The "All-In" Mentality

I'm not much of a poker player. For a few years, I played in a friendly local game, low stakes: the most anyone could lose in an evening was $10, and if that happened, you got to play for free until you won a hand. The games were often high-low, which encouraged you to play out your hand, no matter how bad it might initially seem.

On a couple of occasions, I've also played some Texas Hold 'Em. It's a different kind of game. Often, the smartest move is to fold right away and hope for a better deal on the next hand. Alternatively, you might want to go "all-in," and bet everything you have.

Now, I was never a good Texas Hold 'Em player, so I might get this wrong, but it seemed to me there were basically three reasons you might go all-in: 1) your read of the cards tells you there is a really low probability that anyone else has a better hand; 2) your read of the players is that they can easily be bluffed into folding, even if they have better hands than you do; or 3) you are desperate, and figure you've got nothing to lose.

On the day when Jon Huntsman folded his campaign, the "all-in" mentality came to mind. Huntsman, in my reading, was not an all-in kind of candidate (though I suppose one could characterize his singular focus on New Hampshire that way). When Mitt Romney reduced the America's China policy to a simple matter of getting tough in the last New Hampshire debate, for example, Huntsman answered with a more nuanced approach, citing the complexities of the US-China relationship, and said (in Mandarin!) that Romney simply didn't know what he was talking about.

These Republican primaries are no place for that kind of candidate. It's a year for going all-in.

Take Rick Perry's ridiculous comments recently about the disgraceful video of American Marines urinating on dead Taliban fighters. Perry condemned the Obama administration for "over-the-top rhetoric ... and their disdain for the military." Note the mindset Perry betrays with that remark. For him, criticizing the actions of any servicemen for even a reprehensible act shows "disdain for the military." (He repeated those comments at last night's Republican debate, in which he also said that desecration of American corpses is "despicable" while desecration of Afghan corpses is a "mistake.")

Compare that with the words of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army Gen. Martin Dempsey: “Actions like those are not only illegal but are contrary to the values of a professional military and serve to erode the reputation of our joint force,” Dempsey said. 

Perry is either too stupid or too blinded by his all-in mindset to understand that criticism of such egregious acts, even calling them illegal, does not show disdain for the military. On the contrary, it is Perry who is truly showing disdain for the military by downplaying the incident, and suggesting that it is not unusual. He tried to minimize the incident, saying "there’s a picture of General Patton doing basically the same thing in the Rhine River." Perry evidently doesn't know the difference between a river and a human corpse.

This is what the current tribal politics of the Republican Party produces in dim bulbs like Perry: an absurd reflex to condemn any criticism of the "core values." If the military is good, no criticism can be broached; all criticism signals "disdain."

Others are just as guilty. Take Romney's repeated assertion that every question about the business practices of Bain Capital constitutes "putting free markets on trial." Effectively, he is saying there are no legitimate questions, and asking one makes you an enemy of capitalism. He evinced the same attitude when asked if any questions about income inequality in America were legitimate, and he dismissed them all as "envy." At last night's debate, Romney said he would not negotiate with the Taliban, because you never negotiate with people who are trying to kill you. "Unconditional surrender" was US policy in World War II, but by that standard, most of the other wars in human history would never have ended.

All of these are conversation enders, and are meant to be. There is no interest in actual debate, a real give-and-take that might illuminate and enlighten. There is no desire to learn or deepen understanding (one's own or anyone else's). The discourse has all become about who can seem to be the most vociferous defender of the faith, and the most zealous persecutor of the heretics. (On that score, Gingrich was at his demagogic best in last night's debate.)

That's why I continue to believe that Gingrich's attempt to challenge Romney's business record, and Ron Paul's persistent questioning of the rest of the field's foreign policy myopia (particularly on Iran) are both valuable. Primaries should not be about unthinkingly reaffirming dogma, but unfortunately that's what this "all-in" campaign has been about, far more often than not.

So what does this "all-in" mentality tell us about this year's GOP field? It's possible that the candidates really, truly believe that they hold the best hand: that Obama is so unpopular, and that their core values are so in tune with the electorate, that they don't really need to examine them.

If they think that Obama can be bluffed into folding, well, they have not been paying attention for the last four years.

But I suspect the real reason is, in fact, desperation. The dogma being defended is indeed passionately held by the Republican base. That base, however, is shrinking. With the evidence and consequences of income inequality growing daily, it is getting harder and harder to win national elections by promising to cut the taxes of the wealthiest yet again. With the war in Afghanistan now in its eleventh year, it is getting harder and harder to win national elections by promising ever-continuing war. With America growing ever more diverse, it is getting harder and harder to win national elections by pandering to racial and ethnic resentments.

There were two candidates, I think, who understood all that. One dropped out yesterday, and the other is routinely ridiculed as having no chance of getting the nomination because of his views.

