By Artur Davis, on Thu Jul 26, 2012 at 8:30 AM ET  Count me in the camp that is not yet wringing hands about Mitt Romney’s prospects in the fall, largely because this script is so familiar. The narrative of impending doom (or blown opportunity) plays out every four years when Washington’s pundit class is forced indoors because of the heat. In the summer of 2008, the conventional wisdom among Democratic seers was that Barack Obama had hit a glass ceiling due to his disconnect with the white working class and that the campaign had drifted into a vague, impressionistic state. In 2000, the same chattering class pronounced Al Gore a weak, wooden nominee who had wasted the spring and early summer and was in danger of being run off the court by the Bush machine.
It’s not that the summer never matters: John Kerry’s offhanded remark that he had supported the Iraq invasion before he was against it was a precious kind of self-inflicted injury that happened during the summer lull. But for the most part, the fluctuations in campaign performance and the free media squalls of the convention run-up are over-borne by larger electoral forces. The fatigue with the Bush years and John McCain’s inability to separate himself from that record trumped Obama’s lull; the fundamentally even dynamic of the 2000 contest, a race between two broadly popular, non-polarizing figures in a largely contented electorate, was too fixed to be shaken by momentary plot twists. And the list could go on: for every defining moment in June or July, like Kerry’s gaffe, the list of half-time perceptions that proved flat wrong is far larger and more telling.
The fact is that this race is frozen, and polling as recent as today suggests that Romney’s tax returns and the new surface wounds around his private equity days (must the producers of the Batman installment opening this week have chosen as its evildoer a menace named “Bane”, rhymes with “Bain”?) have not changed the race much, if at all. (William Galston, the most perceptive Obamian at the New Republic, agrees).
But Republicans would still be wise to understand the exchange of blows in July as revealing of a pathway that could pry open the deadlock if Camp Romney is not careful.
 Specifically, the Obama team, which seems at any given moment overwhelmed or bored with the domestic side of governance, has a way of wearing down its opponents with a disciplined, untroubled capacity at gut-fighting. The already forgotten takeaway of 2007-08 was the extent to which the Obama/Hillary Clinton match turned on two reinforcing strategic narratives. The first was the Obama campaign’s ability to disrupt the flow of the Clinton effort by literally driving them to distraction: the early burst of slime about Bill Clinton’s social life: the jabs at Hillary’s ties to lobbyists; the shots at the 42nd president’s historical legacy; the put-down that Hillary was riding her husband’s coattails; the heavy-handed insinuations that the Clintons had a racial complex that was seeping out into view all looked unbecoming the days they were launched, but they did the damage they were meant to do, by knocking the Clintons off their game and into a defensive crouch.
Second, the Clinton campaign matched Obama’s ruthlessness with its own hesitance about returning fire with the same kind of aggression. It is entirely understandable that the Clintonites pulled their punches on Jeremiah Wright in a party where racial ethnic politics is so primal, far less defensible that they shrunk from leveling sustained fire at Obama’s gamey pattern of avoiding controversial votes in the Illinois legislature, or his links to a notorious influence peddler in Chicago, or even more inexplicable, that it never exposed blue collars and rural Democrats in Indiana and North Carolina to Obama’s far-left leaning record in the trenches of Illinois politics (including a lone wolf vote to reduce imprisonment for sex offenders).
Clinton’s strategists were neither inexperienced nor immobilized: their error was in their conviction that Obama’s manifest greeness and the haziness of his public profile were destined to defeat him. It’s hard not to hear some echoes of that mis-placed confidence in Republican circles now, when the case is made that Obama’s economic record is so weak that voters are bound to reject it. It’s equally hard to miss that Republican frustration this cycle at Obama’s resilience sounds, verse for verse, like the post-mortems in Clintonland around a candidate who seemed so overmatched the first nine months of the race.
