As noted earlier, one-time U.N. Ambassador John Bolton wasn’t exactly wild about former President Bill Clinton’s trip to North Korea, even if it did get two American journalists released from detention and 12 years of hard labor.
Specifically, Bolton worried that Clinton’s vist “comes perilously close to negotiating with terrorists,” and — though the administration repeatedly emphasized that the former president’s trip was a private one and he was not representing the government — in the Washington Post, he wrote, “[I]t seems that the Obama administration not only chose to negotiate, but to send a former president to do so.”
Bolton’s ideological comrade, Charles Krauthammer, took a similar position, saying on Fox News Tuesday night, “[I]t was a hostage ransom. No question at all.”
Except, oops — maybe not.
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs got a question about this at his briefing on Wednesday. Here’s the exchange:
Q Did President Clinton have — and you may have discussed this on the call last night — any authorization to make any kind of offers or suggestions for rewards for releasing these journalists?
MR. GIBBS: There were no messages that were passed.
Bill Clinton sat down for an long interview with Bill O’Reilly last night on Fox News, where the two discussed everything from economic and immigration policy, to the horse-race politics of the 2012 election. Clinton issued a favorable forecast for Barack Obama’s re-election — saying his prospects were better than 50/50 — and commented that the president’s current, tougher political posture would help him in the long run.
“[Obama's] out there running against himself now,” Clinton said. “Soon as he gets an opponent, it will be about the next four years — who do you think is going to take us in the right direction.”
Clinton also weighed in a few of the Republican candidates, saying of one-time nemesis Newt Gingrich that he respected the man’s ability to “think and do.” The former president was, however, momentarily lost for words when O’Reilly followed up by asking if he respected Gingrich “as a man.” Clinton tip-toed around the answer, then spent the next few moments criticizng the former speaker’s “scorched-earth” political approach.
When questioned about Mitt Romney, Clinton damned the former Massachusetts governor with praise for his Massachusetts health reform legislation. He stopped short, however, of issuing any endorsements for the Republican primary, saying only that he would vote for Barack Obama regardless in the general election. In fact, the closest he would get to voicing support for any of the candidates was when he mentioned that he liked Jon Huntsman — though he then quickly poked fun at the Utahan’s meager support in the polls.
I got to debate Jonathan Chait about his much-discussed New York magazine piece, “When Did Liberals Become So Unreasonable?” on “Hardball” Tuesday night. He’s aiming at President Obama’s liberal critics, but in fact his article proves that criticism is nothing new. Apparently, we’ve always been unreasonable, because Chait’s survey of Democratic presidents going back to FDR finds that the left has always found a reason to squawk. But he seems to think we’re particularly unreasonable when it comes to Obama. With Thanksgiving ahead, I found myself wondering whether liberals should be more grateful to the president.
First, let’s take in the list of Obama’s accomplishments as Chait describes them. They’re considerable:
His single largest policy accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act, combines two sweeping goals—providing coverage to the uninsured and taming runaway medical-cost inflation—that Democrats have tried and failed to achieve for decades. Likewise, the Recovery Act contained both short-term stimulative measures and increased public investment in infrastructure, green energy, and the like. The Dodd-Frank financial reform, while failing to end the financial industry as we know it, is certainly far from toothless, as measured by the almost fanatical determination of Wall Street and Republicans in Congress to roll it back.
Beneath these headline measures is a second tier of accomplishments carrying considerable historic weight. A bailout and deep restructuring of the auto industry that is rapidly being repaid, leaving behind a reinvigorated sector in the place of a devastated Midwest. Race to the Top, which leveraged a small amount of federal seed money into a sweeping national wave of education experiments, arguably the most significant reform of public schooling in the history of the United States. A reform of college loans, saving hundreds of billions of dollars by cutting out private middlemen and redirecting some of the savings toward expanded Pell Grants. Historically large new investments in green energy and the beginning of regulation of greenhouse gases. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act for women. Elimination of several wasteful defense programs, equality for gays in the military, and consumer-friendly regulation of food safety, tobacco, and credit cards.
