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Category: Politics
Brown’s reasons for rejecting debate make no sense
This commentary is also online at the Huffington Post.
What we were talking about, in case U.S. Sen. Scott Brown’s diversionary tactics led you astray, was a televised debate, held before a neutral audience, to be moderated by Tom Brokaw. Everything else is baloney.
As you no doubt already know, Brown made two demands that had to be met before he would agree to a debate with his Democratic rival, Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth Warren.
The first was that Vicki Kennedy, president of the Edward M. Kennedy Institute, which would sponsor the debate, refrain from endorsing a candidate for “the duration of the Senate race.”
The second was that the debate be carried only by local media outlets and not by “out-of-state cable networks with a reputation for political advocacy” — clear reference to the liberal outlet MSNBC, which had been mentioned as a possibility.
Both demands were ridiculous because they were irrelevant. But when Vicki Kennedy rejected the first of those demands, that was enough for Brown to say no.
(At this point I suppose I should include a non-disclosure: I’m not related to those Kennedys.)
Brown might have been able to make a reasonable case for asking Vicki Kennedy not to endorse until after the debate. But demanding that she refrain for “the duration” was just silly. If the media consortium that includes the Boston Globe schedules a debate, will Brown insist that the Globe not endorse? And what will Brown say if the Boston Herald, as is its wont, puts together its own debate? Surely he won’t ask the paper to withhold its all-but-certain Brown endorsement.
As for MSNBC, the debate organizers could prevent the channel from carrying it live. Afterwards, though, Rachel Maddow, Ed Schultz and company would be free to show clips and comment on them whether they had carried the full debate or not. The fair-use provision of the copyright law guarantees that — not to mention the First Amendment.
And why did I say the debate would be held before a neutral audience? Because you can be sure the Brown and Warren campaigns would insist on equal numbers of partisans in the audience. So the Kennedy Institute’s sponsorship isn’t an issue, either.
I know some observers have questioned Brokaw’s alleged liberal bias. But since that hasn’t been raised by the Brown campaign, we have to assume he had no problem with Brokaw as moderator. When Brokaw moderated a debate between Barack Obama and John McCain in 2008, he seemed mainly interested in making sure neither candidate exceeded his allotted time. Liberal or not, Brokaw has earned his status as a fair-minded journalist who can be trusted not to throw the debate to either candidate.
It’s also hard to figure why Brown suddenly has a problem with Vicki Kennedy or the Kennedy Institute, given that he took part in a debate with Martha Coakley two years ago that was co-sponsored by the institute without setting any preconditions. As Herald columnist Peter Gelzinis points out, it was only a year ago that Brown couldn’t say enough good things about the late Ted Kennedy’s widow.
Globe columnist Scot Lehigh thinks Brown’s demands were “reasonable,” and he gives the senator credit for sticking to them. Yet Lehigh doesn’t tell us what Brown could possibly gain by failing to take part.
As my Northeastern colleague Alan Schroeder, an expert on political debates, puts it, “They’re making such an effort to portray Brown as someone with bipartisan credentials who can work with Democrats, and yet here’s this relatively mild example of cooperating with a Democrat, and they’re balking at it.”
Boston Phoenix political columnist David Bernstein wonders if Brown is trying to curry favor with the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, which has had its own issues with Vicki Kennedy.
Who knows what Brown and his advisers are thinking? Their political astuteness is generally beyond question. Maybe this will prove to be a smart move. Right now, though, it looks like a rare misstep, especially curious given that Brown initially made the Warren campaign look flat-footed with his rapid acceptance of several debate invitations.
My own bias is in favor of as many debates as possible, regardless of the venue. For instance, I don’t understand why Warren won’t say yes to WBZ Radio (AM 1030) talk-show host Dan Rea, who is conservative but is as fair as they come.
The candidates really don’t have anything better to do. How would we prefer they spend their time? Making television ads? Attending fundraisers? Of course not. They should spend as much time as possible side by side, talking about the issues. It’s not always the most edifying experience, but it’s better than any conceivable alternatives.
Photo (cc) by Michael Kwan and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.
Neighbors reject Taunton casino plan by 2-1 margin
As you may have heard, Taunton voters overwhelmingly approved a tribal casino in a nonbinding referendum on Saturday. But that’s not even close to the whole story.
Residents who live closest to the proposed casino voted even more overwhelmingly against it. According to Cape Cod Times reporter George Brennan, the city voted 7,693 in favor and 4,571 opposed — but “in the two East Taunton precincts where the Mashpee Wampanoag casino is planned, voters rejected it by nearly a 2-1 margin.”
