The Thirty Years' War on Medicare

“In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”—Ronald Reagan, First Inaugural address, Jan. 20, 1981

That line, uttered over 30 years ago, was the first shot in a political war that may be coming to a head.

Ever since Reagan turned the New Deal mentality of the Democrats on its head with that clever statement, the Republican Party has been waging a long battle against the idea that government is necessary to solve problems that the market economy has failed to. 

That is the proper context for Rep. Paul Ryan's budget plan that effectively ends Medicare.  It is not the product of Tea Party demands.  Quite the contrary: the Tea Party is, at least in part, a result of thirty years of relentless Republican insistence that we cannot afford government programs and that taxes must always, but always, be cut.

Ryan talks about "reforming" Medicare.  This needs to be stated plainly, and repeatedly: Ryan is not proposing to reform Medicare.  He means to end it.  Yes, he protects those currently on Medicare and those over 55 who expect to have it.  But everyone else will not get it.  At all.  It will cease to exist. The program that began in 1965, and that pays the medical bills of the elderly, will come to an end, and in the future retired Americans will have to buy private health insurance.

It is worth remembering why LBJ proposed Medicare in the first place.  As he said in his statement to Congress proposing the program, "almost half of the elderly have no health insurance at all," and "the average retired couple cannot afford the cost of adequate health protection under private health insurance."  For 45 years, Medicare has solved that problem.

And now the House Republicans have voted to end that program.

The most ideological Republicans have never reconciled themselves to the existence of Medicare.  In 1964, Ronald Reagan made his national political debut making a speech advocating Barry Goldwater’s candidacy: “we're against forcing all citizens, regardless of need, into a compulsory government program.”

Goldwater lost that election, getting a lower percentage of the popular vote than Herbert Hoover did in 1932.  Undeterred, Reagan issued an LP recording of a speech against the passage of Medicare in 1965.  He famously (and foolishly) concluded that if Medicare were not stopped,

one day . . . we will awake to find that we have so­cialism. And if you don't do this, and if I don't do it, one of these days, you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children's children, what it once was like in America when men were free.

But Medicare did pass, with large majorities (307-116 in the House and 70-24 in the Senate).  And America is, somehow, still free.

But some Republicans have never given up the fight to do away with it.  Their major problem is the overwhelming popularity of the program.  When Jimmy Carter tried to hit Reagan with his earlier opposition to Medicare during their presidential debate in 1980, Reagan, sensing the danger, brushed it off with a bit of political misdirection:

When I opposed Medicare, there was another piece of legislation meeting the same problem before the Congress. I happened to favor the other piece of legislation and thought that it would be better for the senior citizens and provide better care than the one that was finally passed.

It is true that Republicans tried to thwart the passage of Medicare back in 1965 with an alternative they called "Bettercare."  Historian Robert Dallek has described it as "a voluntary plan providing federal payments of insurance premiums for older persons with low incomes."  In other words, it is similar to Ryan's plan to provide vouchers to buy insurance.  The main difference is that the Republicans in 1965 were not pretending to reform LBJ's proposal—they aimed to prevent it.  (Also, in 1965 they admitted that their plan "would leave most elderly Americans uncovered.")

The true lineage of Ryan’s plan is from Reagan, via Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich in the 1995 budget showdown with Bill Clinton.

In October 1995, then-Senate majority leader Dole boasted about his opposition to Medicare: "I was there, fighting the fight, voting against Medicare" when the plan was passed in 1965, he proudly said.  Gingrich denounced Medicare as "a centralized command bureaucracy."  This is how he explained the fact that Republicans were only calling for cuts in funding rather than abolition: "Now we don’t get rid of it in round one because we don't think that's politically smart…. But we believe it is going to wither on the vine because we think people are going to leave it voluntarily."

