Afflictor.com

“Now Carson Actually Is Running For President. Or Is He?”

November 3, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

I’ve argued that Donald Trump isn’t a true Presidential candidate but rather an impetuous baby-man who desperately needs attention but desires none of the very real responsibility that comes with such a job.

Of course, running for the GOP nomination for reasons other than politics isn’t something novel to 2015. For quite a while and for quite a few “candidates,” the process has been merely a stepping-stone to more lucrative businesses, from FOX News correspondent to right-wing think-tank appointments to speaking tours. The losers now will be later to win.

How many of the Republican swarm this time are really just Herman Cain without the pizza and the 999s? In a New York column, Jonathan Chait nominates Ben Carson, a retired neurosurgeon who’s worked on a lot of brains, though, it would seem based on his ideas about America, not his own. One of the polling leaders, Carson seems less concerned with whistle-stop tours than the gravy train.

Chait’s opening:

On February 7, 2013, Ben Carson appeared at a National Prayer Breakfast, where he visibly annoyed President Obama by delivering a right-wing speech denouncing Obamacare and cultural liberalism, and calling for a flat tax based on the biblical tithe. Conservatives, still devastated by Obama’s reelection, took delight in the appearance on the scene of a surprising new presidential antagonist, who until that point had no political profile. “Finally, a self-reliant conservative decided to make this every bit as political as Obama does,” tweeted conservative pundit David Limbaugh. The Wall Street Journal celebrated Carson’s remarks in a shorteditorial, headlined “Ben Carson for President.” The headline was obviously hyperbolic; nothing in the text that followed proposed that Carson run for public office.

But now Carson actually is running for president. Or is he? It is hard to tell. Conservative politics are so closely intermingled with a lucrative entertainment complex that it is frequently impossible to distinguish between a political project (that is, something designed to result in policy change) and a money-making venture. Declaring yourself a presidential candidate gives you access to millions of dollars’ worth of free media attention that can build a valuable brand. So the mere fact that Carson calls himself a presidential candidate does not prove he is actually running for president rather than taking advantage of the opportunity to build his brand. Indeed, it is possible to be actually leading the polls without seriously trying to win the presidency.

And the notion that Carson could be president is preposterous.•

Tags: Ben Carson, Jonathan Chait

“At First, Conservatives Denounced This Agenda As A Virtual Revolution”

January 12, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

One thing seemingly lost in the constant hum of the news cycle, the latest poll, the endless horse race that takes us nowhere, is that some are playing the long game, resistant to the cult of now. Or perhaps it’s not truly lost but just a source of frustration to those in the media who live only to feed the beast. If you recall, that sputtering Van Dyke Chuck Todd looked at some survey results early last summer and declared that President Obama’s Administration was “over,” and then the climate accord with China happened as well as the diplomatic re-engagement with Cuba and the economic turnaround and major reforms to immigration.

Obama’s tenure hasn’t been transitional like Bill Clinton’s but transformational (albeit, one that can be reversed in some ways if the next President is Republican). He hasn’t been perfect or always right or even smooth despite his preternatural calm, but his accomplishments are impressive. From “Why History Will Be Very Kind to Obama,” by Jonathan Chait in New York:

The president’s infuriating serenity, his inclination to play Spock even when the country wants a Captain Kirk, makes him an unusual kind of leader. But it is obvious why Obama behaves this way: He is very confident in his idea of how history works and how, once the dust settles, he will be judged. For Obama, the long run has been a source of comfort from the outset. He has quoted King’s dictum about the arc of the moral universe eventually bending toward justice, and he has said that “at the end of the day, we’re part of a long-running story. We just try to get our paragraph right.” To his critics, Obama is unable to attend to the theatrical duties of his office because he lacks a bedrock emotional connection with America. It seems more likely that he is simply unwilling to: that he is conducting his presidency on the assumption that his place in historical memory will be defined by a tabulation of his successes minus his failures. And that tomorrow’s historians will be more rational and forgiving than today’s political commentators.

It is my view that history will be very generous with Barack Obama, who has compiled a broad record of accomplishment through three-quarters of his presidency. But if it isn’t, it will be for a highly ironic reason: Our historical memory tends to romance, too. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fatherly reassurance, a youthful Kennedy tossing footballs on the White House lawn, Reagan on horseback—the craving for emotional sustenance and satisfying drama runs deep. Though the parade of Obama’s Katrinas will all be (and mostly already have been) consigned to the forgotten afterlife of cable-news ephemera, it is not yet certain whether this president can bind his achievements into any heroic narrative.

