Thank you for being involved with the political discussions here. I hope you will continue and move with me to my website. Please join me at www.davidgergen.com. You can also find me on YouTube , Twitter, facebook and CNN.
--David Gergen
Key moments in the CNN debate
updated 2:13 AM EST, Wed November 23, 2011
Analysts pick debate's winners, losers
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- Gloria Borger said "the more positive Newt Gingrich" may be more appealing to voters
- "Typical things that are red meat aren't working this year," said Ari Fleischer
- David Gergen: Gingrich's "more humane position" on illegal immigration will help in long run
- Rick Perry has done a poor job of conveying his ideas to people, said Dana Loesch
Washington (CNN) -- The Patriot Act, immigration and securing the borders, and whether the United States should provide aid to Pakistan were some of the biggest points of contention in Tuesday's CNN National Security Debate.
Here's how CNN's analysts and contributors saw winners and losers and key moments in the debate.
CNN analyst Gloria Borger on Newt Gingrich's debut as front-runner:
"You never know who's going to show up: It could be the good Newt, smart Newt, full-of-ideas Newt, who I think we saw tonight. Or it could be the negative, nasty, anti-media stuff.
"And I think tonight we saw the first Newt Gingrich, the more positive Newt Gingrich who sort of had a vision and took on Ron Paul, and the Patriot Act debate.
"It was very, very interesting -- the intellectual Newt -- but he was appealing, which is something I don't think he's really been before. I think it's probably because he's more relaxed, and he's doing better in the polls and people like him. I think he was more likable this evening."
CNN contributor Ari Fleischer on the race's dynamics:
"When you look at all of these debates, is the Republican Party supposed to nominate the most conservative and this year against Barack Obama the biggest outsider.
"But who's leading? The biggest established figures -- Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. Who is not getting traction? The one who is taking the toughest, most conservative positions, Rick Perry -- no-fly zone over Syria, Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, send Congress home, cut their pay. Typical things that are red meat aren't working this year.
"The biggest thought during the debates, Newt Gingrich, propelled himself back from the depths. It will be a fascinating open primary for Republicans.
"Another debate, another good night for Newt. But the trend here is those who have fallen behind are not coming back up so the question is when the music stops, who is going to be in the not-Romney chair? 78 percent are not locked-in. A lot of time to go."
CNN analyst David Gergen on whether Newt Gingrich's position on allowing long-term illegal immigrants citizenship will hurt him:
"[It does hurt him] probably in the short term. But I will have to tell you, in the long term, i think it may not.
"He broke with the orthodoxy. He did have to take a more humane position. They want a division between those who have been here a long time and let their families stay versus those who have been here a short time. The politics of it, yeah, he'll take a hit in the conservative community. He'll get credit for willing to say what he believes, I think, with the broader public.
"He's just now, for the first time, Americans who are not Republicans, independents are thinking, might Newt Gingrich be the candidate? With a lot of the people seeing the humane side of Gingrich tonight, I think was a plus."
CNN contributor Dana Loesch on Rick Perry's muddled message:
"I don't think it's the ideas that failed, I think it's perhaps the vehicle in which they were delivered -- forgetting the third department that you would cut necessarily isn't helpful. I do think he's coming back from that.
"But that being said, I think if those ideas had been delivered in a Newt Gingrich way -- authoritative, aggressive, dare I say confrontational -- I think it would have gone over a lot better, and we'd see more support from those results.
"You have to be able to convey your ideas to people and that's what Rick Perry hasn't been been doing in the beginning."
Have they gone nuts in Washington?
updated 10:49 AM EST, Mon November 21, 2011
The deficit super committee was asked to find more than a trillion dollars in debt reduction.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- David Gergen: Congress' failure to reach debt deal is reckless
- He says leaders in Washington, including president, have failed the people
- At a time of economic crisis, compromise on budget would be a prudent step, he says
- Gergen: Congress and White House are punting on other economic issues
Editor's note: David Gergen is a senior political analyst for CNN and has been an adviser to four presidents. He is a professor of public service and director of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. Follow him on Twitter: @David_Gergen.
Cambridge, Massachusetts (CNN) -- Have they gone nuts in Washington?
