harikari.com

Given the sorry lot of Republican presidential candidates described below, it’s no surprise that several high-profile Republicans have left the party and decided to throw their support behind a Democratic candidate.  Who are the Bush defectors?  One of them is Tom Bernstein who used to co-own the Texas Rangers with George W. Bush.  Bernstein has actually given a lot of money to the Democrats and Republicans.  His donation record shows that he did support Bush and the RNC with some big chunks of money during the Bush campaigns. Another is Bush’s former chief campaign strategist, Matthew Dowd; and another is Robert Kagan, one of the founders of the Project for a New American Century.

Who do they like?  Barack Obama.

The “leader” of this group of defectors is John Martin.  He is “a Navy reservist and founder of the website Republicans for Obama.”

And…

Financiers have also been oiling Obama’s campaign. In Chicago, his home town, John Canning, a “Bush pioneer” and investment banker who pledged to raise $100,000 for the president in 2004, has given up on the Republicans. “I know lots of my friends in this business are disenchanted and are definitely looking for something different,” he said.

Read all about it at TimesOnline.

This subject is also discussed in “The Conciliator,” a New Yorker article by Larissa Macfarquhar.

After Obama’s Convention speech, Republican bloggers rushed to claim him, under headings such as “Right Speech, Wrong Convention” and “Barack Obama: A Republican Soul Trapped Inside a Democrat’s Body.” The Convention speech was uncharacteristically Reaganesque for Obama, being almost uniformly sunny about America, which he called a “magical place”; these days, he tends to be more sombre. Even so, Republicans continue to find him congenial, especially those who opposed the war on much the same conservative grounds that he did. Some of Bush’s top fund-raisers are contributing to Obama’s campaign.

…

Of course, not all Republicans like Obama—John Martin receives a steady stream of rude e-mails. “Hi John, Just wanted to let you know that there aren’t Republicans for Obama Hussein Barack,” one woman wrote. “Please remove me from your mailing list and get over your white guilt.” “Some Republicans you scum are!” a man from Hobe Sound, Florida, wrote. “This is someone who has a 100% left wing voting record in the Senate, including rejection of Roberts and Alito and wants to repeal our tax cuts. Screw him! And screw you too!”

Yes, Bush’s base sure wants to hold on to those tax cuts of theirs that are bankrupting our country.  The “haves and have mores” sure hate to see their own supporting a genuine “uniter” who would actually try and stop this disastrous war and then start collecting taxes from them to pay off the hundreds of billions of dollars in debt that we’ve racked up on their war so far.

It’s still very early in the campaign, but this is a dynamic that we’ll have to keep monitoring.  If this turns into something big and Obama starts stuffing his pockets with money from Republican donors, how will the Democrats respond?

Karl Rove is no idiot. When he promises an ‘October Surprise‘, he delivers.  So, if he promised an ‘October Surprise‘ back in September, he knew what he was delivering.  I have pondered this topic in a few other posts(here, here, and here), but never found his special gift to the world.

But what is it???

I think his ‘October Surprise’ is a gift that keeps on giving, for at least the next 18 months or so.

The Republicans took a dive in the midterms.

Before we look at the possibility of the Republicans taking a dive, I want to state that I wholeheartedly believe that voters overwhelmingly wanted Republicans out of office and a change of direction for the nation. But, perhaps Karl Rove did not use all the tricks (ex. electronic voting manipulation, caging lists, etc.) which are accessible to him, allowing the Democrats to take control.

Basically, the Republicans could benefit greatly from taking a dive, letting the shit hit the fan with Democrats in power, then in 2008 come in to clean up the mess. I know, the mess is the Republican’s mess, but remember, these guys operate at a 5th grade mentality.

If you don’t believe me about their mentality, check out this passage from an article in Rolling Stone that I mentioned previously:

According to the rules, conferences have to include at least one public, open meeting…amazingly, the Republicans sneak off to hold the real conference, forcing the Democrats to turn amateur detective and go searching the Capitol grounds for the meeting. “More often than not, we’re trying to figure out where the conference is,” says one House aide.

In one legendary incident, Rep. Charles Rangel went searching for a secret conference being held by Thomas. When he found the room where Republicans closeted themselves, he knocked and knocked on the door, but no one answered. A House aide compares the scene to the famous “Land Shark” skit from Saturday Night Live, with everyone hiding behind the door afraid to make a sound. “Rangel was the land shark, I guess,” the aide jokes. But the real punch line came when Thomas finally opened the door. “This meeting,” he informed Rangel, “is only open to the coalition of the willing.”

So, now that I’ve illustrated the maturity of the Republicans, let’s regress to childhood for a moment and role play…

You are a child in a room. There is one other person in the room. There is a table. On the table is a jar filled with your favorite candy. It isn’t your candy, but you love the candy. You eat a piece, yummmmmmm. You eat another and another. Pretty soon the jar is empty. You hear someone coming.

