Process is not content, but process deeply impacts content, and cannot be ignored in how strategic leverage is deployed.  Part of the “content” here might have involved the galvanizing of the Democratic base on behalf of the leadership and desires of the Democratic president.  Yes, a massive stimulus to the economy that will finally generate substantial growth and declining unemployment is Obama’s only chance to be re-elected, and the only chance for the Democrats in Congress not to suffer another large defeat.  So the inadequate and mostly inefficient stimulus in this bill is, on its face, still worth it for Obama to obtain.  Good policy is good politics, indeed, in this case, career-saving politics for him.  But it perhaps is the case that good policy (in this case a policy that will increase the GDP by 0.5 to 1% according to estimates — an OK boost, but not an enormous one) is not good enough when Obama has to subtract from it the respect and enthusiasm of his base for him.  A wildly excited base is worth a few votes in November 2012, too.

Jerry Brown, Barbara Boxer, Harry Reid, and Michael Bennet benefited.  Arguably, labor and Latinos were the difference between victory and defeat for all of them. As David Frum noted on election night, Latinos are very much interested in bread and butter issues, and merely focusing on resolving the immigration issue does not guarantee their support.  But, for many Latinos of Mexican and Central American origin, it does appear to be a threshold issue of fairness and equity.  And even white people in California oppose a punitive approach.  Despite the fact that 62% of voters in California were white and 22% Latino, by 67-24, voters said illegal immigrants should be offered legal status, rather than deported

Unlike much of the rest of the country, the California electorate was demographically similar to that of 2008.  Although the 18-29 vote was way down, slightly less white voters (62%) went to the polls this year than did so two years ago (63%).  But California’s union density remains substantial (over 17%, post-recession, 40% higher than the national figure, and, in absolute terms, the highest  in the country at 2.5 million), And the union’s superb ground game—especially in the vote heavy Los Angeles and San Francisco regions—contributed to an increase in the Latino vote over 2008 from 18% to 22%.  Meg Whitman beat Brown among white people by 4%, and Carly Fiorina beat Boxer in the same cohort by 9%.  But Brown and Boxer each won the 22% of voters who are Latino by about 35%.  (Unfortunately, California exit polls did not break out the union or union household vote).

Nevada was an even starker example of the Latino/Labor difference.  Sharon Angle carried white Nevadans by 12%.  But Reid won Latinos—15% of the vote—by 38% according to the exit polls, or, according to other analysts who questioned the methodology of the exit polls, by an astounding 90-10.  And union households voted at an 18% clip and Reid won that cohort—heavily overlapping with Latinos — also by 38%, while merely breaking even with Angle among non-union household voters, 48-48.  The Culinary Workers Union, based in Las Vegas (mostly housekeepers working in the large casinos on Las Vegas’s “Strip”), is probably the single most organized and potent political force in the state, and was critical in bring Reid back from the dead.

In Colorado, we have the least data, but it is still suggestive.  It should be noted that 54% of Colorado voters thought that Ken Buck was “too extreme,” a catastrophic number even in a state where a 41% plurality supported the Tea Party.Yet, despite the extremist label, Buck still carried the 81% of the electorate that identified as white by 3%. 13% of Colorado voters were Latino, but the exit polls did not break down this vote.  However, the obvious inference is that Bennet carried this vote by a wide enough margin to overcome Buck’s edge among the much larger white cohort.  (Union density in Colorado is just 7%, well below the national figure.  Unions did not play as significant a role here as they did in California or Nevada).

Finally, it’s important to remember that, despite the significance of the Latino vote in each of these states, it still numbered far below its percentage of the populations in each state—Latinos voted at about 60% of their state numbers, while whites continued to vote above their numbers in each state.  While Republicans and conservatives can and will do their best to oppose the legal right of American workers to organize unions, they can have little effect on the birth rates of Latinos already in this country:  about 25% of one year old babies are Latino.  And these are overwhelmingly from Mexico and Central America, and do not share the views, culture or lexicon of Cuban-Americans like the gifted Marco Rubio of Florida.

So Rubio will not be the deus ex machine who brings a significant number of Latino voters into the Republican fold. Republicans had a great day on Tuesday.  But an incoherent, self-refuting political philosophy is only one of their problems going forward.

Almost everything that Kurtz observes about my use of pseudonym, save his own understandable curiosity about my real name, is irrelevant or just wrong.  Still, to answer Kurtz’s question:  I use a pseudonym because, on behalf of my employer, I speak, when I do, in an institutional voice.  The work of “Debs” represents my own opinions, not necessarily those of my employer.  I’m doing a form of moonlighting, and I normally don’t like to mix my two voices.  If Kurtz wants to contextualize my work — a valid desire — he can simply read the ten or twelve other essays I’ve written as “Debs” on FF.

And, although this is entirely off point, I will note that, no, I do not, nor have I ever, worked for Barack Obama or his presidential administration (I did, like hundreds of thousands of others, go door to door for him during the election).  I am not a high profile writer or high profile anybody.

