It's A What Kind of Story?

OK, folks, I need your help on this one.

There needs to be a name for the kind of story which has no substantive importance at all, but nevertheless one hopes is covered by the press because it's fascinating, or fun, or just hilarious. Just as, for example, the re-election campaign of Michael Steele for RNC Chair. I'll be reading every nutty thing that Steele says, and hope for equally goofy quotes from the other candidates -- but anyone who looks at it and tries to tell us it means something about the state of the current Republican party, or even worse that the outcome will have any consequences for the outcome of the 2012 elections, well, that's just foolish.

Anyway, these sorts of stories come up all the time -- just last Friday, we had the great Bernie Sanders non-filibuster filibuster and the Bill Clinton presidential podium press conference.  Neither mattered in the sense of changing the outcome of, well, anything, but both were highly interesting, and I'm glad I watched them both.  We need an easy way to signal that, so that on the one hand no one has to puff them up to justify writing about them, and on the other the gotcha squad can be discouraged from tweeting (yes, I'm looking at you, @daveweigel) complaints about all the attention to focused on hopeless candidates at the expense of people who will soon be winning but anonymous Senators. 

So: my first suggestion for a name is a "Stan Jones story," in honor of the perennial Montana libertarian candidate who turned blue after drinking a silver solution.  What do you think?  "In a rare collision of two Stan Jones stories, Barack Obama turned the White House over to Bill Clinton just as Bernie Sanders entered his fifth hour of holding C-SPAN2 hostage." 

Does that work?  If not, I'm taking suggestions.  Doesn't have to be named after an example of these stories; if you can think of a wording that works better, I'm all for it.  I'm afraid I don't have shirts for the winner, but I can offer a free link to Taegan Goddard's Political Dictionary.  Maybe someday your phrase will be immortalized there!

It's a Trap!

And so, despite all the flashing lights and clear screams, John Thune has voted for the Kenyan socialist budget-busting midnight Christmas tax increase of 2010.

(Midnight? Wasn't the vote at 1PM? Yes, but cloture time ran out at 12:30 AM; if the Senate health care vote could be a Christmas Eve vote because it happened the morning of Christmas Eve Day, then surely this one can be a midnight vote.  Those Republican activists love hearing about midnight votes).

That's final passage; he had already supported cloture, but I suppose he might have had an argument wiggling out of that if he had voted against final passage.

And that's before I just read Dave Weigel's tweet about Thune's earmark requests.  Thune, of course, was already saddled with TARP.

Remember: single votes by politicians rarely matter, and never matter a lot, in general election campaigns.  But highly-informed activists looking for ways to differentiate between seemingly identical candidates can and do care about such things.  That's not the only thing that matters in presidential nomination politics, but it isn't irrelevant, either.  Another way to put this: Republican politicians are more conservative than Republicans in general, but Republicans who play a large role in the presidential nomination process are most likely to the right of either group.  You don't want to be voting against Tom Coburn and Jim DeMint on taxes, and that's what John Thune just did.

I think I'm moving towards Ed Kilgore's view: Thune is a Beltway candidate with essentially no campaign, and no constituency, out where Republicans actually live.

Jon Kyl and the Incentive for Republican Laziness

I love Matt Yglesias's response to Jon Kyl's suggestion that having the Senate work on December 27 would somehow be an insult to Christians: Yglesias proposes a Jews-only session on Christmas Day.  Although note that Christmas happens to fall on a Saturday this year; I believe Joe Lieberman will only show up and vote on Shabbat if his vote is really necessary. 

Moving to more speculative territory, I tend to believe that Kyl's remark -- and see also Mitch McConnell's remarks on why it's OK for him to support earmarks in the omnibus spending bill even though he both opposes the bill and theoretically opposes earmarks -- show a downside of a compliant partisan press: it makes these people incredibly lazy.  Basically, if Fox News will buy whatever GOP leaders are selling, and Fox News viewers will buy whatever Fox News tells them, why should GOP leaders work hard to devise intelligent justifications for their positions?  Hmmm...that's not quite right; they should do so, in part because not all swing voters are tuned in to Republican partisan media (and yes, that sort of stuff only matters on the margins, but still plenty of elections are won and lost on the margins, and after all they're paying people to come up with this junk)..  But it must be tempting to be lazy, since whatever silly argument you make will show up in full voice on the Hannity program that evening, and after all that's what's on the TV in each Republican Senator's office.

