By Artur Davis, on Thu May 3, 2012 at 10:00 AM ET  Washington is a city that loves to see itself on the television screen. Unlike New York or Los Angeles, neither of which is parochial or insecure enough to revel in the attention, the capital loves any affirmation of its glamour; it still takes quiet offense at the barb that it is Hollywood for powerful people who are simultaneously ugly and dull. So, it is no surprise that ABC’s late season series “Scandal”, which tries hard to inject some wit and sexiness into the conventional account of political tawdriness and cover-up, is buzz-worthy in certain sectors of the District. It helps that the show breaks genuine historic ground at the same time.
Most descriptions of “Scandal” have rightly accentuated the ground-breaking part: the casting of an African American woman (Kerry Washington as Olivia Pope) in the starring role in a drama is a development that has not happened either since Diahann Carroll appeared in “Julia”, or, perhaps, since Regina Taylor shared the lead role in the underrated and elegant “I’ll Fly Away”. (At this rate, a ten year old black girl will have her moment by the time I turn 65). It’s a weird—make it maddening, inexcusable thing—that there is still history to be made in the choice to cast a black woman in the lead, but it is unmistakable boldness on ABC’s part. Only three times in the life of our culture has a “big 4” television network trusted a black woman in an up-front role without a laugh track, and ABC to its credit ups the ante by rendering a narrative that has next to nothing to do with race or reimagining the culture of discrimination: no small thing in an industry that still makes movies about maids.
 Olivia Pope is no sacrificing, modest victim of limitations. She is a stylish, equally lionized and feared practitioner of crisis management, which in the mythology of “Scandal”, is the business of burying the secrets of the high and mighty. (as to the impressionable among you, be advised that the real-life version of the profession has more to do with debunking corporate whistleblowers, spinning CEO demotions, and messaging sudden stock deflation). If you are the kind of viewer who catches the stray details in dialogue, it seems that Pope is a Republican—albeit, the moderate, feminist, non Tea Party loving kind. She was an instrumental member of the campaign team that elected the incumbent president, with whom she also shared a bed in between strategy sessions (a disclosure that was only slyly alluded to in the series trailer and which in a more intricate plot might have been late season cliff-hanger material, but which was offered up much too promptly within the opening hour).
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Artur Davis: ABC’s “Scandal”: The Bland & The Beautiful
By Artur Davis, on Wed May 2, 2012 at 8:30 AM ET I have a suspicion that the loathing toward John Edwards in Democratic circles is a kind of remorse toward a path that was almost taken. Another two days of campaigning in Iowa in 2004 and he might well have won there instead of coming in a close second; Iowa was in his reach again four years later and could have fallen his way had the late Obama surge been just a little weaker, or if the Jeremiah Wright tapes had more timely surfaced. Politics is made of those hair-length turns of fate; but there was more to it than some near misses with Edwards. For tantalizing moments in his career, he seemed unstoppable—a preternaturally smooth orator, but also a walking narrative of middle class aspiration who breathed passion into the old liberal idea that the powerful are lording over the powerless. The man who collapsed in a sex scandal came quite close to seducing a party to make him its savior.
Many Democrats know just how close, and in a complex way, they hate Edwards for it. The anger is compounded by the fact that part of his lie involved a marriage to a woman who died valiantly; and then there is the pathological depth of the lies, and the determined way he repeated them.
 But the most legitimate disdain and righteous anger is not a calculus that should drive prosecutorial discretion. If it were, the investment banks who jiggered their books to disguise their leveraged, insecure portfolios, and who helped wreck an economy, would have long faced their day in the criminal dock. The lending institutions who subsidized loans with no documentation, and whose underlings fudged signatures, would have surely faced fraud charges. The executives who told Congress that Fannie and Freddie steered clear of subprime, the senior Goldman management team whose testimony about their securitization of risk has been so undercut by the facts, would all have been hauled off on perjury charges. The fact that the sordid trail just described has not generated one prosecution is defended, and excused, on the ground that the power of indictment is not for morally clear but gray legal areas.
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Artur Davis: The Troubling Choice to Try John Edwards
By Artur Davis, on Fri Apr 27, 2012 at 8:30 AM ET There is the conservative critique of Barack Obama that contends that he has grown the size and scope of government too much; then there is the liberal charge that he has moved to the middle and forfeited the progressive moment. The first is more true, the second more stinging to an administration that believes it is on the verge of breaking the political right.
