Is that the best you've got?

Via Sullivan:

The Romney campaign launches OneTermFund.com ("What is a one term Obama presidency worth to you?"):

The Obama campaign responds by creating TwoTermFund.com, which is comfortably outraising the Romney camp. Capitalizing on the "not concerned about the very poor" controversy, the DNC shoots out an insta-ad:

Forgive my expressing some sudden giddiness here, but it never hurts to have the opposition tossing up these softballs.

And then there's this:

The Republicans have not picked a presidential nominee yet, but President Barack Obama’s Ohio team opened its Dayton headquarters Thursday night looking ahead to the November election.

The headquarters, at 411 E. Fifth Street in the Historic Oregon District, is the third office the Obama campaign has opened in Ohio. The other offices are in Chillicothe and Shaker Heights near Cleveland.

During the grand opening, first lady Michelle Obama spoke by phone to a room full of volunteers and supporters.
“We’re going to finish what we started,” Obama told the crowd. “We got our work cut out for us. Obama told the audience she was coming to Ohio on Feb. 23. She will be holding a fundraiser at the Westin Hotel in downtown Cincinnati.

Republican presidential candidates are also preparing to campaign in Ohio during the next month ahead of the March 6 primary. Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum has events planned for Akron and Columbus on Feb. 18. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney will headline the Cuyahoga County Republican Party’s Lincoln Day dinner on Feb. 16 in Mayfield Heights near Cleveland.

None of the GOP candidates have opened field offices in the Dayton area.

I don't know what it is. But there's just something about seeing Michelle Obama's name followed by Santorum/Romney that brightens my day. Maybe it's because I think Michelle could win this thing by herself.

Blessed Are The Peacemakers

The paper edition of the Post that coincides with this picture explains that this Iowa couple, evangelical Christians who say they practice their faith in part through their vote for president, supports Santorum. The paper quotes the couple as saying they can't support Romney because he's Mormon, Bachmann because she's a woman, and Ron Paul "because of his anti-war views".

Because nothing says Christ follower like some good war making.

Oh Noes, don't "gut" the military!

I hope we aren't all too busy immersing ourselves in the lastest GOP candidate scuttlebutt to notice our political class's latest demonstration of budget shell games.

It started (or at least this phase of the shell game started) over the weekend in the form of the Wash Post's front page, above the fold, report complaining about how after two decades of annual hundred billion dollar surpluses from the Social Security Trust Fund, those trillions of dollars borrowed by the federal budget, are now coming due. Yes, dear media elite, the party's over. No more Social Security Trust Funds to fund your tax cuts and war budgets with.

It continues today with the lament by Robert Samuelson in the Post's op-ed section that, horrors, with all this budgetdebtdeficitspending talk in the past year, the country is in real danger of actually cutting spending....on the military. Although the Cold War ended two decades ago, the U.S. still spends more on war than any of other nation by exponential amounts.

Nevertheless, our pundit class is wringing its hands that all the debtdeficit hype it manufactured last year will potentially result in some possible reductions to the one area of the government it supports: the war establishment.

Here's Samuelson's first 'graph today: (sorry, no linky)

We shouldn’t gut defense. A central question of our budget debates is how much we allow growing spending on social programs to crowd out the military and, in effect, force the United States into a dangerous, slow-motion disarmament.

Get that? Cutting war spending is the same as "gutting" our war-making capabilities. The problem, says our pundit spokesperson, is "growing spending on social programs" that will "crowd out the military".

I see. What the debt howlers meant last year when they were fanning the flames of debtdeficit hysteria was Social Security and Medicare (and Medicaid). Well, they should have said so. At least now this key policy priority is coming into focus.

Samuelson goes on to "refute" what he believes to be a myth of war spending, that we can't afford it. Sure we can, Samuelson says, it's just all about choices.

Well then, how about we make the choice to spend more on our growing population of aged people? We can do that just as easily as we can make the "choice" to continue bloated war budgets and continue wars in faraway places.

Also, as just an aside, can we dispense with the frame of calling America's military spending, "defense" spending? It's war spending. We aren't "defending" the American homeland with any of this.

Our media really is so transparent. #OccupytheWashingtonPost.

