The Palestinian Authority, in a brilliant display of public relations, ran Hebrew-language ads this week, in Israel's four major newspapers, endorsing the Arab Peace Initiative (formerly known as the Saudi plan) and calling on Israelis to support it, too. The Palestinian Authority is also urging President-elect Barack Obama to put his prestige behind the initiative as a critical first step to help end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Obama's immediate challenge is to fill the leadership vacuum created by a lame-duck president with historically-low approval ratings who seems to have lost interest in his job (at this writing, he's out of the country) and who's disappeared from the media, and a Treasury chief who has all but punted on coming up with any workable solution to the crisis. But Obama doesn't become president until 12 noon eastern standard time on January 20 -- and the national economy is imploding right now.
Citigroup was once the biggest U.S. bank. General Motors was once the biggest automaker in the world. Now, both are on the brink. Yet Citigroup is likely to be rescued within days. General Motors may not be rescued at all. Why the difference?
Viewed from Wall Street, Citi is too big and important to be allowed to fail while GM is simply a big, clunky old manufacturing company that can go into chapter 11 and reorganize itself. The newly conventional wisdom on the Street is that the failure of the Treasury and the Fed to save Lehman Brothers was a grave mistake because Lehman's demise caused creditors and investors to panic, which turned the sub-prime loan mess into a financial catastrophe -- a mistake that must not occur again. So, by this view, the government must do everything and anything to keep Citi alive. But GM? GM is just ... jobs and communities.
Walter Reuther, the iconic leader of the UAW, had an idea back in the post WW II era. Build America's labor movement by organizing hard, striking and negotiating, but tie the union's future to the companies that keep America moving--GM, Ford, etc. He used to characterize it as 'social democracy' in one union or it could have been called 'social democracy' in one industry--the Wall Street Journal has probably tagged it as such, come to think of it. It was brilliant at the time. Now, not so much.
The pact being negotiated between the US and Baghdad governments includes a direct rebuff to president-elect Barack Obama's promised policy of withdrawing American combat troops in 16-18 months. The pact instead would leave those troops in place until the end of 2011, a doubling of the timeline to which Obama pledged himself. But that's not all.
The most important things, some say, are the things left unsaid. If so, the unmentionable thing would be the police state America is leaving behind in Baghdad.
Bart's lengthy and admirably lucid response raises one central point that I would like to underscore: Cheney's concentration of power was not a good thing--not for him, not for Bush, not for the U.S. Exactly as Bart notes, it meant that policy was made without the participation of other top officials. Had the Iraq War been thoroughly debated and studied rather than planned by a small coterie of officials, it would surely have been prepared for more carefully.
Fortunately, a number of conservatives have been critical of the Bush administration, noting that it has run roughshod over traditional constitutional restraints by, again and again, invoking the war on terror. Bush has not governed conservatively. If anything, his goals have been Wilsonian--and it was Woodrow Wilson who locked up thousands during World War I for disagreeing with him, an unhappy precedent for the Bush administration, which has apparently conducted thousands of "renditions", i.e., kidnappings, of foreigners. This will be a permanent blot on the escutcheon of the U.S.
So many intriguing points, so little time.
Jake asked if I took on Cheney's working style and wrote from a subterranean lair. Can't disclose that. ;-)
On Spencer's quest for a grand unified theory, I generally agree that Cheney did not transform himself from the administration of Bush the father to Bush the son, and that much of the apparent change can be explained by the absence of counterweights the second time around. I also agree that Cheney believes the expansion of executive power is a good thing, regardless of the particular dispute at hand, but I can't endorse Spencer's view that this is a quest for power for its own sake alone. Cheney believes the executive branch, and the president as its chief, is the only one capable of responding with the swiftness and unity of purpose required to defend vital national interests. Anyone would travel part of the way with Cheney on this -- nobody serious could argue for government by plebiscite, or that every executive decision must first be put to Congress and the Supreme Court -- but my book argues that Cheney misreads the Federalist papers and takes the point way too far.
