Robert Shrum: How President Got It Wrong On IRS Fiasco

 

 

Brilliant commentator and author Robert Shrum wrote in his weekly Daily Beast column that the Obama team is not guilty of scandal around the IRS debacle but incompetence. He provides an important insight into the mess and one that Democrats should read and learn. Usually it is not the issue itself in these situations that cause more problems but how it is handled.

Shrum writes:

I recognize that it's easier to criticize a battle plan from outside the combat zone. I also repeat that President Obama, his political advisers, and White House officials surely didn't instigate, direct, or countenance any IRS targeting of Tea Party or conservative groups. It would have been politically stupid, even suicidal—because it could have blown up in the midst of the 2012 campaign. And at the political level, Obama and his team have shown remarkable smarts since 2007—and as Mitt Romney could attest, a stunning capacity to survive and prevail. In the end, events and the evidence will lead to the overwhelming conclusion that IRS conduct in the Cincinnati field office is a quintessential incarnation of that portion of government that the science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein called "stupid fumbling."

For the White House, there is no crime here, there is no scandal, no matter how feverishly, irresponsibly, or demagogically the GOP labors to concoct one. This is not a case of Nixonian indifference to the Constitution, the law, and the president's oath of office. But it does look like a reprise of Cartersque incompetence, increasingly so as we learn more about how the White House staff handled—or mishandled—a crisis they knew was coming.

White House Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler was told about the inspector general's pending IRS report on April 24. She didn't inform the president, supposedly to "shield" him. And at first, the White House claimed, she didn't tell anyone else either. That claim soon evaporated as the administration conceded that she had "briefed" Chief of Staff Dennis McDonough and other aides. Then the next shoe: other officials in the Counsel's office had known even sooner than Ruemmler. Then another: White House and Treasury staff had conferred about how to deal with the report.

House Speaker John Boehner's press secretary gleefully tweeted: "I can't wait until tomorrow's version of events." That says it all about a plainly hapless effort to protect the president—which instead seems likely to yield a prolonged inquisition into the interstices and tick tocks of what is now routinely referred to as a "scandal," distracting the White House and enthralling the Washington press corps day after day, and conceivably for months on end. GOP overreaching, as I've argued, may hurt the party in the 2014 midterms. But despite all the invocations of legal propriety—of not interfering with an ongoing investigation—it's hard to credibly contend that the White House strategy here, if you can even label it that, has been a model of crisis management.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney has become a serial punching bag at the daily West Wing press briefings. He's been close to unflappable amid a storm of restatements, retractions, and inconsistencies. Nonetheless, he should never have been sent out there without being fully informed—and it's no excuse to suggest that all the facts weren't available or assembled yet. They were all known somewhere in the White House—or at the Treasury. The aides who had been briefed early on certainly hadn't forgotten that; they just forgot to tell Carney.

Shrum closes with:

I have no doubt that the president's outrage was genuine—that he was deeply angry. But the harsh words he did speak needed to be backed up, on the spot, by tough deeds. This was a time for some drama, Obama—for a White House fully committed to engage the issue, get out everything that was known, and pursue every conceivable remedy. Instead the information and decisions have come in dribs and drabs, as redrafts and corrections, propelling wave after wave of IRS stories.

There are now Republicans demanding a special counsel. It won't happen, and shouldn't. For now, Americans believe the president is telling the truth—and in a CNN poll, 55 percent agree that "IRS employees ... were acting on their own." Still, that's muted consolation for a president and a White House already facing the challenge of developing a fresh strategy for a season of unprecedented gridlock.

As anyone who reads my columns knows, I regard Barack Obama as an exceptional president of high achievement. But on the IRS story, there was systematic "fumbling" in the West Wing. I agree with Obama's former press secretary Robert Gibbs that "it's the responsibility of people inside ... who know that they have information or knowledge to go to Jay [Carney] and make his job easier." Indeed, they needed to do a much better job all around as the crisis gathered. And they will have to do it again, not just in all the faux scandals that will relentlessly run their course, but in great political battles ahead.

