My email box is flooded with anti-Daley reactions from left-leaning commenters, and I still have to wonder- what do people think they are accomplishing going after the Chief of Staff? The President has made his pick. This is over. There is no review process. There is no need for Senate approval. It isn’t going to come up for a vote in the plebiscite. I simply do not understand why we are going to turn the next few years into an anti-Daley jihad. You can flood the zone all you want with anti-Daley stuff, I’m betting the Obama team knew it before they made the pick and chose him anyway. So why bother?
Is there anyone out there who thinks Obama is going to come to the podium on Monday and say “I was pretty confident about my pick of Daley as my Chief of Staff, but then I read a very compelling diary at the Daily Kos that called me a traitor, sell-out, corporate whore, and worse than Bush, so I’ve reconsidered my pick and I am here to tell you that I no longer want Bill Daley and am instead choosing Noam Chomsky.”
mr. whipple
RAHM!
arguingwithsignposts
Personally, it’s a big meh to me. But I think it would have been cool to choose a CoS who wasn’t part of the normal beltway village, wallstreet axis. Not sure who that could have been, but that’s it. I’m sure there’s *somebody* out there who hasn’t worked for a fucking wall street bank who could manage the appointment book.
ETA: Fuck you, @mrwhipple – I wanted frist! :)
Alex S.
He’s another veteran Chicago politician. Obama has probably known him for decades. Either Daley has got the competence Obama is looking for, or Obama is simply not the kind of guy the professional left would like him to be.
Edit: Or both, probably.
Albatrossity
‘Cuz his dad was literally a hippie-puncher. Some folks on both sides can’t seem to get over the Vietnam War.
Maude
It’s all part of the narrative.
Obama is bad. He didn’t do what we told him to.
It’s the same arrogant attitude that they use to say Obama is weak etc. It’s too boring to repeat it all.
It doesn’t matter what Obama does, they took against him and that is all.
Odie Hugh Manatee
Because the poutrage merry-go-round isn’t solar powered?
I can almost believe that Obama thought ‘So you whiners didn’t approve of Rahm? Well here ya go…’
Maybe he wants to give the poutrage merry-go-round a shove?
Just Some Fuckhead
Why anyone would email you about the President’s CoS is one of the mysteries of the universe.
Cat Lady
You know how the firebaggers are always asking why there’s so much hippie punching here? It’s because they’re SO FUCKING PUNCHABLE!
stevie314159
Maybe you should start a new blog, “The Daley CoS”
John Cole
@Just Some Fuckhead: I love that people email me. One of the best things about having a blog. I can’t keep on top of everything, and hell, half the things I do follow closely I don’t know wtf I am talking about then, either.
MikeJ
@Just Some Fuckhead: That’s exactly what I was thinking. Emailing a blogger has got to be one of the dumbest things you can do in reaction to anything.
John, you have some awfully moronic readers. Except for the commenters. We’re all keen.
amk
Cue cole-bashing wrecklist diary at gos.
General Stuck
I say better in your email box, than in comments. That shit gives me mega Excedrin headaches reading it. It is personalizing politics to an un healthy emo level, that seems endemic to liberals. It seems to come from some hyper sensitive sense of personal betrayal, that I doubt has much to do with politics.
mistermix
@arguingwithsignposts: I’d be concerned if he didn’t hire a CoS who wasn’t plugged in to the village and beltway. The nature of the job is to get shit done inside the beltway.
magurakurin
Here’s an example of a really good thread of hippy punching on the ole BJ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWLByMshYIU
mr. whipple
I think Obama should have hired the voice dood for the gig.
AxelFoley
These muhfuckas would still piss and moan even if the President chose Howard Dean.
Nothing Obama does is ever gonna please them, with the exception of stepping down and having Sec. of State Clinton take over (how that could happen, I don’t know) or not running in 2012 so as to let the GOP take the White House again so they can play the perpetual victim.
I say again, I hold them in the same contempt I do for the extreme right. A part of me likes seeing them bitch. If Obama keeps pissing both sides off, I’m good.
Buck
Cole, you should share with us some of those emails.
It would be very interesting to see.
TR
Listen, I’m as anti-Beltway as anyone, but Chief of Staff is *precisely* the one position where you really do want someone who’s plugged into the establishment channels in Washington and Wall Street. The whole point of the job is to take the president’s vision and get it carried out, largely by twisting arms in the halls of power.
Seriously, let’s think of all the Chiefs of Staff who came from outside the Beltway circle. There have really only been two outside-the-Beltway chiefs of staff since the position was created under Truman, and they were both spectacular failures:
Mack McLarty was an Arkansas businessman that Clinton brought with him to the White House as a fresh voice. It led to one incompetent act after another — basically, how we got DADT in the first place, folks — and to the ass-whipping in 1994.
Hamilton Jordan was a Georgia ally of Jimmy Carter’s who was brought into the White House late in his term after Carter first tried to be his own COS. Neither Carter nor Jordan had the connections they needed to get the job done right, and the end result: Epic fail.
Sorry, but saying you want an outsider to be chief of staff is like saying you want a surgeon who got his training outside the stuffy establishment of medical schools.
ETA: I see mistermix got to the same point quicker. Consider this a “megadittos”
cleek
the pick just confirms what everybody with a functioning brain already knows, but which some take great offense to: Obama is not actually a radical lefty; he’s a moderate center-leaning pragmatist. people keep hoping he’ll reveal his inner Kucinich, but he keeps disappointing them.
well, maybe he’s not disappointing them. maybe it’s more accurate to say that he keeps enraging them. and since those people are addicted to their own self-generated outrage, it can’t be much of a disappointment – more like a loud, frowny, foot-stompy satisfaction.
arguingwithsignposts
@mistermix:
Is it? the CoS seems nebulous to me. I thought it was managing the POTUS’ time. And fwiw, I don’t think there’s anyone in the wallstreet/village axis who would walk away if any CoS called them up and said, “BTW, the president would like a word with you.” Maybe that’s just me.
AxelFoley
@stevie314159:
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!
Just Some Fuckhead
Why do these threads always devolve into a bunch of C-level commenters acting out against people that hold differing opinions?
arguingwithsignposts
@TR:
having just read a bit about the sordid history of medical schools, I think you might want to rethink your analogy.
Maren
Oddly enough I didn’t see a single diary objecting to the Republicans attempting to put the entire US budget into one wingnuts hands. I guess when ODS has killed off all your brain cells there’s nothing left for actually caring that the country is in deep trouble.
arguingwithsignposts
@Just Some Fuckhead:
and that’s different from most threads in what way?
Capt
Rahm did a fine job and so will the new COS.
It is Obama’s choice. It is Obama’s administration.
All of the BS from the looney left drives him to the center.
If I was Obama I’d be convinved at this point in time that there is no way in hell to satisfy the many naysayers on the left. So the only place to get the votes for the next election is from the center.
All of these crazies on the left whine and moan about how Obama isn’t the far left standard bearer they wished for when they voted for a guy who described himself as a moderate and a centrist.
Just like “hope” is a gift one gives to ones self (like self respect or self worth) and yet there are some who demand they get it from somewhere else.
Silly wabbits – reality is for adults.
rikyrah
I don’t think that people are attacking him. they just believe it’s a bad choice. I happen to be in the group that believe it’s a bad choice. I’m from Chicago, and that’s just how I feel.
Having as COS someone who called your signature achievement – HCR- an ‘overreach’…well, makes no damn sense to me.
stuckinred
@Just Some Fuckhead: devolve my ass
Tom65
I’m beginning to understand the joy the wingnuts get in pissing off the professional left.
Poopyman
@John Cole: Well, if you get some hate mail as good as some of Markos’, you’d better share it with us.
David Marotta
As usual, Cole brings some sanity to a hyperbolic debate…
dr. bloor
Although I love this blog, this, in a nutshell, sums up everything I hate about it. The only thing that’s missing is the hipster “you’re an idiot for caring and thinking Obama gives a shit about you.”
Oh, wait. You got that too.
Bullsmith
I’ve got nothing against Daily as a Chicago insider or an ex-politician of a notoriously corrupt city. It’s also a great city and he walked away a winner. From that angle he’s a perfectly acceptable choice.
But picking a COS straight of Wall Street is beyond disheartening. Can anyone really pretend otherwise? The banks are out of control with greed and fraud and they’re not just pulling the stings of government, at this point they basically are the government. It’s a fucking problem.
MMonides
My “Overton Window/Fuck the Firebaggers” response:
Daley is insufficiently backstabbing insider-DC and we should have chosen an even more connected enforcer for our POTUS’ will.
If they can be stupidly melodramatic, then so can we pragmatists.
Did I mention “fuck the Firebaggers”?
Poopyman
@mr. whipple: I’d support this just to enjoy the reaction from the so-called press he’d be dealing with.
NonyNony
@arguingwithsignposts:
Um, Chief of Staff doesn’t “manage the appointment book”. He has a secretary for that.
The “Chief of Staff” position is basically the “Grand Vizier” in the American governmental system. He’s the guy who sits between the President and everyone else – the guy you have to convince you’re worthwhile before he lets you in to talk to the President for 10 minutes. He’s usually the point-man between the President and Congress too – the guy who does most of the “meetings before the meetings” to arrange things before the actual meetings.
A president who has a Chief of Staff who isn’t plugged into the beltway political scene either has to be a massive creature of Washington himself (and have all those connections already baked in) or he’ll be a flop. That’s why Obama chose Rahm.
His choice of Daley at least suggests that Obama doesn’t think having someone to manage the beltway is important for the second half of his term (hopefully because he understands that they’re going to be unmanageable). His choice of a Wall Street creature over a Beltway creature suggests that either he believes that the banksters are going to be a problem for the next two years and wants someone there to give him an inside track to try to tamp down on them, or he believes that the Republicans are going to be so batshit insane that he’s going to need to reach out to Wall Street to get some help to pull them back towards sanity when they start to do things that might damage the economy. We’ll see if it helps him in either case.
Brick Oven Bill
BEHOLD fundamental transformation.
:)
Not even Nostradamus could have ever predicted this. The thing that is more irritating probably more than anything right now is that Daley is termed as a member of the ‘business community’, when this is not true.
Daley, like his Goldman Sachs lobbyist Mark Patterson-turned Chief of Staff of the Treasury, does not produce or provide like the business community produces and provides. Here is what he does:
His ‘industry’ generates electronic money (Federal Reserve) and gives this electronic money to itself at zero percent interest. Then it loans this free money to Barry’s Administration at around 3% interest, payable to itself. So how profitable is this ‘industry’? Here is the profits from Barry’s annual $2 trillion deficit:
$2 trillion times (0.03) equals $60 billion a year. This is a lot of money.
And, unlike Global Warming, this does represent an acceleration as next year there will be another $60 billion per year due in interest payments:
$60 billion plus $60 billion equals $120 billion per year.
So, anyway, this continues on and on, and it is a tax on all of us in the form of inflation turning to hyper-inflation. It is all criminal in my opinion. Go Barry go.
Strandedvandal
@Just Some Fuckhead: Good question. Why do you do that?
Dave
If Obama walked on water, firebaggers would bitch that he isn’t swimming.
Maude
@rikyrah:
It’s not about feelings, it’s about getting things done at the White House.
And I’m not putting you down. You do make valid points in the comments. I just think that the president chose a person he is comfortable with and will be working with on a day to day basis.
mr. whipple
Why does the name Lanny Davis pop into my head?
General Stuck
@cleek:
I personally cannot see as centrist leaning, pushing and passing things like universal health, despite how it will be delivered, or DADT repeal, roughly 400 bil in the stimulus for long term R and D for prog causes like alternative energy etc…. I would call it mainstream pragmatic progressive liberalism, that bounces back and forth between center to left. Depending on counting votes and concessions that need to be made to get something passed.
Buck
@Capt:
Oh please. Obama was never “left”.
If we’re going to chew others out, let’s at least try to be a little honest about it. This is as much about pearl-clutching as it is about those really mean, dirty hippies.
TR
@arguingwithsignposts:
True, but 90% of the COS’s role and influence is in getting things done *without* having the president talk to someone.
PeakVT
I think the CoS position gathers extra attention because its occupant is entirely at the discretion of the President, unlike cabinet members and the Prez himself. Some people want the Prez’s consigliere to reflect their views because they think that would indicate the Prez shares their views. Reality isn’t so simple, of course.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Bullsmith:
Sounds like you may be thinking of his brother. William M. Daley has never been anything other than a lawyer, banker and privileged insider.
arguingwithsignposts
@NonyNony:
h
that’s a fair point, given the debt ceiling game of chicken they seem to be bent on playing.
And I appreciate your description. But I’m sort of wondering if this isn’t another example of the history name game. Does the CoS not have any deputies? couldn’t a bright mind make the right calls without having a direct connection to the wallstreet/village axis? just wondering here.
TR
@MMonides:
Agreed.
I’m fine with Daley, but you know who would’ve been an awesome choice? Pelosi.
Violet
I’m going to look at results before I make a decision on how good or bad he is.
TR
@arguingwithsignposts:
I was going to recommend a book or two, but honestly, something by Aaron Sorkin would do the job. In The American President, Martin Sheen is the COS; in The West Wing the Leo McGarity character is COS and has some fairly hard-hitting aides like the Josh character.
The latter show actually gives a pretty good take on all the things that the COS does on a day-to-day basis, from negotiations with Congress, to riding herd on Cabinet members, to reaching out to external forces in the business world etc. (And as you’ll see, appointments scheduling isn’t one of those duties. Mrs. Landingham handles that.)
mr. whipple
@Violet:
That’s just crazy talk.
