On Why I Don’t Hate the Yankees

In Sunday’s NYT, Joe Nocera wrote a piece discussing how despite being a lifelong Red Sox fan, he’s warmed to the Yankees. It echoes something I’ve been feeling for the entire playoffs: I don’t hate the team that every fan outside of New York is supposed to despise.

The Yankees are the team that fans love to hate. They’re rich and arrogant. It’s partially their fault that small-market teams have such a hard time competing. It’s boring to see the same team succeed over and over again. They’ll hire players of questionable ethical stock. Etc.

I’m not really compelled by any of that. George Steinbrenner is an ass, but he’s not really part of the day to day operations of the team anymore. And I don’t dislike them because they’re rich and buy the best free agents. What should they do instead? Give their money to other teams? I’ll listen to arguments for restructuring baseball to involve salary caps and more revenue sharing. But in the absence of those constraints, I find it hard to fault a team for using all available means to win, including spending a fortune to get the best players.

More than anything, though, I kind of like these players. (Well, maybe not A-Rod). Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera are legends, and deservedly so. It’s a pleasure to watch them play. And the newcomers ain’t so bad either. CC Sabathia is one of the game’s best pitchers and also one of its nicest guys. Especially (but not entirely) because he was on the Brewers for awhile and was a class act, I’m going to root for him no matter where he plays. Nick Swisher is one of the more underrated players in the game – a prototypical Billy Beane sort of guy: ugly and out of shape, but helping his team win day in and day out. I’m lukewarm about Melky Cabrera (maybe because he almost became a Brewer and that scared the crap out of me), but Robinson Cano is one of the most exciting young infielders around. Joba Chamberlain has got to be one of the game’s most interesting players, even if not altogether likable. I could do without AJ Burnett, but watching Andy Pettite pitch effectively in his old age is kind of cool. And Jerry Hairston, Jr., well…he’s obviously the new David Eckstein. If the Yankees hadn’t given him those 40 ABs in August and September, they probably wouldn’t even have made the playoffs.

Lots of people object: so few of these players are homegrown! (Mo Rivera, Derek Jeter, Robinson Cano and Melky Cabrera – I think – were all Yankee draftees.) But that’s okay. This is how the game is played now. Even small teams with terrific farm systems will almost certainly dip into the free agent market in a big way if they glimpse the possibility of a postseason appearance. Free agency in its current conception might not be a good thing for baseball all things considered – it might need some reform – but it’s not something we can expect teams to ignore if they want to be competitive. (See: Kansas City Royals.)

So: I like the Yankees. And, frankly, I’m happy for them. I’d rather that the Angels or the Twins or the Rockies had emerged victorious from this postseason. It is still better to see the totally unexpected team string together a bunch of wins. But I’m not going to be the guy simulating vomiting when he’s asked about this year’s World Series.

Obama’s Presser

Though I’m pretty peeved at Obama right now, I thought he did a pretty good job in his press conference last night. And I think the press asked him a couple of good questions and a bunch of pretty bad questions and so they let Obama off the hook on some of the most egregiously inegalitarian features of the Senate Bill.

Obama’s opening remarks were terrific: concise and specific and delivered with the right amount of vitriol. They were better than his inaugural address by an order of magnitude. Among the several excellent moments, this is my favorite:

We find ourselves in a rare moment when the citizens of our country and of all countries are waiting for us to lead. It’s a responsibility that this generation did not ask for, but one we must accept for the future of our children and grandchildren.

The strongest democracies flourish from frequent and lively debate, but they endure when people of every background and belief find a way to set aside smaller differences in the service of a greater purpose. That’s the test facing the United States of American in this winter of our hardship, and it is the duty of our leaders and citizens to stay true to that purpose in the weeks and months ahead.

This is Jed Bartlet material. Here’s hoping whoever wrote last night’s remarks is the go-to guy from here on out. Here’s hoping it’s Richard Schiff.