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Artur Davis: Obama – The Master of Negative Arts
By Artur Davis, on Mon Jul 23, 2012 at 8:30 AM ET Last week, during the alternately sad, alternately voyeuristic coverage of Jesse Jackson Jr.’s troubles, I recalled a night that the Congressman himself has probably forgotten. Sometime in 1996 or 1997, Jackson made a speech at Alabama State University in my hometown, Montgomery. At least one local media outlet confused the young, newly elected representative with his father; a then defensible mistake reflecting the fact that much of America, much less Alabama, did not yet know there was a second generation Jackson rising in his own right.
But Montgomery’s African American professional crowd in their twenties or early thirties knew better, and they turned out to see one of their own generation’s most promising members do a star turn. The speech was good but not memorable—more polished than powerful, no preacher’s hook—but the electricity lingered. It was a lot of glamour, a lot of promise, just enough inspiration, in a community where “up and coming politician” meant at most future city councilman, at most state senator. This Jackson seemed to have the stuff to take the train much further. It would not have stunned a man or woman in that aging gymnasium to think that a future president had left a little touch of star dust behind.
I would see Jackson in action a hundred times more. He is one of a handful of House members who can give an authentic floor speech, versus droning through a turgid, staff drafted floor statement. He evolved into the orator whose possibilities were only just in view that night in Montgomery: by the time I watched him speak in Alabama in 2007 as an Obama surrogate, he had the gift nailed, and wasn’t much off Barack Obama’s rhetorical pace: it was a common refrain that day in the audience that Jesse had made the Obama case better than Obama himself had made it in Selma a few months earlier.
The legislator who developed over the last 16 or so years has his defects. Jesse Jr. never turned into a grind-it-out policy technician: his fixation on tacking onto the US Constitution every modern progressive policy plank was quixotic more than serious-minded. He frustrated the Hill crowd by neither reaching for leadership status himself nor aligning with the various power grids that attached around Nancy Pelosi or Steny Hoyer. In a world were institutional status is sought and lobbied over, Jackson’s coolness to that sort of thing could look like disengagement.
 His admirers kept chafing at his reluctance to reach for higher office. The presumed target, a Senate seat in Illinois, was there for the taking in 2004 but Jackson deferred to a black state senator he barely knew who had been mashed pretty badly in a House race four years earlier. In 2007, Jackson took all the steps to challenge another legacy product, Richard Daley, for Mayor, and stepped back again.
The game of politics requires mobility, either toward internal party power or to the next office on the ladder, and a politician who aims for neither is prone to stagnate. I suspect Jesse Jr. felt that tug and it explains the frenzy around his effort to get appointed to the Senate in late 2008 (an effort that did not cross the line into illegality, based on what I have seen, and probably wouldn’t look suspect if the target of persuasion had been anybody but Rod Blagojevich.) While I certainly never heard him express the thought, it would have been inhuman if Jackson didn’t notice that the chits from giving Obama and Daley their space weren’t exactly pouring in. The Obama team, for example, appeared to view Jackson as a ship they had passed on the way, and didn’t even include him on a list of favored suitors for the seat. The Democratic seers in Illinois lapsed very quickly into chatter that Jackson was too “Chicago” to build a statewide brand, more or less their initial take on Obama in 2003.
Politics is anything but fair and I never heard Jesse complain. The maddening irony, though, was that most of the ingratitude could be seen a mile away, involved people whose mindsets he knew all too well, and still Jackson seemed unprepared. He actually seemed to prefer to bid in an insider competition, where he had never excelled, instead of trusting his skills in a fight for voters, where his gifts might have enabled him to fare so much better.
It struck me as perplexing when I heard him say he could never raise the money to run a Senate race without the virtue of an appointment, because that deference to conventional wisdom and doubt clashed so thoroughly with the many times he took on the established point of view: becoming a reform ally in Chicago, endorsing Obama for the Senate in 04 when it seemed pointless. A man with unmistakable boldness never seemed to give a second’s worth of thought to a brass-knuckled tactic like announcing he would run in the Senate primary in 2010 no matter what, to test the Democratic machine’s path of least resistance politics.
