More Free Advice for the Democrats

Mitt Romney's refusal to disclose his tax returns has gotten some media attention lately, but I don't see that this attack has successfully migrated out of the pundit zone and into the heads of most average American voters.  I think a lot of this has to do with the way Obama and the Dems have pushed the story so far:  "Every other presidential candidate in the modern age has released more than two years of tax returns," and "If there's nothing to hide than there's nothing to fear," and etc.


So far, Romney and his surrogates have responded to the demand for the release of additional tax returns by simply lying about precedent.  For example, Romney claims that John Kerry only made two years of tax returns public before he ran for president, a claim that John McCain repeated a few months ago on Face the Nation.  In fact, by the time he ran for president John Kerry had actually released about 20 years worth of tax returns -- not the two that Romney and McCain claim.

The fact that McCain has been shilling for Romney is telling.  After all, 4 years ago when Romney was angling to be McCain's running mate Romney made 23 years worth of his tax returns available to John McCain as part of his vetting process -- a vetting process that Romney failed to pass.  Indeed, John McCain ultimately decided that Sister Sarah Palin would be a better running mate than Mitt Romney.

If you look at it that way, the way to get some traction for this story is simple:  make it a conspiracy.

One Last Iowa Thought . . .

I spend a lot of time complaining about the sheer inanity of the US political press.  But after the Iowa caucus results last night, I think it may have hit a new low.

Until last night, Rick Santorum was a joke candidate.  Best known for the result one pulls up on Google when running a search on his last name, this is a man who has recently declared that the government should prohibit US citizens from using any form of contraception, and that no one should be having sex unless it is for the purposes of procreation.

You get that?  His official presidential policy is:  No Americans Are Allowed to Have Sex Just For Fun.

None of that has changed.  And yet . . . I've been scanning the political punditry all day, and I've yet to see anybody claim other than that Rick "Frothy" Santorum is a credible candidate for the US presidency.

Are.  You.  Fucking.  Kidding.  Me?

Either the world's gone insane or I have, but there is just no way in hell a guy whose presidential platforms is:  The proper role of the government is to regulate your sex lives, Americans is anything other than a joke. I don't care if he did only lose the Iowa caucuses by 8 votes.

It simply boggles my mind that under the modern rules of political punditry they actually have to take this guy seriously.

Obama Doesn't Understand that He Doesn't Get to Set the Agenda

If a tree falls in the Beltway and nobody reports on it, does it make a sound?

Last Wednesday Austan Goolsbee – soon to be the ex-Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors to President Obama – appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.  Goolsbee is about to head back to a teaching gig at the University of Chicago and Stewart spent a lot of time pointing out how “giddy” Goolsbee appeared to be now that he was getting out of Washington.  Goolsbee didn’t make much of an attempt to refute Stewart’s assessment.

During the interview Stewart asked Goolsbee to explain to him why Obama had seemingly acquiesced to using the debt ceiling discussions as an excuse to suddenly start talking about getting the deficit under control.  After all, Stewart pointed out, we had been told by the Obama White House that the stimulus had been what was needed and that it had worked.  Why then would Obama now, in essence, decide to do the opposite and focus entirely on cutting the deficit and government spending?

Goolsbee’s response was interesting.  Substantively, he punted and never really did answer Stewart’s question.  Instead he simply reasserted that an economic stimulus had been required back in early 2009 and then claimed as well that “dealing with the long-term deficit” is also something that has to be addressed.  He did not explain why it had to be addressed now, when one would think that greater and further stimulus efforts are really what is needed.  But the most interesting rationale Goolsbee provided was the following:  now that the deficit had been dealt with (kind of) by the Deficit Reduction Two-Step Shuffle, the President and the government could “pivot back” and start addressing the nation’s economic woes again.

Really?

Obviously, I don’t know Goolsbee and I am glad he is happy to be making his way back to academia, but if the man has spent the past two and a half years in the bowels of Washington and still thinks that now the government can pivot back to focusing on substantive economic issues the man is . . . well, he seems a little thick to tell you the truth.

Were this a fiction then I suppose it could be considered kind of naively charming to think of the President and his economic advisors imagining that they still have the power to set the nation’s agenda:  ‘Look!  they’re still innocents,’ we could all admiringly cry, happy that their basic humanity hadn’t been subsumed in cynicism.  But in the event this sort of naiveté is just chilling.  If the President thought he was cutting a deal by acquiescing to Republican demands in exchange for the power to frame the argument going into the 2012 election then, once again, he has traded the nation’s birthright for a mess of pottage.

Paul Ryan's Real Plan

So, I was looking through some other blogs and reading yet another pundit who made the same (by now) repetitive point: Far from being "courageous," "gutsy," "adult," or (my favorite) "serious," Paul Ryan's budget proposal is a pointless piece of hard-right GOP whimsy. It is based on fantasy numbers, does nothing to actually address the deficit or balance the budget, but consists of a huge giveaway to the rich and the corporations, while paying for that giveaway by taking chunks out of the elderly, the disabled, the poor, the children, the working class and the increasingly middle-class.

I've heard all of these criticisms, I've read the arguments (see Krugman's column in today's NYT), and based on the numbers presented and the information left out of Ryan's plan -- for example, tax cuts are specified, but the loss of revenue those cuts result in will be made up with by unspecified "loophole" closings -- I pretty much agree with these criticisms.

What is becoming more and more clear is that the more one examines Ryan's so-called budget "proposal" is that it is a non-starter. There is no way anything close to this could ever get passed through the Democratic-controlled Senate, much less get by Obama's veto pen.

So why would Ryan author such a dead-letter bill? If he is actually trying to address budget issues and the deficit, why issue such a sloppy, wet, full-tongued French Kiss to the GOP base, when he must know it is going to go nowhere?

Because Paul Ryan is planning to run for President in 2016.

I am sure there is someone else, somewhere (maybe a lot of other someone elses out there, in a lot of other different somewheres) who already has made this prediction. But I've not seen it yet, and it just occurred to me, and so I figured I'd get this post up now and maybe, if I'm right, four years from now when he announces I'll look like a genius.

But . . . think about it. He's young, he's not a bad looking guy. He's a family man and the press absolutely loves him. And I mean, like, really loves him. I got a phone call the other day from a friend of mine about this:

"Dude, you would not believe the kind of shit I'm having to watch on my TeeVee about this Ryan guy. I just listened to some supposed political pundit gush about how much this guy works out!"

(It reminded me of an article I read some years ago about Petraeus, and how much he works out. Back when Petraeus was the next big Daddy Thing for the press to gush over.)

"Seriously, dude," my friend asked me, "is this what our political press has come to? I gotta know about this guy's fitness habits?"

But with the promulgation of this new Very Serious, Gutsy, Provocative, Adult plan to truly screw over all the rest of us in service of his rich overlords, Ryan has gained instant credibility with the Punditocracy. Now they can gush over his gravitas, while still maintaining that special authoritarian Strong Daddy man-crush that they only let themselves develop for Republican candidates who prove their seriousness by their willingness to screw over the poor and defenseless among us. The ones who truly don't have a voice in our politic society.

(I swear, the political press in the United States reminds me of nothing so much as those lickspittles from Middle School that we all sneered at, the ones willing to side with and even suffer a little abuse at the hands of the school bully, if only it meant that they could consider themselves someone among the outer fringes of the bully's hangers on.)

Mark my words . . . Ryan released this sloppy kiss to the Republican base because he knew the Villagers would eat it up. And they have. And he is eyeing a presidential run in 2016.

Please write to congratulate me on my prescience, four years from now when he announces.