As you know, I’m not blogging right now — I’m taking a well-deserved vacation. But if I were blogging, I would most likely be lamenting Hillary Clinton’s decision to take up the side of ignorance in the culture war against expertise.
“There are times that a president will take a position that a broad support of quote-unquote experts agree with. And there are times they will take a position that quote-unquote experts do not agree with.”
That would be Howard Wolfson, Clinton’s communication director, speaking about the McCain/Clinton gas tax holiday proposal. The one that is so bad that a gaggle of economists have fired up a blog just to oppose it. But who cares what economists might say?
STEPHANOPOULOS: But can you name an economist who thinks this makes sense?
CLINTON: Well, I’ll tell you what, I’m not going to put my lot in with economists….
Paul Krugman gets this completely wrong. He thinks the gas tax holiday, while obviously a bad idea, is small potatoes in the big scheme of things, and all of the fuss is just an excuse to paint Hillary Clinton as evil. That’s not right. It is small potatoes, policy wise, but the fuss is being kicked up by the Clinton campaign themselves — they’re running a wide variety of ads attacking Obama for opposing the holiday, casting him as elitist and out of touch.
The gas tax holiday doesn’t help “ordinary Americans.” The supply of petroleum during the summer months is essentially fixed, and the oil companies will charge what traffic will bear. If taxes are lower, they will simply charge the same amount and pocket the difference. Clinton’s proposal includes some weird end-around in which the oil companies pay extra windfall profits taxes so that the idea is purportedly revenue-neutral; which means the whole scheme is precisely meaningless, as the same amount of tax is being paid either way.
The tragedy is that Hillary Clinton understands perfectly well that this is a stupid policy. (If you actually wanted to save people $40 over the course of the summer, you would just give them $40.) She is embracing it anyway. Her campaign is pushing it as a purely symbolic gesture, attempting to take the side of “real people” against elitist snobs with all of their “education” and “expertise” and Ivy-League degrees.
A bit later she added: “It’s really odd to me that arguing to give relief to a vast majority of Americans creates this incredible pushback…Elite opinion is always on the side of doing things that don’t benefit” the vast majority of the American people.
It’s hard to be more clear than that — elite opinion is the enemy. She knows perfectly well that this is a lie. But it’s politics as usual. I don’t want to dislike Hillary Clinton — she is smart and capable, and would be an enormously better President than John McCain. But treating experts as the enemy is a craven strategy to achieve short-term gains at the cost of substantial long-term harm. It’s sad to see her go down that road, and I hope she reverses course soon.
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Hillary can’t win without getting the superdelegades on her side. So, the question is what do the superdelegades think about Hillary gaining a few more votes by using such tactics.
Hypocrisy rules, as always. She’s running for President because she believes she’s elite enough to do it. I’m tellin’ ya, anyone who wants to be president is the very worst candidate.
Bill Clinton:
“It’s the economy, stupid.”
Hillary Clinton:
“Well, I’ll tell you what, I’m not going to put my lot in with economists”
At least we know how her ideas differ from those of the first Clinton.
If you were blogging, which of course you’re not, you might find amusement in Jeffrey Shallit’s post about naive concepts of infinity and time held by Christian apologists.
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Sean did you see the truckers protesting outside the white house in the past two weeks?? They were protesting because of the price of diesel is ridiculous!!
Truckers and working class people need a BREAK.
Hillary’s gas plan is NOT a long term solution. There is NO long term solution.
It also depends on how you define “long”. 2 months, 2 years, 200 years??
Hillary’s plan is simple. Let the oil companies pay for it.
Hillary voted against a previous gas holiday because it was not funded by the oil companies but by transportation taxes.
The choice is simple: Senator Obama wants the American people to pay the gas tax this summer but Senator Clinton thinks Big Oil should.
The Clinton gas tax holiday is financed exclusively through a tax on windfall profits from oil companies and keeps the Highway Transportation Trust fund intact. Hillary opposed a plan in 2000 for a gas tax holiday because it was financed with transportation funds.
Sen. Obama voted three times for a gas tax holiday in 2000 when gas prices were less than $2 a gallon.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080430/ap_on_el_pr/obama_gas_tax_fact_check
It is all but over mathematically for Clinton. So I anticipate her campaign shifting to Florida and Michigan and argue they need to be included. I think the next time she runs lets just get portable goal posts so they can be moved as needed to assist her efforts.