On the IRS, the course probably will be longer than it had to be. For the White House, the problem here resembles Carter, not Nixon. It isn't about crime; it's about competence. This president didn't do anything wrong. But the West Wing sure didn't do everything right.

READ THE ENTIRE COLUMN BY CLICKING HERE>>>>>

Robert Shrum: Republican Program For America? Destroy President Obama

 

 

 

For many on the right, racism is the root of an otherwise inexplicable resistance to the first African-American in the White House. A shrinking rump of older, rural, white America simply can't abide the country they assumed they would always rule now being in the hands of the "other."

- Robert Shrum

Writing in his weekly column for The Daily Beast, author and commentator Robert Shrum calls out the Republicans for their destructive behavior. Their relentless effort to destroy President Obama has been taking place since day one of his administration. Forget how harmful it is to the country. They have paralyzed Washington and any hope of constructive bi-partisan cooperation in the economic recovery or any other urgently needed program.

This is one of Shrum's best columns:

I've written that in the end, congressional Republicans won't agree to move forward on the budget, tax reform, immigration, job creation, or any other issues that matter to mainstream America before the presidential elections. But the fall of 2016 is a long time away, and they have to do something in the meantime. Now we know what it is.

It's not much different from what they've done, or haven't done, all along: obstruct Obama. Traduce him, delegitimize him—and slow economic recovery in hopes that voters will cast a protest vote for the GOP. It worked in 2010, and failed miserably in 2012.

Conservatives are back at it again because the GOP lacks any coherent program other than cutting taxes for the wealthy. Republicans are deeply divided—between the government-hating Tea Party Torquemadas and an establishment that dreads primary defeat, or in John Boehner's case, defenestration as speaker; between the isolationists like Rand Paul and the neo-cons and John McCain.

The animating principle of today's GOP is relentless animus toward the president.

The hard-core base simply rejects his reelection; 49 percent in a Public Policy Poll claim the White House was stolen for Obama last November by groups such as Acorn, Republican-demonized grassroots organization that had disbanded two years earlier. For many on the right, racism is the root of an otherwise inexplicable resistance to the first African-American in the White House. A shrinking rump of older, rural, white America simply can't abide the country they assumed they would always rule now being in the hands of the "other."

GOP members of Congress are—mostly—not that crude or overt. There is Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe, a climate-denying fabulist and scowling denizen of the modern-day, flat-earth society, who has suggested impeaching the president for "the most egregious cover-up in American history." He means Benghazi, of course—a concocted conspiracy incomprehensible to most Americans.

Republican leaders in the Senate and House distance themselves from Inhofe, because of the inevitable backlash from voters beyond the fevered precincts of the far right. But fanning the fires of anti-Obama resentment enables Boehner to hold together his restive, fractured caucus—and lets Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell constantly revalidate his ideological credentials. They—and Republicans in general—are taking advantage of three events to bash the president.

The tactic—you can't dignify it by calling it strategy—may finally backfire. First, though, the GOP will prosecute month after month of a multifront war on the White House.

CONTINUE READING THE ENTIRE COLUMN HERE.....>>>>>>

Robert Shrum: Nancy Pelosi Would Be The Perfect Speaker of the House!

 

 

Commentator and author Robert Shrum writing for The Daily Beast says if the Democrats take back the House that Nancy Pelosi would be one of the best Speakers of the House ever. He writes that, despite her unfavorable ratings from relentless attacks from Republicans, she has the politics to gather the Democratic Party and push through progressive legislation for the President to sign. No wonder the Republicans are so worried about her.

Shrum writes:

Even before she was elected Democratic leader in 2003, she was a pioneering architect of legislation to combat HIV/AIDS. She voted against the Defense of Marriage Act—and against the resolution authorizing George W. Bush to go to war in Iraq. And after she became leader, she marshaled near unanimous Democratic opposition to Bush’s scheme to privatize Social Security, and the intimidated the GOP majority didn’t even dare bring it to a vote.

