A Pox On All Their Houses

From The Economist, November 17-23rd Issue

This cartoon captures some of the absurdity of the current goings on between Israel and Hamas.  But what is utterly misstates is the disproportionality of the mess.  What Israel is doing is a little like dropping a 500 pound bomb on an obnoxious teenager because he shot you with a BB gun.  The pictures of the destruction wrought by Israel in Gaza are all over the place.  What is very, very hard to find is any comparable evidence -- indeed any evidence at all -- of destruction in Israel.  Given the Israeli PR adeptness, I suspect this is because there is very, very little of it.

I have no sympathy for Hamas.  What they hope to accomplish other than getting their own people killed by shooting rockets at Israel is beyond understanding.  Perhaps there is a better explanation, but the seemingly obvious answer is a culture of no-harm-goes-unavenged that would make the Hatfields and McCoys proud. 

But neither do I have any sympathy for Israel.  The idea that somehow Israel is the victim here is preposterous.  The Israeli Ambassador asked what would American do if some foreign group lobbed 8,000 rockets into America.  That begs the question, though, of what we would do if a foreign state had occupied most of the country for nearly 45 years and was relentlessly building settlements along the entire eastern seaboard.  Sporadic rocket fire from Hamas is the price Israel pays for the occupation.  And, since Israel has no intention of ever agreeing to a Palestinian state worthy of the name, they should accept that as a very small price indeed.

The Middle East has dominated American foreign policy for a quarter century now.  We need to follow through on the promise that Iran will not get a nuclear weapon.  But beyond that, it's time to give up.  We are no longer so dependent on the Middle East for our energy, and if we backed away from Israel, the terrorism threat would largely evaporate.  It's time to tell the entire Middle East: "You made this mess. Continuing it hurts no one but yourselves.  We've tried to help.  But we're done.  It's up to you to either clean it up or live with it."

Thoughts on the Debate

I actually came away from the debate thinking President Obama did just fine.  But the chatter about it - Democratic and Republican - is probably much more important that the debate itself, and that chatter leads me to wonder if the debate might be for Obama what the "There you go again, Mr President" debate was for Jimmy Carter, the last Democratic incumbent President to seek reelection in the face of an stagnant economy and an international mess.

The thought of a "President Romney" distresses me.  I have no idea what he believes or what he will try to do.  The man is a shape shifter.  There is no position or statement or promise or record that cannot be changed, disavowed or "etch-a-sketched" away.  But I have come at last to the conclusion that perhaps what seems to be duplicity is actually hyper-pragmatism: he'll say and do whatever it takes to get where he wants to go.  In this malleability, Romney reminds me a lot of Bill Clinton, who also was something of a shape shifter.  And if I am right about that, there are worse things than could happen than having Mitt Romney become President.

But I confess that, if Romney does win, I will feel bad for Barack Obama.  He is a pragmatist as well, but he had one thing above all else that he wanted to achieve, and he did what it took to accomplish that.  He staked his entire presidency on a single minded effort to do something about what is by far  biggest domestic problem we face.  To get that, he gave up a lot to the ideologues of his own party, including a "stimulus" package that was a travesty.  I regret that, but I understand what motivated it.  As Bismark famously said, "Politics is the art of the possible."  The guy was a newbie.  When we needed someone with the experience and contacts of an LBJ, what we got was a very smart community organizer with virtually no political experience at any level.  For all that, though, he has done a creditable job given the hand he was dealt and the irrational, visceral hatred he faced from the opposition.  He deserves more than the two years he actually had to make his mark.  And the Republican Party deserves way more than 4 years in purgatory for the mess they created.

So, I don't think a Romney Presidency will be a catastrophe.  The fact is that we have no idea WHAT it will be.  But from his Massachusetts governorship and his Salt Lake City  intervention, I take the message that he does what works.  The really scary thing is whether he can control his own ideologues.  Romeny doesn't really scare.  But Rick Santorum, Michelle Bachman, Sarah Palin, Pat Robertston, Grover Norquist, et al truly do.

Are we better off?

When Romney made the claim that Obama couldn't tell us that we were better off now than we were when he took office, I laughed out loud.  That statement seemed the biggest departure from reality in an entire week of big truth manipulation, if not outright misrepresentation.  Not better off now than with what Bush wrought?!?!?  The very idea was/is laughable.  We have 11/2 fewer wars, no OBL, 3 pretty healthy car companies, a functioning banking system, reduced unemployment, MUCH higher stock prices, recovering housing prices,  increased mean family income.  We are no longer considered a rouge state by the rest of the world, and we have a president who understands that our national interest is not congruent with Israel's.  And, best of all we avoided a Depression.  But here ' the clincher:  even if none of the rest were true, we would still be better off becuase George W Bush and a berserkers Republican Party is not the Commander-in Chief.  

So, how could Romney make such a preposterous claim? Well, partly, I am distressed to admit, it is probably due to the fact that neither side seems to see any downside in twisting the facts out of all recognition.  But this particular misrepresentation seemed to me to be particularly amazing since it seemed obvious that Obama could kill the Republicans with their own tag line simply by showing all the ways we are better off than we were under Bush.  
But maybe that's not true.  First off, it turns out that the Romney claim is based on a comparison of economic statistics for January 2009 to those for today.  Thus the continuation of the economic collapse W gave us suddenly become Obama's responsibility.  That's like Ryan saying that Obama cut $700 million out of Medicare, closed the GM assembly plant in Janesville, and ignored the Simpson-Bowles budget recommendations.  Oh, wait.  Ryan did say all of these.  

