Obama and the Payroll Tax: Compromise or Capitulation

A vice, St. Augustine reminds us, is a distorted impersonation of virtue.

I offer this principle in case there is anyone who might see virtue in the way President Obama has positioned himself in the standoff over extending the payroll tax. Despite originally insisting on a surcharge on millionaires to pay for the popular legislation that increased the average
worker’s pay by $1,000 a year, the President and Senate Democrats had agreed to
drop this demand if Republicans abandoned their insistence for a decision on
the Keystone XL pipeline.(1) When the dust had settled, the Senate had
passed—and the President had agreed to sign—a bill that jettisoned his proposed
millionaire’s tax but retained the Republican insistence for a quick decision
on the Keystone pipeline.(2) (Unaware of the hostage holders rules of etiquette
according to which when your demands have been met you release the hostage, the
Republicans in the House revolted over the deal most of the Republicans in the
Senate had agreed to—but I digress).(3)

Compromise is the sine qua non of democracy. In a system in
which the minority party can obstruct most action, the art of give and take is
essential for the system to move forward. To some Obama’s retreat from his
stated position in this instance might look like compromise. But it’s not. This
is where Augustine’s principle comes in. Vice can look a lot like virtue to the
uninitiated. Augustine put forward this
principle while agonizing over some pears he had stolen as a youth. Theft, he
declared, attempts to gain illegitimately the fruits of hard labor. Lust, which
he knew a bit about as well, is a perverted attempt to achieve the love we all
desire. And in Obama's case, capitulation in some respect resembles compromise
in that in both cases one must abandon one’s originally stated position. But a true compromise requires a roughly
fifty-fifty split, with each side giving up something significant in the negotiations.
In this instance, the Republicans got a tax cut, got it paid for entirely by budget
reductions, and got the President to accept a provision he had explicitly
threatened to veto. The president got, well, rolled.

The problem for supporters of President Obama is that this
is not just an isolated incident but part of a much larger pattern. The president
campaigns on the pledge that he will end the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy; the
cuts are extended. The Republicans insist on 32 billion in budget cuts or threaten
to shut down the government; they get 38 billion. The Republicans demand that
the debt ceiling raise be accompanied by corresponding cuts, while the President
insists there should be a balance between revenue enhancements and budget cuts;
the final deal raises the debt ceiling entirely through budget cuts.

In the midst of the debt ceiling negotiations, President Obama
derided Washington as a place that did not seem to appreciate the importance of
compromise. The President, unfortunately, seems to have misunderstood the meaning
of the term.

Extended Primary Good for GOP? Don't Bet on It

There are a lot of Republicans including, according to ABC
News, Karl Rove, who think that a drawn-out primary will benefit their party in
this election cycle the way a similar process aided Democrats in 2008. Don’t
bet ten thousand dollars on it.

In fact, there is little substantive similarity between the
two situations. First, consider the optics. The Democratic battle of 2008
featured a mesmerizing African-American politician and one of the most
recognized women in the world. No matter the result, it was destined to be
historic. For the first time, a major American political party would nominate for
president someone other than a white male. By contrast, when the Republican
contest shakes out, its remaining candidates will likely be three white men
whose average age is a whisker short of seventy. A long primary will cement in
people’s minds the idea of the Republicans as the white patrician party. While
that may play well with white patricians, it is guaranteed to give pause to
other parts of the electorate—and it certainly provides nothing to ignite the
imagination.

And then there is the substance. Although
candidates Obama and Clinton certainly had their disagreements (remember the
three in the morning phone call?), they
more often found themselves in lockstep on everything from universal
health care to ending the war in Iraq to preserving Social Security. Since these issues were popular with the
American people, the long contest reminded voters how much they actually agreed
with Democratic positions. Consider, by contrast, how the electorate views the major
Republican views in this election cycle. All of the Republicans running reject any
tax hike on the rich, while according to a recent Bloomberg poll more than half
of all Americans think the wealthy should pay more taxes to help bring down the
deficit. The Ryan plan, which would turn Medicare into a voucher system, is
sure to get more exposure the longer the Republican contest continues. But a
Quinnipiac poll this May showed sixty percent opposed to changing Medicare into
a voucher system. And according to a Fox News poll, sixty-six percent of
Americans think there should be a path for illegal immigrants to citizenship,
while Newt Gingrich gets booed for suggesting someone who has lived here illegally
for a quarter of a century might be allowed to stay. The longer the primary
contest, the more people will wake up to just how out of step the Republican Party’s
positions are with the views of the majority of Americans.

