Well, That Took Long

Paul appeared on ABC’s “Good Morning America” Friday morning and said this was the Democrats’ attempt to “trash” his campaign.

“When does my honeymoon period start?” Paul said.

It’s a line he repeated Thursday night on CNN, where he also blamed the media.

“I think what troubles me is that the news cycle has gotten out of control,” he told Wolf Blitzer. “It started with my Democrat opponent asserting this, but has never been my position.”

And the AP quotes Republican strategists who think Paul’s supporters could see the comments and resulting firestorm “as fresh motivation for voting him into Congress.”

Meanwhile, NRSC chief John Cornyn (Texas) is defending his new Senate candidate.

“Rand Paul, like every new candidate, is going to get better,” Cornyn told Bloomberg’s Al Hunt in an interview to air this weekend. Candidates, Cornyn said, “make mistakes and they misspeak.”

Paul, his GOP primary rival Trey Grayson and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) are scheduled to attend a unity breakfast in Kentucky on Saturday morning.

Do Dems Have a Real Shot in KY?

TPM wonders

One other point worth making on the Kentucky Senate race. Kentucky remains very red, but the recent polling on a hypothetical match-up between Paul and Conway surprisingly shows Conway very much in this race. The current TPM Poll Average gives Paul a 44.7 to 38.4 lead, but the two most recent polls, taken this month, give Paul only a 1-point lead and 3-point lead:

If people are paying attention, and Conway runs a good race, this seat strikes me as relatively easy flip. Paul said yesterday:

“People are already saying, now you need to weave and dodge,” he said. “Now you need to switch. Now you need to give up your conservative message. You need to become a moderate. You need to give up the Tea Party. You need to distance yourself

First of all, it will be interesting to see exactly what “The Tea Party Message” is that emerges from this campaign. But secondly, Paul should have a lot of, “I can’t believe he really thinks that?!” moments, similar to those that his father had in ’08. What does he think about social security? Defense spending? Paying cops, firefighters, teachers? Will he welcome the support of the GOP establishment?

Why Kagan Over Wood

From Nate

Kagan overtakes Wood even though she’s less liberal, because she’s more likely to have survived. She continues to provide excess value over Kagan from that point forward, until we reach a period 40+ years out where both women are almost certain to be dead. On balance, Kagan’s lifetime expected [value] is actually higher than that of Kagan’s (1,280 rather than 1,206, if you care), assuming that she’ll defect from the liberals 10 percent of the time whereas Wood never will.

Meanwhile, John Roberts is 55, Samuel Alito is 60, Clarence Thomas is 61. Kennedy and Scalia are both in the early 70′s, but Roberts and Alito could eventually approach the Hugo Black–William Douglas record (42 years) for time served on the court together.

Why Narrative Matters

When George Bush was president, an engineering failure destroyed the Gulf Coast and a mining disaster killed 13 miners.

This is a representative response:

Here’s a clue: Bush’s indefensible fealty to corporate power undercuts the health and safety of workers at every level of the economy.

Now Barack Obama is president, and outside of the fringes, few really blame him for the disaster, since on the millions of things on a president’s plate, making sure every oil rigged is seal shut and mine safe is, frankly, impossible. This goes to why staffing government with competent people matters–because the public perception that government is staffed with competent people matters.

The Media’s Fault

There is a good post over at the TAPPED blog about the media’ culpability in the health care fight. The post approving quotes TNR’s The Treatment which calls the health care debate the best covered news story, ever. There, Harold Pollack calls “Press coverage of health care reform was the most careful, most thorough, and most effective reporting of any major story, ever” especially once you add up all of the newspaper, broadcast and blog time devoted to it.
“If people don’t look, there is only so much the media can do,” Pollack writes.

I agree, and it is why so much of media criticism is so tiresome. The media critics always complain about what a lousy job us pressmen are doing, and base this on how ill-informed the public seems to be. In fact, of course, the public is ill-informed because in the hustle of their lives, they care little, and they do not believe much of what happens in the corridors of power matters to them. When the media tries to make the story a little sexier, they are accused of dumbing it down. When they get all wonkish, they are ignored.

Ford and Gillibrand

Harold Ford has self-imposed deadline of Sunday to decide whether or not he will challenge Kirsten Gillibrand for the U.S. Senate. Regardless of what he does, he has done a great service to K-Gill, one that should last her beyond this election.
When Gillibrand was tapped for the Senate seat, progressives were appalled. She received high marks from the NRA. She bragged about her opposition to deficit spending. She was against “amnesty” for illegal immigrants. When Steve Israel and Carolyn Maloney declined to challenge her, lefties were heartbroken.
But by running hard and to the right of her, Ford has somehow made Gillibrand into something of a liberal darling. She has rolled out endorsements from Rep. Jerry Nadler and Empire State Pride Agenda and Council Speaker Christine Quinn, herself the first citywide LGBT official.
It is as if, denied a real general election, NY Dems are treating Ford as the Republican in the race. Ipso Facto, Gillibrand becomes the beleaguered bloody shirt.
For example, Gillibrand had no real record on LGBT issues before becoming a Senator.
But check out Ford’s recent appearance at the Stonewall Democratic Club.
(Courtesy of MyDD, of course)

The Life of Biden

Political reporters say that this White House manages the media as tightly as any of its predecessors.
Somehow though the occasional leak is coming from the Oval Office that paints view-president Joe Biden as the administration’s Cassandra. Okay, so not the occasional leak, but in fact major magazine profiles, such as the one that appeared in this week’s Newsweek.
The piece begins with a scene where Biden interrupts a Oval Office to ask hard questions about why the U.S. is devoting so many resources to Afghanistan and so few to Pakistan

The White House Situation Room fell silent. But the questions had their desired effect: those gathered began putting more thought into Pakistan as the key theater in the region.

