Category: Politics

A review of Mark Leibovich’s This Town

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Books, Politics, The Media

[Boston Globe]

This week in the Boston Globe I’ve got a review of Mark Leibovich’s This Town. The book’s been reviewed everywhere, of course, but one of my favorite anecdotes hasn’t appeared in any of them. (To be fair, it didn’t appear in my review either.)

Anyway, Leibovich spends a few pages profiling the late Richard Holbrooke. Whenever the ambassador arrived somewhere, aides would whisper, “The ego has landed.” So it makes sense that, one day, Holbrooke decided to single-handedly heal the rift between Samantha Power and Hillary Clinton. Power, you may recall, called Hillary a “monster” during the 2008 primary, leaving everyone unfathomably angry for six or seven minutes. Later that same year, Power was getting married, and Holbrooke pulled her aside and offered her a truly special wedding gift: he would use his diplomatic skills to defuse the Power-Clinton contretemps. 

A lot of reviewers (including me) have read This Town as the story of the Obama administration lapsing into the ways of Washington. But the president himself comes off pretty well in the book. When he hears about Holbrooke’s matrimonial grandstanding, Obama shakes his head. “Some people,” he tells Power, “just get toasters.”

The real facts on Indiana’s health insurance rates

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Hoosiers, Politics

[Indianapolis Star]

In today’s Indianapolis Star, I’ve got a short op ed on the claim that health insurance will go up by 72 percent under Obamacare. I’ve got a personal stake in this story since I’m moving back to my homestate later this year. But after doing some digging I found that this 72 percent number is totally misleading — and disappointingly political. It comes from Indiana’s Department of Insurance, an outfit that, in the words of one of my statehouse sources, “has traditionally preferred to do its work out of the public and political spotlight, regardless of which party controlled the reins of government.”

But that’s changing as Governor Pence’s administration makes one final push against Obamacare. Check out the op ed for more.

Also, if you want more context, the New Republic, the Washington Post, and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities have you covered. My previous reporting on Pence may be of interest, as well.

A review of Charles Moore’s major new Thatcher biography

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Books, Politics

[Boston Globe]

In The Boston Globe, I’ve got a review of From Grantham to The Falklands, the first volume of Charles Moore’s biography of Margaret Thatcher. It’s a stunningly detailed book — just about every fun fact I include in my review is something new that Moore has introduced to the historical record — and that makes sense, given his access. Thatcher’s camp let Moore dig through her personal papers and interview her, and she helped him secure interviews with everyone else and get an early glimpse at some government documents.

The only analog I can think of for this sort of access is what Edmund Morris got from Ronald Reagan in the mid 1980s. Of course, the book that resulted from that, Dutch, was widely criticized by historians because Morris invented a narrator and added in other fictional flourishes. But two quick thoughts on this: first, Morris’s book is actually really good, and his inventions are easy to spot, if also a little distracting. (I always wondered how many of those angry historians even bothered to read Dutch.) Second, Moore’s book actually makes an indirect case for why Morris needed to experiment. I get into this in my Globe review, but Moore’s biography, good as it is, never really captures Thatcher as a character.

Now that may be the Prime Minister’s fault! Thatcher and Reagan both developed reputations for having only a few core beliefs (and for being happy, in all other cases, to work from someone else’s script). And that presents a real dilemma for any biographer, no matter how good the access. Morris tried to solve this dilemma through one extreme — postmodern trickery, meta-biography, maximal interpretation. Now Moore has tried to solve it through the other — a frills-free approach that gets as much as possible on to the page. I’m not sure either writer managed a total success, but one thing’s for sure: like Thatcher and Reagan themselves, these two biographies are most interesting when considered together.

Jefferson Davis and his “presidential” library

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Books, Politics

[Los Angeles Times]

This week in the Los Angeles Times, I wrote an op ed about the opening of Jefferson Davis’s “presidential” library. I realize how crazy that idea sounds, and it’s certainly in large part a bit of clever self-promotion by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, who run the library. But as I point out in my op ed, every presidential library relates a one-sided version of history. And in a weird way, the Davis library is now the best place to see the logic behind those institutions in action.

Of course, the Davis library is also one of the best place to see Southern sympathizers distort history in some troubling ways. Since 2004, the Sons have become much more radical, purging thousands of moderate members and putting more emphasis on defending the Lost Cause. (You can read about that process here.) During that same timeframe, this process  also occurred inside the Davis library. About seven years ago, a member named Robert Murphree pushed to broaden the site’s appeal; when I talked to him on the phone, he kept mentioning Monticello as the best model. After Katrina, however, the library’s other supporters cut Murphree and his allies out of the rebuilding process.

All this to say that, in a few places, at least, the Civil War still staggers on. If you need more proof, check out this short follow up I wrote for the Times in response to a few angry commenters.