But, again, all of this is off point.  The argument really is the thing, and Kurtz’s focus on the “reputation” of the writer is exactly wrong in a way that a former academic should readily understand.  Kurtz’s biography notes that he has written many, many articles about various subjects and that he taught at Harvard and the University of Chicago.  He has a PhD in anthropology from Harvard.  Surely, then, he knows about, and has probably participated in the system of refereeing articles via the double blind system, a standard protocol for almost every academic discipline.  The way it works is simple:  a writer submits an article to an academic journal.  The article is then evaluated for possible publication by two or three anonymous scholars.  Those scholars, in turn, do not know the identity of the writer of the article.  The entire purpose of the double blind refereeing system is to eliminate, at least ideally, the prejudicial effect of known reputation on a dispassionate analysis of the actual argument put forward by the prospective contributor.  Thus, upon the conferring of his doctorate, the novice anthropologist, Stanley Kurtz, might be assured (barring some unethical violation of some kind or, sure, somebody recognizing the style of a well known scholar) that his article for publication was given every bit as much consideration as that of, say, the distinguished, world renowned anthropologist, Marshall Sahlins. Conversely, the anonymous referees could freely express their criticism of Kurtz’s essay without wondering whether they might be offending the top student of a good friend.   Kurtz will likely respond by saying, “You, Debs, are not an academic referee.”  But the principle stands:  if we want to truly engage an argument qua argument, without the baggage of pre-judgment, the anonymity of its author best serves the interlocutor.

Reputation is the very thing that most distorts the lens by which we view an argument.  We tend to give the benefit of the doubt to arguments written by writers we like, and trash those of writers we don’t.  This is why I was at pains to tell Kurtz that I barely knew anything about him when I read his posts about Obama.  We can’t eliminate every distorting predicate, of course — I know Kurtz is a conservative of some kind, based upon where he writes, and based upon the very brief remarks my friend told me about him.  But I don’t really need to know anything more about Kurtz to judge his argument, nor would it help me to do that.  Yes — and here he conflates two separate forms of judgment — it would help me to know who Kurtz is, in order to judge the complete corpus of Stanley Kurtz.  That would be useful, indeed essential, in order to write a profile or biography of Stanley Kurtz.  But I don’t care about Stanley Kurtz — I only care about what he writes and proposes to write about Barack Obama and socialism.

Kurtz neatly proved the point about how unhelpful relying on the reputation of a writer is when he responded to David Frum’s essay on Obama and socialism.  Kurtz assumed cogency and erudition simply because Frum wrote the essay, and Kurtz knows Frum’s work.  But Kurtz had a problem:  in this case, he didn’t agree with Frum.  So all he could do is compliment Frum for his customary intelligence, without then engaging Frum’s argument on this occasion.  If Frum had written under the name “Edmund Burke”, Kurtz would have had no choice but to actually attend to his argument, actually explicate what he agreed with and disagreed with.  But Frum’s reputation served as a scrim which obscured for Kurtz Frum’s argument.

We want people’s names on their articles so we can cheer for people we like, boo people we don’t, and, yes, put those articles into the larger framework of their intellectual history.  We develop relationships with various writers, grow comfortable or outraged by their writer’s voice.  But, if the purpose of an article is to make an argument as devoid as possible of extraneous information, then anonymity is actually of great intellectual value.

At last, and for the last time, to Kurtz’s argument itself.  Kurtz says, not unreasonably, wait for the book.  And I will.  But my point was to suggest that his posts about the subject of the book indicate that it will be of limited value, no matter the quality of Kurtz’s empirical findings or his skill as a writer.  That was the point of my stipulation that Kurtz could have a smoking gun tape of Obama “confessing” in the most ardent terms, his socialism, and the book would still lack any efficacy.  The problem is the nature of the project, not how well Kurtz accomplishes it.  Thus, I don’t need to read the book to reject the logic Kurtz gives for writing it in the first place.

In summary, yet again:

(1)  I doubt very much that Kurtz can prove anything more than that Obama — like countless young people living in big cities over the past decades — came in contact with, even liked, people to his left on the political spectrum. And that he fruitfully argued with them, and even agreed with them at times. In short, I don’t think Kurtz knows more about Barack Obama, a very well investigated figure, than does, say, David Remnick, and I don’t think association is necessarily approval.  If that were the case, then you might as well assume that Obama is a Republican because he‘s spent time with conservatives at Harvard Law School, a corrupt real estate developer because he knew a few of those, or a sports addled jock, stuck in male adolescence, because he loves watching sports on television, is a rabid fan of various professional sports team, and especially loves to golf and shoot hoops.

