The pundits´ pundit Vol. I

A commentary on Charles Krauthammer's editorial in the Washington Post, 16th January 2009:

"Except for Richard Nixon, no president since Harry Truman has left office more unloved than George W. Bush. Truman's rehabilitation took decades. Bush's will come sooner. Indeed, it has already begun. The chief revisionist? Barack Obama."

It's true that Nixon's approval rating at the time of his exit was worse than Bush's. Bush's approval rating is worse than Truman's though - that's why Krauthammer has to take Truman out of the list ("since"). This is problematic because Truman is the conservatives' favorite example of a president who was redeemed by history. So, Bush's way to rehabilition is probably longer - even though Krauthammer says that it will come sooner.


"Vindication is being expressed not in words but in deeds -- the tacit endorsement conveyed by the Obama continuity-we-can-believe-in transition."

Yes, especially since, at the time Krauthammer wrote his article, Obama STILL wasn't president. So every indication of continuity is just a word, not a deed.


"It's not just the retention of such key figures as Defense Secretary Bob Gates or Treasury Secretary nominee Timothy Geithner, who, as president of the New York Fed, has been instrumental in guiding the Bush financial rescue over the past year. It's the continuity of policy."

Yes, Bush did his best to fix his own errors. Now, why did he listen to Rumsfeld in the first place? And why didn't he dismiss him after his confrontations with Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell? Or after Abu Ghraib? And the Bush financial rescue... I am sure that Bush loved to do it, that he wanted to increase the role of the government all the time... suuure........ I guess the financial breakdown was just a small, temporary setback for Bush's strategic policies that Obama is going to continue...

"It is the repeated pledge to conduct a withdrawal from Iraq that does not destabilize its new democracy and that, as Vice President-elect Joe Biden said just this week in Baghdad, adheres to the Bush-negotiated status-of-forces agreement that envisions a U.S. withdrawal over three years, not the 16-month timetable on which Obama campaigned."

Yeah, I am sure historians will acknowledge Bush's almost visionary plan not to destabilize Iraq after he ordered to conquer it... if only we had had enough troops in there at the first place....


"Which is why Obama is consciously creating a gulf between what he now dismissively calls "campaign rhetoric" and the policy choices he must make as president. Accordingly, Newsweek -- Obama acolyte and scourge of everything Bush/Cheney -- has on the eve of the Democratic restoration miraculously discovered the arguments for warrantless wiretaps, enhanced interrogation and detention without trial. Indeed, Newsweek's neck-snapping cover declares, "Why Obama May Soon Find Virtue in Cheney's Vision of Power.""

Show me that gulf! Show me where Obama himself has used that rhetoric without intending to exercise it. Just because you might be surprised now that Obama is not turning out to be the secret muslim who was radicalized in Reverend Wright's church, then married an angry resentful black woman and is soo soft on foreign policy that he gets called "Obambi", just because Obama turns out to be someone you cannot condemn to hell he is not approaching Cheney's "Vision of Power". You probably perceived Obama to be moving away from the left fringe when in fact, he had never been there...


"Obama will be loath to throw away the tools that have kept the homeland safe. Just as he will be loath to jeopardize the remarkable turnaround in American fortunes in Iraq. "

Remarkable turnaround? Yeah, who might have thought that we thought about actually leaving the country in a peaceful state after the disastrous years 2003-2006.


"Obama opposed the war. But the war is all but over. What remains is an Iraq turned from aggressive, hostile power in the heart of the Middle East to an emerging democracy openly allied with the United States. No president would want to be responsible for undoing that success."

Ok, you can see it that way. However, some would also argue that Iraq turned from a powerless, surrounded puppet dictatorship to a bulwark of Iranian influence and 2nd front for the Mujaheddin.


"In Iraq, Bush rightly took criticism for all that went wrong -- the WMD fiasco, Abu Ghraib, the descent into bloody chaos in 2005-06. Then Bush goes to Baghdad to ratify the ultimate post-surge success of that troubled campaign -- the signing of a strategic partnership between the United States and Iraq -- and ends up dodging two size 10 shoes for his pains."

