The big news today is President Obama’s announcement that his administration will stop deporting “Dreamers,” undocumented immigrants who were brought here as children, and will also grant them work permits, subject to some conditions. Ed has a good read into the details of the mainstream politics here.

But one thing few people are talking about is the reaction in the US Spanish-language press. My Spanish isn’t perfect, but I can get through a newspaper, so I did some very brief reading. First I went to Univision, where the most-read story right now is on the announcement. The same is true of Telemundo. It’s on the front page of Spanish CNN and El Nuevo Herald. The articles play it dry, but still give it a fairly positive gloss.

Meanwhile, the biggest name in US Spanish media, Univision anchor Jorge Ramos, took to Twitter to break the news:

If that’s hard to read, Ramos seems very positive thus far: “Great news for Dreamers!!!” he wrote, and went on to explain the new policy in both Spanish and English. (Top that, Brian Williams.) In case you’re not up to speed on Mr. Ramos, now might be a good time to read our profile of him in our last issue. He has the kind of credibility and trust among his viewers that simply doesn’t exist anymore in the English-speaking media, and could very well decide the election.

UPDATE: Ramos later explained that, though this doesn’t include anything on green cards or a path to citizenship, in his opinion “esta es la mejor noticia para los indocumentados en 26 años. (This is the best news for immigrants in this country since 1986)”

Like some of you, perhaps, when I heard that a journalist named Neil Munro had interrupted the president twice during his press conference on the new policy towards undocumented students with argumentative “questions,” I hastened myself to Wikipedia to find out about this fellow, and discovered this:

Neil Munro (1863-1930) was a Scottish journalist, newspaper editor, author and literary critic. He was born in Inveraray and worked as a journalist on various newspapers….

A key figure in literary circles, Munro was a friend of the writers J. M. Barrie, John Buchan, Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham and Joseph Conrad, and the artists Edward A. Hornel, George Houston, Pittendrigh MacGillivray and Robert Macaulay Stevenson. He was an early promoter of the works of both Conrad and Rudyard Kipling.

As I wondered what a Scottish writer who was supposed to have died over 80 years ago was doing upbraiding the president at a press conference (some of his literary friends were pretty right-wing), I ran across this corrective from The Atlantic’s Adam Martin:

Did you watch the president’s address on his new immigration policy? Did you see the part where he yelled at someone for interrupting? Turns out that someone was The Daily Caller’s Neil Munro, whose Twitter bio describes him as: “Born Irish, then became a Cold War bridegroom. I worked at Defense News, Washington Technology, then 10 years at National Journal, and now at TheDC. Lucky me.” Munro’s Daily Caller archive is full of stories on immigration….

DC Editor Tucker Carlson, who sinks farther into the Breitbartian mire each day, allowed as how he was “very proud” of Munro for “doing his job,” which apparently includes serial heckling of the president. So Munro not only won’t get fired; he’s become the new Joe Wilson, and it is a certainty that by sunup tomorrow he will have his very own Wikipedia entry.

Given his habit of perpetually posing as the Columnist From Dover Beach, forever wheeling eagle-like above the grubby partisan pols with their petty concerns (before landing, inevitably, somewhere amidst the ignorant army of the Right), it’s refreshing to see David Brooks in his latest column just coming right out and making the case for his party, the GOP. Sure, he maintains the third-person in explaining the Republican “viewpoint” to his readers, but the whole way he frames the choices facing the electorate make his allegiances as clear as if he put on a fake elephant trunk and ran around yelling about “secular socialism.” Here’s a sample:

[M]any Republicans have now come to the conclusion that the welfare-state model is in its death throes. Yuval Levin expressed the sentiment perfectly in a definitive essay for The Weekly Standard called “Our Age of Anxiety”:

“We have a sense that the economic order we knew in the second half of the 20th century may not be coming back at all — that we have entered a new era for which we have not been well prepared. … We are, rather, on the cusp of the fiscal and institutional collapse of our welfare state, which threatens not only the future of government finances but also the future of American capitalism.”

To Republican eyes, the first phase of that collapse is playing out right now in Greece, Spain and Italy — cosseted economies, unmanageable debt, rising unemployment, falling living standards.

