Pat Allen: The View from Right Field

Should President Obama Be Using His Family In Campaign Ads?

According to an article in The Washington Post:

“A new Internet ad by the president’s reelection campaign features a portrait of the first family asking supporters to ‘help the Obamas stand up for working Americans.’ …

In the months to come, political strategists expect to see the first family used as a political asset. …

‘The value of the family is enormous,’ said Democratic pollster Celinda Lake. ‘The more you know this family and the more you think of Barack Obama in these terms, the harder it is to vilify him.’

During his presidency, Obama’s children have rarely been featured in such an overtly political way. He has been pointed about leaving family members, especially his children, out of politics.”

While I understand why President Obama may decide to include his wife, and children, in campaign ads, it is unfortunate. If somebody is used as “a political asset,” they are going to be viewed as a political target. I agree with President Obama that family members, especially children, should be left out of politics. But if you think they should be left out, then you need to leave them out.

President Obama Says Jesus Wants the Rich to Pay More Taxes

In his campaign speech at the National Prayer Breakfast last week, President Obama explained how his Christian faith supported his calls for higher taxes on the rich:

“And I think to myself, if I'm willing to give something up as somebody who's been extraordinarily blessed, and give up some of the tax breaks that I enjoy, I actually think that's going to make economic sense.

But for me as a Christian, it also coincides with Jesus’ teaching that ‘for unto whom much is given, much shall be required.’”

I think that President Obama should be a little careful about using Jesus quite so prominently in his call for the rich to pay more taxes.  I say this because President Obama wants the government to force the rich to pay more by raising their taxes.  But I don’t recall Jesus ever calling on Caesar to raise taxes.  Instead, Jesus called on people to give more.  And giving more money to the government voluntarily is not something I have heard the President – or Mr. Buffett – ask their fellow billionaires and millionaires to do.

President Obama’s Testy Side – Again

There was a big brouhaha earlier this week over an apparently testy exchange between President Obama and Governor Jan Brewer of Arizona on the airport tarmac in Phoenix.  According to The Washington Post:

“Shortly after stepping off Air Force One on Wednesday in Phoenix, Obama challenged Gov. Jan Brewer (R) over characterizations she made of him in a recent book. His reaction, coming one day after he used his State of the Union address to call for a renewed spirit of political bipartisanship amid the nation’s economic woes, has exposed him to accusations that he is not interested in working with Republicans.

Brewer, whose ‘Scorpions for Breakfast’ faults Obama for pandering to Hispanic voters in his immigration policy, said the president mentioned the book, unprompted, after she invited him to meet with her to discuss ‘Arizona’s comeback.’”

Bizarre.  The President was in Arizona to talk up his State of the Union address, and when he meets the governor of Arizona he almost immediately brings up something in a book she wrote that he thought was unfavorable to him.  Interestingly, Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, didn’t try to deny that the President raised the question of her book to Governor Brewer, though he said it was just a matter of the President telling Governor Brewer that her description of a White House meeting was “not accurate”.

In either case, with unemployment at 8.5% and the economy just barely growing, you would think that the President would have more important things to worry about than what a governor wrote about him in a book.

But this actually seems to fit a bit of a pattern.  Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana has said that, when President Obama visited Louisiana in 2010 after the big Gulf oil spill, Obama challenged him, once again on the airport tarmac, about a letter Governor Jindal had sent to the President asking for food stamps for people who had become unemployed.  Jindal wrote:

“President Obama had personalized this. And he was upset.  There was not a word about the oil spill. He was concerned about looking bad because of the letter.”

Once again, wouldn’t you think a President would have more important things to worry about this kind of thing?  Can you imagine Ronald Reagan doing something like this?  Can you imagine Abraham Lincoln doing this?

President Obama’s “Recess” Appointments – Even Though the Senate Isn’t In Recess

Last week President Obama made four recess appointments, three to the National Labor Relations Board and one to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.  The Constitution clearly allows a President to make “recess appointments”.  Section 2 of Article II says:

“The President shall have power to fill up all vacancies that may happen during the recess of the Senate, by granting commissions which shall expire at the end of their next session.”

The problem with President Obama’s recess appointments was that the Senate wasn’t in recess.  Senate Republicans, picking up on an idea Harry Reid started in 2007 to stop President Bush from making recess appointments, have forced the Senate to hold pro forma sessions instead of going into recess.  But President Obama didn’t care.  He decided on his own that the Senate was “functionally in recess”, so he went ahead with his appointments.

Which is where Clarence Page’s Op-Ed article in Wednesday’s Chicago Tribune comes in.  Mr. Page agrees there is a constitutional question here, though the way he describes it makes one doubt he considers it all that serious:

“It's about such heavy-duty constitutional questions as how far an embattled president can go to perform his job despite cynical lawmakers who leave no tricks up their sleeves in order to stop him.”