As speaker in 2007, she pushed through an increase in the minimum wage—and a once resistant Bush signed it as part of the bill for Hurricane Katrina relief and supplemental funding for U.S. military forces in Iraq. A year later, she pungently described Bush as “a total failure, losing all credibility…on the economy, on the war, on energy, you name the subject”—an assessment that’s worth remembering during this week’s exquisitely polite rituals at the dedication of the Bush presidential library.

A masterful inside politician, a Democrat’s Democrat, she nonetheless transcended partisanship when the economic crisis hit during the twilight of the Bush administration. After Republicans first defeated the bank bailout bill in the House—and the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 777 points in one day—she persuaded 33 Democrats to switch their votes, and the bill passed despite the opposition of a majority of GOP members. The bailout wasn’t popular, but it was an essential first step back from the brink of a second Great Depression, and then, as now, Pelosi knew that popularity counts in politics, but it isn’t the only standard of public service.

Her chance to change America as well as his came with Barack Obama’s inauguration. The following two years saw what the political scientist Norman Ornstein called “the best Congress you’ll ever hate.” The unrelenting GOP opposition, the distortions and the demagoguery, would cost House Democrats their majority in 2010, but in the meantime they did what had to be done and wrote a new chapter in our national life.

The president, Pelosi, and her leadership team secured a second economy-saving measure, the $800 billion stimulus package, without a single Republican vote in the House. The legislation not only included one of the biggest middle-class tax cuts in history but also pumped resources into broadband and wireless Internet, clean energy, a modern electricity grid, education, transportation, and infrastructure. It responded to “the fierce urgency” of the moment—and it advanced a futuristic vision of America. The investment could have been greater, but it was the most that could be squeezed through a polarized Congress. Or as Michael Grunwald of Time put it in his book The New New Deal, the stimulus was “stocked” with “game-changers” that will strengthen the economy for decades to come.

READ THE ENTIRE COLUMN BY CLICKING HERE.....

Robert Shrum: Democrats Should Be Supporting President Obama's Budget Plan

 

 

Commentator and strategist Robert Shrum bravely advocates that it is time for Democrats to 'get real' and support President Obama's budget proposal. In a thoughtful and informative column in The Daily Beast, Shrum makes the case that President Obama's proposals are not 'draconian'.

The columnist states:

You would think President Obama was proposing to repeal the New Deal. (Well, actually, that’s Paul Ryan.)

This wasn’t the Republican reaction, of course, to a budget that was pre-dead on arrival, dismissed in advance by House Speaker John Boehner and disdained by the Tea-spooked Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, who couldn’t take yes for an answer when the president called for the entitlement changes McConnell had previously promised “would get Republicans interested in new revenue.” Aside from the fiscal fallout of a failed budgetary process that could slow the economic recovery, the episode points to a likely and grim outcome of these two years—that not much will emerge living or lasting from this Congress.

And don’t just blame GOP members, largely trapped in their gerrymandered red districts, incapable of doing right even if they recognize it, as they cower before the threat of primary challenges. The Democratic base, and prominent Democrats in the Senate and House, rushed to scorn the president’s Social Security and Medicare reforms as a betrayal of progressive principle. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren was “shocked,” which presumably means she hadn’t been reading the wave of advance stories on the Obama budget. Iowa’s Tom Harkin denounced “an unnecessary attack on a critical program.” And Rhode Island’s Sheldon Whitehouse insisted that Social Security “has no place in this debate over federal spending.”

That’s an amazing statement, given that Social Security and Medicare account for 35 percent of federal outlays, and the trust funds for both are in serious and not-so-long-term trouble. We are far from the bipartisan moment in the 1980s when Ronald Reagan, House Speaker Tip O’Neill, and Alan Greenspan rescued Social Security—by, yes, gradually raising the retirement age.

In the face of the Obama reforms, the instant rhetoric and reactions were purple—among many, but not all, Democratic officials and across the liberal blogosphere. But what’s the reality, not the abstract jeremiads about a sacrosanct safety net, but the specific dollars-and-cents impacts of the proposals? The president didn’t ask for any fundamental changes in either Social Security or Medicare, which the House Republican budget would voucherize.

