Tag Archives: Barack Obama

Obama and the super-rich

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A couple days on the Internet is a lifetime anywhere else, and so I realize that Chrystia Freeland’s phenomenal New Yorker piece “Super-Rich Irony” has already been read, digested, and analyzed by countless cybernetizens for several days now. That said, it is, I think, such a crucial article that I felt the need to post something about it as well. “Super-Rich Irony” demonstrates just how fragile a grip on reality the wealthiest among us have, and the implications of this collective delusion are enormous.

Here’s one particularly illuminating passage:

Although he voted for McCain in 2008, Cooperman was not compelled to enter the political debate until June, 2011, when he saw the President appear on TV during the debt-ceiling battle. Obama urged America’s “millionaires and billionaires” to pay their fair share, pointing out that they were doing well at a time when both the American middle class and the American federal treasury were under pressure. “If you are a wealthy C.E.O. or hedge-fund manager in America right now, your taxes are lower than they have ever been. They are lower than they have been since the nineteen-fifties,” the President said. “You can still ride on your corporate jet. You’re just going to have to pay a little more.”

Cooperman regarded the comments as a declaration of class warfare, and began to criticize Obama publicly. In September, at a CNBC conference in New York, he compared Hitler’s rise to power with Obama’s ascent to the Presidency, citing disaffected majorities in both countries who elected inexperienced leaders.

Later on, a helpful summation of the über-wealthy’s view of Obama:

The President, in Cooperman’s view, draws political support from those who are dependent on government. Last October, in a question-and-answer session at a Thomson Reuters event, Cooperman said, “Our problem, frankly, is as long as the President remains anti-wealth, anti-business, anti-energy, anti-private-aviation, he will never get the business community behind him. The problem and the complication is the forty or fifty per cent of the country on the dole that support him.”

The full article is worth a careful read. But the sheer audacity of these accusations is breathtaking. Here’s Leon Cooperman, a man who makes his money speculating on the financial markets, discussing Obama’s lack of qualifications:

Cooperman’s pride in his work ethic is one source of his disdain for Obama. “When he ran for President, he’d never worked a day in his life. Never held a job,” he said. Obama had, of course, worked—as a business researcher, a community organizer, a law professor, and an attorney at a law firm, not to mention an Illinois state legislator and a U.S. senator, before being elected President. But Cooperman was unimpressed. “He went into government service right out of Harvard,” he said. “He never made payroll. He’s never built anything.”

Again, Cooperman runs a hedge fund. The guy’s enormous net worth has been accumulated via a series of (mostly lucky) life and financial decisions that put him in the right place at the right time. This is a point Freeland makes very well:

Between 1991, when Cooperman founded Omega, and the 2008 financial crisis was the best time in history to make a fortune in finance. Cooperman’s partners who stayed behind at Goldman Sachs are hardly paupers—and those who stuck around for the 1999 I.P.O. are probably multimillionaires—but the real windfalls on Wall Street have been made by the financiers who founded their own investment firms in the period that Cooperman did.

Cooperman was lucky enough to study at Columbia Business School, then he jumped to Goldman Sachs and eventually became a partner there before founding Omega. Was it hard work? I’m sure. Community organizing is also hard work. Making it as an elected official is enormously hard work. So is working at a law firm and teaching at a law school. All of these positions, in fact, have at least as much of a direct and tangible impact on people’s lives as moving futures contracts on a trading floor does.

So to hear Obama’s work qualifications disparaged by Cooperman — many of whose wealthy peers have collectively pillaged the American economy, been bailed out by the very victims of their recklessness, and have continued onward without showing remorse and (more devastatingly) without serving prison terms for the blatant fraud they perpetrated on their clients — should enrage any thinking American. To hear Cooperman tell it, the rich have quietly suffered untold abuse and recriminations under Obama’s Third Reich. And yet, what is this?

His Administration supported the seven-hundred-billion-dollar tarp rescue package for Wall Street, and resisted calls from the Nobel Prize winners Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, and others on the left, to nationalize the big banks in exchange for that largesse. At the end of September, the S. & P. 500, the benchmark U.S. stock index, had rebounded to just 6.9 per cent below its all-time pre-crisis high, on October 9, 2007. The economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty have found that ninety-three per cent of the gains during the 2009-10 recovery went to the top one per cent of earners. Those seated around the table at dinner with Al Gore had done even better: the top 0.01 per cent captured thirty-seven per cent of the total recovery pie, with a rebound in their incomes of more than twenty per cent, which amounted to an additional $4.2 million each.