It is already clear that, whatever the source of the current disappointment with Obama, the explanation cannot be that he failed to achieve his stated goals. In his first inaugural address, Obama outlined a sweeping domestic agenda. The list of promises was specific: not only to rescue the economy from catastrophe but also to undertake sweeping long-term reforms in health care, education, energy, and financial regulation.

At first, conservatives denounced this agenda as a virtual revolution. “An ambitious president intends to enact the most radical agenda of social transformation seen in our lifetime,” cried the columnist Charles Krauthammer. It “would permanently refashion the role of the federal government in the lives of every American,” warned Jennifer Rubin. Conservatives have since changed their line, and now portray the president as a Carter-esque mediocrity—a “parenthesis in American political history” (Krauthammer) “with no significant accomplishment” (Rubin). But this is not because Obama failed to accomplish the goals he set out. On the contrary, he has incontrovertibly made major progress on, or fulfilled, every one of them. The horrifying consequences conservatives insisted would follow have all failed to materialize.•

Tags: Barack Obama, Jonathan Chait

“Then, After A While, The Dreams Stopped”

November 11, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Stephen Glass, the infamous fabulist who was nearly the death of The New Republic in the late 1990s, no longer practices journalism nor should he ever. He works for a law firm in Los Angeles, leading a good-if-unglamorous life, a different man. But is he a changed one? And should he be trusted again in his new vocation? Chuck Lane, the editor who uncovered the fraud, has not forgiven or forgotten, and it’s hard to blame him. To those he lied to, it isn’t easy to restore faith. In a new TNR piece “Hello, My Name Is Stephen Glass, and I’m Sorry,” written by one of his former deceived deskmates, Hanna Rosin, the author tries her best to see things with fresh eyes, hoping they’re not blind ones. An excerpt:

“Once we knew what he’d done, I tried to call Steve, but he never called back. He just went missing, like the kids on the milk cartons. It was weird. People often ask me if I felt ‘betrayed,’ but really I was deeply unsettled, like I’d woken up in the wrong room. I wondered whether Steve had lied to me about personal things, too. I wondered how, even after he’d been caught, he could bring himself to recruit me to defend him, knowing I’d be risking my job to do so. I wondered how I could spend more time with a person during the week than I spent with my husband and not suspect a thing. (And I didn’t. It came as a total surprise). And I wondered what else I didn’t know about people. Could my brother be a drug addict? Did my best friend actually hate me? Jon Chait, now a political writer for New York and back then the smart young wonk in our trio, was in Paris when the scandal broke. Overnight, Steve went from ‘being one of my best friends to someone I read about in The International Herald Tribune,’ Chait recalled. The transition was so abrupt that, for months, Jon dreamed that he’d run into him or that Steve wanted to talk to him.

Then, after a while, the dreams stopped. The Monica Lewinsky scandal petered out, George W. Bush became president, we all got cell phones, laptops, spouses, children. Over the years, Steve Glass got mixed up in our minds with the fictionalized Stephen Glass from his own 2003 roman à clef,The Fabulist, or Steve Glass as played by Hayden Christiansen in the 2003 movie Shattered Glass. It was the book that finally provoked my anger. The plot follows a thinly fictionalized Steve in the aftermath of the affair. It portrays him as humble, contrite, and ‘a few shades hipper than the original,’ I wrote in a review for Slate. The rest of us came off as shallow jerks barely worth apologizing to. Steve sent about 100 handwritten letters of apology that year to people he’d injured, all several pages long and very abject: ‘I’m genuinely sorry that I lied to you and betrayed you.’ But he was also hawking his book, so we saw the letters as an effort to neutralize us. Reading the novel pretty much killed off my curiosity. For years afterward, if I thought about Steve at all—usually when I got an e-mail from a journalism student who had seen the movie in an ethics class—he was the notorious Stephen Glass, still living in the Clinton era. …

Steve Glass now lives in Venice Beach with his longtime girlfriend, Julie Hilden, a dog, two cats, and a rotating cast of foster pets. (The couple are also vegans.) He works as director of special projects at Carpenter, Zuckerman, Rowley, a personal-injury law firm in Beverly Hills. For anyone who knew him back in the day, this is a comical juxtaposition. Steve is a Jewish boy from the posh Chicago suburb of Highland Park with pushy Jewish parents who insisted on the usual (doctor, lawyer). When they urged him to go to law school, they probably had Supreme Court appearances in mind, not, as the firm boasts, a $2.1 million settlement for a homeless man hit by a garbage truck. But Paul Zuckerman, the partner who hired Steve and has become his mentor, considers this development to be a sign of grace. ‘You were on track to be an asshole,’ he told Steve when I was there. ‘The best thing that ever happened to you in your life is that you fell flat on your face.'”

