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Obama Wasn’t a Silver Bullet, and Neither Is Hillary Clinton

by MarilynFortney Posted on July 2, 2014

Mother Jones

Noam Scheiber has a piece in the current issue of the New Republic about Hillary Clinton’s imminent takeover of the Democratic Party, and today Ezra Klein interviewed him about it. Klein was especially interested in the argument that Obama’s 2008 supporters were so disillusioned by Obama’s failure to change Washington that they’re now eager to support an old-school politico like Hillary. Here’s Scheiber:

Back in 2008, Hillary Clinton made this kind of snide, but in retrospect apt, critique of Obama where she said that Obama thinks he’ll get to Washington and the heavens will part and the Republicans will cooperate, but that just won’t happen. So I asked some of these Obama supporters if she was right. And a lot of these people remembered those comments and being annoyed by them. But they all said she was actually a bit right. We were a bit naive then, they said. People used the word naive a lot in these conversations.

I’m not sure I’ve ever fully fessed up to this, so this is as good a time as any. For years, I really didn’t believe the conservative snark about how Obama supporters all thought he would descend on Washington like a god-king and miraculously turn us into a post-racial, post-partisan, post-political country. Kumbaya! The reason I didn’t believe it was that it never struck me as even remotely plausible. Did Obama give soaring speeches? Sure, he’s a politician. Did he promise to change the way Washington works? Sure, he’s a politician. Did he promise to pass historic legislation in dozens of different areas? Sure, he’s a politician.

It just never occurred to me that anyone took this stuff seriously. It’s a presidential campaign! Of course he’s promising a chicken in every pot. That’s what presidential candidates do. I believed then, and still believe now, that Obama is basically a mainstream Democrat who’s cautious, pragmatic, technocratic, and incremental. In fact, that seemed so obvious to me that I never really credited the idea that anyone could seriously see him any differently.

Well, I guess that was naive on my part. By now, the evidence is clear that millions of Obama voters really believed all that boilerplate rhetoric. Naturally, then, they’re bitterly disappointed at the real-world Obama. Well, I’m disappointed in some ways too—mostly in the areas of foreign policy and national security—but I continue to think he’s a pretty good president because my expectations were tempered to begin with.

Nor do I think Hillary would have done any better. Probably worse, I’d say. After all, once he was in office, it’s not as if Obama acted like he believed his campaign-trail rhetoric. He hired a bunch of pretty ordinary staffers and got to work passing pretty ordinary legislation. Is the theory here that Hillary would have figured out some magical points of leverage that Obama didn’t? That she would have done better because Republicans like her more than Obama? Please.

I have pretty mixed feelings about a Hillary Clinton candidacy. On the one hand, I’ve long admired her obviously sincere dedication to public service in the face of abuse that would destroy a weaker person. On the other hand, another Clinton? This is no fault of hers, but I’m not sure I’m any more excited about that than I am about the prospect of another Bush. Maybe it’s time to move on.

Either way, though, I sure hope all those folks who are disappointed by Obama don’t think that Hillary is some sort of silver bullet either. If she runs and wins, she’ll be dealing with exactly the same kind of Republican obstructionism as Obama—and she’ll have just as much trouble getting anything done.

If disappointed Dems really want to change things, they have only one option: figure out a way to take back Congress in 2016. That’s it. Until and unless that happens, George Washington himself wouldn’t be any more effective than Obama has been.

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Obama Wasn’t a Silver Bullet, and Neither Is Hillary Clinton

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Michael Bay: Hollywood’s Conservative Hero?

by Will7881iwjsf Posted on June 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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Director Michael Bay is one of the most successful—if critically detested—filmmakers of the past 30 years. He is worth $400 million. He lives the life of a consummate playboy. His explosion-heavy action films (The Rock, Armageddon, the Bad Boys movies, the Transformers flicks, etc.) have grossed over $4.5 billion worldwide. His new movie, Transformers: Age of Extinction (released on Friday), is also expected to make all the money.

But what about his politics?

