Matt Yglesias

Meet John Thune, Totally Uninteresting Conventional Conservative Republican

David Brooks’ columns sometimes strike liberals as not just wrong, but somehow insidious, tricky, an effort to put one over on the public. Aside from the evident sexual tension, today’s effort on John Thune strikes me as almost the reverse. Brooks’ project is to build up Senator Thune as some kind of Great Plains David Cameron who can construct a more reasonable version of the conservative project and bring the GOP back to power. I’m not, myself, a moderate conservative but I think this is a worthy project. And the Idea of John Thune seems like a good idea:

He doesn’t have radical plans to cut the federal leviathan. He just wants to restrain the growth of government to bring deficits down. He doesn’t have ambitions to restructure the tax code. He just wants to lift burdens on small business.

He says his prairie background has given him a preference for small companies and local government. When he criticizes the Democrats, it is for mixing big government with big business: the bailouts of Wall Street, the subsidies to the big auto and energy corporations. His populism is not angry. He doesn’t rail against the malefactors of wealth. But it’s there, a celebration of the small and local over the big and urban.

But there’s no evidence that any of this is real. As Brooks concedes, “His positions on the issues are unremarkable.” At the end of the day, as Brooks says, “He is down-the-line conservative on social, economic and foreign policy matters.”

Brooks may say that Thune “just wants to restrain the growth of government to bring deficits down” but orthodox conservative dogma involves tax policy that implies either gutting the federal government or else massive deficits. For example, Jim DeMint proposed an alternative to the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act that was focused on large permanent tax cuts. It would have added $3.1 trillion to the deficit over ten years—about triple the cost of ARRA—with no end in sight. And John Thune voted for it.

The weirdest thing here is the idea that Thune is praiseworthy for his opposition to “the bailouts of Wall Street.” For one thing, David Brooks thinks (and I agree) that voting yes on the TARP bill was the right thing to do. For another thing, John Thune voted for TARP along with the GOP party leadership. He’s done what the bulk of the GOP did, namely when everyone’s butt was on the line he voted for bailouts as a necessary evil, but then after Inauguration Day turned around and started hypocritically slamming them while going to war on behalf of financial services companies looking to avoid regulation.

Blaming POTUS

David Brooks is not wrong to recommend the Brookings Institution’s report “Bending the Curve: Effective Steps to Address Long-Term Health Care Spending Growth”. He is, however, being completely absurd to suggest that what’s gone wrong with the health reform process in the United States could be fixed by “ask[ing] Obama to go to the Brookings Institution Web site and read a report called ‘Bending the Curve: Effective Steps to Address Long-Term Health Care Spending Growth.’” As James Suroweicki says:

I could be wrong about this, but I suspect that Obama is more than familiar with Brookings’s work on health-care cost-containment, particularly since Peter Orszag, Obama’s budget director, was a fellow at the Brookings Institution, and has spent a good chunk of his recent years working on the problem of how to contain health-care costs. And it’s not as if the Administration hasn’t been talking — I would argue perhaps talking too much—about “bending the curve” when it comes to health-care costs. Brooks’s piece is written as if the real hurdle to change is that the Obama Administration doesn’t realize what’s wrong with the health-care system, so that if Obama just read the right texts, he would be willing to push for fundamental reform. But the Administration knows more than enough about the problems with health care. It’s just trying to figure out how to come up with a politically possible solution.

The fact that the Brookings report’s title is chosen to echo a phrase popularized by the Obama administration should perhaps have been a clue that the administration is aware of the basic shape of the problem. The fact that one of the authors of the report, David Cutler, was Obama’s chief health economics adviser during the campaign also seems relevant. Unless this is just pure low partisan politics, Brooks seems to be manifesting a weird form of the cult of the presidency problem, in which he suggests that sheer White House willpower could generate congressional support for controversial cost control measures.

But if you want to find villains in our failure to focus on controlling long-term costs, Obama is the last person you should point your finger at. The administration has done more than anyone else to focus attention on this issue. Second come moderate Democrats in congress who’ve also emphasized this. Third come congressional liberals, who don’t seem that interested in the subject but also seem perfectly willing to embrace it as a goal of reform as long as reform succeeds in expanding access. Then you’ve got the congressional Republicans who’ve given no sign of interests in bargaining in good faith. And then you’ve got the right-wing demagogues who now have every politicians in American convinced that any move toward cost control will get you denounced as eager to euthenize grandma. Insofar as respectable conservative like Brooks would like to see health care spending brought under control at some point, their failure to confront these voices is going to make that impossible.

As David Frum has written, the right is waging this war in a way that makes future conservatism impossible:

Even worse will be the way this fight is won: basically by convincing older Americans already covered by a government health program, Medicare, that Obama’s reform plans will reduce their coverage. In other words, we’ll have sent a powerful message to the entire political system to avoid at all hazards any tinkering with Medicare except to make it more generous for the already covered.

If we win, we’ll trumpet the success as a great triumph for liberty and individualism. Really though it will be a triumph for inertia. To the extent that anybody in the conservative world still aspires to any kind of future reform and improvement of America’s ossified government, that should be a very ashy victory indeed.

The perversity of winning this kind of pyrrhic victory is what convinced people that congressional Republicans might prefer to make a deal. But it seems that those who believed that were mistaken.

Moderation in Style or in Substance?

David Brooks in a back-and-forth with Gail Collins says:

At the moment, I feel politically closer to Barack Obama than to House Minority Leader John Boehner (and that’s even while being greatly exercised about the current health care bills). On the other hand, I feel politically closer to Lindsey Graham than to Henry Waxman.