There is a third case, however, that is tied not to a theory of how big or small government should be but to the idea that a leader has obligations to speak with precision and clarity about the nature of the country’s burdens. By that elusive standard, the famously slippery Bill Clinton still fares well on an issue like welfare reform, where he reminded his base that an entitlement that penalizes work is a social disaster. Jimmy Carter, for that matter, deserves points for an energy policy that meant to cap the rising dependence on foreign oil at 1978 import levels, which had future presidents stuck to his efforts, would have us paying $2.25 at the gas pump.
President Obama gets low marks on the precision and the clarity scale when he outlines a budgetary vision that treats Medicare and Social Security as asterisks and not the biggest driver of deficits, and trusts the future of Medicare in particular to the old trope of going after “waste, fraud and abuse.” He gets similarly low marks when his defense of healthcare reform channels Newt Gingrich’s tirade about unelected judges trumping our venerable elected congressmen (whose job rating bats .100) And he gets barely passing grades on his case for the Buffett Rule, a kind of minimum tax for millionaires that would trim the deficit next year by the grand sum of a tenth of one percent while diminishing charitable giving much more.
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Artur Davis: The Shrinking Obama Vision
By Artur Davis, on Wed Apr 25, 2012 at 8:30 AM ET Hilary Rosen’s put-down of Ann Romney has operated in a remarkably generous manner for all sides of the dispute. For Republicans, the incident has been galvanizing, sympathetically raising the profile of Mitt Romney’s strongest validator, and reviving familiar arguments about liberal condescension toward traditional family structures. For Team Obama, the lightning fast denunciations of Rosen were an opportunity to claim solidarity with non professional married females who have lagged in their enthusiasm for the president in most surveys; and to simultaneously highlight the wealth gap between the Romneys and those same non professional marrieds.
 Even for Hilary Rosen, while her 33rd visit to the White House has been indefinitely postponed, she is now another previously interchangeable DC consultant whose business will thrive from the glow of 15 minutes of fame.
So, spare the ritualistic outrage over the Rosen comment, and the dissection of whether she was an aberration or just speaking out of school, long enough to consider the following: an election that seemed destined to be about job growth and consumer confidence is taking on broader dimensions.
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Artur Davis: The Culture War Begins
By Artur Davis, on Thu Apr 19, 2012 at 8:30 AM ET When Barack Obama is not being re-cast as a principled defender of progressive values, his defenders in the press try another sleight-of-hand, defining him as a pragmatist desperately seeking responsible Republicans with whom to cut deals. Enter Paul Krugman’s latest column, “The Gullible Center”,which is a warmed over attack on Paul Ryan’s “extremism” (the ninth from the New York Times editorial pages in seven days, but who’s counting) and a mildly more original jab at moderates who allegedly lavish the undeserved label on seriousness on Ryan’s budget cutting, while missing the genuine article in President Obama.
A few observations about Krugman’s revisionism. First, I’m not exactly a Ryan devotee for a variety of reasons: marginal tax rate reductions are overstated in Ryan’s model as a tool of economic growth; at the same time, his plan leaves too little room for additional investments in worker retraining, infrastructure, and education (it is particularly worrisome that he would leave Washington with fewer resources to incentivize the wholesale reforms on education that have to be effected at the state level) and it slices out too many elements of the safety net without doing a rigorous accounting of what has and hasn’t worked. Budgeting, Ryan style, is much too vulnerable to the criticism that it is a theory of emasculated government and an ideological tool rather than a blueprint for expanded prosperity.
 But the notion that President Obama is the misunderstood centrist in the budget wars? It’s a fantasy; to paraphrase Krugman’s closing jab at moderates, a naked conceit that has not much substance. Obama’s current budget repeats his minimalist approach to entitlements from last year—a series of mini-measures on cost reduction for Medicare, no rethinking whatsoever of how to restore Social Security to a safety net rather than a substantial net windfall for its beneficiaries. While Ryan has at least traded future structural realignments in Medicare for a safe haven for current beneficiaries, Obama resists countering Ryan, by defending the status quo while outlining an alternative of what a sustainable future looks like. To the contrary, Obama’s budgetary approach to Medicare and for that matter Obamacare mimics conservatives when they load all manner of unrealistic growth assumptions on top of their tax cut proposals: Obama’s version of fanciful thinking is the cost-cutting from comparative efficiency techniques that may or not survive congressional review, and that may or may not be scalable.