"He doesn’t lead, and he doesn’t understand why we don’t feel led."

That's a snippet from MoDowd's NYT column today, which I invite you to read in full. Not all of the column is compelling, but this line in particular I thought was pretty spot-on.

It seems that the agreement to raise the debt ceiling has marked a sea change for how some of Obama's strongest defenders have turned disallusioned. Bloggers P.M. Carpenter and Andrew Sprung are two prime examples. The same is true for neutral or quasi-neutral media observers like Dowd and Dana Milbank, who had a like-minded disallusionment column yesterday.

There are probably more things that could be said about this, but I'll leave for that another time when my thoughts are more cohesive.

2 out of 2 Pundits agree - Bad Economy requires massive cuts to Social Security

"Sure, high unemployment sux, but since we can't do anything about that, let's go for the gusto and gut Social Security."

“The problem for Obama is that right now, the United States is either at a precipice or has fallen off it,” said David Rothkopf, a Commerce Department official in the Clinton administration. “If he is true to his commitment to rather be a good one-term president, then this is the character test. In some respects, this is the 3 a.m. phone call.”

Mr. Obama, Mr. Rothkopf argues, has to focus in the next 18 months on getting the economy back on track for the long haul, even if that means pushing for politically unpalatable budget cuts, including real — but hugely unpopular — reductions in Social Security, other entitlement programs and the military.

A longtime Republican strategist echoed Mr. Rothkopf. Charlie Black, a senior adviser to Senator John McCain when he ran for president, said Mr. Obama “has got two big problems” — the unemployment rate and the budget deficit.

“Frankly, there’s not a whole lot he can do about jobs now,” Mr. Black said. “But it would help if we got the deficit under control, and to do that, you’ve got to reform entitlements.”

For instance, he argued, Mr. Obama should tackle Social Security, leaving the system in place for those 55 and older but establishing means tests to determine benefits for those under 55. If Mr. Obama did that, Mr. Black said, “he could be a hero like Bill Clinton was when he negotiated with Trent Lott and Newt Gingrich” on the 1997 budget.

If Mr. Black’s take is correct and there is little the president can do about jobs, that is more bad news. In a New York Times/CBS News poll released last week, 62 percent of those responding said that creating jobs was the No. 1 priority, while only 29 percent said cutting the deficit should be the top goal.

"Yes, it's true, the public seems to care about jobs, but since we can't do anything about that, Obama should become a 'hero' by making sweeping changes to Social Security."

Seriously, if you're going to go all in on the one term presidency deal, maybe Obama could make a few other "unpopular" choices, like increasing taxes.

On Not Binding Future Executives and Congresses

Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers on the recently concluded debt deal:

Despite claims of spending reductions in the range of $1 trillion, the agreements reached so far are likely to have little impact on actual spending over the next decade. The deal confirms the very low levels of spending already negotiated for 2011 and 2012 and caps 2013 spending about where most would have expected this Congress to end up. Beyond that, outcomes are anyone’s guess — Congress votes on discretionary spending annually, and the current Congress cannot effectively constrain future actions. True, there are caps and sequester threats in the debt deal, but these are virtually certain to be reformulated in 2013; in other words, the fact remains that discretionary spending going forward will largely reflect the will of future Congresses.

Will Wilkinson (h/t Andrew Sullivan) also writes:

Maybe Washington's game of debt-ceiling chicken went on too long for comfort, but the resolution of the game looks a lot like a pragmatic compromise to me. Unless the bill fails, which it might, it looks like our democracy will have raised the debt ceiling, didn't really cut a thing, passed off responsibility for substantial deficit reduction to a "super committee", which will either come up with a plan that does not bind the future executive and legislature or will trip a "trigger" that won't go into effect until after the next election, and then, again, will go into effect only if the government of the future wants it to go into effect. If this is what "raw extortion" delivers, it's not very much.

I realize most of our Media Villagers apparently don't understand the political process and are busy breathlessly proclaiming the triumph of teabaggerism on the debt, but for all the fire and fury the past few weeks, nothing really much happened here.

