Jim is a candidate for the DFL endorsement for a run against Erik Paulsen in the Third Congressional District.
We meet starting around six PM at the 331 Club in Northeast Minneapolis. Jim is scheduled to arrive around seven to deliver some remarks and take some questions from the audience.
How about a little non-political discussion today — caucus day — grasshopper?
That would be great, Spot, but I figured you were going to do that.
How’d you figure it out?
The title of the post. But can kids really sue their parents?
Sometimes, but this is more of a corporate personhood kind of a thing.
You mean like Citizens United?
After a fashion, Spot supposes. Anyway, there is an article in the StarTribune today about Opus West, the bankrupt Phoenix subsidiary of Opus Corp., suing the parent company for $163 million.
That seems a little ungrateful.
Well, maybe, but the suit alleges (and that’s all it is so far: allegation) that Opus Corp., the parent, located in the Twin Cities, was a bad parent: it looted the subsidiary and left it unable to pay its creditors. You can read more about what is claimed in the suit in the article.
But if Opus West is bankrupt, how can it sue?
That’s the point Spot wants to illustrate today, grasshopper. The article doesn’t say, but the suit was undoubtedly brought by the trustee in bankruptcy. It’s the trustee’s job to gather as much money as possible for the “bankrupt’s estate” for distribution to the creditors. To do that, the trustee pesters other people and firms who owe the bankrupt company money; the trustee has the power to sue to recover that money if necessary, even against a corporate parent — or a shareholder.
As Tom Petters and Denny Heckert are finding out.
Jim Meffert, a candidate for the DFL endorsement to run against Erik Paulsen in Minnesota’s Third Congressional District, will be the guest speaker at Drinking Liberally this Thursday, the 4th of February.
Just confirmed: Paul Thissen, a Minnesota House member and candidate for the DFL endorsement for the currently vacant job of governor, has agreed to be our guest on Thursday, February 18th.
What about the 11th you ask? That night, we’ll all put our feet up, quaff some suds, and engage in polite political conversation. We haven’t done that for a while. The “feet up” part, anyway. Some of the regulars yearn to put their feet up.
As always, we meet at the 331 Club in Northeast Minneapolis. Our guests usually begin their remarks around seven.
Let us start again with the purpose behind campaign finance laws: the elimination of, or at least he discouragement of, corruption. The most direct form of corruption is money for legislative votes, so called quid pro quo corruption. Not even the Roberts Five, or the Roberts Four plus one, are likely to think quid pro quo corruption is protected by the First Amendment. But it seems that is about all the present Supreme Court majority in Citizen United is ready ban.
I’ve already quoted this from Heather Gerken, the law professor at Yale, writing in the American Prospect, but it bears repeating:
The truth is that the most important line in the decision was not the one overruling Austin. It was this one: "ingratiation and access . . . are not corruption." For many years, the Court had gradually expanded the corruption rationale to extend beyond quid pro quo corruption (donor dollars for legislative votes). It had licensed Congress to regulate even when the threat was simply that large donors had better access to politicians or that politicians had become "too compliant with the[ir] wishes." Indeed, at times the Court went so far as to say that even the mere appearance of "undue influence" or the public's "cynical assumption that large donors call the tune" was enough to justify regulation. "Ingratiation and access," in other words, were corruption as far as the Court was concerned. Justice Kennedy didn't say that the Court was overruling these cases. But that's just what it did.
If the Court rigidly insists that Congress can regulate only to prevent quid-pro-corruption, narrowly defined, then Citizens United has implications that extend well beyond what corporations can do. Justice Kennedy's own opinion even hints at the possibility, as he notes that the evidence supporting the "soft money" limits – which apply across the board -- rests on evidence about the connection between money and political access. While Justice Kennedy backed off from saying anything definitive, we may find that it was the Court's discussion of corruption, not corporations, that matters most in the long run.
“Ingratiation and access . . . are not corruption.” That would be giving money to both parties so that politicians of every stripe will come and heel when you call. For those of you who were at Drinking Liberally last Thursday, you heard John Marty describe how Ziggy Wilf, the owner of the Vikings gave large sums of money to both the Republican and the DFL parties, their respective caucuses, and to each of the major party candidates for governor last time around. It wasn’t, as John said, because Ziggy was confused about which party he supported; it was to buy, to use the terms of the Supreme Court, “ingratiation and access.”
