September 30, 2008

9/30: Bailout Fallout

Political bloggers on the left and right were both pleased (for the most part) that the House rejected the $700 billion bailout bill. On the left side of the blogosphere, a number of bloggers view the bill's defeat as an opportunity for progressives. They're urging Dem lawmakers to forget about getting GOP votes and instead pass a more progressive bill on a party-line vote, essentially daring President George W. Bush to veto it. Other lefty bloggers are concerned about the political ramifications of the Dems taking ownership of such an unpopular piece of legislation.

On the right side of the blogosphere, most bloggers are blaming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for the bill's defeat. That said, several conservative bloggers agree with their liberal counterparts that this was a major political blow to John McCain, considering that he suspended his campaign in an effort to save the negotiations.

$700 BILLION BAILOUT: Yes, It Deserved To Die, And I Hope It Burns In Hell!

Most liberal bloggers are pleased that the bailout bill failed:

• Daily Kos' Markos Moulitsas: "I'm glad this thing failed. The right and left may have had different reasons for voting this bill down, but fact is, the 'consensus center' rushed into this bill with little transparency or public input deserved to die. Was this the right bill? Maybe, maybe not. but we certainly didn't have a fair debate on it. Some of you may be quick to trust your representatives in DC. I'm not willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. On the merits, the bill fell short. The CEO compensation provision was a joke, the oversight provisions were a joke, Congress had no ability to block additional disbursement of the money without an affirmative vote (subject to filibusters), and not a dime was directed at average Americans. It was a reverse Robin Hood -- the largest transfer of wealth in our nation's history from the working class to the upper class. And transferring that wealth to healthy financial institutions and foreign ones was morally repugnant."
• Firedoglake's Ian Welsh: "The bill has failed. Good. It deserved to die. There are two considerations at this point. The first is to get through the next three months. [Treasury Sec. Henry] Paulson, in testimony admitted that all 700 billion wouldn't be spent right away. So give him 150 billion and only that, to him. While I doubt he exactly 'needs' it, he and [Fed Chair Ben] Bernanke must not be given an excuse for engaging in a fit of pique now that their pet bill went down, and 'proving' that disaster would occur without it. [...] The next step is to start working on defining what a good bill would look like for January."
• MyDD's Natasha Chart: "Congress listened to their constituents today, instead of to the absolutely terrified financial elites."
• Daily Kos' mcjoan: "The message members of Congress and candidates is getting is very clear. Right now, they're listening, which is pretty much what representatives are supposed to do."
• Atrios: "Let it fail. If something really needs to be done, tell Paulson, the Republicans, and the Bush Dogs to eat shit and pass a bill Democrats can support."
• Salon's Glenn Greenwald: "The economy and the markets are clearly in severe distress, and some form of Government action is needed. I don't think anyone denies that. But this was the wrong deal..."

Open Left's Chris Bowers thinks Congress should wait until the next administration before passing a bailout bill: "Politically speaking, any bailout bill passed between now and January 19th will require Bush's signature, and siding with Bush will do Democrats more political harm than good. Economically speaking, any bill that gives the Bush administration this much money and power will cause more economic harm than waiting 113 days to allow [Barack] Obama to deal with the problem. As such, it is not just politically sensible, but it is also economically sensible to wait until the next administration in order to act. My solution is simple: stop negotiating with Bush altogether and make the election a referendum on what sort of economic plan to pass. The public would overwhelmingly back such a move, as polling shows."

$700 BILLION BAILOUT II: On The Other Hand...

A few liberal bloggers felt differently about the bill's failure:

• Mother Jones' Kevin Drum: "An awful lot of people really, really still don't get it. I swear, if I hear one more blogger or pundit suggesting that maybe it's actually a good thing the bailout bill failed because now we have a chance to pass an even better bill, I'm going to scream. [...] Do you know the old saying about credit? 'It's like oxygen. You don't know how much you need it until it's gone.' We're about to go into financial hypoxia, and it's not the millionaires who are going to suffer most from this."
• FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver: "The schadenfreude of certain liberals on this issue is absolutely obnoxious. A lot of people are going to be hurt by this, and not just those in the investor class. I tend to see this more as a failure of our democracy than a reaffirmation of it. The congressmen who are retiring this year -- and who therefore can perhaps be described as the most neutral arbiters of the public good -- voted overwhelmingly for this measure."