Obama did a nice job with the first few questions offering his rationale for the stimulus package. He also did a nice job responding to Chuck Todd’s moronic question (you want to give money to consumers, but didn’t consumer spending get us into this mess?). I’m afraid Chuck Todd’s still a little too green for the front row of the White House news room.

What didn’t happen last night was an explanation of the bill’s current measures. Obama didn’t need to sell the stimulus in general; Americans support it. But he does need to tell us why he’s going to sign a bill in which the ratio of spending to tax cuts is under 2:1, which contains a provision to allow home buyers (read: those who aren’t too hurt by a recession) are given a $15,000 tax break in order buy homes that are undervalued in the first place, and which has been stripped of substantial sums of immediate aid to cities, states and universities, money which is likely to help the sorts of people who are likely to be the most hurt by a recession.

Pressing for the passage of a bill is an indication that he’ll sign whatever is passed. Since the House needs no Republicans to pass its bill and the Senate needs at least two, the Senate will dictate the terms of the bill as its worked out in conference between the two houses. So, Obama will sign something similar to the Senate bill. For all the campaign talk about immediate relief to the middle class – the talk that got him elected, I think – this bill is something of an insult.

Had Obama played this right all along, I believe he could have gotten the bill he wanted. He didn’t and he won’t. Perhaps Obama’s a little green for the Oval Office.

The Senate Bill

We should, I think, be upset about the Senate stimulus bill. In order to get 60 votes, Dems have capitulated on a lot. The bill now resembles far more closely than it ought a collation of stale, Republican notions about correlations between economic health and wealthy people having enough money to do whatever they want.

Most disastrously, I think, the Senate has drastically pared down funding to states and schools and replaced (some but not all of) it with various forms of tax cuts. I’ve written before about my astonishment that our elected representatives could be having this debate with a straight face, not least because we just had an election in which Americans decisively preferred the candidate who spoke often and eloquently against cutting taxes as a means to economic health. Did I dream it all? There’s also this niggling little detail: Republicans ideas about extreme supply-side stimulus have been discredited.

Republicans hate giving money to state and local governments and to educational institutions because the money will largely be used to fill holes and their budgets. They think this sort of stimulus won’t create jobs. But I don’t quite get this line of argument: if the states and universities can’t balance their budgets, then people who have jobs will lose them. I know this: a bunch of Ohio State employees are almost certainly going to lose their jobs in 2009. In what way does giving money to entities to allow them to allow their employees to continue working not accomplish some pretty obvious and reasonable goals of a stimulus package?

Obama has got to take some blame, here. Notions of “centrism” and “bipartisanship” are proxy ideals that we employ when we’re dissatisfied with the inefficacy of our government. The root cause of our dissatisfaction is not that some people hate some other people and don’t want to work with them; it’s that nothing gets done. Obama came into office with terrific majorities in both houses, a great deal of political capital, a stimulus proposal that the majority of Americans support and a mandate earned largely on the basis of his pronouncements on the economy. He should have pre-empted the complete and utter lack of respect he has gotten from Republicans by simply ramming his bill down their throats and rejecting their demands. We want courageous and bold leadership. Feeding hysterical Republicans a $15,000 tax credit for home purchases is neither.

You might think that Obama had to concede in order to get 60 votes. But the Senate could have passed its bill with a simply majority – so long as the bill was brought out of committee as a budget amendment bill (or some such; I’m not entirely clear on how the process works). But he’s been afraid to be seen as the kind of guy who smashes his agenda through, opponents be damned. Unfortunately, given the circumstances, I think that’s exactly what we’re hungry for. And I think the criticisms of such an approach are both obvious and invalid: though this wouldn’t represent “change” in one sense (opponents-be-damned strategies are nothing new), it would represent “change” in the sense that the man damning his opponents is, as we already all know, a responsible, honest accountable person who is deeply constrained by empirical fact and is getting advice from an all-star team. “Change” is a dangerous ideal: it opens one up to criticism far too easily. So be it. Let’s get this done and done right anyway.

Honeybees! Outrage! Ack!