Senator Marty called this process “corrupt,” and he is right. Not the donors, at least necessarily, nor the politicians, again, at least necessarily, but the process itself. It is a corruption of a core principle in a republican democracy that some citizens are heard so well and so often and others not at all.
I’d intended to finish up with a discussion of some of the proposals to address the consequences of the Citizens United decision, but that will have to wait for another day.
Ninety six! Ninety seven! Ninety eight! Ninety nine!
Ninety nine and half percent won’t do!
Spot was reminded of these words to the great gospel song when John Marty was delivering his riff on 93% health care coverage as “universal coverage.” John was our guest at Drinking Liberally on January 28th. Here’s a video of some of his remarks:
There was a large and boisterous crowd in attendance for the senator’s remarks.
There is a new lighting setup at the 331 Club that I’ve not entirely figured out yet; the quality of the video isn’t great, but the audio is good.
From the lede in Frank Rich’s column this morning in the New York Times, The State of the Union is Comatose:
HANDS down, the State of the Union’s big moment was Barack Obama’s direct hit on the delicate sensibilities of the Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. The president was right to blast the 5-to-4 decision giving corporate interests an even greater stranglehold over a government they already regard as a partially owned onshore subsidiary. How satisfying it was to watch him provoke Alito into a “You lie!” snit. Here was a fight we could believe in.
More satisfying, at least to Spot, would have been if Obama had handled it the same way that middle school teachers sometimes do when kids are whispering in class.
Stop and ask, “Sammy, do you have something you want to say to the whole class?”
“Um, no.”
“All right, then; please be quiet.”
An enormous breach of protocol, of course, but so is doing pantomime in the well of the House (where the Supremes sit, up front, along with the military brass) during the State of the Union address. The likelihood that Alito would have stood up and delivered a stirring defense of Citizens United is about zip (and without a microphone, it wouldn’t have mattered anyway), especially since Obama was describing the very real potential for foreign influence on elections in the wake of the decision.
Frank had some other great observations about the address and, well, the state of the union. Rich is a trenchant and colorful observer, and his entire column is very good, but here are just a couple of grafs:
In Obama’s speech, he kept circling back to a Senate where both parties are dysfunctional. The obstructionist Republicans, he observed, will say no to every single bill “just because they can.” But no less culpable are the Democrats, who maintain “the largest majority in decades” even after losing Teddy Kennedy’s seat — and yet would rather “run for the hills” than accomplish anything.
What does strong Senate leadership look like? That would be L.B.J. in the pre-Kennedy era. Operating with the narrowest of majorities and under an opposition president, he was able to transform a sleepy, seniority-hobbled, regionally polarized debating society into an often-progressive legislative factory. As Robert Caro tells the story in his book “Master of the Senate,” this Senate leader had determination, “a gift for grand strategy,” and a sixth sense for grabbing opportunities for action before they vanished for good. He could recognize “the key that might suddenly unlock votes that had seemed locked forever away” and turn it quickly. The horse trading with recalcitrant senators was often crude and cynical, but the job got done. L.B.J. knew how to reward — and how to punish.
* * *
Perhaps McCain was sneering [during the speech] at Obama because of the Beltway’s newest unquestioned cliché: one year after a new president takes office he is required to stop blaming his predecessor for the calamities left behind. Who dreamed up that canard — Alito? F.D.R. never followed it. In an October 1936 speech, nearly four years after Hoover, Roosevelt was still railing against the “hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing government” he had inherited. He reminded unemployed and destitute radio listeners that there had been “nine crazy years at the ticker” and “nine mad years of mirage” followed by three long years of bread lines and despair. F.D.R. soon won re-election in the greatest landslide the country had seen.
Obama should turn up the heat on both the G.O.P’s record of fiscal recklessness and its mad-dog obstructionism. He should stop paying lip service to the fantasy that his Congressional opposition has serious ideas to contribute to the cleanup. Better still, he should publicize exactly what those “ideas” are.
