Bill Greider, a thinker and writer, I have long admired and a former neighbor in Washington DC weighs in.
The recent roughing-up of Barack Obama was in the trademark style of
the Clinton years in the White House. High-minded and self-important on
the surface, smarmily duplicitous underneath, meanwhile jabbing hard to
the groin area. They are a slippery pair and come as a package. The
nation is at fair risk of getting them back in the White House for four
more years. The thought makes me queasy.
January 25th, 2008 at 3:46 pm
Give me a break. Politics is a contact sport. If either Al Gore or John Kerry had been a Clinton-style fighter we wouldn’t be suffering the incompetence of GW Bush. “High-minded and self-important on the surface, smarmily duplicitous underneath, meanwhile jabbing hard to the groin area” is a much better description of W than of either Clinton. Read what Mary Matalin has to say in “All’s Fair” about “junior’s” role as the enforcer of his father’s 1992 campaign — and she was a fan.
Politics is show business. They’re all about ego, that doesn’t mean they’re bad. Talk about self-importance, FDR ran for four terms!
If Obama is the nominee, he’ll be thankful for having learned to fight back in the primaries. Because the dirt and attack machine of the Right will make the Clinton’s comments look like patty cake.
January 25th, 2008 at 4:05 pm
I don’t agree Michael. A candidate lies, cheats, and steals when he/she can’t win on the merits. We should expect this from the Republicans. After all no one actually likes their positions. But we should expect more from our side. Anyway, why resign ourselves to this gutter politics? Can’t we do better? In the end, there are only two options available in social relations, conversation or violence. I’d prefer a politics based on conversation.
January 25th, 2008 at 4:48 pm
We’d all prefer a politics based on conversation. Gore & Kerry tried playing nice, and lost. This is a rough game, it requires fighters. I’ll give you Bill’s lieing about his sex life, but what examples are there of either Bill or Hillary cheating or stealing? He was easily our best president since Nixon (I never thought I’d say that in the ’70’s).
Their campaign’s “attacks” on Obama are pretty mild, and mostly comments about his record which is fair game. I haven’t seen anything I’d call “gutter”. Compare them to the Swift Boat lies about Kerry, the Bush slime against McCain in 2000 or the Right’s scandalous attacks on Max Cleland in Georgia.
I have my own doubts about Hillary, but I think she & Bill are being slammed in the press about things that any other politician would get a pass on.
January 25th, 2008 at 5:13 pm
Bill and Hillary are typical old style politicians who will say and do anything to get in power. Their time is over, let’s have something new and fresh.
January 25th, 2008 at 5:52 pm
All – I’m all for the rough and tumble. I am concerned at how the Clinton’s behavior -and especially the former president’s – is alienating a good chunk of the left. When former Rolling Stone editor Bill Grieder is off the bus, something is going wrong. There is much talk about GOP fracturing: Are we all that sure that Democrats aren’t as well.
January 25th, 2008 at 6:19 pm
I hate party politics, plain and simple, as I’ve said over-and-over. Beyond that, the Democrats are on course to wreck their party forever by raising taxes.
But for those who still doubt the positive effects of tax-cutting, the following excerpt of a WSJ article explains what Ronald Reagan learned from reading Andrew Mellon and what the Dems better learn quickly: when you try to tax the rich, they simply avoid the taxes; so if you want their tax dollars, the tax rates must be palatable to them:
“But now we get to the secret sauce, and the essence of what really happens in the realm of tax rates, incomes and tax payments by the rich.
We have accurate data on both the total taxes paid by the top 1% of income earners, and on their comprehensive household income as measured by the Congressional Budget Office. From these two data series we can calculate the effective average tax rate for the top 1% of all income earners.
Surprise, surprise: The effective average tax rate for the top 1% of income earners barely wiggles as Congress changes tax codes after tax codes, and as the economy goes from boom to bust and back again (see chart).
The question is, how can that effective average tax rate be so stable? The answer is simply that the very highest income earners are and have always been able to vary their reported income and thus control the amount of taxes they pay. Whether through tax shelters, deferrals, gifts, write-offs, cross income mobility or any of a number of other measures, the effective average tax rate barely budges. But this group’s total tax payments are incredibly volatile.
For the low- and middle-income earners, the effective average tax rate has tumbled over the past 25 years, and so have tax revenues no matter how they’re measured.
Using recent data, in other words, it would appear on its face that the Democratic proposal to raise taxes on the upper-income earners, and lower taxes on the middle- and lower- income earners, will result in huge revenue losses on both accounts. But some academic advisers to Democratic candidates have a hard time understanding the obvious, devising outlandish theories as to why things are different now. Well they aren’t!”
January 25th, 2008 at 9:23 pm
Couple of thoughts. I don’t relish Hillary in the white house, but when looking from the U.S. outward toward the rest of the world, the glib and charming Bill backed by the ball busting bitch from hell Hillary makes a formidable dynamic duo from a foreign policy standpoint.
Studies based on historical comparison of percentages always strike me a specious and largely irrelevant.
January 26th, 2008 at 12:10 pm
Do the Democrats not remember how the elder Bush lost in 1992? When asked if he would raise taxes, he promised to say: “read my lips…”; and then he raised taxes. And then he lost. And Bill Clinton later created the first budget surplus by cutting the capital gains rate at the urging of a Republican Congress.
It’s the taxes stupid!!!! The Democrats are about to turn the clock back to the ’80’s and return the Reagan Democrats to the Republican column with their amazing amnesia. And that would not be good, we need positive and permanent political changes, not a return to the old paradigm. We need both parties moving to the middle.
