Robert David Sullivan

Georgia congressman channels Archie Bunker on FDR

US Rep. Paul Broun of Georgia gave a history lesson on the floor of the House last night on how President Franklin D. Roosevelt tried (successfully, I guess) to bring Stalinism to America. Political Correction has the video and the relevant quote:

BROUN: Original intent was the general welfare, the general welfare of the nation, not welfare of individuals. We've developed this big welfare system in this country. It all started, in earnest, with President Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt just exploded the size and scope of the government with his New Deal. Both progressives. Both had socialist beliefs. In fact, Franklin Delano Roosevelt sent his advisors, his close friends, his cabinet people to go visit with Stalin in communist Russia to study what he was doing, what Stalin was doing there so that FDR could replicate it here in the United States. And he did everything he possibly could to do so.

OK, that's pretty good, but it's not as pithy or passionate as the Archie Bunker assessment of FDR ("the first creeping socialist"), from 1971. It starts at 0:40.

Do people who answer polls trust people who answer polls?

Matt Yglesias is troubled by a new Gallup poll suggesting that more people trust bonus-grabbing CEOs than President Obama in coming up with solutions to our rotten economy (see poll results below). I'm more concerned with Gallup's refusal to include a key question: "How much confidence do you have in people who answer polls?" Since Gallup and company do as much as anyone to influence public debate (certainly more than labor leaders!), why aren't they included in this power ranking?

My answer, by the way, would be that I trust pollsters very highly in revealing how little the average voter knows about economics. And I trust former Clinton pollster Mark Penn (at right) to intepret any poll as a demand for Democrats to become more like Republicans.

Weak Broadway belting, Santorum leaks plans, and a fan of Fung Wah

Here's what to talk about if you're stranded on a highway on the way to New York tonight:

• Charles Isherwood complains in the New York Times that "television and movie exiles" are bringing down vocal standards on Broadway, calling Daniel Radcliffe "light" and "reedy," Sean Hayes "well-drilled" rather than "naturally gifted," and Catherine Zeta-Jones lacking in "delicacy and emotional truth." He does admit that this is not an entirely new phenomenon, pointing to the "modest singing abilities" of Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady. I have to confess a sympathetic response to the lead-throated movie stars in Isherwood's piece, as I have been relegated to tunelessly talking my way through "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face" at more than one piano party.


• Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum has made it semi-official that he's running for president, beginning what all headline writers hope is a long campaign with plenty of opportunities to sneak in references to the Dan Savage definition of his name (a "frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the anal sex"). JoeMyGod goes for the obvious, with "Frothy Mix Makes It Semi-Official," but Dave Weigel wins the day more subtly with "Santorum Makes Splash on 2012 Field." I await the report of "Santorum Fever Spreading in Iowa," hopefully accompanied by a color-coded map with Iowa's quilt-like county lines.


• The Daily's Reihan Salam praises the Fung Wah bus line, which runs between Boston and New York, as a cheap and efficient alternative to high-speed rail (a.k.a. "billions of dollars on routes to nowhere"), seemingly oblivious to Fung Wah's status as a punch line involving crashes, fires, and "comically calamatious ineptitude."

Maine as Tea Party Central, gay penguins in libraries, Graceland turns 25

Some stuff to talk about if you end up in a cartoon graveyard this evening:

• Mother Jones and other sites have praised the Los Angeles Times for the "unusually clear and accurate headline" pictured at right ("GOP governors say they have a recipe for recovery/Reduce healthcare aid to the poor and give tax breaks to the wealthy"). It's been less commented-upon that the state of Maine serves as Exhibit A in the story about Tea Party principles being put into action. The "pugnaciousness" of Gov. Paul LePage is one reason, but it can't hurt that the state is blessed with a slogan — "The Way Life Should Be" — that started as a benign tourism marketing tool but can seem rather arrogant when a steamroller-type governor is standing beneath it, as in the LA Times photo. BTW, if Maine and New Hampshire ever merge, the new state slogan can be "Live the Way Life Should Be or Die."