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Artur Davis: Jesse’s Drama
By Artur Davis, on Tue Jul 17, 2012 at 8:30 AM ET  Ed Kilgore’s latest posting in The New Republic is a pretty fair representation of how allegedly centrist Democrats have maneuvered their way into becoming skeptics of education reform, or at least reform more comprehensive than charter schools. Kilgore’s target is Governor Bobby Jindal’s statewide voucher initiative in Louisiana, and its embrace of a parental right to transfer children out of sub-standard districts. Kilgore focuses on what he describes as insufficiently strong standards to measure performance levels in private schools, or to weed out “bad apple” private academies that have no legitimate claim on public dollars.
On one hand, Kilgore’s line of attack already seems slightly outdated: as he concedes, the state is actually in the process of developing metrics for evaluating which private schools are eligible for participation in the program, and the more pressing debate in Baton Rouge has not been over performance standards, but over which faith-based institutions are suitable for inclusion. Kilgore still persists in assuming that Louisiana’s voucher program will let in too many bottom-dwellers. But while lamenting the fact that an unidentified number (he unhelpfully describes it as a “lot”) of the schools applying for the voucher program suffer from curriculum flaws or other professional deficiencies, Kilgore offers no evidence beyond a reflexive suspicion of Louisiana’s competence that the weakest applicants will survive vetting. Of course, the larger inference, that too few of the state’s private schools provide a high quality alternative worthy of public support, requires a much rigorous assessment of comparative data like graduation rates, college enrollment, achievement based testing, etc.
 Certainly, it’s a case that would also demand comparisons between private institutions and the existing state of Louisiana public schools. Kilgore spends literally no time analyzing the conditions in the state’s government run schools, and if he had, he would have uncovered appalling levels of mediocrity: according to the state’s education department, 44% of the state’s public schools received a D or F ranking under the state’s system for grading its K-12 institutions. Roughly one-third of graduating seniors are deemed to be inadequate in basic skills.
Nor does Kilgore grapple with a fact that even a private school skeptic must concede. At least some Louisiana private schools are high performers, but remain well out of financial reach for children whose median family income is one of the lowest in the country. Is it troubling to Kilgore that without vouchers, there is no consistently effective path for low-income Louisiana children to gain access to schools like New Orleans’ well regarded but 8% African American Isidore Newman, or the nationally recognized girls school at Mount Carmel Academy, with its 2% black population?
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Artur Davis: Education Reform and its Centrist Critics
By Artur Davis, on Thu Jul 12, 2012 at 8:30 AM ET Imagine if it were revealed that Scott Pelley or Diane Sawyer had met with Chris Christie last year to implore him to enter the presidential race in order to save the country from political crisis, and had offered the platform of their evening newscast for the announcement. Then imagine the reaction if Brian Williams made a speech decrying extremism in the Republican Party and describing the Right as a threat to the national discourse. For good measure, consider the aftermath if the Romney campaign made back-channel inquiries to Sawyer about running for vice president and Sawyer failed to disclose the offer to her superiors, much less her audience.
Any single one of these scenarios would be explosive and would ignite a gusher of passion about the decline of objectivity in journalism. The specter of national news anchors venturing so blatantly into politics would be cited as toxic proof that their craft had been corrupted.
If you have waded through Douglas Brinkley’s thick, detailed book on Walter Cronkite’s life, you know that each one of these far-fetched sounding examples is borrowed from actual events. The venerable news legend exhorted Robert Kennedy to challenge Lyndon Johnson in 1968 and prodded him to announce his bid on the CBS Evening News. Cronkite publicly assailed the Nixon Administration for seeking to subvert the press specifically and political dissent broadly. On one occasion, in 1972 with George McGovern, and perhaps with an independent candidate in 1980, Cronkite entered discussions about taking a vice presidential slot, and kept the conflict of interest from his public and his bosses.