In a departure from several of his other speeches during the first year of his term, Obama only used the term “bipartisan” twice. (Spot counted.) Republicans have demonstrated time and time again they have no interest in bipartisanship. “Bipartisanship” is just self flagellation at this point. Remember, while Tony Scalia may be an Opus Dei member; Barack Obama is not.
It is clear to Spot that FDR and Lyndon Johnson, and not Bill Clinton, who lost both houses of Congress in the midterms after his first election, show the way forward for Barack Obama.
The lede from an article in Saturday’s New York Times:
TIANJIN, China — China vaulted past competitors in Denmark, Germany, Spain and the United States last year to become the world’s largest maker of wind turbines, and is poised to expand even further this year.
China has also leapfrogged the West in the last two years to emerge as the world’s largest manufacturer of solar panels. And the country is pushing equally hard to build nuclear reactors and the most efficient types of coal power plants.
These efforts to dominate the global manufacture of renewable energy technologies raise the prospect that the West may someday trade its dependence on oil from the Mideast for a reliance on solar panels, wind turbines and other gear manufactured in China.
Tony Winkret said during his DL visit that relying entirely on the “market” for an industrial policy is an industrial policy for people too lazy to actually have one.
From an email from Andy Driscoll:
James Mayer of Twin Cities AM950's "Of the People" and I are collaborating on a special of his program airing from 3:00 to 4:00PM Sunday (tomorrow), Jan 31, in honor of the lifelong contributions of the great historian, author and progressive mentor to all, Howard Zinn, who died last Wednesday at age 87 from a heart attack while visiting family in California and giving yet another of his great talks. Howard's landmark book first published in 1980 - "A People's History of the United States," stands forever as a counterweight to the often distorted views published and taught in elementary and secondary schools, absent as they are of the perspective of those who sacrificed their people, their lands and /or their human dignity to create wealth for the colonial powers that settled America.
Tune in and join the conversation about Howard Zinn with AM950's James Mayer and KFAI's Andy Driscoll on "OF THE PEOPLE".
We'll hear the words of Bill Moyers, Matthew Rothschild (Progressive Magazine), and talk with Zinn's closest friends and colleagues, retired Macalester Professor Henry and wife, Pat West along with longtime Zinn friend, Marv Davidov. And YOU.
And we'll hear the wisdom of Howard Zinn from the horse's mouth in his past appearances on Twin Cities radio shows, TruthToTell and Of the People and read from his books, "A People's History of the United States" and "Voices of A People's History," the latter written with Anthony Arnove.
Sunday, Jan 31 - 3:00-4:00PM - on KTNF - 950 on the AM dial - or STREAM US LIVE AT <http://www.am950ktnf.com/>
Join us tomorrow at 3:00PM. Call in with your thoughts and remembrances of Howard Zinn: 952-946-6205.
Spot says not to miss this one.
Update: Bob Herbert had an affecting remembrance of Howard Zinn in the New York Times today. And I meant “affecting,” not “affectionate,” although it is that, too.
Please see:
Jes’ folks like everybody else
In Citizens United – again, I mentioned that one concern arising out of the opinion in Citizens United was the prospect that the Supreme Court would expand the idea of corporate personhood beyond “speech” or advocacy into campaign contributions. Nate Persily, writing at Balkinization, articulates the concern:
The opinion's significance will be greatly magnified, however, by the doubt it might cast on the soft money contribution restrictions of [McCain–Feingold], which ban corporate and union treasury contributions to political parties. My guess is that, in their heart of hearts, five members of the Court want to strike those down as well, even though we are a long way off from that happening. Citizens United could erase many of the distinctions between corporations and other voluntary associations by questioning the special corruption threat ("the corrosive and distorting effects of immense aggregations of wealth amassed through the corporate form") the Court has recognized as flowing from corporate participation in elections. If the special corruption threat posed by corporations and unions is taken away, then it becomes more difficult to justify a ban, as opposed to simply a limit, on their contributions to parties.
Persily is a law professor at Columbia Law School; he is suggesting that Citizens United may well be just a step along the path.
