More Mercado News

The jury in the pension funds lawsuit against Wells Fargo Bank (successor to First Interstate Bank) returned a $4.1 million verdict in favor of the funds.

Comedy and Columns: The Secret Is TIMING!

This week's column explains what happened to last week's column. We were in St. Louis, helping America's Favorite College Freshman™ move into her dorm at Washington University and I filed my column by email while out of town. I therefore didn't know that just that morning, the editor had finally broken his silence on Bush's latest flip-flop on campaign finance reform. So the column, ripping him [a new one] for giving Bush a pass, got killed. But he got enough [like, everything] wrong in the editorial that I could revise and extend my remarks for publication yesterday. I was short for time this week anyway, because I spent much of two days after my return as a witness in the pension funds-Wells Fargo litigation; yes, more on the Mercado, on which project I first started working when our daughter was 1 year old, and last weekend we took her to college. It's not Dickensian, but it's close.

For those of you really, really into campaign finance and the 527 soft vs. hard money distinction, as Mark Schmitt noted, the idea that Democrats were going to be entirely dependent on soft-money 527 organizations dates from back in February, when political insiders thought that the Democratic nominee would have participated in the public financing system for the primaries, and would have no money between March and the Democratic convention. That, of course, didn't happen; Kerry (and Dean) opted out of the system for the primaries, and Kerry set records for Democratic fundraising and had plenty of money right through the convention. (Instead, the problem became that he was getting the public funding too soon compared to when Bush switched from opt-out to opt-in funding after the Republican Convention, which nobody really expected to be the issue back in February.) But the press is fixated that the Democrats need soft-money 527s even though that really didn't turn out to be true (and the R's have more than their share of 527s and 501(c)(4) and (6) organizations.) Note: If you don't know what those numbers mean, you're better off not knowing.

ON CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM, BUSH IS THE FLIP-FLOPPER
East Valley Tribune, Sep. 5, 2004

The Tribune finally criticized President Bush’s call to expand campaign finance reform, which the Tribune considers restricting political speech. You may recall that when both Sens. John McCain and John Kerry called on Bush to denounce the Swift Boat ads -- in which the Kerry opponents’ every factual assertion is contradicted by all available documentation, including their own prior statements and medal citations -- Bush painstakingly avoided any direct criticism. Instead, he called for more regulation of political speech, usually anathema hereabouts.

The Tribune’s silence astounded me, so I submitted a furious column ripping the editorial page (and its editor) on the very day, unfortunately for me, that The Tribune finally criticized restricting so-called 527 groups. I’d be totally humiliated, except that the editorial got approximately every fact wrong.

In the Tribune's view, both George Bush and John Kerry propose further restrictions on political speech. That’s incorrect -- for both men.

According to the Tribune, President Bush says “[k]eeping those [Swift Boat] ads off the air is fine with him as long as all 527 groups quit trying to influence the thinking of voters.” But that’s not what Bush wants.

Bush isn’t proposing banning 527s, despite saying so more times than you can count. What he really (and sneakily) proposes is restricting 527s from using “soft money” large contributions; his planned lawsuit with Sen. McCain will allow 527s to run ads, as long as they do it with “hard money” smaller contributions.

Thus, despite asking for a radical reform, Bush really wants to change only the financing rules, hoping to benefit Republicans and hurt Democrats. He’s saying one thing, but doing another -- yet again.

Next, the Tribune wrote that Kerry wants to “[k]ill the ads from the veterans critical of his Vietnam record,” while allowing other anti-Bush ads to remain. This statement is true, in the sense that any candidate would love a world where the only ads anyone sees support him and oppose his opponent. But while Kerry may dream of “killing” anti-Kerry ads, Kerry (unlike Bush) has never said that 527 ads, even those against him, should be made illegal.

Kerry demanded Bush say that the Swift Boat ads were out-of-bounds, not that they were or should be banned. Kerry was complaining about the truth and propriety of the ads, which is itself political speech. Claiming that Kerry wants to restrict speech is putting words in his mouth, something Republicans do perfectly well without the Tribune’s assistance.

Finally, after getting both Bush’s and Kerry’s positions wrong, the Tribune then offered a similarly unique theory of Supreme Court jurisprudence. According to The Tribune, the McCain-Feingold law, “like previous campaign finance laws, violates the Constitution’s stricture about Congress writing any law -- any whatsoever -- that infringes on free speech.” This, like so many absolutist statements, is also wrong. First, many perfectly constitutional laws “infringe” on “free speech.” There’s libel, obscenity, and disclosing military secrets, for starters.

Second, the U.S. Supreme Court, to the surprise of all concerned, upheld the constitutionality of virtually all of McCain-Feingold. Maybe they were having a bad day, but many Americans also believe that the Court was having a bad day when deciding Bush v. Gore, and you’ve told us to accept it and move on. Respect for law, finality, blah blah blah. Don’t complain too much about the Supreme Court getting it wrong. Some of us might start thinking that the guy who gets the most votes should be president.

In the Tribune’s “plague on both houses” worldview, both Kerry and Bush get equal blame for McCain-Feingold; Bush signed it, while Kerry co-sponsored and voted for it. But Kerry, unlike Bush, hasn’t flip-flopped on this issue multiple times (Bush opposes! Bush signs the bill, but says it goes too far! He now says he thought it went farther! He now wants more regulation!) Bush isn’t just a flip-flopper; he’s now worse than Kerry on one of the Tribune’s key issues.

But if they’re both equally blameworthy, then criticism of Kerry’s legislative achievements now rings pretty hollow. If Kerry’s just as responsible as Bush for landmark campaign finance reform legislation, then that alone is a pretty impressive legislative record.

