My favorite criminals are those known in the literature — or at least in the movies — as “standovers,” criminals who specialize in victimizing other criminals. Examples of the type are Omar Little in The Wire, whose occupation is robbing Baltimore drug dealers, and the Joker in The Dark Knight, who loots and extorts Gotham’s mob bosses. The really bold ones who show up at large drug deals and rob both sides.
The problem with the standover business model, obviously, is the same as the problem of scorched-earth banditry: It drives away exactly the sort of activity that the criminal needs to make his own living — it’s a crime on the wrong side of the Laffer Curve. For this reason, banditry frequently degenerates into a protection racket, a relatively modest tax on criminal enterprises and non-criminal enterprises alike. Protection rackets have their own challenges: For one thing, you actually do have to provide some protection, mainly from other predators like you. Over the years, economic success and administrative demands eventually transform bands of roving bandits into bands of stationary bandits. One popular theory of the state — one that is pretty well-supported by the historical evidence in the European context — is that this is where governments come from: protection rackets that survive for a long enough period of time that they take on a patina of legitimacy. At some point, Romulus-and-Remus stories are invented to explain that the local Mafiosi have not only historical roots but divine sanction.
The fundamental problem — the provision of services — never really goes away. It is even today a critical issue in places that are (or recently have been) ruled by crime syndicates such as the Taliban and Fatah. Hamas, especially, is known to put some real effort into the social-services front. There are some services that markets historically have not done a very good job of providing — these are called “public goods,” which is a specific term from political economy and not a synonym for “stuff the public thinks is desirable” — and their provision is the only real reason we have governments. Or, more precisely: Providing public goods is the only legitimate reason we have governments.
In reality, we have governments for lots of reasons, most of them illegitimate: That ancient instinct toward banditry is powerful, and the desire to make a living by simply commanding economic resources rather than earning them through trade or labor seems to be a fixed feature of a certain subset of human beings. Patronage and clientelism are very strong forces, too, and government can be used to create public-sector salaries or welfare benefits that are well in excess of the wages that political clients could expect to earn in honest work. In the United States, our swollen public-sector payrolls, particularly at the state and local level, are little more than a supplementary welfare state, providing a more dignified form of public dependency for relatively low-skilled and mainly unenterprising people.
Lately, our Democrat friends have taken to pointing out that things are done rather differently in places such as Denmark and the Netherlands, where taxes are very high and where — our progressive friends generally leave this bit out — people get a lot more for what they pay in taxes. Once you figure in federal, state, and local spending, U.S. public-sector spending isn’t much different from Canada’s or much of Europe’s or the OECD’s — but what do we get for it?
Been to the DMV lately? …
If you ever have started a business, you are more than a little familiar with the armed-middleman business model, with 70 or 80 percent of your compliance challenges being composed of things that you have to comply with for the sake of complying with them. I always enjoyed putting up those OSHA posters featuring men in hardhats and shovels in my newspaper offices, where the most likely injury was carpel-tunnel injury or possible hearing damage when I started yelling at you around deadline time. I once put the question to a young, idealistic liberal Democratic budget guy in the employ of the city of Philadelphia: “What share of city workers actually does something useful?” His estimate was about 1 in 10, excluding police, firemen, and teachers — but, considering the number of police officers whose full-time job is administrative work at the Police Athletic League, you might want to qualify that further still.
When it comes to government, if you aren’t involved in the provision of actual public goods, you are involved in extortion. It may be legal. It may have the blessing of the mayor, the city council, and your union representative, but it’s still extortion. And you should be ashamed of yourself. If your only purpose is getting in the way until somebody hands you money, then you are part of a protection racket. And you might want to think about going into a more honorable line of work.
Category: US politics
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No comments on Criminals and government, but he repeats himself
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Thanks to a tip from a sharp-eyed Power Line reader, I went back to a New York Times story about a recent Senate hearing on Puerto Rico’s debt crisis. If you’ve been following the news, you’ll know that Puerto Rico is bidding to be the Greece of the western hemisphere, but since it is a U.S. territory it is Washington rather than the E.U. that is being looked to for a bailout. Naturally the Obama administration is working on a bailout plan.
Toward the end of the Times story, the fun really gets rolling:
Democratic senators at the hearing made it clear that they were deeply concerned about some hedge funds betting on Puerto Rico’s crisis and the possibility that they were seeking to influence the rescue plan in order to maximize profits.
Imagine that! Creditors wanting to have some say in restructuring a debt burden! It’s like this has never happened before or something. Dogs and cats, living together! Real “end of days” stuff.
And sure enough, Bernie is leading the hit parade.
Mr. Sanders said that what he termed “vulture funds” had been buying up Puerto Rico’s debt for as little as 30 cents on the dollar.
“Why should they get 100 percent of their investment when they are paying 30 to 70 percent for their bonds?” he said.
Mr. Weiss said that some debt securities were yielding 11 percent.
“Whoa!” Mr. Sanders exclaimed. “They are receiving 11 percent and children in Puerto Rico are going hungry. That, for me, is not an equation that works.”
Where to begin? “Why should they get 100 percent of their investment when they are paying 30 to 70 percent on their bonds?” Well, a fellow named Alexander Hamilton explained that once, after “speculators” had bought up much of the debt issued by the Continental Congress and U.S. government under the Articles of Confederation, often for pennies on the dollar. Hamilton pointed out that if the U.S. didn’t honor the debt, no one would ever lend money to the U.S. again. “Full faith and credit” isn’t worth much if lenders think you won’t honor your debts.
Sanders objects that some investors are “receiving 11 percent” while children are going hungry. Actually investors won’t receive anything if Puerto Rico defaults. More likely they’ll receive market rates of return if the debt is restructured, which makes Puerto Rico bonds a normal investment. But what about the widows and orphans and union pension funds that bought Puerto Rico bonds at full face value (and a lower coupon rate)? Does Mr. Sanders care about them? Or should they be screwed just to satisfy Bernie Sanders’s lust to punish Wall Street?
This subject might make for a series of good questions for Sanders at the next Democratic debate. Should President George Washington have defaulted on the U.S. debt in the 1790s? What about 1981, when U.S. long-term bonds had a coupon rate of 13 percent, while they were hungry children (some of them in Vermont)? Better still, if the U.S. hits a debt crisis some time in the near future, would President Sanders recommend defaulting on U.S. sovereign debt because some banks have taken the risk to buy our debt at a discount? Just how would he distinguish “vultures” from other debt investors? (Actually, I know the answer to this last question: the same way the Obama administration distinguished between GM bondholders and union claimants in the auto industry bailout. Socialism always ends in gangster government.)