When I talked to the 49-year-old director last year, he demurred on the question of whether he leans right or left: “Yes, I am a political person, and I have my views about America,” Bay told me. “I’m very proud of my country; obviously it’s going through a lot of turmoil, and we have a very ineffectual government… It doesn’t matter at all whether I’m liberal or conservative—it’s not a part of what I do. I don’t feel the need to go out and tell people what to believe politically.”

Bay is obviously more private about his politics than, say, mega-producer Jerry Bruckheimer, who worked with Bay on some of his biggest hits and is one of liberal Hollywood’s top conservatives. You won’t find much at all about Bay’s politics online or in his past statements, and a search of a public campaign finance records database turned up nothing.

However, Bay did tell me that, though he doesn’t receive a writing credit, he works closely with his screenwriters and will tweak the scripts as he sees fit. And there just so happen to be many hints of political conservatism in his movies. Out of the 11 movies Bay has directed, the one truly left-wing outlier is The Rock (1996), starring Nicolas Cage and Sean Connery. The action film depicts the blowback from illegal American covert operations overseas, and is critical of gun-toting “patriotism”; it was also co-written by West Wing creator (and diehard liberal) Aaron Sorkin, so there’s that.

But much of Bay’s filmography is loaded with political content and attitudes that your average (stereotypical?) American conservative can totally get behind. In Armageddon (1998), a NASA-recruited team of blue-collar oil-drillers agree to embark on a dangerous mission to blow up an asteroid and save mankind—on the condition that they never have to pay taxes again.

In Bad Boys II (2003), the film’s rowdy-cop heroes illegally invade (and destroy large chunks of) communist Cuba, in the name of fighting the international drug war. The subsequent car chase concludes in front of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, where a conveniently placed mine tears apart the body of the psychotic Cuban drug lord:

And Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009), starring Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox, easily doubles as a critique of the Obama administration’s foreign policy. Seriously. In this fictional Transformers universe, Barack Obama is identified as the president of the United States. (George W. Bush appears briefly in the first Transformers, where he orders some Ding Dongs on Air Force One.) President Obama orders the American armed forces to try to engage in diplomacy with the Decepticons (the bad-guy alien robots) and to suspend cooperation with the Autobots (the good-guy alien robots). The Obama administration also agrees to hand Sam Witwicky (LaBeouf) over to the Decepticons—the kind of act of shameful appeasement that the president’s real-life conservative critics so often accuse him of perpetrating.

Fortunately, brave members of the US military disobey these orders (a mutiny, essentially), and the day is saved! (Bay loves the US military, and also patriotism, very much so.)

“Optimus Prime truly cares about the future of the human race, unlike the Obama administration, which Bay represents as so prissy and antiwar it just wants the alien robots off the planet,” Mary Pols wrote for Time in 2009. “Bay’s Obama would probably drive his Prius over Optimus if he had the chance.” According to Bay, the reason Obama is in the film is because he once bumped into him—back when he was 2008 presidential candidate Obama—in a Las Vegas airport. Upon meeting, Bay said a couple of nice things to the future president, and Obama in turn complimented Bay by calling him a “big-ass director.”

This exchange was apparently enough to make the director want to turn the Democratic politician into a movie character. Here’s video of Bay recalling their encounter:

And in the new Transformers installment, Mark Wahlberg‘s tough-talking character, whose family property is cluttered with bold American flags, warns despotic, anti-Autobot government agents about “messing with people from Texas.” To be fair, the film can also be interpreted as a shallow pro-immigration-reform robot movie.

Regardless of how Michael Bay views Obama, or Bush, or the Democratic Party, or the Republican Party, or the tea party, his patriotic views may have been best captured in a line delivered by Wahlberg in Bay’s 2013 crime film Pain & Gain: “When it started, America was just a handful of scrawny colonies. Now, it’s the most buff, pumped-up country on the planet. That’s pretty rad.”

As for making public political statements, again, don’t hold your breath. If Bay is going to make a stand, he is way more likely to do so out of his love for animals than any political conviction. In late 2010, Bay offered a $50,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and successful prosecution of a woman who threw puppies into a river. Bay is a dog lover who lives with two gigantic English mastiffs named Grace (after actress Liv Tyler’s Armageddon character) and Bonecrusher (after a Decepticon).

