Re: Krugman on Rove

[Clifford Poirot <cpoirot@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Gore lost W.Va., a state he should have carried. Gore also lost Ohio, a
state he could have won. The decaying steel industry is an issue in both
states. The other issue was gun control. Of course, there is no use in
Monday morning quarterbacking.

-----Original Message-----
From: Henry C.K. Liu [mailto:hliu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Tuesday, June 11, 2002 8:11 PM
To: pkt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx; gang8@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx;
TheNewForum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx; a-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Krugman on Rove


When economists talk politics, they move from the the obscure to the
rediculous.

Delong's claim that Clinton went out on a limb to alienate the labor
vote was a triumph of principle over politics was pure spin.  The
calculation in the clinton camp was that labor had no place to go and
therefore could be ignored.  The driving force in the adminstration re
NAFTA was Rubin, who assured Wall Street funding if Clinton supported
NAFTA.  No doubt many on the Clinton economic team  truly believed they
were doing the right things as Krugman said, but believing the wrong
thing to be right is no merit for any econmists.

Krugman wrote: "If Bill Clinton had given the steel industry the tariffs
it wanted, Al Gore would probably be living in the White House. But
administration officials actually worried about the consequences - for
the nation, and for the world economy - of giving in to special
interests."  As I remember, the steel states were not hotly contested
states in the last election. Th pivotal state was Florida, where Cuban
and Jewish votes were critical.

Clinton's second term was bought with considerable political
backpedalling, told to a prostitute by his counterpart of Karl Rove.

As for Karl Rove,  see the following:

Karl Rove's Wedges
By Harold Meyerson
Issue Date: 4.8.02

Print Friendly | Email Article
Some doctrinaire conservatives are growing a bit cranky over the
ideological impurities of George W. Bush. California Republicans
rebelled when he promoted the candidacy of Richard Riordan -- Horrors!
An electable moderate! -- for governor. Free-market ideologues blanched
when he supported protections for the steel industry. "Steel tariffs are
not just anti-market," grumped Sebastian Mallaby in The Washington Post.
"They make no sense on their own terms."

Actually, they make sense and then some. Karl Rove -- the man behind the
curtain in all matters political at the Bush White House -- understands
all too well that busting up the Democratic coalition and building an
enduring conservative majority in the United States requires the
administration to build any number of alliances with its ideological
opposites. While the Democrats remain devoid of any strategic direction,
Rove is busy developing a whole new series of wedge issues to pick them
apart.

Much was made during the 2000 campaign of Rove's appreciation of Mark
Hanna, the late-nineteenth-century industrialist who, as the political
genius of the McKinley operation, remade the Republican Party. Hanna not
only persuaded the CEOs of his day to invest mightily in the party, he
also dashed the designs of the William Jennings Bryan Democrats to
restructure American politics along lines of class. Running against
McKinley in 1896, Bryan began with a base of support among farmers and
sought to bring industrial workers to his column as well. Hanna's
strategy was to align voters not by class but by sector. Industrialists
and urban workers both benefited from the tariffs that McKinley
championed, though Bryan's farmers most certainly did not. Even though
those industrialists paid their workers a miserably low wage, Hanna
found common ground between these two conflicting classes -- and there
built a Republican coalition that lasted for more than 30 years.

Follow the Bush White House over the past few months and it's apparent
that Rove grows more Hanna-like by the week. At bottom, the
administration remains the pluperfect expression of class politics:
crafting a tax cut for the wealthy, bailing out airlines but not their
workers, pushing fast track. But Rove knows that an administration
devoted solely to the care and feeding of the rich is not politically
sustainable. So he's developed a series of discrete policies that appeal
to distinct groups in the electorate by sector.

The steel tariff is one of these. It runs counter to the
administration's overall free-trade policies, but it also stands to
erode Democrats' support among unionized industrial workers in such
swing states as Ohio, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania.

Immigration policy is another of Rove's sectoral opportunities. It's
also a necessity: Rove has long been convinced -- rightly -- that absent
a successful outreach strategy to the fast-growing Latino electorate,
Republicans are doomed. Since the opening days of the administration,
Rove has concentrated particularly on liberalizing immigration policy
with Mexico -- and not even the clamor for greater border security since
September 11 has deterred him from his mission. As with the steel
tariff, he's been dealing with a business-labor coalition: businesses in
search of more immigrant workers, unions bent on organizing them.

As a result not just of September 11 but also the recession, the
domestic pressure to increase immigration has waned, but the Republicans
are still negotiating with unions and other immigrant advocates for more
modest liberalizations. Consequently, Congress is now poised to extend
an amnesty covering many thousands of undocumented immigrants, and to
make legal immigrant students eligible for Pell Grants.