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Reason fires a brushback pitch, so to speak, at former Major League Baseball commissioner and Brewers owner Bud Selig in a book review:
If not for Bud Selig, erstwhile owner of the Milwaukee Brewers, and his single-minded determination to control Major League Baseball’s costs by imposing a salary cap on players, George W. Bush probably would have never run for governor of Texas, much less president of the United States.
That is just one long-rumored story confirmed in Jon Pessah’s The Game, a sweeping and comprehensive investigation of the business of baseball over the past three decades. Selig, along with former Players Association chief Donald Fehr and the late New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, is both credited and blamed for just about everything that has brought America’s pastime into the modern era.
Once struggling to survive, Major League Baseball (MLB) now enjoys massive revenues, billion-dollar local TV contracts, and per-game attendance levels that are up by more than 5,300 over 1995, even after a recent slight decline. But the game also suffers from a confused legacy, with its record books (fetishized by its fans like no other sport’s) tainted in the minds of many by the influence of rampant performance-enhancing drug use.
It is Selig whose legacy is most scrutinized. For all his successes, the second-generation used car mogul from Milwaukee comes across as a panicky, short-sighted crony capitalist who fleeced the taxpayers and fans of his home city and actively enabled other owners to do the same.
To tell the ultimate inside-baseball story, Pessah, a founding editor at ESPN: The Magazine, interviewed more than 150 people, including players, coaches, senior front office staffers, and three MLB commissioners—Selig, Fay Vincent, and the new guy, Rob Manfred.
The story begins in the early 1990s, around the time Selig led a coup against Vincent, whom the owners deemed insufficiently devoted to their interests. Selig used the popular and gregarious Bush—the public face of the Texas Rangers, though he was just a minority owner—to whip the requisite votes in favor of removing the incumbent commissioner. The two small-market owners had a quiet understanding between them: Upon ousting Vincent, Selig would serve as interim commissioner, then, once the battlefield dust cleared, yield the throne to Bush.
Though Bush was a friend and longtime supporter of Vincent, he agreed to rally the troops to support the vote of “no confidence” in the commissioner, based largely on the promise that Selig “would support his dream to become baseball’s next Commissioner.” It didn’t work out that way. Selig would spend the next 22 years in Bush’s dream job. He would preside over a players’ strike that culminated in the only cancelled World Series in baseball history—something the Great Depression and two world wars couldn’t accomplish—but then help engineer a renaissance, thanks to the boom in attendance at new retro-designed family-friendly ballparks (which replaced many cold and ugly ’60s and ’70s mixed-use behemoths), a surge in colorful international talent from places like Japan and the Dominican Republic, and, yes, the steroid-infused home run craze of the late ’90s and early ’00s. Selig was the proud steward of baseball’s rebirth, but once the steroid jig was up, he would become the flustered face of indignation.
The commissioner’s old ally in Texas, stuck with nothing else to do after Selig left him twisting in the wind for more than a year, never officially telling him that he had no intentions of abdicating, would be pushed by Karl Rove into running for governor. Bush unseated the incumbent in 1994, he launched a bid for the White House five years after that, and the rest is history.
Soon after Selig took the job, he was summoned before Congress for one of many hearings in which a committee of mad-as-hell senators threatened to revoke baseball’s antitrust exemption if the sport failed to appoint an “independent commissioner” soon.
Congress’ leverage over MLB lies in that exemption. Baseball is the only professional sports league to enjoy the privilege of a legalized monopoly, thanks to a 1922 Supreme Court decision declaring that baseball is “not interstate commerce.” Pessah correctly calls this a “mistake” but is certain Congress will never reverse it—because then “what excuse would lawmakers have to hold hearings that give them invaluable face time on ESPN and headlines in the New York Times?”
As owner of one of the most moribund franchises in all of sports, residing in the league’s smallest media market, Selig’s modus operandi for nearly all of his tenure was to stress the dire financial state of baseball and the majority of its teams. He was particularly offended by owners, such as Steinbrenner, who unapologetically reinvested their profits into the product on the field, agreeing with other owners’ characterization of the Yankee boss as an “economic bully” who was “bad for the game.” When confronted with the evidence of a number of well-run and innovative small-market teams consistently finding ways to compete—the Oakland Athletics and Tampa Bay Rays, for example—Selig brushed them off as short-term “aberrations.” Pessah notes that Selig would never “consider that maybe he might not be very good at building a baseball team.” He always insisted that the solution to fix the “broken” system was “taking more of Steinbrenner’s money.”
The commissioner would never deviate from this philosophy, despite the fact that MLB enjoys greater parity in the number of teams making it to the postseason than any of the other three major professional American sports leagues (all of which, it should be noted, have salary caps).
In the run-up to the disastrous 1994 players’ strike, Selig pushed the mantra that fans of small-market teams need to have “hope and faith” that their teams would have a reasonable chance of competing for a championship. In Selig’s worldview, billionaires should not and could not be expected to invest in their vanity projects or responsibly manage their finances. Instead, less successful franchises should be subsidized by the more successful teams, and the players’ “out of control” salaries must be capped if the league were to survive.
The Selig-led cadre of owners, many of whom were found to have illegally colluded during the 1987 offseason to not sign each other’s free agents, demanded both a salary cap and revenue sharing, which Selig called “inextricably linked.” To which Fehr, the players union leader, retorted, “The real linkage is the big market owners won’t share with small market owners unless the players give them back the money.”
A talented politician, Selig was able to unite all the owners, including the large-market Steinbrenner, into pushing his agenda. Though the 1994 strike would lead to a cancelled World Series and apocalyptic public relations while yielding no salary cap, the amenability of large-market teams to consider revenue sharing was established.
Revenue sharing would indeed help teams like the Oakland Athletics, whose General Manager Billy Beane revolutionized the game using advanced analytics to determine players’ true value. The A’s regularly reached the postseason despite playing in a universally loathed stadium ill-suited for baseball, housed in an economically depressed city, with one of the lowest payrolls in the league.
But too many other teams would simply pocket their revenue sharing funds, including the Florida Marlins, who Deadspinreported were turning a league-leading $50 million in profits over two years when their payroll was at or near the bottom of the league. Another team taking in more revenue than it invested on payroll was Selig’s own Brewers. (After six years as acting commissioner, Selig transferred ownership of the team to his daughter Wendy so he could maintain the pretense that he was an “independent commissioner.”)
Though critical of a great many aspects of Selig’s management, Pessah gives credit where it is due. Not too long after the players got back on the field in 1995, baseball’s popularity boomed. As an owner, Selig’s management was pathetic. As commissioner, he saw the game enjoy a renaissance, though it would come with a cost.
That same year, former Sen. Mitchell, a longtime Selig ally (and Boston Red Sox executive), released his eponymous report, billed as the comprehensive history of the steroid era. It delivered on its promise to name names. But despite the millions Mitchell personally made on the report (paid for by MLB) and the two years it took to create, the document was mostly a retread of information already gleaned in the BALCO investigation.