We could, and I do, quibble about details in each of Chait’s examples, but his overall point is important: Even if every measure he lists has its flaws, the list itself is impressive. That President Obama took office in the middle of the worst crisis since the Great Depression, and with a nominal Democratic majority in both houses, helps explain why some people still expected more, but we should still stop more often and acknowledge what’s been accomplished in the last three years.
Having conceded that, I think Chait’s piece suffers from big definitional problems. First, how do we define liberals? Polls show self-described liberal Democrats are happy with Obama – in Gallup’s weekly tracking polls upward of 75 percent approve of the job he’s doing (and the same was true for Clinton), and that’s been true since he took office. There’s no crisis of liberal support for the president.
Also, Chait’s roster of unreasonable “liberals” includes MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz. That’s silly: Schultz, cited along with New York Times centrist Thomas Friedman, rails against politicians who refuse to cut the deficit by trimming so-called entitlements and raising taxes. But that’s exactly what Obama tried to do with his proposed debt-ceiling “grand bargain”; Republicans wouldn’t cooperate. Those guys aren’t liberals; Friedman is a formerly liberal, formerly smart writer who got rich and stopped paying attention. (You’d think he could at least pay someone to pay attention for him, so he’d stop asking Obama to do what Obama has already done.)
What about actual liberals, people to the left of Schultz and Friedman – people like Rachel Maddow and, OK, sure, me. Yes, some of us have demanded more from Obama – on the economy, on Wall Street regulation, on gay rights, on civil liberties. But you know what? That’s our job. And when Chait goes down the list of the ways liberals have been disappointed with Democratic presidents going all the way back to FDR, I found myself thinking, Good job, liberals! Because we were usually right, and the country’s a better place for our pushing.
While liberals lionize JFK today, Chait notes, during his presidency (cut short 48 years ago Tuesday) they criticized him for not moving faster on civil rights. Yes, they did. Kennedy was trying to find a way to hold his party together and postpone the departure of the Dixiecrats, and he needed pushing. Should Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. have said, “OK, Mr. President, we’ll skip the March on Washington, we know you’re doing what you can.” Liberals were right to push Kennedy. (I am not trying to say that Obama is compromising on anything equivalent to the basic human rights of African Americans, just that on the social justice issues of their day, presidents need pushing.)
Similarly, while FDR gets more historic veneration from liberals (mainly because there’s almost no one here with us who actually lived through his presidency as an adult), his New Deal only came about because of left-wing agitation (and corporate desperation) in the first place. And liberals were right to criticize some of Roosevelt’s compromises: leaving most African-Americans out of the Social Security program (again to mollify Dixiecrats) and easing up on government spending in 1937 (to mollify conservatives and business leaders), which reversed some of the progress he’d made getting us beyond the Great Depression. Japanese internment was a shame that more liberals should have criticized.
In my adulthood, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton got elected with liberal support but wound up disappointing the left, particularly on the economy. Sadly, both men accepted the Republican premise that the economic problems and social disorder of the late ’60s and early ’70s required that Democrats trim back on government and make nice with business. Chait himself admits that while we all love the outspoken human rights defending, “Habitat for Humanity” supporting ex-president we know today, we didn’t love Carter during his term, and for good reason:
The truth is that Carter’s domestic agenda carried only small bits of liberalism, and those small bits (a consumer-protection agency, tax reform) met with total failure in the Democratic Congress. Carter’s policy accomplishments tilted right of center—he deregulated the airline and trucking industries and cut the capital-gains tax. Most infuriatingly to liberals, Carter refused to push for comprehensive health-care reform. A Carter adviser later recalled that the president “did not see health care as every citizen’s right, nor did he think the government has an obligation to provide it.”
When it comes to Clinton, I think many liberals are frustrated with Obama not because of some supposed great contrast with his supposedly liberal predecessor, but because of similarities between the two. Both of these liberal presidents spent considerable political capital trying to compromise with Republicans, and they failed. That’s been a particular problem for Obama because he didn’t have the strong economy that made Clinton’s inability to wrest concessions from the GOP less painful.