Today's GOP is going all-in. Deep down, I think they know they're holding a losing hand.

Romney, Bain, and the End of the Reagan Coalition

Listening the last couple of days to the Republican crack-up over Mitt Romney and his time at Bain Capital has been fascinating. Conservatives have pounced on Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry for their harsh criticisms of Romney. Perry, for example, has said: "We need more venture capitalism, and less vulture capitalism."

This is an attack from the "left," observers left and right have said. It is not conservative. Rush Limbaugh sputtered in exasperation: "My gosh, that's what the people who indict capitalism say ... this sounds like left-wing social engineering." Gingrich, Rush said, "sounds like Elizabeth Warren."

I couldn't disagree more. This isn't an attack from the left, it is an attack from within the unstable marriage that has been the Republican Party for at least the last thirty years. What's happening, I think, may be nothing less than the disintegration of the Reagan coalition.

The idea that the critique of Romney and Bain is "left-wing" is only true if you conceive of modern American conservatism in extremely narrow terms. By any reasonable definition of the word "conservative," the critique (especially as made by Newt Gingrich) is in fact deeply conservative.

What we are seeing here is the tension, if not outright contradiction, between two strands of modern American conservatism. On the one hand, conservatives value tradition. They talk about small-town values: family, work, religion. But the other strand is unrestrained free-market capitalism, the single most progressive force in history. The essence of capitalism is incessant change. Everywhere it has enjoyed free rein, it has undermined traditions and traditional values.

Ever since Herbert Hoover, the Republican Party has tried to maintain a coalition that includes both strands. Hoover was the epitome of both small town values and capitalist business success: born in the heartland (Iowa), he was orphaned at age 9, overcame being shuffled around for several years, attended Stanford, became a mining engineer, sought his fortune abroad, and became a self-made millionaire. As president during the depression, he warned against the moral degeneracy of dependence on the state.

But the Republican political leader who best combined these strands was, of course, Ronald Reagan. Like Hoover, he came from humble origins. But unlike Hoover, he became "the Great Communicator," a politician who never lost the common touch. The key to his political success was winning over the so-called Reagan Democrats: white, middle-class voters who had become disaffected with 1960s liberalism, and whose economic interests had suffered in the stagflation of the 1970s.

Modern American conservatives, however, have sometimes had trouble maintaining the coalition Reagan forged, and in Romney's Bain experience, we have a stark example of why it can be so hard.

When faced with the recent criticisms, Romney has relied on the power of the free market strand of conservatism. He claims that all of the attacks on him are meant to put "free enterprise on trial." In that, he has the support of Ron Paul, conservatism's purist defender of laissez-faire capitalism: “Bankruptcy and restructuring are very important principles in free markets.”

Free markets always create the correct, and moral, result according to this doctrinaire view. If people get fired in the pursuit of greater profits, so be it. The greater economic good counter-balances whatever harm may have been done by the invisible hand.

But we all know that unemployment is socially corrosive. When people lose their jobs, families suffer. It puts tremendous strain on them, sometimes they break up. When a company goes bankrupt, it can destroy an entire community.

That is the thrust of the devastatingly effective video put out by the pro-Gingrich Super Pac.

What  makes it so powerful is the testimony of real people put out of work by Bain. These are the Reagan Democrats. They come off, as Andrew Sullivan notes, not as "envious," as Romney condescendingly puts it. "They come off as bewildered, betrayed and sure that Romney's goal in all this was merely, solely to make money for himself - the kind of money that most Americans cannot even compute."

Newt's real apostasy here is that he is pointing out the contradiction that has always been there: the market is not inherently moral. The workings of free enterprise can be entirely legal and also immoral.

And, believe it or not, Gingrich is making the moral argument.  Here's how he put it on MSNBC Wednesday:

A company Bain had invested $30 million in, they took $180 million out -- that's 6 to 1-- and the company went bankrupt. And you have to ask yourself, if you're going to get a 6 to 1 return when the company's going bankrupt, gee, what if you'd only taken  3 to 1? ... Just because you have the right to do something, doesn't mean it's the right thing to do.

This is the traditional values argument: doing the right thing. In the video, we see families harmed, we see good people who want to work unable to support those families. We see them sincerely question whether what Bain did was morally right.

This is a conservative case, one that harkens back to an older, pre-capitalist, communitarian ethos, one that values the stability of the community, one that seeks a balance between the interests of the individual and those of the whole.

For advancing this line of attack, Republicans and other conservatives are roundly condemning Gingrich. The president of the right-wing Club For Growth has accused Newt of engaging in “economically ignorant class warfare” and making an "attack on a basic tenet of economic freedom."

Newt has rightly countered: "Criticizing one businessman for one set of practices is not an assault on capitalism." Of course that's true. But there's a good reason today's conservatives cannot agree to that. They're all in. They have fully committed to the free market strand of conservatism.