(2)  But even if Kurtz were to “prove” that Barack Obama was a socialist 20 or 25 years ago — has not just one smoking gun transcript, but dozens of them —  it still won’t matter.  Obama isn’t a socialist today and Kurtz concedes the point by saying that, well, of course, stealthy Obama doesn‘t talk about his socialism anymore.  A pity:  it then becomes difficult to, you know, actually confirm his socialism, then, doesn‘t it?

(3)  Most importantly, the word “socialism”, as Kurtz uses it in a contemporary, as opposed to historical, context, is meaningless; the sheerest anachronism.  We’re not sitting around shooting the bull in a Paris or Berlin café, circa 1906 or 1920.  Nobody thinks Walmart and Target should be nationalized or even “publicly owned” by ACORN.  Nobody argues for anything but variations on the mixed economy — those variations are critical inflections of public policy, but, once you realize that the free trading, private ownership supporting Danes, are just as supportive of a mixed economy, rather than a command and control economy, as John Cornyn, then you also realize that socialism’s day is done.  Calling somebody a socialist today is like calling them a Platonist or a Copernican — the word no longer has any analytical purchase outside of Havana.

To reiterate again — and I continue to hope that Kurtz can actually respond to an argument, rather than wonder whether I’m really Rahm:  Prior to his nomination, the party already agreed with Obama’s politics — because they were also Clinton’s, Edwards’s, and Biden’s too, prior to nominating him.  Like most presidential nomination fights in the modern era, the fight was merely over which carefully crafted persona did the Democrats wish to lead them into battle — the brilliant 21st century bi-racial cosmopolite, the tough as nails, battle scarred Thatcher of the left, or the angry, (white male) Southern populist — but the policies of, respectively, Obama, Clinton, and Edwards were only a smidgeon different from each other, if that.  Therefore, if Obama’s politics are socialist, then the Democratic party is a socialist party, and all of its major figures from both Clintons to George Miller to Harry Reid to Chuck Schumer are socialists.  All of these people entirely agree with Barack Obama’s policy agenda.  So do all of the key figures in the Obama administration.  If Obama is a socialist, there is no difference between socialism and the present day American version of liberalism.  And, therefore, Kurtz might as well have written a book about Reid, Hillary Clinton, Schumer, Pelosi, Kerry — any major Democrat — because they all share the same political platform.  But that would make Barack Obama ideologically mundane (something every person to his left already thinks!), rather than a unique figure, cultivated in the hot houses of Chicago radical politics in order to “bring” socialism to the Democratic party.

Just today, I read that Obama’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, slammed Obama’s leftist critics, declaring that they should be “drug tested”, and further observed that they wouldn’t be happy if Dennis Kucinich were president. Leave aside the point that people like Paul Krugman, probably Obama’s most prominent leftist critic, aren’t socialists — nor is Dennis Kucinich.  The point is that remarks like this don’t trouble Kurtz because, as I must emphasize again, he has made a non-falsifiable argument.  Some people might think, based upon his record and contentious relationship his administration has with its critics, that Obama is actually to the right of, say, the leftist blogosphere.  But to Kurtz, remarks like Gibbs‘s, or Obama’s appointment of a conservative to run the budget commission, or his refusal to nationalize the banks, or fight for even a public option, let alone propose single payer health insurance, only demonstrate how clever Obama is — he fools Americans by pretending to be to the right of Fire Dog Lake, while it’s really the case that he’s a socialist and thus well to its left!  But Kurtz can’t prove by anything he says or does today while in office that Obama is anymore of a socialist than Hillary Clinton would have been had she been elected president.  Nor can he prove that Obama is any more of a socialist than Harry Reid, who faithfully seeks to execute Obama’s program in the Senate.   So, no matter what Kurtz has uncovered, his analysis of Obama is merely an example of a distinction without a difference.

And it’s disappointing to me that Kurtz has not even engaged any of my examples or arguments — if Obama is a socialist, then his selection as his “Minister of War” and “Minister of Economics”, respectively, of Robert Gates and Larry Summers, are self-sabotaging.  Fidel Castro, after all, selected his brother, Raul, and his most charismatic aide, Che Guevara, for those positions.  All Kurtz can, apparently, say in response is, “I can’t prove it to you, you’ll just have to trust me that people whom Barack Obama talked to 20 plus years ago in Chicago are more important to his presidency and current world view than are Gates, Summers, and Emmanuel.”  That’s simply an absurd argument, and, if knowing who Stanley Kurtz is has, in any way, made me think about his argument in a different way, it is only as follows:  It gravely disappoints me that a trained scholar could revel in a non-falsifiable hypothesis.   That’s a rookie mistake–shouldn’t Kurtz’s dissertation director or even his senior thesis adviser have instilled in him better scholarly habits than that?

As I said earlier, I look forward to Kurtz’s book proving that liberalism is really socialism and that, therefore, the Democratic party is really a socialist party.  That is both an internally logical hypothesis and one that is falsifiable.  Whether Barack Obama secretly joined the DSA in 1988, and is, thus, to this very day — as he sits, feet up in the Oval Office, plotting the route by which the sequel to ACORN will “publicly own” the American economy — an officially certified socialist is neither.