 There is not much condemnation of Cronkite’s line crossing in Brinkley’s account; to the contrary, there is a tone of mourning for how much Cronkite’s stature is missed, and a lot of wide eyed admiration for the role he played as “America’s most trusted man” for a span of about 20 years. If Brinkley is at all discomfited by the times Cronkite crossed over from observer to participant, they are overshadowed by the many occasions when Brinkley applauds Cronkite for shaping the public debate, from Cronkite’s televised takedown of Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam policies, to his overt endorsement of the environmental movement, to his open jousting with Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew (the night Agnew resigned after admitting he took bribes, Cronkite editorialized on air that he and Agnew had been “ideological enemies”).
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Artur Davis: The Cronkite Curse
By Artur Davis, on Mon Jul 9, 2012 at 8:30 AM ET Having argued in my previous posting that the Supreme Court’s squeaker on healthcare vindicates the left’s strategy of winning by marginalizing opposition, I am not in the camp that sees a silver constitutional or legal lining (the politics is a different story as I suggested earlier). A significant number of conservative scholars, and a few of their liberal counterparts, have a different view.
Even assuming that at least some of the conservative sentiment is the desire to find comfort in defeat, and that some liberals are engaging in the intellectual version of being graceful winners, there is some core of truth here: upholding the mandate on commerce clause grounds would have linked the power to regulate a market with the power to compel participation in it. Justice Ginsburg’s concession that the power’s only limitation is practicality and political modesty is much less dangerous in a concurrence than a majority opinion.
 But the fact that five votes coalesced around a weakening of the commerce clause is cold comfort when the fifth vote hinged on blowing the lid off of the tax and spend power. That taxing power, which looked until the day of the ruling like a straightforward ability to add an official levy to commercial activity, now looks ominously broader. As of now, it as limitless as the government’s imagination, as long as it not so high that it turns into a de facto penalty or a fine. Or, in Chief Justice Roberts phrasing, as long as it is “just a tax hike”, all is fair.
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Artur Davis: The Silver Lining is Dark
By Artur Davis, on Fri Jul 6, 2012 at 8:30 AM ET If you’re scoring the Supreme Court’s Solomonic ruling on immigration, consider this counter-intuitive result: liberals who would be expected to cheer a ruling that wipes out much of Arizona’s controversial law have sounded strangely conflicted, and from the New York Times to the New Republic, have described the surviving component that allows local law enforcement to determine the legal status of individuals lawfully in their custody as everything from the “centerpiece” of the statute to “its most controversial” element.
It’s an odd approach to a legal victory. Heretofore, the most vocal concerns around SB 1070 (and copycats like the Alabama version) have focused on the blunt-force impact restrictionist statutes have on prototypical undocumented residents and their families: these laws make no bones about a pretty harsh sounding goal, expelling illegal immigrants from communities by rendering them virtually uninhabitable if you lack valid legal status. For example, Section 3 of the Arizona law, which made it a misdemeanor to lack valid immigration documents, and Section5(c), which made it a misdemeanor for an illegal immigrant to even seek work, had the straightforward purpose of pressuring illegal immigrants to move. To more liberal critics of these measures, the so-called “self deportation” strategy exudes a racial ugliness at worst, and a mean-spiritedness at the least.
 But it does not require either compassion or permissive liberalism to recoil at the idea of states solving their illegal immigrant dilemma by kicking the problem next door. Arizona’s toughness, over time, would have almost certainly scattered more of its undocumented population to Colorado, California, or Nevada than Mexico. That entirely legitimate policy instinct may well have influenced the conservative swing justices, John Roberts and Anthony Kennedy, as much as the narrow legal doctrine of preemption that technically decided this case.
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Artur Davis: The Court’s Mixed Decision on Immigration
By Artur Davis, on Wed Jul 4, 2012 at 8:30 AM ET There was genuine suspense in Barack Obama’s announcement that he will through executive order legalize about a million young undocumented immigrants. The details are a bit more nuanced—a minimum five years residency, high school graduate status, and a crime free record are preconditions, and the order contemplates applications for guest worker status rather than citizenship—but it is still a sweeping unilateral move that broke the partisan gridlock on immigration. As such, the non-Fox media has pronounced it a masterstroke that will widen the already sizable gap between Obama and Mitt Romney with Hispanics.