The only significant scoops came from two snitching drug dealers who were able to cut deals to avoid prison by cooperating with Mitchell: New York Mets clubhouse attendant Kirk Radomski and former New York Yankees/Toronto Blue Jays trainer Brian McNamee, both of whom implicated dozens of players, including arguably the best pitcher of his generation, Roger Clemens.
For all its hype, the Mitchell Report would not be the last word on the Steroid Era. In 2013, the South Florida–based “anti-aging clinic” Biogenesis was revealed to have been peddling performance enhancing drugs to numerous players, including such stars as Ryan Braun, Bartolo Colon, and Nelson Cruz—but none so drew Selig’s ire as much as Alex Rodriguez.
Unlike the three aforementioned players, Rodriguez had not failed a drug test, but the overwhelming evidence that he bought drugs from Biogenesis for years, plus his determination to obfuscate MLB’s investigation, led to open warfare between the commissioner and the player many once hoped would pass Barry Bonds on the career home run list and be anointed baseball’s “clean” home run champion.
As loathsome as the serial liar and recidivist cheat “A-Rod” is, Selig was determined to give him a run for his unethical money. He enlisted MLB’s “investigative team,” consisting of dozens of former police officers and even a head of the Secret Service, to nail the slugger at any cost—and baseball’s private cops would engage in plenty of legally questionable tactics to do it. Though the “I-Team” would succeed in securing demonstrable proof of Rodriguez’s years of drug purchases from Biogenesis, baseball would have to consort with known criminals, sometimes paying them cash for stolen documents in shady backroom deals, to preserve the “integrity” of the game.
Pessah describes these efforts by Selig as having an ironic effect. Rodriguez’s legacy was already irreparably damaged, his name mud. But Selig’s personal quest to nail the fallen star only kept steroids and baseball prominently featured in the headlines for longer than they otherwise would have been.
Since the 1994 strike, baseball has enjoyed zero work stoppages. Players’ salaries continue to rise, but so do team revenues. Though he’s especially rough on Selig, Pessah ultimately credits him, Steinbrenner, and Fehr as titans of their time, all worthy of the sport’s Hall of Fame.
But with a fan base that grows older by the season, will future generations care about a game with a deliberately leisurely pace, one that has thus far failed to market its newest stars as effectively as the National Football League and National Basketball Association? Will they be entertained by the markedly decreased offensive output of the post-steroid era? Has the age of publicly subsidized stadiums finally come to a merciful end?
The Game can’t answer those questions, but it can help explain how we got here. This fascinating book demonstrates how an uneasy marriage of punitive socialism and barely restrained capitalism made MLB more profitable than it had ever been but left its future cloudy and uncertain.
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Reason interviews John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods:
Because of Whole Foods’ educated customer base and because Mackey is himself a vegan and a champion of collaboration between management and workers, it’s easy to mistake him for a progressive left-winger. Indeed, an early version of Jonah Goldberg’s bestselling 2008 book Liberal Fascism even bore the subtitle “The Totalitarian Temptation from Hegel to Whole Foods.”
Yet that misses the radical vision of capitalism at the heart of Mackey’s thought. A high-profile critic of the minimum wage, Obamacare, and the regulatory state, Mackey believes that free markets are the best way not only to raise living standards but to create meaning for individuals, communities, and society. At the same time, he challenges a number of libertarian dogmas, including the notion that publicly traded companies should always seek to exclusively maximize shareholder value. Conscious Capitalism, the 2013 book he co-authored with Rajendra Sisodia, lays out a detailed vision for a post-industrial capitalism that addresses spiritual desire as much as physical need. …
reason: You believe capitalism is not only the greatest wealth creator but helps poor people get rich. But you see it as constantly being misrepresented, even by its champions. Why is capitalism under attack?
John Mackey: Intellectuals have always disdained commerce. That is something that tradesmen did—people that were in a lower class. Minorities oftentimes did it, like you had the Jews in the West. And when they became wealthy and successful and rose, then they were envied, they were persecuted and their wealth confiscated, and many times they were run out of country after country. Same thing happened with the Chinese in the East. They were great businesspeople as well.
So the intellectuals have always sided with the aristocrats to maintain a society where the businesspeople were kept down. You might say that capitalism was the first time that businesspeople caught a break. Because of Adam Smith and the philosophy that came along with that, the industrial revolution began this huge upward surge of prosperity.
reason: Is it a misunderstanding of what business does? Is it envy? Is it a lack of capacity to understand that what entrepreneurs do, or what innovators do, is take a bunch of things that might not be worth much separately and then they transform them? What is the root of the antagonism toward commerce?
Mackey: It’s sort of where people stand in the social hierarchy. If you live in a more business-oriented society, like the United States has been, then you have these businesspeople, who [the intellectuals] don’t judge to be very intelligent or well-educated, having lots of money—and they begin to buy political power with it, and they rise in the social hierarchy. Whereas the really intelligent people, the intellectuals, are less important. And I don’t think they like that.
That’s one of the main reasons the intellectuals have usually disdained commerce. They haven’t seen it [as a] dynamic, creative force, because they measure themselves against these people, and they think they’re superior, and yet in the social hierarchy they’re not seen as more important. I think that drives them crazy.
reason: A lot of the times the businesspeople are plucky upstarts—they’re innovators, they’re disruptive, and they’re fighting against the power. But once they get to a certain point of influence or power, they often start to try and rig the market or freeze the market in their favor. Why is that?
Mackey: I don’t know if it’s a psychological switch so much as that they weren’t necessarily grounded in the philosophy of capitalism. They weren’t necessarily advocates of the free market. They were just advocates of their own advancement, their own personal enrichment. And so I think oftentimes, they don’t make a distinction between when they’re entrepreneurs on the way up versus when they’ve arrived. They’re attempting to not fall, so they try to rig the game, and we have crony capitalism.
reason: We live in an age where there are an unbelievable amount of government mandates that restrict the ability of business owners and employees to really negotiate about stuff. Some are things as obvious as the minimum wage, where it says, “Under no circumstances can a business offer somebody less than this amount.” How do these affect your ability to run a business in an extremely competitive market?
Mackey: The impetus behind so many of these types of regulations in the workplace is, in a sense, to shackle business again—to get it back under the control of the intellectuals. Just like commerce: If you study the history of business, you will see that most of the time in our history, commerce was controlled by the aristocrats. The merchants were kept under their thumb. And now they’ve escaped and we have this free-market ideology that says the market should determine all these things. They’re systematically undermining that marketplace to get business back, get the genie back in the bottle.
