punditry

We haven't had a picture of the cats up on the fence lately, have we? Let's fix that. Wednesday was a lovely day here in Southern California, and Inkblot and Domino both took turns promenading up and down the fence in the early morning sun. (Though not that early. They both need their beauty sleep.) Quite frankly, they both look fundamentally, profoundly more presidential than any of the folks running in Florida. If you live in the Sunshine State, I recommend you write in the cat of your choice on Tuesday.

    

Matt Yglesias notes a tension in lefty thought today: the stuff we all support (better healthcare, more teachers, childcare, new infrastructure, etc.) is in the non-manufacturing sector, and yet we all cheer when President Obama calls for increased focus on manufacturing. So which do we want? More people working in manufacturing or more people working in service and construction industries? It's hard to have both, after all.

For the time being, let's put aside the question of whether we should take Obama seriously on this subject (I suspect not) and whether lefties are really all that committed to manufacturing in the first place (ditto). Instead, I'll repeat a point that I think Matt probably agrees with: the real issue isn't manufacturing per se, it's the tradable sector. That is, we really do have a long-term trade deficit problem, and weakening the dollar is unlikely to fix this all on its own. We also need to make stuff that other people want to buy from us, regardless of whether it comes from someone with a manufacturing NAICS code. So whether we like it or not, we really do need to have more workers in the tradable sector. In practice, this probably means more people working in manufacturing, since that accounts for a big chunk of the tradable sector, but maybe not.¹

Either way, though, we can't import oil from Saudi Arabia and MacBooks from China forever unless we figure out something to sell back to them. We can't all be MRI techs, home nursing companions, and K-12 teachers.

¹And just to get everyone riled up, I'll point out that the content industry (movies, TV shows, books, music, etc.) is one of the most important non-manufacturing components of the tradable sector. It's why every administration ever, both Democratic and Republican, has supported strong international IP protection. This, perhaps, suggests an even bigger tension in lefty thought than whether we really love manufacturing.

    

The Wall Street Journal has apparently tapped into the tea party id today and written the ur-text of modern-day climate denial we've all been waiting for. Ed Kilgore, from his new perch at my old perch, reads it so I don't have to:

In these turgid lines can be found a treasure trove of prevarications. You've got your impressive-sounding list of scientists agreeing with the Journal (with no corresponding list of those who disagree; the newsprint or bandwith necessary to publish those would bankrupt even the WSJ). You've got your quote marks around the term global warming. You've got your allusions to the silly "Climategate" kerfuffle. And you've got your unsubstantiated allegations of "persecution" of the brave "heretics" who dare stand with poor, puny Industry against the awesome power of academics.

Originally, climate denial went through three stages:

1. The world isn't warming.
2. OK, it's warming, but it's not man-made. It's just natural climate variability.
3. Fine, people are responsible. But it's not economically worth it to do anything about it.

But conservatives have more recently backpedaled not just a single step in this process, but all the way back to the paleolithic era they're so fond of pretending to know more about than the folks who actually study it:

0. Global warming is the biggest hoax ever put over on the American public.

This all fits in with the paranoia and conspiracy theorizing of the conservative base these days, which is pretty much identical to the paranoia and conspiracy theorizing of the far right since at least the 1930s. Climate change isn't merely wrong — that would be boring — it's an immense conspiracy being waged by a group of nerdy scientists (who want funding) and tree huggers (who are desperate to control everyone else's lives). And it's a damn successful conspiracy, too. Despite the fact that it requires thousands and thousands of participants, with new ones earning PhDs every month, not a single one of them has broken the climate omerta yet and blown the whole thing open. But someone will, any day now. Just you wait.

    

Emily Yoffe writes today about the Soup Nazi approach that modern animal rescue groups take toward deciding who is and who isn't fit to adopt one of their pets. As she says, this isn't just a dog thing:

You might think adopting a cat would be easier than getting a dog. After all, the solitary, self-sufficient feline is the perfect pet for the working person. But I heard from people who were turned down because of the curse of full-time employment—the cat may ignore you, but you should be home all day anyway. Others were told they need to accept a pair of cats or get nothing. And don’t even think about telling the rescue people your cat might go outside occasionally. Lisa wrote to say that she rescues strays that live in her house but are allowed outdoors. When she was looking for another cat and explained this to the person at the shelter, they turned her away.

For any species, the outside world is full of dangers, even potentially deadly ones. Maybe we all should stay inside (and avoid bathtubs and stairs). I have one cat I can’t budge off the couch with a forklift. But the other bolts from between our legs when the front door opens and would be miserable contained in the house. I’ve had successive sets of cats for more than 30 years and have concluded the risk of them going outside is worth their happiness—and they’ve lived to ripe ages. Is it really sensible to keep rescued cats out of loving homes from which they may take an occasional stroll? 