To be sure, the politics are considerably more complicated. The white working class voters whom Obama is struggling with, and who swung decisively toward Republicans in 2010, are unlikely to be impressed. The portion of the Latino vote preoccupied with immigration policy, as opposed to jobs or social issue controversies, could already be secured for Obama and this latest move may not move the needle much more. To conservatives, Obama’s by-pass of Congress drives the narrative that a closet, hard-left agenda is lurking in a second term, which may keep them galvanized to defeat him.
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Artur Davis: Immigration and a Missed Opportunity
By Artur Davis, on Mon Jul 2, 2012 at 8:30 AM ET Whether Chief Justice John Roberts changed his mind, or is the latest example of Republican justices “evolving” on the bench, he has done the improbable: liberals are praising a Supreme Court that they had trashed as a player in a right-wing conspiracy. Old sins like Citizens United are washed away, as are President Obama’s spring musings about the dangers of an unelected court unaccountable to public opinion. The about-face is jarring even in a political atmosphere where the right result typically makes right.
I’ll offer two quick cautionary notes, though, on the politics,and on the arguably more significant trend signified by the outcome. First, a rebuttal to Democratic wishfulness that healthcare is now a politica lwinner for Barack Obama: the better evidence is that it will be a media inflated victory that is worth no votes. Just as Democrats miscalculated in 2010 by assuming that the passage of the healthcare law would prove that they could get things done, they are probably drawing th ewrong lesson today if they assume the Court’s rescue of a deeply unpopular law somehow validates the Obama term.
The notion that the Supreme Court’s imprimatur alters the electoral equation implies that the hostility to Obamacare among Independents and swing voters is related to their doubts about the law’s legitimacy. To the contrary, there is considerably more polling evidence that the political middle’s resistance to the Affordable Care Act is grounded in bread and butter realities: sticker shot at the cost; reflexive doubts that any fledgling federal bureaucracy will work the way it is supposed to; and a suspicion that for all the hoopla, the reform won’t lower their premiums or improve their coverage. The constitutional gripe never really permeated the congressiona ldebate, and it has become a rallying point only within the GOP’s Tea Party base and on the intellectual right: two places that are not exactly part of the persuadable voter universe, and two sectors that aren’t about to rethink thei ropinion based on a one vote escape act.
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Artur Davis: The Liberal Coup
By Artur Davis, on Mon Jun 25, 2012 at 11:30 AM ET [Click here for a link to the entire RP Debate on Roger Clemens]
I appreciate that Roger Clemens is no sympathetic character. Even before his brain and emotions might have been addled by steroids, he could be graceless to an extreme: the few black fans left in baseball winced after he stupidly said he wished he could crack Hank Aaron’s head open when Aaron had the temerity to suggest a pitcher shouldn’t win a season MVP award. It was a dumb, brutal joke that echoed the savage letters Aaron received in the throes of his home run record chase. There was also no grace in the Roger Clemens who could erupt at umpires or batters, and who tended to do it most when his skills weren’t working. There are a host of fans who see nothing but a perennial evader of responsibility in Clemens, and I sympathize.
But the Hall of Fame is a baseball venue and the only relevance of his misdeeds is whether they influenced the stats that make the player’s candidacy (I would say the same for Pete Rose, whose tawdriness never included betting to influence his own games).
Accepting the standard that it’s best to freeze Clemens’ candidacy as of 1998–pre Brian McNamee–I lean toward admission for Roger Clemens, but don’t see the baseball case as nearly as one-sided as some comments on the thread suggest. Clemens’ Red Sox career approximated 16 wins a years for twelve years–exceptional and consistent, but there were outlier years like the masterpiece in 86 balanced against a run of seasons in the early nineties when Clemens seemed past his prime, and an undeniable pattern of erosion. Then there is the mediocrity of his post-season work for the Red Sox, when the rap was that Clemens seemed to fatigue by October (a precursor of why he might have turned to enhancers). The two Toronto Cy Young years (and 41 additional wins) are clouded, perhaps unfairly, by the proximity to his alleged introduction to steroids, and the murkiness around when the cheating might have started.