I am not sure if Bush ever took that criticism. It might have been offered to him, but he turned away, disappointed that things weren't the way he thought they were. By the way, maybe the shoe story tells you something about the relevance of that strategic partnership. True, treaties really meant something, back in Bismarck's times. But that paleoconservative view of foreign relations doesn't get you very far today. Countries are not governed by a monarch anymore. Iraq is far away from showing the stability of the colonial empires of Europe. I am sounding a bit bitter, but well, in this regard, I really wish Krauthammer was right...


"Absorbing that insult was Bush's final service on Iraq. Whatever venom the war generated is concentrated on Bush himself. By having personalized the responsibility for the awfulness of the war, Bush has done his successor a favor. Obama enters office with a strategic success on his hands -- while Bush leaves the scene taking a shoe for his country.

Which I suspect is why Bush showed such equanimity during a private farewell interview at the White House a few weeks ago. He leaves behind the sinews of war, for the creation of which he has been so vilified but which will serve his successor -- and his country -- well over the coming years. The very continuation by Democrats of Bush's policies will be grudging, if silent, acknowledgment of how much he got right."

LOL! Let's be glad that Bush just absorbed that insult, he might as well have retaliated it and declared war or something. Oh and I believe, the Iraqi people are thankful for Bush having avoided these shoes. And Bush did NOT personalize the responsibility! He blamed the CIA, Iran, Al-Qaida, wrong stagecraft ("mission accomplished" banner), but he never, never, NEVER, personalized the responsibility. He never accepted it. If the blame focused on Bush, it's because the people focused it on him, not because he did it by himself.

Well, no comment on the final paragraph... it's quite obvious that I cannot share Krauthammer's conclusion, because I didn't follow his argumentation.

P.S. Krauthammer calls Obama "The chief revisionist". How ironic... considering we will have to endure decades of revisionism from the former Bush circles that continue to linger around in the press, on Fox, and right-wing political organizations.

The Bush Legacy, Vol. I

This is a list that simply shows all the positive actions and all the negative actions of President George W. Bush. Of course, it's my decision to decide what's good or bad. And there are some things I don't mention because they are somewhat neutral, like Bush's non-vetoing of the next stage of medicare. Anyway, this is the first version of the list. I will update the list over time.

The good things:
- his commitment to fight diseases and poverty in Africa
- tried to combat the extremist tendencies of his own party on immigration and race
- the attempt to centralize intelligence at the Department of Homeland Security
- cooperated with the Democrats during the financial crisis
- attempted to improve the education system with No Child Left Behind
- very good immediate response to the terror attacks of 9/11
- effective Afghanistan strategy until the Taliban were out of power
- avoidance of a new Cold War with China by cooperation
- creating marine reserves of previously unmatched size

The bad things:
- inadequate funding of No Child Left Behind
- inadequate funding of Infrastructure
- unsuccessful at enacting Immigration Reform
- confused structure of the Department of Homeland Security
- negligence of Afghanistan after the Iraq war
- Careless reshifting of power by the Iraq war
- deceiving the world and the American people about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq
- emphasizing not existing relations between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaida
- giving Al-Qaida a retreat in Iraq
- not having an occupation strategy after the fall of Saddam Hussein
- limiting Civil Rights to combat terrorism
- inadequate response to torture in Abu-Ghraib
- creating a lawless room at Guantanamo
- not dismissing Rumsfeld immediately
- allowing Dick Cheney to place himself above the Constitution
- inadequate response and completely lacking analytic skills to Katrina
- disregarding international relations before and after the Iraq War
- not signing the Kyoto protocol
- lifting enviromental protection laws
- not regulating Wall-Street
- disregard of the trade deficit
- disregard of the mounting economic problems in the years 2007 and 2008
- not having caught either Osama Bin Laden or Mullah Omar
- Sex scandal between lobbyists and the Department of the Interior
- Ideological infiltration of the Justice Department
- increasing the dependency on foreign oil
- letting North Korea acquire Nuclear Weapons
- increasing Iranian power in Iraq and Afghanistan
- not perescuting the responsible people for the outing of Valerie Plame
- no response to Darfur
- unsuccessful at creating new jobs
- escalating federal debt
- failure to curb goverment spending

Oh Laura,

George and Laura Bush on Larry King:


"KING: Do you like him?

