David Brooks Takes A Sip Of Reality

David Brooks is usually clueless but he at least dips a toe in the cold sea of reality today.  He rightly observes that voters like Medicare and Medicaid and that any serious cuts are unlikely.  

Americans don’t particularly like government, but they do want government to subsidize their health care. They believe that health care spending improves their lives more than any other public good. In a Quinnipiac poll, typical of many others, Americans opposed any cuts to Medicare by a margin of 70 percent to 25 percent.
In a democracy, voters get what they want, so the line tracing federal health care spending looks like the slope of a jet taking off from LaGuardia. Medicare spending is set to nearly double over the next decade. This is the crucial element driving all federal spending over the next few decades and pushing federal debt to about 250 percent of G.D.P. in 30 years.
There are no conceivable tax increases that can keep up with this spending rise. The Democrats had their best chance in a generation to raise revenue just now, and all they got was a measly $600 billion over 10 years. This is barely a wiggle on the revenue line and does nothing to change the overall fiscal picture.

He also observes correctly that the only place the money can come from is the Defense Department.

So far, defense budgets have not been squeezed by the Medicare vise. But that is about to change. Oswald Spengler didn’t get much right, but he was certainly correct when he told European leaders that they could either be global military powers or pay for their welfare states, but they couldn’t do both.
Europeans, who are ahead of us in confronting that decision, have chosen welfare over global power. European nations can no longer perform many elemental tasks of moving troops and fighting. As late as the 1990s, Europeans were still spending 2.5 percent of G.D.P. on defense. Now that spending is closer to 1.5 percent, and, amid European malaise, it is bound to sink further.
The United States will undergo a similar process. The current budget calls for a steep but possibly appropriate decline in defense spending, from 4.3 percent of G.D.P. to 3 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
But defense planners are notoriously bad at estimating how fast postwar military cuts actually come. After Vietnam, the cold war and the 1991 gulf war, they vastly underestimated the size of the cuts that eventually materialized. And those cuts weren’t forced by the Medicare vise. The coming cuts are.

I do have to take exception with Brook's claim that this is why Chuck Hagel was chosen.  It is inevitable that military spending will be cut and Hagel has been a trusted Obama adviser from the beginning.   Empires most often end not when they are defeated in battle but when they are defeated in their treasuries.  That is where the United States is now and a smaller US footprint in the world is a given.

McCain Won But.....

John McCain won in South Carolina but Josh Marshall wonders if this might be the end of the line for St. John. Although he has won some open primaries he has yet to get the majority of Republican voters.

But McCain's victory tonight does set us up to get an answer to an important question: just how much enmity is there for John McCain among base Republican voters?

[....]

I think a lot of the establishment types in the GOP would rather go with Romney. And I think it's a very open question how well McCain will do if this becomes a head to head race between McCain and Romney.

There's also the issue of open and closed primaries. South Carolina, like Michigan and New Hampshire, but not many of the coming primaries, is an open primary. But if you look at the numbers tonight, John McCain lost Republicans by one point to Mike Huckabee.

There aren't many open primaries left. And to best of my knowledge McCain has not won once this year among Republicans. He loses among Republicans and makes it up with big support from Independents.

I firmly believe that John McCain is the only Republican that has a chance of actually winning in November and that depends on Iraq not coming unglued between now an then.

David Brooks had a surprisingly enlightened commentary a couple of weeks ago where he said:

The leaders of the Republican coalition know Romney will lose. But some would rather remain in control of a party that loses than lose control of a party that wins.

I think there is some truth to that but I also think it goes deeper than that. There are more than a few Republicans who realize that the administration of George W. Bush has really fucked things up and furthermore the shit isn't going to hit the proverbial fan until 2009 or later. They want to lose so they can blame it all on the Democrats. It's about the only way they can become significant for a generation or so. Perhaps they want McCain to lose because they are afraid he might win.

