NY Times: Daschle Should Go

By Ed Walsh (WHWG)
February 3, 2009 – 12:51 pm

Quick follow up to my post on Tom Daschle yesterday. The New York Times today called for Daschle to step aside, citing both his tax screw-ups and his close, enriching ties to the health care industry. Daschle would be a big bird for the Times to take down. We’ll see how things develop.

UPDATE: As of 12:50 pm, several major news outlets are reporting that Tom Daschle has withdrawn his name from consideration for the HHS slot. It will be helpful to the Administration if we hear that the president, rather than the Senate, forced him to do it.

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I Heart Hillary

By Vinca LaFleur (WWW)
February 3, 2009 – 12:11 pm

081230_hillary_smI’m a Hillary fan.  Always have been, from her days at the White House to the Senate to the campaign trail to C Street — and her gracious remarks at her swearing-in ceremony reminded me of why.  I appreciate the language she’s been using lately about smart power, smart people, and being smarter “about how we do what we must for our country,” and the sober but confident, “can-do” approach she brings to this era of enormous foreign policy and domestic economic challenge.  Her last few paragraphs of gratitude toward her family were very genuine (and funny too).

Others interested in keeping up to speed on Secretary Clinton should check out Madam Secretary at Foreign Policy magazine — a self-described “obsessive blog about all things Hillary Clinton,” her policies to her pantsuits.

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Burris in the Saddle

By Mark W. Davis (WHWG)
February 3, 2009 – 12:06 pm

The maiden speech is always a rite of passage for a newly elected parliamentarian. Witness Benjamin Disraeli, whose famous wit abandoned him as he stood up to give his first speech as a Member of Parliament.  After stammering for a few minutes, his voice settled into a whisper.  Shouted down, the future prime minister sat in humiliation, promising “though I sit down now, the time will come when you will hear me.”

Roland Burris had no such reluctance.  His maiden speech was clear.  His voice was strong.

He spoke for the confirmation of Eric Holder as Attorney General of the United States to “open the gates of justice once again.”  

What eloquence.  What precision.  Yes, indeed, as Clinton’s Deputy Attorney General Mr. Holder did in fact “open the gates of justice” when he gave the White House “a neutral, leaning toward favorable” recommendation for the pardon of Marc Rich.

A pardon.  Not for a man who had been wrongfully convicted.  Not for a man who had been properly convicted, but whose lifetime of good works argued for a pardon. 

No, Mr. Holder enabled a pardon for a fugitive, for a man who refused to stand trial at all.  Who had fled to his chateau.  A man accused of making oil deals with Iran during the hostage crisis.  A man who was quite generous with his friends in high places.

(A thought experiment: Imagine if Alberto Gonzales had done such a thing.  He would be the last prisoner in Guantanamo and the Oliver Stone movie about it would now be on two screens at your local multiplex.)

In short, Senator Burris wasted his maiden speech in defense of a supine, spineless apparatchik who in his last minutes in office did something that you cannot possibly imagine a Bobby Kennedy, a Griffin Bell, a Richard Thornburgh or Mr. Gonzales ever doing.

The evocation of “justice” here cheapens the language.  Sit down Senator.  You’ve said enough.

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Making a Point, Not Making Law

By Ed Walsh (WHWG)
February 2, 2009 – 5:59 pm

gopOver the weekend I had dinner with a couple of friends, one of whom is a Senate Republican staffer. We were discussing how the public might react to a potential policy proposal and found ourselves getting pretty into the weeds (yep, sometimes Saturdays in Washington are almost too much fun).

My staffer friend stopped the discussion and said, “Remember, we’re making a point, we’re not making law.”

That struck me as a terrific motto for a down-and-out minority, barely holding onto its voice in Congress. It has an appropriate mix of low expectations and the hint of a desire to do something bigger.

“The Republicans of the 111th Congress: Making a Point, Not Making Law.” Let’s get the t-shirts printed.

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Taxing the President’s Credibility

By Ed Walsh (WHWG)
February 2, 2009 – 2:44 pm

daschle-obama2Is President Obama’s good government message running off the rails?

As much as the president may be trying hard to back up his words with actions, he seems to be falling short of the mark now that two Cabinet nominees have been caught playing fast and loose with their tax returns.

Latest victim: Tom Daschle, who today offered his contrition to the committee overseeing his nomination to be Health and Human Services Secretary: “I am deeply embarrassed and disappointed by the errors that required me to amend my tax returns. I apologize for the errors and profoundly regret that you have had to devote time to them.”

Frankly, Daschle is just a mess message-wise. Not only has he neglected to pay more taxes than most Americans make in a couple years’ time (at least $140,000), his appointment flies in the face of the president’s pledge to not let lobbyists run the government.

As the New York Times points out today, Tom Daschle has been quite a lucrative pseudo-lobbyist over the last few years. And he will, in fact, be running a department of government. One could suggest that if President Obama is serious about curtailing the influence of lobbyists, he ought to stop promoting them.