It was precisely because Clinton failed to neutralize the critique of Democrats as the “big government” party that I objected to Obama’s effort to do the same thing in a time of economic crisis. Before it all fell apart, the president defended the idea of his deficit-cutting grand bargain to progressives. “Get this problem off the table,” he argued, “and then with some firm footing, with a solid fiscal situation, we will then be in a position to make the kind of investments that I think are going to be necessary to win the future.” But Clinton already tried that, balancing the budget and endorsing a welfare reform plan largely crafted by Republicans. He believed that getting the issue of bloated government “off the table” would set the table for a progressive agenda. Of course, it didn’t work.
Before writing his New York magazine piece, Chait got a lot of attention for a scathing retort to Drew Westen’s left-wing critique of Obama that ran in the New York Times in August. Chait made a lot of good points; some of the things the left blames on Obama either didn’t happen, or couldn’t have happened otherwise given the Blue Dog Democrats in Congress. But he made one point I wanted to answer at the time, and didn’t. He accused Westen and other lefty Obama critics of romanticizing the power of the bully pulpit and the presidential speech:
Westen’s op-ed rests upon a model of American politics in which the president in the not only the most important figure, but his most powerful weapon is rhetoric. The argument appears calculated to infuriate anybody with a passing familiarity with the basics of political science. In Westen’s telling, every known impediment to legislative progress — special interest lobbying, the filibuster, macroeconomic conditions, not to mention certain settled beliefs of public opinion — are but tiny stick huts trembling in the face of the atomic bomb of the presidential speech. The impediment to an era of total an uncompromising liberal success is Obama’s failure to properly deploy this awesome weapon.
I think that’s a caricature of liberals’ criticism. I have an actual model of what I wish the president had done, and it doesn’t come from Bill Clinton or JFK or FDR, it comes from Barack Obama. Look at the way he tried to sell the deficit-cutting grand bargain, to settle the 2011 debt-ceiling stalemate, even though in the end, the GOP didn’t bite — and probably, predictably, never was going to. That let the president tell voters he was the one who really wanted to cut the deficit, but Republicans wouldn’t let him. He railed, he ranted, he ordered both parties’ leaders to work night and day on a deal. He told the American public to call their congressional leaders and demand compromise — and sure enough, they tied up the phone lines in Congress for a while. In the process, he accepted the Republican premise that deficit-reduction was more important than job creation, a hallmark of the Clintonian “third way” politics he’d supposedly rejected, but even critics had to admit it was a bold political move, and he worked hard and risked a lot for it.
Now, imagine the new president had told a comparably bold story about the recession in early 2009: that he was the one who knew how to use government to fix the economy — but Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats wouldn’t let him do all that was needed, so he was probably going to have to compromise to do what was possible. Obama failed to give voters a vision of the kind of government role that would be required to fix the economy — his advisors were telling him it would take at least $1.2 trillion in stimulus — even if he had to compromise and settle for less. And let’s be clear: He did have to settle for less. Since the Senate barely passed the $787 billion stimulus bill, even though 40 percent of it went to tax cuts, it’s hard to imagine the president getting more than that.
But what if the president laid out bigger, bolder plans for the Recovery Act? What if he’d gone on television every few days, as he did during the debt-ceiling crisis, and demanded the American people lobby Congress? Then, when the compromise stimulus worked as well as it did — and it did work, keeping the country out of a Depression and reversing the steep trend of job losses that began under Bush — but its effects trailed off, he’d have been in a much stronger position to push Congress to do more. But Obama never made that case. That was a missed opportunity that wound up hurting the president politically, and hurting the country.
One last thing about the debt-ceiling debacle: Obama’s approval numbers fell as he pushed for compromise with the GOP, and they have climbed since he’s begun pushing for a jobs bill he knows has no chance of getting Republican support. I think Obama’s liberal critics weren’t just right morally, they were right politically. But I’ll also give the president credit for what now looks like shrewd bargaining: He got the debt ceiling raised without cutting Social Security or Medicare, reckoning he could offer whatever he felt like knowing the GOP would never agree to raise taxes.