Looking out for puppies. That enjoys bipartisan support, right?

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Michael Bay: Hollywood’s Conservative Hero?

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Race and Republicans in Mississippi’s Senate Primary

by LaneGanttl Posted on June 25, 2014

Mother Jones

In yesterday’s primary election in Mississippi, incumbent Thad Cochran appealed to black voters in his race against Chris McDaniel. This is from a New York Times companion piece to their main reporting on the election:

The former mayor of Belzoni, an early focal point of the civil rights movement was not surprised by African-Americans’ enthusiasm for Mr. Cochran. The returns showed that Humphreys County, a predominantly African-American area, went for the senator, 811 to 214. “Cochran has been very responsive to the community, to the constituency and the state regardless of race,” he said.

….Race relations have improved over the last 45 years, and African-Americans made a coordinated effort to keep Mr. Cochran in office out of concern that his challenger, Chris McDaniel, a Tea Party favorite, would be less inclusive.

McDaniels is crying foul because he thinks Cochran won with the help of liberal Democratic voters—as he’s allowed to do in Mississippi’s open primary system. Ed Kilgore is unimpressed:

The kvetching from the Right last night sounded an awful lot like southern seggies during the civil rights era complaning about “The Bloc Vote”….For all the talk last night of “liberal Democrats” being allowed to determine a Republican primary, there’s actually no way to know the partisan or ideological identity of voters in a state with no party registration (as David Nir pointedly asked this morning, why hasn’t Chris McDaniel sponsored a bill to change that in his years in the state legislature?). So what these birds are really complaining about is black participation in a “white primary.” This is certainly not an argument consistent with broadening the appeal of the GOP or the conservative movement.

I don’t doubt for a second that race played a role here, but I think this is a mite unfair. In 2012, Mississippi blacks voted for Barack Obama over Mitt Romney by 96-4 percent. In 2008, they voted for Democrat Ronnie Musgrove over Republican Roger Wicker 92-8 percent and for Democrat Erik Fleming over Thad Cochran 94-6 percent. (Mississippi had two senate races that year.)

Cochran did nothing wrong in yesterday’s election, and if blacks showed up to support him because they disliked McDaniels’ racially-charged past, that’s democracy for you. Still, I think it’s pretty clear that most of these voters really were Democrats. Race may be an underlying motivation for the complaints from McDaniels’ supporters, but conservative dislike of Democrats voting in a Republican primary is also a motivation. (And, in my view, a legitimate one. I’m not a fan of open primaries.)

That said, if tea party types want to avoid accusations of racism, they should steer clear of things like loudly announcing an Election Day program to send teams of “poll watchers” to majority black precincts. Especially in a state with a history like Mississippi’s, it’s pretty hard to interpret that as anything other than a deliberate racial provocation.

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Race and Republicans in Mississippi’s Senate Primary

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This Leading GOP Congressional Candidate Insists We Found Saddam’s WMD Program

by PenniK00bpqmwan Posted on June 23, 2014

Mother Jones

Steve Russell’s political career has largely been propelled by his Iraq War heroics. The retired Army Lt. Col., who’s vying in Tuesday’s Republican primary to run for the seat being vacated Rep. James Lankford (R-Okla.), led the battalion that hunted down and captured Saddam Hussein. After returning to civilian life, he barnstormed the country in support of a troop surge. He has also been one of the leading voices advancing the discredited claim that Iraq possessed an active weapons of mass destruction program at the time of the US invasion in 2003.

“He Saddam Hussein was trying to develop mass destructive weapons to include nuclear weapons,” Russell said in a 2012 speech. “The record is there. We found evidence of it even in Iraq. That’s a big misconception. Oh, there was no WMD, there was no nuclear program. That is false… They were clearly on a path to develop destructive weapons.” Russell, a former Oklahoma state senator, also made the dubious claim during this speech that the rationale for invading Iraq had little if anything to do with WMDs. “Was that the only basis for going in? No. It never was. It was never about WMD. It was about what right does one man have to defy the entire world.”