That goal has not changed, but in the last decade, Republicans have learned their lessons.  They don’t denounce Medicare and take pride in voting against it, they don’t talk about it withering on the vine. Instead they call their attack "reform."  (When George W. Bush pushed his plan for Social Security privatization in 2005, he too called it “reform,” though it was not significantly different from the basic vision of a voluntary opt-out also proposed in 1964 by Goldwater and Reagan.)

If there is a cause for optimism here, it is that the ideologues pushing this radical abolition of Medicare know that they cannot be honest about what they are doing.  The program is simply too popular. In a recent CBS News/New York Times poll, 76% believe that providing health insurance coverage for the elderly is a responsibility of the federal government, 61% think the costs of Medicare are “worth it,” 57% think there is no need to make any changes to Medicare to help balance the budget, and 56% would rather raise taxes than reduce benefits.

But unless President Obama and the Democrats drive home the essential truth that this “reform” is actually repeal, Reagan’s dream may come true.  In that same poll, a question asking if “changing” Medicare to help people buy insurance would meet their approval, 47% said yes, while 41% said no.  The Republicans can only win their long war against Medicare by stealth.  The defenders of Medicare must make Republicans fight out in the open, or they may lose the war.

"And the War Came"

One hundred and fifty years ago today, cadets from the Citadel fired on U.S. Army soldiers at Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor, and began the American Civil War.  Ironically, the first battle of the epic struggle that would take over 600,000 American lives over the next four years had no fatalities.  Today, re-enactors will stage that event again, and one can only hope that they do so with a sense of commemoration rather than celebration.

While most Americans know that events at Fort Sumter began the war, few really understand what happened and why.  This is no accident.  Apologists for the Confederate cause have worked long and hard to cleanse the national memory of any accurate recollection of why that event began the hostilities.  But on this day, of all days, it is worth remembering who fired the shots, and why they did.

While neo-Confederates to this day speak without irony of the "War of Northern Aggression," the facts of that day prove the lie inherent in that utterly false label. 

Lincoln was from the start determined that he would not begin hostilities.  In his first inaugural address, on March 4, 1861, he made that abundantly clear: "The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors."  He was determined that if there were to be civil war, he would not fire the first shot.

The problem was this: secession had a concrete, practical side.  With a much smaller federal presence in those days, often the most common federal property in a state was the post office, which easily passed into state hands.  More problematic were military bases occupied by American soldiers, of which Fort Sumter was the most prominent.  South Carolina demanded it be turned over to the state.  First President Buchanan, and then Lincoln, refused.

A month after Lincoln became president, the Stars and Stripes still flew over the fort, taunting the Confederates on the shore.  Lincoln made clear that he would not give it up and announced that he was sending a ship with food to provision the fort.  If nothing were done, the standoff could go on indefinitely.

That was Lincoln's "aggression."  He refused to turn over the fort and sent food to the American soldiers stationed there.

The Confederates started the war because they feared that without an attack to take the fort, the Confederacy would flounder.  It had been two months since any state seceded.  Important slave states like North Carolina, Tennessee, and most significantly, Virginia, remained in the Union. 

The longer Lincoln presided over the country without lifting a finger to interfere with the functioning of slavery, the more absurd the secessionist caricature of him would appear.  An Alabama newspaper appealed to Jefferson Davis to take the fort by force: "Sir, unless you sprinkle blood in the face of the people of Alabama, they will be back in the Union in less than ten days!" 

The Confederate decision to initiate hostilities was meant to avoid that outcome. Faced with the prospect of peaceful reconstruction of the Union, Davis decided on war. The combat had the desired result: four more states joined the Confederacy, including Virginia.

Like secession itself, the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter was self-defeating.  Lincoln had publicly committed himself to take no offensive military action against the Confederacy.  Without Confederate aggression at Fort Sumter, Lincoln would have been hard pressed to take any meaningful action to enforce federal authority over the Confederate states.  The Confederate leadership resolved that issue for him.

The title of this post is taken from Lincoln's second inaugural (and also serves as the title of one of the classic works of history on the beginning of the Civil War by the great historian Kenneth Stampp).  "Both parties deprecated war," Lincoln said in the spirit of charity that permeates the address.  He did not, however, fail to note the difference between the two sides: "but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came." 