Last summer, as the debt ceiling debacle ended, our political leaders held out high hope that a "super committee" would meet for 10 weeks this fall and forge a bipartisan agreement that would do far more to bring down the nation's deficits.
Everyone knew that members of the committee had deep differences.
David Gergen
Republicans complain that federal spending under President Obama has gone up dramatically and cuts should come there before any new taxes.
Democrats say that the rich have increased their wealth much more rapidly than the other 99% of Americans, while their taxes have gone down, so that the first order of business is to raise taxes on them. Both sides have valid points, worthy of debate.
But such contentious disagreements have characterized our politics since the dawn of the republic, and in almost all crises of the past, political leaders have worked out compromises. As Thomas Jefferson put it in 1790, "In general I think it necessary to give as well as take in a government like ours." George Washington agreed and pushed continually for what he called "a spirit of accommodation."
Our "leaders" of today, however, have tossed aside the wisdom of the Founders. The super committee is now hours away from abject failure on what should have been relatively easy work. Some tell us not to worry: A breakdown will automatically trigger "sequestration" -- automatic cuts in defense and domestic programs starting in January 2013. But there are already efforts within Congress to void the sequestration process.
A related concern is how financial markets will react. Some economists tell us not to worry about that, either: They say the markets have long assumed failure and have baked that into their investment decisions. But who knows for sure? Who can tell how a volatile mixture of political failure in Europe and in the U.S. will play out in coming weeks? The truth is nobody knows for sure.
That's why this failure of the super committee represents a reckless, irresponsible gamble by our "leaders" in Washington. It's difficult to remember a Congress that has put the nation so much at risk in the service of ideology and to hold onto office. Partisans on both sides are grievously failing the country.
An honest assessment would lay blame on the White House doorstep, too. Yes, the president finally put up a plan a few weeks back and made a few phone calls. But he has been exercising the most passive leadership imaginable. Nor have the Republican candidates for president been any more engaged. Why are their campaigns so focused only on 2013 and so detached from a crisis that continues to deepen in D.C. right now?
It is not as if Congress and the White House are working productively together to solve other problems. They have done almost nothing in recent months to create more jobs and to shore up most homeowners. Hope is not a strategy, as we know, but it seems to be ours right now.
Even as the president promises a larger military presence in the Pacific (how are we going to afford it?), some businessmen are coming home from Shanghai and privately saying China has already won the economic rivalry.
Meanwhile, the White House has played politics with a proposed oil pipeline from Canada. And few raised a peep a few days ago when the chief economist of the International Energy Agency warned, based upon a serious study, that the world would face "irreversible climate change in five years" unless we change course on new energy infrastructure.
Sorry, our noble leaders tell us, we have to focus now on election 2012. What was it that Louis XV used to say? "Après moi, le déluge"?
Is money's deep role in politics the root of our woes?
updated 1:05 PM EST, Tue November 15, 2011
Activists carry a placard depicting Congress as a puppet of corporate lobbyists in a May, 2010 event in Washington.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- Book alleges Pelosi, Boehner, other political leaders benefit from insider trading
- Gergen, Zuckerman: Whether allegations are true or not, money plays huge role in politics
- Writers cite new book that argues lobbyists' money permeates and corrupts Congress
- Writers: Fundraising, paying cost of running for office: Money drives our democracy
Editor's note: David Gergen is a senior political analyst for CNN and has been an adviser to four presidents. He is a professor of public service and director of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. Follow him on Twitter: @David_Gergen. Michael Zuckerman is his research assistant.
(CNN) -- This past Sunday's "60 Minutes" and the latest issue of Newsweek bring back to the fore the complicated issue of money and politics. Both highlight a new book by Peter Schweizer, "Throw Them All Out," which rails against what Schweizer calls "honest graft."
Schweizer charges that leaders from both houses of Congress have been drawing on insider knowledge to make money in the stock market -- a practice that is banned in American industry and restricted in other sectors of government. And although he is a conservative at the Hoover Institution, Schweizer is an equal opportunity scourge, attacking both Democratic and Republican leaders.
Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi and Republican speaker John Boehner have fired back, asserting that Schweizer has misrepresented them and they have done nothing wrong. Until competent legal authorities investigate, both deserve the benefit of the doubt. The public does, of course, deserve a more thorough airing of the facts. Equally important, Congress ought to have rules about conflicts of interest that are as demanding as those for people who work in the executive and judicial branches; so far, Congress skates free.