MikeJ
@General Stuck:
But Obama does publicly talk like he’s a centrist. that’s not good enough for the manic progressives. They want all the good stuff and they want Obama to yell and scream that these are all great liberal ideas. And if they have to choose between passing good liberal legislation and making noise about how liberal ideas are best, they’d rather make noise.
guster
@dr. bloor: To be fair, most of John’s posts (and I love him, too, for reasons that escape me) focus like a laser on practical issues upon which leftbloggers can exert specifically-enumerated pressure to achieve our common goals.
“Why bother?” is a perfectly good question on a blog that is all substance, no, erm, hot air.
The Raven
Criticizing Obama for his ties to the big banks is reasonable, especially since the big bankers have been so destructive and such a destructive influence. If the mayor of Chicago makes an arsonist his fire chief, surely complaint is reasonable? John, why are you defending this?
On the other hand, FDL front-pager Marci Wheeler on the choice: unhappy, but with this ray of hope: “But it is true that Obama’s real skill at listening isn’t worth a damn thing if Rahm or Summers are guarding his door. Let’s hope Daley will change that.”
“The Fourteenth Banker“:
It is, I suppose, just possible that Bill Daley is the George Bailey character, rather than Mr. Potter. He could surprise us. Personally, though, I think it’s going to be more food for corvids.
Croak!
General Stuck
@MikeJ:
You are correct
funluvn
Speaking of Noam Chomsky, he we be interviewed today at WildWildLeft Blog radio:
Details here: if you are interested
http://wildwildleft.com/diary/1305/wild-wild-left-radio-93-an-interview-with-noam-chomsky
gelfling545
@AxelFoley: I believe you have something there with the perpetual victimhood. They had a grand time being the opposition when Bush was pres. and can’t seem to get into a new mode. Thoughtful and reasoned support and principled criticism are never as much fun as bashing.
dr. bloor
@guster:
Fair enough, but to the extent that’s true, why bother with these posts at all? People don’t like Obama’s choice, they vent, and the vast majority of them know it will be to no effect and move on after getting it off their chest. Big deal.
For all the derision around here about “circular firing squads,” posts like this do nothing but line folks up in a circle.
Just Some Fuckhead
The Jerusalem Post points out the real significance of the Daley appointment
mistermix
@TR: Actually, you made the point better than me, with two excellent examples of failed, outsider CoS for Democratic presidents.
Bill E Pilgrim
Nope. I don’t. And I also don’t think that the Republicans are going to wake up and say “I was going to get up today and announce some batshit lunatic extreme right-wing nonsense, but I read some comment by a guy named John Cole at Balloon Juice so now I’ve decided not to!”
Thus, you might as well not write any more criticism of the Wingnuts, right?
It’s called criticism. This idea that you shouldn’t engage it in unless A) the object of your criticism will immediately agree, see the light, and change direction to match your views, or B) you intend to never vote for the person again, which any criticism of him obligates you to – where in the world did this all come from? New rules? Since when?
arguingwithsignposts
@mistermix: oh, so a data set of two is enough to carry the day?
Len
People are just venting, letting out some of the steam that has been building for the past two years. Let them. I moaned myself for a few moments when I heard the announcement. Face it, Barack Obama is not the man a lot of people thought he was. He is definitely one of those folks who campaigned one way and is governing another. Remember all those times during the campaign when he said “That is a debate I will love to have”? Folks are wondering whatever became of those debates. I just keep reminding people that it could be a million times worse. We could have McCain/Palin.
Bill E Pilgrim
@dr. bloor: Zackly.
arguingwithsignposts
@Just Some Fuckhead:
head/desk
IM
Chicago Machine politics!
If only.
Now the brother or even better the father…
But I fear this one is to soft.
Which democratic leader did learn at the feet of a machine politician after all?
Nancy Pelosi, that’s who.
homerhk
It’s funny but a lot of people I’ve seen criticising the pick refer to the infamous quote of Daley’s re the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) and I’m sure I’ve seen those same people rail about what a piece of s*it that act is. It’s like, “I hate it, but only I can say that – for others it’s “our signature achievment””. What a load of turd.
I for one am reserving judgment. Can’t quite fathom what he brings to the table but after 2 years as President delivering on a pretty sizeable portion of what he promised, I’m ready to give O the benefit of any doubt on this.
amk
@MikeJ:
This.
The Moar You Know
Fuck Noam Chomsky. He hasn’t done shit for me. Or for anybody. Just sits around and pontificates about pie in the sky bullshit, which is why I suppose most liberals get wood/wet at the mention of his oh-so-hallowed name.
Whew, that felt good to finally say that.
TR
@arguingwithsignposts:
In the entire history of the position, there have been exactly two — and only two — Chiefs of Staff who were not plugged into the ways of Washington. And both were spectacular failures.
I’m sorry if 100% failure rate isn’t convincing for you, but you’re acting like we’re hiding the great, successful outsider Chiefs of Staff out there.
What breath of fresh air do you have in mind? Jim Baker? Dick Cheney? Don Rumsfeld? Leon Panetta? Kenneth O’Donnell? Al Haig?
Arkenstone
So people can’t vent?
IM
Of course it doesn’t really matter, I think. Nobody, not Emmanuel, not Daly not Satan can get anything useful from the House. And in the few cases were only the more movable Senate matters, Obama already has Biden the ultimate Senate insider.
From my perspective one of the greatest weaknesses of the administration has been staffing: All the people not nominated or lost in the Senate. Is the Chief of Staff responsible for staffing?
The Republic of Stupidity
It’s not gonna happen…
But you have to admit… THAT would be an incredibly entertaining moment…
Edward G. Talbot
Yikes, an awful lotta commenters are more vitriolic towards the left than the right. Not that that is anything new, but there’s always way more energy devoted to attacking the professional left than to the right wing. Often the attacks are blaming the left for attacking Obama and the dems instead of the repubs – that irony is thicker than the plaque that caused Cheney’s last bypass. Good for comic relief, though.
It strikes me that:
-The chief of staff choice of Daley merely confirms the past two years. By now, no one should be surprised and it ain’t worth any outrage.
-No matter what Obama does, he can’t please the right. He gave ’em something right of their own proposal from the nineties and they responded by throwing out words like socialist and death panels. He could exhume and reanimate Ronald Reagan and appoint him as SecState, SecDef and SecTreas all at the same time and they’d accuse him of consorting with the undead,
-No matter what Obama does, he can’t please the left. That’s because Obama is not a leftie and we haven’t had a left wing president since the thirties (the FDR of the forties was not left wing, nor was Carter as President). I think Obama knows it and I think it pisses him off because he thinks of himself as left-leaning. He may be, but since he’s not governing that way (other than in an Overton window sense), that’s irrlevent. Like anyone else who’s pissed off, he may very well have made a CoS choice with the conscious or unconscious intent of saying “fuck em, I don’t care.”
-There IS one problem with the selection of Daley, but it’s the same as the only major mistake Obama keeps making- the continued fellating of the financial sector. At this point, it may be too late for him to change perceptions, so maybe the selection of Daley is irrelevant. But Obama has made it clear that he wants wall street insiders running the government’s policies on the financial sector. He’s made it clear he wants very little accountability for what happened. He’s made it clear that there is no problem GS and others making no risk billions trading with funds borrowed for free from the Fed. He’s made it clear that Bonus as Usual is absolutely fine.
I’m convinced that the single biggest thing the public is upset about is the continued coddling of the financial sector. Daley is simply the latest in a long line of moves that will continue to feed this upset.
arguingwithsignposts
@TR:
Look, it’s simple enough math. 100 percent failure rate of *two* is not convincing. It’s not even a data set.
And fwiw, I am fine with Daley. I was fine with Rahm. I’m just asking if there’s not something else available and why it wouldn’t work.
Just for an idea, how about we throw steve jobs into the mix. No inside-the-beltway knowledge, no wall street shenanigans, but he knows how to run an operation. discuss.
mikefromArlington
HOWARD DEAN, ROBERT REICH AND JAMES CLYBURN ARE ALL CORORATE SELLOUTS!!!!111!111ELEVEN!!!ONE111!!
lol
These reactionary dingbats need to stop applying McCarthyism to everyone. Not all bankers are thieves. Not all layers are blood suckers. Not all Republican Senators are closet gays.
Face
What the fuck does the CoS do anyway? Why does anyone give a shit who/what s/he is?
IM
@arguingwithsignposts:
Is it good for the jews?
Obama should have appointed a black muslim CoS. With a german name.
WereBear
@mistermix: My take, too.
Poopyman
OT, I know, but I peeked over at Alicublog, and Roy has responded to contributors. The comments are a nice read, too.
CJR
Shorter Cole: “Because shut up, that’s why!”
HRA
@Just Some Fuckhead: @60
That should hopefully stop some of the dissent except for the fact of sort of knowing the most vociferous of the naysayers must or may be Clinton supporters still smarting from the primary.
Personally, I think most have not caught onto the abilities and capabilities of this president.
As for WMD (yes, those are his initials), I wish him well.
General Stuck
@IM:
Yup, and the House wingnuts will be setting the agenda for all out pol/ideological warfare the next two years in the runup to Obama’s reelection bid. And they have made it quite clear that that war will be fought on the economic battlefield, primarily. There will be no progressive legislation passed, as the GOP has a powerful veto now. It will be all epic world view collision, and trying to prevent those crazy motherfuckers from destroying America and possibly the world economies.
I suspect Obama had this in mind choosing a CoS, who kind of knows some stuff about business and economic matters, and is connected to the powers that be in that world. Obama as a corporatist meme is probly the saddest and wrongest charge coming from the left. Besides his history as a grass roots community organizer, he is smart enough to know that it is often better to keep your enemies, or in this case powerful potential adversaries closer than not, and steal some of the wingnut mojo on the business front. Kind of what Lincoln did in a much smaller and less monumental way before the Civil War.
TR
@Face:
Because the position has rightfully been called “the second most powerful one in Washington”?
The COS leads the White House, coordinates all action from the Executive Branch, spearheads negotiations with Congress, and works outside channels with a wide array of extra-governmental agencies.
Now that Democrats have lost the House and the Senate is led by an ineffective guy like Reid, the COS is probably the most important position to get things done for our side for the next two years.
@arguingwithsignposts:
Jobs would be, oh, a terrific Cabinet member, as that would somewhat replicate the skillset he has in terms of intraorganizational operations. But COS requires the exact opposite skillset, an ability to bridge the gap between different groups and exert pressure on external forces rather than keep internal ones in line. Jobs is smart as hell, but his complete lack of knowledge and experience in the Beltway would be crippling.
Sorry, you keep making an exception out of the one thing that is practically etched in stone on the job description. The Chief of Staff absolutely has to have Beltway and, these days, Wall Street connections. If you can’t grasp that, then there’s really no point discussing it further.
EdTheRed
We’re out of mints,
Pass the Life Savers
MikeJ
@TR:
Where the fuck have you been?
Tim
Commentary/critique/analysis is not made pointless by the fact that the subject of same is unlikely to change as a result.
I’m not trying to change Obama’s behavior; I know it won’t change. I’m just using the Daley development as further evidence of Obama’s tendency to surround himself with corporate/financial whores, and that that tendency has meaningful consequences.
Let’s pull out an old standby: The Holocaust is done and over; nothing will change it. Should all commentary regarding it therefore come to a stop?
Cole’s post reminds me of when we were told to shut up prior to the Iraq Invasion, and the compliant press went along mostly uncritically, because, well, “the decision has been made,” “it’s a done deal…”
Stupid.
Will
I love this thread. It’s a special place where we learn to hate Chomsky because he doesn’t make the trains run on time.
Personally, I hope to see the Republican Party reform itself into something sane in my lifetime, if just so you lot finally have someplace to go.
Cat Lady
Robert Gibbs’ replacement is going to be another opportunity for firebagger on Obot violence. I can’t wait/
Just Some Fuckhead
@HRA:
I think he’d make an excellent Chief of Staff.
arguingwithsignposts
@TR:
but see, i think that is the point at which it needs to be discussed further. I am still having trouble grasping how having village/wallstreet axis knowledge makes it better. Elisabeth Warren shakes shit up precisely because she doesn’t come from the axis.
to be honest, i’m tired of “well, that’s the way we’ve always done it.” if daley gets shit done, then ok. but why not someone else from outside? why do we have to accept that the game is played that way? (realizing i’m stepping into firebagger territory here).
stuckinred
@Tim: thank you professor
IM
@General Stuck:
But that will not work. Let’s say Obama would have appointed Bloomberg CoS: Businessmen and political experience. Much Higher profile too. Would that work, as a signal to the business community?
No, they would still hate him or at least whine like jilted lovers. I mean three quarters or so of them are die hard republicans.
So if a gesture of peace to big and small business was really a object in this decision, it was a illusion.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Will:
lolz.. I’ve expressed this thought a time or two.
TR
@arguingwithsignposts:
Who ever said it was?
You’re complaining that an 0-for-2 record isn’t convincing, while acting like “third time’s the charm” has scientific weight behind it.
This is a vitally important role at a vitally important time. I’m not a huge fan of Daley, but I’d rather have an experienced fixer in there than some outside-the-Beltway naif who would only fuck things up.
pickledjazz
@AxelFoley:
I cackled loudly at this. Funny,funny.
