Reality found shot, stabbed, beaten and left for dead on K Street

Sometimes I resent not owning a television, but at least once a year for the past eight years I’ve been grateful for the lack.

I read the various State of the Union speech press releases from the White House yesterday, including the morning press gaggle with Dana Perino during which she noted repeatedly that last night’s speech wouldn’t be chock-a-block with new ideas. For some reason she and Bush advisor Ed Gillespie, who rated his own, separate briefing, were really pumped up about the president’s decision to do something about Congressional earmarks, although not, apparently, what he had originally planned to do. There was a lot of talk about a “sprint to the finish,” by which I think the aides meant that the president is energized and so on—completely unaffected by the fact that he’ll be leaving in his wake a recession, some degree of financial sector meltdown consequent to a wholesale regulatory failure, an enormous amount of new debt and not one but two seriously fucked up military occupations, with all that they entail—but which also fits with the idea of not loading him up with a lot of weighty, concrete goals that could bog him down on the final lap.

I read all that stuff, and the transcript of the speech when it lumbered across the intertubes, and the earlier release of prospective applause lines which corresponded pretty closely to the actual applause lines that are duly noted in the final transcript. Because I didn’t watch the speech, I don’t know whether White House aides were holding tasty mackerels just out of reach of the audience at strategic moments or whether the crowd was simply that predictable (or that predictably simple, whichever). Or, alternatively, whether someone just added “(Applause)” to the transcript after each of the excerpted lines.

The speech actually tracked reality considerably more closely than most of the previous Bush efforts, if only by dint of not promising much of anything, and putting an unusually modest amount of lipstick on an unusually limited number of pigs. We’re not putting a man on Mars this time around; we’re putting a man in a room and making him count Congressional earmarks. We haven’t saved Iraq; we’ve contained the violence. Yay.

Osama bin Laden made a guest appearance; the only person to be mentioned by name in the speech. He made his State of the Union debut last year. Search the speeches of the five years before that, and the result is “‘Osama’ not found.”

The Democratic response was delivered by Kansas governor Kathleen Sebelius. Sebelius is expected to endorse Barack Obama for president today or soon thereafter, and her speech could have been written by or for Obama.

I’m a Democrat, but tonight, it really doesn’t matter whether you think of yourself as a Democrat, or a Republican,or an independent, or none of the above.

Instead, the fact you’re tuning in this evening tells me each of you is, above all an American, first.

You are mothers and fathers. Grandparents and grandchildren. Working people and business-owners. Americans all.

And the American people — folks like you, and me — are not nearly as divided as our rancorous politics might suggest.

It was clever: a call for the president to come in from the cold and do the right things. Let us know how that works out.

Anticipating the president’s speech, Dan Froomkin wrote yesterday that “President Bush has a lot to accomplish in tonight’s State of the Union address. He needs to lay out a plausible agenda for his final year in office, justify a war that the American people overwhelmingly oppose, stave off a recession and persuade the nation and the world that he’s not been a colossal failure.”

That’s something of a mischaracterization. Bush has certainly been a colossal disaster, but he’s been remarkably successful at doing whatever he wants to do. He has a lock on worst president ever, running the worst national security administration ever, but the thing is, he did it. He got every opportunity he wanted, and he’s still getting most of what he wants; it’s only that the stuff turns out to be inevitably and predictably bad for everyone but him and a few good friends. And the Iranian government.

He has issues with reality, but he’s not the only one. The remaining Democratic presidential candidates, with the partial exception of John Edwards, are campaigning as though they’ll be taking office under less than disastrous circumstances, and reality is going to bite the next president, hard.

All of the Democratic candidates appear to be committed to keeping the Taliban out of Afghanistan’s political process, which means that the occupation there will become increasingly costly as the Taliban continue to consolidate their position. That might not matter, other than in the negligible currency of bodies, if Iraq got cheaper.