Mr. Page goes on to talk a lot about the policy questions involved and why President Obama is right and the Republicans are wrong.  But at the end of his article, Mr. Page sort of returns to the constitutional question:

“Either way, the Cordray fight [i.e., the fight to appoint Richard Cordray as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau] joins other recent events in signaling a less conciliatory Barack Obama. He is framing this battle as a fight against obstructionist Republicans who stage phony sessions to defend big banks against middle-class Americans. Even if Obama were to lose in the Supreme Court, he stands an excellent chance with the court of public opinion.”

What Mr. Page is missing here is the importance of process.  Mr. Page sees President Obama’s policies as right and those of his opponents as “obstructionist”.  But the key to our democracy, and to the protection of our democracy, is not getting policy right but following proper and agreed-upon processes and procedures. 

Our liberties are not protected by those in Washington making the right choices on policies. (Fortunately.)  Our liberties are protected by making sure those who govern us follow the processes and procedures that have been established for running our government.  When those in power decide that their policies are important than our laws and Constitution, i.e., when they decide the ends are more important than the means, our democracy is endangered.

And I really wonder if Mr. Page has thought through the implications of his last sentence:

“Even if Obama were to lose in the Supreme Court, he stands an excellent chance with the court of public opinion.”

Does Mr. Page really think the court of public opinion is more important than the Supreme Court?  There have been many times when the court of public opinion wouldn’t have given us much of a First Amendment.  Protections for people accused of a crime wouldn’t do well in the court of public opinion, either.  And in 1954 I doubt the court of public opinion would have given us a unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education, assuming Brown would have won at all.

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Update (1/12/12 8:15 am):  Fixed a typo in the ninth paragraph.

Update (1/21/12 4:45 pm): A shortened version of this post appeared as a letter to the editor in "Voice of the People" in today's Chicago Tribune.  See here.

Are We Good Enough for President Obama?

On June 17, 1953, workers in Communist East Germany revolted in protest of new, increased work standards that the government tried to impose.  The protests were put down by Soviet tanks.

In response, Bertold Brecht, German poet, playwright and theater director, who had actually moved to East Germany from the West in 1949, wrote this poem:

“After the uprising of the 17th of June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?”

Bertold Brecht’s poem came to mind when I read, over the weekend, that President Obama said the United States has “been a little lazy” in terms of “selling America and trying to attract new business into America.”  This was after the President said that America has “gotten a little soft” and that we “have lost our ambition, our imagination”.

Maybe Bertold Brecht was onto something.  If the American people aren’t good enough for Barack Obama, maybe he should choose himself another people to be President of.

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Update (11/15/11 11:00 am):  Corrected a typo in the last paragraph.

President Obama Thinks We Have Lost Our Ambition and Our Imagination

Yesterday President Obama told the guests at a Democratic fundraiser in San Francisco that “We have lost our ambition, our imagination, and our willingness to do the things that built the Golden Gate Bridge." 

Maybe the President has lost his ambition.  Maybe the Democrats have lost their imagination.  But I haven’t.  And lots of Republicans haven’t either.  But most importantly, America hasn’t.

Americans haven’t lost our ambition.  We haven’t lost our imagination.  Maybe we just need a president who doesn’t want to spread around our money, who doesn’t think we just cling to our religion, who doesn’t think we have gone soft.  Maybe we need a president who believes in us so we can believe in him. 

Washington Budgeting: Adventure in Fantasy Land

Here is a story about how they do budget numbers in Washington, D.C.  It’s something to keep in mind when the people there start talking about deficits and savings and all those things.

Politicians in Washington almost always support their positions on budget issues by claiming that their numbers are supported or verified by the Congressional Budget Office.  For example, when Congress passed Obamacare in 2010, its supporters claimed that it would save money, and they claimed that the CBO agreed.  One of the reasons that Obamacare was going to “save” money was a new program called CLASS, which was short for Community Living Assistance Services and Support.  CLASS was a voluntary government insurance program that was supposed to cover home health care services for older or disabled adults.  Of course, the reason that the CBO said CLASS was going to save money was that it was going to start collecting premiums right away, but it wasn’t going to pay benefits for five years. 

The important thing to understand about the Congressional Budget Office is that when the CBO “scores” proposals for budget purposes, they only look at the costs and income for the first ten years.  Those are their rules.  (They may even be the law; I don’t know.)  Since the CLASS program was going to collect premiums for ten years and only pay out benefits for five years, it was going to have more money coming in than it would have going out over the first ten years.  Voilá!  It was going to save money – under the rules that the CBO has to operate under.  The fact that the program would be a budgetary disaster later on was irrelevant to the way that CBO counts things.