Kurtz has committed a great, yet banal sin of intellectual argumentation: He’s created a non-falsifiable hypothesis by which anything that Obama does, by definition, confirms Kurtz’s point that he’s a socialist. Kurtz and I both consider two definitions of socialism. Kurtz claims that my remarks about what constitutes socialism are “incomplete and unconvincing.”  Actually, he misreads what I wrote:  I proposed as a heuristic device the idea that if socialism really means large increases in government expenditures, or merely the support of existing mixed economies, than every leader in the advanced capitalist world is a socialist, including Cameron, Merkel, and George W. Bush.  So, no, obviously that isn’t my definition of socialism, but only an example of what an absurd definition of socialism looks like.  And Kurtz correctly rejects this—too broad.  (Although, incoherently, he also seeks to preserve the distinction between a capitalist United States and a socialist Sweden—“differences of degree quickly shade into differences of kind”, he writes).

Kurtz also rejects the old fashioned definition of state ownership of the means of production. If Obama were to, via executive order, nationalize the entire American economy, well that would certainly prove he was a socialist.  But that’s too bald for Kurtz and, presumably, Obama.

So Kurtz has created a third category, the non-falsifiable one: “full nationalization” is an “outdated definition” of socialism.  So we are left with, to repeat, “Obama’s policies do fit the model of what socialists call a ‘transitional program”, (i.e. a plan to bring about more complete socialism incrementally, over the long term).”  And also that stealth is critical to the implementation of this transition—thus nothing Obama actually does can be taken as evidence of his non-socialism, but, rather, only of his bad faith, or if you prefer, his implacable sense of what is required to consummate his vision of a socialist America.

Obama’s relationship to the actual left wing of his own party is instructive, in this regard.  Just this week, the impeccably liberal Robert Reich, who supported Obama’s presidential bid, writes in the Wall Street Journal that Obama’s programs have been wholly inadequate to address the nation’s great problem—yet just potent enough to engender an enormous conservative backlash.

Reich lays out the argument for the Left’s disappointment clearly.  Why didn’t Obama—the alleged socialist—fight for the public option?  Why didn’t Obama—the alleged socialist—follow the recommendation of many, including Paul Krugman and Rep. David Obey, that the stimulus be much larger than what he ultimately proposed?  Why didn’t Obama—the alleged socialist—give the American people just a small taste of real socialism and, at least, temporarily nationalize the large banks?  (After all, even George W. Bush’s administration nationalized AIG, the largest insurance company in the world.  Is Bush a socialist?  Is Ben Bernanke?  Is Henry Paulson)?  Why didn’t Obama support a financial regulation bill that would actually break up the big banks and link bankers’ compensation to institutional performance? Why didn’t Obama withdraw American forces from Afghanistan as soon as logistically possible—why did he increase American forces there?  Wouldn’t the fiscal savings have helped with the “transition” to socialism? I know I know—according to Kurtz, this is all part of the plan.  But if this is the plan, the plan doesn’t really make much sense, does it?

Let’s look at another specific policy example—no, not what Obama was saying on Kurtz’s soon to be released basement tapes 20 years ago, but what he actually does when wielding the power of the presidency.  The example is the budget deficit commission, co-chaired by Erskine Bowles, a Democrat, and Alan Simpson, a Republican.  Bowles is yet another strange personnel choice for a socialist president to make.  This commission is considering the allocation of revenue and taxes decades into the future.  Having enormous pots of money to invest in socialist training centers, or whatever, might be helpful to Obama’s long range plan.

If this be so, you might think that Obama would have selected at a minimum somebody like Robert Reich to run this commission. Instead Obama chose a conservative, Southern Democrat.   Bowles wants government spending going forward to be set at 21% of GDP.  That will ensure that the transition to socialism takes … oh four or five centuries.

There are other problems with Kurtz’s argument that his presumed impending revelations can’t allay.  Kurtz wants us to think that “organized socialism” has had “little public influence in the country at large”, yet simultaneously powerfully influences the public policies of the president of the United States.  How? Kurtz observes that socialist colleagues of Obama advocated a plan that would “blend control of capitalism by community groups (like ACORN) ‘from below’ … After all, ACORN couldn’t insert itself into the banking system without support from congressional Democrats and the Clinton administration.”

Ah—ACORN.  ACORN first swung the election to Obama via massive voting fraud, and now ACORN would be a key element in controlling capitalism “from below.”  Let’s think about this for a moment.  Kurtz thinks that ACORN has had a major impact on American life, and, moreover, promised to have a major influence on the transition to socialism going forward.  But…ACORN is defunct.  It collapsed like a house of cards following one trumped up charge leveled at it by elements of the conservative entertainment complex.  The organization couldn’t survive the most minimal public scrutiny and, though Kurtz claims that ACORN had influential Democrats in its pocket, they chose, instead, to let the ACORN fall from its tree into a fatal abyss.  Yet Kurtz would have us believe that the late ACORN was an ideological and logistical juggernaut, a modern day Comintern.

