Yglesias on Obama

Respectfully, you’re quite close to being on a mighty high horse there, Henry.

There are plenty of people in the 1% who support left neo-liberal objectives, e.g. greater redistribution. Obama will go and give a speech about battling a stubbornly conservative Congress or whatever; he will not be preaching to free market fundamentalists. Maybe make a push for more charitable donations, or supporting Democratic candidates. He’ll take their money and get a standing ovation. What’s wrong with that?

Essentially you’re assuming that these gatherings are per se a bad thing. I agree they are dangerous, in terms of promoting regulatory capture/crony capitalism/what not. But I fully expect the man to go and give an entirely reasonable message.

I’m not really sure why I should be more concerned about from whom he receives the money rather than how he spends it and what he said in exchange for it.

Obama is not a progressive. He never was a progressive.

Must we argue over this? Yes, it looks very bad and I wish he hadn’t. But this is as far left as any President is allowed to be these days.

Obama’s critics on this one make me think that conservatives have been successful in convincing even liberals of two points. The first is that a celebrity giving a speech at a celebrity rate is behaving corruptly. There are certainly details that could color the speech this way. For example, the rates could be so high that they are clearly payment for something more than a celebrity speech. The speech content could be held secret. I don’t see evidence that either of these will be the case for Obama’s speeches. But after years of complaining about Hillary’s speeches, it seems like everyone is buying into the line that these speeches are terribly corrupt. Score a win for the right, especially given the second point.

The second conservative talking point liberals seem to be adopting is a version of “If you think taxes should be higher, just write checks larger than what you owe.” Liberals should be detailing what they think should be appropriate policies for such speeches (e.g., payment should not exceed the going rate for a comparable celebrity, which means ridiculously huge but no huger, and transcripts should be made available.) But how is society better off when liberals voluntarily and unilaterally live up to a set of norms that go beyond not only the law, but wise policy. (“No past or possibly future politician can ever be paid a lot for a speech” is not wise policy.)

I never could figure Obama out. Whistleblower convictions, deportations, bank bailout wild profitable success, homeowner assistance abject failure. Now this. I agree that he should either stop doing these speeches, or if he does, donate the money to charity, and stipulate that the remarks will be published later. If the group doesn’t agree to the remarks being published, then no speech.
Off-topic, but related to trying to figure out the Obama’s, WTF is it with the buddy buddy between Michelle and GW Bush, the known war criminal? She must know what he did. Did he come sobbing to them one evening, “Dick made me do it! Sob. Sob. And Rumsfeld promised me no one would get hurt. Sob. Sob. I’m so sorry, Michelle! What have I done? Sob. Sob.”
If that’s what happened, I can halfway understand, like most liberals, her empathy would have a strong influence, while as we all know, Republicans, having no empathy, would not have this problem. If that’s not what happened, I can only conclude that she is playing some cynical political optics game. This also supports the notion that neither of the Obama’s are any better than the standard republican.
And, we all know, as Tom Perez made clear, Republicans don’t give a shit about people. This is a truth that cannot be overstated.

Many of the comments above seem to be doing a lot of weird gyrations in order to avoid the obvious. The enormous fees for these speeches are designed to influence the speaker, plain and simple. Showing up at the event gives the chance for further influence because you have purchased time alone with them to make your various cases. The people paying the money are the biggest beneficiaries of the current set of power arrangements. If you want people to take you seriously as an advocate and trustworthy intermediary in changing/regulating the current power arrangements, you need to not be asking those kind of people for giant personal checks to deposit into your personal bank account. This is exactly the same logic that leads us to want to regulate campaign finance and ban bribery.

The argument above seems to be that $400K/hour is simply the going rate for basking in the numinous glow of Obama’s celebrity. Hence $400K is the fair and natural recompense for his hour of work giving a speech and you’re a puritanical killjoy if you say otherwise. This kind of reification of market prices is problematic in lots of ways, but particularly so when you have someone whose celebrity was obtained through holding public office.

But how is society better off when liberals voluntarily and unilaterally live up to a set of norms that go beyond not only the law, but wise policy. (“No past or possibly future politician can ever be paid a lot for a speech” is not wise policy.)

I am not going to vote for or trust people who take giant personal checks from people actively opposed to my interests is a wise and understandable policy for voters.

Trump of course was personally a guy who was at the top of current power arrangements, but his bid for anti-corruption credibility was that he didn’t actually make his living by asking for naked payoffs from wealthy interests (e.g. a six figure check for an hour of work), which then put him under their influence. Instead he was doing visible work like building hotels and getting money for that. Voting Trump was obviously not wise (and only barely understandable). But his argument that he wasn’t actually taking direct payoffs seems to have had some legs with voters, which shows how toxic it is to take direct payoffs in exchange for celebrity/influence gained through politics.

Shorter: if you demand all progressives wear the hair shirt, get ready to be lonely and powerless.

the notion that turning down $400K for an hour of work when you already have millions of dollars banked and access to any kind of job you want constitutes “wearing the hair shirt” is part of the problem.

The “hair shirt” argument does work when you get corporate lobbyists making a million+ a year screaming that union leaders are hypocrites because they take home $250K a year.

