A Widow's Grief

Carryn Owens was in the House chamber last night when President Trump spoke to a joint session of Congress. Her husband, Chief Petty Officer William (Ryan) Owens, was killed during a military raid in Yemen just a few weeks ago. It was reported in the press (I did not watch the speech) that the applause CPO Owens and his widow received was the loudest of the evening. The President himself noted that Owens must hear the cheering in heaven.

 

While it is pedestrian gross to use the death of a member of our military for political gain, it is a special kind of gross to trot out a widow for such a public spectacle when you (the President) cared so little about the details surrounding the raid, you reportedly approved it between courses of dinner with your political advisors in tow and did not even bother to stop by the Situation Room at the White House during the operation to check on its status. It is also a special kind of gross for members of the Republican party who made the tragic death of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others in Benghazi a cause célèbre for years to ignore the sketchy circumstances surrounding Owens’s death and the apparent lack of rigor that went into signing off on the mission.

 

It might be too much to ask for that the sacrifices of our military be apolitical, but for the man who approved a mission under questionable circumstances to use a dead man’s widow as a prop to make himself look good is a level of cynicism rarely reached in politics. That the media pointed to it as a high point for Trump and not another sub-basement of his venality, is another story altogether.

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Book Review - Too Dumb To Fail

Presaging what will surely be a flood of books about the 2016 campaign is Matt Lewis’s Too Dumb to Fail, equal parts polemic and screed by a card-carrying member of the conservative media establishment (Lewis is an editor of The Daily Caller and regularly appears on “the shows”). Lewis’s thesis is simple - the ideas that undergirded the so-called “Reagan Revolution” have been jettisoned by the Republican Party, which needs to get back to being a party animated by the big, bold ideas that, according to Lewis, led to Reagan’s ascent.

While one cannot question Lewis’s conviction, he cherry picks information to suit his point of view. Perhaps this is simply my own political perspective, but if the first step in solving a problem is admitting its existence, readers will find little comfort here. It is not simply the pot shots Lewis takes at President Obama, Democrats, or the definite article “The Left,” it is the failure of his book to come to terms with some basic facts about Saint Ronnie. 

While the hagiography embraces Reagan’s bumper sticker appeal - low taxes, less government, and a strong national defense - his record was not that simple. Yes, Reagan cut taxes in 1981, but he subsequently raised them - several times - during his time in office. His attempts to rein in the federal government barely moved the needle on the actual number of federal workers (Republicans would have to wait for some guy named Bill Clinton to arrive before a meaningful reduction occurred), and the massive military build-up was done on the government’s credit card, leading to swelling budget deficits that undermined any suggestion of fiscal restraint. And this is without even getting into Reagan’s signing of a bill in 1986 that granted “amnesty” to millions of undocumented individuals, his decision to “cut and run” from Lebanon in 1983, or his sale of sophisticated weapons to the Iranians and the shifting of the proceeds from those sales to Nicaraguan Contras, action that should have gotten him impeached. 

Similarly, Lewis whistles past the graveyard of other recent Republican apostasies. The Second Iraq War barely rates a mention, the Great Recession is an afterthought, and the massive deficits accumulated under recent Republican administrations are barely touched on. Meanwhile, President Obama is dismissed as a paint-by-numbers liberal who has attempted to foist any number of evil government policies on a gullible electorate, not the least of which is of course the Heritage Foundation idea that people be required to purchase health insurance, which forms the core of what we now call Obamacare. 

Lewis also overstates the direness of the state of the Republican Party. The Obama years have been phenomenal for the GOP at the state level, where they control more than half the governorships and legislatures. Indeed, but for a single house of the Kentucky Legislature, the entire Old Confederacy is under Republican rule - a decimation of the Democratic Party that has been as total as the Republicans in the Northeast. In Congress, more Republicans are seated in the House of Representatives than at any time since 1928 and they also hold a majority in the Senate.