Democrats, of course, are blind to all this, imprisoned as they are in old-think. Doing his best Mitch Daniels impression, Brooks casts his vote for the party that wisely understands Yesterday’s Solutions Are Not Today’s, and that extremism in the defense of entitlement reform is never a vice:

The welfare model favors security over risk, comfort over effort, stability over innovation. Money that could go to schools and innovation must now go to pensions and health care. This model, which once offered insurance from the disasters inherent in capitalism, has now become a giant machine for redistributing money from the future to the elderly.

This is the source of Republican extremism: the conviction that the governing model is obsolete. It needs replacing….

This is what this election is about: Is the 20th-century model obsolete, or does it just need rebalancing? Is Obama oblivious to this historical moment or are Republicans overly radical, risky and impractical?

Republicans and Democrats have different perceptions about how much change is needed. I suspect the likely collapse of the European project will profoundly influence which perception the country buys this November.

Yes, that whole social-democratic thing from the 20th century has to be “replaced” by something “market-oriented,” i.e., by little on the pathway to nothing. I wonder what other shopworn vestiges of the 20th century need to be junked to avoid disaster and make way for progress? Unions, surely. Perhaps the minimum wage, or the 40-hour-work week (already fading fast). Public schools, those bureaucratic relics of the “industrial age,” probably strike Brooks as insufficiently nimble and entrepreneurial, certainly for children in his social circle. And who needs civil rights laws any more? Isn’t the real racism on the Left? Reproductive rights? Haven’t ultrasound and (as his Times colleague Ross Douthat suggests) other biomedical advances made those as dangerously obsolete as Social Security?

The real value of this column is as an illustration of how this bogus interest in “change and innovation” makes it so easy for someone as ostensibly reasonable as David Brooks to embrace the kind of raw right-wing radicalism that used to be associated (and still is, at the grass roots) with the kind of yahoos Brooks so often snipes at in his occasional efforts to chide his own party. If something like the basic and hardly over-generous social safety net that Americans rely on can be breezily dismissed as part of a “welfare model” that nobody outside a doomed Greece or Spain could possibly accept any more, then it’s hard to say what communal commitments Brooks would find indispensable. So he’s along for the newly respectable ride back to Goldwater and 1964, spouting pieities about “change” like a slightly more presentable version of Newt Gingrich. It’s truly pathetic what it takes these days to maintain a toehold in the GOP.

I sure didn’t see this coming: even as Sen. Marco Rubio supposedly continued “work” on a “Lite” version of the DREAM Act that was eagerly awaited by many Republicans as an essential step towards avoiding disaster with Hispanic voters in November and beyond, and even as Mitt Romney supposedly “considered” supporting it, his “thining” slowed by the need to avoid accusations of yet another “flip-flop,” the Obama administration moved by executive action to get there first. Here’s Amanda Peterson Beadle’s summary of the initiative (just now officially announced by the president in the Rose Garden):

Under the “deferred action” policy, a Department of Homeland Security directive, students in the U.S. who are already in deportation proceedings or those who qualify for the DREAM Act and have yet to come forward to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials, will not be deported and will be allowed to work in the United States.

An estimated 1 million young people could benefit from the deferral. To be eligible, applicants have to be between 15 and 30 years old, live in the U.S. for five years, and maintain continuous U.S. residency. People who have one felony, one serious misdemeanor, or three minor misdemeanors will be ineligible to apply. “Deferred action” will last for two years and can be renewed.

As AP reports, the initiative is very similar to what Rubio was considering in his “Republican alternative” to the DREAM Act:

The policy will not lead toward citizenship but will remove the threat of deportation and grant the ability to work legally, leaving eligible immigrants able to remain in the United States for extended periods. It tracks closely to a proposal being drafted by Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, a potential vice presidential running mate for Romney, as an alternative to the DREAM Act.

Rubio did not criticize the administration’s initiative Friday but said it would make it harder to achieve a permanent solution.

“Today’s announcement will be welcome news for many of these kids desperate for an answer, but it is a short-term answer to a long-term problem,” Rubio said in a statement. “And by once again ignoring the Constitution and going around Congress, this short-term policy will make it harder to find a balanced and responsible long-term one.”