Still, contained in Kurtz’s remarks about ACORN is the kernel of an insight, however false, that brings his entire argument crashing to ground.  Kurtz writes that ACORN needed those friends in high places to become as influential as it did:  “After all, ACORN couldn’t insert itself into the banking system without support from congressional Democrats and the Clinton administration.”

Wait!  Was the Clinton administration—starting with Bill and Hillary, of course—socialist, too?  And the congressional Democrats of that period as well?  At last Kurtz has latched on to a giant, transformative assertion that does justice to his hard work and ambitious goals.  It’s not only Obama who is a socialist—it’s the entire modern Democratic Party!

Kurtz thinks he has proven a lot—the president of the United States is a socialist!!  But, in fact, he has proven much too little.  If Obama is a socialist, then the entire mainstream establishment of the Democratic Party is socialist, too.  This includes the Democratic leaders and major committee chairs in both houses of Congress, who unreservedly support Obama’s program.  This also includes the major Democrats who competed with Obama for the 2008 Democratic nomination for president whose policy differences with him during that campaign were infinitesimal (Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, of course, have  major positions in the Obama administration).  And the 2004 party nominee, John Kerry, has been one of Obama’s most stalwart allies, only differing with him, if at all, in that he wishes to move faster on climate control legislation.  Do all of these people—in essence, the Democratic Party tout court—realize they are part of a stealthy transition program towards socialism?  Has Obama manipulated people like Chuck Schumer and Pat Leahy, who strike nobody as fools?  Or is everybody—Reid, Pelosi, the whole lot—on board the slowly moving socialist ship?

If almost every influential Democrat agrees with Obama’s policy positions, regardless of their personal histories and exposure to what Kurtz calls “the little known world of post 1960s socialism” what’s the point of chronicling that Barack Obama once sat in a classroom while Professor X told him this, or attended a reception at which some other community organizer said that? If Democrats are all socialists, you don’t need to bother with any of this stuff: just the simple proof that Obama is a Democrat, Democrats are socialists, and therefore Obama is a socialist.   This is the much larger story—and maybe much larger book—that Kurtz should write.

Or at least, as Kurtz says, it could be said. That’s good enough, isn’t it?

So let’s turn to Kurtz’s argument again – and to his answers to my criticisms.

The key question here is this: Let’s stipulate that all of Kurtz’s research into Barack Obama’s antecedents is precisely correct. Let’s imagine that Kurtz has accumulated audio and video tapes of Barack Obama consorting/bonding with known socialists and articulating a fully elaborated theory of American socialism’s march to power. Let’s stipulate further that Kurtz has a smoking gun video of Obama sitting around with Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright in 1990 and saying, “Well guys, how should we map out the next 30 years of the “transition” to socialism?  Just for starters, I think it would be helpful if I were elected president.  From that position, I could really expedite the program, don’t you think?”  What would this prove exactly?

Imagine a Stanley Kurtz of the 1980s, unearthing old Ronald Reagan speeches from the 1940s, back when Reagan was an Americans for Democratic Action liberal. What would those speeches tell us about the Reagan presidency? What would Hillary Clinton’s Goldwater activism of the 1960s have told us about a Hillary Clinton presidency?

Precious little.

We are what we do. The way to know the Obama presidency is to watch what the Obama presidency does, how it is staffed, what priorities it chooses.

Stanley Kurtz disagrees with this—it’s all happening by “stealth”, you see. I asked Kurtz and others over the weekend why a purported socialist like Obama would surround himself with such mainstream figures in the Democratic Party, and even one rather prominent Republican, Robert Gates. Kurtz apparently sees nothing unusual or inefficient about Obama’s appointments to influential positions.  It’s all part of the plan, I guess.  Indeed, Kurtz is “amused” by my Ockham’s Razor remark that Obama has never publicly advocated socialism.  Of course not, writes Kurtz:  it is a deliberate tactic of American socialists to eschew explicit, public advocacy of their deeply held world view.  Rather, “Obama’s policies do fit the model of what socialists call a ‘transitional program’, (i.e. a plan to bring about more complete socialism incrementally, over the long term).”

In other words: while Obama does not act like a socialist now, with a big Democratic majority and in the full flush of his mandate, he might act like one later, when he’s weaker. Or maybe not.  Maybe the transition is so precise and slow that Obama won’t act like a socialist at all, and leave that to subsequent Democratic presidents and congressional majorities. So when Obama rejects his party’s left and takes the most incremental available path on universal health care – that confirms his socialism. When he declines to temporarily nationalize the banks – that proves it too. And when he does temporarily nationalize the auto companies—that also proves it! Omitting real socialists to key positions in his administration – all part of the plan.