Let’s follow up on that and come back to the raison d'être for campaign finance laws: corruption. One of Professor Persily’s sidekicks at Balkinization, Heather Gerken, wrote in the American Prospect:
The truth is that the most important line in the decision was not the one overruling Austin [one of the precedents overruled by Citizens United]. It was this one: "ingratiation and access . . . are not corruption." For many years, the Court had gradually expanded the corruption rationale to extend beyond quid pro quo corruption (donor dollars for legislative votes). It had licensed Congress to regulate even when the threat was simply that large donors had better access to politicians or that politicians had become "too compliant with the[ir] wishes." Indeed, at times the Court went so far as to say that even the mere appearance of "undue influence" or the public's "cynical assumption that large donors call the tune" was enough to justify regulation. "Ingratiation and access," in other words, were corruption as far as the Court was concerned. Justice Kennedy didn't say that the Court was overruling these cases. But that's just what it did.
Professor Gerken teaches at Yale.
Next up, we’ll talk about where the Congress might go from here. The names Alan Grayson, Al Franken, Bruce Ackerman, and Ian Ayres may come up.
There has been a lot written, and some here, too, about the recent Citizens United decision. Not all of it has been illuminating, and there has been some of that here, too. It is perhaps necessary to look at the facts of the case, and at our old friend the procedural posture, to make out the outline of what will be a continuing debate.
The case involved the airing (on cable television) of a conservative docudrama about Hillary Clinton, produced by Citizens United, a conservative 501(c)(4) non-profit corporation (the name proving once again how brain dead conservatives are to irony). You can’t deduct your contributions to a 501(c)(4), since it isn’t a charitable organization.
The film, just called Hillary in the Supreme Court opinion, featured a star-studded cast of the caliber of Ann Coulter, who was, in fact, in it. Fearing that its obvious hit piece on Hillary Clinton was “electioneering” of the kind prohibited by federal election law near a federal election, would be prohibited by the FEC, and maybe earn it a big fine, Citizens United sought an injunction to prevent the FEC from enforcing the law.
The district court said, in effect, you know, now that you mention it, it is electioneering (the advocacy for or against a candidate, not an issue), which is prohibited under McCain – Feingold by corporations or unions within 30 days of a federal election. It refused the requested declaratory and injunctive relief. Citizens United appealed. The case was briefed and argued once.
The Supreme Court took the extraordinary step of telling the parties to go back and re-brief and reargue the case, saying, in essence, we want to take a look at the big picture, here. The Roberts five was spoiling to overturn a couple of the court’s precedents, and when the court asked for reargument, the handwriting was on the wall.
It is important to remember that the case involved speech, not direct contributions to candidates, although the decision has implications for that, too, which is one of the reasons that it is so worrisome. More on that later.
Citizens United did open the floodgates of corporate money for “electioneering,” but it does not mean, at least yet, that corporations – or unions – can give unlimited amounts of money directly to candidates. And while Citizens United, the organization, is a non-profit, Citizens United, the decision, is not limited to non-profits.
This fall, you can look forward to corporate ad buys right before the election that say directly: vote for X because blah blah blah, or against Y for the same reasons.
You can see how Doug Tice would argue that Citizens United merely leveled the playing field of all corporations with media corporations; superficially, it does that. But the true scope of the decision is far, far greater. Media corporations aren’t big government contractors, just for one example.
Campaign finance law is rooted in the concern about corruption of the political process. I’ll have more about that in following posts.
From this morning’s StarTribune:
Is democracy in peril? That's the conclusion of many political operatives and campaign finance reformers after Thursday's U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United vs. FEC, which removed some restrictions on corporate participation in political campaigns. In fact, the opposite is true (Star Tribune, Jan. 22).
Unless one believes more voices and more speech is "chaos," as one professor said, or prefers elections in which the political parties and the candidates they force upon us have more ability to control the information the public receives, as one GOP activist put it, then the court's decision is a big victory for robust and open debate.
Furthermore, corporations -- which are really just associations of people -- do not speak with one voice. They are large and small, for-profit and nonprofit, and often have widely diverging interests.
Refreshingly, the court's decision trusts the people themselves to make responsible judgments about the information they receive. In an age of increasing regulation and paternalism, that is a message some don't want you to hear.