Finally, let’s not forget the
audience participation feature of this year’s debates, as GOP crowds did everything
from boo gay soldiers to cheer on executions to applaud the prospect of denying
the uninsured life-saving treatment. Is there any doubt that an extended
primary contest will present us with even more of these precious moments? And
is there any reason to take Rove’s prediction any more seriously than Romney
claims to have taken his wager?

Logic Missing from Plan B Debate

In the end, everyone blew it. The arguments were flying fast
and furious in the wake of
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’s
decision to prevent Plan B, the morning after pill as it is sometimes referred
to, from being sold over the counter to young women under the age of 17. The
problem is that they were all bad arguments. Indeed, each of the players in
this debate committed at least one textbook fallacy

Let’s start with the Secretary’s reasoning. Her main
argument was that allowing the drug to be purchased over the counter by any
minor would open up the possibility of a 12-year-old girl, who might not fully
understand the instructions, using the drug without supervision and potentially
harming herself. This is a classic slippery slope, the contention that an
extreme situation will result from adopting your opponent’s view. Like asserting
that once we allow gay marriage we open the door to sanctioning bestiality, the
Secretary’s reasoning fails to recognize there is a logical stopping point in
the slide. In this case, it was possible for the Secretary reject allowing sale
of the drug to 12-year-olds but to come out in favor of making it available for
older teens.

Her critics on the Left didn’t fare any better. Writing in Mother Jones, Kevin Drum asserted
that this was the first time in history that the HHS Secretary has overruled a
recommendation from the Food and Drug Administration. Let’s not commit a tu quoque
fallacy ourselves by dismissing his claim because it is inconsistent with a
past position, since progressives would have had no problem with an HHS
Secretary overruling the FDA during the Bush administration. But we should
charge him and others who repeat this claim with the fallacy of tradition,
since they are guilty of asserting as reasonable the proposition that just
because something has been a certain way in the past it should continue to stay
that way. Following this line of thought, women would not have the right to
vote nor interracial couples the right to marry.

Finally we have the strange bedfellow moment of the week,
with the conservative Family Research Council praising an Obama appointee’s
decision. The only problem is that they ruined this rare moment of political
harmony by going off the logical deep end. In the fallacy of irrelevance, one
introduces information which, though interesting, has no bearing on the matter
at hand. This is what has to be said of the Council’s effort to bring the topic
of sexual trafficking into the Plan B debate.
Their concern that young women who are the victims of sex trafficking
could get the pill if it were legal overlooks the fact that the very people who
are doing the sex trafficking are probably old enough to go out and buy the
pill themselves. Sex trafficking is a serious topic, and you do its victims a
disservice by bringing it into an issue with which it has no logical
connection.

Fallacies can be defined as arguments that should not persuade rational
agents. In this polarized political environment, these seem to be in short
supply

Dems: Don't Fear the Newt

Commentary| According to the most recent Gallup poll, Newt Gingrich is the frontrunner in the Republican nomination for president. (1) And it is not only voters who are starting to take seriously the thought of Gingrich as the Republican nominee for president. The possibility of Gingrich as nominee has reached the level where Politico reports that some of Newt's biggest critics within the Republican party are for the time being quiet for fear of possibly damaging their potential nominee.(2) All of which should make Democrats giddy. There may be more flawed presidential candidates in the modern era than the thrice-married, Freddie Mac historian with a six figure Tiffany account who brought us the government shutdown. But one is hard pressed to think of anyone in recent memory who combines Gingrich's personal and political foibles.

Yet, leave it to the Democrats to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Although everyone from liberal icon Barney Frank to conservative provocateur Ann Coulter are claiming a Newt candidacy would be a boon for the Democrats, yet according to an article in the Washington Post (3), some Democrats are beginning to fret at the possibility of facing off against Gingrich in the general election, fearing that unlike Romney Gingrich would both excite the Republican base and appeal to Hispanics. To these Democrats I say: Relax. Let’s look at each of these claims.