So, Obama’s scheme is a stealthy one, and it will lead not to a sudden explosion of socialism, but to an “incremental” “transitional program.”  This sounds very clever indeed, but it creates an insuperable obstacle for Kurtz’s analysis: if Obama’s plan for socialism is incremental and transitional, how are we to tell the difference between it and the mainstream liberalism that every major figure in the Democratic Party supports?  Does Obama send out a secret hand signal when he doesn’t nationalize the banks to those who understand that it means, “Don’t worry, comrades—socialism is coming—I’ve got this under control.”?

Click here to read Part 2.

You see the problem.  Kurtz wants us to believe that one lone Leninist, Barack Obama, broke through the ideological defenses of the United States and—damn the people—was elected president of the United States.   But Lenin had a crew of top flight, like minded assistants around him:  Trotsky, Bukharin, Zinoviev and Stalin, to name just a few of the most prominent.  Who are the ideologically disciplined acolytes of Obama, implacably prepared to implement his, yes, long run “transitional program” to socialism?  Larry Summers—as mainstream an economist as the Democratic Party can offer, disciple of Goldman Sachs honcho, Robert Rubin, whom the faculty radicals at Harvard rode out of Cambridge on a rail for crimes against women?  Rahm Emanuel, a partisan Democrat, but one who famously despises the Party’s left flank, (“retards”, as he famously said) let alone any socialists beyond that?  Tim Geithner, another Rubin protégé, formerly of Kissinger Associates and recently the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York?  Joe Biden who….oh, do I really have to explain that Joe Biden isn’t a socialist, and wasn’t indoctrinated by Bill Ayers?  Robert Gates, the Secretary of Defense for George W. Bush?

So why would the socialist Obama appoint such ideologically unreliable cadre?  Could this be part of the master plan—if Larry Summers enacts socialism, then it will be all the more a “stealth” operation, to use Kurtz’s word, no?  It seems like quite a risk, though, for Obama not to insert like minded people in the most important positions in his administration.

Hmm…perhaps this is an even more remarkable and baffling scheme than even Kurtz realizes.  I’ll respond at greater length to his latest remarks soon, but, in the meantime, I invite readers and Kurtz himself to unravel this counter-intuitive plot.  But, then again, counter-intuitive is what this is all about isn’t it?

Kurtz has decided that Obama is a socialist because, according to Kurtz, Obama favors a secret, incremental path to full nationalization of the economy. This is a difficult argument for Kurtz to sustain, because nothing Obama has ever written or proposed as a politician supports the allegation. Instead, in a recent post on National Review Online, Kurtz fastens on Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson as a kind of ideological doppelganger for Obama.  Kurtz notes that, in his most recent column, Meyerson proposes various policies that are pretty much standard parts of the Democratic party program–including, wait for it… criticism of big business. As a clinching detail, Kurtz observes that Meyerson (we’ve lost Obama altogether in this analysis, but, no matter, Kurtz seems to think that Meyerson and Obama are co-conspirators) is the vice-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America.

According to Kurtz, “Meyerson’s support for these Democratic initiatives could be taken as a sign that some socialists agree with conservatives. That is, sophisticated socialists and conservatives alike believe that America can be pushed into socialism by degrees. Actual existing American socialists (of the sophisticated “non-sectarian” variety typified by the DSA) don’t go around demanding full nationalization of the economy at a blow. On the contrary, they offer support to those Democratic Party initiatives most likely to bring about a socialist transformation in the long term.”

Yes, that’s sounds brilliantly plausible–why would these DSA types actually announce their nefarious intentions? But the key words from Kurtz’s remarks above are these: “could be taken….” Those three words do a lot of work in Kurtz’s analysis. Yes, it “could be taken” that mainstream liberals and Democrats like Meyerson and Obama are biding their time, waiting for the moment when, over the outraged protests of Congress, the Courts, the media, and the American people they impose a massive nationalization of the American economy (I guess Kurtz thinks this will happen by executive order — or maybe he thinks that Congress, etc. will go along with the nationalization — in which case it would be a catastrophe, but a fully democratically enacted catastrophe.  He doesn’t say).  And it also “could be taken” that Barack Obama is a giraffe if he had four legs, was very very tall, and covered with spots.  But Obama doesn’t have any of those characteristics, so he’s not a giraffe. Similarly, Obama, Meyerson, and American liberals at large “could be taken” to fervently believe in the insane and disastrous fantasy that the United States should have a fully nationalized economy.  But they don’t — and Kurtz would be hard pressed to find 1,000 Americans (and no influential ones at any level of society) who believe this nuttery — not now, and not in the avowedly to be hoped for future.   Kurtz claims that “sophisticated” socialists “don’t go around demanding full nationalization of the economy at a blow….”  But if nobody ever makes such a proposal, how can Kurtz prove his point?