In the Taunton Gazette, reporter Christopher Nichols posts the numbers:
Ward 4 — which contains most of East Taunton — voted against the casino proposal with 755 in favor and 1,332 opposed. Voters closest to the proposed casino site in Ward 4 Precinct B voted against the proposal, 678-350.
Yet, with regard to Boston’s two daily newspapers, we’re already seeing a repeat of 2007. That’s when the big news was that Middleborough had voted in favor of a deal the selectmen had cut with the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe to build a casino in that town (big news!), and then turned around and took a decisive but nonbinding vote against the casino itself (shhhh … pay no attention).
The proposed Middleborough casino eventually fell apart, but town officials are still hoping there’s a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Alice Elwell of the Brockton Enterprise has the latest.
So what happened with the Taunton vote? On Sunday, the Globe’s Mark Arsenault reported on Taunton’s vote in favor of the casino — but made no mention of the results in East Taunton. The Herald did better, publishing Brennan’s Cape Cod Times story (Herald publisher Pat Purcell runs several of Rupert Murdoch’s regional papers, including the Times). But today, the Herald offers a follow-up by Chris Cassidy and Laurel Sweet that omits the vote of the opposition in East Taunton.
Arsenault, in his Globe story, closes by noting that Taunton is a long way from actually hosting a tribal casino. Because of a 2009 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Carcieri v. Salazar, the Mashpee won’t be able to build a tribal casino in Taunton without an act of Congress. Good luck with that.
The Taunton vote demonstrates, once again, that no one wants to live next to a casino. Nor should they have to.
A final casino note: Former Boston mayor Ray Flynn turned out on Saturday to lend his support to East Boston residents opposed to a casino that’s been proposed for Suffolk Downs.
Given that the East Boston plan is already being portrayed as a done deal, it will be pretty interesting to see how a battle between Boston’s former and current mayors (Tom Menino supports the proposal) will play out.
Photo (cc) by s_falkow and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.
The humiliation of Elizabeth Warren
New York Times columnist Ross Douthat has written almost exactly what I was thinking regarding U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren and her exaggerated (and possibly non-existent) Cherokee heritage. So I recommend you read it. I have just a few additional thoughts.
I have to admit this is one of those stories that got by me. I didn’t think it would amount to much after the Boston Herald’s Hillary Chabot broke the story on April 27. Even though Harvard Law School had touted her as a diversity hire, there was no evidence (and there still isn’t) that she had ever sought to claim minority status for career advancement. And when the Boston Globe reported that she was, in fact, 1/32 Cherokee, that seemed to be the end of it. After all, the current tribal chief is only 1/32 Cherokee.
But things got a lot worse for Warren last week, when the Globe published a correction stating that there was no real evidence of Warren’s Cherokee background. Apparently this is nothing more than one of those family legends that may or may not have some basis in fact.
Like Douthat, and like millions of other Americans, I grew up thinking I might have some Native American heritage. My mother’s family was named Shaw; we had a cottage in Onset when I was growing up with a sign out front that said “Shawnee,” a tribute to that supposed heritage. My mother didn’t think there was anything to it, but who knows? As far as I know, no one in my family has traced our ancestral roots. We do go back to the early days of Plymouth Colony, so anything is possible.
I’ve heard it said that Warren should have been able to put all this behind her rather easily, but I don’t think it’s that simple. At root, I think she harbored a romantic vision of herself, which is why she listed herself as a Native American in law directories and contributed recipes to a cookbook by Native Americans. I suspect she’s deeply embarrassed that her fantasies have been exposed and mocked.
Can Warren overcome this politically? We’ll see. I’ve thought from the beginning that Warren’s Republican opponent, Sen. Scott Brown, was a tough candidate with first-rate political instincts. As I recently wrote in the Huffington Post, I thought the only reason that Warren had a chance was the large Democratic turnout that could be expected given that she’ll be on the same ballot as President Obama. Otherwise, Brown would be a shoo-in.
Let’s just say that the events of the past few weeks won’t help Warren.
U.S. Treasury Department photo via Wikimedia Commons.
Hypocrites with their hands out
We’re all having enormous fun with the news that 38 Studios, the video-game company launched by Curt Schilling, is circling the drain after receiving some $75 million in guaranteed loans from the state of Rhode Island.
Schilling has never been shy about expressing his views as a small-government Republican. Old friend (you knew there had to be a Backscratching Day angle, didn’t you?) Steve Syre offers a particularly choice morsel in his Boston Globe column:
Schilling is a self-described conservative with a disdain for big government, which he considers intrusive and overbearing. He is a big believer in people helping themselves and solving their own problems.