And after all, who's going to come up to Jon Kyl and tell him how stupid a notion this is?

What is interesting is that there does not seem to be a point at which Republicans viewers feel that their leaders are insulting their intelligence.  Or, at least, not enough viewers to force Fox News (and GOP Senators) to come up with at least marginally more plausible arguments.

Pledging To Stay

Greg Sargent has been following the manuevering over DADT closely, and he calls for a commitment from Harry Reid:

If repeal is going to have any chance, the Senate Majority Leader needs to indicate right now that the Senate will definitely vote on the stand-alone bill after the House sends it over.

He should add: the same goes for DREAM, New START, and for that matter appointments. Reid can't pass those things if they don't have the votes, but if they have the votes, he can't let the clock beat them, at lesat not while there are still minutes remaining.

One key point here is that as long as Reid leaves it all up in the air, and especially if he refers to doing any particular bill "if" there's time, then it gives Republican opponents a major incentive to stall.  That may well be what's behind Tom Coburn's plan to force a full reading of the appropriations bill.  Sure, Coburn may just be grandstanding on spending he opposes, but he also surely believes that any time wasted on that is time in which the Senate cannot be considering the various other measures that he opposes. 

The best strategy for Reid and the Democrats is to make it clear that the Senate will stay in until it's clearly specified business is finished, or until time expires.  Today's comments from him are a good start , but Sargent is right: he should list exactly what he means to finish.  Republicans might still consider it worth stalling to keep one or more agenda item from passing...but the pressure will be on them, from other Republicans who care more about enjoying the holidays than about whether (ultimately) obscure bills pass.  In other words, the way to prevent a post-Christmas session may be to make it clear to everyone that such a session is certain if necessary.

Choosing Someone for NEC

Noam Scheiber has the inside scoop on the question of who will (eventually) replace Larry Summers at the National Economic Council. 

I have no particular sense of which candidate is best (although I guess I do think that Gene Sperling's reputation is good and he has the right kind of experience for the job), but I do think that this paragraph does not inspire a lot of confidence:

My sense is that Sperling's situation is a little different from Altman's. Unlike Altman, there are people on the economic team who think he's terrific; the hesitation here is more among the political people in the White House, who wonder if he's got the right kind of public profile, that ill-defined mix of star-power/charisma/gravitas, etc. 

This is easy: no one inside the White House should care at all about the "right kind of public profile" for whoever gets the NEC job.  We're talking here about a very important position, one that will in part determine how well the economy performs in the next couple of years, which will in turn help determine whether the president wins re-election or not.  Oh, and there's the whole business about whether the American people prosper or suffer. 

The public profile, or star power, or charisma, or gravitas, or whatever will make absolutely no difference to anyone.

Now, whoever gets the job has to have enough oomph to be taken seriously within the White House, and by Treasury and other relevant departments and agencies.  If that's what Scheiber's sources are talking about, then no problem.  But the rest of it is just nonsense.  No one outside of the government (and I think I'd probably include Wall Street and other interested parties) is going to care at all who's at NEC as time goes on, certainly not outside of any policy commitments that person makes -- and since the job calls for an honest broker, that probably doesn't matter all that much either. 

No one, no one, no one is going to vote for against Barack Obama in 2012 because of the public impression left by the person at NEC.  If anyone in the White House believes otherwise, they should move to a different line of work. 

The 2012ers and the Tax Cut Deal

Jonathan Chait and Ezra Klein both speculate today about the possibility of a GOP revolt against the tax cut deal, and tie it to economic growth and the presidential election (as Chait accurately characterizes my post yesterday, I made a wimpy "prediction" that the GOP might defect).