As Isaac Chotiner observes, this doesn’t really make sense:

Henry Waxman will likely end up voting with Barack Obama well over 90% of the time (Obama had a more liberal voting record in the Senate than Waxman does in the House). Meanwhile, Lindsey Graham might sound like a moderate but according to the 2007 rankings, he was solidly in the middle of the Republican caucus.

My hunch is that Brooks prefers Obama’s style and attitude to Boehner’s–just as he (Brooks) prefers Graham’s moderate tone to Waxman’s more visible partisanship. But senate votes matter to people’s lives, and I have the suspicion that if Brooks paid more attention to them, rather than to the personalities of Washington politicians, he might find himself drifting leftward on the political spectrum.

Exactly right.* Tastes differ. Some people like the genteel ways of the Senate compared to the cutthroat partisanship of the House. Others feel that Senators act like self-important blowhards and respect the gritty determination of the House. But that’s just about personalities. On the big issues of the day, Graham and Boehner are very similar (no carbon pricing, no tax increases for any reason, neo-Hooverite approach to the recession) and Obama and Waxman are also very similar. And these positions on the issues matter. A lot. These are literally life and death differences for many people.

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Squeeze Play

There’s definitely something nice about being out of power. I feel like all day every day for the past week, I’ve been watching conservatives on television ranting and raving about how Democratic efforts to control health care costs and reform the system will lead to rationing and your grandma being turned into soylent green. In part precisely in order to avoid those accusations, the bills on the table probably don’t actually do enough to really throttle health cost inflation. So now for their trouble David Brooks treats Democratic legislators to a vicious lashing for not doing enough to control costs, during which time he somehow manages not to mention the scorched earth anti-rationing campaign being waged by the opposition party.

Here’s GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) says President Barack Obama wants to ration health care for Americans and involve the government in decisions on what treatments individual citizens can receive.

During an appearance Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” McConnell said Obama supports “a national rationing board, to determine what kind of treatments would be available for American citizens. Typically, those in single payer countries like Canada and Britain involve delays in treatment, denial of care, those kind of things.”

Now McConnell is just lying here. Straight-out lying. And by doing so he’s making it extremely difficult for the Senate to take anything other than fairly modest steps toward cost control. It’s fine—welcome, even—for conservative pundits to criticize current legislation for not going far enough in this regard. But if you want to make that argument you owe it to the world to get real about the context here and spare a lash or two for the folks who’ve been pushing legislation in this direction. But the right is, as Jon Chait points out, very conveniently having it both ways on the health spending issue, simultaneously whining about expense of giving health insurance to the currently uninsured while positioning themselves as the defenders of unlimited services.

David Brooks Tries to Bring Reason to the Sotomayor Debate

Good for David Brooks:

More than any current member of the Supreme Court, she worked her way up through the furnace levels of the American legal system. [...] She is quite liberal. But there’s little evidence that she is motivated by racialist thinking or an activist attitude. [...] When you read her opinions, race and gender are invisible. I’m obviously not qualified to judge the legal quality of her opinions. But when you read the documents merely as examples of persuasive writing, you find that they are almost entirely impersonal and deracinated.

This should be totally obvious. That it’s not obvious to so many speaks to two things. One is the deranged nature of Supreme Court confirmation battles. Consistent differences have emerged between the kinds of justices conservatives want and the kinds of justices liberals want, but it’s considered out of bounds for politicians to just say “The President has a different ideology from me, he’s appointing a judge whose decisions I anticipate disliking, and that’s one of the reasons I voted for the other guy.” Instead there are these incentives to concoct wild personality defects in the other side’s choices, or accuse them of deliberately subverting the law (”activism”), rather than of simply disagreeing about important issues.

Mix that up with this incredible race obsession held by many white conservatives, and it’s a toxic blend. Suddenly Judge Sotomayor’s participation in 1970s-vintage campus activist groups is a dire threat to the white race’s legal hegemony.

Obama Administration Continues Outreach to David Brooks

At a recent “opinion awards” ceremony sponsored by The Week, David Axelrod showered David Brooks with praise, continuing the somewhat weird phenomenon of a left-of-center administration making it clear that their favorite columnist is a only-somewhat-hostile conservative who as best I can tell opposes the vast majority of the administration’s major policy initiatives.

The appeal of a pundit outreach strategy focused primarily on the “reasonable right” is not lost on me—absent the outreach, it’s overwhelmingly likely that Brooks’ columns would be much harsher, whereas progressives who like most of Obama’s administration on the merits are likely to be nice anyway. But I do think it’s a bit shortsighted. I first thought about this when during the campaign Obama tried to assuage Jewish voters’ fears by courting Jeffrey Goldberg rather than by using one of the many, many, many progressive Jews in the punditry game. On the one hand, it’s arguably more effective to have the kind of guy who writes bogus stories about Iraq/al-Qaeda links in your corner than it would be to have a progressive Jew.

But the danger here is that while this sort of thing may work in the short-run, in the long-run one impact of this sort of courtship is to entrench Goldberg as the arbiter of what kinds of political opinions are kosher. And at the end of the day, a progressive politician is going to be better-off having progressive Jews in the position to define that.

Similarly with Brooks. The coverage Brooks has given Obama thus far has, I think, been on net helpful to the administration. But at the moment Obama’s riding high. His approval rating is in the sixties, his opponents are acting like idiots, and he’s no wracked by any kind of scandals. That sort of situation isn’t going to hold up forever. Any administration features some dark days sooner or later. And when those days come, the people in the media who’ll still stick with you are the people who really care about the substantive agenda. So for the long run, it’s useful to raise the stature of the kind of media figures who are going to be helpful for the long run. Brooks is a good conservative columnist, well-worth reading. But he really is a conservative columnist. And so elevating him as the columnist is ultimately going to be self-defeating.