SUNDAY & MONDAY MUST READS

TWO about the stimulus issue, one about the torture/secrets isssue.

NOTE TO REPUBLICANS AND TV PUNDITS: THE ECHO CHAMBER IS NOT YOUR FRIEND

Frank Rich writes about how Congressional Republicans and flotillas of political pundits, listened to each other instead of the American people (or common sense) regarding the popularity and passage of the stimulus package.

“This town talks to itself and whips itself into a frenzy with its own theories that are completely at odds with what the rest of America is thinking,” [David Axelrod] says. Once the frenzy got going, it didn’t matter that most polls showed support for Obama and his economic package: “If you watched cable TV, you’d see our support was plummeting, we were in trouble. It was almost like living in a parallel universe.”

For Axelrod, the moral is “not just that Washington is too insular but that the American people are a lot smarter than people in Washington think.”

Here’s a third moral: Overdosing on this culture can be fatal. Because Republicans are isolated in that parallel universe and believe all the noise in its echo chamber, they are now as out of touch with reality as the “inevitable” Clinton campaign was before it got clobbered in Iowa. The G.O.P. doesn’t recognize that it emerged from the stimulus battle even worse off than when it started. That obliviousness gives the president the opening to win more ambitious policy victories than last week’s. Having checked the box on attempted bipartisanship, Obama can now move in for the kill.

(By the way, Michael Steele and friends, with their the-government-can’t-create-jobs-the-New-Deal-didn’t-work nonsense, are starting to sound less like run of the mill partisan politicians, and more and more like mouth-frothing Holocaust deniers. )

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THE SLIPPERY SLOPE OF SPECIAL RENDITION SUITS AND “STATE SECRETS”

Last Monday, an Obama administration urged a federal judge in San Francisco not to allow a lawsuit brought by four alleged victims of the Bush Administration’s “extraordinary rendition” program to go forward—because of the “state secrets privilege.”

The LA Times’ Nick Goldberg has done a very even-handed and sober-minded examination of this very disappointing move. He does so as a Q & A—as illustrated by this emblematic snippet:

So the Obama administration — and before it, the Bush administration — were right to stop this case from going forward?

No. But it’s a tough decision. And none of us armchair analysts has seen the double- super-secret information that would supposedly cause such damage if released. Only the government has seen it. Even the plaintiffs haven’t been allowed to see it (and therefore can’t refute the government’s argument with any specifics).

If no one knows the secrets except a handful of government officials, don’t we have to give them the benefit of the doubt?

Absolutely not. There’s a strong case to be made that the Bush administration overused and misused the state secrets privilege. After 9/11, Bush Justice Department officials invoked the privilege dozens of times — far more times a year than any of their predecessors. And they interpreted it expansively, calling for entire cases to be summarily dismissed, rather than merely having specific pieces of classified information withheld from scrutiny.

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YEAH, WELL, ABOUT THAT BI-PARTISANSHIP QUESTION…

In the February 23 issue of the New Yorker that is online now, Hendrik Hertzberg talks about how, as the Congress debated the content and the passage—or not passage—-of the stimulus bill that average Americans hope will throw a life-saving rope to the nation’s drowning economy, one question preoccupied the chattering classes on the cable networks, “especially those desperate for relief from the daunting substance of the matter.” And the question? “Was Barack Obama being ‘bipartisan” enough?”

Some discussed the question calmly, others less so; but there was something like a consensus that if non-trivial numbers of Republican legislators failed to support the stimulus bill the fault, and the obloquy, would be Obama’s. “The bill will be judged a political success not simply if it becomes law, but if it’s deemed ‘bi-partisan,’ ” ABC’s “The Note” Web site warned. The Los Angeles Times, while calling the bill’s quick passage in the House of Representatives a “big legislative victory” for Obama, cautioned that “it was clear that his efforts so far had not delivered the post-partisan era that he called for in his inauguration address.” (The man had been in office for eight days—a tight schedule for era-delivering.) On the Senate floor, the remarks of Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, provided evidence that an age of perpetual political peace had not yet dawned. “This bill stinks!” Senator Graham exclaimed

And here’s how Hertzberg concludes:

Fifty years ago, the civil-rights movement understood that nonviolence can be an effective weapon even if—or especially if—the other side refuses to follow suit. Obama has a similarly tough-minded understanding of the political uses of bipartisanship, which, even if it fails as a tactic for compromise, can succeed as a tonal strategy: once the other side makes itself appear intransigently, destructively partisan, the game is half won. Obama is learning to throw the ball harder. But it’s not Rovian hardball he’s playing. More like Gandhian hardball.

Fine. We can live with that.