JASON ADKINS, MINNEAPOLIS;
STAFF ATTORNEY, MINNESOTA CHAPTER, INSTITUTE FOR JUSTICE, WHICH FILED A FRIEND-OF-THE-COURT BRIEF IN SUPPORT OF CITIZENS UNITED
You’re absolutely right, Jason, corporations are just “associations of people.” Of course, so was the Wehrmacht. Al Qaeda is just an association of people, too, isn’t it?
And who can forget, as Tbogg (at least Spot thinks that’s who it was; he can’t find a link at the moment) reminds us, Soylent Green is people, too.
Rarely in the history of constitutional jurisprudence has such sophomoric thinking and rhetoric been offered to justify, well, such a sophomoric Supreme Court decision. Perhaps Jason will remind us soon that two wrongs don’t make a right. Jason isn’t alone, however.
First, there was Mitch McConnell and our own Doug Tice arguing that the decision merely levels the playing field between media corporations and other corporations. It would be tragic, in their view, if any corporation is left behind. Spot is sure they are both still sobbing with relief that the injustice has been cured.
And now comes Jason offering the jes’ people gambit. After all, says Jason, corporations come in all shapes and sizes, just like people! Big, little, for profit and non-profit.
But ask yourselves, which corporations on Jason’s little list are likely to spend big dollars? If you really think it’s the small ones, or the non-profits (except maybe ones that are bankrolled by other institutions for other than charitable purposes), you’re kidding yourself. Jason also forgot one category of corporations: foreign owned or controlled.
Jason, until a corporation checks itself in for a colonoscopy, Spot ain’t buyin’ it.
Justice John Paul Stevens, who read his long dissent in Citizens United from the bench, called the personhood of corporations a “conceit.”
It’s every bit of that, but Spot would add that it’s a delusion, too.
It is either naive or cunning of Jason to write that the court in Citizens United was putting its trust in the “people.” Never mind that the court already fuzzed up the meaning of people. It is a regrettable fact that the candidate with the most money behind him or her often wins. The decision is only going to assist in the transformation of elections into auctions.
Update: Forgot the link to Adkins’ letter; sorry.
That’s an acronym for Pass the Damn Bill. It’s public sentiment urging the House to pass the Senate bill. It seems this is the only way that health care reform, in any form, is going to pass.
That’s what Spot said to himself when he read that President Obama proposed a (partial) spending freeze for the federal government, and he was right. Krugman commented on it today in his blog, The Conscience of a Liberal, in a post entitled Obama Liquidates Himself.
A spending freeze? That’s the brilliant response of the Obama team to their first serious political setback?
It’s appalling on every level.
It’s bad economics, depressing demand when the economy is still suffering from mass unemployment. Jonathan Zasloff writes that Obama seems to have decided to fire Tim Geithner and replace him with “the rotting corpse of Andrew Mellon” (Mellon was Herbert Hoover’s Treasury Secretary, who according to Hoover told him to “liquidate the workers, liquidate the farmers, purge the rottenness”.)
Here’s the stinger:
It’s bad long-run fiscal policy, shifting attention away from the essential need to reform health care and focusing on small change instead.
By that, Krugman means, at least Spot think he does, that health care spending is a problem to more than the federal budget: it is a national income killer. By literally every measure, we spend an order of magnitude more money on health care per capita than other industrial countries, and we get less for it.
State Senator John Marty has the last guest spot at DL before the caucuses. John will join us around seven for some remarks and a meet and greet.
Senator Marty is probably best known as the primary author of health care legislation in Minnesota to create a single-payer health care system. When other candidates for the DFL endorsement want to demonstrate their health care bona fides, they’ll often say, “I’m a co-author of the Marty bill,” or, “I support the Marty bill.”
Senator Marty is also a critic of the way we finance campaigns in the United States. He’s the author of a recent post at Democracy for America entitled “An Election, not an Auction.”
With health care and campaign finance much in the news, John’s remarks will be especially timely.
But it appears that the reverse may be true, too. In an opinion piece in the StarTribune today, opinion page editor Doug Tice defends last week’s Supreme Court decision to open the floodgates of corporate money for campaign contributions [it’s the Citizens United case, if you want to search for other references].