The final phrase reflects Lincoln's fatalism, but not before he made clear what all Americans should remember on this day: there is an important distinction between those who make war and those who accept it.

A Policy, not a Doctrine

Ever since President Obama's speech last week explaining his Libya policy, there has been much talk among pundits about a supposed "Obama Doctrine."  The president, however, has steadfastly resisted such a characterization.  There is no Obama Doctrine, he says.  While I have many doubts about the wisdom of Obama's actions in Libya, he undoubtedly is right to resist attempts to straightjacket him with a doctrine.

Ever since Secretary of State John Quincy Adams in 1823 developed what became known as the Monroe Doctrine, Americans have become accustomed to foreign policy doctrines.  In the years since World War II, we've seen a veritable explosion of such doctrines—the Truman Doctrine, the Eisenhower Doctrine, the Carter Doctrine, the Reagan Doctrine—and those are just the ones that caught on.

In each case, a specific foreign policy situation gave rise to general statement of policy meant to guide American diplomacy in other cases as well.  Today, numerous voices are trying to do the same thing.  But the problem with doctrines is that they tend to encourage doctrinaire behavior.

The Monroe Doctrine, for example, was prompted by American concern that the states of Latin America, which had recently become independent of Spain, might fall once again under control of European powers.  The first of the American doctrines was meant to deter any such attempt by expressing American opposition:

“the American continents … are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.”

While it was Britain's opposition (and the ability of its navy to make good on that policy) that was the more effective deterrent, the statement also proclaimed an American sphere of influence in the western hemisphere.  Eighty years later, Teddy Roosevelt transformed that doctrine into a justification for American intervention in the same states the original doctrine was designed to protect from European intervention.

More recently, the Truman Doctrine had similar unintended consequences.  His speech to Congress in March 1947 was prompted by specific circumstances—the need to bolster Greece and Turkey in the face of pressure from communist forces.  But the administration took the opportunity to proclaim what became known as containment:

“I am fully aware of the broad implications involved if the United States extends assistance to Greece and Turkey … I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.”

The universalism of that statement went well beyond the immediate needs of the moment, and was meant to send a general message that the U.S. would resist further communist expansion in Europe.

But it did not specify Europe.  It did not distinguish between vital and peripheral interests. Years later, as communists made gains in Vietnam, the existence of this "doctrine" helped to constrain the actions of future administrations.  The father of containment, State Department official George F. Kennan, never intended the policy to apply to a far-off state in southeast Asia.  Twenty years after Truman's speech, 500,000 American soldiers were in Vietnam.

These are the kinds of unintended consequences that doctrines can produce, and that's exactly what Obama was trying to avoid by so carefully resisting any implication that his actions in Libya are some kind of precedent for future policy.

One of the voices calling for a doctrine is former Democratic senator and presidential candidate Gary Hart: "now would be a good time President Obama to announce an 'Obama Doctrine' similar to the Truman Doctrine … We cannot simply respond in ad hoc fashion to these local and regional crises."  Ironically, Hart cut his political teeth as a campaign official in George McGovern's anti-Vietnam war presidential campaign in 1972, and is now calling for a new doctrine that could well create pressure for another Vietnam.

Obama has learned this particular historical lesson better than that.  He may well yet be proven wrong in Libya, but he has been right to resist a doctrinaire foreign policy that might wrongly restrict his future options and those of his successors.

Dim Bulbs, Trivializing Rights

Being of a certain age, I remember when conservatives understood what freedom is and what tyranny is.  They used to talk about “captive nations,” denounce the “gulag,” and declare “Tear down this wall!”  Back in the 1950s, President Eisenhower signed into law a bill declaring the third week in July “Captive Nations Week,” a way of calling for the end of communist governments in Eastern Europe.  You know, the kind of governments that actually denied their peoples freedom.