A couple of lines from an old post on Schilling’s blog, 38 pitches, sums it up:
“If a conservative is down-and-out, he thinks about how to better his situation.
“A liberal wonders who is going to take care of him.”
Entertaining though Schilling’s hypocrisy may be, that’s pretty small beans compared to the monumentally two-faced philosophy of Joe Ricketts, who may or may not be willing to fund a $10 million Super PAC campaign against President Obama centered largely around his controversial former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
Jim Rutenberg and Jeff Zeleny report in the New York Times that Ricketts appeared to be motivated “primarily by his belief that government spending is out of control and that Mr. Obama cannot be trusted to rein in the deficit and reduce the national debt.” Which is what makes this all the more delicious: the Ricketts family, which owns the Chicago Cubs, is seeking $300 million in taxpayer money from the city and state in order to renovate Wrigley Field.
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, a former chief-of-staff to Obama, has been working hard to come up with $100 million in city money for the Cubs, according to Greg Hinz of Crain’s Chicago Business (thanks to Kurt Hartwig for the link).
And Jim Warren of the Daily Beast quotes an unnamed Emanuel aide as saying, “The mayor is pissed. Very pissed. Very, very pissed.”
The Cubs are run by Joe Ricketts’ son Tom, whom the Times describes as apolitical. But the Cubs are by all accounts a family affair, with Hinz calling Joe Ricketts the “patriarch of the Chicago Cubs’ owning family.”
As it turns out, Joe Ricketts has 300 million reasons not to throw the Wright stuff at Obama.
Photo (cc) by Chris Brown and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.
The truth about the deficit
This chart pretty much says it all. But for a fuller explanation, see this story at Talking Points Memo.
A great day for America, but with political implications
Was it partly political? Of course. As Jay Rosen tweeted, “I’m old enough to understand that a president who is with you only when the polling supports it is the best you are ever going to get.”
[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/#!/jayrosen_nyu/status/200314172389601280″]
So perhaps the most remarkable aspect of President Obama’s decision to endorse same-sex marriage was that he clearly saw it as good politics.
There are many ways of looking at this. For instance, Michael Rezendes reports in today’s Boston Globe that it may help the president with fundraising. But I think the overarching reason is that Obama’s been dragged into the most vicious culture war in a generation, and he was fighting with one hand tied behind his back. Now he’s free to play both offense and defense. His base will be as energized as the Republicans’.
(Non-political, real-world aside: This is huge! Tuesday was a great day for our country, and Obama deserves our thanks and congratulations no matter what political calculations went into this.)
Which brings me to an article I wrote for the Boston Phoenix in November 2003, shortly after the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that marriage discrimination was unconstitutional. I urged Democrats in general, and the presidential candidates in particular, to embrace the ruling. My argument was that if they didn’t, they’d be cast by the anti-marriage right as gay-marriage supporters without receiving any of the benefits of actually coming out and saying it.
I was proved correct the following year, when then-president George W. Bush defeated John Kerry in part on the strength of anti-gay-marriage measures on the ballots in a number of battleground states — all while Kerry kept professing his opposition to same-sex marriage.
We are free to speculate that Obama’s opposition to gay marriage was just as political as — or perhaps more political than — his about-face. Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby, who’s against same-sex marriage, tweeted yesterday, “Pro-gay marriage in 1996. Anti-gay marriage in 2004. Pro-gay marriage in 2012. When Obama evolves, he evolves!” Jacoby was referring to a questionnaire Obama once filled out when he was running for office in Illinois.
[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/#!/Jeff_Jacoby/status/200300582387458048″]
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, meanwhile, is doubling down on his opposition to same-sex marriage and even civil unions. And in characteristic Romney fashion, he is saying the matter ought to be left to the states, which contradicts his own position. As Rick Klein of ABC News tweets, “important to add that he [Romney] wants to ban it at federal level, via Constitution.”
[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/#!/rickklein/status/200577602212216833″]
In any event, the president is now on the right side of history, of morality and of human dignity. That it might also help him win re-election is beside the point.
Scott Brown’s flexible New Year’s resolution
Argh. I see Politico beat me to it. But I do want to take note of a rather remarkable statement that U.S. Sen. Scott Brown made Friday on WTKK Radio (96.9 FM) — that he had not touched alcohol since Jan. 1, and wouldn’t until the polls close on Election Day. According to the Associated Press, “Brown called the decision ‘one of those New Year’s things’ that he did ‘on a stupid bet.'”