You have two options. One is to stick around and take responsibility for eating all of the candy. The other option is to go out the back door and avoid any confrontation as to who ate the candy. You know that if you leave, the other person will be held responsible for your actions.

So, what would you do as a child? Not just any child, but the type of child who holds ‘public’ meetings in secret?

Not the best analogy, but hopefully it makes the point. I think that Karl Rove had the Republicans take a dive so that in 2008 they could come back to ‘fix’ the results of the growing mess that the Republicans made in the past 6 years.

The list of the current mess is long and I am tired, but how about Iraq, corruption, a housing bubble about to burst, the growing deficit, and on and on…

The electorate has an amazingly short memory and I predict that the next 2 years will be a period of Republicans turning these into Democrat failures.

Have you ever wondered why the heads of truly stalwart Republicans don’t explode when their man in the oval office says and does things that contradict the basic principles they say they believe in? Like when the President says it’s okay for the government to tap the phones of American citizens without obtaining a warrant? Or maybe when he says we don’t torture and the pictures say otherwise? Or maybe when the man that asks for our unconditional support for the troops doesn’t supply them with adequate armor? Or when his fiscal policy creates the largest deficits this country has ever seen?

You would think that Republicans that believe in a limited role of government would lash out at anyone who dared to ignore the law and spy on Americans. You would think that responsible Republicans would want to hold their leaders accountable for the gross misconduct of the military. You would think that troops-loving Republicans would want the government to supply them with the best possible armor. You would think that proud, self-made Republicans would demand fiscal discipline from their leader.

But, when their leader breaks the rules and spends recklessly on the war (but somehow doesn’t provide adequate armor,) they just shrug it off. Why aren’t they clenching their craniums tightly in an effort to prevent their heads from exploding? Well this new study suggest that our brains (Yes… all of us, even non-Republicans share this trait.) have an unconscious regulator that allows emotions to trump rationality, thus preventing catastrophic cranial damage:

Using M.R.I. scanners, neuroscientists have now tracked what happens in the politically partisan brain when it tries to digest damning facts about favored candidates or criticisms of them. The process is almost entirely emotional and unconscious, the researchers report, and there are flares of activity in the brain’s pleasure centers when unwelcome information is being rejected.

”Everything we know about cognition suggests that, when faced with a contradiction, we use the rational regions of our brain to think about it, but that was not the case here,” said Dr. Drew Westen, a psychologist at Emory and lead author of the study…

…

Researchers have long known that political decisions are strongly influenced by unconscious emotional reactions, a fact routinely exploited by campaign consultants and advertisers. But the new research suggests that for partisans, political thinking is often predominantly emotional.

It is possible to override these biases, Dr. Westen said, ”but you have to engage in ruthless self reflection, to say, ‘All right, I know what I want to believe, but I have to be honest.’ ”

He added, ”It speaks to the character of the discourse that this quality is rarely talked about in politics.”

Now think about “the character of the discourse.” There’s a whole lot more of “…but I have to be honest” and much less emotional partisan response on Comedy Central than there is on most major news network shows that I’ve seen. Apparently comedy can disengage the regulator.

It’s the comedy, stupid!

Bush likes to refer to himself as a “War President.” That he is, but he is also the “Deficit President.”

The previous post talks about the tremendous federal deficit that we have accumulated in the five years that Bush has been president and how he and Congress have no real plan to reduce it. Sure, Bush recently bragged about a reduction in the size of the deficit and claimed that it was proof his economic “stimulus” package that was passed by Congress in 2001 was working. Krugman commented on the new numbers in this column from July 11th.

The usual suspects on the right are already declaring victory over the deficit, and proclaiming vindication for the Laffer Curve – the claim that tax cuts pay for themselves, because they have such a miraculous effect on the economy that revenue actually goes up.

But the fact is that revenue remains far lower than anyone would have predicted before the tax cuts began. In January 2001 the budget office forecast revenues of $2.57 trillion in fiscal 2005. Even with the recent increase in receipts, the actual number will be at least $400 billion less.

(Snip)

It turns out that all of the upside surprise in tax receipts is coming from two sources. One is tax payments from corporations, up both because last year corporate profits grew much more rapidly than the rest of the economy and because the effective tax rate on corporations went up when a temporary tax break, introduced in 2002, expired. Both are one-time events.

(Snip)

In other words, we’re still deep in the fiscal quagmire, with federal revenues far below what’s needed to pay for federal programs. And we won’t get out of that quagmire until a future president admits that the Bush tax cuts were a mistake, and must be reversed.

Hmmm… that sounds familiar. Didn’t we have a Republican president many years ago that tried to spur the economy with tax cuts? How’d that turn out? Not good, but at least Reagan recognized that the rapidly increasing deficit would lead to future economic problems, so he backtracked and raised taxes. His successor, President “Read My Lips… No new taxes!” Bush also had to raise taxes.

