The View from Right Field

Obamacare’s Elusive 60th Vote

Democrats complained a lot about the way Republicans passed the tax bill.  Megan McArdle explained¹:

“Last week, as you may have noticed, Republicans passed a tax bill.  As you may also have noticed, Democrats were aghast.  Passing a bill like that on straight party lines!  Using a parliamentary maneuver to push through something that could never have survived a filibuster!  How could Republicans be so brazen, so immoral, so fiscally irresponsible?

Those of us who remembered saying many of the same things during the passage of Obamacare had to beg them to stop.  I mean, we could have been seriously hurt, laughing that hard.”

In addition to the things Ms. McArdle mentioned, there were complaints about how Senators Bob Corker and Mario Rubio agreed to vote for the bill at the last minute.  Democrats complained Senator Corker had abandoned his concerns about the deficit, and Senator Rubio was bought off by a last-minute change to the family tax credit.  Of course, in making those complaints, the Democrats forgot about the Cornhusker Kickback and the Louisiana Purchase that got Senators Ben Nelson (of Nebraska) and Mary Landrieu (of Louisiana) to vote for Obamacare.

Why Is President Obama Still Blaming George W. Bush?

While President Obama was in New Orleans yesterday for the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the President couldn’t resist yet another chance to blame George W. Bush:

"We came to realize that what started out as a natural disaster became a man-made disaster, a failure of government to look after its own citizens." 

What a sad thing to say.  Is President Obama really so desperate to prove his presidency a success that he has to keep attacking his predecessor seven years after he beat him?

Should a president whose administration:

• Couldn’t build a proper healthcare website in 3½ years
• Turned the Animas River yellow
• Appears to be blocking an investigation by one of its own Inspector Generals into a security breach involving records of almost 22 million current and federal workers
• Doesn’t seem to be properly screening the people into whose custody it is placing thousands of illegal immigrant children
• Whose VA was, and may still be, doing a worse job in caring for our veterans than its predecessor
• And more and more

really be criticizing his predecessor for failures of government?  Maybe instead of worrying about what his predecessor did wrong, he should be spending more time getting his administration to do things right.

“Read My Lips, No New Taxes” vs. “If You Like Your Health Plan, You Can Keep It” – Follow-Up

In my post comparing George H.W. Bush’s pledge “Read my lips, no new taxes” to Bararck Obama’s pledge “If you like your health plan, you can keep it,” I said, regarding the accuracy of President Obama’s pledge: “I would assume that President Obama knew this, too [i.e., that his pledge was not true].  He’s not stupid.”

See this short video from Jake Tapper on CNN.  President Obama knew his pledge was not accurate before the law was passed – but he still kept making it – even after the law was passed:

 

Bizarre.

“Read My Lips, No New Taxes” vs. “If You Like Your Health Plan, You Can Keep It”

During the 1988 campaign, George H.W. Bush famously said, “Read my lips, no new taxes.”  In the fall of 1990, he wound up agreeing to raise taxes.  In 1992 he lost re-election in a three-way race with Bill Clinton and Ross Perot

During the 2008 campaign and since (until recently), Barack Obama said, “If you like your health plan, you can keep it.”  Because of the schedule for the implementation of Obamacare, the fact that this was not true for everybody did not become obvious to the general public until very recently, and Barack Obama was re-elected in 2012.

So, what is there to say about these two pledges?  First, a little history about George H.W. Bush’s pledge.  President Bush made the pledge during the 1988 campaign.  I believe (though some may disagree with me) that he meant it when he said it and that he intended to keep it.  But then, that terrible thing, circumstances, intervened. 

In the fall of 1990, President Bush was trying to get Congress to pass a budget.  Over the Columbus Day weekend, there was a short government shutdown.  President Bush was in a tough spot.  He had promised not to raise taxes, but Democrats in Congress (and the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress) would not pass a budget without a tax increase.*  President Bush agonized:

“I had to decide between a compromise on taxes or literally to shut down the government. … When push came to shove and our troops were moving overseas**, we needed a fully functioning government.  I simply had to hammer out a compromise to keep the government open ….”***

The Democrats would not give in, so President Bush did.  He agreed to a tax increase.  Whether that was the right thing to do or not, I don’t know.  But that was the reason he did it.

Now to President Obama’s pledge:  The Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday that the President’s advisers have known for a long time that his pledge was not true for everybody.  There were some people who had health plans that they would not be able to keep:

“At one point, aides discussed whether Mr. Obama might use more in-depth discussions, such as media interviews, to explain the nuances of the succinct line in his stump speeches, a former aide said.  Officials worried, though, that delving into details such as the small number of people who might lose insurance could be confusing and would clutter the president's message. …

One former senior administration official said that as the law was being crafted by the White House and lawmakers, some White House policy advisers objected to the breadth of Mr. Obama's ‘keep your plan’ promise.  They were overruled by political aides, the former official said.  The White House said it was unaware of the objections. …

Richard Kirsch, the former national campaign manager of Health Care for America Now, which pushed for the 2010 health law, said the words were reassuring – and true – for the vast majority of the people, and so his group never raised concerns about that claim.  Adding an asterisk to note that people who had ‘shoddy insurance’ might need to change plans was not practical, he said.

