On Valiantly Rejecting Monocausal Explanations for a Bad Economy

CNBC's John Carney suggests Timothy Geithner will be fired soon because "the economy is bad":

We're starting a Tim Geithner death watch.

That sounds a bit morbid. So let's be clear. We do not think President Barack Obama will murder Tim Geithner following the devastation of his party in the midterm elections. He'll just toss the guy out of the Treasury Department

There will be heavy pressure from within the Democratic party for the Obama administration to make changes that will both publicly mark a change of direction for the administration and privately send a message to party insiders that the White House is accepting its share of the blame for the loss of the House of Representatives. 

Geithner is a clear candidate to play the fall-guy. In exit polls, six in 10 voters said the economy is the nation's No.1 problem. Around four in 10 believe their family's financial condition got worse since Obama took office. Geithner is the nation's chief economic official. A large share of the blame for last night's results will likely fall on him.

Frankly, these kind of stories make me wish the MSM would be blamed for something and collectively murdered.

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Shame On You, Wisconsin

Russ Feingold was one of the few good men in Washington, but Wisconsin's liberty-loving Tea Party just removed the only Senator to ever vote against the USAPATRIOT act.  Feingold also championed campaign finance reform and was the recipent of the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award.  He is a child of two immigrants, a champion of fair trade and civil liberties, immigration reform, ending capital punishment, cleaning up Washington pork-barrel politics.  Feingold actually returned money to the government that he considered wasteful.  He was the first senator to call foul on Iraq, and the first senator to call foul on President Bush's wiretapping.  Feingold was the poorest member of the Senate.  In other words, he was the closest thing we had to what the Tea Party claims to represent.  Yet the Tea Party actively targeted Feingold for removal.  

Mitt Romney in Retroperspective

I'm currently reading Stephen Fry in America.  My British and British-Light friends obviously know who Stephen Fry is (here he is with House) and this book's purpose, but for my American and American-Light friends, Stephen Fry is an erudite gentleman-comic, and in America is about his travels in a black London taxicab through all fifty U.S. States.  Despite Mr. Fry's handicap, he's incredibly perceptive and honest.  During Fry's titular 2008 travels in America, he followed around Mitt Romney and his team as they prepared to do battle at the New Hampshire primary.  The long version:

With a great flurry of handshakes and smiles, Mitt is suddenly in the house, marching straight to the space in front of the fireplace where a mike on a stand awaits him, as for a stand-up comedian.  He is wearing a smart suit, the purpose of which, it seems, is to allow him to whip off the jacket in a moment of wild unscripted anarchy, so as to demonstrate his informality and desire to get right down to business and to hell with the outrage and horror this will cause in his minders.  British MPs and candidates of all stripes now do the same thing.  The world over, male politicians have trousers that wear out three times more quickly than their coats.  And who would vote for a man who kept his jacket on?  Why, it is tantamount to broadcasting your contempt for the masses.  Politicians who wear jackets might as well eat the common people's children and have done with it.

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Prison Reform through Electoral Reform

America is desperately in need of prison reform.  We have the largest prison population in the world, with 2.3 million people incarcerated, and our rate of imprisonment is six times as large as the global median.  We send too many people to prison, often for minor offenses like using drugs or writing bad checks, and for too long, since older people are more expensive to incarcerate and much, much less likely to engage in criminal activity.  Unfortunately, there isn't much of a constituency for prison reform since ex-felons can't vote and generally politicians fear seeming "soft on crime."  However, the New York Times editoral yesterday advocating allowing felons to vote in federal elections may partially solve that problem.  The proposal that makes sense on it's own merits, but will also create a powerful new incentive for politicians to treat former criminals as human beings.

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Iraq Elections: A Small Step, Not a Giant Leap

After a year of worry, heightened by the drama of the de-Ba'athification candidate purge, the Iraqi elections went off without many hitches.  Which is to say that there were plenty of bombings, 38 people were killed, but turnout was high with two-thirds of the country voting including a majority of the Sunni population which boycotted the last election in 2005.  That's good news for the Iraqis and it's better news for us, because it means that we are on pace to leave on schedule by the end of 2011.  What the election does not do, however, is retroactively vindicate the decision to invade Iraq.  