Well, as Politico puts it, “It depends on what the definition of ‘drinking’ is for Brown.” Because just a week earlier, he allowed Boston Herald reporter Hillary Chabot to accompany him on a day of campaigning. And one of his stops was the Blue Hills Brewery in Canton. “He likes the Red IPA, by the way,” Chabot says in the John Wilcox video that accompanies her story.
In the video, Brown can be seen sampling the brewery’s wares, but if he took more than a sip, the camera didn’t capture it. Chabot’s story resulted in a brief flurry on Twitter among those who thought Brown was setting a bad example by drinking and driving (his truck, of course).
That criticism struck me as overwrought, and it still does. Chabot wrote only that Brown “tasted one of the lighter brews,” although she quoted him as saying of the Red IPA: “You can pound those pretty good.” Sounds like he may need a designated driver in the wee hours of Nov. 7.
But I guess he needs to revise his New Year’s resolution to “No Drinking until Election Day Except with Hillary Chabot.”
Charges, countercharges and the truth
This commentary has also been published at the Huffington Post.
The general-election campaign finally, definitively got under way on Tuesday, when Mitt Romney won Republican primaries in Wisconsin, Maryland and the District of Columbia, and all but snuffed out Rick Santorum’s increasingly outlandish hopes.
With seven months of charges and countercharges from Romney and President Obama to look forward to, it will be interesting to see whether the media are up to the task of parsing truth from fiction — or if, instead, they will settle for the disreputable journalistic game of “Candidate A said X today, while Candidate B responded with Y.”
The first test may well be Obama’s tough speech Tuesday about the budget proposal put forth by U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, the Wisconsin Republican who chairs the House Ways and Means Committee. Among other things, Obama called Ryan’s handiwork “radical” and “thinly veiled social Darwinism.” And he made much of Romney’s praise for the Ryan budget, mocking the former Massachusetts governor for calling it “marvelous.”
So, let’s unleash the X‘s and Y‘s, shall we?
Politico covered Obama’s speech, and ran a separate story on Ryan, who released a statement referring to Obama’s “failed agenda” and “reckless budgets.” The Washington Post characterized the president’s speech as “a stern and stinging rebuke,” balancing Obama’s words with Ryan’s statement. Actual numbers are relegated to a fact-checking piece by Glenn Kessler, who seems reluctant to say anything definitive. PolitiFact, which came under considerable criticism for bestowing its “Lie of the Year” on Democratic critics of Ryan’s Medicare plan last year, has not weighed in yet.
Interestingly, the New York Times appears to contradict the Republican view of reality pretty directly with regard to Obama’s statement that the Ryan budget would cut taxes for millionaires by $150,000 a year. The way this passage is written is a little confusing, but it’s hard not to come away thinking that Obama got it exactly right:
The White House’s calculation for the tax benefit is straightforward, but Republicans on the House Budget Committee say it is wrong. The average household earning more than $1 million would gain $46,000 from the House budget’s repeal of the Medicare hospital insurance tax that was part of the health care law, the Republicans said, and $105,000 from the extension of the Bush-era tax cuts that Mr. Obama wants to see expire next year.
So if “Republicans … say it is wrong,” how is it that the tax cuts add up to $151,000? Yes, the next paragraph goes on to say that might change. But it might not. The Republican Party has demonstrated little in the way of concern about revenue gaps its policies create, especially when those gaps benefit the 1 percent.
Which brings me to reality — that is, to the world of numbers and actual math. The New Yorker’s financial columnist, James Surowiecki, analyzes the Ryan proposal this week and neatly disposes of the notion that it is anything other than a thoroughly political document whose central premises don’t hold up, based as they are on three absurd nos: no tax increases; no cuts in military spending; and no federal intervention in holding down Medicare costs, even as he seeks to privatize the program.
The result, Surowiecki reports, is the Congressional Budget Office has found that all the cuts Ryan proposes — to college assistance, Medicaid, food stamps and other aspects of the social safety net — would, by 2050, come out of just 0.75 percent of the federal budget.
“[T]he Ryan plan is not about fiscal responsibility,” Surowiecki writes. “It’s about pushing a very particular, and very ideological, view of the proper relationship between government and society.”
And it’s the reality of those numbers that the media ought to ask about when they seek out Ryan for comment — or, more important, when they ask Romney why he thinks the Ryan budget is so “marvelous.”
Romney, as we know, is notoriously slippery and flexible, and my concern is that his reputation will work to his advantage. If Rick Santorum were in the lead and had embraced the Ryan budget plan, campaign reporters would assume that Santorum really meant it, and question him accordingly.
