The difference between MSNBC and Fox News

Whereas Fox News’ bread-and-butter is criticizing President Obama, the liberals at MSNBC … criticize President Obama:

While much attention has been paid to the feud between the Fox News Channel and the White House, the Obama administration is now facing criticism of a different sort from Ms. Maddow, Keith Olbermann and other progressive hosts on MSNBC, who are using their nightly news-and-views-casts to measure what she calls “the distance between Obama’s rhetoric and his actions.”

While they may agree with much of what Mr. Obama says, they have pressed him to keep his campaign promises about health care, civil liberties and other issues.

“I don’t think our audience is looking for unequivocal ‘rah-rah,’ ” said Ms. Maddow, who calls herself a liberal but not a Democrat.

Truth be told, I can barely watch Keith Olbermann. I find Maddow more palatable, but not enough to catch her show every night. But MSNBC isn’t just the leftward version of Fox News; it has conservative hosts on its air, and its liberals are more willing to go after one of their own.

Ronald Reagan’s legacy: Sarah Palin

I won’t be reading Sarah Palin’s new book. I’ve got a stack of stuff at home that hasn’t been read yet, there’s only so many books you get to read in a lifetime and … well, I guess I don’t want to have spent a precious portion of that book-reading lifetime reading Sarah Palin.

I have tried, at times, to take Sarah Palin seriously. But honestly, it’s exhausting. In a rational world, a national candidate who’d proved so seriously out of their depth would’ve gone back to Alaska and stayed there. That Sarah Palin is still on our front pages is proof of the powers of the culture wars, I guess.

It’s also the result of Ronald Reagan’s legacy. I realized this when reading a column by her hagiographer, Matthew Continetti, in today’s WSJ. He tries to make the case for her as a 2012 presidential candidate by hearkening back to the Gipper:

What drives independents’ uncertainty is their feeling that Ms. Palin isn’t up to the job. Independents blanch at her perceived lack of expertise on issues unrelated to energy or abortion. They look at Ms. Palin’s disappointing interview with Katie Couric last year, or laugh at Tina Fey’s impression on “Saturday Night Live.” Her resignation—still not fully explained—stokes their worst fears.

However, other Republican politicians have profited when they exposed received wisdom about them as false. In 1980, Democrats portrayed Ronald Reagan as a dim-witted ideologue bent on starting a nuclear war.

Then Reagan debated President Jimmy Carter. The public watched as a conservative pragmatist with a puckish wit unmanned a self-important, humorless liberal. Suddenly, Reagan was no longer the “dangerous” choice. He won handily.

Could Ms. Palin follow Reagan’s example? Maybe.

Or maybe not. Reagan had been pegged as an amiable dunce, but once he got in front of an audience with his opponent was able to demonstrate that the “dunce” part of that description was, at best, a facile description. When Sarah Palin got in front of an audience — with Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric, specifically — she didn‘t demonstrate otherwise. She earned the distrust of independents.

Reagan’s lesson was that you can succeed if you exceed expectations. Palin hasn’t. There’s nothing Reaganesque about her.

Afghanistan: How many Republicans does Obama have to consult to make Peggy Noonan happy?

Peggy Noonan pleads with President Obama to seek out the counsel of the GOP as he decides the Afghan War strategy:

The president is not, apparently, holding serious discussions with the most informed and concerned Republicans from Capitol Hill and what used to be called the foreign-policy establishment, and this, if true, is bad. The cliché that politics stops at the water’s edge is a fiction worth preserving. It’s a story that ought to be true and sometimes is true. There seems to be something in this president that resists really including the opposition. Maybe it’s too great a sense of self-sufficiency, or maybe he’s bowing to the reigning premise that we live in a poisonously partisan age, that the old forms and ways no longer apply. But why bow to that? To bow to it is to make it truer. The opposition is full of patriots who wish their country well. Bow to that.

You know why this is a really weird thing to say? Because Barack Obama’s defense secretary is a Republican — and was also George W. Bush’s defense secretary. Obama’s national security advisor was Condoleeza Rice’s special envoy to the Middle East — and, oh yeah, joined John McCain on the presidential campaign trail. Hillary Clinton, Obama’s secretary of state, is obviously a Democrat. But you could make the case that Obama’s war cabinet is damn near dominated by Republicans.