You know, take away the bitching, griping, moaning, whingeing from these people and they would have nothing to talk about. In some twisted fashion, enraging themselves, empowers them. Geez, how not to live in their bodies 101…the whole course.!!!! Imagine having to use up all that energy daily. Yikes..no inner peace there!
rickstersherpa
Its called venting, and tomorrow we will be amazed, shock, and outrage by something the new Congress is trying to do and venting about that. Liberals, New Dealers, and social democrats (and I think of myself as a Liberal and a New Dealer, but not a social democrat) continued to be mad about that the President is what he is (very much part of the neo-liberal/Rubinite new economy wing of the Democratic party) and not who they imagined he was despite what he and his advisors actually said and wrote (See this salon piece from mid-2007). http://www.salon.com/technology/how_the_world_works/2008/02/04/economics_of_barack_obama
There is not going to any real progressive legislation the next two years. Its going to be mostly about playing defense and making the Republicans look bad, particularly to their corporate masters. The Democrats lost the election in 2010 not because they tracked to much to the left or did not go left enough. They lost because the economy got worst in 2009 and did not recover fast enough in 2010, and even those not unemployed were pissed about about seeing the (inevitable) decline in the value of their homes. If unemployment slowly goes down and housing finally bottoms out this Summer after another 15% decline, then Obama will probably get reelected. By bringing in Daley and promoting Sperling, he is probably hoping to keep enough Galtian overlords onboard for supporting a policy to encourage the recovery through 2012.
By the way, Thorstein Veblen and “Economists for Firing Larry Summers” wrote something last summer that pretty much sums up my critique of the President and my critique of the liberal bloggers for having coniptions fits about having the Democratic President they have, and not the one they dreamed about getting.
“Rant against liberals who rant that Obama is a centrist…
Recently, there’s been a lot of liberal rage against Obama
So, I’ve long been critical of the Obama administration’s economic policy, but there is one thing to know — first off, there aren’t actually all that many liberal economists, and even fewer with the stature to be Presidential advisers. Yes, there’s Stiglitz and Krugman, and Brad DeLong, but, to my knowledge, none of them came down on the right side of Bernanke’s fateful reconfirmation. Obama’s choice to go with a team including Romer, Summers, Geithner, Austan Goolsbee, and Peter Orszag was a choice for Democratic economists with some sharp (or very!) sharp CVs (plus Jared Bernstein…). (How many of us have got “tenured at Harvard in our mid-20s” on our resumes?) Obama himself is not an economist and couldn’t possibly have known about the Dark Ages economics has sadly fallen into the past few decades… And Summers published some extremely populist Op-Eds in 2009, rants about Bush Administration tax cuts and inequality, the kind of thing no liberal would have any qualms about, with an explicit eye toward appealing to candidate Obama.
I think that says Summers thinks Obama is a liberal. And I think it also makes it a touch more difficult to blame Obama for what were the key mistakes — the reappointing of Ben Bernanke (which was supported by both DeLong and Krugman), the feet-draggging on the FOMC appointments, and the small stimulus. Obama deferred to the “experts”. The experts turned out to be medeival priests on the key issues, even though these are not low-IQ, unqualified people. Then there’s health care — Obama did not give Summers control over health care, and the constraint on getting a more liberal health care bill came in the Senate, not from the White House.
Point is there just aren’t that many doors President Obama could have knocked on to get competent advice on all three of these issues. And there are very, very few economists over the age of 35 who are ever worth listening to. More liberals need to get Economics Ph.D.’s instead of Anthropology or History Ph.D.’s if they want to shape policy (that’s why I switched from Poly Sci/Law to econ), and we need to have more liberals who’ve got “Goldman Sachs VP” on their resume as well…
Posted by Thorstein Veblen at 12:42 PM 4 comments
Boehner calls for Summers’ resignation
House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) will call Tuesday for the mass firing of the Obama administration’s economic team, including Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and White House adviser Larry Summers, arguing that November’s midterm elections are shaping up as a referendum on sustained unemployment across the nation and saying the “writing is on the wall.”
Sucks he’s basically right. That Boehner himself was also on the wrong side of all the recent economic policy debates hardly matters. Obama was elected to put the economy in order. He hasn’t done that. He pushed through a stimulus which was too small, waited 16 months on an FOMC appointment, and made a stupid decision to reappoint Bernanke.
And, hate to say it, but had McCain been elected, the Republicans would have pushed through a massive stimulus containing the mother-of-all tax cuts. Republican opposition to the stimulus was largely because it was in their self-interest to oppose it (and, oppose everything obama did). Had the Democrats been in the opposition, there wouldn’t have been nearly as much opposition to the stimulus. Add to that, the right-wingers on the Fed would likely have been less hawkish over the past 18 months of what I would term “very strange” Fed policy. Combine all of this, and it’s not at all clear that the economy would be worse off with a President McCain at the helm.
The mid-terms are basically a referendum on Geithner, Summers, and Bernanke. These guys were simply not up to the task, and so Boehner is right to attack them.
Posted by Thorstein Veblen at 11:48 AM 1 comments
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Tim Geithner is Behind the Curve…
Alex Tabarrok and other econ bloggers (Economists for Firing Larry Summers were not invited) spent the afternoon at the Treasury, firing questions at Timothy Geithner.
Tabarrok describes Geithner’s view of the Fed: “There was a recognition that the Fed could do “dramatic” things but a sense that the theory here was uncertain and untested.”
I wouldn’t really describe a cut in the discount rate, a 25 basis point cut in the Federal Funds rate, an elimination of interest paid on excess reserves, or another $400 billion in QE to be “dramatic”, “untested”, or “uncertain”. On the other hand, doing nothing to hit your inflation target in the wake of a financial crisis has been tested by Japan for 17 years running and repeatedly been shown not to work.
Oh, Timmy Chimeny, Tim tim, tim teroo. We’ve got Tim Geithner and he says (to the unemployed) eff you! javascript:void(0)
(This was Man U.’s Tim Howard chant for those that didn’t get the reference…)
Posted by Thorstein Veblen at 12:12 PM 0 comments
Monday, August 16, 2010
How strange is too strange?
After reading Tim Duy’s latest, I’m just reminded how weird Fed policy has been.
Consider that in 2004, when inflation was at 3.3%, the Fed was fine to leave the Federal Funds rate at 1%. 3.3% inflation wasn’t seen as anything sinister during President Bush’s reelection run. Now, however, with the CPI having increased so far this year by .2%, for an annual rate of less than .4%, we’re suddenly in dire risk of hyperinflation? Isn’t this just a bit too strange?
Either the Fed is as stupid as I suspect they are, or they are very competent but hopelessly in the tank for the Republican Party. How else does one explain the above?
Also, consider that in 2004, unemployment topped out at 5.8% (in March, declining thereafter). Compare that with 9.5% today. This Fed brings new meaning to the phrase ‘regime switching’.
Posted by Thorstein Veblen at 7:25 PM 2 comments
Statistics in the Hands of Idjiots…
Matt Yglesias asks “What is it about the economy?” that impacts election outcomes, and links “Enik Rising”, an interesting blog by a political scientist, who finds that income growth matters but that unemployment does not matter for mid-term election outcomes.
Having done a powerpoint slide on this issue once, I can say that this issue is actually trickier than it looks. His mistakes are three: First, he looks at change in house seats as the variable he’s trying to explain. So, it would make sense to include “how many house seats the president’s party holds” as a control variable. Second problem is that the Democrats usually lose about 8-12 seats in midterm elections simply because the share of young people, women, and minorities all decline during mid-term elections. Of course, young people, women, and minorities all turned out at record rates in 2008, but will sit out the midterms. (Good news for Dems is that they will be back in 2012… There is a lot of habit persistence in voting behavior, but it’s really specific to the type of election.) But I digress. Third issue is that there are just too few data points here, and US politics has changed too much since 1912 to gain much by expanding the series. One thing the author could do is include Presidential election years, and that would help. Also, that the Bush 02 year is a chief counterexample to the “unemployment doesn’t matter” is quite telling. Obviously, 2002 was an election dominated by 9/11. The Republican gain/loss was also helped out by the fact that they only started off with a slight majority, and that Republicans traditionally do well in midterms. Control for those two things and the Republican performance in 2002 loses a bit of its luster… But there’s no way, really to control for 9/11 since it was a one-time event. Which means someone needs to write a careful international paper. And when they do, my guess is that they’ll find that a change in unemployment matters a lot.
After all this criticism, however, I agree with part of the bottom line, that GDP growth matters more than unemployment. Why? The big reason why the economy matters has to do, I’m convinced, not with the actions of laid-off workers but with how the media covers the economy, the president, and the federal deficit. The deficit gets covered like it’s a huge scandal, and it always comes across as though the President and Congress have been reckless with the nation’s finances, even though the truth is that running smaller deficits would have been much more reckless. Since GDP and the stock market rebound before unemployment, of course, this means that GDP growth is a better indicator, because media types care much more about their stock portfolios and bottom-line GDP growth than they do unemployment, which is simply a remote statistic to them.”
Just Some Fuckhead
@IM:
The Jerusalem Post would have fainted.
Tim
@stuckinred:
typical
cleek
@arguingwithsignposts:
IMO, Jobs would be much better behind the Oval Office desk than in front of it. he’s more of a leader than a consigliere.
TR
@arguingwithsignposts:
Right, because Elizabeth Warren’s job is to shake shit up.
One more time, slowly: The Chief of Staff’s job is NOT to shake shit up. The Chief of Staff’s job is to take the president’s agenda and convince a whole host of people with their own agendas — congresspeople of both parties, other members of the party, governors and mayors, business leaders and NGOs, foreign ambassadors and the like — that it’s in their best interest to subsume their agenda for the president’s.
Having knowledge of Washington and Wall Street helps here.
Now answer me this: What advantage do you see in getting someone who’s completely fucking clueless in there? How is someone with no ties to Wall Street going to get them to heel? How is someone with no experience in Washington going to get things done there?
PIGL
@Capt: this is pretty daft.
So you’re saying hte President Obama would have chosen are more left-wing, less wall-street friendly cabinet and administration and staff if the “looney left” had got with his “Third Way” programme to begin wth?
Talk about shooting the messenger.
Short Bus Bully
Noam Chomsky… That got me laughing.
IM
@Just Some Fuckhead:
But not if he had appointed businessman and political activist and holocaust survivor George Soros.
And Bloomberg was pro you know where mosque, so the Post probably hates him.
RalfW
It seems to me that Obama has a strategy. It’s called moving to the middle, or really, moving the image to the middle.
If elections have consequences, then the GOP taking the house by a large margin shouldn’t be ignored. If naming Daley helps move the optics and narrative towards one of conciliation and moderation, that’s OK with me.
I think Obama plays a long game and won’t really change how he governs. And how he governs really never was set up to please the netroots left. More and more its clear they overlaid their dreams onto Obama and now they has a sad that their fantasy won’t come true.
He’s the best damn deal we’ve got to deal with where we are. Are we a nation far too enthralled to corporate interests, kowtowing to the ultra-rich and giving fuck-all to average Americans? Yes, we are. Could any Democrat as president do all that much about it in the current political climate? HAH.
If these wankers would spend more time recognizing that the enemy is the GOP and less time roasting their erstwhile allies, we’d be better off.
Violet
@mr. whipple:
Yeah, I’m crazy like that.
gene108
I’d take liberal outrage more seriously, if they had a clear idea of what they wanted.
I really have no clue what liberals are after, especially on the economic front.
I’m glad Obama picked somebody to chill the hedge fund managers the fuck out. Those guys poured $100 million into beating Democrats and it worked.
I’d like a shot at Democrats retaking the House in 2012, but it won’t happen with Wall Street pouring limitless founds into attacking Democrats. Republicans don’t have to campaign. They let the corporate machine cut Democrats to shreds.
It worked where I live, NJ-03. Adler had a few effective, in my opinion, ads attacking Runyan. Runyan was largely self-financing his campaign and had very little in terms of counter ads or any sort of active campaigning.
Then sometime in September, every third party group and its mother’s brother’s wife’s uncle twice removed, starting running attack ads on Adler and it worked.
I don’t care, if there’s a Blue Dog that gets elected. I’ll take a Blue Dog, who votes with Democrats 50% of the time, versus a Republican who will vote with Democrats 0% of the time any day of the week.
I’ll take Speaker Pelosi over Speaker Boehner, too, which getting back the House would make possible.
General Stuck
@IM:
Yes, many leaders in business are republicans, likely a sizeable majority, but they worship the gawds of profit more than fealty to an ideology. And they realize that their profit gawds are connected to a significant degree to government at the highest level. And they also realize that historically, markets and such have actually done better under dem administrations.
Just look at the recent reports about a possible or likely alliance between The Chamber of Commerce and Labor unions to combat GOP proposed cuts in infrastructure spending. In this world, the dollar is king of the ideological hill, and sometimes lions and hyenas join forces. So, depending on Daley’s actual skill at doing the CoS job, I think his personal business connections could well help Obama.
The Republic of Stupidity
@IM:
Chomsky…
Soros…
Anybody mention Michael Moore yet?
geg6
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Because they are projecting. Everything they bitch about regarding the so-called professional is the same emo bullshit they have going on but just in the opposite direction. They are mirror images. Personally, I’m glad I fall in neither camp because it reminds me that I’m sane and can still think for myself.
arguingwithsignposts
@TR:
strawman much? who said completely fucking clueless? someone who gets shit done can do so wherever they are. they have staff. it’s not gandalf. it’s not yoda. it never was, and it never will be.
btw, who was McGarrity’s successor?
The Republic of Stupidity
Ye gaaaaaaaaaaaaaawds…
Talk about strange bedfellows…
I can’t imagine what the offspring of THAT marriage would look like…
AxelFoley
@RalfW:
This. So very much, this.
GregB
One thing we know is that Bill Daley is tough and he’ll never take a dive.
IM
@General Stuck:
Yes, but the Chamber did not really support business-friendly blue dogs in the last election. And as soon they don’t think about their own narrow affairs and start to think political, the titans of business are not really calculating homo economicus, but naive and given to base prejudice.
A real or pure businessman without political experience would always fail as Chief of Staff or a similar role. It’s a different world and most CEOs won’t make good politicians.