No past or possibly future politician can ever be paid a lot for a speech” is not wise policy.)
I can’t think of a downside to this. If not as enforceable policy, then at least as guide for voting. What do we, ordinary people, gain if our politicians have lucrative relations with rich people? There a million ways how it can go bad, without any upside.

I guess it’s a cultural thing, but I am constantly amazed at the things that Americans accept in this respect, and how rich their politicians can get without voter backlash.

Thought experiment-what if It had been the ACLU paying the $400K? Same problem? I think so, but….

the notion that turning down $400K for an hour of work when you already have millions of dollars banked and access to any kind of job you want constitutes “wearing the hair shirt” is part of the problem.

This thread is hardly into the double digits and already full of people refusing to grapple with the basic ethical principles that such an exchange runs counter to. Apparently so long as one doesn’t get handed a novelty sack with a giant $ on it, everything is fine. No thought is given to the corrosive influence that post hoc payments to politicians has on public trust; instead the wise liberal sternly lectures the people that there’s nothing to see here.

A sports analogy: in the NBA (and other sports) there’s a salary cap. You cannot pay your players more than a certain amount (subject to some exceptions, but nevermind that). That makes it hard to have a team of, say, the five best players in the game, because you’d have to pay them all max contracts, and that’s not allowed. Now, what you could do is hint to e.g. LeBron James, “Hey, take a pay cut for us now, and after you’re done playing we’ll give you a sinecure with the team that pays you $100 million.” Or you could try paying LeBron under the table. Both of these would be obvious attempts to evade the salary cap, and therefore punishable under league rules. It would hold no water with the league office for someone to say that “well, technically, LeBron is a private citizen now so we can pay him whatever we want,” because it would be understood that his post-playing salary was in some sense a quid pro quo for his taking a pay cut earlier to help out the team.

This analogy is imperfect because no one has actually told Obama that they’ll pay him off later for benefits rendered while he was in office. But of course public corruption does not work in the simple ways that people think it does; the influence of money on political decisionmaking is usually implicit rather than explicit. We cannot know whether Obama’s speeches are a reward for something he did as president, but I’m guessing that if the Obama administration had taken over the failing banks at the start of the crisis, he wouldn’t be getting these invitations now. Regardless, taking money for speeches in this way is another example of the revolving door that former politicians make use of to enrich themselves; it’s just that if you’re relatively smaller-fry (e.g. a Congressperson), you might go into lobbying, while a former President can more easily go on the speech circuit. It was gross when Bill Clinton did it, it was gross when George W. Bush did it, and it’s gross now that Obama is doing it. If liberals are substantively as committed to good government as they claim to be, they should be making sure that politicians can’t enrich themselves this way after their service is up, and if it’s not feasible to do by statute, then at least there should be a unified norm against it. Instead lots of people are clamoring to excuse this kind of behavior on the grounds that hey, Obama had a rough time in office.

Henry says, correctly, that the most curious thing about MY’s argument is the push-back, and then selects pushback to criticize for the logic of its arguments and not its motivations. There are some side-long glances at the tenor of MY’s argument, but not much explication.

What is going on here? I think MY and his interlocutors are engaged in hyper-normalization (title of an Adam Curtis “documentary” but not to be scorned as a term merely on that account). MY’s hand-wringing about precedents and ethical appearances is itself an attempt at normalization and a familiar exercise in a a familiar species of Obama apologia, meant to subtly (well, maybe not that subtle) reinforce belief in Obama’s essential if sometimes hapless nobility.

To take MY’s account seriously in 2017 you have to have the memory of a mayfly. It is a little late to be worried about precedents, or whether progressive centrism is beginning (!!!) to look like a scam.

Obama is collecting for a job well-done. Any other interpretation is an exercise is wilful self-deception. He’s the crooked casino croupier, pocketing tips from grateful “winners” as he goes on an extended break. They’ve won billions; he will collect the odd hundred million, a few hundred thousand at a time. As any mention of Blair or the Clintons must indicate, he’s hardly the first in this line and as the imminent election of Macron indicates, is probably not quite yet the last.

[And, no speeches are not different from book deals — another open form of bribery. (Governor Cuomo collected nearly $800,000 for a book he didn’t write and no one will read. Wonder what Obama will get for a book he does write and a fair number of people will read? Speculation on that misses the implications of the world neoliberalism has created where books are published primarily by giant Media conglomerates with an oligarchy’s control of everything. If investment banks owned book publishers they would happily pay the book advance and skip two hours listening to “an entirely reasonable message” and eating rubber chicken. But, it is worse than that. Would MY have a career if he said, “boo!” against either the Media conglomerates or the networks of pilot fish like Politico and the billionaire’s hobbyshops that pass for havens of elite opinion journalism? Can anyone honestly think he does not know that?]