I've seen columnists become obsessed; I've seen them rage at or swoon over the objects of their obsessions. But nothing - not even my own supposed obsession with New York Times columnist David Brooks -- compares with his decade-long, love-hate fixation on the Ivy League, the "love" side of it on display in his column today celebrating an influx of Clinton Ivy Leaguers into the Obama administration.
The "hate" side surfaces and re-surfaces, too, though. In a gloating, 2001 Wall Street Journal essay, "Bush In, Ivy Out," Brooks ridiculed Clinton Ivy leaguers who were then being replaced by real Americans "from inland state schools" under two apostate Yalies, Bush and Cheney: "You couldn't have swung an ax in Bill Clinton's cabinet room without hitting a bunch of Ivy League grads," Brooks snarked, getting meaner from then on. To him and all conservative propagandists, they were all liberal elitists.
I doubt I can break much ground on whether Angler is pro- or anti-Cheney, or sufficiently balanced, or correct in its judgments. I'm happy to leave that judgment to readers. I do not claim, as I think my interlocutors here understand, that Angler is objective if that means it has no point of view. Not only is that impossible, but it's not what I wanted. Most of the work of the book is to tell new stories about what really happened, but Angler also tries to say why and how it happened, too, and in some cases to describe the consequences. I intended to make judgments on those things from a critical distance. I don't preoccupy myself as often with the normative, but I don't think that lands me in a "soup of relativisim," either. Reporting, analysis and commentary are not fully separable, probably, but that does not mean they are not fundamentally different things.
That's why I'm unpersuaded by many of Paul's examples:
He finds that Cheney ... produced a backlash that nearly brought down President Bush....
Let me begin my final post by thanking TPMCafe and Bart for inviting me into this discussion, and the other members of the discussion group for their thoughtful and respectful posts.
Second, I'd like to revise a statement I made at the outset, namely that I would recommend Angler only to those who wish to read an "anti-Cheney brief." Actually, I would recommend Angler to anyone who wants to read about Cheney, but with the proviso that, in my view, it is somewhat slanted against the vice president.
David Greenberg eloquently defends Bart's approach to Cheney and I think we see eye-to-eye. The sheer accumulation of detail and fact makes for an overwhelming portrait of executive manipulation redolent of the Nixon White House. But--you knew that "but" was coming--Paul might seem to have something when he pleads for more context. But I don't think Paul would be happy with the result. Had Bart delved more fully into the relationship between Donald Rumsfeld and Cheney, for example, I suspect he would have unearthed even more unflattering information.
Where David's defense might run aground, I think, is that it skirts the shoals of self-complacency. There's a fine line between adversarial journalism and a journalistic lynching. Lincoln Steffens and Ray Stannard Baker had what we would today call "agendas"--Steffens to expose the iniquity of Wall Street potentates, Baker to burnish Woodrow Wilson's reputation. Bart, by contrast, does not seem to have an axe to grind, at least not one that I could detect.
I really have no interest in debating whether Angler is slanted against Dick Cheney. David really says it all. What I do have an interest in is settling a score with an old Cheney staffer, and, in the process, illustrating a small slice of how the Office of the Vice President worked under Dick Cheney.
In 2003, Frank Foer and I worked for months on a profile of Cheney for The New Republic. (Sadly, TNR's web archives are all messed up, but you can read our 7000-word piece from the Dec. 1, 2003 issue of the magazine here.) We interviewed a lot of people for the piece, and at the end of the process, we reached out to Cheney's office. We wanted to check some basic facts, to get their perspective for the piece and to have them respond to some of the criticisms we'd turned up. Pretty basic journalistic fare. Then we met a man named Kevin Kellems.
Yesterday, I tried to defend my view that Angler presents not a "mixed" view of the Cheney vice presidency but a rather thoroughly negative one. Now I want to defend my view that Angler is slanted to some extent against Cheney.
To make my complete case would require a closer textual analysis than is amenable to this forum. So I will focus on concepts that I think Bart either overlooks or, in my view, should have paid more attention to.
I want to join the debate about whether Bart's picture of Cheney is negative or objective (or, if you find "objective" too problematic a term, let's say fair, impartial, unbiased, or some other similar word). I think it's both.