On public policy, for all the Republican kvelling about Obama’s overuse of executive authority (itself a pile of Grade A horseshit), after Sandy Hook, states passed more laws expanding gun rights than restricting them, and many states in the South have all but eliminated access to abortion. At the national level, the battle over tax policy has been won by Republicans with the assent of Democratic Presidents who have defined up the “middle class” from $250,000 under President Clinton to $400,000 under President Obama, who, incidentally, signed the law that permanently codified 99% of the George W. Bush-era tax rates. Reductions in capital gains and carried interest rates have shifted wealth upward, with many millionaires paying lower marginal rates than middle class wage earners while the amount of federal spending going toward so-called “discretionary” parts of the federal budget are at Eisenhower-era lows. 

And therein lies the limitation in Lewis’s argument. On the one hand, there is little interest in seriously examining the Reagan Revolution and its distortion by Republicans to suit their facile arguments about things like taxes, the military, and domestic policy and on the other, they have suffered no political consequences for it - indeed, but for the Presidency, Republicans have not held so many offices at the federal and state level in eight decades. 

What Lewis is left with is a lot of Poli Sci 101 ruminations on political philosophy and a few well-placed critiques. For example, Lewis rightly criticizes the anti-intellectualism of his party and its failure to adjust with the shifting winds of social change. He points to the weakening of the party structure and the rise of outside groups as one symptom of why there is less party unity and fidelity. Instead of having extremism rooted out, the party has been overtaken by its most intransigent members. In an alternate universe, Senate Republicans would be willing to give an Obama nominee to fill Justice Scalia’s seat a fair shake, would have negotiated (and voted for) the stimulus bill, and provided suggestions that could have incorporated more conservative policies into the Affordable Care Act - but Lewis cannot bring himself to suggest even these modest concessions.  

When it comes to solutions, Lewis goes for some unusual options - promoting “New Urbanism” - and more conventional choices - hello, outreach to Hispanics. But even here, he cannot mask his disdain for “the Left.” After a pages-long screed over how “the Left” politicizes climate change, the best Lewis can muster is the idea that it is okay to question the science but not demonize it (never mind that the Republican Party literally stands alone among all political parties in the Western Hemisphere as questioning man’s role in climate change). Similarly, instead of questioning (and offering answers to) the near total rejection of Republicans by African-American voters, Lewis glides right past this problem to focus on attracting other minority groups. In doing so, he misses the opportunity to mine what is a deep vein of skepticism toward his party by people of color based on the policies they advocate and the message they send. Finally, he encourages young conservatives to be well-read, but fails to identify anything other than standard conservative reading material as a starting point for their education. 

Any reckoning for why the Republican Party is so monochromatic and why the demographics that are making it harder and harder for them to compete for the White House will be lost so long as there are no electoral consequences in off year elections and at the state level. In the meantime, while the chances for winning in November become more remote with every batshit crazy Donald Trump incident, the reality is the GOP is that one election away from complete control of the federal government - hardly a political party in decline.

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Book Review - The Wilderness

While flipping through McKay Coppins’s book The Wilderness: Deep Inside the Republican Party’s Combative, Contentious, Chaotic Quest to Take Back the White House it is easy to close your eyes and envision what the GOP’s Presidential nominating contest could have looked like: a telegenic young Florida Senator who had championed immigration reform debating with an ardent libertarian who supports privacy rights over foreign wars, a bilingual elder statesman lobbying for education reform and big tent conservatism squaring off against an Indian-American Governor of a blood-red state, a silver-tongued double Ivy graduate and former Supreme Court clerk voicing the frustrations of an electorate fed up with the Washington establishment dueling with a former tech CEO who was once one of the leading female executives in the country. 

That debate, a relatively sober, yet sharp conversation about the future of our country, how our money is spent, where we deploy our troops, how we help those in need and what we do about those in our country illegally would have elevated the discourse in a party that has lost the popular vote in five of the last six Presidential elections, but sadly, it was not meant to be. A tsunami of bile and invective spewed from the mouth of an all-id billionaire named Donald Trump consumed every molecule of oxygen available for months on end, leaving the best laid plans of party leaders in ruins and a reality TV star at the head of an army of discontented voters clamoring for high walls to keep out Mexicans, a ban on Muslims entering the country, and a visceral disdain for anything that vaguely smelled of the dreaded “establishment.” 

