Chuck Todd, during today's round table, said that the American people just want to see the Congress do something on the economy replacing the endless gridlock we seem to be having. And everyone realizes that we have to do something and as Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) urged, we have to put everything on the table, to which his counterpart on the right, Senator Lindsey Graham, stated that Republicans are not going to vote on raising taxes. This means, in fact, that everything is not on the table.
Never raising taxes, as we've said in this column numerous times, is an unrealistic position if this country is to ever be genuinely serious about solving our budget problems. However, and there's a big however, Mr. Graham did say that we should end the oil subsidies being doled out by the government to the giant oil companies. In Grover Norquist's world, this is considered a tax hike and is unacceptable. In a reasonable person's world, it's a handout from the government to entities that don't need the assist.
By the way, the ending oil subsidies idea came from Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) standing up with common sense against Mr. Norquist's influence and since Mr. Coburn jumped this fence, we've seen other Republican politicians follow. If this is the way in which we have to tackle our country's revenue intake problem, then at least it's something and a start.
With regard to cuts, we side with Mr. Durbin in that Medicare is a basic promise that the U.S. Government (our politicians) have made to the American people. Medicare is something that by paying taxes we pay into. To cut the benefits later that we pay for now, it literally taking money from us for nothing in return.
At this point, Mr. Gregory asked both Senators if we were headed in the direction of Greece, whose government has made what he termed draconian cuts, which has sparked civil unrest in that country. Both politicians said no, and Mr. Graham pointed out that the 2010 mid-term election was a referendum on spending and the deficit, which was to say that the American people want severe cuts in spending of the Republican variety therefore no civil unrest. As we've previous discussed in this column, the Republicans have misinterpreted the result of this election since the results came in.
But as we know now, the Republicans have in most people's estimation, overreached with the Ryan budget and on local points of scale. For example, in Wisconsin, where Governor Walker stripped union collective bargaining rights. However, soon the people could view what's going on through this prism - the Democrats are ineffectual and the Republicans aren't considering the true human cost of their actions, and so where does that leave us?
Major shifts in spending have to happen for this country to become solvent, and Republicans haven't faced the truth of that. On the other hand, Democrats do not have the necessary unity within the party to fight with a solid voice to re-prioritize where the dollars go.
Right now, many members of Congress are deciding one place where they don't want the dollars to go and that place is to the military effort in Libya. And though this is a North African country, we're all over the map with this place. Politicians from both parties are calling for defunding the NATO effort, and cite the War Powers Act as the reason - the 60-day time limit for the President to act unilaterally has passed and Congress wants answers.
Today, Mr. Graham said that the War Powers Act isn't worth the paper it's print on and that the President should in fact step up his game in Libya. Chuck Todd, during the panel, said that the President did not do his due diligence in telling members of Congress his reasoning on our actions in that country, and that is definitely a mistake. But the conundrum with Libya is that this action is part of a NATO operation, and in that we may have to do things we don't necessarily want to, just as it was correctly pointed out during the panel that we asked our NATO ally Italy to participate in our was in Iraq, which that country did not want to do, but did.
[Aside: In the phrasing of that last sentence, we said "war in Iraq," not war with Iraq. We have three wars going on, and we're at war with no country, just in countries. In WWII we were at war with Germany and Japan, but how times have changed in a more disturbing direction. Using maximum war power force in countries who we're not technically at war with creates a climate of the U.S. at will going into sovereign countries and using military force. This is happening now and if the roles were reversed in some way, where a country arbitrarily came into this country and started shooting things up, how do you think people would react. A bad long-term trend is what we're on here.]
Now, Mr. Gregory pointed out that NATO isn't working in the case of Libya, about which he is correct, but that's most likely because the U.S. hasn't taken the lead and the President with two other wars on his plate, is hesitant to take the lead on this deferring to our NATO allies, who aren't doing a good job. This is probably because they are now so used to the United States doing the heavy lifting that now that they're asked to do it, they're not quite prepared.
