Bozell Says Obama Was A Far-Left Candidate, Seconds Later Says He ‘Won As A Conservative’

By Ali Frick on Nov 7, 2008 at 3:58 pm

Reeling from Tuesday’s widespread losses, yesterday “about 20 political strategists and social and fiscal conservative leaders met” to discuss the future of the movement at the home of Brent Bozell, head of the right-wing Media Research Center. Describing the meeting on Fox News this morning, Bozell insisted America remained a “center-right country” and that the election had not been the death knell for conservatism because “conservatism played no role in the election.” Seconds later, however, Bozell claimed that Barack Obama had won the election “as a conservative”:

BOZELL: Conservatives didn’t play a role in this campaign. This was a moderate Republican against a liberal, left-wing Democrat. And the left-wing Democrat beat the moderate Republican. … If you look at the exit polls this year, you’ll find two fascinating results. Number one: This country remains every bit as center-right as it has for a generation.

HEMMER: You don’t think that’s changed at all?

BOZELL: No it hasn’t. … Number one is that the public is conservative; number two: Barack Obama won as a conservative. That means Barack Obama does not have the mandate to enact the progressive agenda he wants to enact.

Watch it:

As Bozell seems to acknowledge at the start of the interview, Obama in fact “ran on the most progressive platform of any presidential candidate in at least 15 years, including a promise of universal health care coverage, a dramatic transformation to a low-carbon economy, and a historic investment in education.” Despite the radical right’s repeated claims to the contrary, Tuesday’s election results were a clear mandate for positive progressive change.

What’s more, Bozell insisted that if you simply “look at the exit polls,” you see proof that Americans remain conservative. However, exit polls show that Americans were overwhelmingly concerned about the economy — and the majority of those voters saw Obama as the best steward of the economy. Moreover, two-thirds said they were worried about being able to afford health care, and sixty percent of these voters supported Obama. A majority of voters felt the government “should do more” rather than less, and 63 percent disapproved of the Iraq war.

As far as Bozell’s point that Obama ran as a conservative and thus has no mandate for progressive change — even the McCain campaign disputes that claim. As Mark Salter told Politico, Americans clearly understood Obama’s progressive agenda:

Our polling showed that more than 60 percent of voters identified Obama as a liberal. Typically, a candidate is not going to win the presidency with those figures. But I think the country just disregarded it. People didn’t care. They just wanted the biggest change they could get.

Perhaps the media isn’t reporting the “fascinating stuff” Bozell sees in the election results because it’s simply not true.

Transcript: Read more

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Yglesias

Things to Expect When You’re Going Bankrupt

By Matthew Yglesias on Nov 7, 2008 at 3:32 pm

More trouble in Detroit:

Still, G.M. said that it “will fall significantly short” of the cash needed to run its business in the first half of 2009 unless economic conditions improve and the company gets access to financial aid from the federal government.

Describing it that way is a neat way of trying to imply that federal aid should be anticipated. But it’s not as if a company lacking the cash needed to run its business is some unprecedented occurrence. Businesses go under all the time. And the nation’s lawmakers have thoughtfully written extensive bankruptcy laws to deal with these situations. Of course, for GM or Ford or Chrysler to go under would cause a lot of hardship for a lot of people. And arguably the federal government should do something to help those people. But whatever volume of help you think would be appropriate should be targeted to people in need not handed out to firms as a favor to shareholders and managers who brought the companies to this place.

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Politics

Obama breaks down his family’s puppy dilemma: ‘We have two criteria that have to be reconciled.’

By Faiz Shakir on Nov 7, 2008 at 3:24 pm

After meeting with his Transition Advisory Board this afternoon, President-elect Barack Obama held a press conference to discuss his plan to move forward on the economy. Obama laid out three principles: “a rescue plan for the middle class,” “address the spreading impact of the financial crisis on other sectors of our economy,” and “review the implementation of this Administration’s financial program.” When Obama opened it for questions, the Chicago Sun-Times’ Lynn Sweet turned the page on the economy, asking instead about his family’s puppy dilemma — namely, what kind of puppy will he get for his daughters. Addressing the question with his trademark dead-pan sarcasm, Obama responded, “We have two criteria that have to be reconciled.” Watch it:

Obama indicated his own personal leanings: “Our preference would be to get a shelter puppy, but obviously a lot of shelter dogs are mutts like me.”

Update

Fishbowl DC notes that Obama did not call on Fox News in his first press conference.

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Yglesias

Savage on CAP

By Matthew Yglesias on Nov 7, 2008 at 3:12 pm

Charlie Savage, fresh from investigated the abuses of power at the heart of the Bush administration, takes a gander at John Podesta and the Center for American Progress. This isn’t the main point of the piece, but I did want to emphasize one thing:

With Democrats back in control of the executive branch, the question now, Professor McGann said, is whether the center will keep going. If its policy experts all leave for government jobs, he said, it could collapse as quickly as it rose.