Surely, when Coppins signed a contract with Little, Brown in June 2013 to examine how the Republican party would attempt to reclaim the White House in 2016, neither he nor they foresaw Trump’s rise. After all, the GOP was just 8 months removed from getting its clock cleaned in the 2012 election, 3 months past the issuance of a report by a a blue ribbon panel of party elders that concluded Republicans needed to do more to attract the votes of African-Americans, Hispanics, and women, and President Obama had seemingly vanquished Trump from public life with a withering takedown at the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner. Against this backdrop, it certainly made sense for the writer to spend time with people like Bobby Jindal, who had noted that the GOP needed to stop being the “stupid” party, Paul Ryan, who emerged unscathed from the smoldering ruin of the Romney campaign, and Rand Paul, who TIME Magazine dubbed “the most interesting man in politics” in October 2014. 

Coppins’s research and effort is on display throughout his book, it just turned out to be largely beside the point. We get the deep dive into biographical minutiae like the exorcism Jindal participated in, Paul’s bizarre “Aqua Buddha” incident from college, the oppo research on Rubio that was never released (but that Coppins eagerly does), and Jeb Bush’s transformation from entitled rich boy to humbled public servant (eye roll). While the breadth of Coppins’s research is admirable (poor guy fished out Jindal’s Oxford thesis that supported a health care plan that looks suspiciously like Obamacare) his word choice suggests a penchant for playing favorites. Marco Rubio is described as having “unparalleled skill” as a communicator (debatable) while Paul Ryan is “genial” and “good natured.” Coppins seems particularly taken with the now House Speaker. He goes on for several chapters lauding Ryan’s  listening tour to learn about how ex-offenders and drug addicts access treatment in the community while giving a one paragraph blow off to the fact that the budgets and tax policies Ryan supported after this little policy jag bore no resemblance to the needs of these men and women. 

While it is understandable that some characters may be more compelling (or likable than others), I was more troubled by the absence of attribution throughout much of the book. The sourcing stems from Coppins’s interviews with the candidates or those around them reconstructed or summarized except where quotations are used; however, the book has no endnotes or footnotes and the sources are rarely identified by name, leaving the book with an impressionistic feel that permits thumb-on-the-scale descriptions by the author that poo poohs Ron Paul as a “kooky gadfly” but Jeb Bush as a sober elder statesman. It is this type of Acela Corridor thinking that created a blind spot in the media’s collective reporting on the GOP, dismissed Trump and refused to concede he had kneecapped Bush with a few strategic insults.  

Moreover, the book makes a few declarative statements that are at best misleading and at worst, flat wrong. A discussion of the government shutdown describes the fall-out as the government’s inability to pay its bills, which is not technically true; rather, it results in employees not being able to go to work. At another point, Coppins claims that Ryan was “a few hundred thousand swing state votes” from being elected Vice President. This is not only demonstrably false, but the predicate before it, of Ryan’s feeling self-conscious while visiting a church that helps those in need, is a perfect illustration of the attribution failure described above. Lastly, because the book had a delivery due date, it already feels outdated. Cruz, who has rocketed to second place to Trump and who none other than Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman has identified as the likely Republican nominee, is referred to as a “footnote” by Coppins and Governor Chris Christie, languishing in the polls when The Wilderness went to print, is now surging in New Hampshire. 

Ultimately, the main failing of Coppins’s book is the same one that has bedeviled the Republican party and the Beltway cognoscenti - their collective failure to anticipate Trump’s meteoric rise fueled by the deep antipathy many in the GOP feel toward their own leaders. To be sure, there were hints along the way that Coppins highlights - Cruz’s kamikaze government shutdown effort, Dave Brat’s out-of-nowhere takedown of Eric Cantor, even Trump’s appearance at an Iowa “cattle call” in early 2015 where he flatly stated the party could not nominate another member of the Bush family - but instead of focusing on these clues, much of the book lingers on also rans who never made an impact on the race. Bobby Jindal is portrayed as both a serious man of faith and one who blithely jettisoned his reputation for wonkishness when it was clear his message was not selling with the base. Rand Paul’s brand of libertarian tinged Republicanism is shaded in the Oedipal struggle he felt with his father, but ultimately, the “libertarian moment” that the pundit class keeps claiming is going to happen when a Paul family member runs for President never materialized. 

