Matt Yglesias

Rich on McCain

To appreciate this crowd’s spotless record of failure, consider its noisiest standard-bearer, John McCain. He made every wrong judgment call that could be made after 9/11. It’s not just that he echoed the Bush administration’s constant innuendos that Iraq collaborated with Al Qaeda’s attack on America. Or that he hyped the faulty W.M.D. evidence to the hysterical extreme of fingering Iraq for the anthrax attacks in Washington. Or that he promised we would win the Iraq war “easily.” Or that he predicted that the Sunnis and the Shiites would “probably get along” in post-Saddam Iraq because there was “not a history of clashes” between them.

What’s more mortifying still is that McCain was just as wrong about Afghanistan and Pakistan. He routinely minimized or dismissed the growing threats in both countries over the past six years, lest they draw American resources away from his pet crusade in Iraq.

Two years after 9/11 he was claiming that we could “in the long term” somehow “muddle through” in Afghanistan. (He now has the chutzpah to accuse President Obama of wanting to “muddle through” there.) Even after the insurgency accelerated in Afghanistan in 2005, McCain was still bragging about the “remarkable success” of that prematurely abandoned war. In 2007, some 15 months after the Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf signed a phony “truce” ceding territory on the Afghanistan border to terrorists, McCain gave Musharraf a thumb’s up. As a presidential candidate in the summer of 2008, McCain cared so little about Afghanistan it didn’t even merit a mention among the national security planks on his campaign Web site.

The key to understanding McCain’s strategic “thought” is that he loves war. Whichever war the United States of America seems mostly likely to start on any given day is the war he wants to start. Whichever war the United States of America seems mostly likely to escalate on any given day is the war he wants to escalate. The entire rest of his erstwhile worldview will just revolve around that. In the mid-nineties, he wanted to start a war against North Korea. In 1999, he wanted a land invasion of Serbia. But in 2002, he viewed North Korea’s nuclear program as no big deal (and certainly wasn’t mentioning the need to invade Serbia) because that might distract from the goal of invading Iraq. In 2006, he downplayed problems in Afghanistan to further his goal of sending more troops to Iraq. But now Afghanistan’s in the spotlight so we need to send troops there. But just last summer, he thought we needed to intervene in the war between Russia and Georgia.

It’s a consistent point of view in the sense that no matter the question, McCain’s answer is always “more war” but it doesn’t reflect any kind of coherent theory about national priorities or strategic issues. You never see people from the American Friends Service Committee brought on TV to talk about Afghanistan policy. But pacifists have a much stronger case to make on behalf of their approach than does the “all war all the time” crowd that continues to be treated by the media as possessed of vast credibility on these matters.

Meet the Zapateros (and remember how crazy John McCain was)

Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Zapatero posed for a photo with his family and the Obamas when he met with Obama when they were in New York for the UN meeting. The photo wound up posted on the White House Flickr page:

As Bobby Peirce points out at Foreign Policy, this wound up taking the Spanish press by surprise since over there they take the privacy of the family thing super-seriously and the public had never before seen photos of Zapatero’s daughters.

That’s mostly just a funny story, but it is worth recalling that this whole incident could have been avoided had America elected John McCain last November since he promised to continue the Bush administration’s insane policy of snubbing Zapatero. No meeting, no photo snafu. Except, again, refusing to meet with the head of government of a NATO ally in good standing was nuts.

The Inescapable John McCain

An excellent question from Steve Benen:

Just once, I’d love to hear producers/hosts explain why McCain has to be on one at least one of the Sunday shows 11 times in eight months. Refresh my memory: was there this much interest in John Kerry’s take on current events in 2005?

It’s worth noting that Kerry has more seniority than McCain, so the answer to the puzzle can’t be that McCain is a more important legislative figure. Indeed, as far as I can tell McCain’s never dedicated as much as 30 seconds thought to actual health care policy. I will, however, be interested to learn if this weekend’s appearance will finally bring the moment that someone in the press mentions to McCain that he’s actually unusual for an American citizen in that literally throughout his life he’s been a beneficiary of government-run health insurance.

CBO Scores Complete HELP Bill and the News is Good

When the Congressional Budget Office did its preliminary analysis of a sketchy outline of the Senate HELP committee’s vision of health care reform, the outlook was not-so-good. The bill was estimated to cost $1 trillion over 10 years, while reducing the number of uninsured by “only” one-third. At the time, voices of reason tried to point out that this was a preliminary estimate of a bill that was missing many crucial elements so we ought to reserve judgment. But Faiz Shakir reminds us that key conservative legislators were not so kind:

John McCain: “[The CBO estimate] should be a wake up call for all of us to scrap the current bill and start over in a true bipartisan fashion.”

John Boehner: “[T]he public option would cost over $1 trillion, and would cause 23 million Americans to lose their private health care coverage.”

Lindsey Graham: “The CBO estimates were a death blow to a government run health care plan.”

It’s a sign of the ignorance or dishonesty of Boehner and Graham that they made those remarks even though the absence of analysis of the impact of a public health insurance option was precisely one of the shortcomings of the initial analysis. At any rate, now a more fleshed-out version of the bill is available and as the AP reports things now look much better:

The plan carries a 10-year price tag of slightly over $600 billion, and would lead toward an estimated 97 percent of all Americans having coverage, according to the Congressional Budget Office, Sens. Edward M. Kennedy and Chris Dodd said in a letter to other members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. [...]

The [employer mandate] provision is also estimated to greatly reduce the number of workers whose employers would drop coverage, thus addressing a major concern noted by CBO when it reviewed the earlier proposals.