Yeah, sure: Congress has been unwilling to consider anything like significant immigration legislation ever since the Bush administration-backed “comprehensive” proposal crashed and burned in the Senate in 2007, which triggered a rush towards neo-nativism in the GOP (most notably by a guy named Mitt Romney, who used the scourge of Rick Perry’s support for a Texas variation on the DREAM Act to very effectively lash his campaign to a bloody pulp during the nomination contest).

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Something about my fatigue and hunger this morning reminds me of hearing a fellow law student one bleak and wintry day say just prior to a boring 8:00 a.m. class: “These hamburger and beer breakfasts have got to stop.” I didn’t go THAT far, but my granola-and-pizza combo platter came close. Anyway, here are some tidbits for your (presumably healthier) mid-day meal:

* Poppy celebrates 88th birthday, sounds less than jazzed about contemporary GOP politics.

* Politico offers preview of “Koch World Convention” in San Diego later this month. “Summit” doesn’t have official title; how’s about “Their Satanic Majesties Request?”

* Daily News offers brief ‘n’ breezy coverage of Obama fundraiser at SJP’s crib. No mention of a really large shoe closet.

* Connecticut cage match: Shays rips McMahon in GOP Senate debate for WWE’s “war on women.” Wouldn’t work down south, where they love their rasslin’.

* Off-message: McCain attacks Adelson political contributions as introducing “foreign money” to U.S. politics. I would guess other big donors have some offshore profits, too.

And in non-political news:

Ban removed from Scottish girl’s blog featuring photos of her school lunches after international outcry. Love this story.

Back after a brief break.

One of my favorite small moments occurred at a breakfast meeting at Washington’s Tune Inn in about 2005, when I was breaking bread with a brilliant progressive blogger (who will remain nameless) and discussing this or that political subject. I made a casual reference to the “K Street Project,” and was amazed to find that my very smart friend did not know what I was talking about. I briefly explained the Project, and its corrupt purpose as a means to Republican domination of DC-based lobbying and fundraising. But the most helpful thing I did was to direct my friend to Nick Confessore’s exhaustive piece on the Project in the July/August issue of the Washington Monthly, “Welcome to the Machine.”

If this article—or for that matter, the Washington Monthly—did not exist, maybe I would have eventually come to understand the K Street Project, and the distinctively Rovian focus of the Bush-era GOP on the nexus of money, politics and policy, which if anything has become more intense since then. But it would have taken much longer, and who has all that much extra time?

Ever since I can remember, the Monthly has been the kind of publication that regularly produces seminal articles like Confessore’s on subjects that transcend the moment or their immediate context. I’d like to say if the Monthly did not exist, it would have to be invented, but the truth is, if it didn’t exist, we’d all just miss a lot. You can do your part to make sure we don’t by making a donation here. That will also help ensure Political Animal will stick around as your reliable water-cooler for discussion of the day’s political news. As the old Byrds’ song goes: “You Don’t Miss Your Water Til the Well Runs Dry.”

As someone who became an avid fan of pioneering baseball analyst Bill James in about 1980, I was naturally drawn to Sam Stein’s HuffPost piece suggesting that the perspectives inspiring Moneyball might have applications to electoral politics. But as the example of Rick Perry’s “genius” staff shows, any old “statistical” or “scientific” approach to electoral strategy won’t necessarily work, and it’s easy to misapply principles that make sense in a business or sports context to a very different arena.

To be specific, here’s how Sam quotes James on the perennial topic of “persuasion” versus “mobilization” strategies:

James likened the idea of trying to win an election through get-out-the-vote drives as “analogous to trying to win a pennant race by doing better in the close games.” A team that won 75 games and lost 87 over the course of a season could get to 90 wins if they changed their win-loss record in one-run games from 26-29 to 41-14.

“It can happen,” James said. “But it’s a lousy strategy.”

“When people disagree with you, what you ultimately have to do is persuade people to agree with you — period,” he added. “You can’t ultimately dodge defeat by winning close elections.”