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Good Time Charlie: Dreaming of Crist

When the rumors that Charlie Crist may opt to run as an independent for the open Florida Senate seat, following the "Joe Lieberman Primary sore-loser" model, the reaction from political watchers was rapturous.  Nate Silver summed it up best: "If Crist were to win as an indie, he'd instantly become one of the most important politicians in America. But not an easy path."  I agree on both points, having a true independent from the center-right would be a refreshing change of pace in Congress, but it will be tough to pull off.  Crist is currently bleeding support against both Marco Rubio, his staunchly conservative Republican Primary opponent, and Kendrick Meeks, the likely Democratic candidate.  The man who was once the most popular governor in the country has lose his luster thanks to a concerted effort on the part of conservatives to punish him for his moderate policies and support for Obama's stimulus plan.  However, if Crist were to leave the Republican party by highlighting how his sensible progressivism was heir to the Teddy Roosevelt Republican tradition he could be a formidable foe in the general election; once a clear winner develops from either party, and in all likelihood Mr. Rubio looks like the heavy favorite, voters from the other side might flock to Crist as the lesser of two evils.  Given the state's history with disputed elections, I imagine Florida voters will be sensitive to the notion of "throwing their vote away."

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Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory

Scott Brown's victory in the Massachusetts special election is such a colossal upset that it will necessarily become a symbol for Republicans to rally around.  However, the fact that his election may likely derail health care reform does not mean that it was anything like a national referendum on that process.  While Democrats will no doubt be even more timid about passing health care reform, they should be more determined than ever to do it anyway.  

Both parties have internalized the lessons of 1994, but only the Republicans have crafted anything coherent from it.  Democrats running away from health care reform should remember that it didn't save the party in 1994 and it will surely doom them now.  The problem with health care reform isn't the bill, it's the process.

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The Democratic Electoral Apocolypse

After a triumphant 2006 and 2008 the Democrats had reason to believe that 2010 would continue the trend of Democratic gains in Congress.  Specifically, the 2004 Senators elected with President Bush's victory over John Kerry would be up for reelection and should have provided ripe opportunity for further Democratic gains.  In Nate Silver's January 2008 Senate Rankings, which list the possibility of a Senate seat changing parties, 10 out of the 13 seats most likely to change parties were Republican.  In his last Senate Rankings, 8 of the top 13, including 5 out of the top 6, are now vulnerable Democratic seats.  The worm has turned.  

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Hope Harry is Hardy

Harry Reid faced an uphill battle to retain his Senate seat even before Game Change revealed his observation that then candidate Obama was a "light-skinned" black man "with no Negro dialect unless he wanted to have one." The controversy unfolded over a weekend so it remains to be seen if it has legs, but it presented Michael Steele with his first opportunity realized.  He pointed out, rightly, that a double standard exists: a Republican could not have gotten away with it and moreover, Trent Lott resigned from Reid’s current post over a comment that turned into a racial scandal.

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Mid-Midterm Elections

Blowing a Kiss To HoffmanLast night there was a hodgepodge of elections.  None had national significance, but many are symbolically important.  Unfortunately in the maelstrom of hype known as 24 hour cable news, that means that everyone pretends that the Democratic losses in the governor races for Virginia and New Jersey means that Obama has problems nationally or that conservatives have been dealt a serious setback because Doug Hoffman wasn't elected to a one year stint in the House of Representatives.  The real lesson, as always, is that politics are local, whether in New Jersey where John Corzine had a reputation for mismanagement and corruption that sunk him even though 57% of voters approved of Obama or in NY-23 where Bill Owens won a seat held by Republicans since the 19th century after national conservatives, like Sarah Palin, rallied support to Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman

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