Fantasy 11-dimensional chess

I like Mark Thoma’s remarks on the proposal and his comment, “let me emphasize the degree to which this proposal turns its back on those who are still unemployed.”

Campaign slogan: “I’m unemployed and I vote.”

A link of interest: Obama thought the mic was off.

Have to concur with Steve. The simplest explanation for Obama is not that he’s a liberal playing n-dimensional chess, but that he’s a conservative who’s highly adept at getting exactly what he wants, including what he wants from liberals.

If he were a liberal, keeping his light under a bushel, there’d be no way to explain his embrace of Bush administration policies on torture, secrecy, and the immunity of the executive from the rule of law.

Glen, I’m not sure there’s a non-crazy explanation for Obama’s handing of the Treasury Department, just for starters, or choices like Simpson and Bowles. These make sense only in a context of really thoroughly rejecting the notion of consequence. Obama seems not to be a sadist, and that puts him up on Bush and Cheney, but it’s become very unclear to me that he’s much better connected to reality.

Bruce,

If he wanted to end the New Deal, he passed up a wonderful opportunity. Why did he stick that stilletto into Ryan the night before last, if he’s really on their side?

Again, I’m not going to defend his choices. That would require that I understand what’s going on, which I don’t. They all seem crazy to me, and it’s been that way since our system couldn’t or wouldn’t stop the slide to war with Iraq. There are people who claim they can make sense of that as some sort of rational, if evil, decision. It was all about oil, or it was all about empire, or some such. To me, such explanations simply deepen the mystery of why anybody would have done something so deeply irrational as to try for empire in the Mid-East, or control of the oil or anything else via some sort of such empire, as if those projects made any sense, as if they were achievable, if admittedly evil, as if such ideas as an American Empire had any possible relation to any real world, and an American Empire was available as a real choice for this country to assume in an embrace of evil, or refuse to assume in an embrace of virtue.

The closest I can think of as an analogy in my memory to what we face today, is Louisiana in the 50s, as Jim Crow was finally threatened. The Long machine, despite its origins in cracker country, had blacks as part of its voting coalition (they were allowed to vote in New Orleans, where they were the pro-Long resistance to the local white machine, which was of course otherwise more “progressive” than the Longs). Well, with Jim Crow actively threatened by SCOTUS, the crackers wouldn’t sit still for having blacks in their coalition, and by then the Longs didn’t have enough sheriffs sufficiently on their side to steal elections, so they couldn’t jettison the blacks. The result was that the lone voice for racial non-craziness in the political landscape was this literally crazy and alcoholic, racist as the day is long, cracker, Earl Long. And it wasn’t just Long. We had an otherwise completely reactionary Archbishop of New Orleans who got the dictator and white ethnarch of Plaquemines Parish, Leander Perez, actually excommunicated by the Pope, as if he were some Dark Ages monarch, which of course he effectively was, for the sin of not letting parochial schools in his fiefdom integrate.

My political childhood prepared me to look with equanimity on all sorts of political apostasy and general craziness. As long as Obama generally and in the end slips the shiv mostly to people even crazier and less moral than he is himself, he gets my vote. Out of the crooked timber from which politics is formed, nothing straighter was ever made than the mess we have today. It just sometimes seems like it, the conflicts are sometimes more subterranean. No less twisted for that, just more deniable.

The simplest explanation for Obama is not that he’s a liberal playing n-dimensional chess, but that he’s a conservative who’s highly adept at getting exactly what he wants, including what he wants from liberals.

As I’ve noted recently, that may not be true. But theories that subscribe to that notion certainly do enjoy a lot of predictive power, don’t they :-)

Glen, I think one can be a Village crazy without favoring the specific flavor of crazy Ryan is dishing up at the moment. I mean, gangs of loons fall out over whose hallucinations take precedence at the moment, and like that.

As President, he’s certainly walked and talked like a center-right politician. But how does one explain The Audacity of Hope and the campaign rhetoric? Just ploys? Maybe … hard to tell.

Geo: I think the real answer to that hinges on evidence we simply don’t have right now, and that it’s perfectly acceptable to say “there is no easy way to reconcile those claims and these actions if you don’t want to jump to the button marked Pathological Liar or something like that”. Suspending a judgment for lack of sufficient evidence is pretty okay, or should be, and then we can move on to deal with the problems at hand.

Hats off to jim @19!

Obama said he only agreed to the tax cuts for the rich to ensure the tax cut for the rest. But he wouldn’t agree again.

But of course the Republicans will threaten the middle-class tax cut the next time too. Obama told them that would be effective.