When I hear the term “class warfare,” I think of men like Leon Cooperman: hallucinating by the bright lights of their own tainted, zero-sum “successes,” they bemoan the centrist policies of the president whose meek statements urging the rich to “pay their fair share” may be the last, best hope of a society lurching towards banana republicanism. And when that breaking point arrives, the very rich will fall alongside everyone else. They’ll have no one to blame but themselves.

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A sign of just how far the American right has drifted

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David Brooks, the eminent New York Times columnist and leading conservative intellectual, dreams up a hypothetical Mitt Romney debate monologue:

The second wicked problem the next president will face is sluggish growth. I assume you know that everything President Obama and I have been saying on this subject has been total garbage. Presidents and governors don’t “create jobs.” We don’t have the ability to “grow the economy.” There’s no magic lever.

Instead, an administration makes a thousand small decisions, each of which subtly adds to or detracts from a positive growth environment. The Obama administration, which is either hostile to or aloof from business, has made a thousand tax, regulatory and spending decisions that are biased away from growth and biased toward other priorities. American competitiveness has fallen in each of the past four years, according to the World Economic Forum. Medical device makers, for example, are being chased overseas. The economy in 2012 is worse than the economy in 2011. That’s inexcusable.

If you’re wondering why that second-to-last sentence sounds wrong, it’s because it is. I suppose this was just Brooks’ attempt to channel Romney’s campaign, which will not be “dictated by fact-checkers.” Forgive me for thinking the Times still was.

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Why (not) to vote for Obama

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As the election approaches, I’ve found myself waffling among various choices:

  • voting to re-elect President Obama
  • voting “none of the above”
  • voting “Foreign Policy: Ron Paul; Economic Policy: Paul Krugman; Social Policy: Barney Frank”
  • (lastly, voting for Tom Brady)

You’ll notice “vote for Romney” is not present anywhere on that list. Strange as this may sound, during the Republican primaries, I honestly believed the whole “Romney is out of touch with the average voter” meme was simply on-point messaging from a well-oiled Democratic PR machine. But it turned out that the spin was a lot closer to the truth than I’d initially imagined (either that or the Democratic PR team is even better than I’d thought). I wouldn’t have voted for him anyway, as I think Obama’s a far better choice. But my “unfavorable” (to borrow polling terminology) impression of him has greatly increased in recent months.

That said, I hardly think Obama has come out smelling like roses. The Atlantic recently published an essay by Conor Friedersdorf (currently the most popular article on its site) titled “Why I Refuse to Vote for Barack Obama.” In it, Friedersdorf identifies three key disappointments in the Obama administration: drone strikes in Pakistan, extrajudicial assassinations of American citizens, and a conflict in Libya that was not approved by Congress:

In different ways, each of these transgressions run contrary to candidate Obama’s 2008 campaign. (To cite just one more example among many, Obama has done more than any modern executive to wage war on whistleblowers. In fact, under Obama, Bush-era lawbreakers, including literal torturers, have been subject to fewer and less draconian attempts at punishment them than some of the people who conscientiously came forward to report on their misdeeds.) Obama ran in the proud American tradition of reformers taking office when wartime excesses threatened to permanently change the nature of the country. But instead of ending those excesses, protecting civil liberties, rolling back executive power, and reasserting core American values, Obama acted contrary to his mandate. The particulars of his actions are disqualifying in themselves. But taken together, they put us on a course where policies Democrats once viewed as radical post-9/11 excesses are made permanent parts of American life.

There is a candidate on the ballot in at least 47 states, and probably in all 50, who regularly speaks out against that post-9/11 trend, and all the individual policies that compose it. His name is Gary Johnson, and he won’t win. I am supporting him because he ought to. Liberals and progressives care so little about having critiques of the aforementioned policies aired that vanishingly few will even urge that he be included in the upcoming presidential debates. If I vote, it will be for Johnson. What about the assertion that Romney will be even worse than Obama has been on these issues? It is quite possible, though not nearly as inevitable as Democrats seem to think. It isn’t as though they accurately predicted the abysmal behavior of Obama during his first term, after all. And how do you get worse than having set a precedent for the extrajudicial assassination of American citizens? By actually carrying out such a killing? Obama did that too. Would Romney? I honestly don’t know. I can imagine he’d kill more Americans without trial and in secret, or that he wouldn’t kill any. I can imagine that he’d kill more innocent Pakistani kids or fewer. His rhetoric suggests he would be worse. I agree with that. Then again, Romney revels in bellicosity; Obama soothes with rhetoric and kills people in secret.

To hell with them both.

