"On climate change, the GOP is lost in never-never land" (Fred Hiatt). Wait, Fred Hiatt???

It seems that on the WaPo editorial pages they actually know about climate change after all. Who'da thunk it?

"Climate science is complex, and much remains to be learned. But if you asked 1,000 scientists, 998 of them would say that climate change is real and that human activity -- the burning of oil, gas and coal -- is a significant contributor. But [former Minnesota Gov. Tim] Pawlenty’s supposed uncertainty is convenient, because if we don’t know the cause, then there’s little point in looking for a cure. And any cure is going to cost money, or votes, or both."

-- Washington Post Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt, in his column "On climate change, the GOP is lost in never-never land"

"[T]he President might be a better tactician than his critics. But outmaneuvering his political opponents is not the same thing as achieving a country that, as he said last week, 'values fairness.'"

-- George Packer, in a "Comment" in the April 25
New Yorker, "Deepest Cuts"

by Ken

There would be nothing remarkable about an op-ed page piece titled "On climate change, the GOP is lost in never-never land" if not for the source: Washington Post Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt, after all, has presided over more than one newspaper's share of willful climate-change obfuscation steadfastly defending the lies of serial offender George Will.

And it isn't just on climate change that our Fred accuses Republicans of being "lost in never-never land":

The Republican self-deception that draws the most attention is the refusal to believe that Barack Obama is American-born.

But there are Republican doctrinal fantasies that may be more dangerous: the conviction that taxes can always go down, but never up, for example, and the gathering consensus among Republican leaders that human-caused climate change does not exist. . . .

Just a few years ago, leading Republicans — John McCain, Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Tim Pawlenty among them — not only accepted global warming as real but supported some kind of market-based mechanism to raise the cost of burning fossil fuels.

Now polls show declining numbers of Republicans believing in climate change, and a minority of those believing humans are at fault, so the candidates are scrambling to disavow their past positions.

Palin, who as Alaska governor supported efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions, in 2009 wrote in The Post, “But while we recognize the occurrence of these natural, cyclical environmental trends, we can’t say with assurance that man’s activities cause weather changes.”

Pawlenty similarly acknowledged on “Meet the Press” last year that “the climate is changing,” but added that “the more interesting question is how much of that is man-made versus natural causes.”

When I asked last week how Pawlenty would answer that “interesting question,” his spokesman responded by e-mail: “We don’t know [the] cause of climate change.”

Hiatt also notices that there's something a bit askew in the Economic Gospel According to St. Paul Ryan:

When President George W. Bush and Congress lowered taxes in 2001, the justification, unlikely as it seems today, was a budget surplus. When the surplus melted away, that didn’t affect the ideology. Surplus or deficit, peace or war, healthy growth or steep recession -- anything is an argument for tax cuts.

You can get a taste of this illogical arithmetic in Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget. The Wisconsin Republican lays out some ideas worth discussing to control entitlement costs. But by refusing to acknowledge that revenue will ever have to rise, even as society ages, he ends up, as the Congressional Budget Office noted (though not in so many words), in fiscal never-never land.

In Ryan’s vision, all federal spending other than Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and interest payments will decline from 12 percent of the national economy (GDP) in 2010 to 6 percent in 2022 to 3.5 percent in 2050.

“For comparison, spending in this category has exceeded 8 percent of GDP in every year since World War II,” the CBO said. “The proposal does not specify the changes to government programs that might be made in order to produce that path.”

Of course not — because they are changes that few Americans would ever support.

Naturally, since this is still our Fred, there's a good deal of nonsense. There's really nothing in the Ryan plan worth discussing. The most you can say is that he bumps up against some issues that bear discussion, but not by the people who are pretending to discuss them. The size of the national debt is certainly one such subject -- not the deficit, mind you, which merely tells us how much is being added to the debt, but the staggering amount we've borrowed to keep the lower classes bought off while the upper economic crust drains the lifeblood out of the economy. But of course the right-wing ideologues don't want to talk about that.