I was immensely pissed off at the rescue shelter that we last tried to adopt a cat from, though judging from what Yoffe says, they were pussycats (so to speak) compared to lots of others. I'm appalled that so many of these groups apparently prefer to keep hundreds of cats caged up and obviously unhappy forever rather than adopt them out to someone who they feel is, perhaps, ever so slightly unsuitable in some obscure way. "Perhaps you should try a kill shelter," we were finally told after two hours of cat surveying and form filling out, in a tone of voice normally reserved for child molesters and rapists.

In the end, we did go to our local municipal shelter, the same one that we adoped Inkblot from, and took home Domino. So I guess it all worked out in the end. But it left a sour taste in my mouth that I don't think I'll ever get rid of.

    

From Renae Hathway, Ron Paul's former secretary, on his famously racist and loony newsletters:

It was his newsletter, and it was under his name, so he always got to see the final product. . . . He would proof it.

This should surprise exactly no one, but it's still good to get it on the record. And there's more:

A person involved in Paul’s businesses, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid criticizing a former employer, said Paul and his associates decided in the late 1980s to try to increase sales by making the newsletters more provocative. They discussed adding controversial material, including racial statements, to help the business, the person said.

“It was playing on a growing racial tension, economic tension, fear of government,’’ said the person, who supports Paul’s economic policies but is not backing him for president. “I’m not saying Ron believed this stuff. It was good copy. Ron Paul is a shrewd businessman.’’

What a creep. All things considered, though, I guess I'm glad this came out today, not yesterday. Paul deserves all the grief he's gotten over this, and I'm delighted to see his phony teddy bear image permanently tossed in the dustbin of history where it belongs. Still, I'm not sorry that we didn't waste debate time on this nonsense. It might have taken valuable attention away from Newt's plan to turn the moon into the 51st state.

    

No one asked me, but I just want to briefly weigh in on the question of whether the increasingly brutal primary process will hurt Mitt Romney in the general election. No. It won't. Voters will forget the debates even happened about ten seconds after the last genuine competitor (i.e., everyone except Ron Paul) drops out. Intra-party feuding will stop about ten seconds after that, when everyone remembers that Barack Obama is Hitler. And the Obama campaign itself, though I'm sure they're enjoying the bloodletting, probably had better versions of all the anti-Romney attacks already prepped and ready to go before the first GOP primary even got started.

Any other questions?

    

A few days ago Google announced a new privacy policy: If you're signed into any Google service, the information that Google collects from you can be combined with information from every other Google service to build a gigantic profile of your activities and preferences. On Tuesday I wrote that I was pretty unhappy about this, and a lot of people wanted to know why. After all, Google says this new policy will mean a better computing experience for everyone:

Our recently launched personal search feature is a good example of the cool things Google can do when we combine information across products. Our search box now gives you great answers not just from the web, but your personal stuff too…But there's so much more that Google can do to help you by sharing more of your information with…well, you. We can make search better—figuring out what you really mean when you type in Apple, Jaguar or Pink. We can provide more relevant ads too. For example, it's January, but maybe you're not a gym person, so fitness ads aren't that useful to you. We can provide reminders that you're going to be late for a meeting based on your location, your calendar and an understanding of what the traffic is like that day.

So what's my problem? Easy. In that mass of good news, the real reason for Google's announcement was stuffed quietly into the middle: "We can provide more relevant ads too."

This is so obvious that no one even paid attention to it. Of course Google wants to target its ads better. That's where most of its revenue comes from. Yawn.

So again: What's my problem? Why do I care if Google serves up ads that are a little more suited to my tastes? The truth is that I don't. What I do care about, though, is the obvious corollary: Google's main purpose in life, as you'd expect from any big, public company, is making money. And the way they make money is by helping third parties sell you stuff. Here, then, is the nut of the thing, from the same blog post announcing the new privacy policy:

Finally, what we're not changing. We remain committed to data liberation, so if you want to take your information elsewhere you can. We don't sell your personal information, nor do we share it externally without your permission…

Do you find that reassuring? I decidedly don't. If Google can change its privacy policy today, it can change it tomorrow. And it will. No company is an unstoppable juggernaut forever, and Google is already showing signs of becoming an ordinary corporation that has to scrap for profits just like everyone else. This is what's motivating their policy change this week, and someday it's likely to motivate them to sell my personal information after all.