Of course, that will stifle innovation. It’ll stifle the dynamic creative destruction of capitalism. But I don’t think they’re thinking about it that way. They’re very concerned about the motives of business, and they see it as this selfish, greedy, exploitative thing. Businesspeople can’t be trusted, markets aren’t just, they’re not fair, so we need to intervene, we need to control this situation.
Let’s take the minimum wage. Let’s say Tom wants to go work for Whole Foods Market, and Tom is willing to work for Whole Foods for, you know, $10 an hour. And we want to hire Tom, and we think Tom is worth about $10 an hour, so we come together, and Tom’s winning. We’re not forcing him to work there. He’s getting benefits. He’s getting opportunities to advance, learn new skills, and make more money in the future. We’re gaining from it because we think he’s going to be a good employee, and we think $10 is a fair wage. However, the government may not let us do that. They may say, “You can’t pay Tom $10 an hour, because we’re going to set a minimum wage of $15 an hour.” So the government’s basically saying, “We know better what’s [good] for Tom, and we know better what’s [good] for you, and we’re not gonna let you guys freely come together and do voluntary exchange.”
reason: The argument is that especially in an era where there’s high unemployment and low labor-force participation, it’s a buyer’s market. Tom wants to work for $10, but you could probably get him for $5 or $6. So the argument is that, somebody’s got to look out for Tom.
Mackey: Well, first of all, I think Tom can look out for himself. But [second], that’s basically a myth. Wages in a marketplace are determined by productivity. Why should we pay Tom even $10 an hour? If we can control the wages, then why don’t we just pay him 10 cents an hour? Why not? Because Tom could go get a job someplace else that would pay him better. Wages are determined through competitive marketplace dynamics. And wages will settle at the marginal level of productivity, meaning we might like to pay Tom less, but Tom’s not willing to work for less, and he can get a job down the street that pays him what he thinks he’s worth. So the competition between employers sets wages.
When the government sets it, it’s inevitably going to screw it up. It’s going to set them too high, and so a company like Whole Foods Market—let’s say they say the minimum wage is $15, but Tom’s only worth $10 to us. Well, what we’ll do is we’ll restructure our marketplace so that we’ll provide less service. We’re actually a very high-service supermarket, but if they make service too expensive, so our customers aren’t willing to pay for it, then the rational, logical thing to do would be to cut back. Do more self-service, make people queue up in lines longer, so we can keep our labor costs under control, so we can be competitive in the marketplace.
reason: What are some of the other, less obvious regulations that really hinder the ability of business and individuals to come together, or to be flexible and innovative?
Mackey: There are hundreds of them, and most of them, as you say, are hidden. One, perhaps, that’s not so hidden is Obamacare. Again, it’s determining, rather than letting the marketplace determine, health care in a competitive format. They’re basically saying, “You must cover this.”
Let’s say they mandate that you must cover in vitro fertilization, which as far as I know is not really an illness or a health condition, but [let’s say] some lobbyist somewhere can jam that through. When they jammed it through in Massachusetts and forced us to cover that, we were paying an extra $750 a person for health insurance, and there’s no free lunch. So if we’re paying an extra $750 to cover everybody in the workplace so they can get in vitro fertilization—so someone, sometime can get it—well, the result is they’re going to get $750 less in [other forms of] compensation. I think this is what people don’t understand: If you mandate certain benefits then the cash compensation’s going to be less. Oftentimes, you’ll see studies that show that “real wages” are stuck. Well, real wages and benefits aren’t stuck, but you don’t necessarily see that.
reason: So it might be that the pay is stuck, but the overall compensation, the fringe benefits, etc.—
Mackey: Exactly. They’re forcing us to cover more things. If you’re forced to give paid time off, if you’re forced to give maternity leave, you’re forced to give paternity leave, you must give this many vacation days—well, those are all costs to the business. They sound good, but there’s no free lunch there. So if they’re raising our costs through benefits, then necessarily total cash compensation must be reduced. Then they say, “You’re going to have to pay this much in cash compensation.” Again, there’s no free lunch. So we’ll either have to cut back on labor, or we’ll raise prices to our customers. And they think, incorrectly, that you can somehow or another take it out of profits. But the profit fund is too small. At a business like Whole Foods Market, we pay seven to eight times more in wages than we actually make in profits.
reason: Some of the hardest people to convince of your vision of capitalism are libertarians who believe what Milton Friedman, one of your intellectual heroes, used to talk about-that the only responsibility of a business is to increase its shareholders’ values. Talk a little bit about what kind of resistance you get from people who are rock-ribbed free-marketeers, who [might disagree with] your discussion of capitalism being more broadly inclusive of not just shareholders, but also other types of stakeholders.
Mackey: I get quite a bit of resistance. And it’s a shame, because if you think about what really empowers the left to put high living-wage compensation, or minimum wages, or mandates of a bunch of benefits, or additional regulations on the business, it’s because they don’t think business is “good.” They think business exists simply to maximize shareholder value and make profits. So if that’s really the motivation for business, if it’s not a more inclusive philosophy, then they feel quite justified in hamstringing business. Because they’re basically a bunch of psychopaths running around trying to line their own pockets; we can’t trust them to do the right thing, so we’re going to have to do it for them.
In a more inclusive view, business has these responsibilities to all its stakeholders, customers, employees, investors, suppliers, and the larger community. If business behaved like that, the impulse to regulate and control would be lessened.
reason: Do you think we’re shifting into a mode of capitalism where the idea of “doing well by doing good” is really starting to come into focus and will start energizing the way people think about business, and for-profits and nonprofits, and how the two may not be so diametrically opposed?
Mackey: I really do. When you asked me the previous question, do I feel resistance from traditional free-marketeers and libertarians? Yeah. Old ones. But as they say, social progress is made one funeral at a time. Young people are eager for these ideas. I’ve oftentimes gone to business schools and talked about this, and I see the professors with their arms crossed, saying, “This is about shareholder value.” But the students, the MBA students, they’re lapping it up, because this is exactly what they want to believe. “Yes, I can get rich, and I can do good.” That seems like a win-win strategy to them and to me.
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Charlie Sykes has known U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Janesville) before he was first elected to represent the First Congressional District, and now as the person second in line to the presidency:
Over the next few days, commentators who do not dwell in the fever swamps of Ann Coulterism, will note that Paul Ryan will (a) be the most conservative speaker in recent history, and (b) has risen on the strength of his unusual combination of policy wonkishness and principle.Matthew Continetti recalls how unlikely his ascension would have seemed only a few years ago. In the wake of the 2008 electoral debacle, Ryan stepped forward with what seemed an almost quixotic idea – a blueprint of conservative reform.
The GOP was approaching a nadir—unpopular, exhausted, in the minority. What did Ryan do? He authored the first version of his budget, the Roadmap for America’s Future. He called for spending and tax cuts, changes to Social Security and Medicare.