First a little background: I think it's a good thing that we have news media outlets in this country that aspire to be objective and non-partisan, and it's good that the journalists who work for them strive to keep their personal political opinions from influencing their duty to report the news without fear or favor. For all the heat that the Washington Post and the New York Times take from the left and the right, they are national treasures. You might find bias in a gossipy story about a picked-over issue like Hillary Clinton's possible appointment at State (the Times recently used the occasion to flog a long-dead story about a speech Bill Clinton once gave in Kazakhstan), but when Lehman Brothers collapses or war ravages the Congo, we turn desperately to these papers--implicitly acknowledging their indispensable role as disinterested providers of news. And when Bart and Jo Becker, or James Risen, or Dana Priest, or Charlie Savage any number of the other superb reporters at these (and other) papers disclose valuable information to the public about lawless, duplicitous, or improper actions about the Bush administration, they are not acting from any liberal or anti-Bush bias. They are acting from a sense of professional duty.
So, those of you accustomed to surfing the waves of TPM reader blogs and comment threads have probably noticed by now that on each individual comment, a report abuse button has been added.
The idea is pretty simple-- if you think a comment is in violation of our terms of use, click the button and let us know. Note: this isn't where you go to express general dissatisfaction with a comment. Only click it if you find it to be genuinely abusive. It's important to us that TPM is a place where people treat each other with basic respect-- and that no one is personally attacked based on gender, age, political orientation, and so forth. Though of course-- feel free to aggressively argue the ideas themselves...
Let me know if you have any thoughts or questions in the comment threads here.
A good debate has started as to the size of the stimulus package the economy badly needs, and what it should include. I suggest that paying in part for the greening of all public facilities should be included. Such greening should be required of all federal facilities (from office buildings and prisons, to courts and military bases), and of all corporations that receive a substantial amount of federal funds in grants or contracts (e.g., Halliburton and Boeing). It should be demanded of all that receive bailout money, of state and local government, as well as of other public agencies (e.g., the nation's 35,000 school boards) and the hundreds of thousands of not-for-profit organizations, such as the Gates, Ford, and Rockefeller foundations, that benefit from tax privileges. (Granted, some public agencies already participate in some greening measures, but it's sporadic and not on a national level.)
The Great Depression was a horrible and extremely painful experience. But we did learn something extremely valuable from this experience: how to get out of a depression. The answer came in the form of the massive government stimulus associated with World War II. At the peak of the war, our deficits exceeded 20 percent of GDP. This would imply deficits of more than $3 trillion in today's economy.
This is important. We know how to keep the economy from collapsing. We didn't have this information 80 years ago. The secret is to spend money, lots of it.
I'd like to tag onto Paul's most recent observations. Bart, what struck me about your book perhaps most forcefully was the opening. You depict Cheney in the darkest light possible, as edging out any possible competitors for the vice-presidency, mounting and stuffing them (I believe those were the words you used) with the help of David Addington. The bit about Frank Keating being knee-capped by Cheney speaks volumes, I should think. Clearly Cheney set out to ruin Keating's reputation, even after he was no longer a candidate for the slot, so as to warn everyone else: don't even think about messing with Dick. Doesn't that amount to a kind of deep organ tremolo, warning the audience of what's to come?
Let me respond to the first of Bart's posts from yesterday.
First: I agree with the vice president that Bart has "done his homework." In fact, he has done a remarkable job of research.
Second: Bart asks, "is there any doubt that the government's reaction to [the] threat [announced on 9/11] did more than the attacks themselves to change the nation and the world?" But this isn't quite the claim he makes in Angler. As I read him, Bart compares the impact of the administration's response to 9/11 with the impact of the threat announced by 9/11, not just the events that occurred that day. ("A familiar threat announced itself that day with frightening new proximity and ambition. But decisions made in the White House, in response, had incomparably greater impact on American interests and society.") (page 132)
Spencer Ackerman raises the question of whether Cheney is, in fact, a victim of success, on the order of LBJ. I think it should be reversed. Cheney profited from failure. The Bush administration was obsessed with missile defense rather than stopping terrorism before 9/11. It seems to have viewed the terrorist threat as a sideshow to the big issues of foreign policy. After 9/11, however, Bush and Cheney did exactly what Colin Powell warned them not to do--overreact.