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This Leading GOP Congressional Candidate Insists We Found Saddam’s WMD Program

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It’s Time to Acknowledge Reality: Obamacare is Working Pretty Well

by JulianaWillifor Posted on June 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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A new paper concludes that “rate shock” under Obamacare has been generally more modest than we thought:

Using data from the Current Population Survey, we find that the average prices increased by 14 to 28 percent, with similar changes in California and the federal exchange states; we attribute the increase primarily to higher premiums in exchanges associated with insurer expectations of a higher risk population being enrolled.

This doesn’t take into account federal subsidies, which would lower this number even further. What’s more, rates most likely would have gone up about 10 percent even if Obamacare had never existed. Taken together, this suggests that the average premium increase thanks to Obamacare has been very small. And of course, that small increase buys you a policy that in most cases is considerably more robust than older policies.

In related news, HHS reports that people who qualify for tax credits are paying an average of $82 per month for their policies. This is roughly a fourth of what they’d pay without subsidies. The chart on the right shows how this breaks down: more than two-thirds of those who qualify for subsidies are paying less than $100 per month. Fewer than 20 percent are paying more than $150. In a nutshell, then, we now know that (a) the system works, (b) enrollment targets were largely met, and (c) health insurance under Obamacare is pretty affordable. Matt Yglesias explains what this means:

These three factors together should end the phony war over Obamacare and let the real debate begin — not the debate over whether the program “works” but the debate over whether economic resources should be devoted to providing health insurance to people at the bottom of the income distribution or to providing tax cuts to people at the top.

….Obamacare is a large-scale effort to improve living standards for people in the bottom half of the income distribution by giving them additional economic resources. One of America’s political parties doesn’t like that idea in any non-health context and they don’t like it for health care either. They think the money it costs to provide those subsidies should be taken away, and it should be given to high-income households in the form of tax cuts.

This is an excellent and important policy debate to have. One of the great ideological issues not just of our time and place, but of democratic politics across eras and countries. Should economic resources be distributed more equally or less equally?

Yep. It’s time to stop arguing over minutiae. Fundamentally, Obamacare “works.” It’s not perfect, but after nine months we can now say that it does indeed provide health coverage to the poor and the working-class in a reasonably efficient manner, and it does this largely by a combination of taxing and/or reducing payments to the relatively well off.

I think this is a good idea. Republicans don’t. But this, rather than the cacophony of nonsense we’ve been subjected to over the past several years, is what we should be arguing about.

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It’s Time to Acknowledge Reality: Obamacare is Working Pretty Well

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Retail Politics: Hillary Clinton Heads to Costco, Skips Walmart on Latest Book Tour

by Juli34Bfuc Posted on June 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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How times change. This Saturday Hillary Clinton is scheduled to swing by a Costco in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC, for a book signing—part of her tour touting her new release, Hard Choices. The choice of venue isn’t all that surprising: the discount retail outlet has become a favorite among liberals thanks to its reasonable wages and generous health benefits. President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden love to get photographed yucking it up at Costco stores, while the company’s co-founder and former CEO spoke at the Democrats’ 2012 convention.

For Clinton, this is a near repeat of her last book tour, almost exactly 11 years ago today. That tour also took her through the DC suburbs. But back then, she appeared at Costco’s rival, a company that has become, for Democratic activists, the emblem of income inequality: Walmart. In 2003, more than 1,000 Hill-fans showed up at the Fairfax, Virginia, store to have their copy of Clinton’s memoir Living History signed. “After many hours of waiting, they finally reached the senator, sitting at a black-curtain display facing a rack of $9.88 women’s shoes and $7.84 denim baby outfits,” according to an Associated Press article from the time. Clinton spent three hours interacting with her adoring crowd, at one point needing a hand massage from an aide after she got post-autograph finger cramps.

Clinton’s Walmart allegiance would soon sour. In 2005 she returned a $5,000 donation from the company’s PAC, severing most of her political ties to the company and putting an end to a long, cozy relationship that dated back to her days in Arkansas. Walmart is the country’s largest private employer with 1.3 million US employees, a wildly profitable company that has led the way in destabilizing unions as a force in the American economy. It is now common course for Democrats with national ambitions to rail against the company’s low wages and efforts to quash workers’ attempts to organize. Clinton’s past association with Walmart shows the dangers of a political career that spans more than three decades. When political tides shift over the years, they can leave stains on one’s resume.