The question not being asked is what makes this, “hyper-normalization”: can the system survive this level of corruption? Making this open delivery of cash dollars “normal” is a pretense that the political-economic system can survive this level of corruption. Not an argument for its survival, mind — not an argument that there is a lot of ruin in a nation or something like that, nor an argument that I am exaggerating, a gloom and doomer who loves collapse scenarios as drama; the system may not survive an open acknowledgement that the system is on the verge of some massive and irretrievable failure or breakdown. So, you cannot really legitimate those arguments by pushing back from that direction. We are in pretend and extend mode. “hyper-normalization” is the pretense, which MY and those pushing back are cooperatively engaged in — a kind of dance — that this is all about the appearance of ethical impropriety and possibility of a precedent (those horses left the barn some years ago), not about whether the legitimacy and basic function of the economic and political system has already been jeopardized and we are just waiting for a decisive break. (Like Trump is not a serious systemic breakdown in himself, or the collapse of traditional left-of-center political parties across the West is not serious)

“The Clinton ‘charity’ was no charity, it was money laundering and influence peddling.”

The last I knew it was rated higher than the Red Cross, and despite intense journalistic investigation, no wrong-doing by it has been discovered. Guilty until proven innocent is not a standard any of us could live up to.

I think (as a guess) that one of the motivations Obama had as president was to convince people that having a black president was okay; that he wasn’t going to do anything radical or even much outside of conventional wisdom or precedent; that he would listen to all sides; that he wouldn’t focus narrowly on black issues and interests. I’m not saying it worked, but I think he wanted some acceptance. If so, ironically he probably lost as much or more on the left as he gained on the center-right.

FDR could say of the rich and powerful, “I welcome their hatred.” That was easier for him to say as president than for BHO, for reasons which I think are understandable.

“Thought experiment-what if It had been the ACLU paying the $400K? Same problem? I think so, but….”

See, that’s the whole point, that never happens – never. Its like asking would it still be morning if the sun rose in the West instead of the East. Its not a good question, its only an amusing counterfactual.

Its why you know that the $400k isn’t for his clever rhetoric and cheerful anecdotes. He could stand at the podium and recite the alphabet for an hour and still get his dough….

Paid – in – full.

If you don’t see that, all the defenses, rebuttals and moralizing are either moot or talking past the point.

Wilder: Wonder what Obama will get for a book he does write and a fair number of people will read?

You must have missed it, $60 million for a book each from the First Couple, from the publishing who got approval for a merger during O’s term. I think it is a record.

I think it may be about time we accept that democracy is over and we are ruled by oligarchs and a courtier class, with a very large class getting bread and circuses, and the wage class/organized proletariat going the way of the dodo. I have been thinking fairly hard on it since the intro to the book forum was posted yesterday, and I sensed an resignation to neofeudalism. Maybe I am wrong to want the streets to flood with blood before I kowtow to that. But that belongs over there rather than here maybe.

“MY wants Obama to behave better, because otherwise political centrism will start to look like a hustle. But if someone like Obama is not behaving better, doesn’t that imply that the hustle theory has legs?”

No, it does not. Not when you examine the reasons why “political centrism will start to look like a hustle”.

What will make it look like a hustle are the concerted efforts of right-wing smear-machines, which are not reliable truth-tracking devices.

Look, I agree with Yglesias on this one. The Democrats have a *much* better record of helping the non-elites in America than the Republicans do. Whether it is income inequality or health-care or pensions or voting rights, the Democrats have proven over the decades that they are the party of ordinary Americans vs. the rich.

But those facts are not widely known among the electorate, because symbols loom larger in their mind. A Clinton who genuinely helps working-class people was pilloried for elitism, while a Trump who is a non-stop exploitation machine was lionized for his “populism.”

So the symbols that Yglesias is worried about are not symbols that actually indicate that centrism is a hustle. Instead, they are symbols that the real hustlers, the right-wing elitists, will manipulate in the furtherance of their own hustle.

I like other parts of your post, though.

Come on guys!! –
Obama voluntarily took the worst job on earth for 8 -(in words:’eight’) consecutive years – and all in ‘good humor’ – while he got insulted, abused and harassed by the American people to such a degree – that the $2.9million in damages Stella Liebeck got from McDonalds Coffee Burns are the minimum for all of his extensive ‘pain’ –

AND that’s what’s so unfair about my homeland – if slightly ‘less brilliant’… let’s call them: ‘First Class Entertainer’ -(‘Oprah or LBron James or what’s about Jennifer Lawrence or ‘the Bieb’?) – get much more – per performance – only because they are NOT ‘politicians – there is something seriously wrong with America!

Obamas ‘timing’ is impeccable – It always was -(as not only the 2011 Correspondence Dinner has proven) – and this Matthew Who? – might be just a sourpuss??!

and just his performance at the 2011 Correspondence Dinner was worth about double -(if compared to what other US entertainer receive) –

Sorry – I just think he doesn’t get enough in comparison to somebody like Colbert -(or what

I think its weird to be upset about the left not trusting politicians who are taking huge pay-offs from the lefts political enemies. Yes Obama was never left, although this now acknowledged, only because he’s no longer a product that has to be sold to them.

““The Clinton ‘charity’ was no charity, it was money laundering and influence peddling.”

A good proxy for the corruption ratio would be to observe how the donations hold up once there is no chance of Clinton regaining power. Unfortunately it appears that donations are down dramatically.

The critique I have with this argument is do we just want only the right to talk to business? Isn’t talk better than not talking? It borders on self righteousness.

Obama can talk all he wants. It’s not as if, being an ex-president, he lacks for a platform. He could go on TV tomorrow and talk as much as he liked, or he could talk to anyone at all in private. The objection is not to talking, it’s to the grotesque remuneration for an hour of platitudes. What do you think he’s going to tell them for $400k other than how handsome and accomplished they all are?