The administration went so far as to confect a bogus case for war in Iraq, whipping up ties between Osama bin-Laden and Saddam Hussein. Without the war on terror, however, I am convinced that Bush would not have won reelection in 2004. A case could be made that Cheney and the neocons retarded rather than accelerated the collapse of the GOP--that it would have occurred even sooner absent the terrorist threat.
Let me try and break the apparent logjam between Jake, Paul and Bart. Leave aside for a moment the question of whether Cheney is a singular figure or whether other people in the administration resisted his whims. Maybe a better way of contextualizing Cheney arrives by asking whether/which previous government officers were as able to enact their agendas as Cheney was.
I'll be clear I'm not a historian. And for purposes of this discussion we're pretty much eliding the question of Bush's relationship to Cheney, which isn't an insignificant consideration. But I'm hard-pressed to think of anyone who got his way more often and more thoroughly than Cheney since Lyndon Johnson from 1965 to late 1966. Like Johnson, Cheney knew the institutional obstacles to his agenda, and he knew their fracture points: how to circumvent and undermine the CIA; how to manipulate the GOP congressional leadership; when to appease, for instance, the Saudis and when to flout them.
Flying from Jerusalem, I hankered to hear Hebrew poetry. Back in Jerusalem, unpacking, I longed to hear liberal principles. This place is beautiful; that has always been its problem. It is the kind of place that engenders enigmatic words like birthright, which brothers kill each other over. And it makes the word brother a little dangerous, too.
Anyway, the city just elected a new mayor who narrowly beat the ultra-orthodox candidate promising my brothers that Jerusalem is one birthright he would never share. We hung up the clothes, and shelved the hair cream, listening to laconic Israeli reporters talking about what our enemies have been up to; and it suddenly occurred to me that I'd like to hear, of all things, Barack Obama's speech "on race" again. I took out the laptop, and linked over to the site, and we began to listen. After a while we just sat down on the bed; by the time we got to "Ashley," we were in tears.
Henry Paulson's main claim to fame is getting just about everything wrong in his tenure as Treasury secretary. However, he now stands to gain lasting notoriety as the person who destroyed the domestic U.S. auto industry, and the economies of the Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana along with them.
The story is that the big three automakers are struggling with record sales declines. This collapse in car sales in turn is the fallout from the collapse of the Greenspan-Bernanke housing bubble. While the domestic automakers have been hit hardest, all manufacturers have seen sharp drops in sales. Toyota's sales were down 23.0 percent compared with its year ago levels. Honda's sales were down 25.2 percent, and Nissan's sales fell 33.0 percent.
My goodness, it looks like a little crockery is starting to get flung around the genteel confines of the cafe. It's about time that this book club turned into a fight club.
Bart defends himself from Paul Mirengoff's contention that he created a "Potemkin Washington", DC by pointing to his book as trying to achieve an objective look at Cheney with a kind of Thucydidean detachment. For the most part, I'm sympathetic to Bart, and it is, of course, the traditional aspiration of American journalists to "show, don't tell," as the old saying has it.
But Mirengoff is surely on to something when he says that the marshaling of evidence, the structure of the book itself is, to some extent, going to shape the narrative. I don't see anything wrong with that. Otherwise, Bart would end up in a soup of relativism, wouldn't he? The testimony he elicits from, for example, Dick Armey (not exactly a darling of the Washing Post) portrays Cheney in a very dim light--as willing, for the purposes of selling the Iraq War, to deceive an old chum. Goodness knows, Cheney isn't the first high official to engage in such tactics: Gordon M. Goldstein's new book, Lessons In Disaster, notes that McGeorge Bundy flummoxed Lyndon B. Johnson by suggesting that he should simply tell the American public the truth about sending more troops to Vietnam. Bundy observed, "Lyndon Johnson's view of the truth is like a Boston trustee's view of capital. It's much too valuable ever to be used."
I replied to Paul's first post before reading the most recent. So a few more words on the "Potemkin Washington" that Paul sees in my book.
