The Perpetual Progressive Campaign

So, the elections are over -- for a too brief interlude.

The grumps who have been complaining all along that there is no longer a breathing space between elections are right. Forward! as they say in the progressive Beltway. In our time, politics itself has become a form of electioneering. That’s what is wrong with it. President John Kennedy governed; President Barack Obama campaigns.

Campaign finance reform was supposed to settle some of these problems.

Karl Kraus, a great German critic and a contemporary of Sigmund Freud, use to say that psychoanalysis WAS the disease it purported to cure; so with campaign finance reform and other political bromides. There are only two ways to shorten the political season. The first is borrowed from Shakespeare, with an important revision: “First thing we do is shoot all the lawyers,” Shakespeare’s Dick the Butcher said. A modern Butcher might be inclined to say the same of politicians, a good number of whom are lawyers. The second less dramatic solution is to term-limit politicians. While this more practical measure may not eliminate political corruption –neither does campaign finance reform, by the way – it will distribute political corruption more fairly among yet uncorrupted new political recruits and weaken the stranglehold incumbents have on political office.

One reporter wrote in a story about Mitt Romney’s failed campaign that the campaign for governor of Connecticut begins the day after Romney’s concession speech. And so it has. Governor Dannel Malloy has claimed that Obama’s victory in some sense vindicates his own political program.

That is a weak argument. In Connecticut, there was little to no turn-over in the General Assembly following the election, although Republicans in the state made some of Malloy’s questionable initiatives the center piece of their own campaigns. Actually, Republicans have been too cautious in their criticisms, and programs are vindicated, ultimately, by their consequences.

Mike Lawlor’s early release program, for instance, is a ticking time bomb. Once a prosecutor for the State's Attorney Office in New Haven and later co-chairman of the General Assembly's Judiciary Committee from 1995 to 2011, Lawlor is Malloy’s undersecretary for criminal justice policy and the chief architect of Connecticut’s early release Earned Risk Reduction Credits program.

It’s only a matter of days, weeks and months before another violent criminal let loose early under Lawlor’s ill-conceived program murders another store clerk: So far, that has happened twice since the program was launched, ineptly and without proper political vetting. Republicans are right to insist that early release should apply only to non-violent criminals. But Malloyalists operating under a one party regime tend to be hard-headed about their palliatives. Like most politicians, they are effectively reproved only after the plane has crashed into the mountain.

Some parallels may legitimately be drawn between Malloy and Obama.

Both are chief executives; both are progressive Democrats. During the early part of Obama’s first term, Democrats controlled the White House and both Houses of Congress. Malloy, the first Democrat elected governor in more than twenty years, presides over a General Assembly controlled by Democrats. Obama has yet to produce a budget, and this has alarmed some people who believe that state and national budgets define both political programs and the nation’s destiny. Malloy stiffed Republicans during his first budget negotiations, as did Obama, and hammered out a budget in collusion with SEBAC, the union organization charged with negotiating contract terms with the governor and Connecticut’s ex officio third party. Malloy, the Malloyalists, the Democratic dominated General Assembly and union representatives pushed through a “fair share” budget that relied – unfairly, say its critics – on the largest tax increase in state history, following close on the heels of the second largest tax increase in state history, the Lowell Weicker income tax. Obama is promising a “fair share” budget as well. So far, he has not been able to pass any budget. Both in Connecticut and in the nation, recent elections have not substantially changed political configurations. These are the obvious parallels.

There are important differences as well.

Here and there, one glimpses hints, foggy intimations, that Malloy is not willing to surrender the WHOLE of Connecticut’s government to progressive sans culottes who favor the despoliation of the rich, the one percent of those in the state who believe in a kind of egalitarianism that differs only in degree from that of Sylvain Marechal, the utopian socialist who declared in his Manifeste des Égaux (Manifesto of Equals, 1801) "Let the arts perish if needs be. But let us have real equality!" Antoine Lavoisier, the "father of modern chemistry," was executed during the French Revolution in 1794. The revolutionary judge who sentenced Lavoisier to death proclaimed, "The Republic has no need of chemists." Such was the purity of egalitarianism, a modern construct, at its headwaters.

Here in Connecticut, we yet tremble before such perfection. Hope and change beckons.

McMahon And The Editorial Boards

Linda McMahon, now engaged in a Republican Party primary with former U.S. Representative Chris Shays, has been around the Connecticut editorial board block before when she ran on the Republican ticket against then Attorney General Richard Blumenthal.