In this way, The Wilderness offers an interesting examination of a political party that does not actually exist while maintaining a blinkered view of what caused Trump’s rise. Indeed, but for a single chapter that probes into the darker recesses of right-wing thought and a couple of paragraphs at the end of the book that spotlight this phenomenon, The Wilderness is surprisingly light on what seems an axiomatic idea - that whatever humility Republicans felt after Obama’s re-election receded when the party suffered no political consequences for the 2013 government shutdown and gained seats in the 2014 Congressional elections. These results, coupled with the party’s massive gains at the state level during Obama’s time in the White House and the fall of both John Boehner and Eric Cantor, the top two Republican leaders in the House of Representatives, emboldened the right wing, not cowed it. While most GOP candidates for President were busy running the same establishment playbook, Trump upended the conventional wisdom and swooped into the chasm that exists between the most ardent Republican voters in the hinterlands and the party’s leadership in Washington. A book that told that story would have been a worthy addition to the nascent canon of 2016 reporting.

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Fighting ISIS

For much of the last decade, Tom Friedman has been an object of derision outside the comfortable bubble of official Washington. From his blind allegiance to the Bush Administration’s decision to invade Iraq to his habit of predicting that any six month period thereafter would be crucial in determining the fate of our folly [1], Mr. Friedman’s judgment has been brought into question, but the man has reported from and about the Middle East for more than thirty years. Indeed, his seminal book From Beirut to Jerusalem still stands as one of the single best encapsulations of the complex politics of that region, so when he talks, people listen.

As national attention is consumed again with what to do about terrorism, something Friedman wrote in a column earlier this week bears noting:

For whatever ridicule “the Mustache” receives for his sometimes facile explanations of complicated issues, this observation should be printed out and tacked to the wall of any politician purporting to say there is an answer, easy or otherwise, to defeating ISIS.

Consider some of the ideas being bandied about and how easily their limitations are exposed. Most Republicans are calling for a grand international coalition harkening back to the days of George H.W. Bush and the First Gulf War as the model for what American leadership can do. But that metaphor is deeply flawed and not just for the reasons articulated in Friedman’s article. 

In 1990, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, our most important coalition partner in the region, Saudi Arabia, was highly motivated to cooperate because they feared invasion by Iraq’s superior, well trained, and experienced military. Iran, on the other hand, was weak, licking its wounds from an eight-year war with Iraq. The Berlin Wall fell less than a year before Saddam’s invasion and the Soviet Union was in the process of collapsing while simultaneously trying to build better relations with the West. China, conversely, was isolated internationally after its crackdown on democratic protests in Tiananmen Square in June 1989. In 2015, Russia is feeling its oats, China is ascendent on the global stage, and Iran is emerging back into the community of nations thanks to its nuclear deal with the United States.

What about Donald Trump’s idea to “bomb the shit” out of ISIS. Sounds good, I mean who doesn’t like bombing the shit out of somebody? The only problem, well, problems, are that (1) ISIS is not like the Nazis, with large divisions deployed over a field of battle for the aforementioned bombing; (2) ISIS fighters can blend into civilian populations, thus increasing the chances of collateral damage (i.e., dead innocent people, which tends to anger the locals); and (3) you cannot bomb an ideology out of existence - just ask the Israelis, who have been fighting with the Palestinians since before the state of Israel was declared or the countries that still cling to communism. [2]

So if a coalition will not be an easy lift and we cannot simply carpet bomb ISIS, what about that old standby “boots on the ground?” Right. We are kind of in this mess because some guy with an Oedipal complex decided to invade Iraq in the first place. Our current President has rightly observed that we could deploy thousands of troops to root out ISIS in places like Raqqa, but the question no one has a good answer for is “then what?” The same complications Friedman identified in his column would still apply - the competing interests, conflicting agendas, and most importantly, the total lack of credible political figures on the ground to make something sustainable long-term (just look at the mess in Iraq or the faltering “democracy” in Afghanistan) would still be there. Moreover, unlike the First Gulf War, where a basic status quo ante resulted from Saddam Hussein’s defeat, the heavy lifting of stabilizing and remaking Syria, reconsidering Iraq’s political structure and who should play what role in those decisions, would require a level of diplomacy and commitment our nation has expressed little passion for and the people of that region seem uninterested in adopting. 