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Artur Davis: The “Obama is a Moderate” Fantasy
By Artur Davis, on Tue Apr 17, 2012 at 8:30 AM ET Some post-mortems on Rick Santorum’s partly admirable, partly vexing candidacy: First, his is a campaign that can credibly spend energy on the “what-if” game. That distinguishes him from Herman Cain, Rick Perry, and Michele Bachmann, all of whom were so thin in national campaign skills, or so palpably unprepared to be president, that no assembly of tactics would have gotten them there.
I’ve believed since the night of his Iowa speech that Santorum did have a pathway. It involved owning a unique economic message, one that chastised both Wall Street and Washington for breaching the social compact, and one that recognized that middle class anxiety has cultural and economic roots. He could have so easily broadened that theme by embracing tough education reforms and a crackdown on special interest influence. He could have wielded the Bain Capital card much more credibly than Newt Gingrich.
 For a mix of reasons—the lack of a strategic thinker in his campaign circle, an undisciplined communications style, and way too much time arguing process and electability instead of ideas–Santorum never polished the smart populism that I described above. Instead of becoming the “creative, new ideas” alternative to Romney, he lapsed into the politics of last conservative standing, which after his peak in February, was only good enough for the Deep South and a string of solid seconds. It’s a gambit that might have worked against a Giuliani or a Huntsman; but against a mainstream conservative like Romney, whom the right found acceptable if unexciting, the game plan was too cautious and too uninspiring.
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Artur Davis: A Santorum Post-Mortem
By Artur Davis, on Thu Apr 12, 2012 at 8:30 AM ET Ira Shapiro’s recent work on the late seventies, “The Last Great Senate”, has the gift of good timing. It hits bookstands during a time when its thesis–that Washington was occupied by political giants, moderates, and thoughtful deal-makers until far-right Republicans dragged it into the mud–is the conventional wisdom du jour. As a narrative, the book also reads well, which is no small accomplishment, given its dive into the nuts and bolts of policy battles that are only dimly recalled: Jimmy Carter’s conservation initiatives and his failed stimulus are not exactly the stuff of lore. As Shapiro reminds, there actually was an ample amount of substance and rigor in many of those debates, and the quality of the fight seems, in Shapiro’s telling, richer than our current sound-bite clashes.
 Click on the book cover to order To be sure, there is much that is admirable about this book from one of the most credentialed public policy lawyers in DC. It’s worth asking though, whether Shapiro’s underlying theory of senatorial decline and right-wing liability really holds up as a description of the last thirty odd years. Two threshold criticisms: first, the supposed dark ages after 1980 contain a lot more bipartisan accomplishment than Shapiro acknowledges. While his epilogue makes a nod to a series of eighties era achievements, including a refinancing of Social Security, a work-over of Title VII, tax reform, immigration reform, and the patent protection that enabled the generic drug market, it’s a run of success that Shapiro seems to dramatically understate and which is at odds with his premise. If Shapiro is right about the sources of dysfunction, a Republican lurch to the right and the surge of cut and slash ad wars sponsored by conservative cash, the eighties should have been one long pattern of gridlock. The fact that they weren’t gives Shapiro’s case fits that he doesn’t really address.
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Artur Davis: Seventies Night on Capitol Hill
By Artur Davis, on Tue Apr 10, 2012 at 8:30 AM ET Hillary Clinton must know that there are at least three ways she might have been president.
Had she been modest enough to return home to build a Senate candidacy, rather than relocate to New York, she would have been handed the 2004 Illinois seat; and the young legislator named Obama who actually won that year might have become, say, a precocious lieutenant governor aiming higher, and the Democratic nomination would have been hers for the asking four years later.
On the flip side, had she been more immodest, she would have sought the presidency earlier, in 2004, a year when the Democratic field was weak and George W. Bush was vulnerable. Had she been a shade luckier, in 2008, Florida and Michigan would have saved their primaries for Super Tuesday, and the comfortable wins they gave her would have been decisive instead of being discounted under the byzantine nominating rules of that cycle.