But in Columbia, South Carolina in the year 2011, freedom isn’t threatened by the secret police dragging dissidents to late-night interrogations.  It isn’t denied via a one-party state (well, at least not officially).  No, in our time, freedom means something else.

Now freedom means incandescent light bulbs.

The South Carolina legislature spent time Wednesday debating what they are calling the Incandescent Light Bulb Freedom Act.  As Dave Barry likes to say when he cites something seemingly too silly to be true, I am not making this up.  These brave, freedom fighter legislators are looking to protect the people of South Carolina from the assault on freedom represented by a federal energy standards law passed in 2007, which mandated greater energy efficiency in light bulbs.

The leading sponsor of this legislation, Rep. Bill Sandifer of Seneca, S.C., argues that this is a matter of rights: “These rights to have the kind of light bulbs we want and need are our rights. They are not given to the federal government.”

Have we really gotten to the point where the right wing in this state defines “rights” as being able to buy the exact kind of light bulb you want to?  I rather doubt this is what John Locke had in mind when he wrote his Two Treatises of Government.

And what essential right is threatened by this electrical tyranny?  Rep. Mike Pitts of Laurens, S.C. tells us: “Did you know that light bulbs that are going to be required by the federal government cannot be used in an Easy-Bake Oven?”  That’s right.  They are trying to preserve the freedom to use an Easy-Bake Oven.  It’s what the Founders would want.

Even when we dismiss this nonsense that our rights are threatened by energy efficiency regulations, the idea that the energy efficiency law is taking away choices is simply not true.  An article from July 2009 points out that the effect of the law will be innovation, not extinction, for the incandescent bulb:

 Indeed, the incandescent bulb is turning into a case study of the way government mandates can spur innovation.

“There’s a massive misperception that incandescents are going away quickly,” said Chris Calwell, a researcher with Ecos Consulting who studies the bulb market. “There have been more incandescent innovations in the last three years than in the last two decades.”

In other words, the very premise of the South Carolina bill is mistaken.  A portion of the AP story (edited from the version printed in the Spartanburg Herald-Journal) explains:

David Jenkins, spokesman for Republicans for Environmental Protection, said the federal legislation is misunderstood. “The government is not actually 'phasing out' incandescent light bulbs in favor of fluorescent bulbs,” Jenkins said. “The law is technology neutral; it merely establishes energy efficiency standards for bulbs -- much like the efficiency standards for appliances that were established during the Reagan Administration.”

While people knock compact fluorescent bulbs, Jenkins said, there are alternatives, including halogen and LED bulbs. He expects the LED bulbs will ultimately win over consumers as prices come down.

What this story shows is how trivial our politics has become.  At a time when people all over North Africa and the Middle East are literally putting their lives on the line for freedom and standing up to actual tyranny, we in South Carolina have our elected representatives making fools of themselves by equating freedom with light bulbs.  They cheapen one of the noblest concepts in human history, one that millions of people have died for, with this joke of a bill. 

Like the light bulbs they love, the sponsors of this bill are both wasting energy and throwing off more heat than light.

The United States, Libya, and the "Arab 1848"

A number of observers, such as Andrew Sullivan, have been calling the events of the last two months in North Africa and the Middle East the "Arab 1848." The reference is to the numerous revolutions that swept the states of Europe in 1848.

I've just recently covered that period of history in my Western Civilization class, so I've been pondering the implications of the analogy, particularly in light of last week's UN resolution authorizing the use of force against Qaddafi's Libya.

The most sobering fact about the original 1848 is the ultimate failure of most of the revolutionary movements. While the wave of revolutions in 1848 showed the enduring power of ideas like liberal ideology and nationalism, most of the early gains were wiped out by a conservative counterattack.

When examining that failure, historians usually emphasize the splits between liberals and nationalists and between the middle and working classes. Starting a revolution can be the easiest part; coming to a common understanding of its goals is often the hardest. Those divisions were exploited by conservatives who sometimes used brutal force to re-establish their power.