G. BUSH: I do. Yes, I do like him. And you'd like him, too.

KING: Oh, I know him. He was -- but he was so critical of you. Do you take that personally or you don't?

L. BUSH: I did."



But Laura, there is nothing that you can take personally, because Obama never talked about you...

The Neoconservative Agenda

I have thought about posting something like this for a while. I have probably waited too long and it has lost something of its relevance. Because, luckily, George W. Bush's term is about to end and there is no neo-conservative president-elect succeeding him, so my theory is not as frightening as it once might have been. But keep in mind that it would have taken just one more conservative Supreme Court Justice and the agenda would not have met a lot of resistance anymore.. But the voting people as a majority didn't fall for the same old strategy this time. Now Barack Obama has to clean up the mess, the mess that probably was not entirely unwanted by the Neo-Conservatives.


Remember the tell-all book by former Bush press secretary Scott McClellan? The permanent campaign? Well, what differenciates the campaign from the political climate we are used to? Certainly, a campaign is a time of simplified messages. You need to get your message through, you need to establish an image of yourself, people need to know why they should vote for you, and why not for the other guy. It doesn't have to be much. 2-3 keywords and a little bit of context. For example, in the end, Barack Obama's campaign came down to the word "change" and the message "John McCain is like George W. Bush".
However, there was always more to Obama's message than this - and it became obvious with the collapse of the housing bubble at the end of the campaign. The criticism of the whole neo-conservative economic theory that had lingered under the radar, suddenly moved to the forefront. John McCain never had an adequate response apart from planless actionism. Sarah Palin campaigned on as if the collapse had never happened. She continued to throw out her one-liners and hateful rhetorics that reduced McCain's platform to a raging anti-movement against intellectualism, science, cities, race, religious tolerance, social tolerance, and economic changes. It was as if Sarah Palin had no clue what was going on...
Maybe she didn't, maybe she did... remember that she couldn't answer Katie Couric's question about the newspapers she reads? Well, it's not that she didn't read at all, but what she read. It was material from the extreme right-wing, from the John Birch society, for example. Of course, that didn't quite fit to the small-town major from Alaska, the hockey mom. But make no mistake, she was, and is, a member of the neo-conservative circles, either a real player or just a rather clueless product of it, that have ruled the USA for the past 28 years.
It's common knowledge now that the Republican Party uses social wedge issues to get people to vote against their economic interests. But I want to emphasize just how strong the grip of the GOP on the people was. The Reagan coalition was a combination of several distinctive developments that all came together under the grandfather personality of Reagan: the Southern Strategy of Nixon, racism as the main argument against the Democrats; the evangelical movement that emerged as a counter-culture to the counter-culture of 1968; and the neo-realistic school of international policy as exemplified by Henry Kissinger, the Nixon/Ford administration, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. Also, don't forget that the Republican Party never accepted the New Deal and the bigger role of the federal government since then. The Republicans saw the New Deal as a historic mistake that needed to be undone.
So, if you were not a Republican you could be labelled a traitor, a heathen, a terrorist, a socialist or communist, a troublemaker, soft on crime, a weakling, wavering, french, soft on foreign policy and maybe against your own race, if you were white. And if not, you were lazy, probably an illegal immigrant or in a different conflict with the law, either related to burglary or drugs. That's how the Republican Party fought their way back to power, from Nixon, to Lee Atwater, to Karl Rove. It was all timed to reverse the course of the nation, once there was a neo-conservative majority in every branch of government.
With Reagan it all came together. With the moral superiority of the evangelicals, the conservatives tried to turn back the clock. The social progress of the 60's had to be reversed, social programs were attacked, the tax system was changed, the old New Deal regulatory systems were weakened or destroyed. Government became the enemy, and in a way, the Reagan/Bush/Bush governments fought against themselves (the Clinton government wasn't quite innocent either). In a way, the government wasn't meant to succeed. To cover up weak economic performance, foreign policy served as the device to stay in power, from the aimless Star Wars Defence program, the fight against the evil empire, the Axis of evil, to the unjustified 2nd Iraq war.
A conservative government simply wasn't meant to be successful as an economic player, or it would have justified the New Deal programs. Remember that, according to Reagan, goverment never was the solution it always was the problem. So a successful economic policy would have destroyed that belief. No wonder that Reagan and Bush Jr. let the debt explode. The government HAD to be rendered unable to act if the ideology was meant to succeed. And of course, the massive debt helped to justify any further reduction of the welfare state. Neo-conservatism was a self-justifying ideology.
Another popular slogan of the neoconservatives was/is the call for tax-cuts, at best down to zero. It is still being promoted by Grover Norquist and Newt Gingrich, the pair that basically represents the 2nd generation of Reaganomics. Well,of course, everyone wants to have more money, but it's also no wonder that the gap between the rich and the poor got bigger, because as a wealthy person, you have more options to increase your wealth, especially in an unregulated financial market. Your average Joe probably doesn't see that the massive amount of debt leads to inflation, that the crumbling infrastructure makes transportation more expensive, that many of the benefits of the tax-cuts are taken away at another point and the best the middle-class can hope for, is for things not to change.
Neo-conservatism actively worked to change the electorate. Remember, people are most attracted to populism when they are in danger of losing the most. The upper middle-class had no problem to vote for Obama because they could afford a slight rise of taxes. But the lower middle-class couldn't afford it so their fears could be instrumentalized to make these people vote against their economic interests. The bulwarks of conservatism are in places that are under siege, like the white South, fearing to lose its jobs to minorities. It's in neighborhoods with older people, and less educated people, that see the effects of immigration and thus, try to augment the differences between themselves and these immigrants, although, socially, they are on the same level. And while the tax system will never allow these people to climb up the ladder, because the people above them are always able to move quicker, they still have to have got something they can lose to be attracted to conservatism. If you have got nothing to lose anymore, you will probably not vote at all, or you will vote for more social programs. Maybe you see where I am going, the one possession that turned people into conservatives, was the house.
The housing bubble was a product of the Bush Jr. goverment that wanted to keep people in the suburbs and on the countryside, because the Republican Party had lost the urban areas by the 2000's. Urban areas also force people to get along with their neighbors. They concentrate lots of social and ethnic backgrounds. They require infrastructure and flexibility - everything that works against conservatism.
So you see, for the suburban and rural conservative losing the house was a constant possibility, so any tax increase, any social program was a threat to the own existence. The spread of the population across huge suburban and rural areas, which is a true American tradition actually, also worked to idolize the typically big American cars. It is a waste of energy and nurtures the fossil fuel fetish.