Tags: Chuck Lane, Hanna Rosin, Jonathan Chait, Paul Zuckerman, Stephen Glass

“The GOP’s Strategic Failure Has Grown Out Of Its Intellectual Insularity”

October 7, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

More than a decade ago, before everyone could disappear into their own channel, their own tube, I argued that I thought personalization was dangerous. Perhaps inevitable with cable TV and the Internet providing endless channels, but a bad thing for a democracy. The beauty of the heterogeneous is that you’re exposed to other arguments than your own, and even if you’re not moved by them, you at least understand how the other half lives. For too many people in this country, that appears to no longer be true.

I mentioned last week that I thought GOP insularity was at least partly behind the government shutdown. More on the topic from New York‘s ever-excellent Jonathan Chait:

“One of the causes of the economic and Constitutional crisis unleashed by House Republicans is their utter failure to grasp how Democrats would perceive their behavior. Conservative reporter Byron York perceptively, and alarmingly, describes a discussion with an influential Republican, who explains that the GOP stumbled into the shutdown war without a plan and repeatedly expected Democrats to bail them out by capitulating, only to be shocked when they refused. The GOP’s strategic failure has grown out of its intellectual insularity (or, to reprise a once-hot term, epistemic closure) leaving them so unaware of the principles motivating the other side that they couldn’t anticipate the Democrats’ obvious response.

‘I would liken this a little bit to Gettysburg,’ York’s source explained, ‘where a Confederate unit went looking for shoes and stumbled into Union cavalry, and all of a sudden found itself embroiled in battle on a battlefield it didn’t intend to be on, and everybody just kept feeding troops into it.’ An even more apt, and more recent, analogy might be Iraq, when Republican war planners expected a suspicious Muslim culture to greet their troops with sweets and flowers.

If you reside within the conservative news bubble, you probably had no idea before this crisis what the Democratic position on the debt ceiling and the shutdown is. You still probably have no idea now.”

Tags: Byron York, Jonathan Chait

“Presidential Systems Veered Ultimately Toward Collapse Everywhere They Were Tried”

October 6, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Not only do the branches of government in America serve as checks and balances, but different parties empowered in different wings keep us from moving too fast in any direction. But what if that keeps us from moving at all? The American system only works if there isn’t pure partisanship, if politics makes strange bedfellows. The opening of “The Shutdown Prophet,” Jonathan Chait’s customarily excellent analysis in New York:

“In a merciful twist of fate, Juan Linz did not quite live to see his prophecy of the demise of American democracy borne out. Linz, the Spanish political scientist who died last week, argued that the presidential system, with its separate elections for legislature and chief executive, was inherently unstable. In a famous 1990 essay, Linz observed, ‘All such systems are based on dual democratic legitimacy: No democratic principle exists to resolve disputes between the executive and the legislature about which of the two actually represents the will of the people.’ Presidential systems veered ultimately toward collapse everywhere they were tried, as legislators and executives vied for supremacy. There was only one notable exception: the United States of America.

Linz attributed our puzzling, anomalous stability to “the uniquely diffuse character of American political parties.” The Republicans had loads of moderates, and conservative whites in the South still clung to the Democratic Party. At the time he wrote that, the two parties were already sorting themselves into more ideologically pure versions, leaving us where we stand today: with one racially and economically polyglot party of center-left technocracy and one ethnically homogenous reactionary party. The latter is currently attempting to impose its program by threat upon the former. The events in Washington have given us a peek into the Linzian nightmare.

Tags: Jonathan Chait, Juan Linz

“A Philosophy Like That Is Immune To Empiricism”

March 18, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Jonathan Chait, the excellent political writer for New York, is doing an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

_______________________

Question:

Jonathan Chait:

Question:

You specialize in hilarious and brutal takedowns, but do you think that limits you in some way? In other words, did you ever make the career choice not to be an Ezra Klein type reporter who stays “nice” in tone and gets rewarded with lots of access and chatter with the other side?

Jonathan Chait:

So many kind questions. Well, I respect Ezra a lot. He does amazing work. But, yes, I always saw myself as a blunt critic. I don’t like reporting much anyway. I think the onll real limit is that I’ve made a lot of enemies within the journalistic world.