I think Chait’s right that liberals are less inclined than conservatives to close ranks around their president, right or wrong. Conservatives tend to defer to authority, by definition; our side, not so much. I think he’s right to remind liberals how much Obama has done. I’m grateful to Obama for a lot of those things, but mostly, I’m grateful to be a member of a party that fights openly about what’s right. When the president got heckled by some Occupy Wall Street protesters Tuesday in New Hampshire, he modeled that tolerance, listening to them; he didn’t have them pepper-sprayed. I guess I’m grateful for that too — but I wish I didn’t have to be.
Here’s our “Hardball” debate. Have a great Thanksgiving.
As Democrats survey the political wreckage of the last three years, the temptation to imagine more pleasant alternate realities is irresistible. What if Hillary Clinton had been elected president instead of Obama? Would events have played out any differently? Or, even more tantalizingly (albeit technically impossible), what if the Big Dog himself, Bill Clinton, had been in charge the last three years? Would he have done a better job fixing the economy? Been more effective knocking heads with the Tea Party? Established himself as a better bet to win a second term?
These are questions that obviously can’t be answered with any certainty. We’ll never know how a Clinton (or a McCain, for that matter) would have tackled the recession or jousted with John Boehner, just as we’ll never know what would have transpired if there had been no stimulus at all, or if Obama had taken a more confrontational stance against his Republican opposition from the get-go, rather than pursue a doomed strategy of bipartisan cooperation. We’re stuck with the world we’ve got.
But in the wake of the publication of Bill Clinton’s new book, “Back to Work: Why We Need Smart Government for a Strong Economy,” there is simply no choice but to plunge into these hypothetical waters, however impracticable they might be. Because even though, when you boil it down, the agenda set forth by Clinton is not substantivally different from what Obama has attempted to execute, the implicit theme of “Back to Work” is that there’s a better way to go about the business of government than what we’ve witnessed in the last three years. As TalkingPointsMemo’s Josh Marshall joked in a tweet, the real title of “Back to Work” should be “If I Were Still President I’d Be Ownin’ These Bitches.” Clinton periodically offers lukewarm support to Obama, but he’d much rather be recounting the successes of his 1990s glory days. Just put him back in the Oval Office, and we’d get this mess fixed, stat!
Dream on, Bill. One could reasonably argue that Clinton would have done a much better job facing down McConnell, Boehner and Cantor on the debt ceiling and government shutdown showdowns. But his program for smart governmental intervention in the economy would have constituted exactly the same kind of anathema to a Republican Party determined to prevent him from accomplishing anything as everything hitherto proposed by Obama. Clinton would also have discovered that when you come into office on the heels of a fiscal quarter in which the economy contracted by almost 10 percent, while facing a Senate opposition determined to filibuster your every move at a historically unprecedented rate from Day One, recovery would be slow and painful and politically costly. Furthermoe, any notion that Bill Clinton might have been tougher than Obama on the banks or Wall Street, while fighting for his beloved middle class, seems especially dubious. Let’s not forget, Obama’s economic team was largely staffed by veterans of the Clinton administration, and some of the key deregulatory measures that contributed to the financial crisis were passed during Clinton’s administration with the enthusiastic support of those very same men.
“Back to Work” includes a cogent analysis of where the U.S. has gone astray, is full of sensible ideas to encourage job creation and economic growth, and makes a robust defense of the notion that strong government is a good thing. But so what? The people who will buy and read this book not only already agree with just about everything that’s in it, but they also already know it all. There’s almost nothing here that hasn’t been proposed by the Obama administration, or that isn’t already a stock part of the mainstream Democratic agenda. Which makes it all completely meaningless in the context of current political gridlock. Clinton wants us to get back to a government based on doing things that work — but as has become abundantly evident in the past few years, congressional Republicans are content with a system that doesn’t work. And neither Obama nor Clinton has any leverage to change that reality, unless Democrats enjoy a surprising victory in the 2012 election.
Any imaginary history that plucks Bill Clinton out of 1992 and time-travels him into 2008 has to grapple with some mighty big historical transformations. For most of his two terms, Bill Clinton enjoyed a huge wind at his back — a stunning period of economic growth that was in large part fueled by two things he can take zero credit for: the end of the Cold War and the massive tech boom. And even without the black hole of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression sucking at his presidency from the moment he moved into the White House, Clinton still managed to make a pretty big mess of things in his first two years. His efforts to push through the first priority on his political agenda — healthcare reform — failed miserably and contributed heavily to one of the worst midterm election defeats faced by a sitting Democratic president in a century. The Obama midterm debacle was even bigger, but in some ways less embarrassing. Until Clinton came along, Democrats had held a majority in the House of Representatives for 40 years.