Paul says that in Angler-world "the only pairs of sharp elbows appear to belong to the vice president and his counsel," while "everyone else plays 'fair,' never seeking an edge for the purpose of advancing an agenda." He recalls no one in the book, Cheney's office aside, "playing 'hardball' until somewhere around page 300." That is not quite accurate, though I concede that Paul has a point. In fact, Angler depicts quite a few rivals who try to block Cheney's path, using many of the same time-honored techniques. One example: John Bellinger, Gordon England, Phil Zelikow and Condi Rice team up to try to close down Guantanamo, with Rice giving a memo privately to Bush and then sneaking it onto a Principals Committee agenda. Also in Angler, Matt Waxman and other allies maneuver to restore Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention as Pentagon policy, attempting a fait accompli reversal of Cheney's success in making legal room for "cruelty" in interrogations. Christie Whitman seeks a one-on-one meeting with Bush to argue against Cheney's proposal to drop a campaign pledge about carbon dioxide regulation. Alan Greenspan works with Congress and White House friends to warn against a second round of tax cuts. Senators Specter and Chafee try to use the five votes of their "Mod Squad" caucus as a pivot point in a closely divided Senate, aiming to water down Cheney's hard-line initiatives.
Uh oh. I waited too long to weigh back in, and now there's way too much to talk about. I'll address two points now and post again as soon as I can.
Jake asks what's so new about a big shot cutting corners and maneuvering for power. In principle, nothing. Senior advisers to presidents contend for turf and influence, and they don't always play nicely. There are official meetings and real meetings, the latter setting policy without nettlesome opponents in the room. Powerful people use back channels and proxies, preempting rivals. They reach down to subordinates to shape the options sent back up to the boss. They promote allies and dispose of obstacles. Cheney did not invent the Cheney Rules, as I described them tongue-in-cheek in the Washington Post's "Outlook" section recently; the rules go back to The Prince and doubtless earlier.
My opinion of Angler has become more favorable during the course of this discussion as I see some of the paths Bart didn't take. Before I fall into the tank completely, I should post some of my promised criticism of the book.
One of my main complaints has to do with the portrayal of official Washington. That, of course, is the setting of the events Bart describes. It seems to me, then, that one cannot fully understand the Cheney vice presidency without a fair account of Washington and its bureaucracy.
The Washington Post has a piece up about the anti-choice movement's next moves now that Obama has been elected. Some movement leaders are abandoning their strategy to overturn Roe, instead focusing on ways to reduce the number of abortions. (Well, not really - but I'll get at that in a minute.)
Some of the activists are actually working with abortion rights advocates to push for legislation in Congress that would provide pregnant women with health care, child care and money for education -- services that could encourage them to continue their pregnancies....Although the activists insist that they are not retreating from their belief that abortion is immoral and should be outlawed, they argue that a more practical alternative is to try to reduce abortions through other means.
I'll hopefully have time to post on why allowing the U.S. auto industry to die without help would be a catastrophic mistake, but let me note a more basic political issue for progressives, of helping the UAW save their members jobs. The United Auto Workers has been a stalwart ally of progressives for going on seventy-plus years, from helping build the New Deal to supporting progressive government for years (thanks for Michigan, guys!) Without going through the longer list, let me just remind folks of the central role of the UAW in the civil rights movement. No organization gave more financial and political support to Martin Luther King Jr.'s movement.
* Few remember, but before the famous March on Washington in 1963, there was a precursor march in Detroit, backed by the UAW, where 200,000 folks marched down Woodward Avenue led by King and Walter Reuther, head of the UAW.
David has with unerring professorial precision raised a question that I think is at the heart of the Bush presidency: to what extent was Cheney reflecting Bush's wishes? The opening scene of Angler, where Cheney colludes with Bush to create the appearance of a true search for a vice-presidential nominee suggests, I think, that Bush didn't have any illusions about Cheney. To what degree was Cheney simply Bush's errand boy as opposed to an independent actor?
I think at this point my admiration for Angler, and that of my colleagues, is amply clear. So I wanted in this next post to raise what I see as some unanswered questions about Cheney's White House operations. None of these questions, I hasten to add, should be seen as denigrating Bart's reporting, which is first-rate and revealing. Nonetheless, I had some questions after finishing Angler.
