Michael Grunwald’s book on the Obama administration looks fascinating. Here’s a bit from it on the “party of no”:
Cantor’s whip staff had been planning a “walk-back” strategy where they would start leaking that 50 Republicans might vote yes, then that they were down to 30 problem children, then that they might lose 20 or so. The idea was to convey momentum. “You want the members to feel like: Oh, the herd is moving, I’ve got to move with the herd,” explains Rob Collins, Cantor’s chief of staff at the time. That way, even if a dozen Republicans ultimately defected, it would look like Obama failed to meet expectations.
But when he addressed the conference, Cantor adopted a different strategy. “We’re not going to lose any Republicans,” he declared.
Maude
I used to love him…?
Donut
Gawd. These fuckers propagandize their own caucus. Shameless.
Davis X. Machina
Nothing a few prime-time speeches to joint sessions of Congress couldn’t have put straight.
And armfiresidebullytwistingpulpitchats.
Baud
Saw him on Chris Hayes. Liked him a lot.
cmorenc
Among the splendid features of Obama’s second term if he wins will be that he won’t need to be nearly so restrained about not showing any hints of “angry black man”. He can adopt a bit more of the eloquently articulate black preacher mode in his presentations to the nation.
karen
@Maude:
Don’t hurt me now for his love belongs to me.
Ben Franklin
:”Speak no evil of a Republican’ or words to that effect. (RWR)
Cantor is singing to the Temple on this. Since the brutal arm-twisting of the bug exterminator from the independent Country of Texas, this is the scorched-earth
strategy.
Its not Houston Rocket Science.
Yutsano
@Davis X. Machina: BULLY PULPIT!! Moar bipartisanship. Also. Too.
General Stuck
I know it’s uncivil, but goddam these cheese dick motherfuckers are more dangerous to America than a boat load of Bin Ladens. It’s nothing more than a big parlor game to them, and they are oblivious to their behavior creating innocent victims in real life. And double goddam to the ignorant fool voters that make it possible for such seditious shit to exist in the first place.
Patricia Kayden
Would love to see the media ask the “Party of No” about why they haven’t done more to create jobs. Obstructionism shouldn’t be a winning strategy.
Maude
@karen:
Thank you. Couldn’t remember the words.
Maude
@General Stuck:
And they don’t care what they do to anyone as long as they get what they want.
NotMax
Optics is a wizened substitute for governance.
Dennis SGMM
Forty years ago I would have found this unbelievable. These days, if someone uncovered a Republican plan to spread Ebola throughout the nation in an effort to discredit Obama my only reaction would be “Fancy that.”
The Republicans’ desire for power is matched only by their refusal to do any good for their country with it.
raven
Zombies
General Stuck
And from the Amazon link.
I been hollering to our progressive overlords for 4 long years about the underlying long term real benefit from Obama’s stimulus bill, being a pair-a-dime shift in the realm of alternate energy research into the future, and that that is precisely why the nutters and their old money plutocrats hate it so much, that threatens their status quo lock on keeping fossil fuels as the number one, and only energy producer.
waratah
The book is fascinating Doug, must read for balloon juicers.
He covers all the politics, and what the recovery act actually did in great depth.
amk
@General Stuck:
Yup. Wilful self destruction.
Suffern ACE
@Maude: And they don’t care what they want as long as they “get back” at someone they don’t like.
Dennis SGMM
@General Stuck:
I doubt that the overlords on either side are interested in a paradigm shift.
Baud
@General Stuck:
When I saw Grunwald on Hayes’s show, Hayes admitted that he was surprised to learn all the stuff that was in the stimulus. (To his credit, Hayes seemed somewhat embarrassed by this.)
raven
Looks like about 27% of the reviews are negative.
Suffern ACE
@Baud: Yep. And into that empty space left by progressives marched the Republicans and “Foreign Corporations, Cronies and just plain old waste and fraud”. There was a good article on this in the Times a few years ago, but the main concern of progressives was that the stimulus was too small and had tax breaks than what was actually in it.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Baud: it was fun watching Sam Seder get some flat out pushback on the ridiculous “it should have been bigger!” whine. I really liked him on Air America, but Seder has been caught up in what I can only conclude is the willful delusions that Blue Dogs, Republicans, and the Village have no effect on politics.
waratah
@raven: Not everyone is going to like everything in the book, especially not Republicans and not all Democrats but it is fascinating reading.