Obama voluntarily took the worst job on earth for 8 -(in words:’eight’) consecutive years – and all in ‘good humor’ – while he got insulted, abused and harassed by the American people to such a degree – that the $2.9million in damages Stella Liebeck got from McDonalds Coffee Burns are the minimum for all of his extensive ‘pain’ –

Ah yes, he didn’t want the job but a bunch of mean people dragooned him into it, apparently. What this has to do with McDonald’s coffee escapes me, but at any rate, he’s not leaving his position in order to renounce his worldly possession and enter a monastery, nor is anyone saying he should do that. But profiting from your public service is actually bad; that’s the principle at stake here that’s worth defending. Even Josh Barro understands this.

“Obama voluntarily took the worst job on earth for 8 -(in words:’eight’) consecutive years – ”

Pretty sure there are coal miners who might disagree about this.

Like Henry in the OP and some others, I’m bemused that anyone could find this other than very troubling.

In the grand scheme of things, the ideological function of Barack Obama was to convince the US electorate that left neoliberalism is humane and viable after the 2008 financial crisis. He was meant largely to maintain the status quo. And he did, pretty handily, even while ameliorating many of its harmful effects.

But it’s really looking like it wasn’t enough.

Best way for Obama to deal with this- “

“So American to excuse it all if he gives the money to charity!”

I wish that were generally true; I don’t see why it shouldn’t be (morally). I got about 20 requests for more money today, by email and paper mail: Sudan famine, Syrian refugees, Mercy Corps, Médecins Sans Frontières, Southern Poverty Law Center, ACLU, Common Cause, Carter Foundation, SPCA, Mercy Flights, St. Jude Children’s Hospital, Alzheimers research, American Indian Education Fund, two universities, and various Democrats including Elizabeth Warren. There are a lot of places among which $400K could be split to do a lot of good.

“If you can’t eat their food, drink their booze, screw their women, take their money and then vote against them you’ve got no business being up here.”

So the question is whether BHO did the equivalent of “voting against them”.
At all? On balance? Always?

My intuition is that middle answer is most nearly correct.

Anyway, we would be much better off if we did not idolize, did not make heroes, of our political leaders. It may be human, but it is not politically useful. Obama was clearly superior to alternatives presented to us in either 2008 (John Edwards? really???) or 2012; further, supporting him rather than any of the Congressional leaders he had to work with as President was more sensible than not. That was reason enough to support him, despite any character or ideological flaws.

Many people’s lives are better now than they would otherwise have been, given the choices available to us at the time. Well into middle-age, with reasonably clear memories of Reagan, Bush 1 & Bush 2 (and teen-age memory of Nixon), I find that good enough. Carter has been a holy man as ex-President. As President, he was pretty much useless. I’ll choose an effective sinner who manages to leave the world a better place than it would have been — & BHO certainly did* — over an ineffectual saint 8 days a week.

Now it is time to move on from him. If he can and wants to be helpful in achieving the goals of a progressive/left political movement in the US, let him work with us. Otherwise, let us not worry too much about his raking it in. We have better things to be wringing our hands about, and better things to do than to wring our hands.

*ACA, anyone? Counter-arguments relating to his military policy will be batted away as bog-standard for an American President – no choice available to US voters in 2008 or 2012 would have done anything better and to the extent that they would have done anything differently, it almost certainly would have been even worse. To the ACA, add climate policy, the accord with Iran, the DoL under Tom Perez, Sonia Sotomayor. Much of this is unlikely to survive Trump. I doubt that this was Obama’s intent although we may be able to fault him for decisions last fall that led to this outcome.

I don’t blame anyone for cashing in. Especially with the US political system crashing, Obama doesn’t really know what kind of assets he will be able to keep his hands on to live who knows where he’s going to have to escape to.

J-D @ 46:
Ray-gun? Did Tricky Dick do any? Carter has helped build homes for Habitat for Humanity and still flies commercial if he’s going anywhere.

@37
‘But profiting from your public service is actually bad; that’s the principle at stake here that’s worth defending. Even Josh Barro understands this.’

But as Berra also said so famously:
‘When you come to a fork in the road, take it.’ – and about McDonalds and hot Coffee – nothing beats the Pain to be US President – and especially in Obamas Case – the abuse he had to take is much MUCH more worth than what O’Reilly get’s from FOX!
and about

@39
‘Pretty sure there are coal miners who might disagree about this’.
Do you know a Coal Miner who ever was President?

I’m still trying to understand why accumulating tens of millions of dollars after leaving elected office is some deep principle that liberals are supposed to defend.

We can make a moral case that this is unacceptable: this can be a powerful argument
against this sort of insidious reward system. Or we can defend the right of people on our team to cash in. We can’t do both.

And calling people upset about this on moral grounds racists because the latest person to benefit from a corrupt practice is black…well, it’s an argument, but not one worth a printable response.

How much better it would be if these men acquired great wealth *before* they have their time in office.