Poll: Americans love Republicans more than Democrats

New York Daily News:

For the first time in years, the GOP has the lead in generic ballot preferences over Democrats. That is, if people are asked whether they’ll vote for an unnamed Democrat or Republican for Congress, 48% are saying they’ll back the Republican, versus 44% who will choose the Democrat.

A lot is driven by the economy, and it’s mostly independents fleeing Democrats. Back in July, independents were about evenly split. Now they favor the Republican Party by a huge 22-point margin.

I’ve got no explanation or spin for this: The Democrats are running things now and, so far, they’re not making people very happy. When you run the show, you gotta deliver. And despite the president’s efforts, most people aren’t going to care that things are getting worse more slowly. They want better. Better is what you’re going to have to deliver if you want to keep power.

What did tea partiers accomplish in NY-23?

That’s the topic of my column this week with Ben Boychuk. To recap: “tea party” conservatives in that New York congressional district managed to drive a moderate Republican out of the race — and ended up handing the seat to a Democrat in a district that has long sent the GOP to congress. As I write in the column, we’ve seen this story before:

For a good idea of what tea party activism might accomplish, take a good look at Kansas.

It’s about as Republican a state as they come. It last went for a Democratic presidential candidate in 1964. And the GOP has 300,000 more registered voters than its Democratic rivals. But the state’s governor is a Democrat. So is the attorney general.

How in the heck did that happen? Easy. The Republican Party in Kansas tore itself in two, between center-right “moderates” and conservative true believers. The infighting has been going on for more than a decade, leaving voters alienated and giving Democrats opportunities for electoral wins in a state they have no business contesting.

That looks similar to events in New York. The district there had sent moderate Republicans to Congress forever — its last congressman, John McHugh , crossed party lines to work as President Obama’s Secretary of the Army. But when the GOP establishment picked a similarly centrist Republican to run for office, the tea party folks rebelled and backed a different candidate. Who lost.

The tea party movement started as the biggest expression of sore loserdom in America’s recent political history. George W. Bush had expanded “socialized medicine” — in the form of the new Medicare drug benefit — and turned a budget surplus into a deep deficit. Yet the tea partiers only took to the streets when a Democrat was elected president. It’s not difficult to figure out what motivated them.

So the fact that tea partiers are now holding Republicans to account is refreshing. But parties that insist on ideological purity are usually losers at the ballot box; Democrats began their recent comeback when centrists like Sens. Jim Webb and Bob Casey joined their cause. Tea partiers should heed the lesson if they want to win.

The Republican health care plan

They finally offered one. But it seems they did this precisely so they could say they offered one — and not with any intent of actually trying to reduce the ranks of the uninsured. How do I know this? Because the GOP health reform plan doesn’t actually reduce the ranks of the uninsured:

The different goals and effects of the GOP bill are reflected in a preliminary analysis released Wednesday evening by the Congressional Budget Office, which put the bill’s 10-year price tag at $61 billion. That is far less than the $1 trillion estimate for the Democratic bill that House leaders plan to bring to the floor as soon as this weekend.

But the CBO analysis also concluded that under the GOP plan, 52 million nonelderly Americans would have no insurance in 2019 — even more than the 50 million in 2010. By comparison, the House Democratic bill would reduce the number of nonelderly Americans without coverage to around 18 million over the next decade.

So of course it costs less. It doesn’t actually do anything.

Al Schmidt never had a chance

Not even the combined weight of Philly’s media establishment could save him: The Republican candidate for controller only collected 28 percent of the vote.

Schmidt carried the hopes and dreams of a lot of folks who would like to see a genuine opposition party rise up in Philadelphia in order to give the fat, lazy and complacent Democrats a little bit of a spark to try to run City Hall honestly and effectively.

After last night, there’s two options:

• Treat Schmidt like Barry Goldwater: Not as a devastating loss for his party and movement, but as a necessary first (painful) step to rebuilding the Philly GOP to provide the competition.

• Look elsewhere.

I’m not always sympathetic to Republican candidates, but Schmidt deserved better support than he got. His head might be hanging low this morning, but hopefully he and his pals see the first option as a real opportunity, instead of deciding to let the city’s hidebound GOP establishment go back to collecting patronage crumbs.