Mr. Podesta, for one, plans to stay. On Wednesday, when he was named to the transition team, he sent an e-mail message to the center’s staff pledging that “I will not be joining the new administration and will return to American Progress after the transition ends.”

We could all be killed in a meteor strike next week but, really, everyone has every intention of the Center continuing to exist. The Heritage Foundation didn’t close its doors when Ronald Reagan came into office. If anything, it grew in size and influence as people realized that this whole conservative movement thing was kind of a big deal. Politicians being in office who are sympathetic to progressive ideas doesn’t obviate the need for politically engaged policy analysis and communication. Indeed, in a lot of ways it makes it more important for someone to be doing work that’s a bit detached from the day-to-day dictates of political expediency.

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Politics

Byrd to voluntarily step down as chair of Appropriations Committee.

By Matt Corley on Nov 7, 2008 at 3:06 pm

Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) announced today that he will voluntarily step down as chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee on Jan. 6. Byrd, who is the longest-serving senator in American history, said in a statement that he made the decision “only after much personal soul searching”:

In a news release, Byrd said he decided to step down “only after much personal soul searching, and after being sure of the substantial Democratic pickup of seats in the Senate.

“I am now confident that stepping aside as chairman will not adversely impact my home state of West Virginia,” he said.

Democrats had been hoping that Byrd would “step aside voluntarily” due concerns that he was “not up to the immense challenges he would face in that job.” Byrd will be replaced by Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-HI)

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Security

Iraqis on the SOFA: Definitely Maybe!

By Matt Duss on Nov 7, 2008 at 3:05 pm

The New York Times’ Alyssa Rubin declares that the election of Barack Obama “is already beginning to shift the political ground in Iraq and the region.”

Iraqi Shiite politicians are indicating that they will move faster toward a new security agreement about American troops, and a Bush administration official said he believed that Iraqis could ratify the agreement as early as the middle of this month.

“Before, the Iraqis were thinking that if they sign the pact, there will be no respect for the schedule of troop withdrawal by Dec. 31, 2011,” said Hadi al-Ameri, a powerful member of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, a major Shiite party. “If Republicans were still there, there would be no respect for this timetable. This is a positive step to have the same theory about the timetable as Mr. Obama.”

Buried in the middle of the article is what I think is a more accurate rendering of the scene:

Mr. Obama’s election also coincided with the American negotiators’ acceptance of many of the changes Iraqis demanded in the agreement, which created an overall picture that was easier both for the Iraqis and their neighbors — Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia — to accept.

The American negotiators sent a new version of the agreement to Iraqi leaders on Thursday that included many of the changes Iraqis had demanded. In public, Iraqis said merely that they were studying the document.

By contrast, the Washington Post reports that Iraq’s chief spokesman said with unusual forcefulness Thursday that his government will continue to insist on a firm withdrawal date for U.S. troops, despite American demands that any pullout be subject to prevailing security conditions.”

“Iraqis would like to know and see a fixed date,” spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said in an interview in which he also reiterated Iraq’s position that American forces be subject to Iraqi legal jurisdiction in some instances.

Iraqi officials, who see President-elect Obama’s views on the timing of a U.S. withdrawal as consonant with their own, appear to be leveraging his election to pressure the Bush administration to make last-minute concessions.

While I think there’s little doubt that Obama’s election has had an effect on the calculations of Iraq’s political leaders, and strengthened their position against the Bush administration, there’s a danger in overstating the amount of influence that U.S. leaders themselves have in Iraqi politics, a consistent problem with Bush’s approach.

The SOFA in its previous form was effectively scuttled by prominent Shia clerics with influence on Iraq’s leading Shia parties, and it remains to be seen whether the changes accepted by U.S. negotiators will be enough to satisfy the ayatollahs. Unsurprisingly, several Sadrist leaders have already indicated that they are not.

The Bush administration has wasted a huge amount of time and political capital basically bargaining with Iraqi government to stay in Iraq. Rather than accept the inevitability of a U.S. exit, and then leverage that withdrawal to pressure Iraqi leaders to confront the difficult political issues which still persist, President Bush instead clung to a fantasy of a long-term military presence in Iraq, and now finds the impending arrival of a new administration being used as leverage against him.

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Media

Too Many Press Releases

By Matthew Yglesias on Nov 7, 2008 at 2:29 pm

The Obama transition operation just emailed me the seating chart from their economic summit:

I recognize that it must be hard to just go cold-turkey after the manic press release-sending of the campaign, but guys it’s really a time to give it a rest.