Obama would shift the annual cost of living increases for Social Security to a new formula with the unfortunate name “chained CPI.” But the consequences for benefits are not draconian, or even substantial—and as I’ve argued before, the formula has been altered in the past. It’s not sacrosanct, a matter of basic principle, even if the program is. Chained CPI would initially yield about $2 less a month in the average Social Security check. And as its effects multiplied, in 20 years, the difference would be $126—approximately $2,100 instead of $2,200 a month.

Beyond that, the president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities Bob Greenstein, one of the landmark defenders of the safety net and a passionate advocate but a cooler head, pointed out that Obama was offering essential offsets to chained CPI: “[His] budget includes a series of adjustments and protections for the very old and for people with low incomes... It should prevent an increase in the overall poverty rates among the very old.”

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And what’s the alternative to calibrated entitlement reforms that reform rather than gut Social Security and Medicare? Virginia Democratic Sen. Mark Warner explains: “You squeeze early childhood programs, you squeeze Head Start, you squeeze education and veterans.” Or now, or later, Congress could lift the eligibility age for Medicare to 67 or beyond, potentially leaving millions of seniors without any coverage while saving hardly any money.

The question here, the question the president had to answer, is what’s both acceptable and attainable. Progressives, for example, favor abolishing the limit on income subject to Social Security payroll tax—currently $113,700. Everyone would pay on every dollar. Fat chance that would get through this, or perhaps any, Congress.

The Obama budget does raise taxes on the wealthy by capping their deductions—which is one reason Democrats should rally to it. And there’s another: it increases spending now, while back-loading steeper deficit reduction, to support and speed the pace of the recovery. Do Democrats really think it’s smart to go into the midterms weighed down by the vulnerability of a sluggish economy? That didn’t work out so well for them in 2010.

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Just because the GOP is unserious about government doesn’t mean Democrats should be unserious too. The president has been responsible and brave. In any event, his party could fight out 2014 on Medicare and Social Security against an opposition that has a long record, and a contemporary one, of inveterate hostility to the social safety net.

Democrats could prove willing, as they showed during the battle at the fiscal cliff, to compromise—and settle for the Obama budget. They should. But what then would happen in the Republican House of hard-core reactionaries, where all good ideas seem to go to die? The columnist Jonathan Alter makes the case that Congress conceivably may agree on a “B.I.G.” agenda—that with a “cracking of gridlock,” a decent budget, real immigration reform, and some gun-control could pass. I hope I’m wrong, but I’m convinced we’re doomed to see a season full of sound and fury, legislating nothing big.

READ THE ENTIRE COLUMN BY CLICKING HERE

Glenn Beck: Marriage Equality Won Because LGBT Americans Talked About Freedom

 

 

 

In a shocking video released by Right Wing Watch, right wing commentator Glenn Beck said that LGBT Americans have won the battle for marriage equality. The reason is that LGBT Americans were able to claim the mantle of freedom and having the government dictate individual private lives.

Not sure if Beck found that a good thing or was just expressing anger that we demanded our freedom and got away with it.

"Robert Shrum: GOP Should Be Afraid (Very Afraid!) Of Clinton Run In 2016"

 

 

 

Commentator Robert Shrum in his column for The Daily Beast says that Republicans should be deeply concerned about the potential Hillary Clinton run for President in 2016. Why? Because she will knock their socks off and win the election. In the column, Shrum answers his friend David Frum who argues that a Clinton nomination would not be good for the Democrats.

Here are excerpts from Shrum's column:

She's back. And it seems like she never left at all.

After a pause to rest and recharge—and she apparently recharges swiftly—Hillary Clinton reemerged to a rapturous welcome at the Vital Voices Global Leadership Awards last night, to be followed on Friday by a keynote speech at the Women in the World Summit sponsored by Newsweek and The Daily Beast. She came to the first event to pay tribute to Melanne Verveer, her former chief of staff, assistant secretary of State, and a pioneer of women's rights across the world—or as Clinton put it, one of "those amazing women who could not be denied."