Bill Kristol believes insiders like Newt Gingrich are outsiders

Bill Kristol in today’s WaPo:

In a recent Rasmussen poll, the only candidates with double-digit support among Republicans were Mike Huckabee (at 29 percent), Mitt Romney (24 percent), Sarah Palin (18 percent) and Newt Gingrich (14 percent). These four are running way ahead of various senatorial and gubernatorial possibilities. So a party that has over the past two decades nominated a vice president (George H.W. Bush), a senator (Bob Dole), a governor (George W. Bush) and another senator (John McCain), now has as its front-runners four public figures who are, to one degree or another, outsiders.

This is a bit of dishonest framing on Kristol’s part. He surely knows that every president since Jimmy Carter — with the exception of the first George Bush — has won office by running as an “outsider” pledging to bring change of some sort to Washington. Even Al Gore, the sitting vice president, tried to fashion himself as an insurgent with the “people versus the powerful” theme of his 2000 campaign.

But it kind of defies common sense that two governors — one of whom has his own show on Fox News — a vice presidential candidate and a former speaker of the House can in any rational sense be judged as “outsiders.” As always with Kristol, the question is whether he’s lying or dumb. I don’t see why we have to choose.

The Philadelphia media establishment really wishes the GOP would get its act together

If three makes a trend, then we’ve quickly arrived there:

•PhillyMag:

But the perennial weakness of the Philly GOP isn’t just a Republican problem. It’s a problem for Democrats and Independents, too — for anyone who cares about the city and wants it to be better. Politics is supposed to be adversarial. In America’s two-party system, the assumption is that both parties try to win. If that assumption breaks down — if one party unilaterally disarms, as it has in Philadelphia — strange things start to happen. You end up with a Jurassic power structure, populated by large, lazy creatures incapable of adapting to new climates, like diseased stegosauruses whaling at each other in the hot sun. You end up with a broken city. A broke city. And if things get bad enough, like they’ve gotten in Philadelphia in 2009, you end up rooting for some very strange heroes. Heroes who, in any other time, you’d probably walk away from, backward, slowly.

• Stu Bykofsky in the Daily News:

Under Democratic monopoly, Philly residents have: the highest city tax rate in the nation, craven Council members cashing in on DROP, an incompetent Board of Revision of Taxes, a 25 percent city poverty rate, a pinball pay-to-play system, a Department of Human Services that kills kids, a school district with a near-50-percent dropout rate and city workers who don’t pay their taxes.

As a wholly owned subsidiary of the over-promising and underperforming Democratic Party, Philadelphia is failing.

• Kevin Ferris in the Inquirer:

Rob Gleason, the state party chairman, says, “I expect a person who’s the leader of a party to conduct a vigorous operation, raise money, have staff and committee people, and win elections. . . . I just haven’t seen that in Philadelphia since I’ve been state chairman.”

That doesn’t hurt just Republicans, Gleason says.

“Not having a viable operation allows the Democrats to run wild . . . and not be accountable,” Gleason says. “So you wind up with a dysfunctional school system and city government, and the city becomes a giant stone dragging Pennsylvania down into the Delaware River.”

It’s kind of hard to argue these points: One-party dominance will always lead to calcification and corruption. That’s not good for the city.

Here’s the problem: The modern GOP — increasingly rural, always anti-safety net, occasionally race-baiting, more willing to tax non-profit theaters than smokeless tobacco — isn’t really a good fit for Philly. There was a Philadelphia Republican who was pretty decent at collecting votes: His name is Arlen Specter, and he was chased out of the party. And do I have to remind anybody how the GOP-controlled General Assembly let Philly twist in the budget wind for the entire summer?

There might be individual Republican candidates — like Al Schmidt, who is running for city controller — who might do a fine job. But Republican winners in Democratic big cities — think Michael Bloomberg in New York — tend to be considerably more liberal than the parties they represent. In Pennsylvania and elsewhere, there’s simply less room than ever for that kind of ideological diversity within the GOP.

So, yeah, theoretically it would be good if Democrats had a little competition to run the city. But today’s real-world Republican Party doesn’t really like Philly; how could it possibly compete for votes here?

The party of spite

I think Krugman gets this right:

But more important, the episode illustrated an essential truth about the state of American politics: at this point, the guiding principle of one of our nation’s two great political parties is spite pure and simple. If Republicans think something might be good for the president, they’re against it — whether or not it’s good for America.

I try — more often than I succeed — to give the benefit of the doubt to my ideological rivals. They want what’s good for America; they just have a different way of getting there. Their glee over Chicago losing the Olympics was dispiriting, though. It’s hard to see it in terms other than spite.