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Politics

CIA Torture Advocate John Rizzo Says Obama Must Deal With Interrogation Program ‘Immediately’

By Matt Corley on Nov 7, 2008 at 2:17 pm

At the American Bar Association’s conference on national security yesterday, CIA senior deputy general counsel John Rizzo recommended that President-elect Barack Obama “address immediately detainee issues at Guantanamo Bay and in the CIA’s interrogation program.” Rizzo said that the agency’s interrogation and detainee program needs “urgent” attention:

The CIA detention and interrogation program, he said, is just as urgent. “That’s going to have to be dealt with immediately,” Rizzo said. “We do not have the luxury to wait and muddle through.” He knows how tough the issue is–his involvement in helping the CIA construct the program earned him opposition in Congress that killed his nomination to be the CIA’s general counsel.

The Wall Street Journal’s Siobhan Gorman did not report whether Rizzo said anything specific about how the program needs to be “dealt” with. This information would be important since, as Gorman notes, Rizzo controversially helped construct the program that pushed the boundaries of torture.

In 2002, while serving as an acting general counsel, Rizzo approved of a memo drafted by then-Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee that stretched the definition of torture in order to make it permissible for use in the course of an interrogation. Asked at a June 2007 confirmation hearing if he “should have objected at the time” to Bybee’s definition of torture, Rizzo replied, “I can’t say I should have objected at the time.” Watch it:

[flv http://video.thinkprogress.org/2007/06/rizzo.320.240.flv]

Rizzo’s nomination was withdrawn by the White House in Sept. 2007 after key senators and human rights and advocacy groups protested his stubborn “>refusal to renounce his role in crafting the Bush administration’s torture policies.

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Yglesias

False Choices

By Matthew Yglesias on Nov 7, 2008 at 2:11 pm

Ross Douthat and David Frum argue about whether the GOP needs to do better at targeting relatively prosperous educated professionals (Frum) or economically struggling cultural conservatives (Douthat). Ross frames the dispute:

But for the national party, Frum is right that there are real choices to be made. If you follow the Douthat-Salam model, which Reihan has dubbed “lower-middle reformism,” you’re going to be crafting a message aimed at the place where the non-college educated and college-educated categories bleed into one another – one pitched to the exurb-living college graduate who picked up a degree from a regional public university (or jumped from school to school and didn’t finish in four years, like Sarah Palin), and who probably has more in common, culturally and economically, with a lot of grads of community colleges and technical schools than he does with someone who went to, say, Swarthmore. This approach requires talking a lot about the famous “kitchen table” issues – public education and transportation, crime and health care costs – and trying to expand the definition of what it means to be “pro-family” without abandoning the GOP’s core pro-life convictions. If you follow the model Frum recommends in his column, on the other hand – call it “upper-middle reformism” – and pitch your message to the Obama-voting, ex-Rockefeller Republicans making $150,000 a year, then you’re talking to a “post-material” group of people who worry less about day-to-day economic concerns and more about causes like global warming – making Frum’s vision of a pro-choice, pro-carbon tax GOP a more plausible fit.

On the environment, I think there’s a heavy dose of false choice here. Say the Republican Party did whatever it is Ross thinks it ought to do on economic issues. That would require the government to raise some level of revenue. And if there were a carbon pricing scheme adequate to avoid the worst consequences of catastrophic climate change, that would bring in some level of revenue. The level of revenue would be high, but it would also be lower than whatever quantity of revenue is necessary to run government à la Douthat. So carbon pricing could cover some portion of the costs, with other taxes being lower than they otherwise would have been. It would be win-win — a Republican Party that has a reality-based view of climate change to appeal to upscale postmaterialists and also one that does more on kitchen table issues.

The point is that while I think there are serious arguments on both sides of the question of to what extent should carbon pricing be revenue neutral (i.e., offset by corresponding reductions in other taxes, or else rebated to the population somehow) or instead used to finance green investments, there’s no serious argument that failing to price carbon is preferable to pricing it.

In a political debate undistorted by the influence of special interest money, the left-right ideological dispute would take place along that dimension with people on the right arguing that the revenue should be used to cut taxes and the left arguing that the revenue should be used to hike spending. Indeed, note that even if environmentalists are massively overstating the risks of climate change, a revenue neutral carbon price would still make us no worse off economically than we currently are, and would probably have substantial public health benefits. But instead, there are various politicians (from both parties, I hasten to ad) in the pocket of energy or auto interests and plenty of funds going from oil and coal firms to think tanks that hire people to pooh pooh the problems of climate change and so forth. And that, in turn, creates this false sense of a need to choose between an agenda to appeal to the working class and an agenda to appeal to the sort of upscale types who are more likely to care about the environment.