Ultimately, much of what passes for policy discussion in our nation assumes that we know what is best for others and that they will support our beliefs because hey, America. But the calls for more passion from the President, more boots on the ground, or more bombing raids belies a simple fact - some problems are not ours to solve.

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END NOTES

1. Friedman’s reliance on this trope was dubbed a “Friedman Unit” by the blogger Duncan Black (a/k/a “Atrios”). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_Unit

2. Of course, getting rid of one ideology does not guarantee anything. The Soviet Union dissolved but it was simply replaced with a mixture of dictatorship and an oligarchy that has left most Russians no better off than they were under communist rule. 

The Rank Hypocrisy of Lindsey Graham

Irrelevant Republican candidate for President Lindsey Graham may not be able to attract more than 1 percent in national polls, but he can always be assured of fawning coverage from the Beltway media. Earlier this week, Graham delivered a speech to a group called the Republican Jewish Congress, laying into his competition for their hard right positions on immigration and “hateful rhetoric” directed at minority groups in America. 

Graham’s speech occurred on the heels of a quote he gave to the New York Times’s Jonathan Martin, who dutifully transcribed Graham’s comments into a lengthier story on the GOP’s fear of a Trump nomination. According to Graham:

Of course, the DC media *loves* this type of alleged honesty from the political spawn of the original straight talker, John McCain, but a funny thing happened yesterday just hours after Graham’s polemic against wedge politics. The Senate took up a bill via reconciliation, a strategy they bemoaned when they were in the minority as undemocratic, that would defund Planned Parenthood and repeal Obamacare, you know, that law that millions of people, many of whom are African American, Hispanic, or Latino, and who Graham claimed - earlier that day - his party needed to bring into their tent. Graham voted in favor of that bill, not only making him a hypocrite of the first degree, but he may have also redefined a term the people at the RJC are very familiar with - chutzpah.

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Speaker Ryan

The Beltway media has found its new obsession. The implosion of the House Republican conference that began with John Boehner's announcement that he was stepping down as Speaker went thermonuclear when Kevin McCarthy, his presumed successor, bowed out of the race. The internecine war within the House GOP has become a full-fledged crisis that laid bare a years-long descent into blind governmental obstruction that included hundreds of Senate filibusters, a government shutdown, and more than fifty fruitless attempts to repeal Obamacare. 

While the media has, until now, been wary of pointing a finger solely at the GOP (the preferred "both sides do it" trope is so ingrained at this point, you wonder whether it's taught in J school), journalists are slowly coming around to the idea that it is not President Obama's failure to invite Republicans to the White House for drinks that is to blame for Washington dysfunction, but rather, the nihilistic streak infecting the House Republican caucus. Their timing could not be worse - the country will hit its borrowing limit in less than a month and the government is running on a continuing budget resolution that expires in two. 

Of course, as is the media's wont, the focus is on process and personalities - can Paul Ryan be cajoled into accepting this thankless job? Did McCarthy bow out because of rumors circulating in the right-wing blogosphere? Might Newt Gingrich return to save the day? (not making this one up). This plays to the preferred narrative that has turned politics into some combination of soap opera and professional wrestling, and it surely fills hours on cable news and column inches in newspapers, but lost in this is the fact that paying the country's bills and passing a budget that funds everything from the FBI to food safety, is the bare minimum of what any Congress should be able to do. It is the equivalent of waking up and brushing your teeth in the morning. 

That the Beltway media characterizes raising the debt ceiling and passing a budget as burdens, not requirements of government is embarrassing. Instead of shaming Republicans for failing to achieve even this minimum threshold for governing, journalists view these issues through a purely political lens that simply considers how John Boehner might ease Paul Ryan's ascension to Speaker by getting these pesky pieces of business out of the way. And if the media wants to focus on Ryan's viability, it would be great if they spent a bit more time picking through his radical policies like privatizing Medicare and transferring trillions in tax dollars to the wealthy and what it would say about the Republican party if their public face supported such extreme positions than whether or not he is BFFs with his own caucus.

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