Some concern the outcomes of Cheney's handiwork. For example, after the stranger-than-fiction showdown with Cheney's allies at the hospital bedside of Attorney General John Ashcroft, FBI chief Robert Mueller persuaded Bush to revise his illegal wiretapping program. But while it's portrayed as a win for FBI and Justice, we never really learn the terms of the victory. "Over the next weeks and months, the program changed. It stopped doing some things, and it did other things differently." I'm curious, Bart--and maybe I should just use the second person hereafter--to know whether you were able to learn what, precisely was stopped, what changed, and what continued. How much of a victory for Justice over Cheney's team did these changes represent? If you learned these details, why did you omit them? Did you expect that including these minutiae would bore readers? Were there national security concerns?
Paul Mirengoff takes me to task for likening Dick Cheney to Artur Sammler. He has a point. It's a bit of stretch to compare them because I made it sound like Sammler was a product, like Cheney, of the 1960s. Not so. Sammler was responding to the lunacy. And Cheney?
I'm not sure I should plead nolo contendere to Mirengoff's assertion that Cheney was never a culture warrior. Well, no, he obviously doesn't appear to be a fire-breathing social conservative. That's not his bag. National security is. But for many of the neocons, the McGovern era liberalism is, in fact, synonymous with a failure of nerve, a loss of faith in America abroad and at home.
It seems to me that Angler undercuts Jacob Heilbrunn's attempt to cast Vice President Cheney as a Dr. Sammler figure on a mission to combat the counter-culture of the 1960s and 1970s. For example, Bart shows that Cheney had little interest in "cultural" issues. At the beginning of President Bush's first term, Cheney focused on economic policy and energy policy, two areas well removed from the "culture war." After 9/11, he focused, not surprisingly, on issues relating to terrorism. Terrorism was not an issue in the 1960s and 1970s either.
It is true, as Heilbrunn observes, that Cheney was quite unhappy about one relic of the 1970s - the post-Watergate limitations on presidential power. In this respect, he was like most who served in the Reagan administration and some who served in the Clinton administration.
Before I expand on my critique of Angler, I want to respond to Spencer Ackerman's post in which he attempts to distill "Cheneyism" into the view that "power for its own sake is an uncomplicated good, and letting it expire without use is irresponsible." By power, Ackerman says he means "executive power."
Ackerman thinks his theory explains why Cheney opposed taking down Saddam Hussein in 1991 but favored doing so after 9/11. In the earlier period, according to Ackerman, going to Baghdad would have weakened the presidency due to certain "institutional impediments," namely "the United Nations, the Democratic opposition, the country's touch-and-go wariness to a ground war." After 9/11, as Ackerman sees it, these obstacles ceased to exist and, in their absence, "the imperative of harnessing and using executive power" caused Cheney to push for war.
Newsflash: Word is that Bart Gellmann will soon be emerging from a hidden location to respond to these posts. But before he does, I'm going to offer a few thoughts on Dick Cheney's mental world. If you'll recall, in Saul Bellow's novel Mr. Sammler's Planet, 1960s New York is lurching out of control. The liberals have taken over. The universities are hotbeds of revolt. A black pick-pocket ends up flashing his member at a cowering Mr. Sammler, who managed to evade the Nazis while hiding out in Poland but now, decades later, as a withered old man, can't escape the social chaos created by the latest breakdown of the liberal order. While I wouldn't credit Cheney with the kind of literary perspicuity with which Bellow endows Sammler, I suspect that Cheney, no less, is a product of the late 1960s and early 1970s--someone who despises what he saw as the rise of the counterculture and set out to battle it.
A stockbroker named Fred Schwed wrote a book in 1955 called "Where Are The Customer's Yachts?", which leads me to the tale this morning of the Big Three auto execs flying into Washington on their private jets to plead their case of poverty to the U.S. Congress. Democrats and the new Obama Administration have to be very mindful that there is very little sympathy abroad for either the managers of the car companies or the head of the UAW, Ron Gettelfinger who recently told the Wall Street Journal, "This industry is in a crisis situation not of its own making." GM and Ford are equally clueless, spending millions of their precious cash lobbying lawmakers.