The phrase aptly applies to her own prospects for 2016 as the amazing candidate who, if she chooses to run, almost certainly cannot be denied: the nomination or the presidency itself. Outside the Kennedy Center in Washington, the site of the Vital Voices event, a sign-waving crowd chanted: "Ready for Hillary." Almost simultaneously, a new political action committee was launched to promote her next race for the White House—and it promptly attracted 60,000 Twitter and Facebook followers.

She is far ahead in polls of Democratic primary voters. Remarkably, in a general election match-up, she leads Jeb Bush by 9 percent and Marco Rubio by 11 in their home state of Florida—and perhaps most stunningly, a PPP survey finds her ahead of Rubio, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, and Texas Gov. Rick Perry in the incarnadined Lone Star State.

All this sets the stage for extended kabuki theater about Hillary's intentions. She has no reason to rush in from the wings early on: her financial backers and fervent partisans will wait; her strength among women, who think it's time to elect one of their own, won't wane but intensify. She doesn't need an all-out, three-year long march to the Iowa caucuses. Now we have heard something like this before. But there's no Barack Obama out there to challenge her. And she won't make the decisive mistake she did in 2008, when her campaign misread the primary electorate and malpositioned her as a candidate of restoration in a year of change.

And all of this does something else: it sends the chill wind of a potential 16 years of Democrats in the White House, along with a Supreme Court where the justices actually do justice, through the fevered right-wing swamps of the Clinton-haters and the Obama-abominators who see the white-male dominated America of their imagining fading away. My colleague, friend, and podcast sparring partner David Frum is certainly not among them—instead he's offered the GOP perceptive counsel, fortunately spurned so far and perhaps indefinitely, about how to remake the party in substance as well as style. Now, however, on CNN and in The Daily Beast, he has weighed in with advice for Democrats and Clinton herself: She would be "a mistake for 2016." It is a provocative, fresh, and seemingly well-argued piece—but it's just plain wrong.

*****************************

Finally, my friend and this would-be Democratic strategist writes that a Hillary abdication would open the way to a Democratic "renewal"—a debate between the defenders of the Obama legacy and candidates who believe in Bill Clinton's more moderate approach. Inside the party, no major presidential possibility would focus on that disjunction, let alone accept it. Every one of them, Hillary included, will look to the future—not to repudiate the president, but to build on what he has achieved. To do otherwise would be political suicide in the primaries. It's the other party that needs to renew himself, to find a path out of a fundamentalist wilderness on social issues, to reach the young, women, minorities, and Hispanics—and above all, stop looking and acting as if favors government of the privileged, by the privileged, and for the privileged.

The GOP may not transform itself until it's beaten again and again—for example, by Hillary Clinton in two successive presidential races. And if she walks away from 2016, Democrats will not rend themselves ideologically. Indeed, the odds-on choice then and the probable nominee will be Joe Biden. He's hardly in a position, or hardly disposed, to run against the Obama-Biden administration—and anyone who does will lose to him early on.

I can hear Frum's rejoinder: Biden will be 73. But what will count is vigor, not age. And Biden's performance in 2012, in the debate with Paul Ryan and in the critical swing states—and then in the fiscal cliff negotiations—robustly validates Robert Kennedy's observation that “youth is not a time of life, but a state of mind."

Biden appeared at the Vital Voices event too, where he told the cheering crowd: "There's no woman like Hillary Clinton." He's right, and I more than doubt he'll run if she does. Others may, but he's too astute a politician to take the plunge.

So David, Hillary Clinton won't "inherit the Democratic nomination and the presidency as an estate in reversion." She's earned it on her own. I'm convinced she will do it. And then she'll win it.

Yes, she's back—and Republicans should be very, very afraid.

Read the entire column here....

Robert Shrum: GOP Putting Lipstick On Elephant Still Makes It An Anti-Gay Elephant

 

 

 

Responding to the announcement that the Republicans are in the process of a political version of 'Extreme Makeover", commentator and author Bob Shrum says just applying lipstick won't transform the GOP elephant. Writing for the Daily Beast, Shrum states that Paul Ryan and the Republican anti-LGBT faction will make that 'make over' impossible.