Note how John McCain put it to Fox News: "To go after [Romney], on really what is the essence of what we Republicans believe about economy, is a serious mistake.... There's an alternative to how Bain does business. It's called communism."

In other words, the distinction Newt makes -- between the ideal of capitalist competition and the predatory practices of Bain -- simply does not exist for today's Republican Party. It is either unrestrained free market, with all of its excesses and destruction (both "creative" and not), or it is communism. There is no middle ground.

Republicans and conservatives cannot acknowledge the conservative moral legitimacy of the Gingrich critique because they have been damning it for at least the last three years. To say that Gingrich has a point would invalidate their entire critique of Barack Obama: it would expose the "Obama is a socialist" line for the idiocy that it is.

It is Obama who has been making the conservative critique of capitalism. It is Obama who has been criticizing specific businessmen and specific business practices. It is Obama who has championed Wall Street reform and consumer protection -- not because he doesn't believe in capitalism (as Republican demagoguery would have it), but because, like Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt before him, he sees that capitalism is in crisis and needs to be saved from its greatest and most self-destructive excesses.

There is no room for such a view among the power elites of the Republican Party and conservative movement. They have forgotten that the moral component of conservatism was never merely lip-service opposition to abortion or gay marriage. At its best, it has been much more than that.

Reagan knew that. As Obama has adroitly noted, his so-called "Buffett Rule," far from being "class warfare," was Reagan's idea.  In 1985, Reagan said that tax loopholes "sometimes made it possible for millionaires to pay nothing, while a bus driver was paying ten percent of his salary, and that’s crazy.... Do you think the millionaire ought to pay more in taxes than the bus driver or less?"

That same year, Reagan said the following:

I told some people ... of a letter that I just received ... from a man out here in the country, an executive who's earning in six figures -- well above $100,000 a year. He wrote me in support of the tax plan because he said, “I am legally able to take advantage of the present tax code -- nothing dishonest, doing what the law prescribes -- and wind up ... paying a smaller tax than my secretary pays.” And he wrote me the letter to tell me he'd like to come to Washington and testify before Congress as to how that's possible for him to do and why it is wrong [emphasis added].

Legal, nothing dishonest -- but wrong. Reagan knew the difference, and knew how important that difference was politically. Today, in his political desperation, Newt Gingrich also knows it matters politically.

In his segment on Romney's Bain problem Wednesday night, Lawrence O'Donnell put it beautifully:

The freedom to choose our occupations, the freedom to choose what we will do for money, requires us to check, not just if it's legal, but if it is the right thing to do.... What we do for money, and what harm we do while doing it, goes a long way to define who we are.

O'Donnell is a liberal, but that is a fundamentally conservative statement: freedom is not license, freedoms come with responsibilities, and we are responsible not just to ourselves, but to others and to our communities.

This debate over Romney and Bain is not about Republicans sounding like Democrats, or about both parties trying to be economic populists: it is about the moral dimension of our politics. It's something that a significant number of Republican voters value, but that the radical individualists among the Tea Partiers and libertarians either reject or flatly deny, and the corporate elite don't even understand.

Gingrich is, of course, primarily motivated to make these attacks by personal animus to Romney due to the negative ads that killed Newt's chances in Iowa. But one of Newt's (few) political virtues is that he does sometimes see a bigger picture. In this case, he knows that the Republicans, if they nominate Mitt Romney, are handing this potent political issue to President Obama, and with it, possibly, an essential component of Republican political success over the last 30 years.

If Obama can take advantage of Romney's moral blindness and regain a significant number of Reagan Democrats, he will win re-election. If he can go further and recapture the mantle of the moral dimension of politics, he can realign American politics and fracture the Reagan coalition.

Rick Perry's Theocratic Vision

Rick Perry's new "I'm a Christian" ad is evidence that the people he's targeting do not understand something fundamental about the American system that they proclaim is so "exceptional." The mindset expressed in the ad is nothing short of theocratic.

Perry says: “there’s something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school.” Discussing that passage, Andrew Sullivan writes:

we get a classic non-sequitur: the notion that allowing openly gay servicemembers to serve without fear of prosecution is somehow connected to the constitutional prohibition of prayer in schools. There is zero connection between the two issues - except both are objected to by Christianist fundamentalists.

I think there is a connection between the two, beyond what Sullivan says, and that the way Perry connects the two is instructive.

Perry is really saying that government, by allowing open service by gays in the military, is thereby endorsing who they are. Defending the ad today, Perry said: "President Obama has again mistaken America's tolerance for different lifestyles with an endorsement of those lifestyles."

In Perry's mind, treating people whose conduct you personally find to be contrary to your own morality as equals in the public sphere is an endorsement--it is saying that who they are and how they act is right and good. In his mind, there is no room for saying "that's none of my (or the government's) business."