@18:

Nah. You could tell what he was “about” right after the election and well before his inauguration. The first appointment was Rahm Emmanuel, as chief of staff, (who’s since been replaced with Baby Doc’s younger, smarter brother), followed by Geithner and Summers in charge of econ policy. BHO had both a large, primarily Wall St. big donor base and, unusually, a large small donor base. So what did he do after the election? Effectively, shut down his mass donor base, which could have potentially formed a mass support group to maintain pressure on his left flank, while “veal-penning” progressive activist organizations. Hence a president from Wall St. Not really surprising to anyone who’d actually scrutinized the guy. BHO is just an empty brand name, the usual marketing ploy.

But how does one explain The Audacity of Hope and the campaign rhetoric? Just ploys? Maybe … hard to tell.

Er . . . talk is cheap? I ought to know :-)

The President must be laughing to himself. By kicking-off his campaign with a rallying cry to protect the safety net while judiciously cutting the long-term deficits, he goaded the Republicans into doubling-down on their own ideology and voting, as a unified block, to empty granny’s purse then kick her out onto the street!

You will recall that the necessary game, since before the last election, has been to finally start taking the Republicans at their word: I have been writing this here since last June: The strategy should be to force the Republicans to come up with the spending cuts to match their tax cuts, in the same Congressional bills. The stark nature of this would force a wedge between the Tea Party and the Republican leadership, and also force a wedge between the Republican Party and the rest of the country. Force the country to see just what the Republicans want: tax cuts for the rich so they can gamble again on deregulated Wall Street, and balance the budget on the backs of granny and the teachers. The basic aim should be to make the electorate see this, and thus to put the Republicans out of business.

(That could be a good name for a music band: Granny and the Teachers. I Googled it; so far, there is no ontology.)

(Liberals keep saying to themselves, “What do you mean, take the Republicans at their word! Oh they don’t really mean it — they don’t really care about deficits! You can’t possibly respond to them in kind! That will NEVER work!” etc. etc. ad nauseum because liberals apparently like to shoot themselves in the foot with bullets full of their own brain-vomit. Who cares what the Republicans actually believe? To turn that around,: believe me, they don’t care about what you believe.! Could you try to be lil’ more fatuous and self-defeating? [–this note on whining stupid liberals, maybe discard it?]–[nah, leave it in. The incredibly stupid pathetic whingering liberals and progressives who show up in comments here and at Baker, Benen, DeLong, Drum, Ezra’s and Thoma (to meander in lexicographic order) are gobstricken and offended and lovelornlike because Obama has to act like a politician. — All truly great bloggers, I don’t mean to gainsay. My hat is off to everyone of you. In fact I sort of love you though only in a man-cavey way. It’s most of your commenters are fantasists and can’t see what is directly in front of them, to, like, grab an affordance and actuate an intention. Though it do seem that all you bloggers had the attitude to keep insisting that the TeaParty is not important–as if that should make ANY goddam difference at all.])}

But I did think it would be difficult! Little did I suspect that the Republicans would walk right into the trap!

Looking back on it, perhaps they were first goaded by the failure of their normal rhetoric on the Sunday morning talk shows back in September, when McConnell, Kyl, Boehner, et alia were struck speechless on camera by the interviewers’ refusals to agree that tax cuts “pay for themselves.” It totally interrupted their blabber for, like, 60 hexideciseconds! This happened on at least three different shows! What a sight! Do you suppose they were so two-by-foured upside-the-head, that they figured they had to invent a budget?

Note however that there is a history leading up to this horrifying state of affairs. Short version, teh Republicans are in their death-throes. It may take a million years like the dinosaurs, but this looks like an evolutionary cul-de-sac. They have two long-term problems: (1) Their ideology, Reaganomics, has intellectually imploded on the shores of reality, indeed upon a profusion of mixed metaphors, and they cannot formulate coherent explanations for things, and so they rely upon the Luntz-teased emotions of fear, uncertainty, and resentment. (2) Then they have to sell it to the far right, who are their only reliable voters.

Driving a wedge into this mess is therefore a good idea, if you really like Truth, Justice, and the American Way.

A major misstep was the decision by McConnell and Boehner, after Obama’s election, to go into a mode of total obstruction for political gain. I suppose it seemed only fair, since the Democrats had previously decided to block Bush’s Social Security privatization efforts — though I like to refer to it as the Democrats “coming to their senses.” So it might have been tit-for-tat, but the Republican obstructionism was politically shortsighted. Instead, they should have taken credit for the 1/2 of the ideas in the healthcare reform which are in fact Republican, and it would have taken the wind out of the sails of the liberals. As I wrote, at the time. Instead they chose a rhetorical path to certain self-destruction, however long it might take for reality to catch up with them, and they decided to lie about the likely effects, both budgetary and medicinal, of the healthcare reform.