• The American Library Association has released its Top Ten List of the Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2010. No. 1 was And Tango Makes Three, about two gay penguins raising a chick in the Central Park Zoo (not to be confused with the two gay penguins in Pawnee, Indiana, that got married on Parks and Recreation). The ALA lists the most common reasons for challenging the books, and "political viewpoint" is cited for only one book in the Top 10: Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickle and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, which makes the unpatriotic and unashamedly anti-Ayn-Randian argument that a lot of poor people have to take terrible jobs that don't give them much chance to get out of poverty.


• Paul Simon's album Graceland turns 25 this summer, and Nell Boeschenstein has a great essay about it at This Recording. ("We also recognize not just our parents in the words of those songs, but ourselves and our own impending midlives that loiter like shortening shadows on the horizon. ") It makes me want to find a cassette tape of the recording so I can listen to it the same way I did in college, when I was already acting as if I had hit midlife.

Talking Heads revenge, stupid punditry, hating on the Greenway, etc.

Here's what to talk about tonight if you feel the need to make factual statements:

• Former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist (at right) was legally forced to release a video apologizing for using a Talking Heads song, "Road to Nowhere," during his failed campaign for the US Senate without songwriter David Bryne's permission. Crist may have passively-agressively gotten back at Bryne by erroneously referring to the band as The Talking Heads, but given his machine-gun-pointed-at-head-just-outside-of-camera-range expression, it was probably an innocent mistake. Bryne should still make him do the video all over again.


• Jonathan Bernstein takes apart a fellow pundit who downgraded Mitt Romney's presidential prospects by noting that only five people in more than 200 years have reached the White House on their second try. Bernstein makes good points, but he could also note that almost all of these "only x times" statements are ridiculous. The current presidential election process has really only been around since 1976, when Jimmy Carter was the first to win a major-party nomination solely through primary wins. Before then, the process was so radically different ("smoke-filled rooms" and all that) that pre-76 nomination battles can't be used to develop any rules of thumb.


• Old Urbanist joins the haters of Boston's Rose Kennedy Greenway, writing that "the mantra that the Central Artery had severed the city, and that its burial underground somehow would "knit the city back together" seemed oblivious to the fact that it was not the Artery which had severed the city, really, but the demolition of over 1,000 buildings for the Artery's right of way which had done so." Market Urbanist concurs, quoting Jane Jacobs herself to the effect that city dwellers really prefer pocket parks to sweeping or serpentine expanses of green.


• The Boston Globe reports that food deemed too old to give to public schoolchildren was shipped off to prisoners instead, though most of it was thrown away all over again. If Slate's Justin Elliott is correct, Massachusetts prisoners may be at a disadvantage, since we don't have a lot of conservatives like Duke Cunningham who get sent to the slammer and then start to agitate for improved incarceration conditions.

Conversation starters for April 11

Here's what you can talk about if you get trapped in an elevator with a bunch of strangers today:

• Ezra Klein points out that about 3 percent of Planned Parenthood's services are connected to abortion, and Republican Party efforts to gut funding for the organization are more likely to increase unwanted pregnancies than to reduce politically incorrect terminations of such pregnancies. (An Andrew Sullivan reader disputes this stat.)


• San Francisco faces the closure of an iconic, 30-year-old gay bookstore (A Different Light) and an iconic, 30-year-old leather bar (The Eagle). Boston's anti-gentrification movement may not have many tears to shed over the West Coast changes, as it's still preoccupied with the closure of the iconic, 47-year-old Latino supermarket Hi-Lo Foods in Jamaica Plain.


• Dave Weigel speculates that Sarah Palin's plunge in the polls has been hastened by Donald Trump's takover of the "freak show" slot in coverage of American politics.


• A new Siena Poll has 58% of New York state residents in favor of gay marriage. Among Catholics, the number is 59%, more proof that there's no such thing as a "Catholic vote" and that Catholics pretty much mirror the political attitudes of whatever state they reside in.


• People had better things to do last weekend than see a remake of Arthur.


• The Globe reports that craigslist is taking business away from shady pawn shops and free-lance fencers, especially in the stolen bike resale market. 

Image from Planned Parenthood.