” if someone like Obama is not behaving better, doesn’t that imply that the hustle theory has legs”

I don’t recall Obama ever behaving better. He just had Jesse Jackson Jr. others hurl the bigotry. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2007/10/barack-obama-donnie-mcclurkin-and-the-limits-of-tolerance/50782/

A lot of the oppo research on Obama ended up on the Daily Kos threads and it didn’t portray a man of the people, but rather a cynical hustler willing use everyone from Ayers to the now forgotten Rev. Wright to sideline opponents. Borrowing cash from Tony Rezko whilst Rezko was turning off the heat for the poor speaks of nothing but pure cynicism and opportunism.

I don’t begrudge O a nickel of his money and I’ve little sympathy for those who are unhappy to learn that George Washington did in fact tell a number of lies. He’s a grifter like the rest and suggesting he be held to a higher standard than Chelsea Clinton is just plain silly. And it’s not like the Republicans are going to turn down a free lunch.

Let O take his rightful place at the trough. He’s ‘earned’ it.

j.c. halasz @44

In Dante, this is called simony and the sinners’ shades are cast head down into a mock baptismal fount even as their flailing feet are on fire…. Admittedly, the sin involves the sale of ecclesiastical offices, but I think we might be permitted a modern secularized update.

I confess that I know about simony not from Dante but from Walzer’s Spheres of Justice (where it’s referred to more than once), e.g.:
here

@kidneystones

He’s a grifter like the rest

Obama was president of the Harvard Law Review. He could have gone the route of prestigious judicial clerkship followed by lucrative partnership at a corporate law firm. Instead he became a law prof. and then entered politics, starting iirc in the Illinois state senate.

Doesn’t sound like a grifter’s trajectory. I think now Obama shd stop spending time on billionaires’ yachts and turn down any more Cantor Fitzgerald-style speaking fees. He has an extremely nice house in a very wealthy section of D.C., presumably a nice downtown office, and a zillion-dollar book contract. I think that’s probably enough.

[aeiou] 65@ elected president of HLR – please refer us to a single legal piece he published under his own name. He could have clerked…but that would have gotten in the way of his much more pressing autobiography, and in the process exposed him to unwanted scrutiny of the sort he never endured in Cambridge.
He was a lazy rich kid who smoked dope at Occidental and couldn’t make honors at Columbia pre-law. I’d be surprised if his grades match those of most of us here. I wouldn’t dream of writing one autobiography explaining to the waiting world how wonderful I am – much less two, both before the age of 40 – what a wonderfully exciting and illuminating life that must have been!

He’s a B student at best, unable to help his own kids with high school math. But as we can see today, any clown with the right messaging can achieve high office. Oh yeah, he’s spent his entire life in the company of the rich, so please don’t ask him to stop the ostentatious displays of wealth at this point in his career. Michelle knows how to spend money every bit as well, despite her more modest upbringing.

The Obamas are American royalty and perfectly at home among their many wealthy admirers. Leave them to their rewards – to ask otherwise is churlish.

Finally Kidneystones has been disemvowelled. But given we’re running reactive moderation, why bother? Just kick him.

@68: No, it really did start with Ford, at least in the modern era, and accelerated dramatically with Bush the first and Clinton. Truman is a pretty dramatic counter-example, and I’d argue Carter as well.

The fact that people who hate Obama seem happy at this turn of events should be a massive clue to Democrats that, perhaps, there are costs to the party of confirming the most cynical assumptions about its leaders.

I’ll take avoiding that problem over any free market apologetic about losing the “best” leaders because they can’t become incredibly rich from public service. Or however the argument is supposed to go.

Yes, some things are so obvious that even Matt Yglesias gets them.

1. Draw a clear distinction between yourself and your opponent: Politics 101.
2. The “don’t care if he’s a rich grifter” demographic is already sewn up by the GOP.
3. The U.S. is near bottom in voter participation in the “developed” world.
4. When polled non-voters frequently talk about how there is little difference between the major parties, politicians are all in it for themselves, and so on.
5. If non-voters voted they would almost certainly tilt toward the liberal/left.
6. Therefore it would certainly help the Dem cause to at least appear to not be rich grifters.

All of this assumes, of course, that Dems really believe the stuff they purportedly believe in and want to see those policies succeed, rather than being themselves grifters who spout socially liberal platitudes to the voting base.

“that is what a Google Search produced then” referred to my previous comment, not PP’s assertion.

Isn’t that the so called American dream – to lift oneself up by one’s bootstraps and become wealthy?

No, and that is part of what disturbs me here. The AD where and when I grew up involved a good lifetime job, house , car every 5 years, helping kids through college, a vacation cottage or RV, a decent retirement. Little League, High School sports, a pro game once a year. Respect from and involvement in the community where you were born and buried.

The ambitious and independent might make 2-3 times the average, but had talent, expenses and risks and gave back. Doctors, lawyers, storeowners.

We thought we understood that becoming rich and famous had nearly prohibitive costs, sacrifices, and ethical dilemmas and we did not approve.

There appears to a normalization of ambition and greed within society or a part of society, some kind of comprehension and acceptance and even aspiration to the lifestyles of the rich and famous that I find almost terrifying. Liz Taylor loved crazy jewelry. We didn’t hate her, but we thought it weird, silly, clownish. Part of what is going on is the urban-rural sorting, where 50k a year for an apartment is just a necessity.