‘The actual, accurate statement is if you have good insurance, and you like it, you can keep it,’ said Mr. Kirsch, now a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, a liberal policy organization.”

In other words, the President’s advisers knew that the statement was not true for everybody.****  There would be a “small number” of people who would not be able to keep their health plan.  But “delving into details … could be confusing and would clutter the president's message.”

So, President Bush violated his pledge because circumstances changed and the nation might soon be at war.  As for President Obama’s pledge, his aides**** knew it was never true in the first place, but it didn’t work politically to say it right.

President Bush’s reason for breaking his pledge versus President Obama’s:  You decide.
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* Some things never change.

** The troops were going to the Middle East to follow through on President Bush’s statement in August, 1990, about Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait: “This will not stand.”  Back then, red-lines were red.

*** George Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (1998), p.380.

**** I would assume that President Obama knew this, too.  He’s not stupid.

So When Does Barack Obama Apologize to George W. Bush?

On Tuesday, President Obama nominated three judges to the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals and, in doing so, complained about the Republicans in the Senate:  “Congressional Republicans [have] cynically used Senate rules and procedures to delay and even block qualified nominees from coming to a full vote.”  The President did admit that Democrats were “not completely blameless” on this issue when he was in the Senate, but he said the Republicans are worse:

"[M]y judicial nominees have waited three times longer to receive confirmation votes than those of my Republican predecessor.  Let me repeat that:  My nominees have taken three times longer to receive confirmation votes than those of my Republican predecessor.”

Glenn Kessler, however, who runs The Fact Checker in The Washington Post, gave the President two Pinocchios for this claim.  (See Mr. Kessler’s article for the details.)  Also, the President did not mention that he personally led an attempted filibuster against Samuel Alito when Justice Alito was nominated to the Supreme Court.

Then today, in response to disclosure of a huge government program collecting data on just about everybody’s phone calls and e-mails, the President (in the words of The Wall Street Journal)

“defended his administration's vast collection of emails and telephone records, saying the programs help prevent terrorist attacks while imposing only ‘modest encroachments’ on people's privacy. 

Mr. Obama made clear that his own views of such intelligence-gathering efforts have evolved since he was a candidate for the presidency in 2008.  He suggested he is now more comfortable with the ‘trade-offs’ involved in guarding against terrorism.”

In the President’s own words:

"I came in with a healthy skepticism about these programs.  My team evaluated them, we scrubbed them thoroughly, we actually expanded some of the oversight, increased some of the safeguards.  But my assessment and my team's assessment was that they help us prevent terrorist attacks."

In other words, President Obama is now complaining about the opposition party in the Senate delaying his judicial nominations when he and his party did the same thing when he was a senator.  And President Obama has continued the very kind of data collection programs that he criticized his predecessor for implementing during the 2008 campaign. 

As I asked in the title of this post, when is President Obama going to apologize to President Bush?

The Presidency of George W. Bush Is Finally Over

I have not had a lot of time for blogging lately.  I retired yesterday, and there were a number of things to do before then.  Now, they’re done, so hopefully I will have more time for posting.  (I left work at noon yesterday and went to the Cubs game with Susan and Ross.  Cubs 7, Diamondbacks 2.  Go Cubs Go!)

Here is a first (short) comment.  Back in November I talked about the possible 16-year presidency of George W. Bush.  Throughout the campaign, the Democrats blamed everything that was wrong with the economy on George W. Bush: it was all Bush’s fault, they said.  I was wondering how long it might last.  But now it looks like it might be over. 

In his weekly address to the nation today, President Obama talked about how much the economy has grown in the last 38 months (note: he has been in office 52 months) and what Congress needs to do it growing.  (He didn’t explain what happened to the recession that was supposed to happen if the Republicans let the sequester kick in on March 1.)  It sounds like the economy is no longer the responsibility of George W. Bush.

That also seems to be true in foreign affairs.  With President Obama’s speech on drones, etc., on May 23, it appears the Barack Obama of the 2008 campaign has finally won the presidency.  The foreign policy of George W. Bush, especially on the war on terror, has been defeated.  Barack Obama circa 2008 has won, and the war on terror will end.  This is true, apparently, regardless of what Al Qaeda, or any other terrorists, may think.  According to President Obama (channeling candidate Obama):

“This war, like all wars, must end.  That’s what history advises.  That’s what our democracy demands.”