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Don’t Swallow

By Josh Gilder (WHWG)
February 2, 2009 – 2:07 pm
Congress considers the stimulus package

Congress considers the stimulus package

Ed makes a good point, to wit that opposing this stimulus pork pie carries certain risks. But then so does going along with it, which would completely and utterly shred any remaining Republican credibility on fiscal responsibility.

Clearly it isn’t enough to simply oppose, however. The anti-pork faction has to make their case and they have to provide alternatives, but each are becoming easier by the moment, and if the bill can be delayed long enough, the weight of evidence against it – and the sheer partisan outrageousness of the bill – will land it in the deep fryer.

Jed Babbin today points out that a consensus or economists (both Dem and Republican) is developing against the bill:

As a Sunday Washington Post editorial said, “Former Clinton administration budget director Alice Rivlin fears that “money will be wasted because the investment elements were not carefully crafted.” Former Reagan administration economist Martin Feldstein writes that “it delivers too little extra employment and income for such a large fiscal deficit.” Columbia University’s Jeffrey D. Sachs labels the plan “an astounding mishmash of tax cuts, public investments, transfer payments and special treats for insiders.”

I think, as they say, “the science is settled” on this.

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Authenticity, not lost in translation

By Vinca LaFleur (WWW)
January 31, 2009 – 6:35 pm

President Obama’s recent interview with Al Arabiya made global headlines, but I enjoyed this behind-the-scenes  conversation with Al Arabiya’s Washington bureau chief Hisham Melham, describing what it was like to get a call from an NSC contact that morning, with the message, “I’m either going to make your day or ruin it:  the president wants to see you at 5 o’clock.”

Al Arabiya claims 130 million Arabic speakers in its viewing audience.  Mr. Melham says he always knew the interview would be widely watched, but he was not prepared for the overwhelming nature of the reaction, which he described as “almost universal.”  He believes the dominant impression on his audience was President Obama’s authenticity and “honesty in tone,” and noted that the president “clinched it” with his mention of Muslim family members.

When the interviewer asked if this meant the president’s demeanor was more important than policy, Mr. Melham responded that “policy is framed with language.”  He drew distinctions between the way Presidents Bush and Obama describe the war on terrorism, and commended President Obama for not speaking in generalizations — specifically, not lumping Al Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbollah together.  You can hear the interview in full at NPR’s “On the Media.”

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Private Jets and Gold-Plated Toilets

By Josh Gilder (WHWG)
January 30, 2009 – 10:55 am

I imagine other people hear about Citi’s reluctance to give up its new $50 million private jet, financed by the taxpayer’s $45 billion bailout of the company, and of the $1.2 million used to renovate the bathroom of Merrill Lynch’s CEO, and they think things like “corporate greed,” “arrogance,” “supreme cluelessness.”

I, however, think of the poor communications guy who has to try to explain this to the public. Most of us have been in similar situations: all the executives are sitting around agreeing that the $50-million jet is really an efficient use of funds and a cost saver in the end (given how precious executive time is and, of course, those golf club membership fees, though the latter isn’t mentioned) and you start laughing because they’re clearly joking, right? Right? But they’re not. They’re all nodding their heads, perfectly serious.

So you try to explain that this isn’t going to go down well with the public, and they turn to you and now they’re shaking their heads. That dang public, they just don’t get it. They just don’t understand. That’s your job, they tell you, to make them understand. And you say (or don’t) that the public understands all too well.
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A Bitter Pork Pill?

By Ed Walsh (WHWG)
January 29, 2009 – 3:00 pm

piggyI completely agree with Josh’s analysis of the pork pie moving through Congress. All the evidence indicates that this bill won’t do much to stimulate the economy, and, according to the CBO, the package even falls short of President Obama’s goal for how quickly money can be dispersed.

But I worry that while the facts may be on their side, Republicans could end up losing this message battle in the long run. And it has to do with a simple and unavoidable fact: Republicans are mean. The economy will recover.

Recovery may happen later this year. It may happen next year. It may happen in three years. But one day the economy will recover, regardless of how effective this stimulus measure turns out to be.

And when the economy does recover, the president and the Congressional majority will crow about the aggressive action they took in the winter of 2009 to stop the Next Great Depression. Imagine how bad things could have been, they will say, if we had followed the Republican course and not acted.

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Words Matter

By Josh Gilder (WHWG)
January 29, 2009 – 11:20 am

Words matter, so it’s time that Republicans stopped calling this a “stimulus package.” It has nothing to do with stimulating the economy, it’s simply a political payoff to Democrat constituency groups on a scale so massive it’s  mind boggling.

This is Chicago politics on steroids. It makes Blagojevich look like a piker (though it’s all perfectly legal, unfortunately).