Mr. Blumenthal had earned some twenty years of fawning commentary chits collected from Editorial Board Writers (EBW) and commentators, and it was plain from much of the adoring press reports issuing from the attorney general’s office, many of them put into print with little or no editing, that he had cashed in his during his campaign for the U.S. Senate.

So then, Mrs. McMahon (LM in the imaginary dialogue below) knows there are wolves dressed in wolves’ clothing out there eager to pounce.

EBW: Quick now: Do you think the United States should assist, behind the scenes of course, in overthrowing Yahya Jammeh?

LM: What?

Perhaps the easiest questions to handle are those surrounding World Wide Entertainment (WWE).

EBW: What about the pornography issue, Mrs. McMahon?

LM: It’s not porn, but WWE fixed all that.

EBW: Should lawyers from WWE have threatened to sue a political commentator for having exercised his constitutional right to say that the company you once served as CEO was engaging in pornography?

LM: The statement is not true, and corporations have a responsibility to protect their brands from questionable assertions. But the answer to your question is – No.

EBW: Well, do you plan to relay your opinion to your husband and WWE lawyers?

LM: I just did. I’ve always been partial to Dick the Butcher’s view of lawyers. You remember your Shakespeare: “First thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”I shouldn’t be so hard on them. They do perform a well-paid sometimes necessary service. And if we shot them all, the halls of Congress would soon come to resemble the sadly diminished staffs of Connecticut newspapers, which, come to think of it, might not be a tragedy after all… Wait a sec: I’ve just had a mental flash on Yayah, and – Yes – the United States should work quietly in the background to rid post-colonial states of pestiferous dictators, though I am not quite ready to send the drones in on them. You haven’t yet asked me any questions on the economy, still stuck in low dive. Here are some figures taken from an article written by Jonah Goldberg of National Review that could be obtained by any curious editorial board writer from any number of sources: From the end of World War II to the beginning of the Obama administration, federal spending had never exceeded 23.5 percent of the Gross National Product (GDP). The average for the Bush years was 19.6 percent. The U.S. broke 25 percent in 2009 because of measures initiated by Bush and afterwards augmented by Obama. In the last four years, we have added $6.3 trillion in federal debt, $5 trillion on Obama’s watch. Debt held by the public in 2008 was 40.5 percent of GDP. The debt today is an alarming 74.2 percent and rising…

EBW: (eyes glazing over) Excuse me…

LM: Excuse me… These are indisputably accurate measurements of spending increases. Everyone running for Congress this year and everyone writing about the economy should be aware of these figures. And no one should be allowed to pass through the doors of Congress following the election without having proposed a plan to reduce those percentages. I hope your next question is: What’s your spending reduction plan – because our time for this interview is running short, and the nation is on its knees praying for spending relief. When the time comes for you to interview U.S. Rep Chris Murphy [the likely winner in the Democratic primary for the U.S Senate], you might ask him why his party has not produced a passable budget since the beginning of the Obama administration – even when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency. If the budget is kicked down the road by means of continuing resolutions, you can’t control spending.

One feels tempted to shout in Mrs. McMahon’s ear: Get thee to an editorial board.

My best guess – and I must confess that I have no access to inside information from the McMahon camp – is that Mrs. McMahon is being held prisoner by her Beltway staff and advisors, possibly some lawyers, who may have told her: “Now look here, Linda, we absolutely forbid you to throw around the silverware until the Republican primaries are over, and this for the best of reasons: You are going to win the primary without firing a shot at Mr. Shays. After that -- game’s on. Go kick butt.”

Never having been a paid political consultant, I do not know whether such advice is good or bad politics, if it has been proffered.

I do know that left of center editorial board writers are waiting anxiously to plant their progressive hobnailed boots on Mrs. McMahon’s face.

Mrs. McMahon should give them the opportunity to howl and stamp their feet and yelp and moan. People in Connecticut, as she well knows from her glory days in WWE, love a gaudy political show almost as much as they like mud wrestling contests and the soft porn endemic in widely viewed and popular Madonna concerts.

Eat The Rich, A Secular Sermon

Just because President Barrack Obama wants to skin the millionaires, this does not mean that he counts no millionaires among his campaign contributors.