I did not realize that ending the fight with Al Qaeda was that easy.  Just say “our democracy demands [it],” and it’s over.  If it was that easy, we should have done it a long time ago.  (I apologize for the sarcasm.  As I said, I have not had a chance to do much blogging lately.  I guess it’s been building up.)

In any case, with the economy doing better and the battle against Al Qaeda being over (at least in our view), it appears that the long presidency of George W. Bush is finally over.  It apparently ended sometime in late May of 2013.  Which means George W. Bush was president, or at least his policies were, for about twelve years and four months.  Longer than even Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  But now it’s over.  Just in time for the 2016 campaign to start.

President Obama on Afghanistan: From “War of Necessity” to “How in the Heck Do We Get Out of Here”

David Sanger has a new book coming out next month, Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power.  Last week The New York Times published an article by Mr. Sanger on President Obama and Afghanistan, “Charting Obama’s Journey to a Shift on Afghanistan,” that was adapted from the book.

Other comments on the article have noted President Obama’s shift of policy in Afghanistan and his eventual exclusion of not only military leaders but also Defense Secretary Gates and Secretary of State Clinton from policy planning sessions.

What is more fascinating to me, however, is how little Barack Obama apparently knew about Afghanistan when he was elected President in 2008.  Throughout the campaign then-Senator Obama talked about the dumb war in Iraq and the “war of necessity” in Afghanistan.  Except the article makes it pretty clear that President Obama’s commitment to the “necessity” of the war in Afghanistan was shallow, if it existed at all beyond being a great campaign issue.

Which brings me back to the 2008 campaign.  One of the big stories of the campaign was how smart Barack Obama was.  He spoke so well, and he knew so much.  Except as Mr. Sanger’s article makes clear, then-Senator Obama didn’t really know what he wanted to do in Afghanistan or how he wanted to do it.

One of the other big stories of the 2008 campaign was how little Sarah Palin knew.  But after reading Mr. Sanger’s article, I wonder if then-Governor Palin knew any less about Afghanistan than Barack Obama did.  And I cannot help but think that she might have been a better learner than he turned out to be.

Ted Stevens Isn't Guilty and He's Not a Senator

The reversal of former Senator Ted Stevens’ conviction and the decision by Attorney General Eric Holder to drop the charges against Mr. Stevens (see here) raise some interesting "what ifs" and a couple of "thank heavens". First, the "what ifs".

What if then-Senator Stevens had not been improperly convicted before the November election? As it was, he only lost by 3,724 votes. If he had not been convicted, or maybe even acquitted, would he have won re-election? Given the small margin by which he lost after being convicted, a good argument can be made that he would have won.

What if Republican Ted Stevens had been in the Senate for the past three months instead of Democrat Mark Begich? Instead of a 58-41 party split (we’re still waiting for Minnesota), we would have a 57-42 split. Would have made a difference on some of those bills that passed without a vote to spare? Even if the bills would still have passed, might some changes have had to be made in them to pick up another Republican vote?

And now for a couple of " thank heavens". What if, instead of Senator Stevens, the Bush Justice Department had gone after a Democratic Senator and convicted him or her through prosecutorial misconduct, thereby flipping a Democratic seat Republican. If the Minnesota seat finally goes to Franken, would that Republican senator be the difference between 59 Democrats and 60 Democrats in the Senate? Thank heavens it was a Republican seat, not a Democratic one.

What if there had been a Democratic President in office last year? What if it was a Democrat-led Justice Department that got a conviction of Senator Steven through prosecutorial misconduct? Would some people think it was part of a plan to get to do whatever was necessary to get to 60 seats in the Senate? Thank heavens it was a Republican-led Justice Department, not a Democratic one.

One final note. Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said this of the decision by Attorney General Holder to ask that the charges against Senator Stevens be dropped: "Ted Stevens is 85 years old. He's already been punished enough. I'm satisfied." Uh, Senator Reid, with his conviction reversed and the charges against him dropped, former Senator Stevens hasn’t been convicted of anything and has no charges against him. Why should he be punished at all? How much punishment is enough for somebody who hasn’t been found guility of anything? But, I guess, that is just Harry "this war is lost"/"we won’t seat anybody appointed by Rod Blagojevich" Reid.

Rove on Bush: He Was Right When It Mattered Most

In Thursday’s Wall Street Journal Karl Rove wrote an op-ed piece entitled "Bush Was Right When It Mattered Most". Some of Mr. Rove’s comments need a response or two.

"To start with, Mr. Bush was right about Iraq. The world is safer without Saddam Hussein in power."