 It’s enough narrowly missed fortune to haunt even a happy, contented soul who has power and fame to spare. Whether or not she feels cheated by destiny, though, Clinton can’t help but hear the drumbeat: the one from female activists who regret their coolness toward her in the last race; the one from Democratic insiders who don’t like the shape of a 2016 field of national novices; and the one from a surprising combination of the grassroots and the elite who aren’t bound to either party but harbor this quaint notion that for once, the most supremely qualified individual ought to advance to the presidency.
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Artur Davis: Hillary Nostaligia
By Artur Davis, on Fri Apr 6, 2012 at 10:00 AM ET There is a price to invoking race too frequently. It goes something like this: allege bias and racial motivations often enough, and the case gets old. Then, when the time comes when there is a genuinely ugly racial moment, and the claim needs to be made, it seems more shopworn than moving.
I have seen this equation play out countless times in Alabama, and I thought of it as the outcry builds over the shooting of an unarmed black child in Florida named Trayvon Martin. The details remain vague but there is at least an outline of what occurred. A neighborhood resident notices a black teenager who seems out of place to him; without reason or provocation, and contrary to the instructions of the police dispatcher he called, the man apparently follows the teenager. At some point, the two encounter each other and the episode ends horrifically. A 17 year old with no history of violence, and nothing in his past to suggest he would resort to violence, is shot dead. The shooter was allowed to leave without being arrested and without even being subjected to an alcohol or drug test.
 The shooter had a bloody nose and it suggests that his meeting with Martin turned into an altercation. But the case seems an almost perfect storm of bad, flawed intentions: one man’s suspicions of a kid who looked neither menacing nor suspicious; a police department’s insensitive decision to let the shooter walk away from the scene of a death; the local prosecutor’s failure to see probable cause to convene a grand jury; and a state deadly force law that might have been written for the jungle and not the confines of a community. It is morally clear enough that, yes, the Justice Department ought to be preparing an assault on the law as well as an investigation of the shooting.
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Artur Davis: The Other Trayvon Martin Tragedy
By Artur Davis, on Thu Apr 5, 2012 at 10:00 AM ET At the risk of reading tea leaves from two justices, the ever pivotal Anthony Kennedy and the magisterial but cautious John Roberts, the game seems up on the health insurance mandate.
In casual parlance, they seemed to get it—the “it” being that a government with the power to compel a consumer to enter a market is as omnipotent economically as it wants to be. That government is not only theoretically free to pursue a range of things it won’t do, from making Prius purchasing, Iphone carrying, broccoli eaters of all of us—but, as Kennedy especially seemed to intuit, its also capable of doing something more realistic and more substantial, which is collapsing the zone of economic autonomy to almost nothing, in the name of making the economy look the way government thinks it should.
 David Brooks, in his latest column in the NY Times, puts the mandate in the familiar context of the Obama Administration’s penchant for centralized bureaucracies, and he is certainly right about that. Given its druthers, and more votes in Congress, the president would have almost certainly followed that trend into a full scale public option that would have arguably refashioned healthcare delivery along the lines of the fraying, cost-exploding model that is Medicare. For good measure, this White House would have done the same with cap-and-trade and the market for carbon emissions, and they have certainly run the same play in the context of the Dodd-Frank reform by carving out an aggressive new regulator for consumer financial products.
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Artur Davis: The Mandate’s Very Bad Day
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Olivia Pope is no sacrificing, modest victim of limitations. She is a stylish, equally lionized and feared practitioner of crisis management, which in the mythology of “Scandal”, is the business of burying the secrets of the high and mighty. (as to the impressionable among you, be advised that the real-life version of the profession has more to do with debunking corporate whistleblowers, spinning CEO demotions, and messaging sudden stock deflation). If you are the kind of viewer who catches the stray details in dialogue, it seems that Pope is a Republican—albeit, the moderate, feminist, non Tea Party loving kind. She was an instrumental member of the campaign team that elected the incumbent president, with whom she also shared a bed in between strategy sessions (a disclosure that was only slyly alluded to in the series trailer and which in a more intricate plot might have been late season cliff-hanger material, but which was offered up much too promptly within the opening hour). 
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