The same fat cat one per centers upon whom Mr. Obama is prepared to shower crony capitalist bucks will undoubtedly contribute lavishly to national Democratic campaigns. And even those who are not so favored will be happy to throw a few hundred thousand into the collection basket as a down payment on Mr. Obama’s elephant ears.

Over the years, the purchasing power of the dollar has declined precipitously, the result of inflation brought on by the unwillingness of presidents and congresses to pay down the national debt with tax increases and spending cuts. For this reason, it takes more worthless greenback to buy ear time and a place at the table.

A million bucks ain’t what it used to be.

Even if all the millionaires in the United States were by some swish of the magic wand to become as greedy, selfish and slothful as Mr. Obama and Connecticut’s Democratic congressional delegation imagine them to be, rivers of campaign contributions from the one percenters would continue to flow into Democratic coffers. Even if Mr. Obama and the three Democratic millionaires in Connecticut’s congressional delegation – U.S. Representatives Rosa DeLauro, among the ten richest legislators in the U.S. House; U.S. Representative Jim Himes, who made his big bucks on Wall Street working for a firm that profited mightily from the sub-prime mortgage collapse; and Senator Richard Blumenthal, who married well – were to invite millionaires to the next Jefferson, Jackson, Bailey fete and cannibalize their assets, campaign funds still would swell the feeder streams that lead to Democratic victories Washington D.C.

Connecticut, as everyone knows, has an abundance of millionaires. Mr. Obama intends to make the eating of millionaires a central part of his political strategy through the eponymous “Buffet Rule,” so named after Warren Buffett, whose secretary is said to have paid more in taxes than the billionaire one percenter. The Buffet Rule, co-sponsored by Mr. Blumenthal, would impose a 30 percent tax rate on all income earned by Americans making more than $1 million a year. This Damoclean sword is not expected to fall upon the necks of the rich anytime soon. A lean and hungry Congress is thinking on it.

Mr. Obama this year escaped flogging as a millionaire because he has been too busy flogging millionaires to write one of his bestselling books, which in the past had pushed him over the edge. Embarrassingly, Mr. Obama’s secretary this year paid more in taxes than the president, according to figures supplied by ABC News.

As a general rule, Americans brought up on the malisons of St. Luke upon the rich – “Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation; woe to you who are full, for you shall hunger” – would be happy enough during our long and agonizing “Made in Washington and Wall Street” crony capitalist recession to see the rich hanging on hooks in Hell.

Demagogic politicians have strummed Luke’s chord for decades. Mr. Obama has been much in the habit of affirming the more recent malisons of President Teddy Roosevelt and his fifth cousin Franklin, both of whom were progressives, one an aspiring and the other a born to the purple millionaire.

“Eat the rich” is politically titillating both as a political platform and a bumper sticker. However, appropriating all the riches of Buffet and other one percenters in the United States would not make a scratch in the country’s National, State and Municipal obligations. When operative, the Buffet Rule is expected to bring in $47 billion to the U.S. Treasury, a drop in an ocean of debt.

Total national debt in dollar terms is expected to double between 2008 and 2015 and will grow to nearly 100% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), a measure of the value of everything produced in the United States. Not included in this projection are Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac obligations; obligations arising from direct investments made in response to the 2000 financial crisis until such time as there is a call on them, and payouts for Medicaid, Social Security and Medicare. Payouts to Medicare Part A (hospital insurance) over the next 75 years will significantly exceed tax revenues and consequently require funding from borrowing or other tax resources.

The eat the rich demagoguery, to be sure, will draw public attention away from a suicidal spending death spiral, and that is its chief purpose. Winning public office is an irresistible consolation for the lean and hungry politician Shakespeare’s Cesar warns us to be wary of.

The members of Connecticut’s progressive congressional delegation, all Democrats, seem content to spout Mr. Obama’s party line in their own election campaigns, seemingly unaware that the bulk of revenue flowing into Connecticut’s coffers has been supplied by the very hedge fund managers they and the president so easily condemn.

Mr. Blumenthal, who seems to be having a difficult time transitioning from his previous position as Connecticut’s Attorney General to Congress, waxes enthusiastic over the Buffet Rule: “This legislation would ensure that people with the highest income -- including millionaires and billionaires -- pay their fair share of taxes. They should pay the same rates as hard-working, middle-class Americans. Unconscionably, current tax loopholes allow the wealthiest Americans who make most of their income from investments to pay a lower tax rate than middle-class families."

