of complication to the process was what health care reform needed? Really?) and feckless communications operation that seems to perpetually be on the defensive; and a mainstream media expertly played like a piano by the GOP.

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Radical Sheet

Thursday, March 11th, 2010
Elbert Ventura


Elbert Ventura is the managing editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. He formerly served as the managing editor of the Progressive Policy Institute.

by Elbert Ventura

The following is an excerpt from Elbert Ventura’s review of Peter Richardson’s A Bomb in Every Issue in the newest issue of Democracy journal:

Flipping through The New York Times on the morning of February 16, 1966, a reader would have come across a startling photo: a stern-faced soldier, standing against a pitch-black backdrop, crowned by the bold declaration “I quit!” The soldier was Donald Duncan, a decorated Green Beret who had just returned from Vietnam. The small print announced Duncan’s opposition to the war after an 18-month tour. “I couldn’t kid myself any longer that my country was acting rationally, or even morally,” he said. But the photo wasn’t telling his story. It was selling it–it appeared in a full-page ad promoting the newest scoop fromRamparts magazine.

That wasn’t the first, and was hardly the last, of the Bay Area-based monthly’s provocations. In its brief and glorious heyday during the late 1960s, Ramparts produced a succession of images and stories that jumped out of newsstands and shook readers by the shoulders: four hands holding aloft burning draft cards; a portrait of Black Panther Huey P. Newton behind bars; an exhortation for more student uprisings and “two, three, many Columbias”; an all-American tyke holding the Viet Cong flag under the headline, “Alienation is when your country is at war and you want the other side to win.”

The magazine bloomed during a fertile period for radical media. Underground newspapers and leftist journals–the Berkeley Barb, the Los Angeles Free Press, Viet-Report, Rat–sprouted like wildflowers in the 1960s. But none of them were as big, as brash, or as influential asRamparts. This was no austere newsletter that took pride in its obscurity. Its covers were as eye-catching and inventive as anything mainstream publishing produced. Ramparts was unrepentantly glossy, filled with ads (a no-no for some on the left), groundbreaking design, and a pop savvy that tempered the sting of its incisive critique. Warren Hinckle, the executive editor, proudly wrote of the influential Ramparts style: “[B]y the late 1960s one could line up Evergreen Review, Harper’s, Atlantic, New Yorkmagazine, Esquire and Ramparts and be unable to tell the chicken from the egg.” By aping the look of the corporate media it mercilessly hammered, the magazine gave a sheen of mainstream legitimacy to radical ideas.

Considering that an entire continent’s worth of trees has been felled commemorating the ‘60s, it is something of a surprise that a proper history of Ramparts has never been published. Peter Richardson’s A Bomb In Every Issue: How the Short Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America redresses that oversight. The editorial director of PoliPointPress, a publisher of progressive books, and author of a book on 1960s Nation editor Carey McWilliams, Richardson is steeped in the world of leftist ideas and journalism, and he ascribes an autobiographical dimension to his interest, noting that he grew up in the Bay Area and was marked at an early age by the very milieu that gave rise to Ramparts.

Richardson’s book offers a breezy, blow-by-blow account of the magazine’s short-lived existence. If anything, for those hungering for such a history, it might be a little too brisk–at a mere 227 pages including endnotes, the book whets one’s appetite for a longer, more immersive chronicle, not to mention an anthology of Ramparts’ best. But what’s here is choice. Relying heavily on two autobiographies by Ramparts editors–David Horowitz’s Radical Son and Hinckle’s If You Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade,, a gonzo memoir that’s due for rediscovery–Richardson also includes material from recent interviews with many of the magazine’s principals to put in perspective its unlikely achievements.

Smart enough to get out of the way of a story that needs no embellishing, Richardson fills in the backdrop with convincing color, placing Rampartsfirmly in its unique historical moment. The dramatis personae is a writer’s dream: eccentric millionaires, Berkeley radicals, Black Panthers, a dipsomaniac editor. Richardson is a lucid and even clever writer (a nice touch: lyrics from “The Star Spangled Banner” are used as chapter titles, a nod to Ramparts’ provenance). “If 1968 was the year America had a nervous breakdown, Ramparts was its most reliable fever chart,” writes Richardson. (The chapter is aptly titled “Bombs Bursting in Air.”) The line sums up Ramparts’ importance in the story of American journalism. In the postwar era’s most tumultuous decade, the magazine became the scrapbook of the zeitgeist. Richardson strains to make a case for Ramparts’–and his project’s–relevance to today, but he need not try so hard. The magazine’s singular brilliance and influence on its time more than qualify it for remembrance.

Read the rest at Democracy.

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NY Lost at the Oscars Last Night

Monday, March 8th, 2010
Mike Derham


Mike Derham is chair of PPI's Innovative Economy Project.

by Mike Derham

“So did you watch the Oscars last night?”

You probably heard that question at least 20 times around the water cooler this morning, and followed it up debating the merits of Avatar vs. The Hurt Locker or Jeff Bridges (who will always be “The Dude” to me) vs. Colin Firth…unless you were one of three million households in New York City, in which case you were fuming that Cablevision and ABC conspired to keep the Academy Awards off your TV screen. In a last-ditch effort to not alienate all their viewers, the two companies — which had allowed ABC service to Cablevision subscribers to expire at midnight the night before the Oscars — got ABC back on Cablevision under an “agreement in principle” about the time Christoph Waltz was accepting the best supporting actor award.

How two of the largest entertainment companies in the country (ABC you know; Cablevision, in addition to being the nation’s fifth largest cable company, owns Madison Square Garden and Radio City Music Hall) could work together to keep the biggest night in entertainment from viewers would seem to boggle the mind.

Cable operators provide local terrestrial broadcast stations over their cable systems under a “must carry” rule, paying carriage fees to provide free-to-air local channels. This arrangement — a leftover from the birth of the cable era in the 1980s — is how you can get your local affiliate on your cable box. But now that “everyone” has cable (87 percent of households in the U.S. subscribe to satellite or cable), terrestrial providers have noticed that they could be charging cable providers for as much as they are paying for the Home Shopping Network. Needless to say, while cable providers want rates to reflect what they feel is the cost of providing a free-to-air channel, local stations want to have the special relationship they have with viewers priced into their carriage fees.

With the conversion of free-to-air analog signal to digital broadcast TV — indistinguishable in quality from the basic cable signal — the stakes seem to have gotten higher. The first shots in this particular war rang out among the New Year’s fireworks, when Fox Television and Time Warner Cable came to a last-minute agreement on providing Fox TV (and the bowl games it broadcast) to 13 million Time Warner subscribers. Fox was looking to get one dollar per subscriber from Time Warner, while the cable provider hoped to continue paying in the neighborhood of the existing nickel-per-customer fee structure.

As local broadcasters are a patchwork across the country, their carriage fee agreements come up for renewal on an irregular basis. The game of chicken was played again this past week between ABC and Cablevision — and with no agreement and neither side blinking, the cars crashed. New York area Cablevision viewers were the losers, though I’m sure Time Warner subscribers and local bars were very popular last night.

The impasse raised the attention of Sen. John Kerry and the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet — who unsurprisingly thought this was as head-slappingly bad an idea as the rest of us — but the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has jurisdiction over the issue. FCC media bureau chief William Lake emailed a tepid statement yesterday urging “both parties to quickly reach a resolution for the benefit of viewers.” Rather than taking a passive role with service providers, content providers, and consumers, the FCC should have taken a proactive role in this issue. The goal should have been to keep the players involved from grandstanding in an attempt to gain an undue advantage, and bring them both to the table in search of a solution beneficial to both parties and — most importantly — us viewers.

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