Senator Graham continued by saying that he wanted to see U.S. air power back into the mix, a view that is shared by Senator John McCain (R-AZ). There is no question that Republican Senators would like to see Col. Quadafi out of the picture. As pointed out during the panel, Libya is not going well for NATO, but the United States will kill NATO if it doesn't support this action, which brings us to Robert Gates' citation that the Republicans in particular do not have consensus on the United States' role in the world. It makes us think of leading by example, which the United States certainly does not do, we're more like do as I say, not as I do, at least right now we are.
And the news maker for the day was when Senator Graham warned Republican candidates that if they try to go left of President Obama on Afghanistan, Libya, or Iraq, that that position will certainly be a loser because that's not a Republican position. But the Republican candidates seemed more in an isolationist stance collectively on Monday night's debate.
Former Governor Romney said that only the Afghanis can win their freedom, to which Richard Engel, making a rare stateside appearance said that if you're going to make decisions on foreign policy, you better know that the people are Afghans and the currency is Afghani. The fact is that the Republican candidates don't care about such details. But Mr. Romney has shown that he'll say anything as long as it is politically expedient and that's why people aren't really excited by his candidacy - this from the solid front runner as Mr. Todd termed him.
Getting back to the macro look for a moment, Richard Engel called Secretary Gates' statement on one of his reasons for retiring chilling. And if you think about it, it is in fact very disconcerting what Mr. Gates said, which was that because of our economy, we do not have the ability to lead the world and that he didn't want to be part of that. In other words, our longest tenured Secretary of Defense doesn't want to represent us, our military, around the world because we can not get our shit together here at home.
And speaking of which, it was very helpful to have Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa from Los Angeles on the program because he does have his finger on the pulse of what cities face, and it all starts with our cities. He posed the proposition that if we had the $126 billion that we spend on the war in Afghanistan for domestic purpose, think what we could do, given the local budget crises we have around the country. His perspective was grounding and should be noted - he said that when Washington is focused on scandal, it feels like that city is coming from another planet. He also pointed out that Washington politicians contemplating defaulting on our debt do not have any idea what that would do to the economy, where we interpreted as 'local economies and people's pocketbooks.'
Given the content above, are we Greece as we posed in the title of this week's column. The answer is no, but we're more going the way of Brasil. In Brasil, there are many nice houses and apartments and living standards for a segment of the population are quite good. But after the churrasco and capirinhas, take a walk to the edge of the lush property, look across the street and down the hill, and what do you see? Shanties for a mile. A little over-dramatization? We'll concede, but at least Brasil is trying to move away from this direction instead of moving toward it.
Round Table: President-elect of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, Antonio Villaraigosa, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page editor Paul Gigot, Presidential Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, NBC Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel and NBC Chief White House Correspondent Chuck Todd
Presidential Politics:
On today's show as per usual, there was the discussion of Presidential candidates, most notably Former Governor of Minnesota, Tim Pawlenty, and current Texas Governor, Rick Perry. In terms of what was discussed today, here's our quick take.
Tim Pawlenty during Monday's debate backed away from his 'Obamneycare' when face to face with Governor Romney himself. Plain and simple, Mr. Pawlenty wimped out, and then admitted as much in the days following. Here it is - he's done, no shot at winning - contributing to his campaign is wasting your money. America doesn't elect wimps, period.
With regard to Rick Perry, it seems that pundit and media land are salivating for him to get in the race. If Mr. Perry does decide to get in the race, he would get a huge push and would look great for a longer period of time than the others running now, but Mr. Perry has too many flaws. One is beyond his control, which is Texas fatigue - social conservative politicians from Texas are not the desired flavor of the Buck Country wealthy Republicans of the northeast as Ms. Godwin pointed out. Secondly, Mr. Perry has his August 6th National Day of Prayer coming up. We find this notion of mixing religion and politics so closely as Mr. Perry is doing, is in direction contradiction to the United States Constitution and frankly, we find that a little scary. We point out Iran's religious dogmatic approach to world relations so why do we want to go there? One religion is better than the other? In the end, Mr. Perry has some extreme views that will cause a potential candidacy to be unsuccessful - such as suggesting at one point that Texas secede from the Union. To reference Bill Maher, you can't run the United States, if you don't believe in the 'united' part.
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