Centrist Pundits

Tonight, Massachusetts voted a Republican in to the Senate. This would surprise anyone who was looking at the race a few months ago, but comes as no surprise to those who’ve been looking at it for the last couple of weeks.

What does this mean for centrism? Well, you have to look at how the race was run.

On the one hand, it definitely reminds us that almost no state is a red state or a blue state. Like all states, Mass has a mix of people with a vast, muddy middle area. They elected Romney to office, after all, though he was a bit more liberal at the time. So it might be tempting to note this as a victory for centrists – that even in a “solid blue” state, moderates can and do influence the politics. A lot of people have said that Republicans could be in trouble if they go to the right particularly hard, and this might bear that out – for both parties.

On the other, neither side ran a typical campaign. Brown, for one, hardly ever called himself a Republican, knowing that word is anathema in Massachusetts. Coakley, on the other hand, sold herself mostly as a person with a penchant for misspeaking. Democrats didn’t take this race seriously, and it might have had another outcome if they had. But Brown’s strategy worked – Brown sold himself as a moderate, and yet a look at his record, while hardly the most conservative record in the world, if fairly solidly in the Republican camp. Whether or not the votes of Massachusetts will hold him to his promise of “social consciousness” while he has his personal beliefs tend towards the conservative side of the aisle will remain to be seen.

Now, the question is, what does this mean for the legislative centerpiece of the Democratic Congress, health care reform? I’ve seen a surprising number of posts tonight indicating that its dead, most of them in the “ding dong the witch is dead” vein (mostly from my conservative friends). And it could mean that. But keep something in mind: neither side really wants it dead, and neither side has to accept its death.

Democrats may actually come out ahead (at least in terms of how liberal a health care bill is passed), if they are willing (which is always the question with them.) The only option left to them is reconciliation, a concept I admittedly don’t understand well. I thought it could only be used for the budget. But people talk about using it for health care reform. If Democrats move this direction – costly as it may be in terms of making them look like they are playing fair – then they only need 51 votes in the Senate. They can tell Lieberman and Nelson to take their amendments and shove them, and pass the House version generally in tact. This might be a monumentally unwise move by the Democrats, but cornered animals tend to do strange things.

On the other hand, while no Republican in the world would admit it, they need Health Care as an issue. If they kill it now, it – meaning the need to repeal the bill – doesn’t help with the mid-terms and doesn’t help in 2012. I wonder if we’ll see Snowe or another moderate Republican have a change of heart, though that may be the cynical part of my brain.

What does this mean for the future? Not a whole lot. It will keep Steele in his job a little longer, and it will re-energize the morale of a number of downtrodden Republicans, but like NY23, it won’t maintain its party switch. Come 2012, barring a truly popular Republican with incredible coat tails, one Kennedy or another will decide to run, and take it from Brown. In short, what this race does is one thing only – remind us that the political pendulum in America is ever-swinging.

JC Congress, Political Parties, State Politics Congress, Health care, Massachusetts, Scott Brown, senators

So the world is atwitter about Harry Reid recently revealing that he said something extremely stupid and, frankly, racist during the campaign. I’m actually more shocked that we’re finding out about it now (one would think it would have come out sooner) or, if it didn’t come out immediately, that it came out at all.

There must be something about white men of a certain age thinking that being complimentary while saying something racist isn’t racist. You’ll remember that Biden did something a little less obviously stupid but still fairly dumb, calling Obama “clean”.

Part of me agrees with the Republicans who are trying to equate Reid with Trent Lott. Whether or not the comments were equally offensive, I understand the impulse to say that if your stupid enough to make a racist comment like that, well, you deserve what happens. And what’s good for geese is good for ganders… or Democrats and Republicans.

On the other hand, part of me wants to take President Obama’s lead. He’s basically told Reid that it was all okay now. Given that the comments were about Obama, that seems that.

On the third hand, what do I know? I’m white. On the other hand, a lot of people who shouldn’t be piping up are. Normally, I wouldn’t take Michael Steele to task for commenting on it, even as much as I like pointing out how bad a Republican leader he is – but he’s in trouble of his own right now for using the phrase “honest injun” and the sheer weight of hypocrisy for criticizing one foolish, probably innocent racial comment while defending his own foolish, probably innocent racial comment may cause him to implode. I’m concerned for his safety!