I not only sympathize with Friedersdorf’s thesis. I am nearly convinced by it. In fact, maybe I already am. (I’m still not sure how I’ll vote, although I’m fairly certain it won’t be for Tom Brady.) But I recently fell upon an equally arresting argument for the opposite position, and from the unlikeliest of sources: comedian and Daily Show correspondent John Hodgman (perhaps best known for playing the clunky PC in those then-ubiquitous “I’m a Mac” commercials).

On a web site called 90 Days, 90 Reasons, which describes its mission as compelling “a wide range of cultural figures to explain why they’re voting for Obama in 2012, in the hopes that this might re-inspire the grassroots army that got Obama elected in the first place,” Hodgman does so in hilarious yet eloquent fashion:

Like many, I first heard of Barack Obama when he spoke at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Though I lived at that time on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, I was listening to him on the radio at our summer house in the five college area of Western Massachusetts. I say this to set the scene, and also to re-assert my credentials as an elite, affluent, northeastern liberal, and thus, at that time, a non-American. In case you had forgotten.

Listening to Obama, I realized I agreed with him on most issues, but mostly I was electrified by the premise of the speech, which was essentially that we are all part of the same country, but which I took to mean “people in blue states are actual humans as well.” There weren’t many people saying this in 2004. Not even many Democrats. And while I was instantly thralled by this on a purely selfish level, I also liked that the sentiment flowed in reverse as well. I have disagreements with, but no need to demonize, conservative America, as indeed many of them are my family, even right here in supposedly liberal Massachusetts. We are all one, he said in 2004, and I was so excited. This guy is going to lose so BEAUTIFULLY, I thought.

But it didn’t happen that way. I can place the moment I knew I was wrong. In July of 2008, I was driving past the empty hole where the new World Trade Center had STILL not been built, and I heard on the radio (I LOVE PUBLIC RADIO, REMEMBER) that Obama had reversed his position on the update of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and would agree with a compromise that would grant telecom companies immunity from prosecution for cooperating with warrantless wiretaps. I had to look all that up, because I honestly forgot what the specific issue was at the time. All I remember was that knife twist in my gut of deep disappointment. I learned then that Obama was going to disappoint; that his ideals were tempered by a kind of rough pragmatism; and that he would be willing to personally alienate ME. ME OF ALL PEOPLE. The one person who knew best about how to run a presidential campaign and ranked Obama’s performance as a candidate solely upon his adherence to a few very specific positions that I cared most about. HOW COULD HE WIN THIS ELECTION WITHOUT ME? And then I realized: Oh. How can he win the election WITH an asshole like me?

Now that I’ve looked it up, I still disagree with his decision on the FISA update. But what I remember is this: not only would I have to get used to that knife twist of disappointment, I would have to learn to enjoy it. Because that’s the moment that I realized that Obama actually intended to win…

And of course, the cost of losing is very high. As a supporter of health care reform, same sex marriage, women’s rights, tax fairness, a domestic policy responsive to the realities of the present day as opposed to toxic nostalgia, and an international policy that punishes our enemies more than it rewards our private contractors, I may not always agree with the speed or execution of Obama’s policies. But I know that a loss this year would not be seen as a noble failure. It would be seen as a repudiation of these values for a long time to come. Losses transform ideals into irrelevant fantasy, and idealists into weepy self-pitiers, like old-school Red Sox fans and Tea Partiers and people who really believe some day that Firefly might come back.

There’s more, of course, and it’s definitely worth reading the whole thing. As for me, I remain undecided but, like the U.S. as a whole, leaning Obama.

“Unskewed” polling?

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In light of recent attempts by Republicans to soften the blow of polling showing a solid Obama lead (attempts which have been widely mocked), I highly recommend this very detailed analysis by Mark Blumenthal from three months ago on how polling methodologies differ, and why these differences are so crucial this election year:

As a Pew Research Center study recently demonstrated, random-sample surveys continue to provide accurate data on most measures — but only when their samples of telephone numbers include both landline and mobile phones, and only when the completed interviews are weighted to match the demographic composition of the population. That means the weighting procedures that pollsters use are critical to producing accurate results.

The need to weight accurately by race and ancestry is particularly significant when it comes to evaluating the contest between Obama and Romney. As Gallup itself reported in early May, Romney led Obama among non-Hispanic white voters by 54 to 37 percent, while the president had the support of more than three-quarters of non-white registered voters (77 percent). Obama’s support among African Americans on Gallup’s tracking poll stood at 90 percent.

That gap makes the way pollsters account for race hugely important. When pollsters weight their samples to match population demographics, every percentage point increase in black representation translates into a nearly one-point improvement in Obama’s margin against Romney. The difference of just a few percentage points in the non-white composition of a poll can produce a significant skew in its horse race results.