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The RPs Debate Roger Clemens: Artur Davis Cleans Up
By Artur Davis, on Fri Jun 22, 2012 at 10:00 AM ET When a gifted politician stumbles over words, it is often the case that Michael Kinsley’s venerable definition of a gaffe is the reason: namely, that the supposed miscue is nothing but the truth being told unintentionally. By those lights, there is a value in lingering over the last week of presidential gaffes: Barack Obama’s observation that the private sector economy is “doing fine”; and Bill Clinton’s aside that the Bush tax cuts should be extended for the immediate future.
The Obama blunder has already been discarded by the White House, with the campaign team weakly offering that “doing fine” was a poor word choice offered on behalf of a fact—that private sector job growth has been constant for 20 odd months. Clinton has more doggedly pleaded the defense of context killing by Republicans. The maze of explanation goes something like this: the former president opposes and has always opposed the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy and if he had his druthers, would repeal them; having said that, repealing the cuts not in isolation but as one element in a comprehensive deficit reduction deal is the best strategic approach for the economy; to buy more bargaining space for a deal, Clinton reverts to a short-term extension of the cuts for one year past their expiration this December. Not exactly a model of clarity, but perhaps a model of how to muddy the record.
The Kinsleyan truth is that both men meant it, but didn’t quite mean to say it. As for Obama, the remark on Friday paints a candid picture of this administration’s sanguine view of its economic record. Whereas most of the country incorrectly but tellingly describes the economy as mired in a recession, the Obama team believes it has woven a success story that compares splendidly with the staggering job losses in early 09. While the country hands Obama an approval rating barely above 40 percent on its economic policies, Team Obama grades itself as the architect of an emergency set of maneuvers that averted a depression. While polls show the country leveling at least some blame on Obama for failing to break the gridlock in Washington, it is the president’s conviction that the recovery would be stronger if only Republicans had not been so determined to block his policies out of calculation and extremism.
In other words, it is a self-drawn portrait that is indeed “fine”, perhaps even verging on quite good; it’s premises are recited as an article of faith by Democratic loyalists on every level. If only the country could see it.
As for the 42nd president, it is worth noting that no high profile Democrat more consistently draws a link between taxes and economic growth. On more than one occasion, Clinton has extolled the virtues of the Simpson Bowles Commission and its blend of entitlement reform, discretionary spending discipline and tax reform as well as outright tax hikes—but he has regularly done so with the caveat that the blueprint ought to be adopted now but shelved until after the recovery has gotten more robust. While the distinction can seem like a timing detail, it is in fairness a sharp point of departure from the 44th president, who sought just last summer to forge a substantial tax hike (and a package of spending cuts) in the teeth of the weakest three months of job growth in the last two years.
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Artur Davis: Of Presidential Gaffes & Their Consequences
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Specifically, the Obama team, which seems at any given moment overwhelmed or bored with the domestic side of governance, has a way of wearing down its opponents with a disciplined, untroubled capacity at gut-fighting. The already forgotten takeaway of 2007-08 was the extent to which the Obama/Hillary Clinton match turned on two reinforcing strategic narratives. The first was the Obama campaign’s ability to disrupt the flow of the Clinton effort by literally driving them to distraction: the early burst of slime about Bill Clinton’s social life: the jabs at Hillary’s ties to lobbyists; the shots at the 42nd president’s historical legacy; the put-down that Hillary was riding her husband’s coattails; the heavy-handed insinuations that the Clintons had a racial complex that was seeping out into view all looked unbecoming the days they were launched, but they did the damage they were meant to do, by knocking the Clintons off their game and into a defensive crouch.
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