Similarly, our Fred feels obliged to stress that the Democrats aren't much better than the Republicans, and in a sense he's right. As we here at DWT scream frequently, the common Democratic surrender to right-wing economic talking points is basically a good old-fashioned sellout of traditional Democratic principles. So Fred is perhaps intentionally when he writes:

I’m not saying that Democrats’ answers to the budget or climate challenges are necessarily right. You can make a case for smaller government or argue that there’s no point in America curbing greenhouse gases if China won’t.

Or when he writes:

Democrats aren’t honest in these areas, either. President Obama does a good job of explaining how the Bush tax cuts helped cause today’s deficit, but then pretends that reinstating taxes on the rich alone can fix most of the problem. As the polls on climate change shift, he talks about green jobs and energy independence instead of global warming, as if there’s nothing out there but pain-free, win-win solutions.

The intention, or at least result, here is to claim that all Democrats say and think these things. What's conveniently left out that is there lots of Democrats who've been saying quite a lot of other things, Democrats who have been bitterly disappointed, to put it mildly, with the president's proposals on both the budget and climate change.

But then, it may well be that our Fred really and truly doesn't hear those voices. It's a basic fact of Village life that only "serious" people can participate in these lofty discussions of serious issues, and only tried-and-true Villagers know who qualifies as a "serious" person. I don't think even the president has suggested "that reinstating taxes on the rich alone can fix most of the problem." But our Fred really doesn't hear what people on our side of the budget issue say, doesn't hear, say, an economist of the stature of Dean Baker, not to mention people like Paul Krugman or Joseph Stiglitz. It's as if the People's Budget didn't exist.

So I truly appreciate it when as determined a Village centrist as our Fred writes:

To say that Republican irresponsibility makes it more difficult for Democrats to speak honestly is not an excuse. But it is a partial explanation. And while Obama may wish the climate change conversation would go away between now and 2012, he at least is not pretending the phenomenon is fiction.

I just wish he grasped that the problem isn't just Republican irresponsibility. There's a heavy component of craven media irresponsibility.


MEANWHILE, GEORGE PACKER OFFERS A
GREAT PERSPECTIVE ON THE BUDGET BATTLE

I don't have a smooth segue, but I think you'll understand the connection.

While I was working on the above post, my attention was diverted (my attention is ever so easily diverted) to George Packer's "Comment" in the new New Yorker. It's important to bear in mind that Packer is no frothing leftist. While the president's budget proposal is worlds better than Pouting Paul's, it's still way too corrupt a giveaway, and you'll note that he places a lot more stock in the Obama health-care package than, say, I do.

But my goodness, does Packer ever distill the essence of the stakes in the current budget battle. I did some doodle-like highlighting, but really, I think the piece deserves to be read whole, so I've sneaked it in here.

Deepest Cuts

In the fall of 1995, a year after the Democrats had lost control of both houses of Congress in a devastating midterm sweep, Bill Clinton's advisers were so worried that he would give in to draconian Republican budget cuts that they joked about disconnecting the Oval Office phones to keep him from calling Newt Gingrich, then the Speaker of the House. Flying home on Air Force One from the funeral of the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, aides maneuvered to keep the President from wandering back to sit with Gingrich (who promptly committed political suicide by announcing that he was toughening his budget demands in retaliation for being snubbed). In the end, though, Clinton stood fast for the quartet of Medicare, Medicaid, education, and the environment. That December, when he vetoed the Republican budget, precipitating the second of two government shutdowns, he used the same pen that Lyndon Johnson had used to sign Medicare into law, thirty years earlier. Confrontation over principles sent the President's poll numbers up, as triangulation never did, and he coasted to reëlection in 1996.

A few of those advisers are back in the White House, no doubt beset by déjà vu. In the months after last fall's midterm wipeout, President Obama took to floating above the ugly congressional fray as if he were the unaffiliated head of state in a parliamentary system. In December, during the battle over the Bush tax cuts, he chided both sides for squabbling, and earlier this month, in the negotiations over the 2011 budget, he praised both sides for making sacrifices. While his supporters in public-sector unions around the country were desperately fighting -- and, for the most part, failing -- to retain their collective-bargaining rights, the President remained largely silent. The politics of his withdrawal were clear enough: in the wake of an electoral rebuke, Obama, like Clinton, was signalling to voters that he understood their displeasure. He was also positioning himself to be the candidate of the broad middle when he runs for reëlection.