On the fourth hand, I’m perfectly willing to let this be Reid’s waterloo. I have no love for Reid, not because he’s a racist – and I don’t know that he is or isn’t – but because he’s not an effective leader. If in a month he emulates Dodd and says he’s retiring, I’d be fine with that. Sure, it means Nevada will almost inevitably go back to the Republicans, but I think that’s likely anyway.

I guess what I’m saying is Reid just bugs me. Whether or not he’s doing something stupid right now.

JC Personalities, Society racism, Reid, senators, Steele

The Lion of the Senate has passed.

Whether you agreed with his views or not, whatever you thought of some of the more controversial aspects of his life, there is no denying that Ted Kennedy is one of the, if not the, most influential Senators of our time.

His name is on many of the most important bills that have passed since he started in the Senate in 1962.  And despite being a fairly ardent liberal, he was the go-to Senator for bipartisan bills from the Republicans, because he got stuff done.

I’m normally an advocate for term limits, but then I forget that would have shortened the legacy of some truly awesome American leaders, like Kennedy.

If there’s anything to take away from this, anything looking forward, instead of past – not that his history won’t be examined – but it is merely this - Ted Kennedy beleived that people can get things done.  He made it true in his own life and encouraged it in others.

“The work begins anew. The hope rises again. And the dream lives on.”

What are you doing to live up to the idea that you can make a difference?  What are you doing to make America a better place?

JC Personalities death, senators, Ted Kennedy

I was going to write on the Mel Martinez resignation here, but… well, Nate Silver of Fivethirtyeight did an excellent job summing it up.

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/08/mel-martinez-to-resign-senate-seat.html

So I’ll just link it.

JC State Politics Crist, elections, Martinez, senators

So it is looking likely that the Senate will allocate more money to the Cash for Clunkers program.  Maybe they’ll have already done so by the time I post this.  I’m glad.  There’s a lot of debate about if Cash for Clunkers is actually doing anything helpful in the long run, and its legit, but I still think it’s a good idea to keep it going.

Some say that the Clunkers program isn’t really good for the environment.  Those clunkers would have been off the road in the next few years anyway, they say, as they broke down.  They may be right.  4500 may will have been the difference between “I’ll eke another year or two out of this car” and “I’ll go get a new car”.  And newer cars do tend to be more efficient.  Plus, we now have to deal with the environmental effects of disabling the turned in clunker and scrapping it, etc.  I get that, and it may be that cash for clunkers isn’t actually that environmental, but it certainly doesn’t hurt the environment to get some gas guzzlers off the road early.

Others say it isn’t good for the economy.  Some say it puts money in to the hands of foreign car owners, and that’s true, I suppose, when someone uses Clunkers to buy a Toyota or a Honda or what have you.  On the other hand, most of those foreign manufacturers have American plants these days, so when you buy a car you are keeping an auto worker on the line.  Others talk about the economic waste of trading in perfectly good vehicles for only slightly better vehicles.  That’s true, too, and to be honest I don’t have a good counter-argument for that.  On the other hand, it is a good idea to shore up car sales, car manufacturing, and all the related industries.  It’s a complex system and I’m not sure anyone can fully map out the advantages and disadvantages of the Clunker program in that way.

But you know what?  It is popular and it is cheap.  And while neither of those things alone, or even together, make an idea a must-do, taken in the context of other things we are doing, it makes sense.  Americans see the Government as an obstacle to what they want to do, much of the time, so to see the Government serving the people isn’t a bad thing.  As for the cost, sure, it may be a billion – or 3 billion after this cash infusion – spent badly, but that’s a drop in the bucket compared to hundreds of billions spent on bailouts for banks of dubious success and hundreds of billions spent on military actions of dubious justification.  3 billion of a project that makes voters happy?  Pah.  Not even anything to think about.  Just vote yes, Senator.

JC Economy Cash for Clunkers, commerce, Economy, senators, stimulus

Name recognition is a powerful thing.  A short while ago, news agencies started reporting that Jim Bunning wouldn’t be running for Senate again in 2010.  Bunning has cited a lack of funds and a lack of support from the NRSC as his main reasons.  This kind of shocked me, as I figured a senator who’s name I recognized so easily shouldn’t have any fundraising problems.

Except that while I may know his name, simple research in to him to remind myself of the details of his political career reveal that this shouldn’t be a surprise at all.  He’s always had a rocky relationship with the NRSC and the Republican leadership in general, and he’s never won his elections by large margins on his own merit.