It won't be mandatory, of course. If I want to close my Google accounts, they'll let me. But if I use an Android smartphone—and this is plainly one of the primary targets of Google's new policy—that will be pretty hard. And after years of using Google products like Gmail and YouTube, it's not as easy as it sounds to simply export all your data and move to a new platform. In reality, very few people will do this. Google is counting on the fact that they'll grumble a bit, like I'm doing, and then get on with their lives.

And maybe I should too. That's certainly the primary advice I got after writing Tuesday's post. Perhaps, as David Brin has been telling us for years, traditional notions of privacy are going away whether we like it or not, so we might as well like it. Complaining about it won't do us any more good than complaining about the end of transatlantic ocean liners or old-time radio shows.

And yet…I'm just not there yet. It's bad enough that Google can build up a massive and—if we're honest, slightly scary—profile of my activities, but it will be a lot worse when Google and Facebook and Procter & Gamble all get together to merge these profiles into a single uber-database and then sell it off for a fee to anyone with a product to hawk. Or any government agency that thinks this kind of information might be pretty handy.

So that's why I'm unhappy. I don't believe for a second that Google's policy against selling personal information will last forever. Maybe I should just relax and accept that this is the direction the world is going, but for now I think I'll continue to fight it.

    

You know those basketball rematches where a team that got pummeled last time suddenly comes out totally on fire and wins by a mile? It's never clear quite why that happens, but it happened in the Republican debate tonight. I don't know what Romney ate for breakfast this morning, but he came alive and wiped the floor with Newt Gingrich in this debate. He went after Gingrich for his Freddie Mac connections and made it stick. He was outraged when Newt said he was anti-immigrant, and for once he actually sounded outraged. And when Newt tried to buy some anti-media cred by attacking Wolf Blitzer, he got pwned by both Blitzer and Romney:

BLITZER: Earlier this week, you said Governor Romney, after he released his taxes, you said that you were satisfied with the level of transparency of his personal finances when it comes to this. And I just want to reiterate and ask you, are you satisfied right now with the level of transparency as far as his personal finances?

GINGRICH: Wolf, you and I have a great relationship, it goes back a long way. I'm with him. This is a nonsense question. Look, how about if the four of us agree for the rest of the evening, we'll actually talk about issues that relate to governing America?

BLITZER: But, Mr. Speaker, you made an issue of this, this week, when you said that, "He lives in a world of Swiss bank and Cayman Island bank accounts." I didn't say that. You did.

GINGRICH: I did. And I'm perfectly happy to say that on an interview on some TV show. But this is a national debate, where you have a chance to get the four of us to talk about a whole range of issues.

....ROMNEY: Wouldn't it be nice if people didn't make accusations somewhere else that they weren't willing to defend here?

Ouch. Gingrich has tried that bit about nasty attacks being OK when you're on some radio show or something but not when you're on national TV, and for some reason he's gotten away with it even though it's transparently self-serving and ridiculous. Tonight he didn't.

This was all in the first half hour, but by then the debate was over. Romney lost a bit of his mojo later on and reverted to the stuttering, stumbling Mitt that we've seen in the last two debates, but not enough to hurt him, especially after Newt was forced to endure ten minutes of attacks over his support for a lunar colony during the second hour. This attack from Romney was both brutal and effective:

ROMNEY: I spent 25 years in business. If I had a business executive come to me and say they wanted to spend a few hundred billion dollars to put a colony on the moon, I'd say, "You're fired."

The idea that corporate America wants to go off to the moon and build a colony there, it may be a big idea, but it's not a good idea. And we have seen in politics -- we've seen politicians -- and Newt, you've been part of this -- go from state to state and promise exactly what that state wants to hear. The Speaker comes here to Florida, wants to spend untold amount of money having a colony on the moon. I know it's very exciting on the Space Coast.

In South Carolina, it was a new interstate highway, and dredging the port in Charleston. In New Hampshire, it was burying a power line coming in from Canada and building a new VHA hospital in New Hampshire so that people don't have to go to Boston.

Look, this idea of going state to state and promising what people want to hear, promising billions, hundreds of billions of dollars to make people happy, that's what got us into the trouble we're in now. We've got to say no to this kind of spending.

Coming from a guy like Romney who's famous for his willingness to say pretty much anything to anybody, this was a great job of jiu jitsu. It was also true. Gingrich really has been pandering to state interests relentlessly, and nowhere more so than in Florida.

I don't know how much debates really matter compared to the tidal wave of advertising that's inundating Florida right now, but if they do matter then Romney won the Florida primary tonight, and almost certainly the nomination along with it.