He became the unofficial GOP spokesman for free markets and fiscal restraint. No one ordered him to do this. He alone among House Republicans took the initiative, much like his hero Jack Kemp had done in the 1970s…
His colleagues were curious about the plan, how to discuss it with their constituents. Ryan taught them the details. His dissection of Obamacare as Obama sat glaring before him made Ryan a viral video star.
By 2011, his ideas – once derided by the beltway and GOP establishment – had become official GOP policy. Because Ryan was willing to embrace policy innovation and political risk – and because he was willing to lead on both — he was able to remake the GOP into “the party of spending restraint, tax cuts, and entitlement reform.”
Despite dire warnings that Ryan was seducing his party into touching the Third Rail of American politics, Republicans have won congressional majorities in three consecutive elections. Ryan himself was tapped to be Mitt Romney’s vice presidential running mate and, as the recent Draft Ryan movement made clear, he remains one of the GOP’s most compelling figures.
Like Jack Kemp, he has emerged as an intellectual leader of his party, while still being its most attractive spokesman. As Speaker, he will also inevitably be compared to Newt Gingrich, but Ryan presents a far different face of conservatism and the distinction is crucial. Gingrich was a deeply flawed leader, prone to political tangents and often prey to his own restless and undisciplined imagination. Ryan is not.
Ryan’s most important quality tends to be overlooked by the political class, but is easily recognized back home: he is a fundamentally decent human being. In the age of Trump and Clinton, this is saying something.
As evidenced by its embrace of Trump, such decency does not play well with the Rush/Levin/Drudge/Ingraham conservative media axis. His insistence on protecting his family time was derided by some as a sign of his unseriousness, but it undoubtedly struck a chord among many who do not believe that politics is the sum of our human identity.
This makes Ryan something of a unicorn in American politics, an officeholder who says he wants to spend more time with his family… and actually means it. Having lost his own father, Ryan is determined to be a father who is present in his own children’s lives and is willing to curtail his power in order to make that happen. No one who knows Ryan doubts his sincerity or the depth of his commitment to that non-political part of his life.
This fundamental decency also explains, at least in part, why his colleagues rallied around him so decisively, ignoring the nattering and browbeating from the activist media and “Scam Pacs.” His colleagues, who know him and have worked with him for years, clearly respect, trust, and like him. Given the toxicity of modern congressional politics, this is itself a remarkable feat.
They know him to be intellectually curious and sincere in attempting to apply his ideas to seemingly intractable problems, like the national debt and the impending entitlement crunch. More recently, he has been willing to step into the intellectual vacuum that has developed within conservatism on the issue of poverty. Here again, his fundamental decency is on display.
His attempt to wrestle with conservative approaches to poverty is politically risky, but also a fascinating departure for a political figure who had helped popularize the notion of “makers and takers.” Ryan openly admitted that he was rethinking his ideas, recognizing that the War on Poverty was a demonstrable failure, but that conservatives were not offering a plausible alternative. His plan is certainly not without flaws and there are areas that deserve conservative skepticism. But the key point is that Ryan was willing to address the issue at all by opening himself to new ideas, perspective and experiences.
Quick: name another American political figure who is willing to admit his fallibility like this or display his openness to ideological innovation. What leading progressive has challenged his co-ideologues to rethink or reconsider the agenda of the left? What figure is likely to do so in the near future?
If you are unclear what makes Paul Ryan tick, watch this video, in which he discusses his visit to Cleveland with neighborhood activist Bob Woodson:
Robert Woodson: Why do you care?
Ryan: it’s something I’ve always cared about, but that visit that you I had that day in Cleveland really touched a chord with me and it rekindled within me a desire to learn more. I think we’ve gotten so swelled up with these fights in Washington … that we sort of forgot about listening to people who are actually making a difference, who are actually fighting poverty successfully, who are showing though the example of their lives how we can do a better job of helping people. I come from Janesville Wisconsin, and I’ve met a lot of folks struggling, it opened my eyes to a whole new set of struggles that people have gone through.But in learning and hearing those stories, I also learned about the triumph of actually overcoming those challenges and how wonderful that is. People who had gone through the worst of all situations came through those situations and redeemed themselves and are helping make other people do the same thing. What I got you that day in Cleveland was to me an inspiration and a calling and I want to see if I can take this feeling and translate it into better lessons learned, so that we can translate that into better action.
If House of Cards accurately reflected American political life, Paul Ryan would likely be the last person to ever become Speaker of the House. But this week he will take the gavel, a sign that we sometimes get better than we deserve.
This must drive Wisconsin liberals almost as insane with range as Gov. Scott Walker does. Imagine a Republican who tries to help the poor, but not through the usual (and unsuccessful) top-down government-knows-all approaches.
Some conservatives Sykes lists aren’t happy with Ryan either. They appear to forget that, in case they haven’t noticed, there is a Democrat in the White House, and Democrats controlled the Senate until last year. Most voters regardless of party or ideology want government to improve their lives (something Barack Obama either doesn’t or won’t realize); they do not want to see government dismantled and replaced with nothing.
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Noah Rothman on the real Republican In Name Only:
For Republicans with even a passing attachment to the principles of conservatism, as opposed to merely the personalities who count themselves among the movement’s members, the fatalistic refrain so often repeated over the course of 2015 has been that “nothing matters.”
The latest Republican of dubious loyalty to be thrown into the stockades by the movement’s purity police is soon-to-be Speaker of the House Paul Ryan. The Wisconsin representative and former GOP vice presidential nominee has done more to advance conservative principles and a Republican agenda in the age of Obama (and has taken innumerable arrows for it) than virtually any other elected official. For the alleged heresies of preventing a financial meltdown in 2008 with his TARP vote and for supporting comprehensive immigration reform, Ryan has been branded a “RINO.” This is unhinged in the most literal sense. It is an opinion divorced from reality and lent legitimacy only by the critical mass of angry Republicans who have also succumbed to this mania.
There is no small irony in the fact that many of those conservatives who are supposedly so committed to principle that Republicans like Ryan, Rick Perry, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio — et cetera, et cetera – have been judged suspect are foursquare behind Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy. It has been demonstrated again and again that Trump is an orthodox liberal with a hawkish stance on immigration, but it matters not to Trump enthusiasts and those conservative media figures that seem to think their influence is enhanced by linking themselves to his movement. As he becomes more assured of the blinkered devotion of his fans, Trump appears to be shedding even a pretense that his candidacy is a conservative one. For most of his career on the fringes of American politics, Trump has demonstrated that his instincts are generally liberal, and he appears to be reverting to form.