Then along came Clinton, and he proved that you could increase taxes, turn the deficit into surplus, and have a thriving economy. Ahh… those were the days. All we had to worry about was how to define a sexual relationship and what the meaning of “is” is.

That brings me to a lengthy Atlantic Unbound interview (subscription required, but if you email me, I’d be happy to email the article to you from their website.) with John Harris, “author of The Survivor, on why Clinton and his legacy will be debated for decades to come.” Here’s an excerpt of Harris’s response to a question about Clinton’s deficit reduction plan:

…I’m wondering if Clinton’s action to reduce the deficit really did spur the economy, or if he was the beneficiary of lucky timing.

That’s an argument that you can never fully resolve because it rests on an imponderable. You can’t go back and try it the other way. That 1993 deficit-reduction package was passed with all Democratic votes… The predictions on the Republican side were that this would cause an economic catastrophe, that it would plunge the economy into recession-that’s what Newt Gingrich said, that’s what Dick Armey said, and that part’s not an imponderable. Those predictions were ostentatiously wrong. Certainly if the economy had not improved, Clinton would have borne the blame for that… To my mind, it is almost like the debate that echoes from the Reagan years. Democrats always say, “If we hadn’t had a military build-up, the Soviet Union would still have collapsed.” That might be true, but most sensible people would not want to go back and try it another way, given that the end result was a good one. I really do think it’s equivalent, and I think it’s churlish of conservatives not to accord Clinton some credit for the economy of the 1990s, since they almost certainly would blame him if it had gone the other way.

Bush is in the middle of an expensive war that is adding hundreds of billions of dollars to the deficit, and he won’t ask his ultra-rich donors to sacrifice a little of their “hard earned” billions to pay for his folly.

Here’s a story by Washington Post writer Jim VandeHei about Bush’s comments at yesterday’s Rose Garden news conference.

In what has become a monthly session with reporters, Bush said an Amnesty International report condemning the U.S. treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, was “absurd.”
“It seemed to me they based some of their decisions on the word of – and the allegations – by people who were held in detention, people who hate America, people that had been trained in some instances to disassemble – that means not tell the truth,” Bush said. He appeared to have intended to use the word “dissemble.”

I’ve read that it’s pretty common for people to mix up “dissemble” and “disassemble,” but you’d think that a graduate from Yale with an MBA from Harvard would use the correct word.

That aside, Bush says we shouldn’t believe the allegations of the former Guantánamo detainees because they were trained to dissemble. Hmmm… Can I think of any other people who have perfected the art of dissembling? Oh yeah… what’s that guy’s name that dissembled during the run-up to the Iraq war? Whose Administration dissembled before Congress in 2003 in order to get them to pass the Drug Prescription bill? Who’s that guy that has been dissembling for months about the “urgent” need to overhaul Social Security?

Answer: George W. Bush, Dissembler in Chief

Have you ever had the conversation with someone in the previous generation like say your parents or your uncle or whomever that inevitably includes the statements like: “Well when I was your age things were different… Back then mothers stayed home with their kids… We didn’t need any daycare… We made no attempt to ‘have it all’ from the get-go… We could afford what we needed on one salary, blah blah blah…”

Well things certainly were different back then. Housing prices were much lower, working men and women used to make sustainable incomes, and employers used to pay for employee benefits. Now housing prices are in the stratosphere, the salaries of working men and women have decreased in terms of real dollars, and employers make their employees pay for their own retirement benefits and ask them to pay for large portions of their health insurance.

Paul Krugman has a few things to say about this in his column today. Here’s an excerpt:

In 1968, when General Motors was a widely emulated icon of American business, many of its workers were lifetime employees. On average, they earned about $29,000 a year in today’s dollars, a solidly middle-class income at the time. They also had generous health and retirement benefits.

Since then, America has grown much richer, but American workers have become far less secure.

Today, Wal-Mart is America’s largest corporation. Like G.M. in its prime, it has become a widely emulated business icon. But there the resemblance ends.

The average full-time Wal-Mart employee is paid only about $17,000 a year. The company’s health care plan covers fewer than half of its workers.

True, not everyone is badly paid. In 1968, the head of General Motors received about $4 million in today’s dollars – and that was considered extravagant. But last year Scott Lee Jr., Wal-Mart’s chief executive, was paid $17.5 million. That is, every two weeks Mr. Lee was paid about as much as his average employee will earn in a lifetime.

Read the whole column here. (If you aren’t already a registered user of the New York Times, a short registration procedure is required to access the articles on the web.)

And while you’re there, check out the recent column by Robert Rubin titled Attention: Deficit Disorder. It’s full of information about the economic dangers this country faces if it continues to run huge deficits.