John Cohn explains that this $900 billion figure is actually somewhat misleading, and fully covering this 97 percent should cost more like $1 trillion to $1.3 trillion. That’s a lot of money, but the gains in coverage are major. Given that the right was so impressed by the CBO score of the preliminary draft, will they also be so impressed by this new, more accurate score of the more completed draft? If they’re honest and principled they ought to be and they ought to recognize that this is a pretty good bill.

McCain Confuses on Health Care

More adventures in tweeting from Senator John McCain (R-AZ) who tells us: “It’s not the quality of health care it’s the cost – wellness and fitness!” Like Ezra Klein I don’t really understand what that means.

One possible reconstruction is that McCain is saying that our problem is that health care costs are too high because of insufficient attention to wellness and fitness. This is, I think, a bit of a misunderstanding. It’s true that investments in wellness and fitness would be highly cost effective ways of improving public health. But it’s in the nature of the human species that even very healthy people eventually get sick and die. Consequently, it’s often far from clear whether or not healthier behavior reduces health care costs in the long run. Dying of lung cancer at 57 could be cheaper than developing Alzheimer’s and living to 97. Which isn’t to downplay the importance of “wellness and fitness”—these can do a lot to improve quality of life. But they’re more-or-less separable from the issues of who gets health insurance, what does it cover, what does it cost, and how efficiently are health care services directed.

Gideon Rachman on John McCain’s Tweets

This seems like an unfortunate slap at peasants to me:

But I cannot say Mr McCain’s twitters fill me with regret that he is not sitting in the Oval Office. They seem to be a mixture of sports scores and self-congratulation. He crowed recently about the number of followers he has on Twitter: “800,000!!! Think we can make it to one million?” Some of the senator’s tweets make him sound like a peasant. On May 19th he said: “Meeting with Dr Kissinger – the smartest man in the world.”

It’s the ideal medium for a politician who loves to make his opinions known, but doesn’t appear to have any knowledge of or interest in any area of public policy.

Tancredo Accuses Senators McCain and Martinez of Complicity in KKK Activities; Will They Fight Back?

Earlier today, Representative Tom Tancredo, a noted anti-immigrant extremist, went on television and denounced Sonia Sotomayor for her association with the National Council of La Raza. NCLR is a Latino advocacy group akin to the NAACP. But to Tancredo it’s the equivalent of the Ku Klux Klan, a violent racist terrorist organization:

TANCREDO: If you belong to an organization called La Raza, in this case, which is, from my point of view anyway, nothing more than a Latino — it’s a counterpart — a Latino KKK without the hoods or the nooses. If you belong to something like that in a way that’s going to convince me and a lot of other people that it’s got nothing to do with race. Even though the logo of La Raza is “All for the race. Nothing for the rest.” What does that tell you?

SANCHEZ: Alright. We’re not talking about — we’re not talking about La Raza –

TANCREDO: She’s a member! She’s a member of La Raza!

Check out the video:

Now as Dave Meyer points out, this is not just a vile slur on Sotomayor and the NCLR, it’s a serious slur on Senator John McCain (R-AZ) who delivered the keynote at NCLR’s 2004 conference and also addressed the group in 2008. Meanwhile, Senator Mel Martinez (R-FL) accepted an award from NCLR earlier this year.

The question arises as to whether McCain and Martinez are going to stand for this. Will they take on the maniacs in their own party who are slandering them, or will they decide to just lay low and hope that nobody notices what’s going on. I know that if someone accused me of having delivered the keynote address at a Klan rally, I’d be mad as hell. Is McCain?

Climate and Obstruction

Kevin Drum points out that tough cap and trade legislation isn’t just in trouble because of Republican opposition, it’s in trouble because Barack Obama never campaigned hard on it, and because the public seems skeptical. This is all true.

But it’s worth emphasizing that these obstacles are largely all parasitic on lockstep GOP opposition. The environmental movement has—correctly—been willing to be extremely flexible in terms of how to organize a policy aimed at reduce carbon emissions to a sustainable level. Folks have been open the idea of a carbon tax, or else to cap and trade. Within cap and trade they’ve been open to giving the permits away (to minimize the adjustment costs to business) to rebating the revenue (to minimize the adjustment costs to consumers) to using the revenue to finance offsetting tax cuts (to minimize the macroeconomic adjustment) and to using the revenue to finance clean energy investments (to minimize the impact on energy intensive businesses). They’ve been open to mixed strategies for the use of the revenues and to mixed strategies about the extent of permit auctioning.

If the conservative movement were willing to put forward any kind of realistic proposal for coping with the climate crisis, environmentalists would gladly embrace it, and political obstacles would melt away. But instead, the main strategy of the conservative movement has been to foster public ignorance by denying that the problem even exists.

A secondary, and infuriating, move has been for politicians to establish “reasonable” cred by putting forward a climate change proposal and then becoming absolutely dogmatic about the precise details. So John Corker (R-TN) is for cap-and-trade but only if it’s 100 percent auction with 100 percent rebate; anything else he’ll vote against. And John McCain (R-AZ) is for cap-and-trade but only if it’s 0 percent auction; anything else he’ll vote against. This is all enormously irresponsible, and it’s this irresponsibility that’s the fundamental cause of the problem. None of the possible approaches to the climate crisis are especially appealing, but the conservative movement has invested a ton of time and energy in obscuring the fact that doing nothing is not appealing either, thus creating an enormous amount of public inertia around what’s really a very acute problem.

The only beneficiaries of this, in the end, will be the coal and oil companies. But they benefit a lot. And obstruction has proven to be an enormously successful tool for advancing their interests.