But there is one other factor I mention: the fact that Great Britain, the most liberal power in Europe at the time, did not intervene to aid the liberal and nationalist forces.  And that's where the analogy to today kicks in again. The United States now stands in relation to the Arab revolutions as Britain did to the ones in Europe in 1848.

The British Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, was primarily concerned with maintaining the balance of power in Europe.  That had been Britain's chief objective for decades, and all players understood that by weighing in, Britain could tip the balance.  According to The Cambridge History of British Foreign Policy, "Appeals poured in upon him from all sides — desperate cries for help from distressed potentates, insistent demands for aid from struggling patriots."

While Palmerston "iterated and re-iterated with a frequency that became monotonous his exhortations to the dynastic despots to make timely concessions to national democracy," he rebuffed all pleas for outright intervention for liberal or nationalist causes.

For example, when the Hungarian nationalist leader Louis Kossuth begged for British assistance in the face of Russian intervention to re-impose Austrian rule over Hungary, Palmerston resisted, even though "British public opinion ... began to express itself clearly and loudly on the Hungarian side." 

Palmerston was personally appalled by the crackdown against the revolutionaries, writing privately that he thought the "Austrians are really the greatest brutes that ever called themselves by the undeserved name of civilised men."  In the end, however, he contented himself with diplomacy to help save Kossuth's life, not his Hungarian regime.

Up until last week, the United States had been largely able to avoid making any such hard choices about active intervention in the Arab 1848.  The protests in Tunisia and Egypt ended with repressive leaders stepping down, while other protests, such as the one in Morocco, never reached the boiling point.

And then came Libya.

Qaddafi's brutal use of military force to quell the protests and subsequent rebellion raise the specter of  the conservative backlash that destroyed the revolutionary momentum of 1848.

Despite its sympathies, Britain then was not on an ideological crusade, and it remained on the sidelines.  This week, the U.S., prompted ironically by Britain and France, entered the fray.  While the Obama administration has avoided stating that it is now committed to the fall of the Qaddafi regime, that is the reality.  Whether or not that is wise remains to be seen.

In my classes, I always say that the lack of British intervention was, compared to the splits among the revolutionaries themselves, a relatively minor factor in the outcomes of 1848. But we'll never know if a different British response might have produced a different outcome.  Although there is no way truly to replay history, this intervention in Libya may be as close as we can get.

Obama Baffles the Baby Boomers

Andrew Sullivan had a nice post on Friday praising President Obama's restraint and refusal to take credit for what Sullivan is calling the Arab 1848. When Mubarak left office, Obama rightly said "Today belongs to the people of Egypt."  The credit, he made clear, was all theirs.  According to Sullivan, Obama's "willingness not to take credit" is "part of his nature."  While that's true, it is,  I think, only part of the story.  The rest is generational. 

Baby boomers of the left and right have a common trait: they tend to see the United States at the center of everything.  For far left groups like the Weather Underground in the late 1960s, the U.S. was the root of all evil.  For the "love it or leave it" right, America was unquestionably the source of all good.  But in either case, whatever happened in the world, for good or ill, was due to American action (or inaction).

Obama, by temperament and by generational background, eschews such extreme views, and in doing so, confounds his opponents who remain mired in the 1960s political and cultural divisions that shaped them.

Depending on how one dates the baby boomer phenomenon, Obama, who was born in 1961, is either post-boomer or late-boomer.  In my view, he is our first post-boomer president.  The previous, World War II generation, had a long 32 year run in the presidency.  Every president from John F. Kennedy to George H.W. Bush was 18 years old or older during the war.  By contrast, the two boomer presidents, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, only held the presidency for 16 years.

I define Obama as post-boomer because he came of political age after the polarizing issues of the 1960s.  He was too young to be a participant in the vehement disagreements over the Vietnam war.  He came of political age in a later time: the post-Watergate troubles of the late 1970s and the Reagan revolution of the 1980s.