A Connecticut Post reporter notes in his story that the bill, “widely seen as a political device that will enable Democrats who vote for the measure to accuse Republicans who vote against it of coddling millionaires,” will be useful as a campaign instrument.

Eat the rich and their taxable income disappears, at which point Main Street is left holding the tax bag. In the absence of spending cuts, it did not take long for the Woodrow Wilson 1913 income tax, a 1 to 7 percent progressive tax levied to reduce crippling tariffs, initially affecting only one percent of the population, to spread from those favored by Wall Street to those taxed on Main Street.

Mr. Dodd's Valedictory Speech

“The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones."

So said Mark Anthony in William Shakespeare’s “Julius Cesar” during Cesar’s funeral oration. Anthony, who took no part in the assassination of Cesar, the bloody work of Brutus and others, all honorable men, was determined that the good Cesar did should not be buried with his bones and that the evil done by his assassins should not outlive them.

U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd’s farewell speech before the senate serves a like purpose. Farewell speeches by senators of long standing and exit interviews recorded in newspapers are like brief autobiographies, and there never yet was an autobiographer who was not the hero of his own reminiscences. Eventually, the encomiums are overwritten by sober historians far removed from the partisan atmosphere that colors all the deeds, evil and good, of their subjects.

Mr. Dodd’s errors in office lie just beneath memory’s skin. His three decades in the senate are hardly ancient history. It may be recalled – though not of course by Mr. Dodd, and especially not in a farewell address to his colleagues in the U.S. Senate -- that Mr. Dodd was the senator who, to speak metaphorically, assassinated the Roosevelt era Glass Steagall Act, a measure that prevented rapacious financial institutions from meddling with the bankbooks of Mr. Dodd’s constituents, as noted by Managing Editor of the Journal Inquirer Chris Powell:

“I suspect,” Mr. Powell noted in an interview a little over a year ago, “that Connecticut's Senate election will be determined more by doubts about Dodd's personal integrity than by doubts about his record, particularly his long subservience to Wall Street. That will be too bad, since, in providing what turned out to be the crucial support for the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act and thereby letting commercial banks and investment houses merge, Dodd bears as much responsibility as anyone for the collapse of the world financial system. His Irish "cottage" and the terms of his mortgages are trivial by comparison, not that those things don't imply his having lost touch with Connecticut, a sense of entitlement as part of the ruling class.”

The crushing Dodd-Frank regulatory bill  may be Mr. Dodd’s feeble attempt at repentance.

It will not be long before the regulations in that bill are offset by exceptions awarded by the commanders of the nation’s new command economy in Washington. Companies too big to fail – Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, for instance, both Government Sponsored Entities (GSEs) responsible for the swelling housing bubble the bursting of which preceded the collapse of the mortgage industry in the United States – always have been able to purchase the ears of congressmen prepared to dole out tax dollars to favored failing enterprises.

Before Mr. Mr. Dodd decided not to run for re-election, the Chairman of the Banking committee, always attentive to opportunities, was hauling in campaign dough from major financial institutions, among them Countrywide, the now bankrupt GSE whose CEO, the odious Angelo Mozillo, regarded Mr. Dodd as a “Friend Of Angelo.” Mr. Dodd recently pointed to a lack of reform in Fannie and Freddie as one of the biggest gaps in the new legislation.

In his Senate Swan Song, Mr. Dodd also lamented that “Powerful financial interests, free to throw money about with little transparency, have corrupted the basic principles underlying our representative democracy. And, as a result, our political system at the federal level is completely dysfunctional."

He signed off by quoting from 2 Timothy 4:1 – “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.”

The author of those words, concerned that Christians following him in later years would “turn away their ears from the truth and will turn aside to myths,” earned his crown of suffering and kept the faith by dying for it. St. Paul suffered martyrdom near Rome at a place called Aquae Salviae (now Tre Fontane), somewhat east of the Ostian Way, about two miles from the splendid Basilica of San Paolo fuori le mura, which marks his burial place.

Mr. Dodd, no doubt, will enjoy a more pleasant end. It has been rumored that Mr. Dodd has been offered a job as chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America. Should Mr. Dodd accept the position, he will earn a handsome salary of a little over a million a year. Should he decline the offer, his future still promises to be more remunerative than that of St. Paul -- and his final years less agonizing.