New Republic

You can tell a Washington scandal is nearing ripeness when people start calling for the appointment of a special counsel to conduct the investigation. So it is today with the IRS targeting of conservative groups.

The calls to date come from two distinct groups: One consists of Republicans/conservatives who either sincerely believe only a special counsel can get to the bottom of things or who think siccing a special counsel on the Obama administration is the best way to inflict maximum political damage. The other, more liberal-leaning, is made up of people who think Obama can get his second term back on track by a conspicuous gesture to restore public trust and who incidentally also believe a special counsel won’t turn up much that is damaging. Continue reading →

New Republic

According to pretty much everybody, last week was a rough one for White House spokesman Jay Carney. Dana Milbank ripped him in The Washington Post, Eleanor Clift felt his pain so acutely she helped him relive it in The Daily Beast. Alex Koppelman accused him of playing “semantic games” in The New Yorker. And then there were the conservative commentators. So all in all, I’d have to say he had a pretty good week—and I mean that sincerely.

My moment of epiphany on presidential scandals came during the first term of the Clinton administration, when Mike McCurry was press secretary. I was editorial page editor of The Washington Times at the time, a job I held from 1992 through 1998. The bookends of my tenure were the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court and the House vote to impeach Bill Clinton; then as now, never a shortage of material. And if it’s true that what goes around comes around, I think it would be fair to say that in that period in Washington, everything that went around did indeed come around. Continue reading →

New Republic

Republican Mark Sanford’s convincing victory over Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch in the South Carolina special election to fill a vacant House seat may mark a turning point in the politics of GOP sex scandals. Simply put, Sanford refused to pursue the traditional GOP path of settling into a new life of disgraced obscurity. He went for the comeback, and he pulled it off.

It would be a fool’s errand to inquire into whether one political party has the edge over the other in matters of sexual morality. But it does seem clear which has been the more moralistic party in such matters, and it’s not the Democrats. Republicans have been defending marriage and promoting abstinence for decades—often, as it happened, more in the breach than the observance. And for years, this has meant that the party disappears those who stray. A classic example is the tale of the downfall of Republican congressman Mark Souder. He resigned in 2010 in order to avoid an ethics committee investigation into his affair with a part-time female staffer, Tracy Meadows Jackson, with whom he had made a video promoting abstinence education. Continue reading →

New Republic

No one is more preoccupied these days with Hillary Clinton’s 2016 plans than the Beltway political class—not even the former presidential candidate herself. To hear some tell it, her decision will be dispositive for all other Democrats thinking of entering the race. And pundits and reporters aren’t the only ones positing the “The Hillary Factor“: No less than the House Democratic whip, Steny Hoyer, toldBuzzFeed, “I don’t know that anybody would run against Hillary…. If she runs, she clears the field.”

It’s an understandable conclusion, given Clinton’s stature in the Democratic Party and her 70 percent national job approval rating when she left office as secretary of state. An indication of how much less polarizing and how much more iconic a political figure she has become: 41 percent of Republicans expressed their approval. When Colin Powell stepped down as secretary of state, he had a 77 percent job approval rating. But by 2005, Powell was yesterday’s man, content to amble downhill from the peak of his career. Clinton isn’t at all about nostalgia and gratitude; her best years may lie ahead of her. Continue reading →

New Republic

Cass R. Sunstein has thought deeply about the regulatory state both as a theorist and as a practitioner, and he also knows a thing or two about practical politics. Now, in response to the successful opposition to Senate legislation expanding background checks for gun buyers, he has proffered an interesting critique of the “slippery slope” style of argument notably on display in defeating the measure.

Sunstein wants to add the “slippery slope” argument to the three types of argument the late economist Albert O. Hirschman identified as characteristic of “The Rhetoric of Reaction.” Reactionaries, in Hirschman’s telling, frequently make their case against a proposed reform not on the basis of the merits of the reform itself, but on its imagined consequences: perversity (the unintended effects of reform), futility (the intractability of the problem and the insufficiency of the reform as a solution), and jeopardy (the reform itself risks upsetting some important  applecart).

Sunstein has a point: slippery-slope arguments don’t really address the merits of the issue at hand. As he writes: “When opponents argue against [modest] Reform A by saying it will lead to [undesirable] Reform B, it is often best to assume that the slippery-slope argument is merely a rhetorical move. It isn’t the real reason they oppose Reform A. When they point to the supposedly slippery slope, it is only because they know a lot of their fellow citizens favor Reform A—so they try to scare them by changing the subject and talking about Reform B instead.” Continue reading →

New Republic

A piece of news this week seems to be vexing progressives enormously: George W. Bush is no longer as unpopular as he used to be.

Approval of the 43rd president’s handling of his job now stands at 47 percent. Fifty percent still disapprove, but there has been significant movement in Bush’s favor. When he left office, according to Gallup, a mere 34 percent approved and 61 percent disapproved. Bush’s all-time low was in the low 20s, which in Democrats’ view is more like it. Meanwhile, President Obama’s approval rating in the ABC/Washington Post was exactly the same as his predecessor’s, 47 percent. The most recent Gallup survey had Obama at 50 percent approval and 43 percent disapproving, which means Bush is definitely within the margin of error. Continue reading →

New Republic

Now that even a watered-down effort to “do something” about guns in response to the mass slaughter of small children in Newtown has collapsed in the Senate, it’s time to look political reality squarely in the face: No external shock, no matter how extreme, will clear a path for meaningful gun control legislation to emerge from Congress.

In the end, the debate in the Senate wasn’t even about serious reform. Nobody ever gave a ban on so-called assault weapons a chance of passage, and it went down 60 against and 40 in favor (which might actually have been a better showing than anticipated). But when all that’s on the table is expanded background checks for gun buyers, and the president himself has designated gun legislation his top priority early in his second term — and still the measure falls six votes short of the 60 required to advance against a filibuster — then it’s time for gun control proponents to acknowledge that they are a long, long way from having made the political case. Continue reading →

New Republic

Political opponents are wont to describe Barack Obama as apolarizing figure in American politics. In fact, they angrily note, the most polarizing of all presidents. They decry this in the context of his 2008 campaign, during which he presented himself as a figure almost above partisanship, or at least capable of transcending it for the common good. Of course his critics, as a general rule, never really believed Obama was actually some sort of fusionist post-partisan; they thought he was a liberal Democrat (or worse). But the point among critics, it seems fair to say, has been to paint a portrait of an Obama who has descended from the lofty heights he once claimed to get down and dirty in the political arena — perhaps unpresidentially so. Continue reading →

New Republic

One of the most interesting features of President Obama’s second-term policy agenda is that he doesn’t seem to think he needs one.

OK, he got some of his increase in the top tax rate for high earners even before his second term started. He campaigned on it; it’s policy; that counts. And immigration policy reform seems to be a possibility not too far down the line. And of course there’s gun control, even if it looks doubtful that anything of substance will come of it. Continue reading →