So far this year, G.M. has spent $10 million on lobbying, out of $95 million in the past 10 years, placing it at No. 16 on the site's "top spenders" list. Ford, which ranks No. 19 on the list, has spent $5.7 million this year, out of $80.6 million the last decade.
Bart's book is one of the best to be written about the Bush administration, at least until the National Archives allows the scholars of the future full access to the classified record. Actually, chances are Liz Cheney's children will still be litigating the case for continued secrecy, represented by little Addingtons, so perhaps Angler will simply stand as among the greatest accounts ever to be written of these last eight years. There are worse fates.
But here's where I'd like to press Bart and the rest of our group: what's the heart of the Cheney legacy?
The headline of a front page article in the Washington Post tells readers how Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson changed his approach to the economy in response to "this storm."
That is so sweet of the Post. We are looking at an entirely preventable economic catastrophe that was brought on by the policies supported by Mr. Paulson and the rest of the Bush administration, as well the Greenspan-Bernanke Fed. And, these were policies that Mr. Paulson personally profited from, earning hundreds of millions of dollars in his years at Goldman Sachs.
But in order to avoid reminding readers of Mr. Paulson's culpability, the Post describes the economic crisis as a "storm," implying that it was some sort of unforeseeable natural disaster that came out of the sky. This is the sort of reporting that you would have expected from Pravda in the days of the Soviet Union.
I'm still trying to figure this one out. I'm in the "one the one hand, on the other hand" mode.
But, like Josh, I'm surprised he'd ask her and surprised she wants it.
What's the deal?
The first thought I had on opening Angler was that for most of American history, no one would have dreamed of writing a vice-presidential biography. From 1804, when the 12th Amendment established our current method of choosing VPs, until 1901, when William McKinley's assassination placed Theodore Roosevelt in the Oval Office, the No. 2 position was a steppingstone to oblivion. T.R., who was elected in his own right in 1904, broke the pattern, and Calvin Coolidge followed suit. By the mid-1970s, VPs were routinely going on to become their parties' standard-bearers. Walter Mondale and Al Gore epitomized the vice president in the era of big government--forces to be reckoned with, armed with experience to match the president's and portfolios and constituencies all their own. Even so, Mondale and Gore occasioned biographies because they won their parties' presidential nominations, not because they served as second fiddle to Presidents Carter and Clinton.
Let me begin by thanking TPMCafe for inviting me to discuss Angler and by thanking Bart Gellman for reaching out to me following the publication of his book.
As Bart notes, the other participants in this discussion have reviewed Angler; I have not. So my main purpose this week is to provide my views of the book itself. I'm less inclined to debate the Cheney vice presidency. That's really a debate about the past eight years, one that has been taking place for approximately the past seven. Opinions have hardened and are not likely to change. On the other hand, it may prove impossible to discuss Angler without some attention to the merits of its subject.
One of the more interesting moments of last night's 60 Minutes broadcast of their interview with Barack Obama was the point where he indicated that he was open to ideas from anyone, whether it be FDR or Ronald Reagan, as long as the ideas workto solve a current problem.
My first thought was that this was a calculated political move, designed to appeal to conservatives who are still skeptical about an Obama presidency. But on at least one issue -- the need to eliminate nuclear weapons -- Reagan's legacy fits perfectly with Obama's current position.
Greetings Bart. . .and very much look forward to being back tomorrow when I'll weigh in on your must read book for those wishing to understand the core sculpting force of the Bush years.
But Jacob Heilbrunn suggested that I wrote a piece saying Biden should learn from Cheney. Actually, I think that would be a bad idea.
I didn't say Biden -- I said Obama.
Here's the intro to my post which already got quite a few razzled for mentioning Dick Cheney and Barack Obama in the same headline. So let's not add Biden just yet.
From the blog post:
Hi Bart--excellent explication of your book that you provided. Just out of curiousity, I was once told that authors can take on the personas of their characters while writing biographies of them. Did you find yourself writing as much of the book as possible in a subterranean lair and becoming, if you will, suspicious of strangers?