I realize this is a short snippet from what may have been a long interview, but the quote reflects precisely the kind of dogmatism James fought against among baseball “experts.” He seems to be analogizing GOTV to the “one-run-strategies”—e.g., sacrifice bunts, base-stealing—often deployed by baseball managers to give them an advantage in close games, at the large opportunity cost of giving up “outs” and thus the chance to maximize the big innings that produce more wins over time.

But as James himself acknowledged in his baseball writings, one-run strategies do make sense in certain contexts: the late innings of tied games, the dead-ball era when total offensive production was low, and in spacious ballparks where big innings are rare.

Given partisan polarization, the relatively low number of true “independents” and of true “undecided voters” at the moment, and the relatively even strength of the two parties, the 2012 election may well be the equivalent of a game tied in the eight inning in old Forbes Field at the height of the dead-ball era. It’s a context where a one-run strategy—or in politics, a heavy emphasis on GOTV and voter mobilization generally—may make perfect sense if the alternative is sacrificing the maximum “base” vote to a high-cost, high-risk effort to persuade a tiny segment of swing voters. And that’s particularly true if the number or “persuadable” swing voters is unusually low—as Alan Abramowitz has shown is the case this year—and the characteristics that “persuadable” swing voters are looking for—a clear message, a “mainstream” agenda, and resistance to the opposition’s extremism—are the same as those necessary to mobilize “the base.”

It’s just not a context where the “big bang theory” of seeking big swings in the “score” is an intelligent investment of resources. So will all due respect to Bill James, I don’t think his advice should be taken by political strategists, particularly that big-time baseball fan David Axelrod.

It’s okay with me that a lot of people didn’t like Barack Obama’s big economic policy speech in Cleveland. But one objection, from WaPo’s Dana Milbank is just maddening.

What Milbank objected to was Obama’s basic framing of the election as a “choice” between two fundamentally different points of view that had brought Washington to gridlock, requiring action by voters to follow one path or the other:

He’s right about the stalemate. But he’s absolutely wrong that November offers an opportunity to break it. No scenario shows either party with a chance of amassing a solid governing majority of the sort Obama had when he took office. The way to break the stalemate is through compromise, not conquest.

Actually, Dana, either party with control of the White House and both Houses of Congress can “break the gridlock” in the sense of charting a fundamentally different fiscal course via the use of the reconciliation process,so long as party ranks hold. Everyone seems to have forgotten that because Democrats chose not to use reconciliation (or, as some would have it, chose to recognize that the use of reconciliation would have required structural changes in the legislation to keep it within the boundaries of the budget process) with respect to the major legislative initiative they advanced prior to losing the House in 2010, health care reform. Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have zero intention of “compromising” if they get to 50 votes in the Senate.

But Milbank isn’t interested in just any old compromise: he very specifically wants Obama to compromise on “entitlement reform” as a “solution” to the “debt crisis:”

Despite his claim that “both parties have laid out their policies on the table,” Obama has made no serious proposal to fix the runaway entitlement programs that threaten to swamp the government’s finances….

Undoubtedly, Obama would take heat from his base if he put forth a serious plan along the lines of Bowles-Simpson, whose recommendations he never quite embraced. Doing so would also blunt his political advantage as the defender of Medicare from Republican marauders.

But taking a stand on concrete fixes for the nation’s fiscal problems would get Obama credit for strong leadership — and he would be able to tell the new economic narrative Americans crave. There’s even the remote chance that taking such a gamble would bring Republicans to the table.

So Obama should abandon his own approach to entitlement spending—gradually bringing down the long-term cost of health care (and thus of Medicare and Medicaid) via persistence in health care reform—and embrace reductions in benefits on the “remote chance” Republicans would meet him half-way and accept high-end tax increases. That’s not compromise, of course; it’s surrender disguised as compromise—unless, of course, Obama, like Milbank, actually supports Republican-style “entitlement reform” on its own merits, independently from anything that happens on the revenue side of the ledger.