Democratic bloggers are calling the House Republicans who unanimously voted against this porker “obstructionist” (see here, here, and here).  Fine.

Even Keynesians have trouble defending this kind of spending. Billions of dollars for the National Endowment for the Arts, Planned Parenthood and colleges sitting on huge endowments has nothing to do with the economy. Spending on green energy, whether one likes the idea or not, has little to do with getting us out of our present slump. Obama knows this. The Democrats in Congress know it. That’s why they’re trying to rush this through before the American people become aware of the details.
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Tactless in America?

By Podium Pundits Editor
January 29, 2009 – 11:01 am

By Max Atkinson, Guest Contributor

The point I was making that Clark Judge has responded to was not that the UK had a better or older version of democracy than the USA, but that American claims to democratic superiority come across as a bit tactless to some of its closest allies.

His suggestion that it is no more than stating a simple fact to say that America’s historically unmatched commitment to popular sovereignty and individual liberty had been there ‘from the hour of its independence’, still strikes me as overstating the case. After all, the commitment to individual liberty did not apply to slaves, and voting rights after independence were restricted to white male adult property owners – nor were they extended beyond that until about 1850, after which voters still had to be white and male. There then remained the de facto denial of African American voting rights in most southern states until as recently as the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

A year before that, Ronald Reagan had described the USA as the last stand on earth for freedom and liberty. And, although Clark may be right in saying that other free countries might have followed if the US had fallen, that was not the point I heard Mr Reagan to be making – unless George Bernard Shaw was right about Britain and the United States being ‘nations separated by a common language’ and we really do hear things differently.
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A Perfect Rhetorical Storm

By Ed Walsh (WHWG)
January 28, 2009 – 5:44 pm

putinRussian Czar president prime minister Valdimir Putin delivered a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos today and, God help me, I read it.

One thing I learned is that Putin is a fan of banal metaphors. For instance:

“Regardless of their political or economic system, all nations have found themselves in the same boat.”

“There is a certain concept, called the perfect storm, which denotes a situation when Nature’s forces converge in one point of the ocean and increase their destructive potential many times over. It appears that the present-day crisis resembles such a perfect storm.”

“Although the crisis was simply hanging in the air, the majority strove to get their share of the pie … and did not want to notice the rising wave.”

“This pyramid of expectations would have collapsed sooner or later.”

“[W]e could face far greater complications if we merely treat the symptoms of the disease.”

“In our opinion, we must first atone for the past and open our cards, so to speak.”

But the speech wasn’t all platitudes. It also featured some fun stick-in-the-eyeing of the United States:

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Shakespeare in the C-Suite, Act II

By Ed Walsh (WHWG)
January 27, 2009 – 6:29 pm

The Wall Street Journal today offers a further look (registration may be required) at Richard Olivier’s Macbeth-themed business seminar, on stage this week at the World Economic Forum in Davos:

“‘Macbeth is a noble warrior who apparently believes in serving his kingdom, but is spectacularly derailed, caught by his own ambition. He is never happy with what he has got and always wants more,’ says Mr. Olivier, who runs a business giving Shakespeare-based leadership seminars.

“That can apply to every banker who ignored risks to chase returns in recent years – and many homeowners taking out unrealistic mortgages too, says Mr. Olivier.”

Really? Didn’t Macbeth also kill a king? I don’t want to ruin Olivier’s narrative, but I’d say regicide is an order of magnitude above, say, taking out an interest-only mortgage.

But I guess it’s all in the staging.

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Sorry For the Expensive Loo

By Ed Walsh (WHWG)
January 27, 2009 – 12:49 pm

versaillesFinancial company executives are making a habit of apologizing for bad decisions and/or bad behavior these days. Or, at the very least, admitting they got some serious ‘splainin’ to do.

Following the trend, John Thain quickly responded to the charges leveled at him last week by journalists and Bank of America insiders. The characterization of Thain as ethically impaired and culturally tone deaf – spending more than a million dollars on office redecoration as the financial system was heading toward collapse – was taking hold in the public’s consciousness.

Yesterday Thain released a memo to Merrill Lynch employees explaining that BofA was fully informed about huge losses at Merrill and also signed off on how and when bonuses were awarded to Merrill employees. To what extent that’s true will be debated over time.

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Funny Business

By Vinca LaFleur (WWW)
January 26, 2009 – 2:00 pm

alfalfac10113037-vi2With the annual Alfalfa Club dinner just around the corner, Washington is entering the so-called “Silly Season” of political speechwriting, when humor prevails from the podium.

For those interested in what it’s like to write for the Comedian-in-Chief, I commend Mark Katz’ Washington Monthly piece from January/February 2004, “Mirth of a Nation.”

And for more recent thoughts on how to make ’em laugh against an economic backdrop that is anything but funny, check out this interview with my West Wing Writers partner Jeff Nussbaum and our friend and colleague Eric Shnure.

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