Here are some excerpts from this column:

The Republican Nation Committee’s postmortem on 2012 is hardly a guarantee that the party will come back to electoral life in 2014, or even 2016.

And to find out why, look no further than Paul Ryan. First, though, the report itself, grandly titled “The Growth and Opportunity Project.”

In some ways, it is an unsparing document, arraigning a party out of touch with Americans, especially the new America of younger and more diverse voters; slamming last year’s presidential nominee in all but name; and, in effect, calling for a sweeping de-Romneyization. In other ways, it’s as obvious as it is correct, calling for a state-of-the-art social-media and turnout operation to replace the Mitt model nicknamed Orca, which on Election Day beached itself on the shores of untested and outdated technology.

The report did call for several shifts on policy, outraging conservatives like Rush Limbaugh, the GOP’s waning pooh-bah, who bloviated: “The Republican Party lost because it’s not conservative.” How I wish that advice would be taken to heart—and into electoral oblivion. Instead, saner, more establishment heads have concluded that the party has to moderate, a word they dare not use on issues like gay rights and immigration reform. Easier recommended than realized—and once done, almost certainly not enough.

Gay rights, the report argued, are a “gateway” for “many younger voters”: they just won’t come to the GOP if the GOP doesn’t bend here. Don’t bet on that move. The religious right, with its potentially decisive power in midterm and presidential primaries, will resist any candidate who follows such thoroughly sensible advice. In any event, the advice is queasy and muddy: what exactly are reformed Republicans supposed to say about marriage equality? How about North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr’s dodge? “It’s a states’-rights issue,” he pleads, invoking the age-old rationalization for discrimination and repression. But even this modified, limited hang-out won’t redeem Republicans when their House members are swinging the opposite way in the Supreme Court, spending millions of dollars to defend the so-called Defense of Marriage Act.

Georgia Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss, asked if his views on same-sex marriage were changing, offered an ugly reply: “I’m not gay. So I’m not going to marry one.” What if he had been questioned in 1967 about the state laws prohibiting interracial marriage about to be struck down by the Supreme Court? I suppose the Chambliss of that year, channeling Georgia’s arch-segregationist Gov. Lester Maddox, would have replied: “I’m not black. So I’m not marrying one.” There is something indivisible about bigotry—and something profoundly revealing in a comment like this. The GOP may want a cosmetic gloss on its hostility toward gays, but it’s more of a gossamer fig leaf over a reflex instinct for inequality and a resolve to hold on to the religious right at all costs. And that kind of masquerade won’t convince the 70 percent of millennials born since 1980 who favor marriage equality. All the social media in the world, no matter how sophisticated

Shrum shows how on immigration and woman's rights the GOP is totally out of step. Paul Ryan's budget is a recipe for disaster. The journalist concludes:

So beyond the mechanics, the outreach, the shorter presidential-primary season—all the recommendations of the RNC report—here is what the party has on offer.

A “gentler” tone on gay rights accompanied by a hard line in the Supreme Court—and almost certainly in the next rounds of primaries for the Senate and for president.

A confused, shilly-shallying, often slur-riven approach on immigration reform that surely won’t convert Hispanics and other ethnic minorities.

And one place where the RNC report is truly shy: an enmity toward a woman’s right to choose and women’s health services that will perpetuate and widen the gender gap.

The coup de grâce comes with the Ryan budget’s rank economic injustice and massive cuts for the middle class, seniors, and the poor. The RNC may be trying hard, but Paul Ryan has starkly shown that you can’t put lipstick on an elephant.

READ THE ENTIRE COLUMN BY CLICKING HERE......

Robert Shrum: History, Republicans and Newt

 

 

 

Daily Beast columnist and television commentator Robert Shrum says the Republican Party is in dire straits and might have to bring back Newt Gingrich. The Democratic genius shares the history of constructive opposition to sitting Presidents and contrasts it with the 'take no prisoners' approach in the House.