In effect, he is saying that there is a moral standard (one that is set by his own view of Christianity) to qualify for equal citizenship. It is hard to imagine anything more contrary to a foundational principle of American government, expressed in the words engraved in the Supreme Court building: "equal justice under law."

Perry then makes a comparison between open service and not allowing schools to endorse Christianity via prayers and Christmas celebrations. That's why they are connected in his mind, and in the minds of those to whom he is appealing. Government, he says, is endorsing homosexuality (which it should not do), and is not endorsing Christianity, which it should do.

The common element is the idea that government has a role to play in endorsing some moral principles and condemning others. Government should not, Perry is suggesting, treat all people equally: it should endorse some and condemn others. That is a theocratic mindset.

Perry looks at the inclusiveness that a pluralistic society demands (everyone is treated equally under the law) and the refusal to endorse one religious vision (which a pluralistic society also demands) and wants us to see a contradiction. In fact, the two things are perfectly consistent with each other--if one believes (as the Founders did) that there should be no religious test for citizenship.

Perry's problem is that he either does not understand that, or does not believe in it. He thinks government should discriminate against those whose private behavior he abhors and should publicly advance his particular religious beliefs even though they are not universally held. He is saying that failing to give Christians a superior position in American society is effectively discrimination against Christians.

In this worldview, there is no room for equal protection under the law. This is truly 1984 territory: failing to discriminate against minorities is discriminating against the majority.

It is disturbing enough that an allegedly serious candidate for the presidency in 2012 could espouse such views. It is even more disturbing that he seems to think it will appeal large number of Republican primary voters. It would be most disturbing were it to turn out that he's right.

“As a Christian, I have a clear directive to support Israel”

Unquestioning support for the policies of the government of Israel (whatever they may be) has become an article of faith on the Republican right. Last May, when the right was in a frenzy over what should have been entirely uncontroversial comments made by President Obama about the shape of a peace settlement between the Israelis, Mitt Romney said that the president had "thrown Israel under the bus."

As I wrote at the time, Romney's remarks showed his utter ignorance of the most basic concept of foreign policy: that a nation pursues its national interests, and does not subsume those interests to those of another state. Romney thinks otherwise. He said that "a first principle of American foreign policy ... is to stand firm by our friends," evidently entirely unaware that George Washington said precisely the opposite in his Farewell Address in 1796.

Now Rick Perry has (predictably) gone Romney one better.  While criticizing the president yesterday, Perry said: “As a Christian, I have a clear directive to support Israel.”

I heard only one very brief reference to this incredible remark on the news today. When I first heard Chris Matthews say it, I thought he must have gotten it wrong and went searching for evidence to find out the facts.

But Matthews did not get it wrong. Perry actually said that. Moreover, it is not the first or only time he's said it. This was no mistake.

This comment is so remarkable in its radicalism, so completely inappropriate for someone who presumes to become president, that it ought to disqualify Perry for the office.

Perry was effectively saying that he would let his personal religious convictions dictate his foreign policy. Think about that for a moment. He offered unquestioning, unqualified support of another country, premised not on American national interests, but on his own religious beliefs.

Imagine if, in 1960, John F. Kennedy had said: "As a Catholic, I have a clear directive to support Vatican City." It rightly would have been the end of his candidacy. (In fact, JFK explicitly opposed even sending an American ambassador to the Vatican.)

What Kennedy actually said in his famous speech in Houston, was quite different:

Whatever issue may come before me as president — on birth control, divorce, censorship, gambling or any other subject — I will make my decision ... in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be the national interest, and without regard to outside religious pressures or dictates.

That is the one and only proper standard for a president when making policy: the national interest.

No doubt Perry would say that American national interests and support for Israel are in no way contradictory. That may be. But it is not inconceivable that a situation could arise where they would not be. It has happened before.

In the 1956 Suez Crisis, when Israel cooperated with Britain and France in attacking Egypt, President Dwight Eisenhower resolutely opposed Israel. At the height of the cold war, he worked with the Soviets against not just Israel, but America's two closest European allies, and used the U.N. to force them to withdraw.

The U.S. and Israel have a close relationship, one which most Americans support. But if Israeli and American interests diverge, an American president must choose American interests. Someone who honestly believes that his religion directs him to support another nation in all circumstances has no business putting himself forward as a candidate for president.

JFK also considered the question of a conflict between personal religious belief and national interest in that speech:

But if the time should ever come — and I do not concede any conflict to be even remotely possible — when my office would require me to either violate my conscience or violate the national interest, then I would resign the office; and I hope any conscientious public servant would do the same.

With this remark, Rick Perry has shown that he does not deserve to ever be in that position. He has already told us all we need to know.