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Perhaps it was because it was a long speech delivered in the middle of a mid-week afternoon, with no prepared remarks distributed in advance (and no transcription available for quite some time). Maybe the White House overhyped it as a big turning point. Almost certainly the MSM, having manufactured a crisis in the Obama campaign over the last week, expected some dramatic departure or new catch-phrase. The speech did get a bit draggy in the sections on education and energy policy. And obviously anyone who doesn’t like Obama could easily find something to diss (several of my progressive acquaintances just completely lose it every time Obama refers to deficit reduction, ever).

But I’m still a little surprised by the generally negative reaction to Obama’s remarks in Cleveland yesterday, which provided his clearest-ever effort to frame the election as a choice not a referendum, with the path ahead offered by Mitt Romney not representing his “ideas” or his “experience” or his “skills” but a very old philosophy that in current circumstances woud have a savage effect on the people of the United States.

Whether or not the speech is rated a success, the message it contained is the right one. Mitt Romney will go to extraordinary lengths to talk about anything other than the actual agenda he has embraced at the demand of a conservative movement that would have otherwise found a way to deny him the nomination. He’s not going to point out for us that 90% of his economic talking points are identical to those of George W. Bush, or that the 10% variation involves issues on which he is distinctly to the right of W. He’s not going to wrap himself in the Ryan Budget—the enormous, disastrous package of legislation that would be enacted within a few months if Romney becomes president and Republicans control Congress—and won’t be honest about its content or implications when it does come up. And in general he won’t repeat much of anything he was talking about incessantly during the primaries, other than his alleged hatred of ObamaCare.

So the president is going to have to present both sides of the debate the election is actually about, even as Romney tries to pretend he’s just this mild-mannered patriotic technocrat who’s willing to “fix” the economy and then go back to his virtuous life. The Cleveland speech was a good start. But it will have to be repeated many times over until its essential points can be rattled off succinctly by surrogates and even, at some point, understood by the MSM.

At Wonkblog this morning, Ezra Klein considers the possibility of another global economic crisis driven by a possible Greek withdrawal from the eurozone, and then notes the official GOP announcement that it will block all judicial nominations until the end of the year. It makes him wonder:

This is related to something called the “Thurmond rule,” which Manu Raju at Politico explains is an “informal rule [that] holds that sitting presidents should not get Senate votes on lifetime appointments to the bench in the months leading up to a presidential election.” If there was some evidence that this really would be limited to lifetime judicial appointments, then fine: The aftermath of the euro zone break-up doesn’t require any lifetime appointments. But combined with everything else we’ve seen from the House and Senate in recent months, I take it as further evidence that Congress would strongly prefer to do nothing until the next president is elected. That’s not comforting at a moment when a lot might need to be done before the next president is elected.

Remember: The financial crisis also came a few months before a presidential election. In that case, the Obama campaign and congressional Democrats joined with the Bush administration to pass the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008 and TARP. If similar cooperation is needed this year, is there any real chance that we’ll get it?

Nope. I don’t know if congressional Republicans would publicly cheer a really bad economic turn by dancing around the Capitol signing “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead.” But they are not about to lift a finger to help the Obama administration. Aside from the considerations of simple partisanship, I am increasingly convinced that most conservatives don’t really much care about the performance of the economy one way or another. They have an agenda they want to implement. It never, ever really changes regardless of economic circumstances, which simply require different rhetorical packaging rather than any modification of the central tenets of smaller and less charitable government, lower high-end taxes, and state intervention to bring back as much of the patriarchal family system as is possible.

If another percentage point of unemployment enabled Republicans to elect two more Senate members and get closer to the ability to pass any legislation they wanted, do you think most conservative activists—who believe, or say they believe, that Obama is an avid proponent of genocide (legalized abortion) who hates God Himself—are going to do anything to ameliorate it? Of course not. Let’s hope we don’t need some “government of national salvation” any time soon, because we aren’t getting it.

For no particular reason other than my affection for the song and the singer, here’s the Patti Smith Group performing “Gloria” in Germany in 1979.

This was a day when news s-l-o-w-l-y trickled out. Longest day, however, not until next week. Here are some final tidbits:

* Jesse Kelly, who lost to Gabby Giffords in 2010 and to Ron Barber on Tuesday, won’t run for Congress again in November. Too bad.

* RNC site devoted to Latino outreach features photo of kids who are—Asian.