Today, there is a rosy glow associated with the Clinton years. We tend to forget such things as the tawdry impeachment scandal, for a simple reason: The economy grew quickly and millions of jobs were created. If you couldn’t find a job in Northern California in the late ’90s, you weren’t breathing. The warm tint of the rearview mirror imbues Clinton with the authority to lecture us all now on how we should be doing a better job getting people back to work. But what about the responsibility that Clinton should shoulder for sowing the seeds of the financial crisis in the first place?
Clinton rightly dismisses the notion that his aggressive support of the Community Reinvestment Act was the root cause of the housing bust. We’ll give him points for that. But what are we to make of the one area in which he does acknowledge making a mistake?
I do think I can be fairly criticized for not making a bigger public issue out of the need to regulate financial derivatives. I couldn’t have done anything about it, because the Republican Congress was hostile to all regulations … But I should have spoken out more, especially after Congress included a measure barring financial derivatives from being regulated as securities or commodities in an appropriations bill that passed by a veto-proof majority.
Clinton then has the gall to approvingly mention Commodity Future Trading Commission director Brooksley Born’s strongly voiced opinion at the time that “financial derivatives should be subject to the same kinds of capital and transparency requirements as agricultural derivatives.” He somehow fails to mention the fact that Born’s push to regulate financial derivatives was cut off at the knees by Clinton’s own senior economic officials, including, notably, Larry Summers and Robert Rubin. The heads of the Treasury Department, Federal Reserve and SEC released a joint statement that left no doubt as to administration policy: “We have grave concerns about this action and its possible consequences. We seriously question the scope of the CFTC’s jurisdiction in this area.”
For Clinton to suggest that he would have made a bigger public issue “out of the need to regulate financial derivatives” implies that he agreed with Born — but there is very little evidence to be found for this revisionism in the historical record. The opposite is much more true. Clinton’s administration was extraordinarily accommodative of Wall Street’s desires; their priorities were his priorities. One can assume that the health of the financial sector would have been just as high a priority for a Clinton administration in 2008 as it was in 1999. The banks would certainly have been bailed out, fueling popular resentment and creating identical political problems for the incumbent party.
Before Bill Clinton decided to write a book arguing the merits for smart government, he should have fessed up to how his own dumb government played a role in creating the financial crisis that put so many Americans out of work and has made it so difficult to restart economic growth.
That having been said, however, anyone looking for a smart to-do list of what government can do to spur economic growth would not be ill-served by reading Chapter 6: “How We Can Get Back in the Future Business.” Clinton is a bit more supportive of the debt-reduction proposals that came out of Obama’s Erskine-Bowles commission than most serious liberals will feel comfortable with, but aside from that, most Democrats will find themselves nodding their heads at his proposal to spur green job creation through investment in renewable energy, his call for a big infrastructure buildup, and his plan to fix the housing sector. Clinton’s always been a wonk’s wonk — he clearly enjoys wallowing in the nitty-gritty details of policy. There’s meat in “Back to Work.”
But he gives away the game on Page 111:
If there are any militant antitax folks still reading this book, I can hear the counterattack forming in your minds: “Clinton wants European-style social democracy! He wants to tax us to death. He’s for too much government! He doesn’t believe in American exceptionalism! He doesn’t even love America anymore, or he wouldn’t be telling us all this bad stuff!
“That’s all nonsense,” he writes.
Well yeah, sure, except for the annoying little fact that it’s nonsense that represents the expressed views of most of the Republicans currently elected to Congress. And indeed, it’s mild nonsense that doesn’t even come close to the intemperate nastiness of the rhetoric routinely hurled at President Obama.