President Bush was right about Iraq, but he was right about Iraq because he thought, as almost everybody else did at the time, both here and abroad, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Given what had happened on September 11, neither the world nor the United States could take a chance on somebody like Saddam Hussein having WMD. Saddam was not involved in the 9/11 plots, but he was doing other things, like paying the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, starting a war with Iran, invading Kuwait, using WMD on his own people, etc. The risk of him having WMD could not be allowed to continue; it was too dangerous. Bush was right to go in for that reason. The fact WMD were not found does not mean the decision was wrong. There did not need to be another justification for the invasion once WMD were not found. The decision could only be based on the facts available at the time it was made. And it was right on that basis – period.*

"And the former president was right to change strategy and surge more U.S. troops."

President Bush was right about changing our strategy in Iraq and, therefore, needing to send more troops, but it took him too long to figure it out. The change in strategy should have happened six, nine, even twelve months earlier. And the failure to figure it out and do it earlier was a huge mistake. Without an incompetent foe like Al Qaeda in Iraq, that delay might have cost us the chance to win. Being right too late doesn’t count as being right.

"Mr. Bush cut income taxes for every American who pays taxes. He also cut taxes on capital, investment and savings."

President Bush was right to cut taxes, but he and the Republicans in Congress were wrong to play games with how the tax cuts were passed. Because of some silly Congressional budgeting rules, these tax cuts (or at least most of them) were structured so they would automatically expire in 2010. That means that unless the new Democratic Congress passes a law to continue them, they go away. That may have made it easier to pass the tax cuts in 2003, but it is not looking like a good idea now. Instead of playing budgetary games, President Bush and the Republicans in Congress should have locked the tax cuts into place when they were originally passed.

"Mr. Bush was right to match tax cuts with spending restraint. … Bill Clinton's last budget increased domestic nonsecurity discretionary spending by 16%. Mr. Bush cut that to 6.2% growth in his first budget, 5.5% in his second, 4.3% in his third, 2.2% in his fourth, and then below inflation, on average, since. That isn't the sum total of the fiscal record, of course -- but it's a key part of it."

I don’t know what Mr. Rove means by "domestic nonsecurity discretionary spending," but this doesn’t reflect the reality of what happened during President Bush’s first six years in office. Once again, it was not all President Bush. Republicans in Congress were complicit, too. But the spending excesses of those six years are hurting Republican credibility now when we try to warn of overspending by the Obama administration. Why should people listen to complaints about wasteful spending from the party that originally brought you the Bridge to Nowhere?

"He was right to have modernized Medicare with prescription drug benefits provided through competition, not delivered by government. The program is costing 40% less than projected because market forces dominate and people -- not government -- are making the decisions."

While the competition part was good, it was wrong to pass the biggest expansion of the welfare state since the Johnson Administration before addressing the funding problems of Medicare and Social Security. Also, let’s see how many of those competition provisions survive the new Administration and the new Congress.

"Mr. Bush was right to pass No Child Left Behind (NCLB), requiring states to set up tough accountability systems that measure every child's progress at school."

No, President Bush was not right to get the federal government so deeply involved in elementary and secondary education. Education is a state and local responsibility. President Bush was President of the United States, not president of the school board. The president’s responsibilities are huge. He has enough to do without taking on other jobs, too. For example, President Bush needed to get Iraq right, not worry about fourth grade social studies scores.

President Bush did get some things right, but not as many as Mr. Rove claims. Also, too much of what President Bush did has cost the Republican Party its credibility and some of its principles. How can you support fiscal responsibility and pass that many earmarks? How can you claim to believe in federalism and pass NCLB? How can you worry about the size of government and pass the senior drug program? People may have thought that doing these things would help Republicans stay in office. They didn’t. And in any case, if that is what you have to do to stay in office, why would you care?

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* The question of whether we should have gone into Iraq in 2003 if we had known that Saddam Hussein did not have WMD is another question, and it is beyond the scope of this post. I hope to get to that question someday.

President-Elect Obama to Take the Train to Washington

Reports are that President-Elect Obama will take a train to Washington for his inauguration. This is apparently another of his efforts to invoke the memory of Abraham Lincoln, though President-Elect Obama will just take the train from Philadelphia instead of all the way from Springfield.

Two comments on this plan, one serious and the other not so. First, the not-so-serious comment: So, President-Elect Obama wants to take the train to Washington for his inauguration, just like Abraham Lincoln. Does that mean Obama is going to get off the train in Baltimore and sneak into Washington in the middle of the night, dressed up like an old woman?

Second, the serious comment. President-Elect Obama has said Abraham Lincoln is one of his heroes. There can be no objection to that. There may not be a better role model for a public official than Abraham Lincoln. But I wonder if President-Elect Obama is talking about Abraham Lincoln too much. I wonder if he isn’t pushing the comparison with Lincoln too far. Comparisons with people like Abraham Lincoln should come from others, not from one’s self.

I would urge President-Elect Obama to de-emphasize the Lincoln comparisons. If someday he deserves the comparisons, they will come. If he doesn’t, he will look the poorer for having tried to make them himself.