But with Romney, there’s an assumption — grounded in his record — that he is, at root, a moderate businessman, not all that ideological, who will say anything and embrace any issue. When the time comes to move to the center, he can make his support for the Ryan budget disappear as though he were, oh, shaking an Etch-a-Sketch.
Words ought to have more consequences that. If Obama can say something demonstrably true, and the media’s principal response is to quote the other side as saying Y, it’s going to be a long, unenlightening spring. And summer. And fall.
Photo (cc) by Gage Skidmore and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.
Don’t sell Scott Brown short
This commentary also appears at the Huffington Post.
Will Republican Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts win re-election this November? Or will he be defeated by his Democratic rival, Elizabeth Warren? The answer, clearly, is “yes.”
I’ve been thinking about writing this post for a while. Frank Phillips’ story in today’s Boston Globe on Democrats who are panicking over the latest polls seems like as good a hook as any, so here we go.
From the moment Warren announced her candidacy, I’ve been struck by the fever-pitch feel that has permeated the race. Not among ordinary voters, of course; they won’t tune in until after Labor Day. But political junkies are fully engaged, as you know if you dip into the Twitter streams at #masen and #mapoli.
It seems to me that we’ve got a race between two very good candidates. I think Warren is the best the Democrats could have hoped for — not just better than the unknowns and wannabes who were running before she got into the race, but better than any member of the state’s Democratic establishment, with the possible exception of Gov. Deval Patrick.
Warren is articulate, she’s an economic populist, she combines insider experience with outsider credentials (how many people have managed to piss off both Republicans and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner?) and she’s almost as pretty as Brown.
Nor has she made any major missteps to this point. Brown supporters have tried to make hay of her endorsement of the Occupy movement, but that’s not going to play. The repeated references to her as “Professor” Warren are kind of pathetic. Anti-intellectualism does not have the sort of appeal in Massachusetts that it does in, say, Texas.
But some Democrats seem surprised, at the very least, that Brown didn’t topple like a rotten tree at the first sign that he’d have a serious opponent. Those sentiments vastly underestimate Brown’s strengths. In fact, I can think of two only first-class political talents to emerge in Massachusetts in the post-Michael Dukakis era: Patrick and Brown. (If Mitt Romney didn’t have a zillion dollars, I’m not sure he could win a seat on the Belmont Board of Selectmen.)
Democrats ignore the reality that no one is really angry at Brown other than liberal activists. He was elected just a little more than two years ago, and the glow from his startling victory over state Attorney General Martha Coakley has not fully faded. Massachusetts voters have traditionally liked having a Republican in a statewide position, and with the governor’s office now in Democratic hands, Brown has that working for him as well. My sense is that a lot of voters are still rather pleased with themselves for their role in Brown’s win, and it’s going to take more than Warren’s just showing up to get them to change their minds.
Nor should anyone discount Brown’s political instincts, which are superb. Brown has been a master of not taking strong stands on divisive issues, leaving himself free to bend when it’s necessary for his survival as a Republican in an overwhelmingly Democratic state. It took a while, but he eventually came around to voting for the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” He was among the very few Republicans who voted in favor of financial regulation, although he also loses points for his role in weakening those regulations.
The outlier in Brown’s record is his staunch support for the Blunt amendment, which would undo President Obama’s compromise on birth-control coverage at colleges, hospitals and other secular employers owned by religious institutions. Although Brown’s stand doesn’t seem to have hurt him in the polls so far, I think those who argue his rising poll numbers reflect public support for Blunt are wrong. Again, people just aren’t paying attention yet.
Why did Brown do it? Who knows? Maybe he’s acting on principle. Maybe the Senate leadership believes it has let Brown stray from the reservation too often and demanded his fealty on this one. In the long run, Brown’s support for Blunt will probably hurt him at the margins, but it’s not likely to determine the outcome of the race.
So what will determine the outcome? My guess is turnout. If this weren’t a presidential-election year, Brown would probably be a shoo-in for re-election. But with Obama on the ballot, a lot of people in Massachusetts are going to come out on Election Day looking to vote a straight Democratic ticket. The likelihood that Romney will be Obama’s Republican opponent only makes matters worse for Brown. Romney is not popular here except among the state’s tiny band of Republicans.
Predictions are futile. But I would imagine that whoever wins, it’s going to be extremely close. My advice: Don’t sell Brown short. And chill out. It’s only March.
Photo of Scott Brown by Dan Kennedy. Photo of Elizabeth Warren by the U.S. Treasury Department via Wikimedia Commons.