Tuesday, November 25, 2008 - Posts
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Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Mazda has joined the ranks of Pixar cars and chosen an unfortunate new corporate face. Is it smiling or hurling? ... 11:04 P.M.
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Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Gird Your Loins: David Frum and Bill Bradley offer hard nosed, savvy explanations of why picking Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State makes sense for Obama. He looks magnanimous. He'll find out her secrets--then he has the goods on her. He can fire her. She'll work for him. Bill will be controlled. Now she'll have real trouble paying Mark Penn's bill! ...
Sorry, I'm not buying it. It seems simple to me: She can't do him much damage from the Senate, where she doesn't rank. She can do him a lot of damage through self-interested leaking from the State Department. (Here's Exhibit Z, if you needed it, from Elizabeth Drew.) If he fires her she can then run against him and make more trouble.
Even smart, well-advised people make mistakes. I think it's a mistake. Or else there is some other factor at work that we don't know about (e.g., Hillary has the real birth certificate! Joking!)... [How do you know her aides will keep leaking? That's just CW. The CW said Joe Biden would be a walking gaffe machine, remember--ed Joe Biden was a walking gaffe machine. Remember] 10:24 P.M.
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Jonathan Chait argues that Clinton made a political mistake by running up a budget surplus in his second term--because "all you ended up doing was just giving more money for George Bush to devote to tax cuts for the rich." I've never understood this argument. It would have been better if the money had been pissed away on veteran's programs, civil service salary hikes, agriculture subsidies and money for the failing education bureaucracy? In Democrats wouldn't have enacted universal health insurance in Clinton's second term after all. (The GOP controlled Congress.) They would have just larded up existing programs--programs that are then almost impossible to cut. Now, at least, the Obama administration has the option of raising money for health care by raising the taxes on the rich back to where they were before. If Chait's advice had been followed, Obama wouldn't have that option (because taxes on the rich would never have gone down). ... It's hard to raise taxes, but it's easier to raise taxes starting from a lower base. And it's easier to raise taxes than to try to finance health care by cutting government programs with powerful constituencies. ... A fuller version of this argument can be found here. ... P.S.: I'm not saying Bush's distribution of tax cuts was the right one. I'm saying that running up a surplus from 1996 to 2001 and then spending the surplus on tax cuts of some sort was way better for Democrats than not running a surplus in the first place (because the money was spent on the sorts of Democratic "priorities" that would have been funded at the time). Politics isn't a football game where Dems gain yards by spending on their "priorities" and GOPs gain yards by helping the rich. Some Dem "priorities" get in the way of other Dem "priorities." Some GOP "victories" set the stage for later Democratic achievements. ... 7:10 P.M.
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Wake Up Call: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid tells the Detroit News that Obama and McCain reached an "agreement" to "move forward" on "comprehensive immigration reform" (i.e.: legalization) early in the next Congress.
Q: Will there be as much of a fight on immigration as last time?
A: We've got McCain and we've got a few others. I don't expect much of a fight at all.
Brian Faughnan has the details, and notes Sen. Menendez urging Senators to swallow the bitter immigration pill early, instead of close to the midterms when voters might remember. (That's because "comprehensive" reform is so popular!). .... 1) This is a stronger statement from Reid than I, for one, had expected; 2) The Senate has passed legalization before. They balked in 2007, but it's not clear that this year the biggest obstacle won't come in the House, where lots of newly-recruited centrist Dems ran tough-on-immigration campaigns. 3) Rahm? Rahm? Don't you maybe want to put a stop to this? 4) There are ample opportunities here for posturing and "make believe"--e.g., scoring points with Hispanic groups by voting for a reform that you don't think will actually pass. Of course, if enough legislators vote for a reform thinking it won't actually pass it might pass; ... P.S.: Note that Reid also pours cold water on hopes of fast Senate action on health care ("[T]hat's going to take a lot more time to do.") .... So voters don't get health care (which Obama made a central issue in the campaign) but do get illegal immigrant semi-amnesty (which was a selling point only on Spanish language radio)? .... 12:27 P.M.
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