Cat Lady
@Will:
Oh fuck off. That’s just the firebagger purity binary bullshit that gets deservedly mocked here. Pointing out that Chomsky is a professional polemicist (and no one in this thread said they hate Chomsky) who has never had to dirty his hands making legislative sausage, thereby rendering him likely to be ineffective at making legislative sausage makes us Republicans? That’s just fucking retarded. Rahm was right.
lacp
It’s probably just me, but I’m actually more concerned about the President’s judicial nominees who have been languishing in Senate limbo than I am about whoever he’s made his CoS, about which selection I don’t give a rat’s ass.
sixers
What you don’t understand is Obama owes me and I want my enemies punished!
Sin,
The tea party equivalent on the left.
stuckinred
@GregB: God, Wolf showed that 20 times last night all the while showing how HE saved Daley from certain death!
danimal
@Just Some Fuckhead: I aspire to be a C-level commenter.
nancydarling
@The Republic of Stupidity: At least the relationship is not incestuous. I’m amazed that the spawn of the military/industrial/congressional complex are not born with six toes on each foot and a third eye.
mr. whipple
September? They were running radio shit here continuously since April.
madmatt
The man is being rewarded for helping destroy the middle class with NAFTA…I can only imagine what other shitty bills he will help create this time around.
Fuck barack, he and reid proved that dems don’t give a fuck about anybody but bankers and insurance execs…oh yeah and people who do our torture for us, they get a pass too.
TR
@arguingwithsignposts:
No, they can’t. Jesus, you sound like those Republicans who stuck out their chests about how the Bush administration was going to be so awesome because it would be staffed with all these business geniuses with MBAs.
To go back to my historical examples — which, you know, actually happened — Ham Jordan was the mastermind of the 1976 presidential campaign, which succeeded against all odds in getting a peanut farmer and one-term governor of a small southern state elected as president, while Mack McCarty was one of the youngest directors ever of a major oil company and recognized as a business genius by Forbes and Fortune magazine.
These guys were regarded as golden boys who could do no wrong, but because they lacked any understanding of Washington politics and any personal connections to get things done there, they were utter fucking failures as Chiefs of Staff.
I’m sorry I don’t have a billion examples to satisfy you, but there have only been two dozens chiefs of staff in history, and only two who fit your dream of being untainted with skills that would actually help them on their job. Both were successful, smart guys in their previous careers, and both flamed out as utter failures on the job.
The press secretary who’d been an integral part of the White House operation for like seven years. In other words, an insider.
IM
Perhaps Alinsky can be resurrected as Chief of Staff?
More practical experience then Chomsky! And the base would be happy! And he is from Illinois too!
madmatt
@AxelFoley:
Maybe somebody should tell barack that, he gives them what they want more often than he gives the people who voted for him anything.
jcricket
@RalfW:
I couldn’t give a crap about the “netroots left” and whether they’re enraged about Obama, but Democrats do need to understand that making the base feel excited is how you keep winning elections. And reminding people that your brand is better than the other brand and is the brand that believes in ideas x, y & z is always important.
I think this is one of the Democratic Party’s core problems. Far too many people are “ashamed” or unwilling to call themselves Democrats because Democrats (writ large, not just Obama) do too little promotion of themselves.
Yes, we win legislative victories, and that matters. I’m unhappy the Senate Dems dicked around on healthcare, but glad it got passed (I think less fumbling would have led to better outcomes). I’m happy DADT and Lily Ledbetter got passed. Financial and environmental reforms were weak, but not bad. Everything is better with Dems in charge than Republicans. I’m not even that mad at Obama, per se (most of my anger is at Senate Dems).
Republicans continually manage to sell people a shit sandwich and have them grinning while they eat it. We could learn a little something from their act, esp. considering our actual policies are really popular by themselves.
I believe the reason CA is so f’ed up, and even blue states like WA can’t raise taxes is because of years of unopposed demonization of the “Democratic brand” by Democrats. We can’t control what the Repubs are going to say, but we can counter with our own offensive. Again, this doesn’t mean moving more to the left, or being more obstinate or anything, just not acting so defensive.
madmatt
@gene108:
And obama would of gotten more positive spin if he arrested or executed a half dozen bankers on treason or what ever fits wrecking the economy? Instead he decided to give the scum that wrecked the economy another chance to do it….and put in a CoS who will help them out.
General Stuck
@IM:
The last election is over and done, the one coming up will have much different dynamics, and whether personally CEO’s vote GOP matters little as their roles of profit takers for their investors. The focus for Obama, now with a GOP House that is insane, will be to defeat their ideological agenda mostly to kill HCR before it can be implemented, along with other pol pluses for Obama like with infrastructure spending. Whether or not the Chamber and other business interests prevail as favoring the GOP, is irrelevant to obama’s short term interest of stopping the House wingers, and winning reelection. . And temp alliances are nothing more than seizing the day in the thunderdome of American politics. It is politics, not nobility.
arguingwithsignposts
@TR:
and so we are back to square one. did you read me upthread when I said I had no prob with daley or rahm? i’m sorry if a data set of two doesn’t settle it for me.
arguingwithsignposts
@TR:
and so we are back to square one. did you read me upthread when I said I had no prob with daley or rahm? i’m sorry if a data set of two doesn’t settle it for me.
burnspbesq
@Len:
“Remember all those times during the campaign when he said “That is a debate I will love to have”? Folks are wondering whatever became of those debates.”
Debates are like sex, i.e., more fulfilling when two are involved. The Republicans aren’t interested in debating policy in public, because they know that if the American people fully understand what they’re about, they’re toast.
Just Some Fuckhead
@burnspbesq:
That’s a debate I’d like to have.
homerhk
madmatt, the name suits
It’s President Obama, not ‘barack’ unless you’re on first name terms with him.
burnspbesq
@arguingwithsignposts
“Look, it’s simple enough math. 100 percent failure rate of two is not convincing. It’s not even a data set.”
Those are all the data points that exist. Didn’t we have aconcersation yesterday in which the strong consensus was that Making Up Data Is a Bad Thing?
J.W. Hamner
If you want to analyze this pick… and I personally don’t have much interest in it… then you shouldn’t really be thinking about what the President is going to do with Congress the next two years. This seems more about working national politics and winning in 2012.
It seems they mainly want to hold on to the accomplishments of the 111th and set up for a rebound in the 113th.
There: my first and last tea leaf reading for the new CoS.
TR
@arguingwithsignposts:
You keep insisting — against what little evidence we do have — that someone whos’ smart, but without connections in Washington or Wall Street, could do well in the job.
We have two examples who were brilliant in their previous roles and crashed and burned in the COS job. That’s enough for me.
And for what it’s worth, it’s not just a data set of two here. Plot in all the successful chiefs of staff — and, like I have, maybe read a few of their memoirs and biographies — and you’ll see that they credit their successes to their knowledge of Washington, to their connections, to their links to power.
There’s a strong correlation between “knowing Washington” and “being successful.” The two who didn’t know Washington (McCarty, Jordan) were unsuccessful. The ones who did (Baker, Haig, Panetta, Adams, on and on) were successful.
Jesus Christ. Arguing with signposts indeed. I might as well be talking to a street sign.
Kath
@gene108: I’m in NJ-12. We got lucky having Rush Holt as our rep, we were able to GOTV for Rush alone. But it was sad at the polls, freaking repub lawyers auditing shit…
Trouble is, from the prog left there needs to be total ignore on all but one issue; the failure of these wars, on all fronts. It’s the one concentrated, ethical, liberal message that if we all pulled together on could maybe get some traction. And it’s the only important one. And it is rarely ever mentioned. But CoS, oh yeah that we gotta froth over… jesus murphy.
Alex S.
@Just Some Fuckhead: @Just Some Fuckhead:
Thanks for the laughs
burnspbesq
@TR:
“How is someone with no ties to Wall Street going to get them to heel?”
Having a kick-ass US Attorney for the Southern District of New York would help. Preet Whatsisname is making me nostalgic for Rudy Giuliani.
Leftist Not Liberal
Whether you have a Repub in there or a Dem, the evisceration of the middle class will continue unabated. Since there is no viable Left, a real Left, which unabashedly supports the working class, the United States is headed for Third World status. Obama chips away at serious systemic problems, but does not offer big ideas on how to transform our ailing economy and deteriorating culture.
Sometimes you need to look at the big picture. Neoliberal capitalism will most certainly destroy the US. This is a fact. The latest outrage is that both parties wish to destroy all unions and Soc Security. In ten years, it will look far worse for the average person. One can see how bad it has gotten since Bill Clinton, who was the chief advocate of off-shoring our jobs and deregulating Wall Street.
If this is purism, so be it.
arguingwithsignposts
@TR:
okay, so maybe that’s the problem then. we have to suck dick to get your attention. Fuck that. there are a lot of people out here who aren’t villagers. do you fucking hear us? I’m guessing “no.” do i sound like a republican teabagger? probably. But why shouldn’t i? answer me that. why should i listen to wall street fuckers who whinge about how Obama’s hurting their fee-fees and yet they can burn the economy into the ground.
Protip: Ireland did the austerity measures, and it didn’t work.
Allan
Obama said, “I am going to make my hand into a fist and extend it in front of me in thirty seconds.”
The hippy said, “Great, let me stand directly in front of you.”
Thirty seconds later:
“Ow, you’re punching me!”
Omnes Omnibus
I’m dropping hints;
Candy for candy-coated tongue.
MK
Come on. People have to have something to bitch about… After all unemployment leads to a lot of free time…
gwangung
The problem with your argument is that, prima facie, it fails. Someone WITHOUT connections for a job that demands connections is a certain candidate for failure.
Do you not understand the coin of personal connections? The higher you go in the worlds of power, the more important it becomes. An outsider is, by definition, supremely unqualified for the job.
Tom Hilton
@Albatrossity:
No shit. Fuckin Greg Mitchell tweeted about how “this is personal” because his father targeted “me and Phil Ochs”.
Fucking 42 years ago, motherfucker. Get the fuck over it.
WereBear
This is the 21st century equivalent of examining bird entrails.
This why every little piece of information is grabbed, massaged, and held up to the light. Because everyone is pissed off and anxious about the future; and we have as little confidence and control over it, individually, as the guy who put the mask on and danced in the firelight.
Maybe because I’m getting up there in years, but I remember when repealing DADT and reforming health care and equal pay were DREAMS. Dreams I thought would never come true in my lifetime.
Thinking a “take charge person is a take charge person” is making the same mistake all those brand new MBA’s make; “a business is a business, it doesn’t matter what it makes.” The past few decades has shown that is manifestly untrue.
TR
@arguingwithsignposts:
Do I hear you? What the fuck are you talking about?
I’m not a Villager and I have nothing but contempt for most of them. But as I said in my initial post, this is the one job where, yes, it’s important to have someone with connections in Washington. It’s what the job is all about.
You mean without any understanding of history, politics, or these pesky things called “facts”? Yes, you do sound like one of them. Jesus, when this thread started, you though the Chief of Staff handled the president’s appointments calendar.
You don’t have the slightest clue what you’re talking about, but you feel the need to rage on anyway. Yeah, sounds like a Teatard all right.
Who said you should listen to the Wall Street fuckers at all? I sure as shit didn’t. In fact, I said the exact opposite — the way to get Wall Street to listen to the White House, and to do what the White House wants, is to have someone in the COS role who has at least some ties to them.
This isn’t some asshole hedge fund manager he’s appointing, by the way. It’s the guy who ran Al Gore’s presidential campaign, a guy who has been given an enthusiastic thumbs-up from Howard Dean.
TR
@Tom Hilton:
Seriously.
NobodySpecial
I love this thread, too, for the same reason I loved the other one. Way too easy to tell for whom pissing off liberals is the goal and for whom it’s not.
As for me, I’m not real happy, mostly for optics reasons. Daley’s a Big Four Banker who happens to essentially be a Blue Dog on all the big positions lately. Against ACA entirely, not because it’s too little, but because he didn’t want it at all. Against financial reform. While serving as Clinton’s SecCommerce, pushed heavily for NAFTA, which was such a ringing success for the American middle class. Makes public statements that Democratic positions are rejected by Americans. That’s not really the person you want being the visible gatekeeper for you if you really espouse Democratic values, any more than Mitt Romney would be.
I wish Obama would have read the real tea leaves from the election…Blue Dogs are NOT popular with any part of America right now. Liberals did fine in the offyear election; Blue Dogs got slaughtered and replaced with mostly crazies. Opposition to Obama’s policies didn’t make Dems ok in GOP leaning moderate’s eyes…it just made them a bigger target. Refusing Obama’s help didn’t save anyone’s seat, because Obama is still popular.
Obama picking Daley doesn’t placate GOP moderates. Obama picking Daley doesn’t placate big business. Both groups will still vote against everything Obama, and the latter group will throw another 100 million down the pipe to eliminate as many Democrats as possible. All it does is give people who complain that both sides are the same another thing to point to. It’s just plain shitty optics.
Davis X. Machina
Al Gore on Bill Daley:
There’s an election in two years… maybe a CoS with some election experience would be a good move.
Brachiator
@TR:
Great, accessible examples. Really enjoyed how you explained the pragmatic aspects of the CoS job.
The official Wikipedia entry on White House Chief of Staff notes how the job has evolved as presidential authority has increased. The article also notes how some chiefs become powers themselves, while others can be overshadowed by other White House advisers:
gene108
@madmatt:
Free trade is good for America and good for the world.
The 1950’s and 1960’s economy, which liberals seem to want to “take our country back” to was built because industrialized nations – Germany, Japan, France, etc. – had to deal with destruction of infrastructure from WWII.
I think in the 1950’s, the U.S. accounted for 80% of world’s manufacturing output.