    

It's sort of fascinating watching the Republican establishment finally go nuclear on Newt Gingrich. As near as I can tell, pretty much everyone who actually served with or alongside Newt in the 90s hates his guts. But as long as he was just writing books and doing think tanky stuff, they were willing to let bygones be bygones. Ditto for the period when he was supposedly running for president but, in reality, was just conducting an innovative new kind of book tour.

But now that he has millions of dollars of Sheldon Adelson's casino money and has even an outside chance of actually winning, the long knives are out. Bob Dole has a scorching attack here. The Drudge Report is now the We-Hate-Newt Report. Philip Klein launches a brutal broadside here. Suddenly everyone remembers the 90s again, and in particular how volcanically unstable Newt was.

All good fun. What's most ironically amusing about all this, though, is that underlying a lot of the attacks on Newt is the complaint that he's not conservative enough. Weirdly enough, there's some truth to this by modern GOP standards. Newt's tone and temperament are perfectly suited to the no-compromise-no-surrender spirit of the tea party-ized GOP, which is why he's so appealing to the base during debates. But the truth is that for all his bluster, Newt was perfectly willing to do deals during his time as Speaker. He likes to think of himself as a world-historical figure, and that means getting world-historical things done. Simple obstruction is not really his MO. That makes him doubly unreliable, since obstruction is the sine qua non of movement conservatism these days.

Conservatives think that listening to Newt is a hoot, and they love it when he gets the crowds wound up. The problem is that they never quite realized the crowd wasn't in on the con. The rank-and-file actually took Newt seriously, and now party leaders have to figure out how to suck the fetid air back out of the Gingrich-inspired fever swamps without losing their core audience of old people and the white working class, who are voting for their side because they're scared to death that Barack Obama is destroying western civilization. In the end, I don't think they'll have much trouble pulling this off, but in the meantime it makes the whole specatacle even better fun for us jeering liberals.

    

It is hard to read Remedy and Reaction, Paul Starr's remarkable chronicle of the hundred-year effort to legislate universal health insurance in the United States, without recalling Robert Gibbs's tortured quip that Democrats who've denounced the Obama White House for having knuckled under to Republican principles or intimidation "ought to be drug-tested." Nobody with a sense of history--that is, nobody who reads Starr's book--could doubt how sensible and brave was the president's effort to drive the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 through Congress. Nobody with a feel for the present moment should doubt how imminent is the threat to the act, how urgent it is for progressive Democrats to rally around Obama--and without all the condescending qualifications that "independents," who flock away from allegedly weak or incompetent leaders, interpret as contempt.

Starr, who teaches at Princeton and, with Robert Kuttner and Robert Reich, founded The American Prospect, has written 300-plus pages of tightly woven policy description, narrative and polemic; but one needn't be a wonk to benefit from the tutorial or detect an occasional sigh between the lines. Literary scholars speak of a pathetic fallacy, the idea that inanimate objects have intentions and feelings. Starr makes clear that various political commentators have been susceptible to a somewhat different fallacy, pathetic in its own way, that America's desires can be fathomed through polling and that the president must somehow be at fault if a desire is not fulfilled, as though flawed legislative institutions, entrenched political forces, conflicting popular incentives, regional rivalries and sheer corruption do not shape political outcomes.

Starr learned his lessons the hard way. He closely advised the Clintons on health strategy in the early 1990s (he still knows and has debriefed key Congressional staffers). The centerpiece of Remedy and Reaction is a long section, full of illuminating asides, on the frustration of the Clintons' plans. Starr shows that, even as Bill Clinton submitted his bill to Congress, some 70 percent of voters subscribed to the principles embodied in the legislation he proposed. Yet the bill didn't come close to being enacted. True, Clinton was losing altitude by then, but to suppose his failure was largely a matter of leadership--you know, that he didn't use his bully pulpit forcefully enough, the sort of gripe heard relentlessly on MSNBC, the Huffington Post and Daily Kos about Obama and the "public option"--is to suppose that willows really weep.

Obama's actions were cannier than Clinton's, but they also amounted to a profile in courage. When Obama came into office, Starr explains, only 11 percent of Americans thought reform would have a "negative personal impact," but by August 2009 this segment of the population was trending to 31 percent. Both Rahm Emanuel and Joe Biden were urging retreat. Starr writes, "Obama not only resolved to go ahead; in September and again in the new year, the president took charge of the effort to steady the health-care initiative and prevent it from careening off the tracks." Nor was the final bill anything less than what might reasonably have been expected, filling as it did the negative space left by four generations of government programs and serial compromises. Starting with clean sheets of paper was never realistic when one-sixth of the economy was at stake.