General Stuck
@Baud:
“Too small” was the progressive talking point on the stimulus, and that was that. Maybe a script edit to the narrative can occur now, at least on our side of the isle.
waratah
@Baud: I followed the passage of this bill and I did not know what all it covered until I started reading this book.
dmbeaster
Cantor’s stunt is just a basic political ploy adopted to the lazy ways of the media. Politicians know that they can leak stupid crap and it will be printed without much circumspection. You cannot play the expectations game without lazy complicity.
Baud
@Suffern ACE:
@General Stuck:
That’s the problem with the Betters – they can’t commit to supporting something that’s imperfect until it’s under threat from attacks from the right. Stimulus, health care, financial reform – all the same.
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I hadn’t seen Seder before. He’s now on my Feel Free to Ignore list.
Baud
@waratah:
I still don’t know all of it (haven’t read the book yet). But I’m not a professional journalist, nor am I someone who’s believed that the stimulus was not a big accomplishment.
Maude
@waratah:
There was a bit of road work down here. I heard a man say to another man, that’s Stimulus money.
There was a sign at another road that said that the money came from the Stimulus.
@Baud:
It is never good enough for them, sniff.
Suffern ACE
@General Stuck: It’s a Keynesian mindset trap. You know the government needs to spend money. You know how much money they need to spend. And while Keynes joked that they could hire people to bury cash in bottles and then hire people to dig those bottles up again, he didn’t really mean “Don’t bother to think about what you spend on, just spend.” In the real world, it does too matter what projects the money is spent on. The electorate in the midwest states had an opportunity to change that course in 2010, but resoundingly and at all levels rejected any more spending and instead elected people who ran on a platforms that included laying off government workers and cancelling high speed rail projects. It’s possible if the bill was larger and had more in it, they wouldn’t have done that, but that is doubtful.
Corner Stone
@waratah:
Interesting. What conclusions, if any, did you draw from that?
raven
@waratah: You’re not from around here are you?
Mnemosyne
Speaking of idiots who can’t handle paradigm shifts, why is the hardcover dead tree edition less than $2 more than the Kindle edition?
Apparently the lesson the media giants learned from the $18 CDs fiasco was to overprice the electronic editions, too.
Corner Stone
@raven:
Give the guy a chance. After all, he’s talking bout Monorail!
raven
@Mnemosyne: Less than $2 more. Is this a Clint Eastwood movie?
jwb
@amk: Our way or the highway. What you gonna do about it? I still don’t see a good strategy for combatting it except winning every election for quarter of a century—and that hardly seems plausible at this point.
Maude
@Mnemosyne:
There are a lot of complaints about ebooks being higher in price that paper books. The pubs price them as high as they think the market can bear. Cheaters.
realbtl
They are rebuilding Going to the Sun road here in Glacier Natl Park, shoring up the WPA era walls etc. Big signs stating that this is stimulus money. Hopefully some of the red staters who drive it will make the connection. Though they will probably just piss and moan about the traffic delays.
Suffern ACE
@Maude: They are making the assumption, probably correctly, that the people who buy readers currently are in it for the convenience of being able to carry around a bookshelf in a purse and not in it for the price. It’s a space saver not a money saver.
lamh35
This is why the Obama camp goes around the village and the MSM. Local reporters are actually looking to ya know actually report news that their viewers want to know from a candidate. The village on the other hand are just stenographers for the GOP (I’m looking at you Dick Halperin & Howard Fineman!)
Romney Campaign Forbids Local Reporter From Asking About Akin, Abortion
raven
@Maude: There also are significant efforts in the area of open textbooks afoot.
“An open textbook is an integrated course-associated learning tool that is in the public domain or has been open-licensed by the copyright holder to permit re-use without the necessity of asking permission of the copyright holder. Open textbooks improve learning and teaching by freeing instructors from constantly seeking permission. Open textbooks are free or inexpensive on the web and modestly priced for downloads, use on eReaders, or in bound format.”
Emma
@Dennis SGMM: You know, I’m getting there myself. It pisses me off when their machinations outpace my imagination. And I’m a paranoid.
lamh35
Also wouldn’t it be interesting if Huckabee had Akin as his plus one for the Repub Convention??
Baud
@lamh35:
Of course, Romney criticized Obama the other day from not doing enough press conferences. But the hypocrisy is so par for the course now, it’s almost not even worth mentioning.
WaterGirl
@lamh35: Interesting that the video at the link doesn’t work…
waratah
@Corner Stone: I am not through reading yet, there is so much to think about. He also covers actually getting the money spent which was interesting as they had to get it out fast and you know the federal government does not do fast. But they were able to do it.
The money spent by the DOE and learning about the ARPA-E.