Well, it was enough to win the November election. After all, Americans are oftentimes dunces. But within a few months, Gov. Walker of Wisconsin, elected with Koch money and receiving phony Koch calls, decided to balance the budget on the backs of the teachers and the cops they are married to, thereby creating a new world’s record in public-opinion turnaround! That was a good hoot! I was walking around, going Hoot! Hoot!

But who could have hoped for what came next? Ryan’s budget proposal is an astonishing political gift to the Democrats. Let’s everybody go live on Skid Row! The idea of showing up on Wednesday and going, like, “Nyah-Nyah, Nyah-Nyah-Nyah, we are SO not doing this!” must have really appealed to the President. But it actually goes further: Obama’s speech is among other things evidence that he may see that a stable, dominant center-left coalition is almost within reach. To kick it off with his re-election campaign is almost too much fun.

The way forward? Let it be known to all people that we don’t have to destroy Medicare or the safey-net to fix the deficits. That is all bull. And be sure to explain this to the Independents, who are unaware. CBO’s most recent Long-Term Budget Outlook showed that the Democrats have already reduced the long-term deficits by 2/3rds, IF Congress sticks to the current plans and lets the Bush Tax Cuts expire. And those savings may be more, nobody knows. Are we going to reassure the “bond market” by throwing the U.S. into a social cataclysm? In every case, piecemeal reduction of the long-term deficits is the best way into the future. And meanwhile, what will be Ryan’s CBO score? And why would future Congresses stick to it, when the Republicans won’t stick to Obamacare? As soon as you try to follow the logic, the Republican plan not only destroys the future, it destroys thinking itself. According to all the polls, we have 70% of the people in favor of keeping Social Security and Medicare, taxing the rich, a public option available in healthcare, saving the environment, etc. etc. etc. Use this, now. The mainstream media may be pillars of sophistry and lazy blabber, but if they see a scientific proof, like the Sunday talk show hosts refusing any longer to accept that tax cuts pay for themselves, then they will in fact come forward and say so. Use this, now. Once you get all the ducks lined up, then it high time to push it all in front of the Republican Party, and make them fall over it. Also, always remember to ask the Republicans if they support universal health coverage. They don’t like to answer that question, either. And wear your galoshes, it is going to get deep.

He’s a center-right, status quo politician who is no more interested in radical-right ideas than in leftist ones.

My perhaps too-cynical take is that he’s proven that a black man can be elected to the highest office in the land, provided he’s four-square for preserving the status quo and the alternative is a white woman who just might rock the boat, a.k.a. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

@28:

Just another version of the n-dimensional chess thesis. Hypomanic fantasy. I’ll grant you, though, that the Repubs. are so ignorant, incoherent, and dysfunctional, that their policies would produce a depression, which the corporate PTB will not let happen. They’ll use them for what they’re worth, in terms of policy extortion, but they won’t let them work their will. (Aside from which, you’re just using the blue meanies argument, by which the Dem. establishment power-brokers always shore up, while diminishing, their “base”, in order to betray them). So BHO is the man, since the choice is between a depression and a prolonged stagnation to maintain the MNC/Wall St. regime, which BHO, with his bromides and economic policy fallacies, is dedicated to promoting. A Hobson’s choice. But in no way a “progressive” outcome.

Steve,
Well, until we reach that better day when our political culture is not dominated by the presidency, our politics will continue to revolve around the president. Even folks who don’t overvalue the role the president should have in a saner system, can’t ignore the centrality he does have now.

As for my expectatioins of the speech, it wasn’t that he needed to make me think that he was a white knight to keep me in the party. He just needed to not openly embrace the Dark Side, not jettison SocSec and Medicare. I’ve never felt personally betrayed by this or that Obama apostasy from progressivism because it was always obvious that whether from opportunism or actual conviction, he was all over the ideological map. I’m not sure what would be worse, that he dove to the right of McCain over Afghanistan because he really is stupid enough to believe in victory in Afghanistan, or he’s cynical enough to buy an election at the cost of so many lives. But if he could do that during the election, tout his belief in voctory in Afghanistan, nothing else he can ever do later is going to shock me into some political nunnery.

I just need my party and its leader (and the president is the leader until we get rid of that failed institution, or at least cut it down to size) to be one thin dime less disastrously stupid and cynical than the Republicans. Giving in over SocSec and Medicare would have been past my line in the sand mainly because of the incredible political stupidity that would have involved. Instead, he used the expectation that he was going to cuddle up even more closely to the Rs to make a more effective attack on them. He got Ryan to pout in public about his supposed betrayal.! His job doesn’t require a white knight, it needs someone who is good with a knife. The correct antidote to the tendency to idolize the presidency is to take this realistic view of the true nature of the power of the office.

I’ll drop by to point out that when it comes to bizarre eleventymillion-dimensional chess, the Oregon Legislative Study Group has already won.