The gravaman of his argument is that media corporations have a big megaphone, so why shouldn’t other companies have one, too? This is a piece of thinking for which Katie would indeed be proud:
Last Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld this elementary truth [that political debate that is supposed to shape and control government] with a sweeping ruling throwing out many restrictions on the free political speech of corporations and of other associations, like labor unions and advocacy groups. The decision threw editorial boards at some influential newspapers into a frenzy of indignation.
What's strange is that all these editorialists are salaried spokespeople for, well, corporations. Speaking with the so-called "institutional voice" of their employers, they routinely endorse candidates for public office, usually in the decisive weeks of campaigns. This involves contributing to candidacies not just a message of support, but whatever credibility and influence has been amassed through the newspaper corporation's long exertions and investment.
It’s a novel argument, Spot; you have to admit that.
It’s not even novel, grasshopper; it’s just a talking point. Mitch McConnell made the same point on one of the talking heads Sunday shows yesterday. But let’s ask Doug a question, just for giggles. Which of these things is not like the others:
1) Writing a letter to the editor decrying the state of pothole repair in Metropolis.
2) Attending the church of your choice on Sunday, or not attending one, if that’s your choice.
3) Writing an opinion piece or even an unsigned editorial in a newspaper about a candidate.
4) Mounting a street demonstration to protest the war in Afghanistan.
5) Telephoning your state representative to urge her to restore the GMAC cuts.
6) A corporation shoveling money at a politician until he chokes.
What’s that you say, Doug? They’re all the same to you? The first five are traditional exercises of the freedom of speech, religion, press, assembly, and the petition for redress of grievances. The last one? A horse of a different color, Spot says.
The personhood of corporations and the equivalence of money and speech are two of the more corrosive things that have happened to First Amendment jurisprudence in the last century, and they are among the loopiest, too. The fact that Justice Scalia is such a fan of both ideas gives the lie to his boast that he is an “originalist.”
In spite of what Tice says about the Supreme Court merely following precedent, the Citizens United decision, while foreordained given the composition of the court, was, in fact, massive judicial activism striking down long-standing federal law. Supreme Court Justices used to lecture lawyers from the bench that the court reaches constitutional questions last; not this crew. It asked the parties to rebrief the case, because it wanted to get to the good parts.
Jim Kunstler wrote a little bit about it this morning in his weekly rant, Clusterfuck Nation:
. . . That's why movements like Nazism start. If there ever was another nation beautifully primed for an explosion of deadly irrational politics, it's us. And it looks to me as if that's exactly what we're going to get -- especially now that the Supreme Court has made it possible for corporations to buy elections lock, stock, and barrel. I hope our constitutional law professor president turns his attention to proposing a legislative act that will sharply reign in the putative "personhood" prerogatives of corporations. They are relatively new entities in legal history, and their supposed "rights," duties, obligations, and limits have been regularly subject to re-definition over the past hundred years. There's no reason to believe that the court's current ideas are definitive. In fact, they are completely crazy -- given the fact that the fundamental character of corporations is sociopathic, insofar as their only express allegiance is to their shareholders, meaning they are devoid of any sense of the public interest, meaning they are unfit to participate in electoral politics.
Update: It is also worth mentioning that in the political contribution area, as opposed to the realm of freedom of the press, media companies enjoyed no advantage over other corporations. And there was no restraint on any of them starting a newspaper, and little restraint on acquiring a broadcast license. The fact that media companies have ownership like Rupert Murdoch, General Electric, and Disney Corporation also demonstrates just how absurd Tice’s complaint is.
From a description of features on the Malmesbury Civic Trust River Walk:
Cross the road to the Memorial Gates (commemorating those who fell in World War II) and follow the Walkway. The land to your right is Rack Meadow, where cloths from Avon Mill were hung to dry, next to Cucking Stool Meadow, where unruly women were ducked in the river. Avon Mill (Old Silk Mill) was built in 1793 by Francis Hill to Introduce new machinery into the wool industry. Unfortunately the quality was poor. After prospering whilst making cloth for uniforms during wartime the business failed in peacetime. For 90 years after 1852 it produced silk ribbons, finally being converted into flats in 1986.