Hillary was the primary breadwinner for the Clinton clan when Bill was governor of Arkansas in the 1980s. With Bill earning $35,000 a year as governor, the family relied on Hillary’s salary from her job as a partner at Rose Law Firm, which she supplemented by serving as a board member for several companies. One of those companies was Walmart, and it was an association that proved particularly lucrative for the Clintons. She sat on the board from 1986-1992 and earned $18,000 a year, with a $1,500 bonus for each quarterly board meeting she attended. Clinton held nearly $100,000 in Walmart stock before she and her husband moved to DC.

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Retail Politics: Hillary Clinton Heads to Costco, Skips Walmart on Latest Book Tour

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"Serious-Minded" Benghazi Committee Chair Pushed Anti-Obama IRS Conspiracy Theory

by VictorHoppe Posted on June 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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When Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) was anointed last month by House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) to lead yet another congressional investigation of Benghazi, the second-term tea party congressman, a former prosecutor, was hailed by his Republican colleagues as an evenhanded lawmaker who had no political ax to grind in this endeavor. Boehner called him “serious-minded” and cited his “zeal for the truth.” Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) praised him as “cerebral” and said “he has a great capacity to work through an investigation and come to a fair conclusion.” And Gowdy himself vowed, “We’re going to go wherever the facts take us. Facts are neither Republican nor Democrat. They are facts.”

Yet when it comes to another conservative crusade, the supposed-IRS scandal, Gowdy has not been so dispassionate and judicious. As a member of the House government oversight committee led by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), which has mounted the main congressional inquiry into this matter, Gowdy has publicly suggested that the vetting of political groups conducted by an IRS office in Cincinnati was part of a scheme hatched in Washington to benefit President Barack Obama and the Democrats. And he has done so without presenting facts to prove this assertion.

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"Serious-Minded" Benghazi Committee Chair Pushed Anti-Obama IRS Conspiracy Theory

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Chart of the Day: Democrats Have a Big Headwind to Overcome In Midterm Elections

by Anderso7849 Posted on June 10, 2014

Mother Jones

This is nothing new to regular readers of the blog, but the chart below from the Washington Post very nicely illustrates the Democratic Party’s midterm woes in a nutshell. In every demographic group that tends to support Republicans, more than 60 percent are highly likely to vote. Conversely, in every demographic group that tends to support Democrats, fewer than 50 percent are highly likely to vote. That’s a very tough headwind to overcome. Just imagine what liberals could accomplish if they actually bothered to go to the polls.

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Chart of the Day: Democrats Have a Big Headwind to Overcome In Midterm Elections

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Rand Paul Holds Conference Call With Tea Partier Who Says Obama "Has Muslim Sensibilities"

by TobyTheodore Posted on June 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday, Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) was the guest speaker on Rev. E.W. Jackson’s semi-regular conference call, during which Jackson, a tea party activist, said that President Barack Obama has “Muslim sensibilities” and that gay Americans “want to destroy us.”

Jackson, who was the losing Republican nominee for lieutenant governor of Virginia last year, is known for his many offensive and outlandish statements about gays, lesbians, non-Christians, and Obama. Jackson has warned that yoga leads to Satan, Obama is using NASA to expand Islam, and the Democratic Party platform is “an agenda worthy of the Antichrist.”

During the call, Paul generally gave routine answers to questions on abortion, border security, and the size of the military. One caller did ask Paul if he supported Obama’s recent declaration that June was LGBT Pride Month and if he believed homosexuality is an illness. The question was reminiscent of a tweet Jackson wrote in June 2009, when Obama designated June as Pride Month: “Well that just makes me feel ikky all over. Yuk!”

“I don’t think that there’s really a role for the federal government in deciding what people’s behavior at home should be one way or another,” Paul said. “It’s not something the federal government needs to be involved in.”

After Paul left the conference call, Jackson said he suspected the caller who asked about Pride Month was trying to harass them. “Thank god he was respectful,” Jackson said. “But I just want to encourage everybody, that they are going to talk about us like we’re dogs because all they know is hatred, because all they know is anger and bitterness, because there’s something wrong with them on the inside…And by the way, they also want to destroy us…We are in a fight for our very lives, for our survival.”