In fact, even though the program was a long-term budget-buster, since the CBO only looks at the first ten years, and since that is how things are calculated for Congressional budgeting purposes, when some Republicans were talking about repealing the CLASS program earlier this year (because it is unsustainable on a long-term basis), under CBO rules the Republicans would have had to either raise taxes or cut other spending to balance the loss of budget savings from repealing the program.*  Mind-boggling.

But finally, earlier this month, the Obama administration admitted that they couldn’t come up with a way to make the numbers work for the CLASS program, and they shut it down.  (The Senate had included in the original Obamacare legislation a provision requiring the Department of Health and Human Services to certify that the program had an actuarially-sound premium before they could start it up.  When they couldn’t certify that, the program had to be shelved.)

This is where it gets interesting – and really bizarre.  Once the Obama administration finally admitted what everybody already knew (i.e., that the program didn’t work financially) and said that they were shutting it down, the head of the CBO said this:

“Following longstanding procedures, CBO takes new administrative actions into account when analyzing legislation being considered by the Congress – even if it has not published new baseline projections.  Beginning immediately, therefore, legislation to repeal the CLASS provisions in current law would be estimated as having no budgetary impact.”

In other words, if Congress had passed a bill cancelling the CLASS program before HHS acted, then the cancellation would have counted, for CBO purposes, as an $86 million increase in the 10-year deficit calculation.  But a month later, after the Administration decided to shut the program down, repealing it wouldn’t count toward the 10-year budget projections.

While I am sure that this makes sense in the strange world of federal government budgeting rules, it obviously doesn’t sense to anybody who lives in the real world.  And that is something to remember the next time you hear somebody say that their budget numbers have been confirmed by the Congressional Budget Office.

One final point, not on budgeting but on the Obama administration:  Even though the Administration has admitted that it could not come up with a way to make the CLASS program work financially, President Obama still opposes repealing it.  Why?  According to a White House spokesperson:

“We do not support repeal.  Repealing the CLASS Act isn’t necessary or productive. What we should be doing is working together to address the long-term care challenges we face in this country.”

Which is gobbledygook.  Maybe I am being cynical, but I think the reason that President Obama doesn’t want to repeal the program is because, if the President gets re-elected and doesn’t have a Democratic Congress, he wants the ability to be able to have his new person at HHS look at the CLASS program and come up with a new theory on why it does work and start implementing it – without needing any kind Congressional approval.**

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* “The Definition of Insanity,” The Wall Street Journal, October 4, 2011.

** Some health care “experts” have already criticized the President for shutting the program down, saying that it actually could work (see here).  After the election, there is no reason to believe that the President wouldn’t decide they were right after all and start it up again.

Update (10/23/11 9:25 am):  For a prior comment on the CLASS Act, see here.

Japan Tells President Obama That Apologizing in Hiroshima Is a "Non-Starter"

According to a secret cable published by Wikileaks, it appears that, when President Obama went to Japan in November of 2009, he wanted to go to Hiroshima and apologize for the United States having dropped atomic bombs on Japan in August of 1945 and that it was the Japanese who had to tell him he could not to do it.

While the White House is claiming “there was never any plan for the president to apologize for Hiroshima”, let’s look at what the cable says.  The cable, which was from the United States Ambassador to Japan to the State Department, said this, in relevant part (the whole cable can be found here):

“On the President's upcoming visit to Japan in November [2009], he [Vice Foreign Minister Mitoji Yabunaka] recommended keeping the program relatively simple and centered around the Tokyo metropolitan area, adding that it would be premature to include a visit to Hiroshima.  …

Anti-nuclear groups, in particular, will speculate whether the President would visit Hiroshima in light of his April 5 [2009] Prague speech on non-proliferation.  He [Vice Foreign Minister Yabunaka] underscored, however, that both governments must temper the public's expectations on such issues, as the idea of President Obama visiting Hiroshima to apologize for the atomic bombing during World War II is a ‘non-starter.’”

While the cable does not specifically state that it was the President’s, or the United States’, idea for the President to apologize in Hiroshima, I find it hard to believe Japan would tell the President it was a “non-starter” for him to go to Hiroshima and apologize if the United States did not bring up the idea itself.  Is it really plausible that the Japanese government would tell the President that he shouldn’t go to Hiroshima and apologize on their volition? Would the Japanese really bring this up first, by themselves, without the United States indicating pretty clearly that this is what the President wanted to do?  Highly unlikely.

Which means that President Obama wants to, and apparently thinks it is appropriate for him to, apologize on behalf of the United States for the United States having dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Which means I want Barack Obama out of the White House on January 20, 2013, before he gets a chance to do that. 