The fact that the supposed long term cuts amount to less than that proposed by other policymakers in town has also attracted some attention:

The problem with the plan is that it’s just a step forward; it isn’t a solution. It leaves more than half of its work — finding at least $1.2 trillion in savings to avert an automatic set of cuts — to a new bipartisan Congressional committee. Even if that committee is successful, more tough work will be necessary to avoid, a few years down the road, another crisis over the deficit.

This country needs a plan to reduce our deficits by no less than $4 trillion in the next decade. It needs a plan to cut more wasteful spending in the defense and nondefense budgets than this deal does. In addition, we must address the unsustainable growth of our entitlement programs and reform the tax code to make it more competitive and more efficient.

Even if fully implemented, the debt deal's 10-year budget cuts would amount to only $2.1 trillion, which is far less than the $4 trillion proposed by Obama's own deficit commission, chaired by Bowles and Simpson.

No need to panic. Yet.

Reading my Twitter feed this weekend had me thinking the looming debt deal was a blunder and capitulation of historical and tragic proportions.

My reading of the actual deal, however, makes me more optimistic, or at least not nearly so discouraged as many of my Progressive bretheran and sisters.

First, there are no real cuts in the deal. True, about $1 trillion or so is scheduled to be lopped off the budget over the next ten years, but as I understand it, none of that will take effect in this fiscal year (FY 2011) and only $25 bill will take effect in the next FY, starting in October.

Second, the debt limit gets increased into 2013. Republicans wanted a shorter extension. They did apparently enact the McConnell scheme to allow the phony "repudiation" votes to take place in which the teabaggers can vote against a scheduled increase a few months from now, but if the House vote fails to gather a two-thirds vote, the debt limit increase will continue. This is supposed to be a real scary and threatening vote for Democrats who want to support the President. But it seems like BS to me. The debt limit has been increased into 2013. That's the deal. The rest is kabuki.

Third, future cuts, if they take place at all, will either need to survive a separate vote, or will involve significant cuts in the defense budget. Most Progressives don't seem to think much of this "trigger". But to avoid the trigger will require the passing of legislation, agree to by a sizeable number of Democrats to make very painful cuts in social spending. Or the Republicans will need to pass separate legislation somehow sparing the Pentagon from the cuts agreed to in this bill. The default, no pun intended, option is to do nothing. And the do-nothing option of allowing Pentagon cuts to go through, would be better for Progressives. Conservatives can override this, but it won't be nearly as easy as simply holding the debt limit hostage and risking default. Inaction this time won't be on their side.

Finally, to reiterate previous points, there's nothing in this bill that can't be undone by future Congresses. The only sure element in the bill is the debt limit increase.

The real battles lie ahead with the "trigger" and the expiration of the Bush tax cuts. A tax deal as a part of the compromise might have generated far less revenue then the expiration of the Bush tax cuts will. Again, Progressives aren't confident the Bush tax cuts will be allowed to expire. I'm not so sure. The onus will be on Conservatives to pass a bill extending them, while having to explain the tax cuts impact on the debt they've just been complaining about, or they will need to agree to a tax reform bill of some kind to replace them. And if they can't do that, and nothing gets done, the tax cuts expire.

Conservatives have a harder road ahead, as hard as that may be to believe.

Today in Consumer Protection

Michelle Singletary and Faiz Shakir sound off on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and its nominee.

Singletary rightly regrets Obama's declining to name Elizabeth Warren to the post, while Shakir wants the WH, in the face of Republican obstruction, to let this, and perhaps other, nominees speak for themselves and the policies they'd advocate:

[CFPB nominee] Cordray could face the same ignominious fate. A toxic partisan climate, amplified by a round-the-clock news cycle, demands a new strategy.

The White House should take the muzzle off its nominees. Let them talk to the press over and over again to tout their accomplishments. Allow them to publicly defend their records, as they are best and uniquely qualified to do.

By silencing a nominee, the administration gives its critics the opportunity to spout unfounded concerns about the nominee’s fitness to serve. The conversation quickly descends from one about the individual’s merit to meritless attacks on his or her character or qualifications.

The White House must be willing to cede a degree of control over its day-to-day messaging in favor of the greater victory of getting its nominees passed and its policies enacted. The administration shouldn’t be turning down all press requests, but should instead be picking and choosing the venues that can give the nominee a fair and reasonable hearing.