And that’s part of what I find abhorrent in Obama. Nobody needs 50 million dollars. It is inexcusable.

On the debate about POTUS being a good or bad job – it is obviously a highly desirable job, for a whole host of reasons both the laudable (satisfaction derived from ability to make positive social change and improve people’s lives, great medical benefits) and the less laudable (egotism, ability to launch cruise missiles at will). It also has very substantial downsides (on-call 24/7, enormously stressful, microscopic personal and professional scrutiny that begins 5 minutes after you start, continues for hundreds of years after you die, and most of which garners attention at an inverse rate to the actual knowledge of the critic and their unwillingness to indulge in personalised vitriol). And the pay, while definitely not peanuts by the standard of us mere mortals, is generally vastly smaller than what a person with the skills desirable in a president can make in the private sector.

That’s why, while I find the six-figure after dinner speaking circuit problematic and skeezy, it really isn’t something I can get myself too exercised about. Maybe that’s because over on this side of the pond the post-governmental careers of numerous major political figures have involved making oodles of money in much less reputable ways (incredibly, the OP’s reference to Blair’s shilling for Nursultan Nazarbayev isn’t even the most odious one I could name, and that’s without even doing any extensive research on the topic). Maybe my standards are imperfectly calibrated, but a politician getting vastly overpaid for mouthing platitudes at plutocrats and tickling their egos a bit doesn’t really hit my outrage buttons. A fool and his money and all that. And the exorbitant nature of the fees strikes me less as evidence of a quid pro quo, as a further example of the ludicrously wealthy engaging in a demonstrative display of ostentatious consumption to show how ludicrously wealthy they are. Financial peacocking if you will.

That’s not to say its a good thing. As has already been pointed out there’s a danger that public officials will treat their tenure in office as an extended audition for the oligarchic after-dinner circuit. And even if they don’t, the appearance of corruption in a democracy is in certain ways as corrosive as the fact of it.

I’m also sceptical of claims that Obama is basically cashing in for services rendered. Obama implemented policies that the financial industry was happy with in office that’s true. He also implemented policies they fought tooth and nail. That’s not surprising, given how US politics works. The POTUS isn’t a dictator and the argument ‘Barack Obama – tool of finance’ is about as well founded as ‘Obama – tool of the insurance industry who could have got single payer but He. Didn’t. Even. Try.’

“If you can’t eat their food, drink their booze, screw their women, take their money and then vote against them you’ve got no business being up here.”

Disclaimer needed if you’re quoting this approvingly. Or do people here really still think that “women” are an owned commodity (“their women”) of the default human (“their”) which are to be consumed / taken like free booze?

It wasn’t always the case that ex-Presidents of the US went on a hugely well-paid speaking circuit. Does anybody know when this pattern started?

Ray-gun? Did Tricky Dick do any? Carter has helped build homes for Habitat for Humanity and still flies commercial if he’s going anywhere.

Grant.

No, it really did start with Ford, at least in the modern era, and accelerated dramatically with Bush the first and Clinton. Truman is a pretty dramatic counter-example, and I’d argue Carter as well.

Grant was dying and trying to stave off bankruptcy when he wrote his memoirs, published by Mark Twain, to provide for his widow. His memoirs are considered the one masterpiece in an otherwise pretty mediocre genre.

I expect there are gaps in the information available from Wikipedia on this question, but it is at least a place to start, so I’ve investigated there the ex-Presidents mentioned here.

There’s no direct indication that Grant made large sums of money on any speaking circuit, and (without going into details) the other information available makes it extremely unlikely; the same goes for Truman.

Wikipedia reports that Nixon made a lot of speeches, without reference to how much, or whether, he was paid for them; it does mention the large sum he was paid to be interviewed by David Frost, which is not the same as being on the speaking circuit but does bear some relationship to it.

On ex-Presidents after Nixon, Wikipedia is less informative,with the striking exception of Clinton, apparently because his wife included information about his income from public speaking in her ethics reports as a Senator. He’s the only ex-President for whom, so far, I”ve found definite information about making large sums on the speaking circuit, which of course doesn’t mean that he’s the only ex-President who’s done it. No doubt there’s much more information available outside Wikipedia if I’m prepared to do the extra work to find it.

It seems to me that outrage is the appropriate emotion for a politician cashing in on his career. He was, after all, paid quite handsomely and given a very pleasant lifestyle indeed during his career in public office. If he needs more money, he can get a few directorships somewhere with no trouble at all.

Of course, one may say that everybody does it so there is no point in being outraged. One may also say that everybody exhales carbon dioxide so there is no point in getting upset about global warming. This, it seems to me, is simply an attempt to get away from the point, which is that Obama is participating in a process of the corruption of the American political system.

As to claiming that it’s fair to take the money from rich people and redistribute it to yourself, the same, obviously, would be true of expensive prostitutes; the problem is that the whores are not going to change the practices of the rich people — they are simply affirming them. Obama, by his action, is saying that he is willing to serve the powerful. You may, if you wish, say that he always has done that — I believe that myself. But at the same time, to do it openly is rather distasteful.

Also, if you really believe that the entire political system is as corrupt as that — and the original post seems to conclude with that — then there is really little point in pretending that the political system can generate any positive consequences.