Obama is having a harder time than I thought he’d have getting Congress to pass a stimulus bill quickly. Let’s have a look at the two major stories enveloping the stimulus bill this week:

1) The House passed an $820 billion (or so) stimulus bill. The Senate promptly decided to, in effect, write a new bill, adding nearly $100 billion to the cost of the House bill. Yesterday, papers reported that a group of moderates – specifically, the Maine senate delegation – met with Obama to propose cutting $100 billion from the Senate bill as it currently stands.

2) Republicans are really pissed that a) not every last cent of the stimulus bill is going to be spent immediately; and b) the stimulus bill contains a bunch of typical, lefty, free-Cadillacs-for-crack-addicted-welfare-mothers-type stuff that, frankly, no one can stomach. Chief among these proposed legislative outrages is the so-called “honeybee insurance” provision.

Let’s have a look at these stories.

First, it strikes me that (1) isn’t so good for Obama: the Senate added $100 billion to the bill and the moderates want to cut $100 billion from the bill, but the $100 billion added and the $100 billion cut aren’t the same provisions. The moderates, whose votes are essential for a fillibuster-proof majority, want to cut primarily spending provisions from the bill, including $14 billion of education funding for states. The spending they propose cutting is not what was added to the bill; the Senate added, among other things, a variety of forms of tax cuts. With the tax cuts added and the spending provisions cut, the ratio of spending to tax cuts is far closer to 1:1 than it ought to be – at least, according to economists. Obama’s trying to test out some Keynesian principles with this stimulus bill. It looks now, though, that the bill is going to be stimulatory in a more conventional, conservative way: by cutting people’s taxes.

This brings us to (2), and a number of contradictory attitudes Republicans have committed themselves to in the past week. Tax cuts have to be used carefully as a means of economic stimulus. While few doubt that certain types of tax cuts have a positive effect on an ailing economy, most also agree that tax cuts during a recession don’t translate immediately into new economic growth. That’s because people who are hurting financially don’t spend the tax cuts; they pay down debt or save them. So, in order to get, say, $100 worth of economic growth from tax cuts, the government must shove far more than $100 into the economy. Thus, they’re not the most effective way of stimulating the economy. For all whining about the need for immediate action, the primary Republican contribution to the stimulus package is one that is likely to have a delayed and mitigated effect.

Second: honeybee insurance. This is supposed to be an example of a Democratic agenda item, unrelated to economic recovery, that Dems are piggybacking on the stimulus legislation because they can. Actually, honeybee insurance is “disaster insurance for all livestock producers,” a group you might think is in need of aid. And now for the real hypocrisy. From Michael Hiltzik at the LA Times (h/t Kevin Drum):

The provision simply continues a program enacted by Congress last year, overriding a veto by President Bush. In other words, the Senate voted on it twice in 2008 — once to enact and once to override. Connoisseurs of political comedy will see the punch line coming: McConnell and Vitter voted yea both times.

So it turns out that McConnell isn’t really against honeybees. He’s only using them to pretend that he’s got a principled objection to a stimulus plan aimed at pulling the country out of the most severe recession in decades.

Heh. They hate what they liked enough to vote for twice. Great.

Here are, I think, two good reasons to include a measure in a stimulus bill:

1) The measure is likely to cause economic growth (or slow economic decline).

2) The measure will help people who have been (or are likely to be) hurt by the recession, even if the measure itself will not cause economic growth.

Republicans have been pretending for awhile that (1) is the only valid reason. They couch various Dem proposals that fit (2) as selfish or wasteful spending proposals. But it shouldn’t come as any surprise that Dems are going to push proposals that meet (2) but not (1). Nor should it bother us: one of the things the federal government should do is help people whose interests have been compromised as a result of slowing economic growth. As it turns out, it doesn’t actually bother plenty of Republicans when they’re not in front of cameras either.

I won’t deny that some measures included in the bill don’t seem clearly to fit either (1) or (2). But my point is that Republicans pretend that any measure that isn’t a tax cut is illegitimate in a bill of this sort (and, presumably, in just about any bill). But they’re not.