What Kurtz doesn’t explain to his readers — perhaps because he doesn’t know himself — is that the DSA is not only without any influence whatsoever, a letterhead masquerading as an organization, but was also created out of a merger between a group called the New American Movement, composed of advocates of early New Left decentralization and “participatory democracy” (the exact opposite of nationalization tout court), and Michael Harrington’s group, the Democratic Socialists Organizing Committee.  Harrington, a  friend of Bill Buckley’s and  his foil in numerous televised debates, was a basic Social Democrat of the kind that frequently run the governments of almost every Western European country (I know, I know—“it could be taken” that these European social democrats want to fully nationalize their economies too).  Harrington spent his life fighting Stalinism and the Soviet Union generally, both because it was a moral monstrosity, and because of its absurd, dysfunctional economic model.  DSA, whatever it may be, is as opposed to full nationalization of the economy as much as Stanley Kurtz is.

Meyerson’s politics, similar to Harrington’s but with a particular interest in the support of the labor movement, have nothing to do with the fantasy that Kurtz has imputed to him, and if you don’t believe me, you can review his voluminous writings for yourself. If you’re a conservative, what you will find is the kind of political and economic program you will oppose, but nothing that remotely has anything to do with “the full nationalization of the economy.” Needless to say, Obama — somebody who has published a good deal for a politician and with his own pen — has never advocated such a program either.  Or one can examine his time in the Illinois and U.S. Senate to investigate whether he ever proposed the nationalization of the American economy.

There’s a good essay to be written about the almost demented anxiety, verging on paranoia, that a mainstream American liberal named Barack Obama has evoked among American conservatives.  Stanley Kurtz seems to be in a good position to write that essay — beginning perhaps with a long conversation with the face he sees in the mirror every morning.

You’re like some mainstream liberal, circa 1969, having dialogues with the Bill Ayers of that day–in which Ayers is telling you that if you don’t agree with him that “we” should all “off the pigs”, and lead an armed revolution, then it is you who is betraying the “true” left.  Except for one thing–Ayers, Dohrn, etc. were kids then, in their early 20s.  But, in this case, you have mature, middle aged people as the heart of the crazy movement–it’s kids like Alex Knepper who are your only hope.  This is both good and bad–good in that youth has time on its side, bad in that the middle aged Tea Party/love Palin/call-Obama-a-socialist-Nazi lunatics are already in positions of influence throughout the media and, to some extent, political office, too (the Pauls come to mind).

These people are not serious in any sense of the word.  They are not thoughtful in any sense of the word.  And, in my view, anyway, they are not conservative in any sense of the word.  They are excrescences of our pell-mell culture of celebrity.

Ann Coulter writes books with “traitor” in the title, an appellation she applies to tens of millions of her fellow citizens.  Yet these folks are outraged that somehow Coulter could be smeared with the same language that she habitually uses when she pollutes our discourse. David Horowitz thinks people like Michael Tomasky (or me) are traitors.  In the old days, he thought people like Dean Acheson were imperialist blood suckers.  Like a broken clock, he sometimes manages to arrive  upon the truth, but only truths that are, in fact, truisms, e.g. Al Qaeda is evil!   Huh–you don’t say!

I don’t know how you create a sane movement, but I guess it happens one day at a time.

Right now the NLRB has only two commissioners serving out of its mandated total of five — it’s not even clear if their decisions for the last two years are constitutional (The Court will hear the case).  All three nominees to fill the Board were tied to Becker, including the Republican selection, Mike Enzi’s HELP staffer, Brian Hayes. (Enzi was supposed to vote for Becker in return for Hayes being put on the Board — but after first voting for Becker in committee, Enzi double crossed the White House and voted against Becker anyway. Classy….).

You might say the Republicans thus “spared the nation” three years of Craig Becker — but dozens of zealous company-side labor lawyers have been appointed to the NLRB and the Republic has survived. A majority party is entitled to promulgate its program with — within broad limits — the people it selects. The opposition party should oppose — but it should not thwart the majority party’s program or the personnel it has chosen to run its government.  If it does, there is no democratic accountability, i.e. the electorate cannot actually evaluate the program of the party it elected.  It can only blame it for failing to implement that program — and this for anachronistic procedural reasons   Judging an actual political program and blaming the governing party for the “gridlock in Washington” are not the same thing.

While eliminating the de facto supermajority for substantive legislation is peculiarly controversial, (would anyone have invented this practice if it didn’t already exist — what problem would it have suggested it solved?  Or do we cling to the filibuster because of the “legitimate” ends with which it was used in the storied history of the Senate i.e. as a bulwark of the apartheid South?  Yes, those were the good old days….) holds would be hard for anyone to defend in a nation which prides itself on its efficiency and productivity.  Imagine suggesting to the CEO’s of UPS or FedEx that they give their line managers the right to exercise unilateral “holds” on company personnel and policies that they, you know, just don’t like (and maybe they’ll rescind the holds if their divisions receive larger budgets) — yet this is exactly the way our vaunted temple of democracy, the Senate, runs.