* Two women in Michigan legislature banned by Republican leaders from making remarks on anti-abortion bill because referenes to “vasectomies” and “vaginas” deemed indecorous. Unbelievable.

* Marco Rubio generally adjudged to have outpandered Rob Portman at Faith & Freedom Coalition event.

* Lockheed Martin heightens pressure to void defense appropriations sequestrations by hinting at pre-election layoffs. Private-sector version of the old “firemen first” gambit?

And in non-political news:

* Sandusky witness says defendent called himself “the tickle monster.” Ugh.

It’s good to be back to full blogging speed. I’ll have more tomorrow about Obama’s Ohio speech—and all the talk and spin about it.

Selah.

As I write this, I’m listening (via Steve Benen) to the president’s speech in Ohio today, for which a transcript it appears to be unavailable. I like what I’m hearing, not only because it frames the election as a choice between two stark, fundamentally different visions of what the country needs economically, but because it implicitly challenges Republicans to explain exactly what they are proposing now that Bush and company didn’t propose during the ‘oughts.

It’s amazing to me that Republicans have managed to avoid association with the Bush economic record by repeatedly attacking Bush for not doing even more of the things that wrecked the economy. Bush didn’t deregulate enough. Bush didn’t cut taxes enough. Bush didn’t shred the social safety net enough. Bush didn’t ratchet down nondefense discretionary spending that provides public sector jobs and private-sector contracts enough. These are the aspects of Bush’s record that lead today’s Republicans to say he “betrayed conservative principles;” these are the “mistakes” they would correct.

No, Obama hasn’t come up with some brilliant new slogan or sound-bite. But he has, finally, begun the hard but necessary task of explaining that conservative ideology, whether it’s promoted by George W. Bush or Mitt Romney, is inherently bad for middle-class economic prospects. I particularly like his adoption of Bill Clinton’s line that Romney’s economic policies are Bush’s policies “on steroids.” Maybe if he repeats that a few hundred times, Team Mitt will finally have to explain exactly how its policies differ from those of Bush, and admit that it’s mainly a matter of even more regressive taxes and an assault on the New Deal and Great Society legacy that Bush could only dream about.

One of the chattering class’s favorite games of late, as you know, is to parse every word said by Bill Clinton—or anyone ever connected with him and turn it into something that “undermines” Barack Obama. Most of these “gaffes” are remarks ripped out of context (not always necessary with the “Clintonites,” particularly those who stopped being Democrats some time ago and/or are on Wall Street payrolls). But it doesn’t take a lot to justify one of those “Clinton versus Obama” or “Democrats in Disarray” memes, does it?

The latest “example” of Clinton “undercutting” Obama, though, is from 2010,for God’s sake, and as Steve Kornacki of Salon explains, it does not actually say what it’s being quoted as saying:

At issue is a speech Clinton delivered in 2010 at the same Cleveland venue where Obama will later today present his main economic argument for another term as president. What supposedly makes this awkward is that in his ’10 remarks, Clinton said:… ‘We found a big hole that we did not dig. We didn’t get it filled in 21 months, but at least we quit digging. Give us two more years. If it doesn’t work, vote us out.’”

And now here we are two years later, the hole is still imposing, and Obama has the gall to ask for four more years? It’s almost as if Clinton has stumbled on a new, retroactive way of making Obama’s political life miserable. Unless you consider the context….

The key point here is that Clinton was asking voters not just to give Obama two more years (they had no choice but to do that), but also to give Democrats two more years of congressional control, to allow the party to continue implementing its agenda. As you’re probably aware, voters ended up ignoring this plea and installing a Republican House, which has pretty much made it impossible for Obama and Democrats to do anything substantive to boost the economy these past two years - like, say, pass a jobs bill that economists widely agree would incease growth and cut unemployment.

This is simply a variation on the GOP habit of keeping Obama from doing anything and then complaining that he’s not doing anything. That’s unsurprising, since their idea of “doing something” is doing the sort of things that got the country into the mess it’s in, along with some other things that are far worse than what George W. Bush did. But the MSM really should not be going along with this sort of brainless revisionist history.