It is certainly clear, as evidenced by his inability to climb in the polls despite unarguably steady performances in the debates, that Mitt Romney has some real difficulty in exciting the base of his party. However, the Republican base is already pumped up at the prospect of beating the man many perceive as the socialist-in-chief. In fact, it is the Democrats who have much more of a reason to worry about their base, since many on the liberal leaning side of the party have been disappointed in everything from Obama’s failure to close Guantanamo to his stepping up the war in Afghanistan to what is perceived as multiple cave-ins to the Republicans on the budget. There is nothing short of resurrecting Ronald Reagan more likely to drive this wing of the Democrat party to the polls than a Gingrich candidacy. In short, Democrats should not worry about Newt’s base appeal.

Neither should Democrats be concerned of Newt’s outreach to Hispanics. In the last debate(4) he suggested that some illegal immigrants who have been in this country for a long time should be given some legal status. But the only reason his proposal sounds remotely reasonable is the red meat the rest of the GOP field is throwing out on this issue. Indeed, when it comes time for the campaign, Newt will be stuck with the Republican platform on immigration and hemmed in on this issue in the same way as John McCain, who was even more outside the Republican mainstream on immigration.

By many accounts, it was Newt who saved the Clinton presidency. History just might repeat itself.

Published at: http://news.yahoo.com/democrats-nothing-fear-gingrich-candidacy-174100093.html

http://www.gallup.com/poll/151355/Gingrich-Romney-Among-GOP-Voters-Nationwide.aspx

l
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1211/69750.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/some-democratic-strategists-worry-about-gingrichs-potential-appeal/2011/12/03/gIQAomJsTO_story.html

http://www.cfr.org/us-election-2012/republican-debate-transcript-washington-dc-november-2011/p26579?cid=rss-u.s.strategyandpolitics-republican_debate_transcript,_-112211

GOP Ignores Science at Our Peril

Every war has its innocent victims, those caught in the crossfire. So it is with the GOP war on science. The casualties here, as is often the case in war, are the young, the elderly and the infirm. At least those are the groups most likely to feel the impact of what the Associated Press recently identified as the growing number of parents who are refusing to immunize their children. In eight states, more than 1 in 20 kindergarten students do not get all their required vaccines—and that number is rising.

What, you might ask, does all this have to do with the Republican Party? Let’s suppose an organization spent massive amounts of energy trying to persuade the American public that it is unsafe to fly on two major carriers. And let’s suppose it was obvious that there was essentially no difference between these two carriers and the other carriers. We would not be surprised if the impact of this negative campaign were felt not just at two airlines but across the industry, nor would we be wrong to ascribe the cause for this reaction to those who sowed the original doubts.

Just so, Republicans, or at least their elected leaders, have been relentless in attacking two pillars of mainstream science: global warming and evolution. As NPR made clear in its recent collection of the candidates own words on these topics, Jon Huntsman is the only major GOP candidate who whole-heartedly accepts both claims (as he made clear in a recent Tweet). But if you attack two fundamental claims of mainstream science, it should come as no surprise when a growing number of the public becomes skeptical about scientific conclusions in general. Case in point: vaccines. According to that same AP report, a decrease in the vaccination rate has been linked in this country to measles outbreaks and a whopping cough epidemic in California, while the examples of what has happened overseas—polio breaking out in China, diphtheria in Russia—show that much dire things are possible when vaccination rates fall.

In light of the centuries-old antipathy of religion toward science and the GOP’s association with the more extreme elements of the faith community, it is not difficult to discern the Republican rationale for joining the religious right in attacking science. And while the less bright bulbs of the Republican pack can be forgiven for their ignorance, surely there are intelligent members of the GOP besides Jon Huntsman who know that science is giving us the truth on these matters.

The good news is that when reason confronts religious prejudice, history shows that it is reason that ultimately prevails. The bad news, at least for Jon Huntsman, is that victory can take centuries to achieve, and those who originally confronted religious prejudice in the name of reason and science (e.g., Socrates, Galileo) usually do not fare very well.