Suzanne

Grant died broke, but not for want of trying. Whether he was gullible and loyal to a fault or corrupt is one of those questions. Many have taken the charitable view that he was the former. I’m not so sure.

His memoir is a wonderful book, written under most difficult circumstances and while he was in great pain, and he did succeed in providing handsomely for his Julia.

You’ve posted this as a response to me (apparently), but I don’t understand how it’s supposed to be a response to me. It has nothing to do with the question ‘When did ex-Presidents of the US start making huge sums of money on a speaking circuit?’, which is the question I specifically stipulated I was discussing, and which is not (do I really need to explain this?) synonymous with ‘When and how did ex-Presidents of the US start trying to make money?’ I know Grant tried to make money after he left the Presidency, but (I am confident) he didn’t do it by going on the speaking circuit.

I know that Clinton did make huge sums of money on the speaking circuit. I am inclined to suspect this ex-Presidential practice didn’t start with him, although I can’t be sure. I’m confident, though, that it started well after Grant.

Here is one comment on Nixon (with link):
He never personally profited from his office. After he left office, he never took a speaking fee. If someone sent him a fee, he would donate it to charity.

The larger claim seems hard to reconcile with what Wikipedia reports about how much he was paid for the interviews with David Frost; on the other hand, the narrower claim about speaking fees in a more restricted sense could still be true.

This report suggests that the practice may have begun with Reagan (and been continued by subsequent Presidents).

J-D, upon reviewing the thread, I see I was commenting on #78 and not your post at #87. I didn’t see #78 immediately and at a glance it looked as if that comment was yours. Sorry for the confusion.

“The POTUS isn’t a dictator and the argument ‘Barack Obama – tool of finance’ is about as well founded as ‘Obama – tool of the insurance industry who could have got single payer but He. Didn’t. Even. Try.’”

Nobody ever said that Obama wielded dictatorial powers, apart from some nutjobs on the right. The fact remains that the financiers were frightened to death when Obama took office and ready to do just about whatever he told them to do. Once it became clear he was going to bail them out (and leave underwater homeowners largely to their own devices), they got cocky again and a few years later they were giving money to Romney.

@79: The argument as I understand it is not that Obama could have gotten single payer but that he dismissed it from consideration at the outset. Not good bargaining and also the single-payer people had every right to have their arguments heard by the President and Congress regardless of the outcome.

The key pain for MY is that all “mainstream ” reformists are being sunk by the idea they are corrupt to the benefit of the extreme right. If you accept the idea that the only viable alternative to a moderate pro business liberal is the Front National or other natzi groups then Obama taking the money is extremely irresponsible. It means people who are consciously evil will keep being elected to the harm of millions of people. It is the fact it handicaps the moderate forces that is the problem. And obama and his defenders must know that which is why MY is spitting blood.

Jerry Vinokurov at 17 has the relevant observation: “….his post-playing salary was in some sense a quid pro quo for his taking a pay cut earlier to help out the team.”
This is a cancer on democracy.
All politicians now in office know that they can have a good career after retiring from politics, if they do the bidding of potential future employers, or at least make no waves. That is one big reason that ‘we cannot have nice things’ , that politicians will oppose things which are obviously popular and would help with their re-election. The future career prospects are more important than re-election (and even direct campaign contributions). Speaking fees, board directorships, cozy jobs as ‘VP Government Relations,’ lobbying jobs for former pols all appear to be equally corrupting. And the example now given by Obama will encourage the pols we have not to mess too much with the financial industry.
And I suspect Bernie Sander won’t get such nice gigs once he retires. Nor will Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
For Republicans, self-enrichment is their base ideology, so they have no qualms taking all they can. With part of the Democratic party going the same way, it seems there is little hope. No wonder voters become cynical (and stop voting, or vote for a ‘protest candidate’)

“The last I knew it was rated higher than the Red Cross, and despite intense journalistic investigation, no wrong-doing by it has been discovered. Guilty until proven innocent is not a standard any of us could live up to.”

This was by Charity Navigator. The Foundation had been on its watchlist and then clarified some things prior to the election.

They aren’t doing anything illegal. Still, questions can be asked. They could be the same issues we might consider about every huge international development foundation, though. The CF financial statements are incredibly vague. They got huge donations from people (e.g., Frank Guistra) whom they also financially benefitted through access to foreign governments. Officers of the foundation (e.g., the Clinton Family) get comped plane rides, hotels, etc. (if not riding on private jets by donors like Guistra) when doing foundation work. The foundation received donations from foreign governments doing business with the US government. They also did not disclose all their donors. (This was one reason they were put on the watchlist). They face much criticism in countries like Haiti where they operate. Again, all this is likely true of all huge foundations, given their enormous leverage and influence in desperately poor places. The CF seems to go a bit beyond this though–there are development projects on their own website that are, in fact, corporate profit-making enterprises. One can learn a lot from a careful read of their own financial statements, and their own website.

The Clinton Foundation also partnered with many excellent NGOs, and put a huge amount of money to a bunch of essential projects.

It’s hard to discuss these things because it all has echoes of (hypocritical) right wing drumbeats. A reason to think about it now is that foundations could be another legal activity like paid speechmaking that undermines our confidence in the motives of government officials when in office. We seem to simply expect high-level elected officials to wield money, power, and influence as a conduit between the corporate sector and foreign governments once they leave office. You can consider Kissinger and Albright as examples of this as well.