Starr's great fear is repeal of the Affordable Care Act, which would not only deny healthcare to more than 30 million people but would cast doubt on whether "Americans will ever be able to hold their fears in check and summon the elementary decency toward the sick that characterizes other democracies." Obamacare, in short, was healthcare reform's best--and last--shot, and it would be unconscionable for liberals to remain cavalier about its defense, or Obama's, for that matter. It's past time to discard the misguided assumption that in a better economy, or with more of "a fighter" in the White House, something like a Canadian-style single-payer system might have been (or might sometime fairly soon be) enacted.

Read on at the Nation's website. Or download a pdf.

One week ago today, CNN's John King asked Newt Gingrich if it was true that in 1999 he asked his then-wife Marianne Gingrich for an open marriage so that he could continue having an affair with his girlfriend Callista. On national TV, in front of a huge audience, here was his answer:

Now, let me be quite clear. Let me be quite clear. The story is false. Every personal friend I have who knew us in that period says the story was false. We offered several of them to ABC to prove it was false. They [i.e., ABC] weren't interested, because they would like to attack any Republican.

This, it turns out, was a lie. Today, after a full week of badgering, Gingrich's campaign has finally admitted what ABC knew perfectly well all along: Gingrich hadn't suggested any personal friends to them at all. Nor, obviously, had they refused to interview any of these personal friends. They didn't exist.

There's an odd de facto standard for political lying: you can mislead people to almost any degree and it doesn't really count against you. It's he-said-she-said. But if there's a clear, smoking gun fact that you plainly misrepresent, no matter how trivial, then it's a scandal. By that standard, Newt ought to be in trouble. His dealings with ABC News may not be all that important in the cosmic scheme of things, but by DC standards this is a flat-out, premeditated fabrication and therefore a scandal. Gingrich told a bald-faced lied and he knew he was lying when he did it.

This all fits Newt's personality. He's always been more brazen than even your usual hardened politico because he knows that nobody really cares about fact checking. But he went over the line this time. I wonder if he'll pay a price?

    

Via Paul Krugman, this is kind of fascinating. Jonathan Portes provides us with this chart, which shows the trajectory in Britain of both the Great Depression and the current Great Recession. The red and black lines at the bottom are the ones to look at:

Now, there's a bit of cherry picking going on here, I think, since Britain had a nasty recession following World War I and sluggish growth throughout the 1920s, which meant they simply didn't have as far to fall during the 30s as we did. Unemployment was also worse during the 30s than it is today. So take this with a grain of salt. Nonetheless, it's sobering: in Britain at least, the Great Recession of 2008 is, in some ways, arguably worse than the Great Depression was.

    

James Pethokoukis is pretty upset that President Obama is coming around to the idea of mass refinancing of mortgages, and I'm upset too. The difference is that he's upset Obama is thinking about this at all while I'm upset that Obama didn't think harder about it three years ago. But now there's something new to be upset about: it's possible that Mitt Romney is in favor of mass refinancing too as long as it "doesn't add additional government obligation." Pethokoukis:

Now, Romney could have said something like, “The way to boost housing is to boost the economy and speed up the foreclosure process so the market can clear.” But he didn’t say that. He said this: “Clearly, if there is a way of providing a break to homeowners to get lower interest rates, that is something which has always been part of the refinance story. If it can be done in a way that doesn’t add additional government obligation, that’s one thing.”

My guess is that mass refinancing isn't going to happen in any significant way no matter who's president, so on a substantive level I can't get too excited about all this. But it does demonstrate just how unrealistic our rhetorical expectations have gotten. Just as many on the left would like Obama to announce some kind of mass repudiation of debt that would be political poison, Pethokoukis is upset that Romney didn't basically tell homeowners to all fuck off. Romney 2012!

In practice, allowing foreclosures to work their will on the market has been bipartisan policy ever since the housing bubble burst, but everyone sort of pretends otherwise. That's politics. If you want people to vote for you for president, you avoid rubbing people's noses in bad news and then putting your boot on their neck. Even for a guy like Romney, there's a limit to just how much he's willing to shoot himself in the foot to please the purists and the fanatics.

    

So, how about that Newt Gingrich fellow? He's down, he's up, he's down, he's up, and now he's down again. Quite frankly, you'd almost think he had some kind of fundamental stability problem.