Open Left's Matt Stoller disagrees with Silver: "Why would retiring Congressmen who do not have to face the voters but might have to face Wall Street recruiters be neutral arbiters of the public good? Why is it bad that candidates in tight elections voted against this bill for political reasons? Isn't that how we decide stuff? [...] This bill was unpopular and hated because the people proposing it do not have the faith of the public to write honest laws or carry them out. That is the problem, not partisanship or an excess of democracy."

$700 BILLION BAILOUT III: An Opportunity For Progressives?

Many liberal bloggers are urging Dem lawmakers to forget about getting GOP votes and instead focus on writing a more progressive bill that could pass the House with Dem votes alone:

• Think Progress' Matthew Yglesias: "Given that the House GOP didn't deliver the 80 (or whatever) votes that Democrats were making substantive concessions in order to achieve, now I really don't see why the Democratic leadership doesn't tear this thing up and start writing a progressive bill. Not only might that produce a good outcome in the end, but it also seems to me like the thing that would be most likely to convince recalcitrant House Republicans to get with the program in order to preempt something more left-wing."
• The Washington Monthly's Steve Benen: "The House Republican caucus has proven itself to be...what's the phrase I'm looking for...stark raving mad. So why bother working to make radicals happy? The Democratic leadership could scrap yesterday's bill, put together a truly progressive package, and pass it with or without Republican support. The Senate might be trickier, but if Dems could overcome a filibuster, the president might, under these circumstances, not want to risk a veto."
• TalkLeft's Big Tent Democrat: "The GOP and McCain do not want the bipartisan bailout solution. Fair enough. Then it is time for the DEM bailout bill. With HOLC, a stimulus package, rigorous oversight of Paulson, equity stakes in the bailoutees, and everything the Democratic caucus thinks is necessary now. Pass it on a party line vote. [...] The House Republicans do not want to be a part of this bipartisan short term bailout solution? Fair enough. Then Bush has to take the Dem bailout solution."
• Mark Kleiman: "Now's the time to pull the bill, go back to committee, write a new bill financing the whole thing with a transactions tax, and pass it with only Democratic votes. It shouldn't be a hard sell to make Wall Street pay for bailing out Wall Street. And the Senate Republicans and the White House are pretty much stuck with whatever the House passes."
• digby: "The Democrats should set forth a real progressive plan -- a New Deal for the 21st century."

MyDD's Jerome Armstrong doesn't like the idea of Dems taking ownership of this bill: "Get more Democrats on board? [This] makes it even more of a Democrat-Bush thing and less of a Republican bill. Not great politics, even worse if its Obama that gets involved. And who's to say that if they do get more Democrats on board, that more Republicans go ahead and bail?"

Ezra Klein doesn't think this will happen: "The likely outcome here is not, so far as I can tell, an aggressively liberal bill. The defecting Democrats look to be Blue Dogs -- which is to say, somewhat conservative, generally vulnerable, Democrats -- and members of the Black and Hispanic caucuses. A more liberal bill might get the latter two. It will lose 90 Republican votes. It won't get the Blue Dogs. And you'll lose a few dozen more Democrats who needed the bipartisan cover. My hunch is leadership is relying on market chaos to turn a few votes and trying to figure out the mixture of cosmetic changes and superficial giveaways that will push them over the finish line. I'd like to believe we're about to see a much better bill, but I rather doubt it."

On the right side of the blogosphere, Jim Geraghty applauds this scenario: "If House Democrats want to pass a left-wing, ACORN-heavy, union-proxies, salary-setting bill, fine. Let Senate Democrats pass that one, too. Let Barack Obama go on record in favor of it. At the heart, the rescue plan is a phenomenally unpopular proposal that is necessary to avert disaster that, for some reason, the public doesn't quite think is real yet. Let the Democrats pass the bill and let the unpopular Bush sign it. The Republicans running for House and Senate -- and McCain, for that matter -- can denounce it until their throats are hoarse every day from now until Election Day. Every voter will no that at a moment when most Americans were struggling, the Democrats voted along party lines to 'bail out Wall Street.' The bailout might save Wall Street, and ensure a Republican tsunami on Election Day to strip out the worst parts of the bill in 2009..."