He was a fairly popular Representative in his heavily-Republican district, but for his first Senate term he won only by half a percentage point.  His second term should have been an easy sailing in to office when his first opponent had a marriage scandal and his second was an unknown.  But then Bunning started saying stupid things, and apparently it turned off a lot of people (and the Democrats started pouring more money in to the race to capitalize on those stupid statements) and he only won by one point.  Wide-spread assumption is that he actually rode Bush’s coattails in to office, which is saying something, because Bush’s coattails were short and slippery.

His state openly talked about recruiting someone to run against him in the primary, and Bunning has suggested that lawsuits might be the solution to that.  He has ongoing financial disagreements with Republican fundraising bodies and leadership disagreements with, well, Republican leaders.

Time Magazine has called him one of America’s 5 worst senators – which ironically may be where my name recognition of him comes from, because I remember reading that article (it was in 2006).  His popularity is astoundingly low in a fairly Republican state, leading one to wonder just how badly one has to perform to be polling behind all of 4 Democrats interested in the seat… in Kentucky.

I saw the breaking news blurb about his choice not to run and originally thought it this was going to be a piece on how badly the economy is affecting candidates fundraising efforts, especially Republicans, if even someone I’d heard of like Jim Bunning was having trouble.  But upon rereading and analysis, the only conclusion I can come to is maybe, just maybe, Jim Bunning isn’t worth Kentucky’s… or America’s… time.  They have very clearly said he’s not worth their dollar.

JC Personalities, State Politics elections, fundraising, senators

Only a quick one today, for a variety of reasons.

I was talking with my dad last night and I predicted that Sotomayor would get 80 votes when it goes to the full Senate, and he thinks I’m crazy.  He thinks it will be a straight party-line vote.

I think a number of Republicans, concerned about how things will appear to Hispanic voters, relatively assured of their base not leaving them, and seeing that she’ll inevitably make it in to office anyway, will vote for Sotomayor.  Similarly, some – those who don’t really have to worry about Hispanics in their district – will vote against her, precisely to play to their base.

So, rather than write anything real and insightful today, I just figured I’d ask – what do you think the Sotomayor vote count will be, and why?

JC Supreme Court senators, Sotomayor, Supreme Court

Almost everyone agrees we need health care reform in this country.  The agreement is widespread as both a moral imperative (why can’t we care adequately for the least of us?) and as a financial need, with health care costs ever rising, ever consuming more of our nation’s available capital.  The how is, of course, still in question, but the need is beginning to cement itself in everyone’s minds.  Even in lobbyist-driven Washington, the fact that a vast majority of Americans are demanding change is beginning to override the power of lobbyists, though to be fair the lobbies are quite willing to pour more money in to the fight.

My problem with all of it is not that it isn’t needed – it is – but in that we’re trying to talk about it like we can predict exactly what will happen.  It will cost a Trillion dollars… maybe.  But that might be offset by savings… maybe.  We’ll get that money from taxes on the wealthy that will be triggered only if need be… maybe.  These costs will adversely affect small businesses and cost jobs… maybe. 

We tend to put a lot of trust in the Congressional Budget Office.  The CBO is a great group, no doubt, being non-partisan and just being a bunch of people with no real agenda who add up numbers on various scenarios.  As more information is given to them, they come up with different and presumably more accurate information about how much various government programs will cost.  But the CBO isn’t perfect – for either party – because while costs are somewhat predictable, the economy as a whole, and indeed the nation as a whole, is a chaotic system.

I don’t mean chaos in a bad way, I mean it in the scientific way.  We all know the basics of chaos – a butterfly farts in Japan and there is a hurricane in Florida.  More specifically, it was discovered when scientists learned that for complex systems, changing the input even a very small amount – like changing the input data from 4 decimal places to 5 – can lead to massively different results over time, results that don’t even resemble each other after just a few years.  The economy is very much a complex system, and is intricately bound to human behavior, another extremely complex system.

We don’t know how many people will join the public option.  We don’t know how many small businesses will have trouble.  We don’t know so many things about health care and the economy, but you know what?  It doesn’t quite matter.  We don’t know a lot of things.  We can only make our best guesses, and act on them in good faith.