OK, on to policy. First question: Yes, Cheney fought for as much power as he could get. But, as some conservative friends chided me recently, what else is new in Washington? What's so uniquely reprehensible about Cheney, they argue. Rumsfeld and Cheney behaved this way in the Ford administration--something I think you could have gone into in greater detail, though I suppose you felt the book was long enough already!--and Bush knew what he was getting into. When Cheney overreached, Bush checked him. But Cheney was no villain. He was executing the president's vision, pushing an obdurate bureaucracy to get moving, and, in general, a loyal soldier. So what's the crime?
Let me just say to begin with that it is flattering and daunting, in more or less equal parts, to talk about my new book on Vice President Cheney with four of its published critics: Jacob Heilbrunn in the NYT Book Review, Steve Clemons in the American Conservative, David Greenberg in Slate and Spencer Ackerman on his Attackerman blog. Paul Mirengoff of Power Line, who critiqued excerpts of the book that appeared in The Washington Post, has also agreed to join this conversation. That's a rare and commendable departure from the norm these days of talking mainly to people who already agree. As a reader, I'd love to see more crosstalk among thinkers across the political divide. I want to thank TPMCafe for setting that example.
It's hard to know where to start a conversation about Cheney. In ANGLER, I make the claim that you can't understand what happened these last eight years without knowing how often the vice president took the helm. But it's just as vital to know about the times when President Bush grabbed the wheel and veered off Cheney's course. Bush really was the Decider -- when he knew what was happening -- and he lost some confidence in his Number Two when Cheney nearly drove him off a cliff in the closing months of the first term. That story, which takes up the two climactic chapters of ANGLER, is one among many we did not know until now. Hundreds of people, many of them speaking on the record about previously undisclosed events, gave interviews for the book (and its predecessor, a series I wrote with partner Jo Becker). This Book Club conversation will go wherever you all please. In the next few paragraphs I'll throw out some of the stories, questions and criticisms that have come up most often in broadcasts and public events these last two months:
This week at Cafe, Bart Gellman is joining us for a TPM book club discussion on Angler, The Cheney Vice Presidency.
The man, the legend, the consequences-- we'll be taking a look in the twilight hours of his vice presidency. Bart's great opening post will be up in a few moments, but just to give you a little teaser of what's to come, one of his opening questions:
What drove Cheney? His thoughts, more than just about anyone's, are a black box. Even so, I gathered a good deal of evidence for the proposition that the vice president has been fundamentally honest about his objectives, if not always about the underlying facts or the methods he employed. A lot of Cheney critics don't like to hear that, begrudging him a principled motive for policies they dislike. But ANGLER takes him seriously, and the public should too. Think about it this way: Cheney is a man of zeal, and zealots have had a lot more impact on history than self-serving hypocrites.
Joining him are Paul Mirengoff, practicing lawyer and co-founder of conservative blog Power Line; Spencer Ackerman, senior reporter at the Washington Independent and former TPM reporter and blogger; Jacob Heilbrunn, senior editor at the National Interest and author most recently of They Knew They were Right: The Rise of Neocons;
David Greenberg, writer and associate professor of Journalism & Media Studies at Rutgers University, "History Lesson" columnist for Slate; and Steve Clemons, political blogger and Director of the American Strategy Program and the New America Foundation.
Join us.
As loyal partisans of Spartakusbund, we have nothing in principle against government ownership of industry, nor against government subsidies to for-profit companies. Today's quandary: are the Big-3 auto companies for-profit companies?
I'm no auto aficionado. I've owned three cars in the past 20 years, so feel free to correct what follows. I know you will.
Remember way back in October when all right-minded people supported Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's bank bailout package, which went under the name of Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP)? Those of us who thought it was poorly designed as a mechanism to help the financial system, and was likely to lead to taxpayer enrichment of the extremely rich, were denounced as knuckle-scraping Neanderthals.
Of course Paulson changed course a week after he got his bailout bill and decided that the best route was to directly inject capital into the banks, as advocated by the knuckle-scraping Neanderthals. Last week the knuckle-scraping Neanderthals could claim a second victory as he announced that the TARP program was officially dead, RIP.
But in Washington, no bad idea stays dead for long.
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