The problem with this strategy was that Obama and his party sustained defeat after defeat. In order to secure an extension of unemployment benefits, the President broke a campaign promise to let the tax cuts for upper-income Americans expire. It was a deal that congressional Republicans, at the time still negotiating from the minority, were happy to get. In the budget negotiations, the Republican majority in the House managed to sucker Democrats by raising its bid after the White House thought that it had an agreement; in the end, Obama was forced to slash programs central to his domestic agenda, such as high-speed rail and environmental protection.

The Republicans now hold just one house of Congress, yet they have controlled the terms of the debate, because they understand that budget battles are about far more than numbers, and they've made the ideology behind their various bargaining positions startlingly clear: government should be reduced to gasping for air. What's more, they're willing to deploy legislative terrorism -- threatening to shut down the government and to allow the United States to default on its debt -- to get their way. In politics, the side with a fixed notion of ends and an unscrupulous approach to means always has the advantage.

A decade and a half after Clinton and Gingrich, Republicans are once again trying to privatize Medicare, gut Medicaid (by turning it into block grants), cut education spending and regulations that protect the environment, and give yet another round of tax cuts to the rich. They continue to insist -- despite years of evidence to the contrary -- that market forces will lower health-care costs and that tax cuts will create economic growth and lift all incomes. "Ideology makes it unnecessary for people to confront individual issues on their individual merits," the late Daniel Bell wrote. "One simply turns to the ideological vending machine, and out comes the prepared formulae." Ideology knows the answer before the question has been asked.

Principles are something different: a set of values that have to be adapted to circumstances but not compromised away. Last week, the President remembered that he was a Democrat and gave a speech at George Washington University articulating his and his party’s vision of the positive role of government: "a belief that we’re all connected, and that there are some things we can only do together, as a nation." He praised social-insurance programs, saying, "We’re a better country because of these commitments. I’ll go further. We would not be a great country without those commitments." For once, he seemed eager to join a fight and draw clear lines.

The impetus for Obama’s return to politics was the budget plan of Representative Paul Ryan, the doe-eyed Wisconsin Republican who chairs the House Budget Committee. The Ryan plan, which claims to cut the deficit by $4.4 trillion over the next decade (and was passed by the House last Friday, along party lines), contains every Republican dogma about political economy, and Obama, in his speech, pointedly called them out, while Ryan sat seething in the audience: "There’s nothing serious about a plan that claims to reduce the deficit by spending a trillion dollars on tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. And I don’t think there’s anything courageous about asking for sacrifice from those who can least afford it and don’t have any clout on Capitol Hill." Obama then offered a counter-plan, vague on details, that would combine spending cuts and tax increases in roughly equal measure, imposing cost controls on health care but preserving entitlement programs, while claiming to arrive at roughly the same savings as Ryan, but guided by vastly different principles.

How much of this would the President -- who has a record of giving things up even before sitting down at the table -- be willing to bargain away? The distance between the two sides is so great that it’s hard to imagine any resolution this year. So, in 2012, the question will go to the voters, where it belongs, since elections should be arguments over principles. By the current wisdom, Obama will then join Clinton in the ranks of two-term Democrats, because most Americans value economic security more than fiscal austerity. If so, Obama will have Paul Ryan, in part, to thank.

All this suggests, not for the first time, that the President might be a better tactician than his critics. But outmaneuvering his political opponents is not the same thing as achieving a country that, as he said last week, "values fairness." The most persistent and corrosive feature of American life over the past three decades is income inequality: it rose steeply during Clinton’s first term, and, despite his budget victory, it continued to go up in his second. Obama often discussed inequality during the 2008 campaign, and his health-care plan represented the most serious effort in a generation to reverse it. But last week he mentioned it only in passing. As he knows, the reform stage of his Presidency lasted less than two years. We have now entered the period of rearguard defense. ♦

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