They know the game, and they’re gonna play it…

[Note: I can’t promise this will be at all funny to anyone unfamiliar with Rickrolling.]

You cannot be serious. About Clinton, at least.

He just needed to not openly embrace the Dark Side, not jettison SocSec and Medicare.

Well, the “Obama, right or wrong” crowd would suggest that the goalposts are being shifted, but while the President gave a fairly good defense of approximately the status quo, the so-called “Gang of Six” in the Senate are making progress on their plan to squeeze Social Security in exchange for Republican support for revenue-raising measures to be left unspecified until later. Will Obama veto this sort of thing from his own party, even if it comes with, e.g., an agreement to raise the debt ceiling? Or will he decide that an empty rhetorical embrace of “revenue-raising” by Tom Coburn counts as victory for his own as-yet purely rhetorical stance, and sign a bill to “put Social Security on a sound financial footing” by cutting benefits?

By the time it does, if it does, the revenue measures will no longer be “unspecified”

Sorry, by “unspecified” I should have typed, “unspecified save for Senator Warner’s assurance that no tax increases are involved.”

I don’t see what could possibly be gained by guessing how Obama might react to a bill that hasn’t even been written yet, let alone passed both houses of Congress.

Indeed, the only time to express concern over a framework that slashes Social Security and doesn’t increase taxes is to see if it somehow passes the House, and also makes it through a Senate in which one of the Gang of Six members is the Majority Whip. Because it’s not like having members of both parties in Congress make a big show of admitting that Social Security “adjustments” are necessary, while tax increases aren’t, in any way muddles the distinction established by Obama’s speechifying last week. “Republicans want to cut Medicare so the rich can have their tax cuts” gets slightly diluted by “Democrats and Republicans want to cut Social Security so the rich can keep their tax cuts.”

So one thing that could be gained is to go ahead and get the disappointment over before it occurs. Because if members of the Senate Democratic caucus publicly repudiate the White House’s own rhetoric less than a week later, I’m not sure how Obama delivers on it, given that doing nothing is unfortunately unlikely to be an option.

unspecified save for Senator Warner’s assurance that no tax increases are involved

reportedly will also include phasing out the mortgage interest deduction

These are obviously inconsistent, which seems to me to reinforce my point that it’s better to wait to see *what the bill actually is* before expecting anyone, including Obama, to react to it. Denouncing theoretical bills that haven’t even been written on the basis that they might be bad bills if they were written in a particular way wouldn’t leave him much time for anything else, on top of making him sound very negative.

That’s not to say that he couldn’t have someone in his office call the Gang of Six and express his opinion of things that *might* be in the bill, but I wouldn’t necessarily expect that kind of communication to take place in public.

Notice how Trump is now leading the Repub polls? Thank the bit of birther nonsense for that. Now he can focus on more mainstream nonsense. Assuming he might actually be running.
Obama was basically about a similar business with the speech- getting liberals back on board. Seems to have worked. Now, of course, he’ll have to see if he can get a deal that he can sell them. Could be difficult, seeing as Repubs are what they are. And I do think ordinary people will oppose a deal that screws them, quite forcefully. Let’s hope so.
Off topic, but are people aware of this:
http://seeyouincincinnati.com/

Protesting against ALEC, the bunch that Prof Cronon was talking about. April 29 is the date.

What I’m wondering, in all innocence, is how one applies Occam’s Razor to the explanations being offered here and elsewhere, when none of the available evidence makes any sense whatever.

As always, the utility of a theory lies in it’s ability to predict. Some have been better at this. Some – such as the elebenty-dimensiona-Obama-is-really-a-progressive – have been much, much worse.

But why stop at theories? You could look at the predictions on record made by various personalities and go with their analysis rather than some single overarching theory. It strikes me that (bringing this around full circle) both Greenwald and Hamsher have been remarkably prescient. Then of course there’s Newberry’s claim – made in 2007 – that no matter who was elected President, they would be essentially Bush Lite.

Yes, irony is the coward’s way out, I admit it. Sometimes, though, it’s as comforting at the end of the day as a stiff drink.

I wasn’t sure what you meant by the above; my apologies. Unfortunately, even here, there are still a few tru blu believers in Obama’s awesome political maneuverings.

And for all that certain, shall we say, cynical models predict Obama’s behaviour, we still don’t know why they do ( I’m not real big on “intent” in these sorts of discussions.) In fact, sometimes I have the sinking suspicion that everyone is more or less right in their theorizing and that we the proles don’t know just how close to the edge we really are. I’ve had one actual nightmare where this figured in, in fact. No, that’s not exaggeration.

I should add that once a nation’s politics is reduced to a competition to see who can tell the most elegant lie, it’s time for a revolution. By that yardstick, I’d say that the United States is overdue.