There is no reason that presidential appointments of either party should require a supermajority or suffer through delays of any sort — such delays make the operations of the government difficult, and leave it without crucial personnel in critical areas.   Indeed, presidential appointments should be rejected only for the most egregious personal or professional failings.  And, yes, that includes controversial Republican appointments like John Ashcroft and John Bolton, too. Russell Feingold took a lot of flak from the Left because he supported Ashcroft’s nomination as Attorney General.  I was one of the people who disagreed with him. But Feingold was right, and I was wrong. Ashcroft is a Confederate sympathizer — not an ideological soul mate of either Feingold or myself.  But Feingold affirmed Ashcroft — something different than endorsing him exactly — on the procedurally neutral ground that presidents should be given the widest latitude in selecting those they wish to serve the country during their administrations. Ideological disagreement is an insufficient reason to reject an otherwise qualified presidential appointment — or even to delay a nomination for months and thus render government inoperable. And obviously a shakedown — holding a nominee hostage in return for a pork barrel project, as we’ve seen recently from Senators Bond and Shelby — is both contemptible and risible. A president of either party is entitled to hire the staff — which, by definition, is temporary — of his choice that will fill the executive branch, and, by allowing that to happen, the Senate merely permits the American government to function at all.

So regarding FrumForum’s recent symposium on centrism:  You want centrism?  How about starting with some procedural sanity — no holds/no filibusters.  Up or down majority votes in an expeditious fashion on presidential appointees, regardless of party or ideology.  Majority votes on bills sent to our already anti-democratic second legislative body.  How about if the damn Senate actually functions as if it’s a governing entity of a proud and great nation, rather than a holding pen for elderly mediocrities and drama queens?

The Republicans’ chronic use of a politically cost-free filibuster has, essentially, ended Obama’s domestic presidency.  So this speech was really an opportunity to begin to change how the political culture thinks about the enormous challenges facing our country.  But other than the bank tax proposal and mild chiding about Senate obstructionism, Obama sought to engage Republicans not by demarcating a sharp line of policy contrast, but, rather, by essentially conceding to Republican arguments regarding budget freezes, tax cuts, nuclear power, offshore oil drilling, and even in the smallness of his jobs proposal.  His stimulus plan, as AEI’s top economist noted in an analysis supported by other professional economists, added several points to the nation’s GDP, and prevented ever more severe unemployment.  However, many Americans don’t grasp the counterintuitive notion of the necessity of government spending to generate demand at a time when they themselves aren’t spending (precisely the problem!).  And Obama, at the time of the stimulus and during the SOTU, did nothing to disabuse voters of their misconceptions.  He has allowed the inane Republican narrative that spending cuts during a massive recession or depression—precisely of the kind that plunged the nation into a second crippling recession in 1937 – are wise. Similarly, the budget freeze will only cripple his economic program and, by excluding military spending, only add to the fantasy that the we can ever eliminate the large, structural deficits that face us in the future without reducing military spending (eliminating all discretionary domestic spending—the parks, the roads, the environmental protection, the home heating oil for the poor, all of it—would by itself merely cut 500 billion or so from the deficit).

As always, this moderation will be viewed as the second coming of Danton.  The health care plan, whose passage he again urged, is essentially identical to that passed by a Republican governor in Massachusetts, and supported by both the Republican Senator-elect from that state and 68% of its voters, according to a new Washington Post poll.  It is also less comprehensive and liberal in every respect than the 1994 Clinton plan, while taking ideas from the Republican alternative of that year.  Indeed, it is a less liberal plan than that proposed by Richard Nixon in 1973!  Still, we hear the tired refrain about a “government takeover of health care.”  How could that be?  Roughly half of health care has already been taken over by the government—the VA and Medicare—and the citizens love them.  The other half—the employer provided part—is precisely what the bill, unfortunately, leaves untouched—yes, the part whose costs are growing even faster than the government programs.

So faced with a childish political culture, exemplified by his conservative political adversaries, who cannot even properly categorize Obama’s pragmatic, moderate liberalism for what it is, Obama himself has conceded even more ideological ground to these adversaries.  He accepts with only marginal modifications the essential rhetorical frame that, since Ronald Reagan, they have constructed to explain American politics and economics:  render unto the Market what is the Market’s, and render unto the Market what is the State’s and civil society’s.

Only once during his presidency has Obama given a speech – his Lincoln Day address in Springfield, Ill. last February – which sought to do what Reagan did during his first SOTU address in 1982 (and on many other occasions): make an argument not merely for discrete policies but on behalf of his world view.  In Obama’s case, this speech advocated the use of the State as the vehicle for the collective aspirations of the American people, and thus to advance the aims of social justice.  Conservatives should feel relieved that Obama—who is at his best when he is calmly professorial, rather than hortatory—has decided to drop this defense of liberalism from his presidency, and merely try to soften the edges of a Reaganist narrative he has decided to let stand.

Conservatism has failed, but its story lingers on.