Mike Pence’s fiscal (and total) conservatism

by Craig Fehrman, posted in A Mike Pence Primer, Features, Politics

In my Indianapolis Monthly profile of Mike Pence, which you can read here, I pointed out that Indiana’s new governor has taken “vocal conservative stands on just about every issue: foreign policy, fiscal policy, social matters, and more.” Yet the media continue to fixate on those social matters (e.g., Pence’s attempt to defund Planned Parenthood). To me, that sells Pence-the-congressman short — even as it also makes Pence-the-candidate seem even more slippery.

Anyway, I wanted to review Pence’s fiscal bona fides, which seem especially relevant as he rolls out his first two-year budget at the State House. Pence became a congressman in 2000 — in the age of George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservative,” which, as Pence loved to point out, “ultimately [is] another way of saying ‘big-government conservative.”

Again and again, Pence fought for his small-government ideals. The only exception I found, and it’s a partial one, was the federal Farm Bill. Pence’s Sixth District, which covers much of southern Indiana, receives more Farm Bill money than any other district in the country. It created an obvious dilemma for Pence, and one of his staffers told me that, early on, at least, their office took a flexible tack. “Mike would talk about fighting over the size of the pie,” the aide told me, “but once the pie was set he’d fight to get his district as big a slice as he could.”

This method applied to the Farm Bill and to earmarks, as well. But Pence ultimately modified his approach, even though it meant working against his constituents’ interests. By the spring of 2008, he was refusing to vote for Farm Bill. “It has always been my ambition to support Indiana farmers,” Pence said. “But I’ve always sought to do that in a way that protects our federal budget and protects the American taxpayer at large.” Stands like this are why I suggested, in a previous blog post, that Pence has “a more consistent and coherent world-view . . . [than] other Bush-era conservatives like Paul Ryan or Mitch McConnell.”

Stands like this are also why Pence became the chairman of the powerful (and extremely conservative) Republican Study Committee. In fact, one source told me that Pence did such a bang-up job that the organization changed its term limits so he could stay in power. “I don’t believe the mission of the RSC is to achieve conservative legislation,” Pence has said. “I believe it is the objective of our committee to ensure that conservative values are given their proper weight with leadership as it seeks the equilibrium of getting a bill to 218 votes.”

(This, by the way, is one of many places where you can see why John Gregg, Pence’s gubernatorial opponent, ran such a poor campaign. Gregg loved attacking Pence for not passing bills — but far more telling was the reason he didn’t pass bills, with that reason being that Pence was a far-right legislator.)

Pence and the RSC caused plenty of trouble for the compassionate crowd. The best example came in 2005, when Pence made a very public demand that any Hurricane Katrina relief be offset by spending cuts. (It was an early version of what we’re seeing today with Hurricane Sandy.) Then-Speaker Dennis Hastert and then-Majority Leader Tom DeLay called Pence in for a meeting — what Robert Novak described as “a closed-door auto-da-fe, with GOP leaders as the inquisitors and Pence as the heretic.”

That’s a pretty great description, but the Washington Post did Novak one better. After that meeting, the paper reported, the congressman “had the look of a hunted man.” Pence was scheduled to deliver a speech at the Young America Foundation. The topic? “Conservative leadership in Congress” and its “massive spending splurges.” But Pence had a change of heart. Instead, he told the crowd, “I believe in the men and women who lead the House of Representatives and the Senate. I see them as men and women of integrity and principle, who work every day to bring the ideals of our Founders into the well of the people’s house.” Then he left abruptly. According to the Post, Pence didn’t even stick around for the Q&A he’d agreed to, which left the Young America crew in a tough spot: “Unfortunately, the congressman will be unable to answer questions today,” the host said. “But we are going to have a door prize.”

Now, you can interpret this event in one of two ways: 1) Pence caved to Republican leadership; or 2) Pence was so good at needling Republican leadership that, eventually, they had to go nuclear on him. I’m inclined toward Option 2 — and not just because that makes Pence’s Young America speech a rare (and revealing) bit of unscripted drama. Pence never stopped needling. In 2010, he was one of very few Republicans to admit that attacking Democrats for their (alleged) cuts to Medicare was dumb and incoherent. Then there’s this, from Michael Grunwald’s excellent book The New New Deal:

[Eric] Cantor and Mike Pence were both part of the conservative Republican Study Committee as well as the leadership team. But as one aide put it, Pence rolled out of bed thinking about being a conservative, while Cantor woke up thinking about being a leader. Infrastructure reflected that difference. In leadership meetings, Cantor argued that the Republican stimulus alternative should go big on public works . . . Pence pushed back: Aren’t we supposed to be against government spending?

All this to say that when people portray Pence as a social crusader, they obscure an important point: he’s a crusader, full stop.

Or at least he was. But there’s one more thing worth noting here: more and more Republicans share Pence’s comprehensive ideology. He’s what the Pew Research Center calls a “Staunch Conservative.” In its political typology survey, Pew highlights “a single bloc of across-the-board conservatives . . . [who] take extremely conservative positions on nearly all issues — on the size and role of government, on economics, foreign policy, social issues and moral concerns.” Yet Pew didn’t identify this bloc until recently, in 2011. In other words, as in so much else with the Republican party, Mike Pence was way out in front.