The ‘Sore Loserdom’ Politics of John McCain

The Article: John McCain’s Grudge Politics by Steve Kornacki in Salon.

The Text: John McCain returned to New Hampshire, the state that made him a star in 2000 and set him on course to win the GOP nomination in 2008, this afternoon to endorse Mitt Romney for president. It’s possible that he did this because he believes Romney would make a good president and would pursue sound policies. But it’s more likely that he was motivated by something much rawer.

As I wrote before, the “maverick” reputation that McCain enjoyed for much of the aughts reflected a basic misunderstanding about his character. What the press tended to regard as the mark of an unusually principled politician — his various high-profile breaks with Republican leaders and conservative orthodoxy — was more easily understood as the product of McCain’s opportunism, thin skin, grudge-holding, and sore loserdom. This is how a very personal confrontation with George W. Bush in the 2000 GOP primaries led McCain to suddenly embrace Democratic positions and rhetoric in the early years of the Bush presidency, only to abandon them when he realized that the 2008 GOP nomination could be his if he became a loyal Republican once more.

What makes his Romney endorsement so interesting is that it seems on the surface like an unusually forgiving gesture. After all, none of McCain’s ’08 GOP rivals got under his skin like Romney did. This was a result of Romney’s decision to position himself as the right’s consensus alternative to McCain, a strategy that required Romney to pretend he’d never said or done anything remotely moderate or liberal in Massachusetts while attacking McCain as an untrustworthy ideological apostate. The initial effectiveness of this approach and its transparent phoniness infuriated McCain, who didn’t even try to mask his contempt for Romney in debates. But now, four years later, here’s McCain providing a potentially key New Hampshire endorsement for Romney. Maybe he’s mellowing!

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Banks Cheat, Taxpayers Lose

The Article: How Banks Cheat Taxpayers by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone.

The Text: A good friend of mine sent me a link to a small story last week, something that deserves a little attention, post-factum.

The Bloomberg piece is about J.P. Morgan Chase winning a bid to be the lead underwriter on a $400 million bond issue by the state of Massachusetts. Chase was up against Merrill for the bid and won the race with an offer of a 2.57% interest rate, beating Merrill’s bid of 2.79. The difference in the bid saved the state of Massachusetts $880,000.

Afterward, Massachusetts state treasurer Steven Grossman breezily played up the benefits of a competitive bid. “There’s always a certain amount of competition going on out there,” Grossman said in a telephone interview yesterday. “That’s good. We like competition.”

Well … so what, right? Two banks fight over the right to be the government’s underwriter, one submits a more competitive bid, the taxpayer saves money, and everyone wins. That’s the way it ought to be, correct?

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The Rise Of The Anti-Romney Resistance

The Article: The Anti-Romney Resistance Takes Shapeby Jonathan Chait in New York Magazine.

The Text: The basic tension of the Republican nominating contest is that it has had a very strong desire to oppose Mitt Romney, sitting alongside an almost comically weak slate of candidates who can fulfill that oppositional role. Now, with Rick Perry teetering and Michele Bachmann out, the opposition is down to two: Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, two washed-up pols who left office in disgrace or landslide defeat, have no appeal to non-rabid Republicans, and little money or organization.

Still, the sentiment against Romney is strong enough to keep one or both of them going for a while. The anti-Romney resistance is still breathing.

The resistance has a few components. At the periphery, you have Republicans who simply want to make Romney commit himself more deeply and irrevocably to the right-wing agenda. The Wall Street Journal editorial page has tiptoed the line all along, signaling ultimate support for Romney but always keeping the carrot dangling a few inches away. Today’s editorial notes with disappointment that his economic plan is less radical than his rivals’, and concludes that he “would benefit from a good, hard slog.” (Perhaps one involving a lot of santorum.)

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Why Don’t We Understand Debt?

The Article: Nobody Understands Debt by Paul Krugman in the New York Times.

The Text: In 2011, as in 2010, America was in a technical recovery but continued to suffer from disastrously high unemployment. And through most of 2011, as in 2010, almost all the conversation in Washington was about something else: the allegedly urgent issue of reducing the budget deficit.

This misplaced focus said a lot about our political culture, in particular about how disconnected Congress is from the suffering of ordinary Americans. But it also revealed something else: when people in D.C. talk about deficits and debt, by and large they have no idea what they’re talking about — and the people who talk the most understand the least.

Perhaps most obviously, the economic “experts” on whom much of Congress relies have been repeatedly, utterly wrong about the short-run effects of budget deficits. People who get their economic analysis from the likes of the Heritage Foundation have been waiting ever since President Obama took office for budget deficits to send interest rates soaring. Any day now!

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Obama’s Challenge For 2012: Can A ‘Messiah’ Win Twice?

The Article: Obama: Can A Messiah Win Twice? by E.J. Dionne Jr. in The Washington Post.

The Text: Four years ago this week, a young and inspirational senator who promised to turn history’s page swept the Iowa caucuses and began his irresistible rise to the White House.

Barack Obama was unlike any candidate the country had seen before. More than a mere politician, he became a cultural icon, “the biggest celebrity in the world,” as a John McCain ad accurately, if mischievously, described him. He was the object of near adoration among the young, launching what often felt like a religious revival. Artists poured out musical compositions devoted to his victory in a rich variety of forms, from reggae and hip-hop to the Celtic folk song. (My personal favorite: “There’s no one as Irish as Barack O’Bama.”) Electoral contests rarely hold out the possibility of making all things new, but Obama’s supporters in large numbers fervently believed that 2008 was exactly such a campaign.

As the attention of the politically minded has focused on the rather more down-to-earth contests in Iowa and New Hampshire that will help determine which Republican will face Obama in November, let us ponder what the coming year will bring for someone who must now seek reelection as a mere mortal.

Obama’s largest problem is not the daunting list of difficulties that have left the country understandably dispirited: the continuing sluggishness of the economy, the broken political culture of Washington, the anxiety over America’s future power and prosperity.

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