The U.S. also benefited from a century or more of destruction of what became known as Third World nations due to European colonialism, since those countries weren’t allowed to develop the capacity to become First World nations.
Is it really fair that a high school drop out, in the U.S. in the 1950’s got a middle class living, by working in a factory, while his counter part in India’s standard of living can be said to have increased 33% because his caloric intake increased from 1,000 calories per day to 1,500 calories per day?
A bunch of the middle class problems felt in America is due to technology, as much as it is free trade. The U.S. is still the #1 manufacturing country on the planet, we just don’t need as much labor to produce a bunch of goods anymore.
Hell, 30 years ago you could make money by learning to type 60 words per minute. That’s an obsolete skill, thanks to technology. Because of automated phone systems and voicemail, many businesses no longer need receptionists.
The issue isn’t free trade, but what the government is doing or can do to help people keep their skills from becoming obsolete.
Lawnguylander
@homerhk:
Note that he refuses to even capitalize his first name. That’s just devastating.
Observer
@Davis X. Machina:
I guess you missed this part in the article you referenced:
Yes please, let’s have more people with major political miscalculations like this. I mean, it only cost Dems the White House. Nothing major. That’ll learn ’em.
Omnes Omnibus
@Observer: Ah, yes. It sounds like someone who recognizes that he made an error and is, therefore, less likely to make a similar error in the future. What a horrible thing.
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
Could you tell us who in the Professional Left besides Ben Smith is heaping scorn on Daley? I cruise through the lefty blogs every day and I didn’t run across any of this alleged outrage, more a sense of resignation than anything else. Maybe I just didn’t read the right ones.
Davis X. Machina
@Observer: Damn fool probably took Nader at his word when Nader announced he wasn’t going to mount serious contests in battleground states.
I don’t fault him for failing to anticipate just how duplicitous and megalomaniacal Nader turned out to be in practice. I certainly didn’t.
NobodySpecial
Hey, look, an E.D Kain sighting! And he approves!
Gee, go figure.
Observer
@Davis X. Machina:
You may not “fault him” but that’s just the problem with Dems in general. Too forgiving. “Lovable losers” and all that.
In a zero-sum game, being too forgiving is a loser strategy.
Means you’re a sucker. Around the poker table of politics, Republican operatives know that most Dem pols are suckers. (The old saying is that in a poker game after playing for an hour you should know who the sucker at the table is. If you don’t know, that means you’re the sucker).
Karl Rove is praising this pick. But Karl beat Daley back in 2000, so why wouldn’t he. How many times does Bob Shrum have to lose a presidential election?
calling all toasters
John, you’re right: liberals shouldn’t try to slow Obama’s his movement to the right by going after the manifestations of that move. Liberals should try to influence Obama by going after Obama himself. Like by primarying him. That always helps the cause.
Will
gene108,
If all this is true, why is Germany so prosperous? It’s a heavily unionized, heavily government protected manufacturing center that is doing much better than nations like the U.S. and UK that wholeheartedly embraced “free trade”? Why do such free trade victors as China, Korea and Japan protect their manufacturing industries with anti-free trade laws?
Maybe having an industrial policy and governmental protections for industry isn’t such an antiquated 20th century idea. Maybe a policy that benefits a chosen few while impoverishing the majority of citizens isn’t a “benefit” for anyone but those chosen few.
gene108
@Kath:
That’s what I don’t get about the left, Obama very quietly ended combat operations in Iraq.
http://www.npr.org/news/specials/election2008/issues/iraq.html
No Republican wanted to end combat operations. Obama said here’s my timeline and stuck to it. Because we still have 50,000 troops in Iraq, the left is still bitching about “these” wars (I assume Iraq and Afghanistan).
President Obama did the draw down and ended combat operations, WITHOUT any Republican having fits about how he “cut and ran”. He handled the Iraq shit pretty damn smoothly.
I wish the left would give him credit for it.
On Afghanistan, he said he wanted to commit more troops to it in 2007. I can understand wanting to end operations there. I can understand demanding operations end and pushing trying to push politicians to do it. I just don’t get why people are surprised by the Afghanistan “surge”; he said he’d do it and he did it.
I can even sympathize and support pushing the U.S. to draw down it’s military foot print around the world, but that’s a bigger issue than any one politician or party and needs to be pushed consistently.
I just don’t agree with with singling out a politician, whom you generally support on many issues, because they are not able to draw down troops or cut defense spending. This a big issue, which really needs more of a national PR campaign than a targeted political campaign. Sure you can take our your displeasure on Obama for leaving 50,000 troops in Iraq, but we have troops in Japan, Germany and other countries.
I think a better strategy to get all troops back from Iraq, will be to put in the larger context of trimming the fat from a bloated defense department and getting Americans to agree we don’t need soldiers all over the world.
FlipYrWhig
@NobodySpecial:
Well, that’s just it. All we can ever analyze and dispute from this distance is “optics reasons.” We’ll probably never know much of what the Chief of Staff actually does from day to day. And that’s almost entirely what he’s going to be doing.
This kind of reaction to the “optics” of everything… it’s just tiring. Does it not _look_ good? I suppose “Morgan” and “Daley” aren’t wonderful credentials. What else can he do and be good at? Whatever it is, would we ever even see? We’ll eventually get some results and evaluate those.
Basically, just because something is symbolically or optically questionable doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s bad. But since we ourselves almost entirely participate in politics on the basis of symbolism and optics, that’s how we’re compelled to analyze everything.
I teach, and I know a lot of people whose work is nothing special but who kick ass at administration. Maybe Daley is like that.
Brachiator
@Bruce (formerly Steve S.):
From the NY Times article on Daley’s appointment:
And the Huffington Post is already indulging the crazy even as it seeks to dismiss conspiracy nonsense.
Good times.
Pangloss
If Noam Chomsky accepted the CoS position, would he then be a sellout? I’m just trying to imagine an existing human being that would be sufficiently liberal to placate the perfectionists on the left of the dial…. Maybe there’s a vegan Black lesbian doing an off Broadway one woman show….
FlipYrWhig
@Bruce (formerly Steve S.): DailyKos front pagers and rec list were airing grievances yesterday. I haven’t seen the site today.
kay
I know it doesn’t really matter, but Howard Dean seems to be saying that Daley is not a “Washington insider”.
“The core issue is the contempt” with which not just progressives “but lots of people were treated by a group of senior advisers around the president who had been here for 20 years and thought they knew everything and we knew nothing. That is a fundamental flaw in any kind of administration.”
“I think if Bill Daley becomes the new chief of staff that is going to be a huge plus because he is outside of Washington. He sees things the way people outside of Washington do,” Dean said.
So. Why did the former chair of the Democratic Party say that?
I don’t know why he said it, but I would assume he thinks it’s true.
gene108
@Will:
Because there economies are tiny specks compared to America. Sure they are among the largest in the world, but add Korea, Germany, Japan and China’s economies up and they are only about $800 billion larger than the entire U.S. economy. In other words, we have the #1 economy in the world. #2-#4 (China, Japan and Germany) combined are not bigger than the U.S. economy. That’s how rich the U.S. is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_future_GDP_%28nominal%29_estimates
When one country has that much money concentrated within its borders, what’s the best use of that money?
For all the problems the recession has caused us, we’re in better shape than most of Europe, with the exception of Germany, who prior to this recession had much greater problems with higher unemployment levels than the U.S. Plus there are some arguments Germany is having its prosperity on the backs of poorer Eurozone nations, by hamstringing what the European Central Bank can do, with regards to the value of the Euro, in response to the various sovereign debt crises there.
The U.K. is going to be cutting government jobs and has less private sector hiring than the U.S.
There are some issues to be addressed with regards to the impact of changing global economics on people here, but to think other countries are vastly superior to us right now is not true.
Omnes Omnibus
Daley is a lawyer. Is there any reason to assume that he will not apply his skills on behalf of his current employer (Obama) as zealously as he has on behalf of his previous employers (e.g., Mayer, Brown & Platt (as it was then), US Department of Commerce, J.P. Morgan, etc.)?
Joe Beese
You know an Obama decision is indefensible when Mr. Cole is unable to contrive even a lame excuse for it and can manage nothing more than “Too late to do anything about it now”.
But today’s Greenwald is right as usual. Fellating banksters with appointments like this is simply who Obama is.
Admiral_Komack
Oh, did the President hurt the fake-ass progressives widdle feelings AGAIN?
What is it THIS time?
He made a decision without consulting their all-knowingness-ness?
Oh.
Just like the other eleventy-billion times.
I sense a pattern ;-)
Lawnguylander
What’s with the firebaggers like Joe Beese and constant references to fellatio and other sexual activity (like Obama or some other politician bending over, taking it up the,,,) when talking about politics? I happen to think sex is awesome but these people are always using it to describe something humiliating. Sick, sad fucks.
Leftist Not Liberal
The problem with Obama is that he has no idea what regular people go through. He says he knows–when he had all that student debt–but the dude didn’t really have to worry, he’s an elitist law professor from the Ivy Leagues. There’s no chance he’d fall between the cracks.
Now some elitist rich people have consciences–some, but not a lot. FDR is a good example. At least, he cared–and people understood that viscerally. He called out the economic royalists and was happy to battle them. Obama is frightened of the Big Money, and it shows with his policies and appointments.
I guess this is what the so-called hippies are so angry about. The rest of the population (other than the 1% who own the joint) are completely absent in any of Obama’s rhetoric. When has he talked about the plight of the poor? The truly destitute? There is something morally reprehensible about it. To ignore a large swath of people who are suffering under the yoke of the rich.
Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel)
@Observer:
IIRC, Karl didn’t beat Daley. 5 Supremes did.
Cat Lady
@Lawnguylander:
This. Seriously. Instead of godwinning a thread, they ALWAYS go to that metaphor. It’s the BJ corollary to Godwin’s Law – the probability that a firebagger will mention forced guy on guy sex in a thread about Obama approaches 1. BJ’ing a thread? It says way more about them than Obama, IMHO.
Tom Hilton
@Bruce (formerly Steve S.): Chris Hayes (guest-hosting for Maddow) devoted a whole bunch of time the other night to Daley and his not-very-progressive record. For example.
cat48
Pete Rouse is the one with enough influence to change the prez’s mind I’ve decided. Did you see the prez talk about him yesterday? Obama’s younger staff obviously adores him too. No one’s noticed that he has received a promotion from Senior Adviser to POTUS, Interim COS to Counselor to the President which is sorta huge since Wiki says Obama eliminated that position.
O said yesterday he wouldn’t be where he is without Pete
I only read recently Pete organized & planned everything involved with the presidential campaign before it started. O also gave him credit for everything that went right in the Lame Duck Session. I just think he’s a lot more important to O than Daley ever will be. Also, too; he is known for bringing “no drama” to Obama when he was his Senate COS.
arguingwithsignposts
@TR:
hey, dude, i said I was “meh” on the appointment at the beginning. I’m not a big Dean fan, either, fwiw. He’s just as much of a power mover as anyone.
And i’d love for a CoS who wouldn’t take typical villager/ws axis bullshit. boehner, cantor and the likes might not, but I also wish they’d DIAF, so there’s that.
Buck
@Tom Hilton:
Poor Obama… constantly catching hell from everyone.
You’d think with all the bitching the extreme-left-fringe-nutcases throw at him, he’d just step down and hand it all over to Joe.
AxelFoley
@Cat Lady:
That needs to be the new tag here, if it isn’t one already. If not, Cole, make it so.
NobodySpecial
@FlipYrWhig: At last, a reasonable human to talk with, and not a troll! Jesus, I’m glad you showed up.
I’m not being snarky when I say that, since Kennedy lost that debate to Nixon, optics matter. In the age of skin deep media analysis by know nothing blowhards on your teevee, how things look are important. People aren’t mostly going to care or know about the relationship between the Daleys, the Clintons, and Obama, nor specifically what the CoS is tasked with doing.
What they ARE going to know, because the MSM will tell them this ad nauseum, is that this is another Banksta who’s been given a prime slot in the Obama administration. If they feel like really screwing Democrats, they’ll add in that quote that’s everywhere about how America has rejected leftist solutions. And it makes our job in getting people to vote Dem a little bit harder than it needed to be, and for no tangible gain to be seen. That’s what bugs me the most about this.
burnspbesq
I think the final word on Sperling belongs to Andrew Samwick:
“He worked for Goldman Sachs, but he didn’t inhale.”
AxelFoley
@madmatt:
The fuck outta here with that bullshit.
Leftist Not Liberal
I don’t see how any one can mistake a Democrat for someone on the left. I mean, if you look at it purely objectively through the lens of political science. The US Dems are a right wing party, probably more right wing than the Tories in the UK.
Now, having said that, it is obvious why we will never get progressive policies out of a right wing party. It is impossible. We may get more moderate right wing policies, but certainly nothing resembling what left wingers advocate.
The labels have been so abused in the US. I don’t expect Obama to act like a leftist because he’s objectively a right winger, if you study political science. Perhaps even the hippies should realize that and plan accordingly. Meaning—people who have left wing views shpudl build movements outside the right wing DC echo chamber (Dem and Repub) and create a new reality–which will help the destitute and the poor. This is what we need.
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
@Brachiator:
@FlipYrWhig:
Let’s try this again.
John’s words: “traitor, sell-out, corporate whore”
Who is saying this, or something that approximates this?
John’s only citation was a link to Ben Smith (???).
Brachiator’s citations were (1) a bland and trivially true statement from a government accountability foundation and (2) a summary of some court gossip from mainstream sources.
Flip made vague reference to Kos writers, no links or specific quotes provided.
So, if somebody used something approximating John’s words — and please don’t waste my time with quotes trolled from FDL comments or Kos diaries — I’d like to know about it.
numbskull
@homerhk:
Daley said the ACA went too far. The people railing against his being chosen and who railed against ACA held that ACA didn’t go far enough.