Michael Bérubé Explains It All To You

Penn State professor, amateur hockey player, and blogger Michael Bérubé, transformed for the week into a post-ironic Republican, explains the GOP's positive agenda:

And what's all this crying and moaning about how the Republicans don't have an agenda? What, you people weren't listening? Exactly how loud do we have to shout it out tonight? You want an agenda, we'll give you an agenda. Take out your little girlie-man pencil cases and start writing it down in your little newspapers:

On health care: we will knock Democrats' teeth down their throats!
On jobs: we will kick Democrats until they die of internal bleeding!
On education: we will show America that John Kerry is even more liberal than Ted Kennedy!
On the deficit: John Kerry looks French!
On the environment: John Kerry's wife is a rich foreigner! who is insane!
On corporate crime: John Kerry shot himself to get out of Vietnam! and he was never there! and he didn't even know how to fire a gun!
On intelligence and security: John Edwards is a pretty boy!
On nuclear proliferation: John Edwards is a trial lawyer!
On Iraq: Democrats are traitors!

So. You people want to debate the issues, we'll give you "issues."

Republicans Abandoning Reagan (That Didn't Take Long)

I ran on Monday, rather than Sunday; the editor gave my space to Gloria Feldt, President of Planned Parenthood, and that was fine with me. Gloria, here, was responding to an op-ed from the previous Sunday, here.

Democrats are mocked for overlooking Kerry's flaws, which are that he's not the world's most inspiring speaker and his personal manner can seem stiff. Why are Republicans exempt from scorn, when they are busy overlooking Bush's flaws, which seem much more substantial--and which require Republicans to ignore long-standing beliefs, like their worship of everything Reagan?

The newspaper version of my column is here.


It's the Economy, Stupid
DON'T BLAME VOTERS FOR TRUSTING THEIR FEELINGS
East Valley Tribune, Aug. 23, 2004

It didn’t take long after his funeral for The Tribune to decide that voting for Ronald Reagan meant you were ill-informed.

Reagan framed the 1980 election for voters: “Ask yourself, are you better off than you were four years ago?” But last Wednesday, The Tribune fretted that “[m]any votes in this election surely will turn on the question: Am I better off or worse off than I was four years ago?”

That’s the very standard by which Reagan asked voters to decide. That would make it a very good question, right? Wrong.

This year, The Tribune says Reagan was wrong, scolding voters who determine their vote using the Gipper standard: “Those won’t be the best informed votes, because they assume the president has more influence over the economy than he possibly can have.”

That’s just the latest contortion that President Bush’s actual record has forced upon good conservatives. First, they’ve abandoned years of decrying deficit spending; Republican Jon Kyl has now voted for budgets with bigger deficits than has Democrat Ed Pastor. Next, they’ve forgotten their opposition to nation-building and humanitarian interventions; Republicans who opposed working with NATO allies to stop ethnic cleansing in the Balkans now want the U.S. going it essentially alone to foment human rights in Iraq.

Bush’s woeful record now has conservatives abandoning Ronald Reagan’s signature quote. Instead, votes cast as Reagan asked are now “not the best informed.” Is reelecting Bush so important that conservatives are abandoning Reagan, too?

Yet if voters hold George W. Bush responsible for the economy, it’s not just because of Reagan, but also because of Bush himself. The administration pushed through its last round of tax cuts, the ones wildly titled toward the richest tier, by repeatedly calling it a jobs package. It’s the “Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003,” for goodness sake. If Bush (and The Tribune) regret that people blame Bush for the lack of job growth, and that Bush is the first president since Herbert Hoover to preside over a net loss of jobs, well, it’s a little late now.

The Bush administration has consistently overestimated job creation. Each year, they’ve issued increasingly overoptimistic forecasts. When their numbers proved far more Dr. Pangloss than Dr. Greenspan, they simply abandoned their prior forecast, plugged in the new lower jobs number -- and then issued another wildly overoptimistic forecast. If voters hold Bush responsible, it’s his own fault.

The Bush administration doesn’t flip-flop, that’s certain. Instead, they tell us things which informed observers say at the time aren’t true, and which turn out to be false. They make predictions that outside experts say have no basis in reality, and which don’t come close to being true. In response, the Bushies just tell us more falsehoods and issue more absurdly optimistic projections, without ever admitting error. (To quote the Master himself: “I don’t want to sound like I have made no mistakes. I’m confident I have. I just haven’t -- you just put me under the spot here, and maybe I’m not as quick on my feet as I should be in coming up with one.”)

Bush is welcome to campaign by telling voters that they’re somehow actually better off than they think. That’s a much tougher job than mocking Al Gore, abetted by the national media. Voters just love it when a politician in Washington says he knows better than they do.

As Jacob Hacker of Yale wrote in the Aug. 16 The New Republic, maybe “[v]oters say the economy isn’t getting better because, as far as they’re concerned, it’s not” -- because Americans are “facing rising economic insecurity even as basic economic statistics improve.”

(Read the whole thing -- and begin understanding why economic security matters more than gross domestic product percentages.)

Voters didn’t react positively to overall economic good news in 1994, either. But having reaped that harvest, Republicans have no grounds to complain that people trust their own feelings about their economic future more than abstract economic numbers -- or Bush’s pronouncements about “turning the corner.”

Neither should The Tribune. After all, it’s what Ronald Reagan asked us to do.

Bring. It. On.

New Kerry ad.

The GOP Standard for Truth-Telling

From today's New York Times:
Ms. Spaeth said, "The answer is 'no,' unless you refresh my memory."