$700 BILLION BAILOUT IV: Capitalism Lives Another Day

Many conservative bloggers were pleased that the bailout bill failed:

• Townhall's Amanda Carpenter: "Capitalism lives another day."
• NRO's Mark Levin: "[I] want to thank the House Republicans for taking a bold stand against what had been a stampede on a scale I have never before witnessed on matters of huge consequence. [...] The liberal uses crises, real or manufactured, to expand the power of government at the expense of the individual and private property. He has spent, in earnest, 70 years evading the Constitution's limits on governmental power. If conservatives don't stand up to this, who will? If they don't offer serious alternatives that address the current circumstances AND defend the founding principles, who will? The House Republicans have done both. And I, for one, thank them."
• Michelle Malkin: "The Crap Sandwich goes down in flames. [...] Imagine if [the GOP leadership] had been on the right side of this monster. They could be claiming victory, seizing the momentum, and advancing the conservative agenda. Instead, they're complaining about Nancy Pelosi's partisan attack on the floor."
• Right Wing News' John Hawkins: "What we have here are large numbers of liberals who don't like the bill because it's not socialistic enough and thank goodness, 2/3 of the Republicans were fiscally conservative enough to reject socialism and stick up for the taxpayers."
• RedState's Erick Erickson: "I'm a bit gobsmacked that conservative pundits who supported the bailout are attacking members of Congress for listening to their constituents. Amazing how representative democracy worked well today and that's not good enough for some people. [...] Does it really hurt Republicans that the media is blaming the GOP for killing something the public did not want anyway?"
• AmSpec Blog's Robert Stacy McCain: "The basic politics of the bailout resembles nothing so much as the immigration reform measures that Crazy Cousin John twice tried to shove through the Senate. It was one of those 'elite consensus' deals, fiercely opposed by ordinary Americans. It's eat-your-broccoli politics -- the condescending Washington-knows-best message that seeks to impose top-down solutions and treats voters as an obstacle to progress. You cannot win elections by campaigning against the people."

Other righty bloggers were concerned about the bill's failure:

• Power Line's Paul Mirengoff: "There's a conservative case for voting in favor of this legislation [...]. There's also a conservative case for voting 'No,' and I respect those conservatives who did so. But under the circumstances -- including the prospect that the Dems will pass significantly worse bailout legislation down the road -- I think the conservative vote today should have been 'Yes.'"
• Townhall's Carol Platt Liebau: "House Republicans have shown themselves to be gamblers. If all of this turns out all right despite the absence of a bill, kudos to them. But it's a big gamble. If the economy now tanks, they will be blamed, unfairly or not. [...] All the stuff about Pelosi's partisan speech and the fact she couldn't bring along more than 60% of her caucus won't matter. What voters will remember (and what they will be told) is that Democrats took a hard vote to avert disaster; Republicans refused. It will be a huge setback not only for the GOP brand, but more importantly, for free market principles, which will appear to have failed. And then good luck averting even worse legislation than this was."

$700 BILLION BAILOUT V: It's Pelosi's Fault!

Many conservative bloggers are joining the House GOP leadership in blaming Pelosi for the bill's failure:

• Townhall's Hugh Hewitt: "The GOP House leadership is now bluntly declaring what everyone who followed the story today knows: Nancy Pelosi killed the bailout bill with a blistering attack on Republicans just prior to the start of the vote. The Speaker cost millions of Americans hundreds of millions in retirement savings today because she could not resist using her position to slam her political opponents even after they had met her more than half way. [...] Wall Street didn't collapse today. The House of Representatives did. And Pelosi is its leader. She should be fired. Vote against every Democrat."
• RedState's Pejman Yousefzadeh: "Nancy Pelosi and the House Democratic leadership misread the mood of their caucus and the mood of the House. The bill failed as a consequence. Despite the fact that Democrats are in the majority, Pelosi & Co. can't count votes correctly and can't run Congress at a time of crisis. That's why the bailout plan failed."
• The Atlantic's Megan McArdle: "Pelosi screwed up royally. She is the Democratic Tom DeLay. Newt Gingrich was an ideologue, but Tom DeLay was simply a partisan, most keenly interested in maximizing his party's political power. Pelosi cut a deal in which, as far as I can tell, every single Republican in a safe seat had to vote yes so that the Democrats could maximize their no votes. Given that the Republican caucus is pretty much in open revolt, this was beyond moronic. She then spent a week openly and repeatedly blaming the Republicans and the Bush administration for the current crisis. The way she set things up, it was 'Heads I win, tails you lose': vote for the deal and I'll paint you as heartless reactionaries bailing out your fat cat friends. If you're going to do that, you'd better make sure you have some goddamn margin for error in your own party. She didn't. Then she got up and delivered yet another speech blaming the Republicans for the bailout deal she was about to pass."
• Power Line's John Hinderaker: "This is a classic Charlie Brown and the football maneuver. Pelosi gives a speech that frames the issue, falsely, as the result of bad Republican policies, then allows her own threatened representatives to do the popular thing while expecting Republicans to take one for the team by casting an unpopular vote. Which, of course, their Democratic opponents would use against them, thereby increasing the Democratic majority in the House. If this was Pelosi's plan it failed, in part, perhaps, because her over-the-top partisan diatribe tipped off Republicans as to what was afoot."
• RedState's Moe Lane: "Either Nancy Pelosi knew that the vote was going to fail yesterday, or she didn't. If she didn't know, then the failure of passage can directly laid at her uncritical willingness to permit her own caucus to slide on an unpopular vote, while doing less than nothing to bring in equally-concerned Republicans -- which could be seen as another way of calling her a blithering incompetent fool. If she did know, then she lied, to all of us, and is currently risking the health of the American economic system for partisan political gain."
• Robert Stacy McCain: "This is a classic example of Pelosi's failed 'leadership.' She could deliver only 60% percent of her own caucus and, needing Republican votes to pass what she said was an emergency bailout, she decided this would be a perfect occasion to score partisan points."

$700 BILLION BAILOUT VI: Don't Blame Nancy's Speech

Other righty bloggers think it's foolish to blame the bill's failure on Pelosi's speech:

• Townhall's Matt Lewis: "I applaud conservatives who opposed this bill on ideological grounds. [...] However, if Republicans think the American people will side with them on voting 'no' -- because they were upset with Pelosi's speech -- I think they are terribly mistaken. Personal slights and 'snubs' should not influence ones vote on an important issue such as this. A congressman's decision to vote for -- or against -- the bill should be based solely on whether or not they believe it is best for the country. Pelosi's remarks should be irrelevant."
• Geraghty: "I'm not buying this 'Pelosi's speech turned Republicans against it' argument. Either you think the bill is worthwhile (or that the cost of inaction is greater than the cost of action) and you vote for it, or you don't. Somebody else's speech is a lousy reason to change a vote on an issue as big as this..."
• Hot Air's Allahpundit: "There are, conceivably, good reasons to vote against a bailout in a national emergency -- if you think it'll do more economic harm than good, if you think it accrues too much unchecked power to the executive -- but being honked off at Nancy is not one of them."
• Liebau: "I'm concerned about the ramifications of this vote, as I noted below, but I can respect any member -- who's knowledgeable about the economy and aware of the risks involved, that is -- who opposed the bill on its merits. I can't respect someone who puts Nancy Pelosi's words above a sense of where his/her duty lies."

MCCAIN: Epic Fail

Liberal bloggers believe that the bailout bill's failure represents an enormous defeat for McCain, since he suspended his campaign in order to get the bill passed:

• TPM's David Kurtz: "Whatever you think about the substance of McCain's bizarre campaign suspension so he could single-handedly save the economy, his gambit now looks like a disaster, judged on its own political terms."
• Firedoglake's watertiger: "After melodramatically 'suspending' his campaign last week to rush back to Washington -- well, okay, to his campaign office in Arlington -- to save the Wall Street bailout negotiations -- well, okay, to make dinner reservations Saturday night with the Liebermans at a four-star restaurant in D.C., John McCain got to watch his latest campaign publicity stunt crash and burn with the same fiery elan as those four Navy jets he piloted."
• MyDD's Todd Beeton: "Remember what John McCain's campaign claimed he was bringing to the table by going to Washington to 'solve the crisis'? [...] His results speak for themselves. Great work, John!"
• Benen: "McCain 'suspended' his campaign to get this bill to the floor -- and then it failed because his friends didn't like it. It's a fiasco that's going to be hard to live down."
• Daily Kos' DemFromCT: "The job of the leader is to deliver the votes. And whether you think it should or should not have passed, John McCain failed miserably as a bipartisan 'leader', though he had no hesitation to prematurely take credit for it."