Of course, I guess what he really has is a Super-PAC problem. Spend a gazillion dollars telling voters that Newt is a lunatic, and the voters listen. Either that or the Marianne Gingrich interview on Nightline was a bigger deal than us jaded sophisticated thought. In any case, it now looks like the course of history is reasserting itself and Mitt Romney is likely to win Florida after all.

    

In his State of the Union address two years ago, in 2010, President Obama kept alive faltering hopes for our fraudulent and now broken political system by appealing movingly to Republicans for bipartisanship and civility. As Ryan Lizza reminds us in a New Yorker article that "everyone" is discussing, Obama had made such appeals even before his inauguration by meeting with George Will and a gaggle of Reaganite pundits.

But even in 2010 Obama was addressing a Congress -- including its Democratic-controlled House, which had been elected with him -- that was stuffed to its gills with frauds, as I put it here in "Pearls Before Swine," because it was owned lock, stock, and barrel by the banking, real-estate, insurance, oil, and myriad other corporate interests that have nearly ruined the country.

Congress still is stuffed to the gills with frauds, and last night's State of the Union address had the slightly edgy, at times faintly desperate tone of a man who knows it better than he did in 2010. "Beyond the few measures on which there is a rare alignment of stars," I wrote then, "nothing Obama called for will happen, unless his road trip unleashes a firestorm in the American people against Congress for the systemic sins mentioned above. " Here's why I wouldn't change a word now:

The only firestorm that followed Obama's road trip two years ago was the Tea Party's, which drove the Republican victories in the congressional races, all of it on steroids provided by the powerful interests I've mentioned and by some people's eternal inclination to seek scapegoats (from Kenya or from the government ) rather than to admit that they've been had and to find the real courage and discipline they'd need to stand up to the owners of the casino-finance, corporate-welfare, totalitarian credit-rating cages we're living in.

When Obama spoke in 2010, Democrats in Congress had outstripped Republicans in a race to be owned. As the political scientist Jane Mansbridge notes in "On the Importance of Getting Things Done," the lead article of the current Political Science, Democrats had rushed to prostrate themselves before finance capital.

Mansbridge cites Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson's report in Winner-Take-All Politics that "In the 2007-2008 election cycle, the Democratic Senatorial Committee raised four times as much from Wall Street as its GOP counterpart did.") For this you can thank, among others, New York Senator Chuck Schumer, who has chaired that committee and led in deregulating banks in the 1990s.

But Obama was encircled back then, as now, not only by the bought-and-paid for buffoons in Congress but also by advisers who -- as Lizza's report shows but doesn't exactly tell -- were sending him memos, framing the hard choices before him, that also reflected Obama's choices of the advisers themselves -- especially Budget Director Peter Orszag, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geitner, and National Economic Council Director Larry Summers.

Ryan doesn't discuss those hard choices of advisers or remind us of who the reasonable alternatives to these people might have been. He does report the decidedly minority, pro-Keynesian-spending view of Christina Romer, chairman of Obama's Council of Economic Advisers. But Lizza recycles uncritically the other advisers' view (which became Obama's, perhaps increasingly as he read their memos) that congressional and other political realities rendered Romer's views unrealistic.

Do they, though? Once again, we find ourselves within the conventional Beltanschauung (Beltway worldview), which holds that in our system of divided government and free markets presidents can't really lead as much as they can facilitate the system's functioning within narrow parameters, however monstrously destructive those have become, and perhaps cajole a few of the players.

In this logic, the 2010 rollback of Democratic gains at the polls "proves" that presidential speeches can't arouse or mobilize people anywhere nearly as much the political psychologist Drew Westen insisted they should in his game-changing New York Times essay of last summer, "What Happened to Obama's Passion?," which enraged the neoliberal Beltway pundits from Fareed Zakaria to Jonathan Chait, as I reported in the HuffingtonPost and here in "Bluster in the Beltanschauung.

In this Beltway view, presidents really only "preside" over most of what goes on in our free-market republic, with its system of independent branches of government; they can execute the laws but not frame or shape them. That isn't how "Decider" George W. Bush saw or did things, of course, but look where he got us! And he was really only deciding how best to advance the above-mentioned corporate interests! His Republican Party won't let Obama decide anything, and they're trying to persuade the American people to dump him.

What's stupefying is that Obama's advisers and neoliberal apologists accept this logic as binding and that Obama does, too, his rhetoric in this year's State of the Union to the contrary notwithstanding.

I sensed this as I watched him milk the Bin Laden kill and shout out some bromides about irresponsible bankers and challenge Congress to change the tax code in some ways that Republicans themselves once supported but won't now that he does, ways that he knows even the Democrats will eviscerate under the ministrations of lobbyists and a public stampeded by the Supreme Court-enhanced conservative noise machine.