Interestingly, many analysts — Andrew Sullivan, perhaps most notably — are very skeptical of Rasmussen’s polls, which consistently show much better numbers for Romney. Aaron Blake at The Fix has more on the firm’s historical record:

Rasmussen has had both good years and bad years, according to various pollster ratings. While its track record was pretty good in the middle of last decade (2004 and 2006) and average in 2008, after the 2010 election the New York Times’ Nate Silver labeled Rasmussen “biased and inaccurate.” Silver calculated that Rasmussen missed the final margin of the races it polled in the 2010 midterms by an average of 5.8 percentage points.

But Republicans note that Rasmussen did just fine in the last presidential race in 2008. They also note that Gallup, while its top-line number is different from Rasmussen, has shown similar movement in its daily tracking poll in recent days.

“Rasmussen’s track record (’08 and ’10) makes it a very credible polling source in this year’s election,” Romney pollster Neil Newhouse told The Fix in an e-mail.

If there continues to be a disparity between Rasmussen and other polls, expect to hear plenty more about Rasmussen’s numbers — along with the continuing debate about how reliable they are.

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“Will Romney go for the Hail Mary in the debates?” and other thoughts

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Almost all the recent polling updates are looking bad for Mitt Romney. As the election inches ever nearer — only 46 days away now — the debates are looking like the last, best chance for him to pull even with Barack Obama — barring some sort of cataclysmic presidential gaffe or paradigm-shifting world event, although I can’t really imagine many international affairs crises that could pull the polls in Romney’s favor these days.

What this means is that Romney, who’s been preparing for the debates by using Rob Portman as a stand-in for Obama, is under enormous pressure to do some serious damage right from the start of the first presidential debate. And this brings me to yesterday evening’s Massachusetts senatorial debate between the incumbent Republican Scott Brown and Democratic challenger Elizabeth Warren.

Brown, who recent polls have shown trailing Warren, opened up with a sharp attack on Warren’s professed Native American roots, which were the subject of much controversy earlier this year. The intensity and repetitive nature of Brown’s accusations — especially contrasted to his “nice guy” persona — raise the specter of a campaign running in just-short-of-panic mode: as some noted, his internal polls may be showing a dire situation. Otherwise, his outburst would have been out of step with the tenor usually used in such an apparently close race.

And speaking of that debate — I only watched the first third or so, and was surprised at how ill-prepared and out of breath Brown looked — I couldn’t help but appreciate this pre-debate message from the debate’s moderator, the healthily mustachioed Jon Keller of WBZ Boston:

I will be asking each candidate to respond to the same question, but unless they totally ignore the actual question, I won’t be cross-examining them. That will be up to their opponent.

And it will be up to you to determine how well or poorly each candidate handled the question, how evasive they were or weren’t.

Sometimes when I see the political garbage some voters gladly swallow like it was hearty beef stew, I wonder at their ability to question authority and think for themselves.

But I digress. Going back to Romney, his significant polling deficits — while concerning for him — should serve as a major red flag to Obama’s debate prep team as well. Losing by several percentage points this late in the campaign season means Romney is desperate for a game-changer, and the only events he has significant control over are the debates. A reasonably solid but otherwise unmemorable performance will likely not tip the scales enough to get him to the Promised Land, so he’ll have to come out swinging.

Paradoxically, this leaves Obama in a somewhat vulnerable position. While his mandate in the debates will be to maintain a calm, presidential aura and avoid any costly gaffes, he’ll have to be ready for a virtually infinite number of potential surprises Romney might spring on him. The key for Romney’s camp will be to pick a line of attack that A) catches Obama off-guard and B) comes off as a credible line of attack and not desperate flailing. It’s going to be a fine line, which should make what might otherwise be a relatively boring 90 minutes or two hours of platitudes into something far more interesting.

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Turncoats, man your stations

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Harvard Law professor Cass Sunstein makes the point that, to convince ideologically rigid audiences of a fact, it is less important how persuasive the argument is and more important who is the one making it:

People tend to dismiss information that would falsify their convictions. But they may reconsider if the information comes from a source they cannot dismiss. People are most likely to find a source credible if they closely identify with it or begin in essential agreement with it. In such cases, their reaction is not, “how predictable and uninformative that someone like that would think something so evil and foolish,” but instead, “if someone like that disagrees with me, maybe I had better rethink.”

Our initial convictions are more apt to be shaken if it’s not easy to dismiss the source as biased, confused, self-interested or simply mistaken. This is one reason that seemingly irrelevant characteristics, like appearance, or taste in food and drink, can have a big impact on credibility. Such characteristics can suggest that the validators are in fact surprising — that they are “like” the people to whom they are speaking.