Why does this matter?  This past week, Roger Newman of the Columbia School of Journalism gave a talk at Wofford and I was invited to have dinner with him afterwards.  During the dinner conversation, the topic turned to the question of when American politics became so polarized.  Newman, who is of the Vietnam generation, argued that Reagan's election was the turning point.  I argued that it was the Clinton-Gingrich confrontation of the early to mid-1990s that was more significant.  I've been thinking about that disagreement, and I think it comes down to this: For Newman's generation, Reagan represented the conservative enemy of the 1960s coming to power to reverse the gains of that decade. 

But as harsh as the criticism of Reagan was from the left in the early 1980s, I would argue that it never reached the depths of personal vilification that greeted Clinton in the early 1990s.  Reagan was denounced by the left as a man of the past, even a reactionary.  Clinton, on the other hand, was accused of being a draft dodger, a murderer, a drug dealer, a traitor (the last for protesting against the Vietnam war while studying abroad).  These accusations almost always had their roots in the cultural and political divisions of the 1960s.  He came to embody for conservatives everything that they had loathed about that decade. 

Similarly, Newt Gingrich embodied the radical right's rejection of the social and cultural developments of the 1960s.  While condemning the results, he often embraced the extremist tactics of the radical left: he consciously demonized the opposition in an effort to discredit them as un-American.

Beginning with Gingrich, the baby-boomer right in the U.S. developed a consistent campaign theme: their opponents were not merely wrong on the issues, they were anti-American.  With figures like Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and John Kerry, the boomer right employed themes pulled directly from the cultural and political baggage of the 1960s.  These tactics have proven successful enough, at least with the base, that they remain addicted to them, even when the new target, Obama, is maddeningly inappropriate for them.

Last fall, Gingrich said of Obama: "he worked very hard at being a person who is normal, reasonable, moderate, bipartisan, transparent, accommodating--none of which was true ... He was authentically dishonest."  Gingrich is not describing Obama--he is describing what he wishes Obama would be: a mirror image of Gingrich.

Think back to the 2008 campaign and Sarah Palin's favorite line, that Obama "palled around with terrorists."  That of course was a reference to Obama's acquaintance with 1960s radical, Bill Ayers. Obama was too young for 1960s radicalism, so they tried guilt by association.  Last August, boomer Rush Limbaugh, whose rise to prominence coincided with the Clinton administration, called Obama "our first anti-American president."  While hawking his new memoir, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld reiterated another common trope: that Obama "has made a practice of trying to apologize for America," a none-too-subtle suggestion that the president, like the radical left in the 1960s, thinks America is evil.

Last week, Mike Huckabee took this absurdity to new lengths for a supposedly mainstream politician by falsely stating that Obama grew up in Kenya and somehow trying to associate him with the Mau Mau revolution in Kenya.  Huckabee surely knows that for Americans of a certain age, the term "Mau Mau" has a particular resonance.   It was part of the anti-civil rights backlash that helped turn the solid Democratic south into the solid Republican south.  The phrase came from a 1970 book by Tom Wolfe.  "Mau Mauing" meant the intimidation of whites by the "angry black male" of the Black Panther variety.

No reasonable person could describe Obama in that way, and yet we hear the right do it time and again.  He's socialist, he's foreign, he is not "one of us."  They make themselves look utterly ridiculous by trying to fit Obama into their 1960s style preconceptions of what he should be, and yet they persist.  Certainly the first African-American president can not be someone who is the epitome of the values conservatives say they cherish: hard work, education, faith, public service, devotion to family.  So they recreate him in their own perverse mirror image.  The more Obama proves them wrong by being truly reasonable and refusing to conform to the boomer stereotypes, the more they flail about, making increasingly absurd charges, removing themselves further and further from reality.  And the more ridiculous they look, trapped in the debates of the past, the more likely they make it that Obama will be our leader for the foreseeable future.