Criticism of the FRRA

This is an excellent look at some of the criticisms of Obama’s stimulus package and some plausible (and perhaps implausible) responses on behalf of the Obama administration.

A Crazy Idea

Now that Daschle is gone, Obama could do worse than to consider (I said consider) nominating Michael Dukakis for Secretary of HHS.

Hear me out. Dukakis is well-known and was very highly regarded as Governor of Massachusetts. More importantly, he has spent nearly twenty years as a full, tenured professor at Northeastern University (and a visiting full professor at UCLA). During that time, he has primarily focussed his research on health care in the United States, a good deal of which he has published in respected, peer-reviewed journals of the highest caliber (including the New England Journal of Medicine). Obama could do worse than to pick someone who is both familiar with the logistical nightmare of trying to implement policy proposals on a large scale and studied in the intricate details of health policy in the U.S. – which he certainly is.

Here’s the rub: Dukakis is 75. Which means that this won’t happen, even if Obama spins it as a hat tip to McCain: proof that McCain’s candidacy wasn’t absurd on its face. It’s a crazy idea and it has no chance. But it isn’t the worst idea I’ve heard. Dukakis is a bit of a joke, so as a PR move it would be risky – especially in light of today’s withdrawals. But both as an indication of the seriousness with which Obama takes health care reform and as a gesture to Obama’s liberal base, a Dukakis nomination would be glorious. Unfortunately, it isn’t practical in the least.

Hendrik Hertzberg Reads this Blog

Here’s what Hertzberg has to say in a new post entitled “Inaugural Redux:”

My stylistic reservation has nothing to do with “narrative arcs” and the like; it’s about staleness of language. Lines like these—

The words [of the Presidential oath] have been spoken during rising tides of prosperity and the still waters of peace. Yet, every so often the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms.

—come dangerously close to “It was a dark and stormy night.” Also, while one might conceivably take an oath “amidst” clouds and storms, one cannot speak words “during” tides and waters. Not without gurgling, anyway.

Here’s what I had to say last week:

I’d like to reflect for a moment, though, on what Obama himself said. I don’t think – as many apparently do – that it was a great speech. In fact, I thought it wasn’t particularly good, and certainly not among the top five speeches of Obama’s short political career. Some commentators said it wasn’t soaring. But it was, at least in parts. The problem is that those parts were tired and heavy-handed. For example:

Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath. The words have been spoken during rising tides of prosperity and the still waters of peace. Yet, every so often, the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms.

I have a difficult time imagining a staler metaphor than water imagery for the purposes of discussing national well-being. And to talk about turmoil via images of clouds and storms is, well, amateurish. The speech seemed to have been written by someone who detests soaring metaphor but felt compelled to include moments of it in an inaugural for fear of earning a historical reputation as a lightweight. Or by a 27-year-old.

Hmmm…. This is more than a little suspicious, don’t you think?

The Morning Shows

In my state of general inattention since November, I hadn’t realized that some genius finally figured out how to stagger the Sunday morning shows so that you can watch both the first half of Stephanopolous’s show and Meet the Press. You’d think it wouldn’t have taken half a decade to figure out that this is probably better for everyone.

The issue du jour is, of course, the FRRA and its impending consideration by the Senate. The morning shows are filled with senators and congresspersons arguing about it. The nature of the debate today is, to my mind, bizarre. The central bone of contention is the percentage of the stimulus plan devoted to spending compared with the percentage devoted to tax cuts. They’re not talking about which ways are the best ways to spend if we are to best help the economy. They’re not talking about whether or not certain types of spending – e.g., Pell Grant increases, food stamps, etc. – are appropriate spending measures given that these ought to be permanent priorities and that an economic stimulus package is, more or less by definition, a collection of temporary measures. Nor are they talking about whether people who have been severely impacted by this recession deserve some relief regardless of the overall impact of such relief on the economy. Instead, they’re yelling at each other about the same issue they’ve been yelling at each other about, recession or not, for as long as I can remember: whether tax cuts are the best way to help the economy.