But there is another reason why the middle-class had to be on the brink of losing everything. The Republican Party, and the Neoconservatives especially, have always depended on the only government sector they didn't want to shrink - the military. From "Top Gun" to President Bush in front of the "Mission Accomplished"-banner, the heroification of the military under any circumstances was another compagnon of the Neoconservative era. The Army had to be an attractive place to work to get enough voluntary recruits. It had to be a stable job in unstable times. It needed to be a good place to work, even if you had to go to prison for a joint or a similarly petty crime. Yes, for many young people, the Army had to be the only place left to work at. Otherwise, the hawkish neoconservative foreign policy would have lacked the human ressources to wage their blending wars - and a draft would have been a far too big role of the government, so there had to be a system of "forced voluntarism".
In short, The Neoconservative agenda worked to remodel the electorate into a highly conservative state. The Reagan Revolution was a true ideology that offered easy answers on every subject of policy: Strong on foreign policy, up to the point that the removal of a foreign dictator is justified by itself, against EVERY counterargument. Smaller government in every sector, except from the military, re-christianization to strengthen social wedge issues, racism in the South, evangelicalism in the plains states, libertarianism in the West, trickle-down economics in the north-east. It all worked together to ensure the electoral support until the expansion of the government after the Great Depression was reversed, even if it meant destroying the functionality of the government. In the end, America would have looked like a voluntarily fascist state. The army would have provided the safest jobs. There would always be an enemy to fight, Communism, Muslims, terrorists, Iran, Palestine, Syria, and who knows what next. The tax system and radically free market would have ensured that a small elite remains at power indefinitely. There would not have been a real political alternative, because of ideological litmus tests at every stage of the way (the Justice Department, Sunday mornings, what you eat, if you respect the flag, and so on and on...).