Tags: Jonathan Chait

“We Are Greater Than The Sum Of Our Individual Ambitions”

November 12, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

“Obama invoked average Americans living out this ethos of mutual responsibility.” (Image by David Shankbone.)

Where are the “job creators” right now? Probably eating freedom fries. As the language of manipulation has been drowned out by machines crunching raw data, it’s good to remember that some people in addition to Nate Silver were calling bullshit on the GOP narratives leading up to Election Day. One was New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait, who called out the wishful thinking being sold in earnest daily by Joe Scarborough and others. (It’s very amusing that Scarborough is now angrily calling out the lies of the conservative media, considering he was a big part of the problem.) Chait’s well-tuned ears also caught the gist of Obama’s victory speech which might have been lost in the wee hours of the morning. From his new article, “We Just Had a Class War: And One Side Won“:

“Obama then proceeded to define the American idea in a way that excludes the makers-versus-takers conception of individual responsibility propounded by Paul Ryan and the tea party. Since Obama took office, angry men in Colonial garb or on Fox News have harped on ‘American exceptionalism,’ which boils our national virtue down to the freedom from having to subsidize some other sap’s health insurance. Obama turned this on its head. ‘What makes America exceptional,’ he announced, ‘are the bonds that hold together the most diverse nation on Earth. The belief that our destiny is shared; that this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another and to future generations.’ Obama invoked average Americans living out this ethos of mutual responsibility (such as a ‘family business whose owners would rather cut their own pay than lay off their neighbors,’ the example of which stands at odds with the corporate ethos of a certain Boston-based private-equity executive). And even the line about red states and blue states began with the following statement: ‘We are greater than the sum of our individual ambitions.’

Presumably more was at work here than mere uplift. The president was establishing the meaning of his victory.”

Tags: Barack Obama, Joe Scarborough, Jonathan Chait

“Of The Many Secret Post-Victory Plans Floating Around…The Least Secret Is Romney’s Intention To Implement Paul Ryan’s Budget”

October 15, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Two quick excerpts from Jonathan Chait’s just-published New York piece about the post-election agendas of Mitt Romney and President Obama:

Romney’s plan:

“Let’s first imagine that, on January 20, Romney takes the oath of office. Of the many secret post-victory plans floating around in the inner circles of the campaigns, the least secret is Romney’s intention to implement Paul Ryan’s budget. The Ryan budget has come to be almost synonymous with the Republican Party agenda, and Romney has embraced it with only slight variations. It would repeal Obamacare, cut income-tax rates, turn Medicare for people under 55 years old into subsidized private insurance, increase defense spending, and cut domestic spending, with especially large cuts for Medicaid, food stamps, and other programs targeted to the very poor.

Few voters understand just how rapidly Romney could achieve this, rewriting the American social compact in one swift stroke. Ryan’s plan has never attracted Democratic support, but it is not designed for bipartisanship. Ryan deliberately built it to circumvent a Senate filibuster, stocking the plan with budget legislation that is allowed, under Senate ‘budget reconciliation’ procedures, to pass with a simple majority. Republicans have been planning the mechanics of the vote for many months, and Republican insiders expect Romney to use reconciliation to pass the bill. Republicans would still need to control 50 votes in the Senate (Ryan, as vice-president, would cast the tiebreaking vote), but if Romney wins the presidency, he’ll likely precipitate a partywide tail wind that would extend to the GOP’s Senate slate.”

Obama’s plan:

“On the morning of November 7, a reelected President Obama will do … nothing. For the next 53 days, nothing. And then, on January 1, 2013, we will all awake to a different, substantially more liberal country. The Bush tax cuts will have disappeared, restoring Clinton-era tax rates and flooding government coffers with revenue to fund its current operations for years to come. The military will be facing dire budget cuts that shake the military-industrial complex to its core. It will be a real-world approximation of the old liberal bumper-sticker fantasy in which schools have all the money they require and the Pentagon needs to hold a bake sale.

All this can come to pass because, while Obama has spent the last two years surrendering short-term policy concessions, he has been quietly hoarding a fortune in the equivalent of a political trust fund that comes due on the first of the year. At that point, he will reside in a political world he finds at most mildly uncomfortable and the Republicans consider a hellish dystopia. Then he’ll be ready to make a deal.”

Tags: Barack Obama, Jonathan Chait, Mitt Romney

“The GOP Has Reason To Be Scared”

February 27, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

What happens if President Obama gets another term? What about if the tax code changes so “job creators” are taxed like everyone else and the number of jobs don’t decrease? What if the Affordable Care Act improves our health and doesn’t bankrupt us? What if gay marriage is legalized at the federal level and has no ill effect whatsoever on society? What if women having access to free contraception actually improves our society?