TV for jerkwads

This review of a TV show you won't care about, by Salon's Matt Zoller Seitz, is hilarious:

If you've ever asked yourself why so many TV shows and movies glorify people who strut around growling orders and insulting underlings and barking, "Think, people! Think!" and otherwise acting like insufferable jerks, you've never spent any time in Los Angeles. Hollywood is a dream factory run mostly by and for raging narcissists with power and money. ... These shows exist to kiss the asses of people who approve shows.

Offending series include the CSI babushka dolls and House, which at least started out as interesting. He doesn't mention The Apprentice, which would seem to qualify. (What? Those are supposed to be real people?)

Seitz explains how these shows get on the air, but he doesn't say why anyone watches them. Maybe the people who support tax breaks for millionaires because they anticipate being rich someday also watch these shows to get tips on how to push around the peons they'll eventually acquire. 

Someone has to win the GOP primary in Connecticut

I still think the chances of a far-right candidate (Palin, Huckabee, Gingrich, Bachmann) winning the GOP nod in 2012 are being overstated by most pundits. One reason is the undeniable entertainment value these candidates bring to the race. But I also notice that a lot of analyses have one of the right-wingers winning Iowa and South Carolina (and maybe a narrow plurality in New Hampshire), then sweeping through the rest of the primaries and caucuses.

I'm dubious. The problem for Palin et al. is that blue states have Republican presidential primaries. In 2008, John McCain lost most of the early contests in states that had backed George W. Bush in 2004 (including Iowa, Wyoming, Nevada, and all of the Deep South). He won the nomination only because he forced Huckabee and Romney out of the race with big wins in states that had voted for John Kerry in 2000. (They were: California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and Vermont.)

Someone has to win, and collect delegates from, these blue state primaries. And a Boston Globe story suggests that Democrats are realizing the implications:

National Democratic leaders are asking state party officials to delay the Massachusetts presidential primary from March 6 until later in the spring, arguing in part that allowing the most Republican states to dominate the early voting would bolster the chances that a more conservative candidate will clinch the GOP nomination.

Democrats believe that the more conservative candidates would be polarizing in the national election and have less of a chance of defeating President Obama than a moderate Republican, such as Mitt Romney, former governor of Massachusetts.

This strategy has little chance of working; voters aren't going to accept mischief-making as a reason to move around Election Days. So the question remains: Who is going to win these states next spring?

Maybe the Tea Party has the Northeastern states in hand. Far-right candidates Christine O'Donnell and Carl Paladino did win GOP primaries in Delaware and New York last year. But turnout is likely to be higher in a presidential year, especially in states where independents can vote in either party (and Obama will be essentially unopposed on the Democratic side). There's also likely to be a number of GOP voters who wouldn't mind sending a Christine O'Donnell to the Senate but are more cautious about who they send to the White House.

I could be naive, but I just don't see a Huckabee or Palin winning primaries in California, Illinois, and New York against a relatively mainstream candidate like Romney or Pawlenty. At least, I'm not going to buy any scenario that has these states meekly falling in line behind Iowa's choice.

 

How the Paul Ryan budget plan is brave and courageous

At first, I agreed with Time's Michael Grunwald: There's nothing courageous about Wisconsin US Rep. Paul Ryan's plan "to propose huge tax cuts for the rich, squeeze health care for the poor, and promise that nobody over 55 — the heart of the conservative Republican base — will have to make any sacrifices."

But it would show a political gutsiness for the Republican party to embrace the plan. It would mean a renewed commitment to the 50-percent-plus-one model of winning elections. This means promising a "no compromise" policy to various constituencies (people at the highest income levels, anti-abortion and anti-gay-rights groups, global warming skeptics, Ayn Rand fans) who could collectively add up to an thin majority — as long as voter turnout doesn't get out of control.

I'm being somewhat facetious, but it is truly risky for the Republicans to kiss goodbye to any hope of attaining Eisenhower/Reagan/Nixon majorities in the near-future and instead risk it all on repeating the dubious and narrow wins of George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004. I'm not saying they can't pull it off; lots of "moderate" pundits will help the GOP by portraying the Democrats as equally obstinate and ideological. But the Republicans are definitely working with a lower ceiling of possible support than are the Democrats, who could probably win back a lot of independent voters by proposing budgetary policies that hurt the poor only slightly less and prick the rich only slightly more than the Ryan plan does.