To the extent that Donald Trump has a position on reforming America’s ballooning and unsustainable entitlement obligations, it is whatever he thinks the audience in front of him at any given moment wants to hear. More often than not, however, Trump has contended that he does not favor changes to Medicare or Social Security’s present structuring. He would address budgetary shortfalls, he says, by liquidating American military expenditures abroad and maximizing federal revenue collection at home. He has in the past added that changes to entitlements are too politically risky, which is objectively true. That is why Paul Ryan was pilloried by Democrats, accused of “throwing grandma off a cliff,” and what led radio host Mark Levin to call Trump a “clown.”
As Trump has encountered a potent rival in the form of Dr. Ben Carson, he has taken to differentiating himself from the candidate by, among other things like attacking his “energy” level and questioning his faith, contending that Carson would reform entitlements. “Ben Carson wants to abolish Medicare – I want to save it and Social Security,” Trump wrote on his Twitter account on Sunday evening. This was a flip-flop in record time. Not hours ago, Trump appeared on ABC News where he was asked if he would support health savings accounts in order to render Medicare unnecessary. “Well, it’s possible,” he told host George Stephanopoulos. “I think it’s a very good idea, and it’s an idea whose probably time has come.” Apparently that time came and went in the interim between breakfast and dinner on Sunday.
A creature of the media, it is rarely wise to underestimate Trump’s willingness to parrot the dominant narrative in the press. The latest and least well-founded contention among media professionals is that the Benghazi select committee’s questioning of Hillary Clinton was a total bust for Republicans. Given the gravity of the revelations about Clinton’s conduct and the administration’s knowledge of the nature of the attacks while they were ongoing, much of which was revealed at that marathon hearing, this claim is nothing short of a rearguard action to shield Clinton from criticism. Leave it to the Republican Party’s presidential frontrunner to legitimize this media narrative. “It was very partisan, and it looked quite partisan,” Trump averred on CNN on Sunday amid his endless whirlwind media tour. Maybe, but it was also quite productive. Moreover, most Republicans on the panel (and Democrat Tammy Duckworth, to her credit) behaved in a dispassionate and prosecutorial manner. To give succor to the liberal narrative that this was a partisan exercise lends validity to the Democratic contention that Hillary Clinton emerged a “winner” out of a process that should be immune to such parochial characterizations.
And what of the fevered passions with which Trump-backing conservatives decry the apparition of “amnesty” for illegal immigrants, the specter of which haunts their imaginations and crowds out virtually any objective or rational thought. In an interview with Larry King, Trump was asked if his unfeasibly aggressive deportation proposals have any redeeming character in the form of compassion for those families he proposes to break up. “We will do something that will be done with heart,” Trump vowed. He added, however, that he would not be more specific. “I don’t want to comment on that one right now, Larry, because that’s the sort of a question where I just don’t want to answer it right now,” Trump said. He has already claimed that he would reintroduce the “good” illegal residents he deports in some expedited fashion. Perhaps this is the start of Trump’s embrace of a pathway to grant amnesty to this population that avoids the cost and redundancy of his imagined re-importation process.
Trump’s retreat on immigration should not surprise anyone who is acquainted with Donald Trump’s liberal predispositions. Trump has in the not-too-distant past called Jeb Bush a “bright, tough and principled” Republican, scolded Mitt Romney for the callousness of his contention that illegal immigrants should face conditions in America that compel them to “self-deport,” and told a group of DREAMERs (the non-citizen children of illegal immigrants) that they had “convinced” him to support their pursuit of full, unqualified citizenship.
To all of this, we turn again to the pessimistic exhortation that none of it will matter. Not to Donald Trump supporters, at least. The candidate is almost secondary to the emotions he produces in his followers, which are previously unknown influence and satisfaction over the irritation his candidacy is causing the political system’s stakeholders. “I feel, for the first time in my life, that I am not invisible,” a devoted Trump fan told Washington Post reporters this weekend. For the candidate’s most indefatigable supporters, Trump’s policy positions are secondary to how he makes them feel. The candidate’s leftward drift is a window into how he would govern, but it’s a window into which his admirers would rather not peer.
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Canadians did something very stupid and elected an idiot liberal to run their country last week. (Not that that ever happens in this country …)
That first sentence is not entirely correct. The Liberal Party won the parliamentary election with about 40 percent of the vote. The new prime minister, Justin Trudeau, was elected only by the voters in his parliamentary district. (It would be like maybe-he’ll-be-elected-Speaker Paul Ryan becoming president despite getting the votes of only a majority of Wisconsin’s First Congressional District.) So almost no Canadians voted for Trudeau but are getting him, and most Canadian voters didn’t vote for Liberals but are getting them. Parliamentary government is a dictatorship of the majority party.
Trudeau of course will be a disaster, which will be the problem of Canadians as well as non-Obamabot Americans. Once we are rid of Obama, and assuming we don’t replace him with something at least as bad (see Hillary and Sanders, Comrade), I have a response.
Traditionally Canadians west of Ontario have been more conservative than those in Ontario (imagine Washington, D.C., as a huge state). Quebec, of course, thinks it’s France. If we had an actual conservative president, we should invite, from east to west, Manitoba, Alberta, Saskatchewan and British Columbia to join their southern (and northern in the case of Alaska), conservative neighbors. For that matter, even the Maritime Provinces might be interested, though they’re probably as liberal as our Northeast.
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Ripon College president Zach Messitte:
It’s October and the leaves are changing colors on college campuses across Wisconsin and the nation. There are countless exams, papers and events before graduation finally arrives in the spring. But it’s already time to start thinking about a commencement speaker. And the decision about who to invite has been too often fraught recently with political peril as potential speakers have failed invisible campus litmus tests. But the ground could be shifting thanks to some choice remarks from an unlikely supporter of the conservative cause.
It’s no secret that college campuses lean left politically. Just as surveys find the U.S. military is more Republican, Hollywood is more Democratic and Wall Street skews right, poll after poll also finds a solid majority of professors self-identify as “liberals.” By contrast, less than 20% of faculty nationwide classify themselves as “conservative.” The breakdown slants away from the near parity of political opinion in American society. Too often, the default position in higher education is to invite speakers who echo our own opinions.
But President Barack Obama has wisely opened a dialogue about diversity of political opinion on campuses in a way that has surprised even his most ardent supporters. Speaking in Des Moines, Iowa, last month the president put his finger on a real problem: College campuses just don’t do a very good job at making sure students hear the conservative side of the argument.
Obama told the audience: “Sometimes there are folks on college campuses who are liberal, and maybe even agree with me on a bunch of issues, who sometimes aren’t listening to the other side, and that’s a problem, too.” The president continued, “Anybody who comes to speak to you and you disagree with, you should have an argument with them. But you shouldn’t silence them by saying, ‘You can’t come because I’m too sensitive to hear what you have to say.’ That’s not the way we learn, either.”