Still Clueless After All These Years

We have the first instalment of Bloody Bill Kristol in the New York Times and yes he's still the same clueless Bill that said this:

"There's been a certain amount of pop sociology in America ... that the Shia can't get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There's almost no evidence of that at all. Iraq's always been very secular."
~Willaim Kristol, April 4th, 2003

The subject of his first column isn't wars for oil and Israel but Mike Huckabee. Now I never thought that Huckabee had a chance at the nomination but Kristol seems to be saying he thinks Huckabee might. Since Kristol is always wrong I guess I was right. He talks about why Huckabee is popular but since he never talks to anyone that isn't a multi-millionaire he gets it completely wrong.

After the last two elections, featuring the well-born George Bush and Al Gore and John Kerry, Americans — even Republicans! — are ready for a likable regular guy. Huckabee seems to be that. He came up from modest origins. He served as governor of Arkansas for more than a decade. He fought a successful battle against being overweight. These may not be utterly compelling qualifications for the presidency. I’m certainly not ready to sign up.

Still, as the conservative writer Michelle Malkin put it, “For the work-hard-to-get-ahead strivers who represent the heart and soul of the G.O.P., there are obvious, powerful points of identification.” And they speak to younger voters who are not yet committed to the G.O.P. In Iowa, Huckabee did something like what Obama did on the Democratic side, albeit on a smaller scale. He drew new voters to the caucuses. And he defeated Mitt Romney by almost two to one, and John McCain by better than four to one, among voters under 45.

Now it’s true that many conservatives have serious doubts about Huckabee’s positions, especially on foreign policy, and his record, particularly on taxes. The conservative establishment is strikingly hostile to Huckabee — for both good and bad reasons. But voters seem to be enjoying making up their own minds this year. And Huckabee is a talented politician.

His campaigning in New Hampshire has been impressive. At a Friday night event at New England College in Henniker, he played bass with a local rock band, Mama Kicks. One secular New Hampshire Republican’s reaction: “Gee, he’s not some kind of crazy Christian. He’s an ordinary American.”

Now I'm glad I have Kristol to make fun of now because I have had trouble making fun of David Brooks lately, he may actually get it. People are not voting for Huckabee because he's a likable guy they are voting for him because they are scared. Not of the Islamo terrorists but they are afraid of losing their jobs, their house and their medical insurance. They are not socialists but as Brooks pointed out the other day they are conservatives but:

A conservatism that recognizes stable families as the foundation of economic growth is not hard to imagine. A conservatism that loves capitalism but distrusts capitalists is not hard to imagine either. Adam Smith felt this way. A conservatism that pays attention to people making less than $50,000 a year is the only conservatism worth defending.

They don't trust the leaders in government or the leaders in business to look out for them. And we are not just talking about the working poor - there are families with six figure incomes that have the same fears. But to be fair Bloody Bill is not alone. Most of the DC punditry never talks to anyone who isn't a multi-millionaire and are just as clueless as Bill.

Does David Brooks Get It?

When I saw the title of David Brooks' Friday column, The Two Earthquakes, I assumed it was simply more of the gasbag bloviating we have come to expect. It appeared in my local paper on Saturday and I read it. The first earthquake he discusses is Obama's win in Iowa and for the most part it fulfilled my initial expectations. But then he moves on to Huckabee's win. Now there was a hint that Brooks might have some idea of what was happening in the Republican party in his commentary on Mitt Romney but his insight on the Huckabee win amazed me.

On the Republican side, my message is: Be not afraid. Some people are going to tell you that Mike Huckabee’s victory last night in Iowa represents a triumph for the creationist crusaders. Wrong.

Huckabee won because he tapped into realities that other Republicans have been slow to recognize. First, evangelicals have changed.

That's right, after being taken for a ride by the wealthy GOP elite they have their own candidate he in addition to talking about social issues is also talking about their economic realities. The "great economy" the Republicans try to spin has simply left a majority of Americans behind and that includes the vast majority of evangelicals.