It should also be noted that the no-compromise attitude of the Republicans is at least partly a reaction to the fact that its rank-and-file members are insisting on it, while Democratic voters want their leaders to play nice.

Bookstores are good for more than public bathrooms

The photo at right, taken at a Borders Books about to be shut down, has been all over the net for the past couple of days. It's mostly hailed as clever snark directed toward people who buy their books online (sometimes after flipping through the titles in actual stores), but Cory Doctorow shows little sympathy for the big chains:

It's funny, but if Borders' best pitch is, "We have less selection than Amazon, but you should see our toilets!" then I think I might be able to put my finger on at least one of the firm's problems.

OK, Doctorow is funny too, but I think he's taking the sign too literally. I'm not familiar with Borders bathrooms (I've never been that desperate, and I usually shop only where there are nice hotels with upper-floor restrooms nearby), but I think the sign refers to much more.

Bookstores are great places to:

• Get out of the rain.
• Kill time between appointments.
• Meet someone for a date when you haven't picked a destination or just want to go on an urban stroll.
• Actually spend your lunch hour away from your desk.
• Run into acquaintances you haven't seen in months (usually a pleasant surprise).
• Flirt with a stranger who hasn't been drinking all night and doesn't have to get off the subway at the next stop.
• Buy books that catch your eye for no reason instead of staying in the whirlpool of titles "recommended" for their similarity to books you've already read.

A bad bookstore doesn't fulfill these functions so well, and Borders certainly has been less fun to browse as its inventory has ripened and rotted. But I don't see any other kind of business that comes close to a bookstore in providing a place for urbanites to get off the busy sidewalks and downshift for a while. Nobody's a bigger defender of cocktail lounges than I am, but there's going to be a significant loss of productivity if more people spend their lunchtimes playing Stump the Bartender.

 

Are Democrats suckers for supporting Democratic candidates?

Salon's Glenn Greenwald revisists one of the most frustrating questions of the Obama administration (and Clinton administration and Carter administration): Why continue to vote for Democrats when Democratic presidents routinely throw away progressive principles to pursue center-right voters? Greenwald quotes Rachel Maddow, who observed on her MSNBC show that "The Democratic Party institutional structures of D.C., and the Beltway press in particular, not only hate the Democratic base — they think it's good politics for Democratic politicians to kick that base publicly whenever possible."

Greenwald's own take:

dedicated partisans who pledge their unbreakable, eternally loyal support for any Party or politician are going to be steadfastly ignored (or worse) by that Party or politician, and rightfully so. If you spend two years vehemently objecting that certain acts so profoundly offend your principles but then pledge unequivocal support no matter what almost two years in advance to the politicians who engage in them, why would you expect your objections to be heeded? Any rational person would ignore them, and stomp on your beliefs whenever doing so benefited them.

I have a lot of sympathy with this view. Democratic national leaders do have a distressing habit of abandoning less fortunate people in our society in order to look "tougher" and "more adult," and they tend to abandon important issues like global warming on the orders of pollsters and Washington Post columnists.

The trouble I have is with how much liberals obsess about the top of the US government. Barack Obama isn't playing to the center-right simply because he wants to position himself against the GOP candidate of 2012, whomever he or she will be. He's doing it because conservative Republicans increasingly dominate almost every level of government; not only did the GOP take over the US House and most governorships last year, they made big gains in state legislatures, picking up 680 seats across the US.

If you dismiss your state representatives as having little to do with national politics, you don't know how elected officials think. In most states, those "local" legislators draw US congressional districts; in all states, they are among the likeliest people to challenge US congressmen and senators (sometimes with visions of ultimately running for president). And if a state representative is defeated for, say, supporting state-level efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions, his or her US Representative is going to be more fearful of supporting federal efforts to do the same thing.

What I don't get is how withholding support for Obama, or even Democratic members of Congress, in 2012 is going to lead to national Democrats with more backbone in the future. Everyone in Washington knows that most liberals are ADD-affected political dilettantes who don't pay attention to local contests. Whining about being neglected by the president while conservatives work to put allies on every elected body down to school boards and zoning commissions isn't going make things any better.