What Rove is doing is coming up with a new generation of wedge issues.
Bill Clinton took all the old GOP favorites -- crime and welfare in
particular -- off the table. Rove is responding by finding new ways to
pick apart the Democratic base -- and with party strength so evenly
divided, it doesn't take much to tip the balance one way or the other.

Rove's strategic initiatives stand in sharp contrast to the Democrats'
torpor. While Rove has shown himself willing and able to deviate from
core GOP policy to cut into the Democratic base, the Democrats have been
unable even to formulate a core policy, let alone deviate from it.
Uncertain whether to stand for fiscal discipline or a real
prescription-drug benefit, divided over how and whether to question the
president on our expanding and amorphous war, paralyzed by the tax cut
that all too many of them voted for, they call to mind Lincoln's
description of a Union general in the aftermath of a battlefield defeat.
The general, Lincoln said, was wandering around "confused and stunned
like a duck hit on the head."

That's our Democrats. Alas, that's not Karl Rove.
Harold Meyerson

The Rove Doctrine

By PAUL KRUGMAN


    ome months ago an academic colleague - a man with strong Democratic
    connections - urged me to write a couple of columns praising the
Bush administration. "What should I praise?" I asked.
There was a long pause - funny, isn't it, how "balance" becomes a goal
in itself? - but eventually he came up with something: "How about its
commitment to free trade?"
Ahem. In fact, George W. Bush has turned out to be quite protectionist.
The steel tariff and the farm bill attracted the most attention, but
they are part of a broader picture that includes the punitive (and
almost completely unjustified) tariff on Canadian softwood lumber and
the revocation of Caribbean trade privileges. When it comes to free
trade, the Bush administration is all for it - unless there is some
political cost, however small, to honoring its alleged principles.
Which brings me to the story that has Washington's political groupies
twittering: that Esquire article in which the White House chief of
staff, Andy Card, frets that with the moderating influence of Karen
Hughes gone, the hard-liner Karl Rove will run the show. If the past 18
months have been what policy looks like with Mr. Rove only partly in
control, one shudders to think what comes next.
For the most distinctive feature of Mr. Rove's modus operandi is not his
conservatism; it's his view that the administration should do whatever
gives it a political advantage. This includes, of course, exploiting the
war on terrorism - something Mr. Rove has actually boasted about. But it
also includes coddling special interests.
One of Bill Clinton's underappreciated virtues was his considerable
idealism when it came to economic policy. The Berkeley economist Brad
DeLong lauded Mr. Clinton's "record of being willing to take major
political risks in order to do what he thinks is right for the country
as far as international economic policy is concerned." What he had in
mind was the way Mr. Clinton went out on a limb, defying the polls and
reaching across party lines, to pass the North American Free Trade
Agreement in 1993, and the even bigger risks he took to rescue Mexico
from its financial crisis in 1995. Like Mr. DeLong, I know some of the
key players in both of those decisions, and I'm sure that they were
taken on the merits: the Clintonites really, truly believed they were
doing the right thing.
That scrupulousness continued to the end. If Bill Clinton had given the
steel industry the tariffs it wanted, Al Gore would probably be living
in the White House. But administration officials actually worried about
the consequences - for the nation, and for the world economy - of giving
in to special interests.
Mr. Rove's administration has no use for such niceties. The deals don't
stop with trade and farm subsidies. As analysts at the Cato Institute
point out, the Bush-Cheney energy plan may have been conservative in the
sense that it was anti-environmentalist, but otherwise it was stuffed
full of things free-marketeers are supposed to abhor: expanded
government power to seize private land (for transmission lines), large
tax incentives for energy sources that don't pay their way at market
prices (nuclear power in particular). The energy plan wasn't about
principles; it was about payback.
And if the administration won't take a stand on principle, who will? I
was particularly struck by a story in the newspaper The Hill titled
"Unions taking fresh look at G.O.P." It quoted the U.A.W. spokesman
saying his union was "looking beyond party labels" to where politicians
stand "on certain issues." In other words, his union will go with
whoever caters to its special interests.
To some extent we've been here before. Paula Stern, the former head of
the International Trade Commission, matter-of-factly describes Ronald
Reagan as "the most protectionist president since Herbert Hoover," and
says that he "legitimized efforts by powerful industries to use
political muscle - not necessarily economic merit or legal criteria" to
get what they wanted. So in a way Mr. Bush is following in Mr. Reagan's
footsteps.
But it seems to me that it's worse this time - that we are witnessing a
race to the bottom in interest-driven politics, taking us to depths not
seen since before the New Deal. And if that Esquire story is to be
believed, it's about to get even worse. Smoot-Hawley, anyone?