Our campus recently has hosted an array of politicians, academics and journalists from the “right” (Newt Gingrich, Dinesh D’Souza, Ron Johnson) and the “left” (Tom Barrett, Hanna Rosin, Mark Shields). And prior to every visit, a predictable batch of emails, phone calls or letters pour in from alumni, parents, students and community members that begin with something like, “How could you possibly invite…? They don’t stand for my values….” And the communication often concludes along the lines, “If this is the direction the college is going, then don’t count on me for any further donations!”
Dissent, civil discourse and a real exchange of ideas are part of the special mix of what makes American higher education, and the liberal arts in particular, the envy of the world. Critical thinking and understanding the other side of an argument are valuable skills in the new global marketplace, as much in demand in China as they are in the United States.
But the commencement address still poses a special problem. There are some who say, do no harm and offend no one. There is the lesson of the apocryphal story of basketball star Michael Jordan, who, when asked to endorse the Democratic mayor of Charlotte, N.C., in a U.S. Senate race against Republican Jesse Helms in 1990 famously declined because, well, “Republicans buy sneakers, too.” The message holds true for colleges and universities: both Democrats and Republicans make annual fund gifts, too, so why alienate anyone?
This do-no-harm trend has been reinforced in recent years as student and faculty protests have knocked down invited graduation honorees with pronounced (and usually more conservative) political opinions. Current Republican presidential candidate, then just a world-famous neurosurgeon, Ben Carson withdrew as the speaker at Johns Hopkins University in 2013 over campus protests about comments he had made about gay marriage. International Monetary Fund Director Christine Lagarde chose not to speak at Smith College after student objections to the IMF’s economic policies. And Condoleezza Rice, the former secretary of state pulled out from a graduation talk at Rutgers University after a faculty-led outcry over her role in the Iraq War.
Obama is right on target by emphasizing that the views of his Republican political foes should be given a stronger voice on campus. Colleges and universities need to do a better job making sure that thoughtful conservative opinions are heard at commencement and during the academic year. Diversity of opinion leads to more informed students and citizens, ones who may disagree with each other, yet with an honest appreciation of the other side of the argument. Respect for the opposition is how compromise and cooperation are born. The nation could use a little more of both right now.
Read the comments, and you will see that “diversity of opinion” degenerates rapidly into name-calling attacks. So much for the First Amendment.
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Some people feel the Republican Party is in chaos, with no obvious front-runner for president, no one apparently willing to be Speaker of the House of Representatives, and the party in danger of losing control of the U.S. Senate in an election year that seems to favor Democrats.
But if you think the GOP has it bad, James Taranto reports on a lefty writer who thinks the opposite is the case:
Matt Yglesias delivers this cheery news to readers of the liberal young-adult website Vox.com: “The Democratic Party is in much greater peril than its leaders or supporters recognize, and it has no plan to save itself.” He has a pretty good argument. Look past President Obama’s “victory lap” and the current disarray in the House and the GOP presidential contest, and Republicans dominate elected politics in most of the country.
The GOP holds majorities in both houses of Congress. Thirty-one governors are Republicans, as are majorities of state attorneys general and secretaries of state. Republicans hold majorities in 69 of 99 state legislative chambers (including Nebraska’s unicameral Senate, which is formally nonpartisan) and have “unified control”—governor and legislative majorities—of 24 state governments (Yglesias erroneously says 25).
The most surprising fact in Yglesias’s piece: Apart from California, the most populous state with unified Democratic control is Oregon, which ranks 27th in population. That surprised Yglesias, too. At the end of his piece is this correction: “Earlier versions of this article said that Minnesota or Washington was the biggest non-California Democratic-controlled state, but in fact the Republicans control one legislative house in both of those states.”
Yglesias argues that even the House Republican leadership crisis is a sign of Democratic weakness: It “reflects, in some ways, the health of the GOP coalition. Republicans are confident they won’t lose power in the House and are hungry for a vigorous argument about how best to use the power they have.”
That confidence, in his view, is well-founded. Republicans have a natural geographic advantage in district-based lawmaking bodies—state legislatures and the U.S. House—because their voters are dispersed, whereas Democrats’ tend to be concentrated in big cities. Majorities are self-perpetuating, both because incumbents tend to win and because control of state government usually entails the power to draw district lines with the goal of enhancing the majority party’s advantage.
And “ ‘wave’ elections in which tons of incumbents lose are typically driven by a backlash against the incumbent president. Since the incumbent president is a Democrat, Democrats have no way to set up a wave.” Recent history bears out that point. The House majority last switched in a sitting president’s favor in 1948; since then, the president’s party has lost its majority five times, three of them since the 1990s.
Washington Monthly’s Ed Kilgore offers a rebuttal, the strongest point of which is that “even if you regard the presidency as a thin, fragile thread by which the Democratic Party holds onto a share of power, it’s a pretty damn important thread.”
To which we would add that Yglesias doesn’t dwell much on the Senate, where a Democratic majority after 2016 is well within reach. Republicans will be defending seven seats in states Obama carried in 2012, and a four-seat pickup would be sufficient for a majority assuming the Democrats win the presidency. A Democratic president and Senate could populate both the administrative agencies and the courts with liberal ideologues. With Justices Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy both turning 80 next year, a reliably liberal Supreme Court majority is a serious possibility.
In 1981-86, the situation was reversed: Democrats dominated the down-ballot offices, but Republicans held the White House and Senate majority. In terms of enacting their agenda, Republicans were much better off then than they are now. (Here a caveat: Because the parties were less ideologically polarized in the ’80s, a House from the opposite party was not as great an obstacle to the president’s legislative agenda as it is today.)
Not that Yglesias would disagree with any of this. He leaves no doubt about the urgency, in his view, of electing a Democratic president:
Winning a presidential election would give Republicans the overwhelming preponderance of political power in the United States—a level of dominance not achieved since the Democrats during the Great Depression, but with a much more ideologically coherent coalition. Nothing lasts forever in American politics, but a hyper-empowered conservative movement would have a significant ability to entrench its position by passing a national right-to-work law and further altering campaign finance rules beyond the Citizens United status quo.
A subtext of Yglesias’s argument is a warning to those Democrats who are (and have excellent reasons to be) wary of Mrs. Clinton that if she loses, they would find the consequences dire.
That complements another recent Yglesias piece, in which he argued that Mrs. Clinton’s contempt for “procedural niceties”—i.e., laws, rules and customs—would make her an “effective president,” one willing to do whatever it takes to get things done. (As we argued, Yglesias may be engaged in wishful thinking if he expects Mrs. Clinton to employ her amoral tactics in the service of a cause other than herself. Recall that Bill Clinton’s boldest assertion of executive power was Clinton v. Jones, the 1997 case in which the Supreme Court unanimously rejected his assertion that his office immunized him against a private lawsuit for sexual harassment.)