Jackson then discussed Obama’s announcement of the release of Bowe Bergdahl, an American soldier captured in Afghanistan. He said that the president “could not help but smile” when Bergdahl’s father, Robert, said “allahu akbar—or whatever it is they say” at the press conference.

Jackson continued: “I have been roundly criticized for saying the president has Muslim sensibilities. That’s not my statement—that’s just a statement of fact…In this situation you would think he would have restrained himself. But he could not help but smile when that man said ‘Praise be to Allah.'”

(Bergdahl actually said “Bismillahir Rahmanir Rahim,” which translates to “in the name of Allah, most compassionate, most merciful.”)

Jackson has a history of extreme statements. In two interviews in October 2012 with Americans for Truth About Homosexuality—which the Southern Poverty Law Center considers a hate group—Jackson accused homosexuality of “killing black men by the thousands.” He added that liberal activists who support gay marriage “have done more to kill black folks whom they claim so much to love than the Ku Klux Klan, lynching, and slavery and Jim Crow ever did.” Of gay people, he said:

Their minds are perverted, they’re frankly very sick people psychologically, mentally and emotionally and they see everything through the lens of homosexuality. When they talk about love they’re not talking about love, they’re talking about homosexual sex. So they can’t see clearly…Homosexuality is a horrible sin, it poisons culture, it destroys families, it destroys societies.

In those interviews, Jackson also said that the president “seems to have a lot of sympathy for even radical Islam, unwilling to call it terrorism, unwilling to deal with it.”

On the campaign trail last year, Jackson denied making the anti-gay statements, which were recorded.

Paul has made controversial remarks about same-sex marriage. After the US Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act in June 2013, he said, “It is difficult, because if we have no laws on this, people will take it to one extension further—does it have to be humans?” Paul later said he was joking.

Paul’s office did not reply to requests for comment on Jackson’s claim Obama possesses “Muslim sensibilities.”

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Rand Paul Holds Conference Call With Tea Partier Who Says Obama "Has Muslim Sensibilities"

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Alabama GOP Is Offering $1,000 for Voter Fraud Tips at Polling Places Today

by Lionel4334 Posted on June 3, 2014

Mother Jones

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Today, more than 700,000 Alabamans are headed to the polls for the state’s Democratic and Republican primaries. It’s the first election since Alabama passed its tough new voter ID law, but the Alabama Republican Party apparently doesn’t think the bill goes far enough. According to the state GOP newsletter, the party is sending trained volunteers to patrol polling places—and offering $1,000 rewards for tips that lead to felony voter fraud convictions. Below is a snippet from the missive, which went out Monday:

Any suspicion of fraud or witnessing the willful non-enforcement of the Alabama’s voter laws needs to be reported….”Reward Stop Voter Fraud” signs with our hotline number will be placed at random polling locations tomorrow and at all polling locations in November. Poll watchers trained by ALGOP staff will also be watching to ensure that Alabama’s election laws—including the new photo voter ID law—are not being violated. Our signs and poll watchers will send a clear message to those wishing to commit voter fraud. Anyone attempting to tamper with the election process will be caught and will be prosecuted.

The campaign could add to the confusion surrounding the new law’s requirements. And the underlying tactics are reminiscent of the controversial “ballot integrity” initiatives that cropped up in the 1960s, following the passage of two landmark bills: the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, which banned discriminatory voting practices such as poll taxes and literacy tests. Under a program called Operation Eagle Eye, the Republican National Committee recruited tens of thousands to volunteers to patrol polling places in heavily Democratic neighborhoods. The ostensible goal was to deter voter fraud, but some of their techniques seemed designed to intimidate voters. Poll watchers were encouraged carry walkie talkies, snap photos of citizens casting ballots, and enlist Republican-friendly sheriffs to help block voters whom the party had deemed ineligible. In Alabama, the GOP also offered rewards for tips leading to arrest and convictions for breaking certain election laws.

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Alabama GOP Is Offering $1,000 for Voter Fraud Tips at Polling Places Today

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