Second, Huckabee understands much better than Mitt Romney that we have a crisis of authority in this country. People have lost faith in their leaders’ ability to respond to problems. While Romney embodies the leadership class, Huckabee went after it. He criticized Wall Street and K Street. Most importantly, he sensed that conservatives do not believe their own movement is well led. He took on Rush Limbaugh, the Club for Growth and even President Bush. The old guard threw everything they had at him, and their diminished power is now exposed.

As I said here:

The Republicans have been forced to attack Huckabee but run the risk of driving off the Religious Right in the process. Even if the Religious Right does not field it's own presidential candidate this important part of the Republican base may just stay home.

But this is what leads me to believe that Brooks either gets it or is very close:

Third, Huckabee understands how middle-class anxiety is really lived. Democrats talk about wages. But real middle-class families have more to fear economically from divorce than from a free trade pact. A person’s lifetime prospects will be threatened more by single parenting than by outsourcing. Huckabee understands that economic well-being is fused with social and moral well-being, and he talks about the inter-relationship in a way no other candidate has.

In that sense, Huckabee’s victory is not a step into the past. It opens up the way for a new coalition.

A conservatism that recognizes stable families as the foundation of economic growth is not hard to imagine. A conservatism that loves capitalism but distrusts capitalists is not hard to imagine either. Adam Smith felt this way. A conservatism that pays attention to people making less than $50,000 a year is the only conservatism worth defending.

I don't think the above applies only to evangelicals but to a majority of Americans which is why the Republican party is heading down the Road to Nowhere. Americans see their political leaders as greedy and corrupt, they see their business leaders as greedy and corrupt and they see themselves as victims of the greed and corruption. Enter a good old boy Huckabee, and perhaps to some extent even Obama, and you have an apple cart that is about ready to be overturned.

The Trouble With Romney

I like to make fun of David Brooks - sometimes his columns are idiocy personified. Occasional he takes off his partisan dunce hat and his delusional rose colored glasses and gets it right. Today is one of those times as he talks about the snake oil salesman, Romney.

Road to Nowhere

Earnestly and methodically, he has appealed to each of the major constituency groups. For national security conservatives, he vowed to double the size of the prison at Guantánamo Bay. For social conservatives, he embraced a culture war against the faithless. For immigration skeptics, he swung so far right he earned the endorsement of Tom Tancredo.

He has spent roughly $80 million, including an estimated $17 million of his own money, hiring consultants, blanketing the airwaves and building an organization that is unmatched on the Republican side.

And he has turned himself into the party’s fusion candidate. Some of his rivals are stronger among social conservatives. Others are stronger among security conservatives, but no candidate has a foot in all camps the way Romney does. No candidate offends so few, or is the acceptable choice of so many.

And that is why Romney is at the fulcrum of the Republican race. He’s looking strong in Iowa and is the only candidate who can afford to lose an important state and still win the nomination.

And yet as any true conservative can tell you, the sort of rational planning Mitt Romney embodies never works. The world is too complicated and human reason too limited. The PowerPoint mentality always fails to anticipate something. It always yields unintended consequences.

And what Romney failed to anticipate is this: In turning himself into an old-fashioned, orthodox Republican, he has made himself unelectable in the fall. When you look inside his numbers, you see tremendous weaknesses.

Brooks sees something that many of us have seen but that most Republicans have refused to acknowledge - the end of a coalition.

But his biggest problem is a failure of imagination. Market research is a snapshot of the past. With his data-set mentality, Romney has chosen to model himself on a version of Republicanism that is receding into memory. As Walter Mondale was the last gasp of the fading New Deal coalition, Romney has turned himself into the last gasp of the Reagan coalition.