Here are some excerpts from Shrum's column:

In reality, things don't work out that way—and they certainly aren't now. In fact, the Tea-fueled Republican resistance to Obama's approach is both consistent with history, and dangerously ahistorical.

First, the consistency: political parties don't surrender core positions just because their presidential nominee finished behind, sometimes far behind, in the electoral college.

After Richard Nixon carried 49 states in 1972, Democrats continued to press for a definitive end to the Vietnam War—and Congress ultimately defied the impeached and disgraced president's successor Gerald Ford and their mutual secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, by refusing a request for last-minute arms and air cover for the South Vietnamese regime. Senator Jacob Javits, a Republican but a long time doubter about the war, was blunt: Congress would "provide large sums for evacuation, but not one nickel for military aid." A conflict that never should've been fought was finally over.

The examples here are legion, for both Democratic and Republican presidents, and whether their elections were close calls or landslides. John F. Kennedy ran on Medicare in 1960—it was a central difference between him and Nixon—and then against fierce opposition, lost the bill in the Senate by four votes. In 1994, Bill Clinton's health-care reform, a hallmark promise of his campaign, never even reached the floor of either house of Congress. George W. Bush claimed a mandate after 2004, and then promptly saw Democrats decimate his proposal to privatize Social Security. After Hurricane Katrina, he couldn't pass a single major piece of legislation or stem the tide of hostility to the Iraq War—that became a driving force of the campaign of the young senator who would succeed him.

**************************************

So the resistance Obama faces today is not unusual, even if it is unusually bitter. What is fundamentally ahistorical is the GOP's utter unwillingness to compromise—and its willingness to threaten the underpinnings of both government and the economy. Even in the throes of the Watergate scandal, the two parties collaborated to keep the system whole, sound, and on track. Or think of 1997: after House Speaker Newt Gingrich had pioneered the apocalyptic tactic of shutting down the government, which brought a fierce political backlash, he worked with President Clinton to enact the measures that led to a balanced budget. It is perhaps Bill Clinton's greatest achievement—and hard as it is to say this, Gingrich's finest hour.

Newt had learned the lesson of the shutdown. And today’s House Republicans say that they have, too. They've just approved a bill to fund the government until the end of September. The prevailing assumption is that the Senate will remove some of the poison pills that are killing domestic programs—and the final product will actually make it to the president's desk.

A great country shouldn't be making fateful fiscal decisions month by month, but it's better than fiscal collapse. That doesn't obviate the prospect of a gradual, grinding economic slowdown. Aside from the human pain, inflicted not just on federal workers but on the poorest and most vulnerable, the sequester is likely to reduce economic growth by at least half a percentage point and trigger the loss of one million jobs.

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I've argued here before that the president in effect has to run for a third term in the midterm campaign. Aside from marshaling the unparalleled competencies of his organization—and I don't care about the tut-tutting of goo-goo groups like Common Cause about his fundraising for this—unilateral disarmament is not a sufficient response to the Koch brothers and their ilk—the president has to pin the tail on the elephant. As the sequester erodes the recovery, he has to hold the GOP accountable, and he has to draw dividing lines on the budget and fiscal policy: growth now, deficit reduction over time; Social Security, Medicare, investment in the future, not tax windfalls for the wealthy.

On a broad span of issues, from economic justice to the rights of women, Hispanics, other minorities, and gays and lesbians, the GOP is paddling against the tide of history. They will do it less conspicuously now, as quietly as the base will let them. And in the meantime, in the name of a clichéd and miscarried fiscal discipline, they will block or weaken the recovery every step of the way—and hope no one notices. Obama can and must make sure everyone does.

The president has reached out, sought out middle ground, and repeatedly been rebuffed. His experience validates JFK's observation that you can't negotiate with those who say: "What's mine is mine and what's yours is negotiable." For the sake of the nation, I wish Obama had some of the luck of Clinton in 1997. So while I never thought I'd write this either, maybe we should bring back Newt Gingrich.