What would those things mean? Is it permanently the end of 30 years of trickle-down economics? Is it the end of Reagan Republicanism? Is the time when the Right could exploit so-called value voters over? Thanks to shifting demographics, we may find out. From “2012 Or Never,” clear-eyed analysis of the political scene by New York‘s Jonathan Chait:

“‘America is approaching a ‘tipping point’ beyond which the Nation will be unable to change course,’ announces the dark, old-timey preamble to Paul Ryan’s ‘The Roadmap Plan,’ a statement of fiscal principles that shaped the budget outline approved last spring by 98 percent of the House Republican caucus. Rick Santorum warns his audiences, ‘We are reaching a tipping point, folks, when those who pay are the minority and those who receive are the majority.’ Even such a sober figure as Mitt Romney regularly says things like ‘We are only inches away from no longer being a free economy,’ and that this election ‘could be our last chance.’

The Republican Party is in the grips of many fever dreams. But this is not one of them. To be sure, the apocalyptic ideological analysis—that ‘freedom’ is incompatible with Clinton-era tax rates and Massachusetts-style health care—is pure crazy. But the panicked strategic analysis, and the sense of urgency it gives rise to, is actually quite sound. The modern GOP—the party of Nixon, Reagan, and both Bushes—is staring down its own demographic extinction. Right-wing warnings of impending tyranny express, in hyperbolic form, well-grounded dread: that conservative America will soon come to be dominated, in a semi-permanent fashion, by an ascendant Democratic coalition hostile to its outlook and interests. And this impending doom has colored the party’s frantic, fearful response to the Obama presidency.

The GOP has reason to be scared. Obama’s election was the vindication of a prediction made several years before by journalist John Judis and political scientist Ruy Teixeira in their 2002 book, The Emerging Democratic Majority. Despite the fact that George W. Bush then occupied the White House, Judis and Teixeira argued that demographic and political trends were converging in such a way as to form a natural-majority coalition for Democrats.”

Tags: Jonathan Chait

“Americans Were Not Itching For Obama To Make Peace With Corporate America”

January 9, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

"Obama issued a course correction and started pursuing a strategy that’s in line with the realities of public opinion." (Image by Elizabeth Cromwell.)

William Daley’s demotion from White House Chief of Staff today is the clearest sign yet that President Obama is loading up for bear during this year of election, that he’s through trying to make nice with those whose only goal is to bring him down, from GOP insiders to Wall Street bankers to corporate CEOs. An exceprt from Jonathan Chait’s smart assessment of the surprising news at New York‘s Daily Intel blog;

“The effort failed because Daley’s analysis — which is also the analysis of David Brooks and Michael Bloomberg — was fatally incorrect. Americans were not itching for Obama to make peace with corporate America. Americans are in an angry, populist mood — distrustful of government, but even more distrustful of business. In the most recent NBC/The Wall Street Journal poll, 60 percent of Americans strongly agreed with the following statement:

The current economic structure of the country is out of balance and favors a very small proportion of the rich over the rest of the country. America needs to reduce the power of major banks and corporations and demand greater accountability and transparency. The government should not provide financial aid to corporations and should not provide tax breaks to the rich.

What’s more, it may be true that a bipartisan deal to reduce the deficit would have bolstered Obama’s standing. The trouble is that Republicans believed the exact same thing. Here’s how McConnell frankly explained his calculation:

‘The only way the American people would know that a great debate was going on was if the measures were not bipartisan. When you hang the ‘bipartisan’ tag on something, the perception is that differences have been worked out, and there’s a broad agreement that that’s the way forward.’

Republicans believed that making bipartisan agreements with Obama would make Obama and his agenda more popular. Republicans are not in the business of helping Obama win reelection. And so they refused to sign a bipartisan agreement, and Obama simply looked weak and ineffectual.

Since that debacle, Obama issued a course correction and started pursuing a strategy that’s in line with the realities of public opinion and the Congress, as opposed to Daley’s fantasy version thereof. Recognizing public populism and GOP intransigence, he is outlining the legislation he wants on jobs, under no illusion that Republicans will cooperate, in order to clarify which party is responsible for inaction. Obama’s approval ratings, after sinking under the weight of Daley’s failed gambit, now appear to be rising.”

Tags: Barack Obama, Jonathan Chait, William Daley

Jonathan Chait