They give Rahm the chance to make the case:

“He says the things that others at the table don’t want to talk about, or which they find uncomfortable,” says White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel.

He also brought a dose of reality to the internal discussions over how far the administration could go. “He’s been asking, ‘What are the trade-offs here?’” says Emanuel.

This story has been so relentlessly flogged in the past few weeks that it points to a concerted effort on the part of the White House to paint the innver circle as one riven by debate and dissension, and more interestingly, to put Biden in the role of truthteller.
It is hard to know what the strategy here. Obama is already under fire for being indecisive. Adding a loud voice to create interference does not seem likely to help convince the public that the president is resolute.

A couple of guesses: 1. Painting Biden as the resident dissenter further distances the Obama administration from its predecessor and shows American that a diversity of viewpoints is tolerated. Ergo, you too, American, who disagrees with the President, are being represented in his White House and your voice is heard too.

Two: The Biden truth-teller meme is specific to this set of circumstances in Central Asia. Throwing Biden out as a dissenting voice gives Obama cover if he chooses to reject the recommendations of Gen. McChrystal. The White House can say, “Well, sure we ignored the military brass, but we listened to the former chair of Senate Foreign Relations Committee. If something goes wrong, just check with him. Likewise, if Obama does follow the General’s advice, his people can say that he did so only after having welcomed the loudest voices against the plan.

Ensign on Incentives

Did I hear this right on NPR this am?

On Capitol Hill, lawmakers seem eager to encourage employers to create and expand programs that tie a portion of workers’ health insurance premiums to their willingness to change unhealthy behaviors. But there’s growing concern that some of those programs represent a new way to discriminate against those in less than perfect health.

By a vote of 18-4, the Senate Finance Committee added to its health overhaul bill an amendment offered by Sens. John Ensign (R-NV) and Tom Carper (D-DE) that would expand existing rules that let workplace “wellness” programs pay bonuses in the way of reduced premiums to workers to lose weight, quit smoking, control their blood pressure or practice other healthy behaviors.

Current rules allow premiums to vary by up to 20 percent of a worker’s total health insurance premium. Under the amendment adopted by the committee, that could rise to as much as 50 percent.

“We know that the more we pay for things the more we’re going to get. And so we need basically to pay for healthy behaviors,” Ensign said.

Eventually, satire will catch up to politics.

Conservative Governance

What does it say ability the ability of Republicans to actually govern that none of the presumed front runners for 2012–Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, and Newt Gingrich–actually hold office at the moment?

I’d venture that it shows that it is impossible to actually be a true blue conservative and an effective executive. Just witness the five Republican governors who attempted to turn down federal stimulus funds, and who by doing so in essence said it would be better to let people starve than betray their ideological principles.

Be Cool

There is a growing sense that Barack Obama needs to show righteous indignation of the kind that Jim Cramer, or for that matter, Jon Stewart evince.
Even the normally sober-minded Frank Rich is on board:

The question is not just why the White House was the last to learn about bonuses that Democratic congressmen had sought hearings about back in December, but why it was so slow to realize that the public’s anger couldn’t be sated by Summers’s legalese or by constant reiteration of the word outrage. By the time Obama acted, even the G.O.P. leader Mitch McConnell was ahead of him in full (if hypocritical) fulmination.

It’s odd how much this lien of reasoning mirrors talk during the campaign: From Michelle Cottle:

All of which strikes me as a bit of a problem at this point. While the cool, composed, no-drama demeanor helps Obama appear presidential–and no doubt allays some subliminal white racial anxieties–it also threatens to make him look a bit detached from the many and multiplying crises around him. These are not, to put it mildly, the most soothing of times for Americans. The economy is shaky. Unemployment is up. Growth is down. Oil prices have hit the roof just as home prices have crashed through the floor. Detroit is facing a full-fledged meltdown. We are still embroiled in two wars, neither of which offers much hope for a happy ending. Al Qaeda is running wild in western Pakistan. And now, like some bad acid flashback, Russia is acting like it wants to restart the Cold War.

Confronted by these dramas, Obama offers thoughtful, balanced, pragmatic responses.

It was wrong then and it’s wrong now. Keeping up with the bloviatiors though is actually the worst thing that Obama could do now, even as populism is supposedly on the rise.

The angry mobs have outlets enough. What Obama needs to do is calmly and patiently explain what is happening, why it is happening, and what the administration is doing to right ship.

From the address to Congress:

But I also know that in a time of crisis, we cannot afford to govern out of anger, or yield to the politics of the moment. My job – our job – is to solve the problem. Our job is to govern with a sense of responsibility. I will not spend a single penny for the purpose of rewarding a single Wall Street executive, but I will do whatever it takes to help the small business that can’t pay its workers or the family that has saved and still can’t get a mortgage.

That’s what this is about. It’s not about helping banks – it’s about helping people. Because when credit is available again, that young family can finally buy a new home. And then some company will hire workers to build it. And then those workers will have money to spend, and if they can get a loan too, maybe they’ll finally buy that car, or open their own business. Investors will return to the market, and American families will see their retirement secured once more. Slowly, but surely, confidence will return, and our economy will recover.

Indeed, if Obama can project calm and confidence, markets are likely to recover. If markets recover, those left holding the pitchforks will look kinda silly.