But Bush indicated last night that he plans to end 2008 with as many troops in Iraq as were there at the beginning of last year, which means that one of the first things the new president will have to do is request somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 billion to fund the occupation through the end of next year. The situation in Afghanistan will have deteriorated further by then, and the new president will presumably have to be more honest about that, and responsive to it, which is to say willing to throw more good money and lives after bad. And who knows what other catastrophic mischief Bush will have gotten up to in the interim.

Further, Clinton, Obama and Edwards have all committed to substantially increasing the size of the Army and Marines. That will be expensive; recruiting enough new personnel to maintain current levels is tough, requiring continually escalating enlistment and re-enlistment bonuses and increasingly loose standards, and it won’t get any easier and cheaper so long as we’re still in Iraq.

So on top of the money for Iraq and Afghanistan, add on another $100 billion or more over a few years for recruitment, training and equipment, and then tack on a permanent $30 billion or so annually for maintenance.

But aren’t we getting out of Iraq? Probably not. All of the Democrats say they’ll keep whatever forces in place are necessary to protect US civilian personnel in the country and conduct anti-terrorist missions. When one really thinks about that, it doesn’t sound too promising; the more troops we withdraw, the more difficult it becomes to protect the ones remaining, and their supply lines, and the civilians. At some moment, it will become impossible. I don’t know what the tipping point would be, but my guess, based upon the levels of violence we saw last year, is that drawing down to fewer than 80,000 or so troops would do the trick.

Neither can the Iraqi government defend itself without significant military support from the US. That hasn’t changed, and it isn’t likely to change. Anyone planning to extricate us from the country has to face the fact that in the short term, the difference between staying and going rests primarily on the nature of the disaster over which they’ll be presiding. Can any of the Democratic candidates handle being tagged as the president who lost Iraq?

Which is to say, don’t count those chickens just yet; even if the new president is serious about getting out and is as willing to own the result as Congressional Democrats have been willing to assume ownership of the occupation, that too will cost a bunch of money over a protracted period of time. And looming over the whole subject of the military is the question of whether or not a Democratic president will succumb to the temptation to prove that we can still kick some serious ass so long as it doesn’t require sticking around afterward.

The costs of the occupations are far from the only financial pressures facing the next president. Annual interest on the national debt will likely top $450 billion in 2008, the national debt will hit $10 trillion in 2009, and deficit spending won’t be ending any time soon. The new president will be facing a recession, which renders tax hikes unlikely. Implementing any of the major programs the candidates are calling for will be expensive: Obama’s campaign estimates that his health care reform proposals would cost in the vicinity of $50-$60 billion a year; Clinton estimates the cost of her plan at $110 billion a year; Edwards says his will cost between $90-$120 billion a year. History suggests that the actual costs would be considerably higher. How will that bill get paid, assuming something significant actually gets passed?

Democrats can expect to pick up a number of seats in Congress, but unless they either pick up a dozen Senate seats or succeed in panicking the remaining Senate Republicans into something resembling reasonableness—shock and awe from Harry Reid, yo—they can also expect a filibuster on any piece of even modestly progressive legislation that would otherwise stand a chance of passage. Congressional Republicans are orcs, not elves, and they won’t be sailing off into the sunset when their time is passed.

Fiscal responsibility will return to the political vocabulary; the institutional press ought to, but won’t, respond with hysterical laughter when Republicans bring the issue up. Within a year of the inauguration, Democrats will be deemed to have been responsible for all the blowback from the Bush years.

“You should have stopped us,” Republicans will say. “We would have stopped you.” They specialize in opposition. It’ll be ugly. Reality so often is, once you populate it with people.

If the candidates aren’t doing much to prepare their supporters for the shape of things to come, again with the notable and laudable (and all too often inaudible) exception of John Edwards, neither are their supporters exerting themselves to see through the haze. Both Clinton and Obama are K Street darlings; the Clinton campaign is K Street, and while Obama doesn’t get quite the overt love from lobbyists that Clinton enjoys, neither does he maintain anything like the separation some of his supporters may envision. Lobbyists and their clients are very far from running scared of either candidate, and that fact should have considerably more predictive power than seems to be the case for their fans.

But it is what it is. Vote Democratic. I might even buy a TV next year. Yay.