I think they are both correct that it is in the interest of the Republican Party to have the economy tank over the next two years -- especially in 2012.  However, I very much doubt that individual Republican pols will care about that.  And I specifically include the presidential contenders.  I'd be shocked if they take November 2012 into consideration.  For the '12ers, it's all about the nomination. 

At least it certainly should be, at least in terms of any of them personally achieving the presidency.  Yes, it is quite true that legislation such as the tax deal can affect the economy, and the economy will be as always the biggest single factor pushing the presidential election one way or another.  But the effects of this particular bill on the economy are apt to be marginal, and at any rate it's not easy to foresee what will eventually happen if the current deal fails in the House; for all anyone knows, the next try will have even more stimulus. 

On the other hand, get on the wrong side of the tax issue, and you're pretty much finished in Republican presidential politics. 

The problem for the '12ers, and similarly for Members of Congress pondering the fate of Bob Bennett, is that it's not clear what the "right" side is.  Would you rather risk being attacked for going along with the Obama tax boondoggle that raised the estate tax along with all sorts of new wasteful spending and pork...or would you rather risk being attack for voting for The World's Biggest Tax Increase? 

You might think that one can examine the bill itself and some set of principles to determine the proper conservative position.  If so, you would be wrong.  For the relevant value of "conservative" (sorry, Andrew Sullivan), what matters here is what movement conservatives will believe going forward.  That's especially true on something like this, in which there's no obvious reason to believe or way to prove that either a yes or no vote is in favor of lower taxes. 

What that means for House Republicans is that if there is a consensus among the presidential candidates (and other party leaders, including Rush Limbaugh and other high-profile conservative yakkers), they are highly unlikely to oppose that consensus -- and without one, they'll be guessing which way it plays out over time. 

What it means for the presidential candidates is a bit trickier.  No one wants to be left on the wrong side of it, but what counts as the right side depends in large part on what each of them does.  At least that's true for the frontrunners; for the longshots, it might make sense to see the consensus, go the other way, and argue that the rest are just Washington sell-outs.  And of course part of the calculation is that Members of Congress actually will be stuck with votes (sorry, Thune), while the others will find it easier to fudge. 

So that's the politics of it, I think -- just remember that whether my analysis of the specifics is correct or not, what they're all thinking about is surely nomination politics, not the general election.  Indeed, this is a familiar and frequent feature of American politics: there are lots of situations in which the party as a whole has one interest, but individual politicians within that party have very different interests.  See, for example, redistricting.  It's not always predictable which set of interests will prevail, but in this case I'm confident that it's the nomination interests of each politician that matter, rather than the general election interest of the party.

See also Dave Weigel for a nice round-up of where the '12ers stand (but: no DeMint?   No Perry?).  And see David S. Bernstein for how Mitt Romney is making like Martha Coakley.

The Hudson Decision

I was going to write a post arguing that the court decision on ACA yesterday really didn't matter at all -- because we already knew that this thing eventually winds up in the Supreme Court, and what happens below won't really affect the outcome there.  However, Adam Serwer beat me to it, so I'll mostly just send you there instead.  I'm not sure I agree with him that the best way to think of Scalia-Thomas-Roberts-Alito is as simple partisans; I think there's a bit more going on than that.  But I don't think it matters a whole lot what the lower courts do. 

As far as the eventual resolution of the case, I continue to think that it's tied in to a larger question, which is whether the conservatives on the Court really want to disrupt the basic governing arrangements that Americans have made since the 1930s, as opposed to just tinkering around the edges, or as opposed to just tilting the playing field within those arrangements.  If not -- or if they just don't have the votes for it at this point -- then I suspect they'll find it hard to knock out the ACA, or even just the individual mandate, without threatening the larger upheaval.  I don't see how they could do another "ignore this case" decision, although I suppose I didn't expect an "ignore this case" decision ten years ago when they tried it, so you never know.  At any rate, I'm pretty confident that Serwer is correct about the lack of importance of these preliminary decisions, on either side.