Yglesias’s piece is weaker on the question of just what the Democrats should do about their down-ballot predicament. He accuses them of “complacency and overconfidence” and observes that “the party is marching steadily to the left on its issue positions . . . even though existing issue positions seem incompatible with a House majority or any meaningful degree of success in state politics.” He cites the example of Wendy Davis, the pro-abortion extremist who thrilled national Democrats but was an obvious mismatch for her state. She got trounced in last year’s Texas governor race.
But his only real advice is this: “The first step for Democrats is admitting they have a problem.” Gee, thanks.
He is weaker still on the question of how the party ended up in this situation. Indeed, he doesn’t address it at all. But when Obama took office in 2009, his party had large majorities in both House and Senate and was considerably better off by every other measure Yglesias cites. It is probably already accurate to say that no president since Herbert Hoover has overseen such a calamitous down-ballot performance by his party. And Hoover was in office at the time of a financial crisis. Obama was supposed to play the role of FDR.
One word that never appears in the Yglesias essay is “ObamaCare.” (Nor does he refer to it by its euphemistic formal title, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, or by a generic term like “health-care reform.”) Putting aside the question of its merit as policy, can anyone deny that the politics of ObamaCare were and have remained disastrous? Obama’s “signature achievement” was an ideological act of recklessness that put the diminished and discredited GOP back on the right side of public opinion. More than any other factor, it enabled the overwhelming Republican victories in 2010 and, after its effects began becoming clear, in 2014.
The Democrats’ best hope for 2016 is that voters will conclude the Republican nominee is manifestly unqualified. The latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finds Donald Trump still leading the Republican field, with 25%. Ben Carson is second, with 22%. If the Obama years have made Democrats overconfident, they’ve made many Republicans desperate enough to turn to men who’ve never even run for public office. Recklessness can as easily be born of anger as of complacency.
This schizoid view is represented in Wisconsin as well. Republicans control both houses of the Legislature, all but one partisan statewide office, and five of eight Congressional seats. On the other hand, a majority of Wisconsin voters haven’t voted for a Republican for president since Ronald Reagan in 1984, and while there is one U.S. senator of each party, U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R–Wisconsin) is not favored for reelection next year.
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The Hill quotes the former potential next candidate for president:
Vice President Joe Biden on Tuesday took a swipe at Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton, saying it’s “naive” to think the country can be governed without working with Republicans.
At a gala honoring former Vice President Walter Mondale, Biden said it’s critical to “end this notion that enemy is the other party.”
“End this notion that it is naive to think we can speak well of the other party and cooperation,” he added. “What is naive is to think it is remotely possible to govern this country unless we can.”
It was Biden’s sharpest critique yet of Clinton’s remark during last week’s Democratic debate that she sees the GOP as her “enemy.” …
Clinton was asked during last week’s debate which enemy she is most proud of. Clinton listed the National Rifle Association, the Iranians, drug companies and “probably the Republicans.”
“It’s most important that everyone in this room understand the other team is not the enemy,” the vice president said. “If you treat it as the enemy, there is no way you can ever resolve the problems we have.”
Biden has taken repeated subtle jabs at Clinton for the comment, albeit without mentioning her by name. At a panel discussion with Mondale on Monday morning, Biden emphasized that “I still have a lot of Republican friends.”
“I don’t think my chief enemy is the Republican Party,” he added. “This is a matter of making things work.”
Biden said he’s fond of former Vice President Dick Cheney, a deeply unpopular figure with Democrats, even though he disagrees with how he used his office.
“I actually like Dick Cheney, for real,” Biden said. “I get on with him. I think he’s a decent man.”
Given that Democrats believe Cheney (who I met 20 years ago) is the devil incarnate, Biden may have lost some Democratic support right there, and perhaps that’s why he announced Wednesday he wasn’t running. On the other hand, Biden is the first actual or potential candidate of either party who, as far as I have noticed, has made a statement that acknowledges the legitimate existence of the opposition party. It’s as if he wanted to get crossover votes or something.
Of course, bipartisanship goes both ways. U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan (R–Janesville) probably lost support in his own party when he was endorsed, sort of, for the job no one seems to want, Speaker of the House, by U.S. Sen. Harry Reid (D–Nevada) and former speaker Nancy Pelosi (D–California). It’s hard to believe that Ryan isn’t a conservative, but that’s what the House Freedom Caucus would have you believe.
Biden’s statement that begins this blog was on Tuesday. Here’s what happened Wednesday, reported by Facebook Friend Ron Fournier:
“I believe we’re out of time,” Joe Biden said Wednesday of his opportunity to seek the Democratic presidential nomination. Then the vice president warned Washington’s political class that its time was running out.
Stop fighting, he said. Stop the madness.
“I believe that we have to end the divisive partisan politics that is ripping this country apart. And I think we can. It’s mean-spirited, it’s petty, and it’s gone on for much too long,” Biden said in Rose Garden alongside his wife Jill and President Obama. “Four more years of this kind of pitched battle may be more than this country can take.” …
Biden projected confidence in his standing among Democrats. “While I will not be a candidate,” he said, “I will not be silent.”
Proving his point, he made a thinly veiled jab at Clinton.
“I don’t believe, like some do, that it’s naive to talk to Republicans. I don’t think we should look at Republicans as our enemies. They are our opposition. They’re not our enemies. And for the sake of the country, we have to work together.”
… While partisan voters love political combat—encourage it, actually—a growing numbers of voters are wary. They’re identifying themselves as independents, even if they tend to routinely support one party over another. They’re disconnecting from the political process or hanging out at the fringes with the likes of Sanders, Donald Trump and Ben Carson.
Clinton says she gets it, and she promises to work with Republicans if elected. It’s hard to imagine that happening.
The vice president certainly is a partisan, but Biden is also the product of a time—he was first elected to the Senate in 1972—when political leaders worked together, when party voters allowed their leaders to bargain, and when members of Congress lived in Washington and made friends on both sides of the political divide. It wasn’t perfect, but it was in many ways better than now.
Biden remembers when there was an incentive to solve problems.
“As the president has said many times,” he said, “compromise is not a dirty word. But look at it this way folks, how does this country function without consensus? How can we move forward without being able to arrive at consensus?”
Good questions. We need answers. Time is running out.
Time for what is running out? Let’s remember that politics is and remains a zero-sum game in which one side wins, therefore the other side loses, and therefore the only goal is winning. This is the logical result of every political development from Franklin D. Roosevelt to today. Congressmen make nearly $200,000 a year, which is four times what the average Wisconsin family takes in each year.
I am starting to think that, like the bizarre Vietnam War statement “we had to destroy the village in order to save it,” we need to destroy our government as it exists today in order to save our country.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 