Unless Obama does take the lead in offering us a counter-narrative to all this and to the fables we've been accepting about the magic of markets, his efforts will go nowhere. Most of them are already dead in Congress, as one could tell just from looking at those trolls, including those who crammed the aisle like children, seeking his autograph. In his speech Obama was trying to go over their heads as much as to get to them, because he knows now, after three years' of trying, that Henry Adams was right a century ago to lament that you Congressmen are hogs that can be gotten away from the trough only if they are beaten over their snouts with an iron bar.

So Obama is concentrating on getting himself re-elected. But his State of the Union didn't serve that purpose effectively, either. He, his advisers, and his apologists in the press haven't examined the possibility that one reason Democrats lost in 2010 is that everyone knew that they were just as "owned" as Republicans, and that the latter at least make a virtue of their slavery as they press the old, reliable scapegoat buttons to distract us from that slavery's ever-more intimate scars.

Nothing in Lizza's account, beyond its obligatory mentions of dissents such as Romer's and Paul Krugman's, challenges the Beltway wisdom that this is the field that Obama and the rest of us must play on. That leaves poor Obama standing wholly alone, as he did in delivering his address to Congress.

A president can't be a prophet, of course. But he can tell more of the truth than his advisers and apologists think he can about our entrapment in the slippery web of contracts and lies that is closing in on us. Everyone outside Washington knows it; Obama himself acknowledged the divide between Washington and the American people. But he didn't describe that divide and the demons and poisons it harbors, and by defaulting on that, he left us standing alone, too.

I still think that he was put on earth to do better. Do you? (For additional responses to that question, please also see the HuffingtonPost, where this column also appears)

George Soros thinks we're in for some bad times:

He doesn’t just mean it’s time to protect your assets. He means it’s time to stave off disaster. As he sees it, the world faces one of the most dangerous periods of modern history—a period of “evil.” Europe is confronting a descent into chaos and conflict. In America he predicts riots on the streets that will lead to a brutal clampdown that will dramatically curtail civil liberties. The global economic system could even collapse altogether.

“I am not here to cheer you up. The situation is about as serious and difficult as I’ve experienced in my career,” Soros tells Newsweek. “We are facing an extremely difficult time, comparable in many ways to the 1930s, the Great Depression. We are facing now a general retrenchment in the developed world, which threatens to put us in a decade of more stagnation, or worse. The best-case scenario is a deflationary environment. The worst-case scenario is a collapse of the financial system.”

Is Soros just a naturally gloomy guy? Or are things really that bad? Felix Salmon is roaming the corridors of the Davos conference and says that gloomy or not, Soros is no outlier:

No one but Soros will actually say these things, at Davos — but everybody here fears them, which is one reason why we have the slightly ludicrous sight of billionaires bellyaching about the global burdens of inequality.

Security this year is tighter than ever — the first rule of security at these events is that it can only get ratcheted up, rather than loosened at all — and there’s a besieged feeling to this Alpine town I haven’t felt before. The financial crisis concentrated minds and was seen as a big problem to be addressed and even maybe solved. But the current breakdown of trust in global institutions cuts at the heart of the World Economic Forum’s founding principle — that if you get a bunch of important people together in the same place, they can actually make a difference.

I doubt that it's time to stock up on canned food or anything, but it's an interesting observation. Are the world's governing elites losing confidence in their own abilities? I wouldn't blame them if they were, considering how they've responded to the events of the past few years. When the big test finally came, they didn't do very well.

    

I know nobody cares, but you really have to admire the chutzpah of a Karl Rove Super-PAC running an ad that attacks President Obama because median incomes are down since 2009. The problem isn't that the statement is literally untrue. According the Census Bureau, the median income adjusted for inflation did indeed drop $368 between 2009 and 2010.

But guess what? Between 2001 and 2009, when Rove's boss was in the White House, median income fell $448. And that's over two entire terms that included six full years of economic expansion. But I guess when you bequeath your successor the biggest economic calamity since the Depression, you need to work pretty hard to rejuvenate your reputation.

    

Matt Yglesias directs me this morning to a column by Peter Orszag promoting the cause of greater price transparency in the healthcare arena. As you may or may not be aware, but it's almost impossible for consumers to find out the price of various procedures, which in turn makes it almost impossible to shop around. This reduces competitive pressure and keeps prices higher:

Several efforts are therefore under way to provide more transparency about health-care prices, with the goal of helping people become smarter shoppers. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services now collect and publish information on prices for prescription drugs (through the Medicare Plan Finder) and for common health services in various areas (through the Health Care Consumer Initiatives). And more than half of states now have publicly accessible websites offering health-care price information.