Though I will say this.  Tom Coburn, Republican Senator from Oklahoma, put a clause in the senate version demanding that members of Congress and their staff be on the public option, if one exists.  The cynics out there would say that this is to scare members of Congress in to not voting for it, because they wouldn’t want to lose their fancy health benefits.  But I think it is a brilliant idea just at face value.  Why shouldn’t our public officials be on the public option?  Would that not guarantee that our public option is up to their standards?  Senators Dodd and Kennedy got behind the idea.  So should every Democrat.  It’s a good one.  Thank you, Senator Coburn – now get back to work on your Ricky Ricardo impression.

JC Economy, Health care CBO, chaos theory, Health care, senators

To be honest, I didn’t think I’d be bringing up Senator Ensign again.

CNN has their political ticker, a website off their main page that does brief political news stories.  I find it a very useful website for scanning what the major political stories of the day are.

Tonight, one of the stories is:  http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/07/08/report-senator-tried-to-stop-colleagues-affair/  which is about the efforts of Senator Coburn to get Ensign to break off his affair.  It is a news article about a more complete story located in the Las Vegas Sun, at http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2009/jul/08/spouse-ensign-affair-says-senator-should-resign/

Now, in the article, it says that the husband of the woman having an affair with Ensign reached out to a conservative Christian senator, Coburn, for assistance in ending the affair.  That’s all well and good, a story about a good man trying to help another man behave well.  Right?

I want to call attention to one line in the middle of the Sun article:

“The group, including Coburn, a well-known conservative, confronted Ensign and suggested that the Hamptons needed to be given financial assistance — in the millions of dollars — to pay off their $1 million-plus mortgage and move them to a new life away from Ensign.”

I guess I could be misreading this, it doesn’t explicitly say it, but is that saying what I think it is saying?  That a group of people including Senator Coburn, in their attempt to get Ensign to break off the affair, suggested that he pay off his mistress to just go away?  Isn’t that just called “hush money” most of the time?

I think CNN really buried the lead on this one.

JC Media, Personalities John Ensign, Media, senators

I don’t like hypocrisy much.  Sometimes, I’m a hypocrite, I admit that, but I try to avoid it and I try to point it out in politicians.  I don’t know why I would expect politicians to be any better about it than others, but it seems to me that if you are in a leadership position, you should be spend more of your time addressing the truth than scoring with cheap shots.  One area I’m not so good at with my own hypocrisy is taking Democrats to task as easily as I take Republicans to task.  It really is a bipartisan affliction.  But, today’s example DOES happen to be a Republican, so we’ll just have to run with that.

Senator John Ensign has admitted to an extra-marital affair.  John Ensign, who has campaigned and advocated for the defense of marriage, has had an affair.  Of course, to a conservative like Senator Ensign, defense of marriage just means that marriage has to be between a man and a woman.  One man and one woman is the common phrasing, and there is indeed one man and one woman in Ensign’s own marriage – just because he also had a woman on the side, does that make him a hypocrite?  Maybe not.  It does to me, but maybe not.

What about the fact he called on Bill Clinton to resign after Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewisnsky came out?  That should firm up his hypocrite credentials, unless he resigns (which most people consider unlikely due to the weak Republican bench in Nevada and that Ensign has said he wants to remain in the Senate).  You can’t even make a case that Clinton’s was worse because it was a staffer – Ensign’s lover was a member of his staff.  At least no relation of Lewisnky ever asked the Clintons for hush money (well, as far as we know)

To be fair, he has resigned his leadership post in the Senate.  Perhaps he thinks that is sufficient.  But while the situation isn’t exactly parallel, I wonder what he would have thought of such a concession from Clinton.  I am inclined to think not much.  And while I don’t think he was really on the fast track for the Presidential nomination some people think he was on, this really has messed up his own political future and, indeed, the Republican party of Nevada.  I can’t imagine the sheer number of people who are angry at him right now.

I’m actually a devoted husband, and I don’t “get” cheating, but I also don’t really have a moral problem with people who get sex from more than just their spouse, as long as their spouse doesn’t object.  I have no idea what Ensign’s wife thinks of all this, but that’s their business.  It only really becomes the business of the people when the politicians uses sex issues to push their own agenda before being caught themselves.  This is why Spitzer had to resign – not the extra-marital sex or even the prostitutes per se, but because he had been such a force against such things in the past.  And it is the same with Ensign.  He made a bed and has to lie in it, if you’ll pardon the expression.

But as I mentioned yesterday, sometimes things are more about political calculation than what is right.  And the politics of Neveda say Ensign should stay in.

JC Congress, Personalities, State Politics John Ensign, senators, sex