Mnemosyne
@Suffern ACE:
To a certain extent, yes, but more $9.99 for an eBook is a barrier that’s difficult for me to cross. And if the paper copy is comparable to the eBook price, I’ll either not buy the book at all, paper or e-edition, or I’ll buy it used, so the publisher ain’t getting a dime from me if I think the eBook price is unreasonable.
Maude
@raven:
The creative commons license can be public domain and it’s easy to set up.
I am all for text books being inexpensive.
Ereaders are getting less expensive. There could be government programs (OMG what is she saying, commie pinko) To offer free (OMG) ereaders to those who can’t afford them for school.
I used to rant about the cost of paper books. Children whose parents don’t have money are unable to write their names in the the front of the book, This Book Belongs To:
The pride of owning a book has been stolen by the greedy bastids.
The problem traditional publishers have to look forward to is that Independent publishers are getting market share. They NYT bestseller list had three Indie books.
raven
@WaterGirl: Check out this book
One Shot at Forever. On it’s face it’s a sports book but it’s really about generational clash in central Illinois in the early 70’s.
raven
@Maude: we’re workin on it
waratah
@raven: I did so miss the 27 percent.
raven
@Mnemosyne: There is another drawback to eBooks. I read a book about D-Day on my iPad and the ability to look up every damn word or passage you want to on the spot makes it take forever to read a damn book!
raven
@waratah: Got it now?
Maude
@raven:
The elite have the nerve to say that kids don’t read. Well, if they are hungry and can’t buy books, I wonder why.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@raven:
That number has to be the new Number of the Beast. The Beast being the Republican party, of course.
SiubhanDuinne
@Mnemosyne: This seems to be happening across the board with e-books. Even six months ago, it was almost always a huge savings to buy the Kindle or K-equivalent format but now if you go by price alone it hardly matters. Pisses me off, too.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
Once again, the only appropriate word I can think of for Republicans: treason.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Mnemosyne: Because, when Kindle was the only player in town, Amazon was able to get the publishers to put the ebooks out at about half the price of the hardback. When Apple got into it, they convinced publishers to go with them by being willing sell the books at close to hardcover price.
Remember when competition was good for consumers?
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Mnemosyne: Because, when Kindle was the only player in town, Amazon was able to get the publishers to put the ebooks out at about half the price of the hardback. When Apple got into it, they convinced publishers to go with them by being willing sell the books at close to hardcover price.
Remember when competition was good for consumers?
hilzoy
I’ve read most of it. It’s quite good, and very informative. Grunwald is very obviously exasperated with the press and Republicans, and to some extent congressional Democrats. You can practically feel him slamming his head against the wall and saying: DON’T YOU ALL GET IT???? This is an EMERGENCY!! Stop quibbling!!
Which is to say: it might strike some people as pretty pro-Obama. I tend to agree with it, but when a book strikes me as written by someone who has just lost patience with one side, and it strikes me that way even though the side he’s lost patience with is one I’ve lost patience with too, I think it’s worth noting.
But it’s really quite informative, when the steam isn’t coming out his ears.
DougJ
@hilzoy:
All we need is a little patience?
Screw that.
Corner Stone
@DougJ: ***gasps***
pragmatism
@DougJ: I been walkin these streets at night.
Just tryin to get it right.
It’s hard to see with so many around.
You know I don’t like bein stuck in a crowd.
And the streets don’t change but maybe the name
I ain’t got time for the game.
Frankensteinbeck
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
The suspicious and uncharitable interpretation is that the big 6 legacy publishers deliberately want to strangle the ebook market as long as they can. It’s a market with much lower barriers of entry than print books, and they rely heavily on their control of market access. Making ebooks as or more expensive than hardback books helps discourage ebooks from taking off, and has the added benefit of screwing the authors out of a LOT of money in the process that becomes straight profit for the publisher.
PIGL
@jwb:
JustBeingPedantic
@hilzoy:
Finished it yesterday. It’s an amazing piece of reporting that lays out the history and implementation of the Recovery Act. Grunwald answers the questions about why more wasn’t done (which basically boils down to “Do you have 60 votes?”), how Joe Biden ended up leading the effort to make sure the money was spent on time with basically no fraud (a really big fucking deal), and how seed money for future advancements in energy and other areas was spread around. The reporting on ARPA-E and electrofuel alone is worth the price of the book. Grunwald also digs into and reports on the events surrounding Solyndra, noting that we haven’t heard much from Mr. Issa on that score in some time.
Phil Perspective
@Baud: So K-Thug is in your ignore list, also, too?