Liberal bloggers are also mocking McCain because "[he] and his top aides took credit for building a winning bailout coalition -- hours before the vote failed and stocks tanked":

• dday: "The guy who suspended his campaign to race back to Washington to save the economy, who then took credit for showing the leadership to get it passed, ended up bragging about passage before it ever happened."
• Oliver Willis: "Like Bush in Iraq, John McCain declared victory before the war was over."
• Daily Kos' BarbinMD: "John McCain and his minions repeatedly took credit for delivering the bailout bill, but when it came time to vote, the Republican Party threw McCain under the bus and refused to support the plan. This is a massive failure of leadership on the part of John McCain, not to mention a large dose of hubris."

MCCAIN II: Crashing And Burning

Several conservative bloggers agree with liberal bloggers that the bill's defeat is bad for McCain:

• NRO's Ramesh Ponnuru: "This vote is very bad for McCain. He was trying to get House Republicans on board, after all, and he failed. Blaming the Democrats for the failure will not and should not work, given the ratios on both sides."
• AmSpec Blog's Philip Klein: "In the immediate term, I think this hurts McCain. He made such a show of suspending his campaign so that he could go to Washington, bring the two parties together, and get things done. The fact that everything collapsed undermines that argument. Furthermore, the longer the stock market is in turmoil and Americans are uncertain about the economy, the harder it will be for McCain to win, because, fair or not, the public holds Republicans responsible for this mess."

Several conservative bloggers believe that McCain made a mistake in suspending his campaign in order to try to broker a compromise on the Hill:

• The Next Right's Patrick Ruffini: "McCain dramatically overestimated his ability to control the battle space with a single grand maneuver. It was the starkest example in recent history of a candidate gambling -- and with seemingly no frickin' clue what would happen at that -- and coming up short."
• Right Wing News' John Hawkins: "How does McCain handle the crisis? First off, he says he's suspending his campaign, canceling the debate, and heading to Washington to work on the crisis. The Democrats immediately called that a cheap stunt. When McCain later inexplicably changed his mind and did the debate anyway, he proved them right. It was a foolish, indecisive move and it didn't help his campaign. Additionally, after McCain made this big show of going back to Capitol Hill, what did he do while he was there? He didn't take a strong position on the bill. He didn't lead. He didn't do anything different from any of the other 'leaders' up on the Hill. [...] Unless John McCain does something differently, I'm afraid this bill is going to sink his candidacy."

THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Why McCain Lost The Debate

The Atlantic's Ross Douthat re-examines his earlier view that McCain won Friday's debate:

"...On points, McCain may have won a lot of the exchanges, and I still think his attacks on Obama were stronger than Obama's attacks on him, but nothing he dinged his opponent on -- from pork-barrel spending to meeting with [Iranian Pres. Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad to being slow to come around to the same position as McCain on Russia's invasion of Georgia -- was big enough or immediate enough to undercut the basic respectability of Obama's performance, and the air of moderation, caution and sanity he projected. If the two men had gone into the debate on equal footing, I suspect my read on the evening would have been on the money (he said, defensively). But they didn't, and it wasn't: Obama needed to seem like a reasonable man and plausible President, and McCain needed to make Obama seem like a neophyte, and incompetent, and/or a lefty radical, and only one of the two of them got the job done."

LEST WE FORGET: Members Of Twisted Sister Now Willing To Take It

From The Onion:

"NEW YORK -- In a stunning reversal of their long-stated reluctance to take it, members of heavy-metal band Twisted Sister announced Monday that, after 24 years of fervent refusal, they are now willing to take it. 'I acknowledge that we promised not to take it anymore, but things change. The world is a different place today, and with that in mind, we would like to go on record as saying that, starting right now, we are going to take it,' read a statement released by the band's lead singer, Dee Snyder. 'To clarify, we would still prefer not to take it, but as of now, taking it is an option that we would be open to. That is all.' Bassist Mark 'the Animal' Mendoza also stated that, in regards to what he wants to do with his life, he no longer solely wants to rock, but would instead prefer doing other things, such as raising a family and working as a claims adjuster in Rye, NY."

Posted by Ian Faerstein at September 30, 2008 01:24 PM