January 26th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
Big Picture:
Bill Clinton has been doing PR for the U.S. abroad and at home in foreign relations and economy development ever since he left the White House. Hillary has worked for healthcare since the beginning and withstood some of the most vicious attacks ever leveled at a First Lady or a candidate. Together they withstood a relentless Republican attack machine witch hunt that lasted 8 years. There is nothing left to throw against them except Bill’s disdain for the media and Hillary not being a Stepford Wife. Some people don’t like her, but they can’t really say why, except she’s “cold.” Is she supposed to be hysterical? One of the qualities in a good leader is the ability to be emotionally stable in the face of lows and highs.
These people are not naive. The only thing that might save Obama from the Republican attack machine would be that he hasn’t been around long enough or voted “yea” or “nay” enough to have anything to use against him. I’ve heard him speak, and he is a very good speaker, I agreed with everything he said. I’ve been almost knocked down by men and women alike trying to… touch him? get a photo? I’m unsure of the motivation and concerned by a single-minded focus that would cause them to push another person over. Look at the audience at his rallies – they are squealing like girls on the Ed Sullivan Beatles show, not the demeanor of concerned voters in a country at a tipping point.
This country does not need a maleable rock star or cultural messiah personality in the White House at a time when we teeter on recession, our infrastructure has been neglected to pay for a fraudulent war, and we have little respect left on the world stage. We do not need another Jimmy Carter (a great man, but too nice and unprepared against the Repub machine). Jimmy Carter represented change, a fresh face. Times are similar to 25-30 years ago: savings & loans then, mortgage/credit crisis now; air traffic controllers strike then, now poorly trained air traffic controllers; Shah/Iran-Contra then, Irag/Pakistan now.
Black Monday. Dollar falling. People complain too much Clinton. How long has a Bush been pulling the strings behind the scenes or out front? 27 years? Longer?
This country needs a leader with proven economic and foreign policy experience, impervious to the Republican machine, able to take a stand and make things happen. Yes, I see a Clinton vote as a 2-for-1. I’d love to go back to a balanced budget, less crime on the streets, and forward with a Democratic congress working with the President than against her, with universal health care for all.
As I said to a Nader-supporter in 2004 who bubbled, “I just couldn’t get behind Gore” – and here we are. No, I’m not crazy about the two-party system. In the ideal, we can vote our conscience, vote for the candidate most like us, or who we most like. In the real world we have to vote for who is less evil, if not more capable of solving the big problems, who will cause the least damage, or be least likely to be run over by the opposition. If we get more than that, it’s a joyous day of hope and faith renewed.
Vote for who can win against the Republicans and who can stand up to their mafioso tactics. A vote for anyone other than Hillary Clinton is a vote FOR the Republican machine. Even a win for Obama in 2008 assures a return to Repulican rule in 2012. Except for the bright 8 years of the first Clinton presidency, they’ve been in charge for at least 27 years. Yes, it would be great to move toward the middle, but the Republicans will not let it happen.
January 26th, 2008 at 2:58 pm
The Republicans have no choice. Did you see Peggy Noonan’s piece on how breaking-up can be so difficult. They have to change because society has changed; and their best candidate (McCain) is a guy who will pick a Democrat (Lieberman) as his running mate. Inside story, a Republican congressman who will go unnamed literally began crying the other night at an event when describing what’s happening to a small group of supporters. Tears!! The GOP as you knew it is DONE! And they KNOW it.
But what will the Democrats become?? Let’s hope something closer to the middle, otherwise, we could be back to old models in a few years. The Dems can begin by taking a REALISTIC look at tax policies.
January 26th, 2008 at 3:06 pm
Jimmy Carter is a curious example. He is one of the few American presidents for whom the job of leader of the free world was the anteroom to his real greatness. We criticize his presidency as blighted by naivete and distaste for realpolitik (and indeed I think we elected him as the ‘anti-Kissinger’). Yet in his subsequent search for world peace he has treated the world’s worst dictators with non-judgmental respect, and so gained their ear, and so changed their policies. Al Gore, and to some extent Bill Clinton, have followed Carter’s example to act as post-Presidential ‘citizens of the world’.
Was the Presidency a necessary step in Carter’s growth as a leader, or was it an unfortunate digression? Does any of this apply to Obama?
January 26th, 2008 at 6:21 pm
For those that were wondering, the WSJ “article” from which Hayden Fisher quotes at length is actually an Op/Ed by supply side economics snake oil salesman – and advisor to Reagan – Arthur Laffer. There may be debates as to what the Democrats should do if they are to control the White House and Congress, but, any sort of return to the long-since discredited supply side economics should NOT be part of their agenda. Period.
January 28th, 2008 at 12:13 am
Brian, that may be, but the supply-side economic view is a misnomer. Reagan culled that policy from a book written by Andrew Mellon during the 20’s that postulated that higher taxes on the rich simply don’t get paid; they get avoided. The progressive income tax only affects the middle and upper middle class; the truly wealthy don’t need to earn wages and can simply reduce their salaries during high-tax times. And they let their assets sit unrealized when capital gains rates are high, waiting for them to drop before liquidating and realizing the capital gains hits. THIS IS REALITY. Not economic theory.
The Democrats’ proposed tax hikes will hit the creative class making $75K – $300K the greatest, depriving them of disposable income that would be redistributed into the service and hospitality economies principally; and into automotive and home improvement industries. If Uncle Sam hits their wallets, the economy will suffer palpably. The Dems need to step out of theory and into reality before they beset the country into a recession and lose a would-be new voting bloc.