Rainblog

I am not a Ron Paul fan. I recognize that he is an intelligent and apparently principled man, who appears to hold and be able to articulate a consistent set of beliefs (which already makes him a rarity among contemporary politicians). Nevertheless, I have enough fundamental disagreements with enough of his political positions that I can’t count myself as one of his supporters.

But even as a disinterested spectator, watching Paul being ‘edited out’ of news coverage of the Republican candidates, like a disgraced Soviet commissar being airbrushed out of history after a purge, leaves me with my mouth hanging open in disbelief. Take for example, a typical report about the Iowa straw poll from CBS. The front-runners after the poll are Bachmann, Romney and Perry. Ron Paul? Oh, he gets a mention - mostly dismissive - way down towards the bottom of the page. The article doesn’t dwell on the fact that he nearly tied Bachmann and got twice as many votes as the next guy, eight or nine times as many as supposed ‘front-runners’ Perry and Romney. And as Jon Stewart has pointed out at greater length and more amusingly, this is pretty much par for the course where Paul is concerned. It always has been.

OK, perhaps the straw poll doesn’t mean anything - but where Bachmann is concerned, the media are certainly behaving as if it did. Well, perhaps the results don’t mean anything because Paul’s fanatical followers packed the house and skewed the results - but weren’t everyone else’s fanatical followers trying to do the same thing? Isn’t that how voting works?

Never mind. Ron Paul is not a serious candidate. It has been decided. Let’s not stop to think about that one too closely. If we’re living in a world where Ron Paul is not a serious candidate but Michelle Bachmann is, we may actually be living in Bizarro World and things are going to get a lot stranger before they start making sense again.

So why isn’t Paul a serious candidate? He’s a smart guy, and he seems to have a following. He’s certainly no less electable than anyone else. Electability is largely manufactured these days. Once a candidate gets the official blessing, the party machine and the advisors and analysts go to work, buff out the rough spots and cover up the weak points and generally get him or her looking presidential. The people who do it are pros. They can do it for anyone: some of them are probably already having sleepless nights at the thought that they might be called upon to do it for Michelle Bachmann.

But the word seems to have been handed down from whatever inner circle constitutes the actual fetid black heart of the GOP: don’t mention Ron Paul. He is not electable. That isn’t really what they mean, though. What they really mean is “he’s not manageable”. The real problem is that he won’t do what he’s told. Romney, Perry, Santorum, even poor crazy Michelle, they know who signs the pay checks. They can all be counted on to follow orders. But not Ron Paul: with him, there’s always the danger that he might say what he thinks or do what he believes is right. That makes him unacceptable.

OK, it’s their Party and they’ll connive if they want to. But the internal machinations aren’t the really scary thing.

What is wrong, really wrong, about this whole business, is that the media are going along with it. Even outlets with no particular ties to the Republican Party are following the official line: Ron Paul doesn’t matter. Ron Paul doesn’t count. Don’t mention Ron Paul. Pay no attention to the rather cranky little old man behind the curtain. The Republican Party may want to see their non-preferred candidates brushed under the carpet, but it’s the supposedly independent press and media who are actually making it happen.

That’s not their job. The job of the media isn’t to play favorites. It’s to report and to inform, not to repeat the party line whispered to them by the apparatchiks. Whether you agree with Ron Paul or not, he deserves to be treated as seriously as any of the other candidates (perhaps more seriously than some). When the media, with near-unanimity, decide to ignore or disparage a credible candidate, something is seriously wrong.

The British Labour politician Tony Benn, who also had an adversarial relationship with the press, once said that if he was seen walking on water to rescue a drowning child, the headline in the papers the next day would read “Benn doesn’t know how to swim”. Ron Paul would probably be grateful for even that much attention.

Back in 2003, as the insurgency in Iraq started to pick up speed, I did some thinking about the inherent asymmetry between the goals of the two sides in the conflict. For the US to achieve victory, they had to essentially fix the country and make everything work again. For the insurgents to achieve victory, they just had to keep breaking things. Obviously, breaking things is very much easier than mending them: it was pretty clear that the insurgency could blow up infrastructure and murder people far faster and less expensively than the US could put Iraq back on its feet. It struck me then that putting yourself in a situation where your conditions of victory are very hard to accomplish and your opponent’s are very easy is probably a tactical error.

Fast forward eight years, and that same asymmetry is repeated, this time in the American political arena. For the President to achieve victory, he needs to fix a thoroughly broken economy, while burdened by the costs of two wars, lavish tax cuts, and at least two rounds of buying off the Wall Street vandals who trashed the economy in the first place. All his opponents at home need to do is prevent him doing that. So the Republicans have been conducting an insurgency of their own, blowing things up and generally putting roadblocks in Obama’s way at every turn. Once again, one side’s victory conditions are nearly impossible to achieve, while the other has a much easier task.

Of course to conduct a spoiling campaign - as the Baathist ‘bitter-enders’ and the jihadis of Al-Qaeda in Iraq did, and as the Tea Party and their servants in Congress now seem to be doing - requires a measurable contempt for your fellow citizens, a feeling that it doesn’t matter how many innocents get caught in the cross-fire as long as the hated enemy doesn’t accomplish his goals. But some people don’t have a problem with that.

Word has come in that the Obama administration has reached a bipartisan agreement with Republicans over extending the Bush tax breaks for the wealthy, where ‘bipartisan agreement’ is a political expression that means ‘abject surrender’.

For those of you who’ve been too caught up in the Wikileaks scandal or Justin Bieber’s latest single, what was at issue is this: with Bush’s tax breaks set to expire, the Obama administration proposed that, given the tough economy, the breaks should be extended for most taxpayers. They should not, however, be extended for the super-wealthy because, well, they already have a lot of money. Predictably, the Republicans pitched a fit and threatened to torpedo the whole deal if their favored constituency - the mega-rich that the breaks were created for in the first place - didn’t get what they wanted.

The argument in favor of letting the breaks expire for the very richest is that, with the economy in shreds, we can’t really afford to lose $4 trillion from the public purse over the next ten years (if the breaks become permanent, as the Republicans intend they will, that’s the estimated loss in tax revenue). The argument in favor of keeping them is that if we don’t, then the Republicans will fuck things up for everyone. No, that’s not actually the argument that usually gets put forward, although it is the one that ultimately prevailed. The usual argument is that if the richest get to keep more of their money, they will kick-start the economy by ordering new swimming pools and tipping generously (rather than, say, moving all their money to some place whose economy isn’t in a death spiral). This is called the trickledown theory, and those of us who lived through the Reagan years remember how well that works.

Some commentators, like Paul Krugman, argued that Obama should call the Republicans’ bluff. He should just tell them that it was his way or the highway. When, predictably, the Republicans called his bluff right back and blocked his proposal, he should remind the American people exactly who they had to thank for their new higher taxes.

Reading Krugman’s piece, you can tell that he didn’t believe for a moment that was actually going to happen, any more than he believes the Republicans when they say that they want what’s best for Americans. He’s just indulging in one of those little day dreams that liberal economists like to have. He’s a smart man, he knew what was really going to happen.

Which is this: Obama caved, and the Republicans got what they wanted. 

You can argue about whether this is a good thing or not. Maybe this time around trickledown will magically work. Maybe we should let the rich keep their money because they can’t use it any worse than the government will. Maybe taxes are a fundamental violation of human dignity and we should have as few of them as possible.

What you can’t argue about is what just happened. The Republicans blackmailed the administration and won. And that’s how it’s going to be for as long as Obama remains in office. Because when you deal with an extortionist, everything they squeeze out of you is just the prelude to the next thing.