I am not going to repeat all of the arguments supporting President Truman’s decision to drop these bombs – other than to say that I envy the certainty of those who say that it wasn’t necessary to drop the bombs and that Japan was going to surrender anyway, without an invasion, in a very short time.

I don’t know what Japan was going to do, and I can imagine that the decision to drop the bombs must have been an incredibly difficult one for President Truman.  He couldn’t know for certain if dropping the bombs was necessary to end the war or if they would end the war, whether because they didn’t work or because the Japanese still wouldn’t surrender.  He made the decision because it seemed to him, based on what he knew then, that dropping the bombs was the best way to end the war as soon as possible and with the fewest number of American casualties (he was, after all, President of the United States), as well as the fewest Japanese casualties.  I can only imagine the relief that President Truman felt when Japan announced its surrender six days after the second bomb was dropped. 

But in President Obama’s opinion, this most difficult decision was so wrong and so morally repugnant that he wanted to go to Hiroshima to apologize for it.  I am very glad he was not able to do it. 

One final point:  Next year, during the campaign, when President Obama talks about the obstructionist or “do nothing” Republicans in Congress, trying to invoke the spirit of Harry Truman, remember that President Obama wanted to apologize for President Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bombs on Japan to try to end World War II war as soon as possible.  And realize that Barack Obama is not a Harry S. Truman Democrat.

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Update (10/16/11 8:05 pm): I corrected a typo in the first paragraph.  I changed "November of 1989" to "November of 2009".

President Obama to America: You’ve Gone “Soft”

In an interview yesterday with a TV station in Orlando, Florida, President Obama said this about us:

"The way I think about it is, you know, this is a great, great country that had gotten a little soft and, you know, we didn't have that same competitive edge that we needed over the last couple of decades. We need to get back on track."

Did he just say that it’s our fault he’s doing a lousy job?  Is this his "malaise" moment?

President Obama’s Debt Reduction Plan

I apologize for not commenting earlier on the deficit reduction plan that President Obama submitted to Congress on Monday, but I have been busy going to a couple of Cubs games against the Brewers (fortunately, I went to the two games the Cubs won and not the one they lost) and some other things.  Also, there didn’t seem to be any real rush to comment on it.  It’s not like it’s going to pass. 

A week and a half ago I said that President Obama wasn’t really serious about trying to pass his American Jobs Act because of how he was proposing to pay for it:  He suggested raising taxes that the Democrats wouldn’t vote for when Nancy Pelosi was Speaker.

The President’s plan to reduce the deficit was similarly unserious – except as a campaign document.  First, of the $3 trillion in cuts that the President is claiming, $1 trillion is money that we save by cutting our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.  This is obviously phony since those cutbacks are going to happen anyway.  It’s sort of like saying I’m going to cut my expenses in 2012 by not having another wedding.  The Associated Press wouldn’t call it phony because Republicans were proposing the same thing.  Well, if Republicans are counting those reductions in their plan, then that part of their plan is phony, too.

Three-quarters of the rest of the deficit reduction plan is tax increases – on the rich, of course.  These aren’t going to pass in this Congress.  For that matter, given the reception they are getting from a lot of Democrats, they aren’t going to pass in the next Congress either, even if President Obama is re-elected.*

While the President’s plan isn’t going to pass, it is interesting.  I think it probably answers certain questions I asked about Barack Obama back on September 1, 2008:

“So what does this tell us about [Barack] Obama? Does it tell us he is very liberal, except when political expedience makes him take more moderate positions? Or does it tell us that he is really moderate, except when political expedience (and his constituents) requires him to take liberal positions?”

I think what his deficit reduction plan and his American Jobs Act tell us about President Obama is this:  He thinks government should spend lots more money.  He thinks government can do good things when it spends money.  Things like green energy (for example, Solyndra), high speed rail, and more.  And he thinks he can pay for all those things by raising taxes on people who aren’t paying their fair share of taxes, people who really have more money than they need.  President Obama still thinks, as he said back in 2008, “when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R, Va.) said this about one of the Democrats who participated in the debt talks with Vice President Biden in May and June: “[H]onestly, one of them said to me, ‘Some people just make too much money.’”**  While it wasn’t President Obama who said it, you get the feeling that he believes it, that this belief is a central part of his political philosophy, and that this is how he’s going to pay for all that increased government spending he is in favor of.

Which means the next 13-1/2 months is going to be a very long campaign.

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* And if they did pass, I can assure you they would not generate nearly as much money as is projected.  Rich people will figure out how to pay less tax than Congress thinks it is imposing.  Count on it.

** Joseph Rago, “The Weekend Interview with Eric Cantor: Obama and the Narcissism of Big Differences,” The Wall Street Journal, August 6, 2011.