But whatever the rebuttals from Capitol Hill, this controversy underscores a deepening sense that money plays far too large a role in politics. If anything unites the tea party and the Occupy Wall Street protesters, surely it is the sense that the system is rigged in favor of big shots in Washington and against little guys back home. Money is at the heart of it.
David Gergen
A new book that should receive far more attention makes an even more sweeping and thoroughly researched case against money in politics -- "Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress -- and a Plan to Stop It," by Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig.
The author is a man of many parts: Lessig made his name as a legal theorist in issues surrounding new technologies, but he also has a keen interest in politics. He was the youngest member of the Pennsylvania delegation that nominated Ronald Reagan at the Republican convention in 1980, clerked for conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, and later endorsed his friend and former University of Chicago Law School colleague Barack Obama for president.
Lessig, who lately has been working to organize a movement for a new constitutional convention, is disillusioned with both right and left and blasts away at them for essentially selling the republic out. But his charge is not that politicians in Washington are taking money on the side, à la Spiro "Pass the Bags" Agnew. He doubts much of that goes on today. Rather, he is deeply troubled by what he calls "dependence corruption" -- the degree to which politicians have become dependent on money from lobbyists in order to pay for their campaigns, and the ways in which that dependence has increasingly distorted public policy in ways that do serious harm to the country, while also (and just as perniciously) undermining public trust.
His argument is wide-ranging and impossible to do justice to in a brief column. But a few of the most striking facts he marshals are worth recognizing. Among them:
-- The cost of getting elected to Congress has exploded: from 1974 to 2008, Lessig notes, the average cost of a re-election campaign ballooned from $56,000 to more than $1.3 million, a more than twentyfold increase that far outpaces inflation.
-- Fundraising is a constant concern: Candidates have to spend between 30% and 70% of their time raising money. (Lobbyists, however can ease this pressure through many kinds of what Lessig calls "legislative subsidies" -- advice, research, support, and most of all, campaign cash.)
-- The revolving door between Congress and lobbyists is spinning faster: In the 1970s, just 3% of retiring members of Congress went into lobbying. But by 2004, in the previous seven years more than half of all senators and 42 percent of House members had made the switch.
-- The incentives for lobbying are clear. A 2009 paper found, for example, that firms get between $6 and $20 back for every $1 they invest in lobbying for tax benefits.
With regard to taxes and regulation, Lessig's observations are particularly sharp. Business leaders argue, for example, that they are not investing as much as they might in new jobs because they face so much uncertainty that they don't know what to expect from the government from one year to the next. Many citizens are likewise baffled by some regulations and, especially, the tax code: Why is it so massive, so confusing, sometimes so seemingly wasteful and preferential?
Lessig's explanation is that this complexity and uncertainty is no accident, and that's because politicians in Washington have an interest in keeping business guessing and the rest of us confused.
Pass a tax law for five years and lobbyists won't need to come around with contributions for a long time; make it a one-year law and they'll be back next week. Likewise, keep the code incomprehensible, and the voters won't know if they're getting hosed. Those are fascinating insights.
One of Lessig's heroes is Henry David Thoreau, and he likes to quote the American philosopher as saying, "There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root." Lessig sees the role of money in politics as the root of the country's current ills, from health care to education to the economy. He also thinks it explains why the parties appear to have grown closer in economic ideology -- where the concentrated corporate lobbying money is -- while growing more polarized in social ideology, for which more extreme viewpoints yield a bigger haul. He is quick to note that this corruption is "not the product of evil" -- it leads to "great harm," but is the result of "no bin Laden."
Without "great evil," Lessig reflects, he is "not yet sure that we can muster the will to fight." That's a deep concern, and it calls to mind the memorable formulation of the economist Charles Schultze, who once divided our problems into two categories: a wolf at the door, or termites in the basement.
As a nation, we've always been a lot better at handling the first than the second. But if Lessig is right about the campaign finance system, it's a major case of termites in the basement -- and addressing it will require more than simply throwing all the bums out. In Lessig's view, it may require laying a whole new section of our foundation instead.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)