You can see Cucking Stool Meadow as the banner to this blog.
Update: It is probably worth mentioning, however, that the Stool “ducks” both the communis rix and the communis rixatrix.
But Spot, Katie is a dog person!
Nevertheless, grasshopper, it was the kitty litter she was sifting when she came up with her op-ed piece today about Scott Brown winning a special election for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by the death of Ted Kennedy. Here are a couple of grafs from the piece:
On Tuesday, we got incontrovertible evidence that the country has finally awakened from its yearlong, modern-day tent revival. Massachusetts citizens spoke for many across America: This man is not the messiah, he doesn't walk on water, and he was selling snake oil all along.
* * *
In fact, America hasn't moved to the left. On Tuesday, we saw this vividly in Massachusetts, where registered Republicans make up only 15 percent of the population. The Bay State hasn't elected a Republican senator since 1972. Last year, Obama coasted to victory there by 26 points.
Katie also tells us that Brown’s victory is cautionary tale for a party that governs too “arrogantly.”
You know, it probably does seem that way to Katie, a woman who takes a long bubble bath in Victimhood® every night, with a glass of white zinfandel perched on the tub, and while listening to podcasts of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.
Frank Rich, f/k/a The Butcher of Broadway, and a pretty clear-eyed thinker in Spot’s estimation, also considered the special election in Massachusetts:
It was not a referendum on Barack Obama, who in every poll remains one of the most popular politicians in America. It was not a rejection of universal health care, which Massachusetts mandated (with Scott Brown’s State Senate vote) in 2006. It was not a harbinger of a resurgent G.O.P., whose numbers remain in the toilet. Brown had the good sense not to identify himself as a Republican in either his campaign advertising or his victory speech.
Rich’s entire column is well worth the read. Rich says the loss of the seat was a symptom of a different problem than that identified by Katie’s sifting and sniffing: Obama’s apparent dithering on the economy and on actually delivering a health care bill. He concludes that it isn’t that Obama hasn’t been too arrogant, maybe rather the reverse. Rich has a better example of a cautionary tale for Obama to heed:
The incident unfolded in April 1962 — some 15 months into the new president’s term — when J.F.K. was infuriated by the U.S. Steel chairman’s decision to break a White House-brokered labor-management contract agreement and raise the price of steel (but not wages). Kennedy was no radical. He hailed from the American elite — like Obama, a product of Harvard, but, unlike Obama, the patrician scion of a wealthy family. And yet he, like that other Harvard patrician, F.D.R., had no hang-ups about battling his own class.
Kennedy didn’t settle for the generic populist rhetoric of Obama’s latest threats to “fight” unspecified bankers some indeterminate day. He instead took the strong action of dressing down U.S. Steel by name. As Richard Reeves writes in his book “President Kennedy,” reporters were left “literally gasping.” The young president called out big steel for threatening “economic recovery and stability” while Americans risked their lives in Southeast Asia. J.F.K. threatened to sic his brother’s Justice Department on corporate records and then held firm as his opponents likened his flex of muscle to the power grabs of Hitler and Mussolini. (Sound familiar?) U.S. Steel capitulated in two days. The Times soon reported on its front page that Kennedy was at “a high point in popular support.”
Can anyone picture Obama exerting such take-no-prisoners leadership to challenge those who threaten our own economic recovery and stability at a time of deep recession and war? That we can’t is a powerful indicator of why what happened in Massachusetts will not stay in Massachusetts if this White House fails to reboot.
The Obama White House is apparently deploying some of its operatives from the 2008 around the country to shore up the Democrats’ fortunes.
Better, in Spot’s opinion, would be to take Rich’s advice and govern boldly. That’s the opposite of what Katie intimates, which is further confirmation of the soundness of Rich’s advice.
At his appearance at Drinking Liberally on January 7th, Tom Rukavina, candidate for the DFL endorsement for governor, made his case for copper-nickel mining in northern Minnesota. Spot isn’t sure whether he’s persuaded or not, but Rukavina made a better case than Spot thought could be made when the question was asked. Judge for yourself.