Some main differences between the way US government officials profit from holding office and the corrupt officials in ‘developing nation’ profit is that in the USA it is all done in a way that is (a) legal (b) much more transparent (c) usually way less lucrative. Those things make it defensible for some, but it’s possible that the wider effects won’t be similar to illegal corruption on the motives of office-holders, and on the public trust. It’s impossible to see what can be done about this in the political culture of 2017. The expectations a successful politician holds for his or her life after office are the expectations most celebrated influential people have–which is that their fame, talent, connections, and experience should also bring them a lot of money. It appears that all of this works as it is designed to work.

Suzanne: “The argument as I understand it is not that Obama could have gotten single payer but that he dismissed it from consideration at the outset. Not good bargaining and also the single-payer people had every right to have their arguments heard by the President and Congress regardless of the outcome.”

I find this criticism quite hard to grasp. The first part, that he dismissed single payer on the outset, hinges on what you mean by ‘outset’. When was that, exactly? There were few if any votes in Congress for single payer, and no proposal based on single payer was going anywhere. A serious single payer proposal would have died without support and probably reduced the chance that anything could be done at all. The time to take something off the table is when that something has no chance of happening and in fact can only harm your chances of anything. But to be clear, explain at what point in time, exactly, it would have been appropriate to take single payer off the table, and how that would have resulted in a different outcome.

Similarly, I don’t know what it means to say that single payer people had ‘every right to have their arguments heard’. Do you think it possible that the President and Members of Congress had never heard any arguments for single payer? That the idea was a mystery to them? I doubt that, so clearly the argument was ‘heard’, and your objection is about when it was heard, or about who made the argument; or perhaps you mean something other than ‘heard’, for example, you mean ‘forcefully argued for’. And this question about rights, does every person have a right to have their argument heard, where heard apparently means ‘listened to and then advocated forcefully for by the POTUS’?

Put another way: If I think the ACA should have provided ponies for everyone, would it have been OK for Obama to decide at the outset not to fight for ponies if he thought it could not possibly pass and he thought arguing for it would be a distraction from what he thought could pass? Must he actually meet with me and every other person who argues for the ponies, because of our rights? Must he then make speeches advocating for the ponies, and put ponies on his list of requirements for the bill, and find a Member of Congress to propose the pony version of the bill, and then only remove the ponies when that version of the bill is defeated, or dies without ever being considered, in order to meet this standard?

@97: I don’t know why you regard it as some sort of loony left position to say that when hearings on national health care are being held, single payer advocates should be heard at such hearings and given a chance to make their case, regardless of whether or not what they want will actually get passed. Obama was routinely asked about the possibility at town halls.

However, given your general tone of derision, it is plain you think little of my opinion, so here’s notorious socialist dreamer Max Baucus:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/us/politics/24baucus.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=all

‘In the interview, Mr. Baucus said he has tried to keep everyone at the table — a tactic he honed discussing tax issues in Montana. “If you don’t like something, suspend judgment for 15 minutes and let’s find a way to get to yes,” Mr. Baucus said.

He conceded that it was a mistake to rule out a fully government-run health system, or a “single-payer plan,” not because he supports it but because doing so alienated a large, vocal constituency and left Mr. Obama’s proposal of a public health plan to compete with private insurers as the most liberal position.’

It seems to me that it is good and right to “keep everyone at the table.” I do not think it was good policy, let alone a good negotiating strategy, to leave the public option dangling like a piñata.

(And enough with the pony nonsense already.)

Not ignoring or evading you, Daragh, BTW. I’ll reply when I can.

The Daniel Davies piece is only good in the sense that it confirms what I thought, not in the sense that it excuses anything.

It says things like “The fundamental insight here is that the reason that we can be sure that these payments are not purely transactional is that nothing in investment banking is purely transactional.”

Are there people who thought that it was PURELY transactional? I don’t really think so.

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“So payments to former politicians for speeches and access shouldn’t be seen as straightforward purchases of services; they are one of the ways in which bankers invest in an overall ecosystem that they think benefits them. This is a fairly uniquely bankerish way to do business, and there is certainly a legitimate question of whether it benefits society as a whole. But it’s not a quid pro quo. You don’t pay $400,000 a speech because you want to hire President Obama — you pay it because you want to be the kind of guy who can hire President Obama.”

Ugh, just so much ugh.

The argument isn’t that the speeches are a direct payment for individual political decisions. The argument is that the promise of future ridiculous payments is a corrupting influence on all the little decisions you make along the way because you know that if you piss them off enough you won’t get them.

Regarding the Clinton Foundation– we don’t have to resolve it now, but we should pre-register a way of judging it.

If the donations to the Foundation go down significantly now that Clinton will never be President, there is a strong indication that there was some corrupt money flows going on there. If the donations do not go down significantly, it can be judged as just a Foundation linked to celebrity.

I would put “significantly” at about 15%. If the donations go down by that amount or more, it seems to me pretty clear that the donations were intended as influencing, rather than charitable. Does that seem fair?

Does anyone here think that when we look at the disclosure from 2017 we will find a smaller than 15% drop in donations?