Fifteen minutes into Meet the Press, John Kerry, in an argument with Kay Bailey Hutchison, finally made what to my mind is the only point one needs to make in this obnoxious debate: that we have years of proof that tax cuts don’t work in the way they would need to work right now. We just had an election fought in part on this very issue and the verdict is in: Americans have rejected the notion that the primary means of effecting economic change should be via private sector tax cuts.

Nobody denies the value of certain sorts of tax cuts to our economy. But very few reasonable people believe that massive tax cuts ought to be the primary mechanism by which we effect economic recovery. (Indeed, most economists believe that tax cuts ought to comprise somewhere in the vicinity of 25% of a total stimulus plan. They currently comprise about a third, which means that the FRRA, as it has been passed by the House, already verges on too conservative.) But you wouldn’t know any of this from watching the morning shows. Instead, you’d think that this was a raging ideological debate between the two major political parties in our country, that the verdict on the economic value of unregulated, unmitigated spending by the private sector wasn’t in. Not true. I can’t believe that Republicans are able to make these sorts of claims with a straight face. And I can’t believe that Democrats are letting them get away with it. Good Lord.

Blago

I’m happy that today does not mark the end of the Blago saga. He’s been removed from his position as governor of Illinois, but he awaits a criminal trial that will almost certainly make him (I think) the fourth of the last eight Illinois governors to go to prison for corruption.

The impeachment trial and Blago’s PR moves in the past few days are the stuff of bad crime dramas. I’m thankful that we have politicians narcissistic and delusional enough to think the following set of actions is remotely coherent:

1) refuse to participate in your own impeachment trial

2) visit talk shows to proclaim your innocence

3) realize the shit is going to hit the fan and insist upon making a “closing argument” in your impeachment trial as though you were a daring defense attorney

4) refuse to swear to tell the truth

5) insist that there is “no evidence” against you when in fact there are mountains of evidence against you and you mean to say that it is not deductively provable that you are guilty

6) have that haircut

7) believe you’re innocent

This is the kind of behavior that has been made famous by Law & Order and serial killers: it’s the stuff of psychotics and narcissists. We’re lucky enough to have a really powerful person do it better than it has been done in either of those venues. What we’re missing is a craven murder charge. But Pat Fitzgerald still has another 65 days or so. Here’s hoping…

FRRA

The FRRA passed the House along partisan lines, yesterday: not a single Republican in the House voted for it. This strikes me as incredibly stupid on the part of the Republicans. It’s clear that the House GOP members are trying to send a message; otherwise, at least a dozen or so would have voted for passage of the bill. But what message are they sending? And what will be heard?

Republican opposition can, I think, be attributed to two factors. First, Republicans want to project an image of fiscal conservatism and are opposed to copius spending. Second, Republicans want to let Obama know that his honeymoon will be short. Hence the unanimous GOP rejection of the bill in the House.

This is a poor strategy. We don’t live in a historical vacuum; the thought that Republicans can credibly claim to be the party of fiscal responsibility isn’t going to fly. Moreover, Americans support a massive spending plan at the rate of 70% (give or take a few points depending on how the question is worded). Taking a stand against Obama’s plan is, in effect, an assault on what Americans think is simply sound conventional wisdom. A bold move, but certainly a myopic one.

Obama wins. He has known for days that Republicans would support a bill only if it included significant concessions: progressive tax cuts, for example. But he allowed House Democrats to put the bill up for a vote nonetheless. He clearly doesn’t care whether or not Republicans vote for it. Americans hate partisanship, but only when it impedes progress and Obama knows that. In this case, it won’t. Nevertheless, Obama spent Tuesday on the Hill talking about compromise and shaking John Boehner’s hand in front of cameras. So, even as he refuses to concede to Republicans in negotiations, Obama allows himself to be seen as fostering a new kind of relationship with Congress: he’s listening, he’s considering, etc.

The only way this turns out to be a bad week for Obama is if, in several years, the FRRA is seen as a significant piece of a larger failure to set the economy on the course to recovery. For now, though, the verdict is that Obama has handled about as deftly as he could have his first major encounter with Congress.