I believe that Obama would have won even without the economic collapse, but we are now facing a repetition of history. 1929 has come back, although the situation is not as bad as it was back then, not yet. As long as foreign countries are willing to buy American debt it will be fine. Government is about to expand massively, Obama is already building a new New Deal. Let's see if the Republican Party, once again, disappears into the political wilderness for a few decades.

US Senate predictions - January

Here's a first outlook at the upcoming US senate elections of 2010.
Since it's extremely early to do this, I will just give a rough estimate on the probability of each seat to go to either the Democrats or the Republicans. I will do this in steps of 10 percent - 90:10, 80:20 etc.... This probability then translates into a decimal gain or loss of seats for the Democrats. For example, a republican seat with a probability of 80% to stay in the republican column still means a 0,2 seat gain for the Democrats. At this stage of the cycle my result just gives a general outlook on the structural possibilities of the parties. Several races could still change fundamentally if a single outstanding politician makes a decision to either join the race or retires. For example, the Iowa seat currently occupied by Chuck Grassley is a safe republican seat, as long as Chuck Grassley doesn't retire. He still might do this though, and all of a sudden, the Democrats would have a very good pick-up opportunity.
Anyway, here are my estimates:

Incumbent, State Dem | Rep % change for Dems

Richard Shelby, Alabama 0 100 0
Lisa Murkowski, Alaska 10 90 +0,1
John McCain, Arizona 10 90 +0,1
Blanche Lincoln, Arkansas 70 30 -0,3
Barbara Boxer, California 90 10 -0,1
Michael Bennett, Colorado 60 40 -0,4
Chris Dodd, Connecticut 90 10 -0,1
(Ted Kaufman), Delaware 90 10 -0,1
(Mel Martinez), Florida 50 50 +0,5
Johnny Isakson, Georgia 0 100 0
Daniel Inouye, Hawai'i 90 10 -0,1
Mike Crapo, Idaho 0 100 0
(Roland Burris), Illinois 10 90 -0,1
Evan Bayh, Indiana 100 0 0
Chuck Grassley, Iowa 20 80 +0,2
(Sam Brownback), Kansas 30 70 +0,3
Jim Bunning, Kentucky 50 50 +0,5
David Vitter, Louisiana 20 80 +0,2
Barbara Mikulski, Maryland 100 0 0
(Kit Bond), Missouri 60 40 +0,6
Harry Reid, Nevada 70 30 -0,3
Judd Gregg, New Hampshire 30 70 +0,3
Chuck Schumer, New York 100 0 0
(???), New York Jr. 90 10 -0,1
Richard Burr, North Carolina 40 60 +0,4
Byron Dorgan, North Dakota 80 20 -0,2
Tim Coburn, Oklahoma 100 0 0
(George Voinovich), Ohio 50 50 +0,5
Ron Wyden, Oregon 100 0 0
Arlen Specter, Pennsylvania 50 50 +0,5
Jim DeMint, South Carolina 0 100 0
John Thune, South Dakota 0 100 0
(Kay B. Hutchison), Texas 20 80 +0,2
Bob Bennett, Utah 0 100 0
Patrick Leahy, Vermont 100 0 0
Patty Murray, Washington 100 0 0
Russ Feingold, Wisconsin 100 0 0

Overall Estimate of Democratic gains: +2,6


A few comments:
- We still need to hear from a few politicians and their plans for the cycle. They are: Mike Huckabee in Arkansas, Chuck Grassley in Iowa, Kathleen Sebelius in Kansas, Mitch Landrieu in Louisiana, John Hoeven in North Dakota and Kay Bailey Hutchison in Texas. These people have a tremendous effect on the race in their state in the sense that their decision to run or not to run can flip a seat. Sen. Hutchison is a special case because her "retirement" to run for Governor would trigger the special election that would give the Democrats a fair chance to get the seat.
- Polling has just started and the estimates will soon change. I already had to adjust my estimate for North Carolina because of the vulnerability of Sen. Burr. Once again, my estimate can only demonstrate the structural problems of the Republicans, who are hurt by the retirements and their slightly higher number of seats to defend. The polls will soon show how the national climate effects the elections.
- Although my estimate is looking good for the Democrats, there is just one seat more likely to change party than not, Missouri. It could still be possible that we don't have any changes at all. On the other hand, the Democrats will be very happy with "only" 60-61 seats, and that result is a very likely one.