Robert Shrum On The Papal Conclave And Catholic Church

 

 

 

The brilliant commentator and author Robert Shrum takes on the Papal Conclave and the Catholic Church in his column for The Daily Beast. As the Cardinals prepare to start voting on Tuesday afternoon, Shrum wonders how much they fear change and will they even dare think about a real reformer.

Shrum confronts the homophobia and misogynist atmosphere that hangs over the church.

Here are two excerpts and you can read the entire column here:

"I hope that when the cardinals finally enter the Sistine Chapel to choose a successor to Benedict XVI, they will comprehend that nothing so became his papacy as the manner of leaving it. I’m not referring to the helicopter that whisked him away—an image so at odds with his richly venerable Renaissance appearance after he took the Medici vestments out of 16th-century mothballs. At least the Pope, with a measure of genuine humility, at the end affirmed that the papal office is just that—-the position, not a person anointed permanently through debility and even unto death. It was the most striking, uncharacteristically progressive decision of his reign.

Otherwise, Benedict left the church weaker not stronger, more remote from the people in the pews, frayed at the center, in decline in the heartlands of Europe and North America, and languishing even in the most Catholic all continents, South America. The decline is the consequence of Benedict’s rule and the decades-long dominance of his predecessor, John Paul II, whose genius in communication concealed or excused his inquisitorial absolutism. The official church, the top-down governance imposed from an eyes-wide-shut Vatican, is incompetent, insular, intolerant, and in thrall to the narrowness of the two popes who have appointed every single one of the cardinals who will determine for whom the white smoke will now rise over Saint Peter’s.

The incompetence is beyond dispute. The Vatican Bank, a fount of scandal for 40 years, is being investigated for money laundering. Thanks to the pope’s butler and Lord knows who else, VatiLeaks revealed a pattern of unholy intrigue and backstabbing in the Curia, wide-ranging allegations of corruption, a back-scratching overpayment of $350,000 for a nativity scene, and a bribe to secure the burial of a Mafia operative alongside cardinals and popes. And don’t forget that this Curia let the pope go off the rails when he delivered a disastrous speech quoting a medieval Byzantine emperor’s statement that Islam brought nothing but “evil” to the world—and then when he lifted the excommunication of a Holocaust-denying schismatic bishop."

Shrum then comments on some of the front-runners for the Papacy:

"The insularity extends to the “papabile”—the roll call of possible, even likely popes.

Cardinal Peter Turkson of Ghana (photograph below), an early odds-on favorite, blames the abuse on gay priests—although pedophilia is not a function of sexual orientation and the abuse has afflicted girls as well as boys. But the scapegoat is convenient—and the rationalization is complacent. As Turkson explained, because “homosexuality is not countenanced in Africa …[this] has served to keep abuse out.” He’s almost certainly in for a surprise. Think of the European prelates who once smugly wrote off the clerical assaults on children and adolescents as an exclusive American problem.

Turkson also has apparently defended or apologized for repressive laws in Africa such as Uganda’s so-called kill-the-gays bill. The joy of the first black pope in centuries would soon be confounded by the reality of someone who has treated child abuse as an excuse for discrimination and who has enabled extreme forms of homophobia.

Or think of another papabile, Honduran Cardinal Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga, who once suggested that “Jewish interests in the media pushed for expansive coverage of the church’s sex scandals.” Imagine if he were the one who stepped out on Saint Peter’s balcony after the cardinal deacon intoned: “Habemus papam.”

As the conclave commences, theologians should be permitted to explore such questions as married priests. The Vatican already countenances married clergy in Eastern Rite churches and for Anglicans who convert to Catholicism. And what about the case for women priests, the role of American nuns who have been assailed by Rome—and yes, the equality of all God’s children, gay and straight?"

VIDEO: Robert Shrum On Fundamental Shift In American Politics

On the Reverend Al Sharpton Show on MSNBC, commentator and author Robert Shrum says there is a fundamental shift in American politics. The fact that the Republicans are still captive to the Tea Party could mean that a major realignment is taking place. Listen in.