These efforts have not been overwhelmingly successful. California’s initiative over the past nine years to require hospitals to make certain price data available, for example, has done little to drive patients toward lower-price competitors or to narrow the price distribution, according to an analysis by the Congressional Research Service. A similar effort to increase price transparency in New Hampshire also had little effect. Simply posting prices online doesn’t seem to do all that much.

Well, of course these efforts haven't been overwhelmingly successful. As Atrios points out, this is partly because most big-ticket procedures aren't really all that discretionary. If you're having a heart attack, you get your bypass surgery from whichever hospital the ambulance takes you to.

But there's another point that's really a lot more important: most people don't buy their own healthcare. They have insurance that pays 90% of their costs. Or they have Medicare. Or they have Medicaid. Or they're too poor to afford healthcare at all. The number of people who literally pay for their healthcare needs on a cash basis and therefore have an incentive to shop around is small. Certainly far too small to have much impact on prices even if they are publicly posted.

I'm in favor of transparency anyway, partly on general principles and partly as an incentive to lower the insane prices that hospitals charge patients who don't have insurance (often 3x-4x the prices they charge insurance companies). And of course, conservatives want price transparency because it's a necessary precursor to their nirvana of HSAs and high-deductible insurance policies, in which consumers really would pay for a lot of healthcare services out of pocket. That's a wet dream that will never happen, but I'm willing to join with them in demanding price transparency anyway. After all, even if there aren't all that many consumers who shop around for healthcare services, why shouldn't they be able to compare prices?

But will it have much impact on the overall cost of healthcare in America? Not a chance.

    

As we all know, much of Mitt Romney's wealth is derived from "carried interest," a share of the profits from investments that Bain Capital made while he was CEO. This income is taxed at the same 15% rate as ordinary capital gains, which is why Romney's tax rate is so low.

But it turns out there's another interesting tidbit about carried interest that I've never heard of before: it's a great way of passing along a huge inheritance to your kids without paying any taxes. David Cay Johnston explains:

Johnston: The Romneys gave $100 milliion to their sons and paid not one penny of gift tax. They were able to take assets they have that are producing enormous income and, under the law, give that money to their children and not pay any taxes on it.

Sambolin: Is that something you specifically found in what has been released to you?

Johnston: Yes. I have suspected this and written about it in my column that this is what happened, and last night, Brad Malt, the attorney for the Romneys, confirmed to Reuters that we were correct. They have not paid a penny of gift tax. That's because Congress allows a very tiny group of people — the Romneys by their income are in the top 1% of the top 1% — to not count as having any value the real souce of their income, something called carried interest, if they give it to their children.

Welcome to the wonderful world of estate planning for the super wealthy. The Romney kids will have to pay taxes when they start taking income from the trust their father set up for them — at the usual 15% rate paid by millionaires, of course — but the inheritance itself is blissfully tax free. It's just another of the many benefits of running a private equity firm.

    

I know it's a cliche to say that an election-year State of the Union address is a campaign speech on steroids, but tonight's State of the Union address was.....a campaign speech on steroids. At one point or another, I think I heard a shout out to virtually every conceivable voting bloc in the nation. We need to double work study jobs, double our exports, double tax deductions for domestic jobs, double our trade complaints against China, and double down on clean energy. We need an all-of-the-above energy policy and an all-options-on-the-table policy against Iran. We salute the million soldiers who served in Iraq, we're going to train two million Americans with new job skills, and we're planning to develop enough clean energy to power three million homes. We're going to save $10 billion in regulatory costs and $100 billion in energy costs. We're going to cut the deficit by $2 trillion.

There was even a shout out to process wonks:

Some of what’s broken has to do with the way Congress does its business these days. A simple majority is no longer enough to get anything — even routine business — passed through the Senate. Neither party has been blameless in these tactics. Now both parties should put an end to it. For starters, I ask the Senate to pass a rule that all judicial and public service nominations receive a simple up or down vote within 90 days.

That's not going to happen, but even a couple of sentences in the SOTU is more attention than this usually gets. Still, I wish Obama had explicitly stated that the Senate now requires 60 votes instead of 50 to pass legislation. If he's going to pander to us process wonks, he should at least do it right.

I'm a Democrat and a fan of the president, but even I found this speech formulaic, devoid of interesting ideas, and built almost solely for applause lines. Presumably this means that it's going to poll through the roof. Joe and Jane Sixpack will love it. And with that, Campaign 2012 has officially gotten underway.