It follows that turncoats, real or apparent, can be immensely persuasive. If civil rights leaders oppose affirmative action, or if well-known climate change skeptics say that they were wrong, people are more likely to change their views.

I’m skeptical as to what extent this theory applies to ethnic, racial, and sexual minorities who have conservative or otherwise unorthodox ideologies for their groups, however. It seems the term “self-hating [insert minority group here: Jew, black, gay, etc.]” is very quickly applied to various targets by many critics in order to diminish the inevitable megaphone effect of the anomalous spokesman or spokeswoman. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas comes immediately to mind, but countless other examples exist as well: Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky, members of GOProud, and even Barack Obama, to name a few.

Perhaps we’ve crossed some invisible line as a nation, and even these helpful “turncoats” can no longer inspire our trust. They certainly don’t persuade me much. I’m a little unclear as to whether this says more about me, or more about the turncoats.

Netanyahu’s bullying, and the pushback

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Yesterday’s New York Times editorialized against Benjamin Netanyahu’s serial arrogance and undermining of American policy:

Yet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel is trying to browbeat President Obama into a pre-emptive strike. OnTuesday, he demanded that the United States set a red line for military action and said those who refuse “don’t have a moral right to place a red light before Israel.” Later, Mr. Obama telephoned him and rejected the appeal. On Friday, Mr. Netanyahu suggested in an interview that Israel cannot entirely rely on the United States to act against Iran’s program.

Leaders need flexibility and ambiguity, not just hard and fast red lines. And it is dangerous for Mr. Netanyahu to try to push the president into a corner publicly and raise questions about Washington. Is that really the message he wants to send to Tehran?

Yet here was the sentence that stood out to me the most:

But 70 percent of Americans oppose a unilateral strike on Iran, according to a new poll by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and 59 percent said if Israel bombs Iran and ignites a war, the United States should not come to its ally’s defense.

That second half is truly remarkable. I took a look at the study, which had several interesting nuggets:

In addition, there is no clear majority support for using U.S. troops to defend Israel if it were attacked by its neighbors: as in 2010, Americans are essentially split down the middle…

In the hypothetical situation in which Israel were to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, Iran were to retaliate against Israel, and the two were to go to war, only 38 percent say the United States should bring its military forces into the war on the side of Israel. A majority (59%) says it should not.

Color me surprised that, since 2010, Americans were only split on whether to militarily support Israel even if it were attacked first. Perhaps we’re less of a warmongering population than our Republican elected officials would have us believe. Which, well, we kinda already knew anyway.

Equally interesting is that, finally (it certainly took long enough), the administration is pushing back. Not only has Obama decided not to meet with Netanyahu this month when he visits the U.S. for the UN General Assembly meetings, but — in a very rare turn of events — a U.S. senator (Barbara Boxer, D-CA) has authored an open letter harshly condemning Netanyahu’s meddling in American foreign policy:

In light of this, I am stunned by the remarks that you made this week regarding U.S. support for Israel. Are you suggesting that the United States is not Israel’s closest ally and does not stand by Israel? Are you saying that Israel, under President Obama, has not received more in annual security assistance from the United States than at any time in its history, including for the Iron Dome Missile Defense System?

As other Israelis have said, it appears that you have injected politics into one of the most profound security challenges of our time – Iran’s illicit pursuit of nuclear weapons.

I urge you to step back and clarify your remarks so that the world sees that there is no daylight between the United States and Israel. As you personally stated during an appearance with President Obama in March, “We are you, and you are us. We’re together. So if there’s one thing that stands out clearly in the Middle East today, it’s that Israel and America stand together.”

Thank you for that statement. I am hoping to hear that statement again.

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What do you do when your prime minister is an extremist?

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From David Remnick at the New Yorker:

It is hard to overestimate the risks that Benjamin Netanyahu poses to the future of his own country. As Prime Minister, he has done more than any other political figure to embolden and elevate the reactionary forces in Israel, to eliminate the dwindling possibility of a just settlement with the Palestinians, and to isolate his country on the world diplomatic stage. Now Netanyahu seems determined, more than ever, to alienate the President of the United States and, as an ally of Mitt Romney’s campaign, to make himself a factor in the 2012 election—one no less pivotal than the most super Super PAC. “Who are you trying to replace?” the opposition leader, Shaul Mofaz, asked of Netanyahu in the Knesset on Wednesday. “The Administration in Washington or that in Tehran?”

(Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for the heads-up.)

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