The Walker Tape

Last week, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker was punked by a website reporter claiming to be billionaire David Koch.  The tape of their 20-minute phone conversation was posted on the internet, leading to an all-too-brief firestorm around Walker’s comments.

The reaction that interests me is this one, from Tim Carpenter, a Wisconsin State Senator, who wrote: “Governor Walker, this tape would make Richard Nixon blush.”

Carpenter evidently has not been listening to the Nixon tapes.

Whenever a politician is caught on tape, the Nixon analogy is the easy one.  But there’s a danger in it.  We have a wealth of material, thousands of hours of Nixon.  What they reveal is a singularly unappealing portrait.  No one tape, not even Walker’s, can live up to that record.  As a result, whoever is compared to Nixon fairly comes off looking, at least comparatively, not so bad.

Nixon’s White House tapes are infamous for their revelations of Nixon’s prejudices.  There are many examples, but just last December a new crop of tapes was released that included the following gems:

“Virtually every Irish I've known gets mean when he drinks. It's sort of a natural trait. Particularly the real Irish."  

(I can’t help wondering if my German ancestry would disqualify me from Nixon’s concept of “real Irish.”)

"The Italians, of course, just don't have their heads screwed on tight. They are wonderful people, but . . ."

"The Jews are just a very aggressive and abrasive and obnoxious personality." 

“The Jews are born spies.”

But it isn’t just prejudice that Nixon reveals in his tapes, it is his criminal proclivities.

Over the years, one of the most common red herrings of Nixon defenders has been the claim that there is no documentary proof that Nixon ordered the Watergate break-in.  That is true.  But we do know that he ordered a break-in of the liberal think tank the Brookings Institution: 

“I want the Brookings Institution cleaned out and have it cleaned out in a way that has somebody else take the blame."

It’s hardly a stretch to think that the man we know was capable of ordering the one was also capable of ordering the other.

Now, nothing like that is present on the Walker tape.  And that’s precisely the problem with Carpenter’s analogy.  By using rhetoric that compares Walker’s comments to the depths of Nixon’s depravity, he gives Walker an easy out—because Walker on this tape is demonstrably not as bad as Nixon on his.

What is there in the Walker tape, however, is plenty bad enough.

Start with this simple fact: while Walker complained about a “group of protesters almost all of whom are in from other states,” he spent 20 minutes talking freely with a major campaign donor from out of state.  Hardly surprising, but telling.

Also telling is Walker’s eagerness to share his strategy with the caller he believes is Koch.  According to his office, Walker has never met or spoken to Koch.  But the fake Koch asks one question and Walker is off to the races.  A look at the transcript shows no reticence at all on Walker’s part.  And what he so freely shares is revealing.

We learn that Walker intended to trick the Democratic state senators who have left the state to prevent Walker’s union busting legislation from passing.  He said he intended to tell the Democrats that he would “talk” to them, get them to come back to Wisconsin, and then refuse to actually negotiate.  In the meantime, the senate would have gone into session and he could get his legislation passed.  In other words, he revealed that he is not to be trusted.

That, sadly, is just politics.  What’s more disturbing is Walker’s reaction to the fake Koch’s suggestion of “planting some troublemakers.”  Walker responded: “we thought about that.”  He goes on to explain that he decided not to, but only because it might backfire politically.  At no point does he offer any suggestion that deliberately provoking violence for political gain is an inherently bad idea.

Now, one of two things is true.  Either Walker really did consider doing so, in which case he should resign right now, or he lied when he said he considered it.  In other words, the best-case scenario is that Walker never thought about it, and merely lied to the fake Koch to avoid contradicting the rich and powerful man at the other end of the phone.

In either case, Scott Walker is no leader.  He either is truly amoral and somewhat Nixonian in the tactics he considered, or so beholden to powerful interests that he will not tell them that their suggestions are both illegal and immoral.

Admittedly, pretending to agree with the criminal suggestions of a wealthy campaign contributor does not rise to the level of Nixon’s perfidy.  But shouldn’t our standard for those who purport to lead us be higher than that?