You see the problem with your reasoning that led to your being upset, right?
FlipYrWhig
@NobodySpecial: I think at least 8 out of every 10 American voters have no idea who Bill Daley is now and will continue to have no idea who Bill Daley is unless he’s caught with hookers. The idea that everyone is keeping close tabs on who’s a banker and who isn’t… I don’t think it’s true.
I think that people are reacting to the choice of Daley as the fulfillment of the kowtowing-to-bankers and/or apologizing-to-bankers angle that a lot of self-avowed populists seem intent on finding Obama doing. (Especially given that there’s been that story repeatedly coursing through Politico about how banks feel frozen out by Obama and they want to be petted and stroked more. Does this pick address that? Is it _designed_ and _intended_ to address that? I dunno.)
I have no idea what he’s good at, if anything, and I get the issue with the optics, but I still feel like what he’s going to _do_ is likely to be quite distinct from what kinds of interests he can be said to _represent_.
I’m just not a fan of keeping score on the subject of how many times Obama has thrown a bone to my interest group, the thought process behind which appears to involve constructing an interest group (the “left,” the “base,” “liberals,” the “netroots”) for the purposes of counting the slights against it.
I really do think it’s starting to have a War On Christmas logic to it, where we circulate tales of perfidy that reinforce the feeling that we are always under attack. We don’t really want him to appoint someone more “left” because that person will do something different or better, we want him to do it because it would prove that he was listening to us. I just don’t really care about that anymore.
FlipYrWhig
@Bruce (formerly Steve S.): Oh, I didn’t know you were looking for specifics. Well, here’s one: Greenwald is now cited on Daley’s Wikipedia page.
Buck
Mitch McConnell seems to be happy with the Delay pick.
It’s all good.
Davis X. Machina
@Observer: You are conceding Nader’s duplicity and megalomania, then?
gene108
@Leftist Not Liberal: Seriously, dude, I just don’t get what you (or any leftist) want?
President and Mrs. Obama weren’t in danger of defaulting on student loans, because they went to good colleges, did well in school, and got good jobs afterwards.
President Obama has only made serious money as an author and that’s because running for President gave him a high level of name recognition, others just don’t have.
Every Democrat should be frightened of Big Money after the 2010 elections. Big Money helped crush the Democrats, after an historic Democratic wave in 2008.
And what would you do?
We can tinker a bit with the tax code, at some point.
Raise some taxes on the rich and give something more to the poor, like say guaranteed health insurance, which won’t be dropped because of pre-existing conditions, but then what?
How do you eliminate poverty?
@Leftist Not Liberal:
This is correct. If you really want to have a more leftist agenda, you need to change the thinking of people in this country. They will then demand more liberal legislatures and politicians.
As much as you do not like the Democrats, the fact is the U.S. has been and seems to always will be a two Party system of government.
The Democrats do try and push liberal policies, such as universal health insurance coverage, equal pay for women, etc., when they get a chance.
Do everything you can to change the attitudes of people, so you can run a more liberal person in NC-11, instead of Heath Shuler, and have a chance to win.
What gets me upset about the shrillness of liberals is they attack the Democratic Party, which carries your shit to try and make it law. They expand huge amounts of political capital, get toasted in elections (the Assault Weapons Ban of 1994 was a liberal idea and hurt many Democrats in rural areas), because of it. Yet the only thing coming from the Left is “it’s not good enough”.
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
@FlipYrWhig:
I’m looking for an answer to a straightforward question, which is still not being provided.
Greenwald’s piece this morning is nothing like John’s words. Try again.
Will
cat48,
You know, I’ve spent a lot of time in Europe and a little in Japan and Korea. There comes a point when you realize that people over there have it a lot better than Americans, despite the fact that their economies are so “small.”
Once you realize this, it’s not a far step to realize that whatever the hell is being measured as the strength of the economy has less to do with the quality of life of a country’s citizens than economists want you to believe. A weak economy where the vast majority of the citizens have decent jobs, benefits, health care and homes is better than a roaring economy where 10 percent are rich and the rest are wondering what overpasses would be the best to live under.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Bruce (formerly Steve S.): Oh come on, Bruce. Everyone knows this is Flog The Left, Part Eleventymillion. Play along in your assigned role.
Leftist Not Liberal
@gene108:
1) Public works project (green jobs)
2) Reinstitute Glass-Steagall
3) Break up banks, then nationalize, if needed
4) Moratorium on all foreclosures, then retool existing mortgages so they help people stay in their homes
5) Tax the rich to Eisenhower levels
6) Prosecute bankster fraud
7) Strengthen unions through card check, repeal of Taft Hartley
8) Single payer universal health care
9) Cut defense spending by 50%
10) Shore up state goverments thru taxing rich
This is just to start.
FlipYrWhig
@Bruce (formerly Steve S.): Here’s the closest I can find: Joan McCarter on DailyKos, The Third Way White House. The diaries I saw yesterday seem to have dropped from the top of the rec list.
Rachel Maddow, I hear, was saying that it was a deliberate swipe at the left.
“Traitor,” I haven’t seen. Corporate/pro-corporate, certainly implicitly, and I think “sellout” comes along for the ride with that. That’s the best I’ll be able to do for you right now.
FlipYrWhig
@Bruce (formerly Steve S.): Also, John says he was getting caustic emails from “left-leaning commenters”. Do you doubt that?
Leftist Not Liberal
@gene108:
It really isn’t good enough. Sorry. I am pretty old. In my 40 some odd years, I’ve seen the Dems become more and more right wing and the country go down the shitter. So yeah, I guess I am kinda angry, hence the firebagger epithet. Natural reaction.
But you know, this era I call the anti-Sixties. In the Sixties the sky was the limit. In this era, if you push for anything other than mild reforms you are a purist.
Jeez, in this day and age, MLK would be skewered as a purist. Diminished expectations. It is destroying the country.
Keith G
At lunch so I am not going to read the 190+ comments, though I read most of the original thread.
Daily is good choice and may turn out to be inspired. He is just about as close as we Dems can get to a James Baker style fixer – a type of being we haven’t had available to us since maybe the great Clark Clifford.
For the 34 years that I have been a Democratic voter,I have often been quite dismayed at how we reject chances for accomplishment in the name of an ideological purity orgasm. Daily brings heft and I would imagine discipline to a good operation that needs a lift to get to the next level.
I’m looking forward to what Obama can get done with a better, smarter West Wing.
madmatt
@homerhk:
He gets no respect from me until he respects the people who put him in office.
Keith G
@Keith G: For some reason I could not edit and I wanted to add, I do not believe that Obama is not his own man and that he would be pulled off a chosen course by a CoS.
If that were the case, the choice of a CoS would be secondary to the fact that we have a light weight as president. Obama is no light weight.
madmatt
@gene108:
so you are of the opinion that allowing business to offshore jobs and improve the GLOBAL ECONOMY is more important than protecting the American economy…good for you but I don’t give a shit about the rest of the world I want jobs HERE and the politicians we elect should want that too.
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
@FlipYrWhig:
I’ve helpfully compiled all the offending statements from all the linked material:
“This was a real mistake by the White House,” – Adam Green
“an interesting choice,” – Jane Hamsher
“The Daley pick seems like a bad idea to me.” – Ezra Klein
“troubling and sends the wrong message” – MoveOn
“it creates a huge potential for a conflict of interest.” – Sunlight Foundation
“This isn’t particularly good news” – Joan McCarter
To review John’s words at the top: Obama is called a “traitor, sell-out, corporate whore, and worse than Bush.”
Nobody cares about Kos diaries.
I don’t care what you “hear”.
There’s nothing implicit about Daley in this regard, it’s his universally acknowledged prime qualification. Has somebody called Obama a “corporate whore” for appointing Daley?
@FlipYrWhig:
Why do I care what some vaguely defined e-mailers have allegedly said to someone? Who has said the things we’ve been talking about?
Brachiator
@Bruce (formerly Steve S.):
Let’s not. My reference was to a NY Times article which noted that Daley’s appointment dismayed some liberals. There’s also stuff like the recent WaPo piece, William Daley: Positive and negative reaction.
And there is also stuff like this from Politico
Or a recent NY Times article by Matt Bai (“A Shift in Tactics, Not in Ideology”)
What you don’t get a lot of is “Obama’s got a new Chief of Staff. His business. Move on”
If John Cole wants to cite examples of fire breathers, that’s up to him. Otherwise, I don’t see much point in your holding out for specific examples of some particular expression of anger.
madmatt
@Omnes Omnibus: yes because he has proven himself a whore he will help those who pay him the most and that means the scum he will go work for in 2 years…screwing over the citizenry for that long will be a breeze.
madmatt
@Lawnguylander: its not sex they are describing it is the whores
Sko Hayes
@FlipYrWhig:
Good lord, first Howard Dean thinks Daley is a great pick, then Greenwald says it’s no big deal.
No wonder it’s so quiet over at GOS today.
MikeMc
Are progressive bloggers ever happy about anything? Who did they want for COS? Unemployment went from 9.8 to 9.4 and liberal blogs treat it like bad news. I’m starting to think they lack the ability to be positive…ever. Why would the President want to reach-out to such a miserable bunch?
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
@Brachiator:
Yes, which contained the quote, “it creates a huge potential for a conflict of interest.” This was in response to my query as to who was using any of the hyperbolic language in John’s OP. Since this quote is not remotely like John’s characterization your response was non-responsive.
[snip more quotes that I’ve addressed or are non-responsive]
What you do get are a lot of answers to the presumed question, “what do you think of Daley as new COS?” People were asked, they answered. None of them (that I’ve yet seen) said anything like “traitor, sell-out, corporate whore, and worse than Bush”. It’s possible, of course, that any number of respondents said something like “Obama’s got a new Chief of Staff. His business. Move on,” but such an uninteresting response would have of course been subsequently edited out.
Of course, it’s his blog. I would think that if you strongly imply that fire-breathers are calling Obama “a traitor, sell-out, corporate whore, and worse than Bush” you’d want to take the minimal step of actually documenting it with an example or two, but maybe that’s just me.
burnspbesq
@Leftist Not Liberal:
Nice list. Now explain your plan for getting it done, in light of the current political situation in this country.
Reality’s a bitch, ain’t it.
General Stuck
Pedantry in the cause of Firebagging is no extremity.
It was me, I just said that. nobody else. only your lonesome. Let the record reflect.
gene108
@madmatt:
The two aren’t mutually exclusive. You can shift production overseas, improve the global economy and improve the U.S. economy.
When a company moves services overseas, they free up money to invest in other jobs here in the U.S. Companies are under tremendous pressure to keep increasing earnings. In a normal economy, they aren’t supposed to sit on piles of cash, but rather invest it to increase growth.
The problem is the jobs that are available don’t match the skillset of the worker, who lost their job.
How we manage the transition to this new economic model is something the current approach by our government hasn’t really had a positive impact on for many people.
The reality is we are in a global economy and we are better off for it. We have more opportunities to make money and have economic expansion because of it.
The only issue is will people do what they need to, to have the skills to make the most of things as they are and as they will be.
Plan S
Long time lurker. Please forgive me for my first post and getting into this so late. But I am getting sick of John’s knee-jerk reaction to start hating on progressives when Obama does something disappointing. I’m sick of progressives constantly being portrayed as unrealistic, pony-wishing, whining purists.
John, what is your opinion on Daley being chosen? Do you think its a good pick? Whats your reasons? Can you do this without resorting to bashing ‘firebaggers’ for being upset about this pick?
Just because some progressives don’t like Daley doesn’t mean they want Noam Chomsky, and that is ridiculous anyways. But is there no suitable replacement for Chief of Staff who has a modicum of progressive values in their way of thinking and in their history? Is this being ‘unrealistic’?
Does any progressive criticism deserve merit in your book? People in the US are seriously suffering, its pretty obvious that the country is a plutocracy, these wars are being fought for the industrial military’s amusement, serious environmental malaise and destruction continues unabated.
A lot of these problems require a complete 180 reversal in order for things to even start getting better, and yet one is supposed to be happy with these watered-down, compromised, drop in an ocean type deals that the Democrats are making because, anything more would be considered unrealistic? Sorry, but I think the Democrats are being unrealistic with how bad the problems are.
Leftist Not Liberal
@burnspbesq:
Not really, if you had a movement. You know, like people here. Instead of complaining about firebaggers and leftist purists and such, we could all band together and defeat the capitalists by being in the streets. You know, like what the Europeans do.
Waiting on Obama or any politician is foolish. Politicians are useless.
I’ve been hearing these excuses and these “purist” epithets for decades and nothing has changed using your approach, in fact things have gotten a lot worse. I am not scared away by these manipulations anymore. At one point , they might have worked. But many, many people are on to this little game. How long can it be played? Well, as long as people are cowed by these epithets.
lacp
@Buck: DeLay? Intentional or Freudian?
gene108
@Leftist Not Liberal:
The country wouldn’t be where it is without the Civil Rights Movement. No one is pushing to go back to Jim Crow laws. Hell a conservative state, South Carolina, elected an Indian-American woman as governor and to boot, she’s in a mixed race marriage, which would’ve been illegal in the 1960’s.
I know Indians, who came to the U.S. to study, in the 1950’s and 1960’s, in the South and they faced the same problems with Jim Crow laws that blacks did, regarding lack of access to facilities.
Don’t get the country is going in the shitter mindset. See above, regarding Gov.-Elect Haley of SC.
See President Barack Obama.
See right-wingers jumping over themselves to be the first group to elect a woman as President, with Sarah Palin.