It’s cute for Clinton to pretend that any “militant antitax” folk would even purchase “Back to Work,” much less be reading it as far as Page 111 without their heads exploding. The sad truth — and this is something that Clinton is surely aware of — is that all the well-meaning and pragmatically effective job creation tools in the world are worth nothing when matched up against the scorched earth tactics and extreme calcified ideology of the current Republican Party. Clinton’s great 1990s nemesis, Newt Gingrich, is a moderate when compared to the GOP’s Tea Party backbone — something Gingrich learned to his shock when he had the temerity to criticize Paul Ryan’s budget as “right-wing social engineering.”
It is in the context of current political reality that all of Clinton’s suggestions must be evaluated, and this is where “Back to Work” is most lacking. It doesn’t matter how compellingly Clinton makes the case for smart government (and higher taxes) in an era when the opposition party has never been more antitax or more resolutely opposed to government action. It doesn’t matter how bad we look when compared to other rich countries, when we are considered by definition incomparable. It doesn’t matter how much sense Clinton makes — in Washington in 2011, sense is irrelevant.
If you’re in the market for an alternate reality, pick up “Back to Work,” mix yourself a strong drink, and pretend to your heart’s delight that if we just had the right wonk in office, pushing the right kind of policy proposals, unemployment would be falling while the economy boomed. But if you want to change reality, just make sure you go vote.
Politico knows it must keep innovating in the field of political horse-race fanfic in order to maintain its position as the nation’s leader in inane presidential campaign speculation. Last week, Bloomberg published Jonathan Alter jumping on the “Obama might replace Biden with Hillary Clinton even though everyone involved has said in no uncertain terms that that will never ever happen” bandwagon. That was Politico’s beat! Rather than complain, though, Politico has decided to move on. They are now way beyond the Hillary chatter.
We like Joe and respect Hillary. But if President Barack Obama decides to follow the path of his favorite president, Abraham Lincoln, and change running mates, the insiders are buzzing about the wrong Clinton.
That’s right: a Barack-Bubba ticket is the way to go. True, if elected, Bill Clinton would become our first vegetarian veep — since he’s no longer the fast-food guy. Can a real Bubba eat tofu? And yes, he would be the first former president to hold the job, too.
Apparently this is technically possible under the 22nd Amendment, or so these two claim. And, really, this idea is not very much dumber than the Hillary Clinton “buzz,” and it certainly makes more electoral sense than the prospect of a totally unwanted Bloomberg third-party run. Maybe Goldman and Rozell are highlighting the absurdity of the fantasy football school of political punditry? Maybe everyone will decide, upon reading this very silly piece, that the entire running-mate-swap genre of analysis is stupid and embarrassing? (Joe Biden is … not actually unpopular, for one thing.)
Or maybe this will just continue to escalate the imagination-based 2012 campaign analysis arms race. Soon Politico will suggest that Romney select Obama as his running mate in order to win over independents. Or maybe there should be a Biden-Palin ticket? Ron Paul should switch parties and primary Obama. How about an independent Scarborough-Shep Smith ticket? Barack and Michelle Obama must trade places if they want to win in 2012. (Failing that, a Malia and Sasha “Freaky Friday” scenario polls well among married women.) Next week: Mark Penn writes that Obama can only save his presidency by traveling back in time and throwing the election to John McCain. Anything is possible, when you don’t actually understand politics except as an amusing parlor game.
Add Bill Clinton to the long list of public figures who support Occupy Wall Street in principle, but insists they need specific goals in order to achieve anything. The former president was on “Letterman” last night, discussing the conditions of anxiety and frustration that spurred the nationwide protests. After issuing a critical appraisal of the movement, he voicing cautious optimism about the potential for change:
I think that, on balance, this could be a positive thing. But they’re going to have to transfer their energies at some point to making some specific suggestions or bringing in people who know more to try to put the country back to work.
The Presidential Election Quiz 
To ? or Not to ? 
Are Kids Really More Resilient Than Adults 
A match made on Craigslist adult services 
Can’t see the forest for the wood 
The things I carry 
When I lost the ability to type 
Pop art, the beaded edition 
The beautiful banality of high school 
The unemployed meet MacArthur’s tanks 
Demi’s last night out 
One day you’re in 
Pitch and catch 