And that is one of my problems.  Both parties seem to be getting to the point where they consider Clinton's "I did not have sex with that woman." to not only not be perjury but to actually be a model of candor.  The Republicans seem worse at this to me, but both parties have decided that any statement or characterization is OK if a lawyer could find one set of facts or semantics under which it might be true.  The idea that a statement or claim needs not to be misleading has been wholly lost.  Maybe it was never there.

But that is not really my point.  My big concern is that the Parties' contempt for the electorate's ability  to see through all this, even with the fact checking resources now available, is justified.  Have we really gotten to the point that a claim that we are better off now than we were under the Bush administration is actually credible to a significant part of the electorate?  Have American voters entirely lost their bullshit detectors?

I hope not.  I believe not.  I have an abiding faith in the third part of Lincoln's famous trilogy:  "But you can't fool all of the people all of the time."  But I have to admit that this election is shaking my faith in Mr. Lincoln's perspicacity.

Medicare Vouchers

Billy Bob asked what I thought about Medicare vouchers.  I like the concept.  I like anything that gives consumers more control and/or more incentive to shop.  But I'm not sure the idea is really practical.  Unless your real goal is to get rid of government participation in the provision of health care.

The problems I see:

1. Too easy to cut - the utility of vouchers depends on the worth of the voucher.  A voucher for $100 is of limited utility if what you want/ need costs $1000.  Or $10,000.  This problem is compounded by the fact that vouchers will be easy to make ever more useless:  with medical costs rising at 12% per year, all you have to do to make them nearly useless is to wait.   The value of vouchers is almost completely dependent on the willingness/ability of Congress to approve increases in their value at a rate that equals the rate of inflation in medical costs.  
2. Too complicated - the people this would affect are all over 65.  Shopping for a good deal in the insurance exchanges will be well beyond the competencies of many (maybe most) of the people who will be using the vouchers.  Witness the mess in the prescription drug benefit arena.
3. Too susceptible to graft - I admit it ; this point is paternalistic.  But the enormous complexity of the choices that will face seniors in trying to decide how to use their vouchers will create openings for the scam artists.  The problem with Paul Ryan is that he believes everyone is (or should be) just like him in terms of their abilities to weigh options and analyze cost/benefit ratios.  Also he believes everyone should by themselves be able to duplicate the analyses he gets from the staff of a US congressman.

I think this is the essential flaw in the current Republican hubris:  they actually believe that everyone is (or if they had any gumption and initiative would be) JUST LIKE ME!!!

Romney and Ryan

There's been a lot written about Romney's selection of Paul Ryan as his VP candidate and what the choice says about Romney himself.  On both sides, pundits and editorial writers seem to assume that the selection of Ryan tells us something significant about what Romey's positions will be if elected.  I think that's wrong. 

The only thing consistent about Romney is his inconsistency, and I think the only calculation he made in selecting Ryan was the same one Kennedy made in selecting Johnson:  it'll help me get elected.  He may actually be wrong on that, of course.  It's possible, I suppose, that Ryan's positions could end up alienating more independents than it wins in Tea Party-ers.  But I don't have much of a doubt that the election was all Romney was thinking about.  After all, he's nominating Ryan for an office famously characterized (apparently by John Nance Garner) as "not worth a bucket of warm spit." 

As the Economist recounts:: 

WHEN Mitt Romney was governor of liberal Massachusetts, he supported abortion, gun control, tackling climate change and a requirement that everyone should buy health insurance, backed up with generous subsidies for those who could not afford it. Now, as he prepares to fly to Tampa to accept the Republican Party’s nomination for president on August 30th, he opposes all those things. A year ago he favoured keeping income taxes at their current levels; now he wants to slash them for everybody, with the rate falling from 35% to 28% for the richest Americans.

Given this history, does anyone doubt that Romney is fully capable of putting Ryan in a closet and leaving him there for four years?

Nothing Romney says or does before the election provides a basis for any inference about what he will do or say afterwards.  Given what he has said, though, perhaps that is a source of some comfort.

A Battle of ideas

This is what I hope this election becomes.  It will not do so explicitly, of course, but if people come to realize that this is what it is ACTUALLY about, I think it may be worth it.

Ending Medicare As We Know It

I’m probably going to vote for Obama this year. It’s mostly, I confess, a vote against Republicanism: that shameless (and to me loathsome) brand of politics that ignores the fact that Republicans created the mess they now pretend to despise, that they spent three years preventing Democrats from doing anything about it, and now campaign as if they are the ones who will “Save America.” It is so staggeringly hypocritical that it would be laughable if it didn’t look like they might get away with it..

But I can’t say I am any longer much of a fan of Barak Obama. He has been a disappointment. I credit him with taking a first stab at dealing with the health care mess, but even there the focus was mostly on coverage rather than costs, which I believe to be the cause of the coverage problem. But still, he got us a bit closer, I think, to a solution.

Beyond that, it’s hard to see what he did with all the advantages he had – and to an extent still has. His lack of success is not all his fault, of course., but in the end the buck stops there: he had the chance, he had the power and momentum, and yet could do little with it. The result is that he is now running a truly awful campaign, a campaign in which we are told over and over (for example) that Ryan budget plan would “end Medicare as we know it.” Is that supposed to be a bad thing? Medicare “as we know it” MUST end. It is bankrupting America. We have got to find a way make Medicare and Medicaid and medical costs generally, manageable. Obama, of all people knows that. But he has chosen, for political ends, to hammer away at a slogan that has no purpose other than to scare people and that will only make coming up with a solution even more difficult. Alas, the politics of hope.