On social issues, the Left has been kicking the crap out of the Right, yet no one on the Left is willing to own up the huge victories we keep racking up on social issues.
Hell, gays can now serve openly in the military.
Of course the Democrats are right-wing thugs, because they pushed through DADT repeal. I mean James Dobson is really the person, who was pushing for DADT repeal (sarcasm).
NR
As usual, in the orgy of hippie-punching here, everyone is missing the point.
The problem is not what the so-called professional left thinks about this appointment. The problem is the optics of Obama appointing a bankster as chief of staff.
But go ahead and keep punching the hippies. I’m sure that’ll bring victory in 2012. After all, it worked so well for the last election.
Mike Kay (Chief of Staff)
Cole,
when you say your email is flooded by left-leaning commentators, are you referring to rank and file Balloon Juice readers, or do you mean the administrators at various blogs?
NR
@RalfW:
The problem with triangulation is that every time you move right to meet the Republicans, they just respond by moving further right. And so the “middle” that you’re moving to keeps moving to the right along with them. Case in point: The fact that passing the Republican’s health care reform bill from 1993 was recently hailed as some kind of great progressive victory.
Also, every time you triangulate, you are sending the message to swing voters that your party’s policies are something to run away from and the other party’s policies are something to embrace.
The only way to stop the rightward movement of the center is to stand up for progressive principles. But Obama does not want to do that.
Kerry Reid
@Lawnguylander:
Mandingo fantasies. They’re not just for Rush Limbaugh!
Mike Kay (Chief of Staff)
@NR: but you guys already said you weren’t gonna vote for him after the tax deal. that no matter what he did during his remaining term, he could never win you back.
so under this circumstance, why should he listen to people who say their decision is irreversible.
as for hippie punching, you guys sure are a bunch of pussies. you can dish it out, but you can’t take it.
General Stuck
@Plan S:
That’s some fairly decent grade butthurt from the low rent stuff we usually get. kudos senor!
Will
gene108,
If you think the problem is that Americans don’t have the skills needed, you need to talk to some software engineers. People with advanced degrees, new graduates and those with years of experience are being pushed out of the market for lower-paid hires from Asian on work visas. In a lot of cases, these hires are of a lower standard of quality – lot of junk credentialing and education going on in India, in particular – but work for a lot cheaper.
The problem is that no one with the “right skills and training” can compete with even an inferior employee from a Third World nation. There are no training programs that will solve this.
If I was going to try to fix this, I would either crack down hard on outsourcing and work visas, or I’d start pressuring our friends and allies to make it easier for Americans to work abroad. As it is right now, most Americans can’t compete with foreigners in their own country and aren’t eligible for work visas in others – putting them at a disadvantage with European, Commonwealth and even Third World nations whose citizens either have multinational rights to work through transnational agreements like the EU or by qualifying for visas specifically set aside for those from low-income nations.
Basically, the fruits of the global economy go to the transnational rich, poor Third World workers and citizens from nations who have greater freedom of movement. Americans are just fucked coming and going.
Leftist Not Liberal
@NR:
To me, it doesn’t matter who Obama appoints. He’s shown his hand. He’s a Raygunite trinckle on neoliberal. Nothing is going to change in two years. People are going to get poorer and more desperate and he’s going to fiddle while Rome burns. He’ll play footsie with the Repubs, maybe offer up some new tax cuts or some such nonsense and call it more stimulus–but basically we are fucked. No matter how this goes down–we are fucked. If he’s reelected more of the same. With Repubs, the descent into penury maybe faster, but either way the corporate state wins.
Unless, unless….
Into the streets.
Mike Kay (Chief of Staff)
@NR:
DADT, withdrawing from Iraq, START treaty, Landmark Food Safety Bill, Fed Reg, Doubling the size of SCHIP, a trillion dollar HCR bill, consumer protection agency, first hispanic on the SCOTUS, 60 billion for renewable energy, funding stem cell research, Lilly Ledbetter act, rounding up loose plutonium, regulating tobacco, Matthew Shepard act, Student Loan reform, etc., etc., etc..
those aren’t progressive values?
Rahm was right, you hippies really are retards.
as Dr Rachel Maddow said, “nothing this big has happened since FDR”.
Suck on this, losers.
http://streetknowledge.wordpress.com/2010/12/24/video-rachel-maddow-says-obama-has-achieved-85-of-his-agenda/
Leftist Not Liberal
@Mike Kay (Chief of Staff):
Why isn’t Obama seriously addressing the issue of poverty and unemployment? 1 in 5 on food stamps. 20% real unemployment. Rising inequality. Etc, etc.
This is why he is so mediocre. He doesn’t address the most important issues at hand.
FlipYrWhig
@NR:
There are hundreds of comments on this thread and a goodly number are specifically on the “optics,” as well as some on the topic of whether “optics” are worth worrying about.
Mike Kay (Chief of Staff)
@Leftist Not Liberal: fuck you. when clinton was president unemployment fell to 3.9%, he raised taxes on the rich, real wages grew, and income disparity fell, but you guys hated him anyways and voted for nader just to teach him a listen. fuck you, you spoiled hippie bitches. it doesn’t matter what happens, you always find a reason to cry.
As Maddow said, Obama kept the country from going into a 2nd great depression.
General Stuck
@Leftist Not Liberal:
By about everyone’s account, Obama just completed the most productive first two years of progressive legislation in recent memory, including an absolutely astonishing wrap up to the congressional session. And because there are problems still left to solve, that makes him mediocre. Well, boo fucking hoo..
wanker
gene108
@Will:
The quota for H1-b visas is at 65,000 per year. The quota has not been met in 2009 and 2010. The U.S. doesn’t have a demand for skilled foreign workers. They aren’t coming in any significant number.
The U.S. government is really tightening down on people getting visas. I know folks who’ve had a lot of trouble getting visas to come here. In the name of being tough on enforcing immigration laws, (I assume to get something like the DREAM act passed), a lot of arbitrary decisions are being made at U.S. consulates and border crossings, which is making it harder for people to immigrate here.
You can’t stop outsourcing. You can stop it no more than you can stop a factory from automating. Both cost people jobs in the USA.
If Company A can produce widgets at $5/unit, because some of their work is being done overseas or has been automated, while Company B produces widgets at $15/unit, because of higher labor costs or lack of automation, who has the competitive advantage? Company A.
If Company B wants to stay in business, they need to cut production costs to be competitive with Company A.
The ideal notion of outsourcing is if Company B moves its operations overseas and reduces its production costs here, it would take the money saved and reinvest in other value added activities, like more sales outlets in the U.S. to push its products, which will lead to more – but different – jobs in the U.S.
There are plenty of policies in the U.S., which are hurting this model from working out, such as the tax preference for investing versus earning income. You aren’t going to do the U.S. any good by trying to bring back some idyllic economic era that was built largely on the destruction of other nations and exploitation of the rest.
Americans can travel through out Europe, without obtaining a visa. I think they can go to Mexico, the Caribbean and many other parts of the world without a visa. They just need their passports.
There are far less travel restrictions for Americans, than there are for Chinese and Indians.
FlipYrWhig
@Leftist Not Liberal:
When was the last time that “being in the streets” _gained_ sympathy for a left/liberal cause rather than losing it? To me, that’s the dilemma. Social change to the left doesn’t happen without public pressure, but public pressure tends to generate negative reaction from both the right (who cares?) _and_ the noncommitted, not-much-paying-attention middle. The moment anyone broke a window or knocked a cop off a horse, the whole effort would be poisoned forever. YMMV.
Mike Kay (Chief of Staff)
@gene108: Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown.
General Stuck
@FlipYrWhig:
At least if they took to the streets, there would be less whiny bullshit posted on this blog and others. I got dragged out of a protest once in a student admin building, though it didn’t stop the Vietnam War, it did get me laid that night. The things we sacrifice for feedom.
FlipYrWhig
@General Stuck: Well, I’d put it differently. If every success is always mediocre and disappointing, the complaint starts to ring rather hollow. Conditions change. Judging politics has to be done by factoring in the era. Otherwise you’ll end up sounding like one of those sports reporters who complains that pitchers don’t throw complete games anymore.
Leftist Not Liberal
@FlipYrWhig:
I don’t see how you can work within a bought and sold gov’t like ours. Despite all of Obama’s “successes,” regular people know intuitively that no one is really representing them. People are falling behind. No one cares what Rachael Maddow thinks. They don’t even know who the hell she is. But they do know that the capitalists are impoverishing them.
I see no other option that a mass movement. This is how it has always been done. Take history as a guide. Obama is an impediment to that movement.
General Stuck
@Leftist Not Liberal:
You know, sometimes it does, and it may well come to that. In fact, I sincerely believe it will, to one degree or another, but castigating obama as an impediment is just foolish blather. When it is time for such a movement, no one will be able to impede it. It will just happen, when a threshold of pain and deprivation is reached by the middle and lower class. Obama is doing his best, with a lot of an establishment still in control, to avoid, or soften the fall that must occur from our overgrown and outsized expectations from our capitalist system.
This is where the near whole of the American public is at right now. They have not given up on the system working for them, just yet. When they do, you will have your movement. These things cannot be forced by the will of a few. When, and if, it is time, it can be led by those few.
Crazies, bashing in car windows and setting fire to shit will only delay the reckoning you hope for, if it comes to that.
LT
Uh. What the fucking fuck? Are you serious? You believe the CoS choice means nothing? And that the “president thinks for himself,” meaning again that the CoS choice, and the CoS him or her elf, has no affect on policy whatsoever? Beyond comprehension. completely beyond it.
Jesus fucking christ, Cole, you can act so fucking obtuse sometimes. Hard to understand from someone who interprets and finetunes events so fucking well so fucking often.
And this:
From a guy who has a fucking political blog. Unfuckingbelievable.
gene108
@Plan S:
Because they never praise Obama or Democrats for doing something right.
Ending combat operations in Iraq, as I posted up thread, was an unsettled issue going into the 2008 elections. Republicans were calling Democrats out for “cutting and running” for setting timetables to withdraw. Obama said through out the campaign he’d set a time table to end combat operations and stuck to it.
That’s Big Fucking Deal, but progressives can only focus on the fact there’s a residual force of 50,000 troops there, so somehow they’ve been betrayed / let down.
Same thing with Health Care Reform. Democrats did what they’ve spent 60 years trying to do and produce a bill that extends health care coverage / access to more Americans, achieving close to universal coverage.
Progressives only focus on not getting the public option and the fact single-payer was never on the table as an option.
President Obama set out to have a methodical process to repeal DADT, so he could get Congress, DoD, and the public behind the repeal. This seemed to be taking a long time. Progressives lost their collective shit that DADT wasn’t repealed, prior to November 2010. They ranted about how Obama should’ve ended DADT by executive order.
Now that DADT is repealed, where’s “Damn, Obama’s the motherfucking Man, he got DADT repealed”? Where’s pictures of liberals popping open champagne bottles to celebrate the repeal?
Not much of peep from liberals for the a big legislative accomplishment.
I agree Obama needs to be taken to task for maintaining the Bush, Jr. police state / security apparatus and other things, but my issue with the Left is their failure to acknowledge any sort of accomplishments by this President or the 111th Congress.
LT
@Tim:
Yep.
General Stuck
@LT:
Could we offer you a fainting couch?
Mike Kay (Chief of Staff)
@LT: why would the objections from your quarter matter when you’ve already said you won’t vote for obama?
Leftist Not Liberal
@General Stuck:
Capitalism, based on endless growth, is unsustainable. The earth will not stand for the abuse. This whole system, our whole way of life, is built on faulty assumptions.
It’s common sense. So, yes, we are in for some major changes. But it will be all for the good. Capitalism is a pretty evil system, if you ask me.
LT
@gene108:
This says so much about the mindset behind people live to hate people who dare criticize the O admin. It’s about “they never praise” him or them.
So fucking petty, immature, hypersensitive, and just fucking stupid.
LT
@Mike Kay (Chief of Staff): Fuckig idiot.
Really.
I have never said that. Never. I have said the exact opposite.
You will say something stupider now, I’m sure.
gene108
@Leftist Not Liberal:
And that ladies and gentleman is the reason for the major disconnect between the liberal base and the rest of America.
The rest of America likes the idea of making money.
LT
@Mike Kay (Chief of Staff): Fucking idiot.
Really.
I have never said that. Never. I have said the exact opposite.
You will say something stupider now, I’m sure.
General Stuck
@Leftist Not Liberal:
Your Lenin is showing wilfred. Yes, capitalism is the pits, except for all the other systems.
gene108
@LT:
And how do you propose to win elections?
Publicly tar and feather the guy whose trying to enact your agenda, to some degree or another?
LT
@General Stuck:
Well since you have one and I don’t…
LT
@gene108:
That’s pretty hilarious too. It’s all about winning elections, is it?
Leftist Not Liberal
@gene108:
Ha, you sussed me out! I’m a red. I’m a red. Oh my god.
AxelFoley
@Mike Kay (Chief of Staff):
THANK. YOU. Fucking. Thank. You.
More progressive shit has gotten done under this administration than any since FDR’s, and these pussy-ass losers say nothing’s been done?
Man, fuck them, fuck they mamas, and fuck they 1st grade teachers. Fuck ’em all.
General Stuck
@LT:
I don’t need one, though maybe a rubber room now and then.
you’re mouthbreathing is fairly spectacular is all. Obama shunned Rahm who wanted to can HCR, and will do the same with any untoward bullshit from Daley, or whomever is his CoS.
Your narrative is stale and has been overtaken by actual events.