That coalition had its day, but it is shrinking now. The Republican Party is more unpopular than at any point in the past 40 years. Democrats have a 50 to 36 party identification advantage, the widest in a generation. The general public prefers Democratic approaches on health care, corruption, the economy and Iraq by double-digit margins. Republicans’ losses have come across the board, but the G.O.P. has been hemorrhaging support among independent voters. Surveys from the Pew Research Center and The Washington Post, Kaiser Foundation and Harvard University show that independents are moving away from the G.O.P. on social issues, globalization and the roles of religion and government.

If any Republican candidate is going to win this year, he will have to offer a new brand of Republicanism. But Romney has tied himself to the old brand. He is unresponsive to the middle-class anxiety that Huckabee is tapping into. He has forsaken the trans-partisan candor that McCain represents. Romney, the cautious consultant, is pivoting to stress his corporate competence, and is rebranding himself as an Obama-esque change agent, but he will never make the sort of daring break that independent voters will demand if they are going to give the G.O.P. another look.

And the following observation is not the kind I have come to expect from Brooks.

The leaders of the Republican coalition know Romney will lose. But some would rather remain in control of a party that loses than lose control of a party that wins. Others haven’t yet suffered the agony of defeat, and so are not yet emotionally ready for the trauma of transformation. Others still simply don’t know which way to turn.

Brooks and other Republicans (and former Republicans) are beginning to realize the the politics of Karl Rove that were supposed to keep the "Reagan revolution" going forever in fact destroyed it. That will be the lasting legacy of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove.

Update
We all know that the vast majority of politicians are phonies. That said Matt Yglesias makes what may be a vaild point about Romney.

...to give Romney the benefit of the doubt, one thing I can say about him is that there's some indication he might make an okay president. He ran a successful business. He managed the Olympics well. He took over a state that enjoyed a high standard of living and during his years of governor it continued to enjoy a high standard of living and he never tried to do anything crazy. He's taken a lot of repugnant stands in the campaign, but that's clearly because he's telling people what he thinks they want to hear. When he thoughts his constituents wanted to hear about gay equality and a women's right to choose he said that stuff, too. He's a giant phony. But also a technocrat with some record of competence -- basically a risk-averse guy who knows what he's doing and understands how to color between the lines. It's impossible to imagine him being a great president, but it's relatively easy to imagine him being an okay president.

The others in the field, not so much. Who knows what wars Rudy Giuliani or John McCain would start? And Mike Huckabee can't even fake knowing what he's talking about for fifteen minutes.

I'm not sure I'm entirely ready to buy that but he probably is the pick of the litter.

Certified lunatics

I rarely comment on the drivel that comes from David Brooks' empty head. Today would have been to exception except this one was simply too much to ignore:
The Republican Collapse
But John Cole beat me to it and his post is so good there is no reason for me to even try. As to why the Republican party is in decline John writes this:

For starters, people got tired of being associated with these drooling retards. Then, when they realized that these drooling retards had ideological allies running the show in the Bush administration and then began to experience their idiotic policies, they moved from disgusted to outright hostile.

Like me. It had nothing to do with Burke, and everything to do with what the party had become. A bunch of bedwetting, loudmouth, corrupt, hypocritical, and incompetent boobs with a mean streak a mile long and no sense of fair play or proportion.

So what's John, a life long Republican, going to do?

Screw them. I got out. They can have their party. I will vote for Democrats and little L libertarians and isolationists until the crazy people aren’t running the GOP. The threat of higher taxes in the short term isn’t enough to keep me from voting out crazy people and voting for sane people with whom I merely disagree regarding policy. Hillarycare doesn’t scare me as much as Frank Gaffney having a line to the person with the nuclear football or Dobson and company crafting domestic policy.

That is why the Republican party is in shambles. The majority of us have decided that the movers and shakers in the GOP and the blogospheric right are certified lunatics who, in a decent and sane society, we would have in controlled environments in rocking chairs under shade trees for most of the day, wheeled in at night for tapioca pudding and some karaoke.

Go read the entire thing.