AxelFoley
@Leftist Not Liberal:
Take your ass to Cuba, then, if you don’t like the system.
gene108
@LT:
Either that or violent over throw of the government…unless there’s another way to change laws, I’m missing…
IU1995
John,
It’s funny how time changes things …
Dating back to around 2004, I regularly followed ~10 -15 blogs a day, a combination of left and right. Over the years, some would come and some would go as I tried to find a good fit. As you can imagine, all of the righty blogs were dumped pretty early on for obvious reasons. Eventually, the number dwindled down to what I considered to be the cream of the crop.
4 years ago, I followed DKos, Firedoglake and Americablog as if they were mandatory weekday reading. I was a junky who had to get a fix every hour from 8 am – 5 pm. I only came to Balloon Juice occasionally to check out the “sensible other side”.
2 years ago, Firedoglake’s over the top PUMA traits finally pushed me over the edge. I still needed my constant DKos fix and even though Americablog was beginning to irritate me, I continued to drop in at least once a day. My traffic at Balloon Juice slowly increased to maybe once a week.
1 year ago, I bit the bullet and had to vacate Americablog. I still can’t get over how they turned from pro-Obama to the gay version of the tea party as fast as they did. At the same time, DKos was starting to get on my last nerve and my traffic at Balloon Juice suddenly increased to daily visits.
Although I never thought this day would come, DKos is on the verge of a blacklist entry. If President Obama does anything that isn’t considered to be progressive or progressive enough, there is guaranteed to be at least 1 main page post and 3 more recs or other comments bitching about it. Even inside positive or celebratory posts like those after DADT repeal, there is bound to be someone with a “…but he didn’t…” comment and the haters come out in full force. It’s overwhelming. As a result, I’ve been frantically searching the blogosphere for a suitable replacement to Dkos but I’m not having much luck. At the same time, my traffic at Balloon Juice has turned into multiple times per day so maybe this is as good as it gets.
These are the blogs I considered to be cream of the crop, for a long time. Now the cream has settled and I’m feeling left out. I knew from day one that Americablog’s ultimate agenda was to focus on gay issues more than anything else. Likewise, I knew that Firedoglake had the tendency to go all out PUMA. In both cases, I’m not in the target audience but regardless, both sites used to put out plenty of good information that didn’t aim for a target audience. I had no problem bypassing things that did not interest me in order to get to the things that did. Eventually, their target audience topics began to dominate and on top of that, they were MAD target audience topics. My presence no longer made sense.
Until recently, the filtering process was never really necessary at Dkos because I was interested in just about everything posted. That’s why I’m having a such a hard time facing reality in this case. I always viewed Dkos as my one stop Democratic shop. The best of the best. It was our melting pot, all of us welcome, no matter how big or small our “d” was.
When the hate / anger towards the President began to boil over, I shrugged it off. I tried to convince myself that the comments were just being temporarily overrun by Republican trolls, PUMAs or maybe even some progressives who have a legitimate beef and need to vent. The air would clear out over time, I was certain. I don’t think that’s the case anymore. As much as I still love to read posts by Markos and a couple other Dkos contributors, ODS is the dominating tone. The good is being drowned out.
I’ve been a staunch Democrat since I hit voting age in ’92. I am reliably left but definitely not a firebreather. In other words, I’m deep blue but I’m not the darkest shade of blue in the crayon box (California vs. Vermont, for example).
The level of hate towards the President, coming from progressives, has made me wonder if it’s me who is changing or is it them. To answer my own question, I know I haven’t moved to the center because my views today are the same as or even more liberal than they were back in the day. That only leaves one other option. The firebreathers have moved further to the left, representing our version of the tea party but different.
If they haven’t moved, then they’ve gotten much louder since Obama became President, similar to the deafening volume of the tea party protesters, huh? No, our firebreathers are not acting like a bunch of yahoos because they think the President is from Kenya or because “they want their country back”. But they are seeking perfection, in that they want the ultimate progressive President, no ifs ands or buts about it. They don’t have that so they are livid and they want everyone to know.
It’s one thing to be disappointed or mad at the choices the President has made. Hell, I haven’t been too happy with some of his choices and/or actions either. But the display that some folks are putting on is on another level. Unlike anything I’ve ever seen within a political party.
Yes, the tea partiers took out some of their own but for the most part, their anger and hostility is directed at the President and not the GOP. Our firebreathers are basically ignoring the GOP and are focused on the President almost entirely. Has any other president in modern times ever been attacked as fiercely as Obama by his own party? As horrible as he was, Bush didn’t even get this much hatred from the progressive blogs, let alone from other Republicans. At least not until Katrina, after he had already been in office messing things up for almost 5 years. Obama came out the gates getting hammered.
Reading political blogs has been my only real outlet / hobby for many years now. But lately this stuff is wearing me out. I guess that means now might be the time to turn the blogs off. I lost my interest in 24 hour cable news a long time ago. My viewership of the MSNBC evening line-up was identical to my daytime blog attendance so if I was able to fill that void, it shouldn’t be that difficult to fill this one too, ie. like being more productive at work … what a concept!
Hell, I’m 6 months pregnant, anyway … all this extra stress is so not worth it. That’s reason enough to step away from the monitor. I’m going to need some detox for a while though. Trying to go cold turkey is killing me. In addition to Balloon Juice, I guess I’ll try to fill up at TPM, Political Wire or Crooks and Liars, but I don’t think that’s gonna cut it.
Since I do still read Dkos, I’m going to post this over there too, with some modifications.
LT
@AxelFoley:
Who says that?
But more importantly, this isn’t abut whether or not it’s right to say something about Daley or not, it’s about different measuring sticks for different things. You or Cole may not care about the Daley choice much, fine, but other criticisms you are fine with – even though it has as much chance of changing the world as any other thing.
General Stuck
@IU1995:
Welcome, and if nothing else, Balloon Juice has an excellent record at helping deliver healthy babies. We are pre natal approved.
IU1995
@General Stuck
Nice and funny response!
Mike Kay (Chief of Staff)
@LT:
hahahahhahahhahahahhahahhahaha
you misspelled “fucking”, moron
talk about stupid — that’s just what the teabaggers do
http://mugsysrapsheet.com/4blog/misspelled_tea-party_sign_05.jpg
hahahhahaahhahahhahahhahahhah
LT
@Mike Kay (Chief of Staff):
Mike, you accused me of saying that I wasn’t going to vote for Obama – and you were wrong. When corrected you say nothing about it – and go after me for a spelling mistake (which I corrected before the post went up, but which went up with the corrected one anyway).
I said you’d say something stupider…
ruemara
@Pangloss:
You know, I am free for the next couple of years. Perhaps Obama should see my resume?
Mike Kay (Chief of Staff)
@LT: must be a bitch having to wear a helmet all day, in addition to riding the little yellow bus, I mean, the little special bus.
ruemara
@IU1995:
Welcome, sit back, pop a cup of chammo. We post a bunch of food pics, pet pics, whine at each other and the world while simply adoring babies!
General Stuck
@General Stuck:
I want to correct a grammar error from a previous comment, because it is an important point, to me.
What i meant to say was Kind of like Lincoln did, but in a much smaller and less monumental way before the Civil War. Don’t want to leave an impression I think that what Obama faces is more monumental than a bloody civil war, though who knows about the future.
slightly_peeved
He isn’t a bankster. He’s a lifetime politician and campaigner, who happened to work for JP Morgan the past few years.
Anyone who knows enough to give a shit about who Obama chooses as their CoS will know Daley for his involvement in Chicago politics, not for his work at JP Morgan. And unless they believe that people get some sort of cult indoctrination on their first day of work at a major bank, I think they’ll judge the guy on the majority of his resume rather than the last job.
Mike Kay (Chief of Staff)
@IU1995: blogs you should read
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/
http://theplumline.whorunsgov.com/
http://wonkette.com/
Also too, Gallup’s year end poll showed 91% of self described Liberal Democrats approved of the president. Even the liberal Salon blog says, “there is a consistent disconnect between elite liberal opinion about the president and the view of rank-and-file liberals.”
http://tinyurl.com/2g29jcv
Mike Kay (Chief of Staff)
@IU1995:
Gallup’s year end poll showed 91% of self described Liberal-Democrats approved of the president. Even the liberal Salon blog says, “there is a consistent disconnect between elite liberal opinion about the president and the view of rank-and-file liberals.”
http://tinyurl.com/2g29jcv
Mike Kay (Chief of Staff)
@IU1995: blogs you should read
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/
Mike Kay (Chief of Staff)
@IU1995: blogs you should read
http://theplumline.whorunsgov.com/
http://wonkette.com/
Buck
@lacp:
Pure Freudian, my friend.
;-)
Plan S
@gene108:
The so-called overton window has been thrown so rightward on all of these mentioned issues that I’m not sure it should be deemed ‘purist’ to have progressive viewpoints on most of the above-mentioned.
The Iraq war has been proven to have been started for such cynical, fraudulent reasons and at such immeasurable cost in U.S. national time, people, and treasure, that why is it unreasonable to believe that it might be worth not wasting any more time in that black hole? Just on a straight up capitalist expenses/profits ratio. And in reality its not like the U.S. is still not the main boss in Iraq right now and for next while, who are we kidding? These symbolic gestures are window-dressing, frills.
Afghanistan, has been shown by history to be an Empire wrecker, is it unreasonable to think that the U.S. might not be able to buck this historical trend? Am I supposed to believe that the US is so exceptional that the normal rules don’t apply to this? Because what, after 9+ years the progress happening there has been showing anything but superficial signs of improvement? Like, people other than soldiers might even think of visiting Afghanistan? Sorry for being so purist. As well, if this is related to the war on terror, has this military adventure been working? Has it made things safer? Is this conversation even being had these days? Not really, because again, its more about the window dressing.
As a large slice of the U.S. budget, is the military budget being spent well and is it reasonable to think that there might be some bloating, overspending? Oh wait, shut up purist, didn’t you hear that DADT was repealed and that means you shouldn’t worry about military issues anymore? To think, how progressives aren’t licking Obama’s shoes, how ungrateful? Meanwhile, DADT is an issue of an issue of an issue, again, window dressing..
Is healthcare a right, or a privilege? Is the current healthcare providers doing a good job of distributing health care or is there other options? Providing a public option is an idea that would just begin to tackle the issue of whether there are other options of distributing health care access beyond the private option. And no, mandating that everyone must buy into the private option is some weird quasi non-choice. Again, this discussion, not really considered, over-looked. Worse, the public option was used more as a tease to placate unruly progressives when it was needed, usually for cynical reasons. Sorry if people were upset about that.
Some fundamental problems with the underlying civilizational system are occurring right now and the U.S., democratic administration is acting like all the car needs is a new gloss tint. And this blog sometimes acts like we should be grateful to just be able to like the new tint. Its just super defeatist, and depressing..
burnspbesq
@Leftist Not Liberal:
That’s worked well for the Greeks and the Irish, hasn’t it? My thesaurus doesn’t list “catharsis” and “progress” as synonyms.
AxelFoley
@burnspbesq:
ROFL
Cat Lady
Why are all the “progressive” purity trolls here against progress? We’re on an aircraft carrier that’s been steaming hard to starboard for 30 years. From 1992 to 2000 we had a skipper at the helm who threw the wheel more to port, in a boom economy, but it took all of those 8 years to get the carrier to orient slightly more to center. From 2000 to 2008 everyone – Dems, Repugs, media, courts and business leaders all went shoulder to shoulder on the wheel to hard starboard and full steam ahead. Now, the leftards here are screaming about Obama not pivoting the ship instantly 180 degrees all by himself while being shot at by left and right. Whining clueless thumbsucking naifs. Grow the fuck up, stop whining, and start getting shoulder to shoulder with him and the rest of us to help turn this ship around. Obama isn’t perfect. No one is, but he’s the best we’ve got now. This is reality. Deal with it or STFU.
gene108
@Plan S:
I’m O.K. with people advocating for pulling all troops out of Iraq. I’m O.K. with people wanting all troops out of Germany, Japan and wherever else we have military bases.
I’m not O.K. with so called liberals blowing off the fact President Obama very smoothly handled the troop draw down in Iraq and the winding up of combat operations, just because there are still troops there. He did a good job managing something, which would’ve become politically difficult, since any time a Democrat talks about reducing military anything Republicans are very quick to try and use it to paint them as weak on defense, unpatriotic, or actually appointing Osama bin Laden to a Cabinet position, etc.
No Republican is attacking President Obama for drawing troops down in Iraq. The troop draw down was handled very smoothly. It could’ve been bungled. Congress could’ve passed some law or not given the funds needed to reassign the troops, because the got scared that Fox News would say they were supporting al-Qaeda. None of that happened.
Does someone need a waaaaaaaaaaaambulance?
Seriously, do you?
Whether or no DADT was repealed has nothing to do with a bloated defense department, since it was, is and will be bloated whether or not they are persecuting gays.
Plan S
@Cat Lady:
Great argument.. Boils down to name calling, shut up and clap louder reasoning, I am the authority on what is deemed reality. Its all a matter of perspective. To use your ship analogy, no one is asking for the ship to be turned 180 degrees around, but is it so purist to ask to go at 45 instead of the current 10? Or is it that hard? I know when Republicans are back in power, the ship will be go right back to where it was, and even more so. They don’t seem scared to turn it 180 degrees. So if you think that this democrats bringing a knife to republican gun fight is working all that well, I guess its time for you to stop dreaming..
johnny walker
@Mike Kay (Chief of Staff): Wow dude. I’m pretty late to the party (as usual) but this is a pretty sad display even for you. A typo? That’s your response to being called on your attempt at a blanket-statement writeoff?
This says so much more about you than anyone else ever could.
ps. Feel free to pretend that since I originally posted this with “part” in place of “party” you aren’t actually being an ass.
Will
Travel ain’t work my friend. I’m not talking about going to see the Eiffel Tower. I’m talking about migrating to where the jobs are and being able to get them.