I’d like the unpledged super-delegates to get off their rears and pick. If their job is to help the party win in November the sooner this is over the better the Democratic chances. McCain has had a free ride for months here.
Bill didn’t look too happy standing behind Hillary in Indiana tonight. I think he knows this is over.
e.
“I’m tellin’ ya, anyone who wants to be president is the very worst candidate.”
Riiiiiight! Blooddy Brilliant analysis! Obama doesn’t want to be president badly!
Obama had the audacity to run for president after less than a year as a senator.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gexyfVpFMU
Obama: “I am a believer in…….(pregnant pause)……….in knowing what you’re doing when you apply for a job…”
Hillary Clinton is vastly more qualified to be president. The only senator in NY state history to be on the armed services committee. Wanted universal health care when it wasn’t cool. Why not write a blog about how every elite economist thinks Hillary has a much better health care plan than Obama! Why?
Because affluent males like Sean favor Obama whereas working class people tend to favor Hillary 2-1.
That should tell you who is for the little guy.
Obama’s claims he is the “people’s president”. He is a “regular guy” he says of himself. A guy you want to get a beer with. Hillary not so much.
George Bush, Jimmy Carter (admitted he wasn’t the best of presidents), and on and on all way back to Andrew Jackson(second worst president ever) ALL ran the same BS campaign. All had the same BS cult of personality. ALL FAILED PRESIDENTS.
Roughly on subject, I’m not sure why even normally reasonable media outlets, such as the NY times, are busy discussing who “wins Indiana”, which is completely meaningless. According to the system of election adopted by the democrats, it makes absolutely no difference who has slightly more votes in any given state. Too many years of covering sports competitions?
This is quite true. Gas prices are up 50% in 2008 but gasoline consumption is expected to decrease by only 0.1% or 0.6% after accounting for ethanol driven changes to mileage.
On the other hand, the very steep demand curve for gasoline is an excellent argument in favor of ethanol. Ethanol provides only about 4% of US gasoline right now, but in the context of a 50% price rise causing a 0.6% consumption decrease, the reduction in the price of gasoline could be at least another 50%.
With apologies to HL Mencken, No one ever lost an election by underestimating the intelligence of the American public. Senator Clinton, however, will lose by being uninspiring to everyone who isn’t already in her camp. Her handlers don’t seem to get that the president can’t DO, the president has to LEAD. Senators McCain and Obama both come across as capable of leading, Clinton not so much.
With of the gas tax, Clinton proposes doing something visible and symbolic that won’t actually help. Obama has the guts to say that he thinks it’s a bad idea even though many voters think it’s free money for them. The fact that Clinton and McCain have both come out in favor of the gas tax holiday ought to be a hint that it’s a grandstand play, pandering to the ignorant.
So when Obama says things that experts decry — and most serious economists are aghast at the things he says about free trade — that’s ok because he really *believes* his twaddle, whereas McCain and Hil are bad people because they are not stupid enough to believe stupid things?
Hillary’s plan is simple. Let the oil companies pay for it.
Hillary’s plan is also wrong. How do companies pay for taxes? They charge it to their customers! They’re not running a farkin charity.
The problem, as actually reading what I wrote would reveal, is not disagreeing with experts, but disagreeing with them because they are the experts, in a transparent attempt to cast yourself as a champion of common-sense regular folks against the Chardonnay-sipping elites.
There are plenty of respectable economists that are not in favor of unrestricted free trade.
Sean,
Some of us stick to red wine. It’s better for your heart.
e.
Well, it is encouraging that this gas tax issue eventually seems to have hurt Clinton more than it helped her. Perhaps the voters aren’t as dumb as she thought.
“The problem, as actually reading what I wrote would reveal, is not disagreeing with experts, but disagreeing with them because they are the expert”
You are just seeing what you WANT to see. Where does one get that from what she said??? You are either seeing something that is not there OR seeing what you want to see. How can you be so sure??
Hillary has stood up against Bush’s war on science and bad economic policy a THOUSAND times.
http://www.livescience.com/history/071004_clinton_science.html
http://www.hillaryclinton.com/news/release/view/?id=3566
http://www.hillaryclinton.com/news/speech/view/?id=3570
This blog post is nothing more than cherry picking. the same thing the stupid pundits do, the same thing that extreme left wing blogs like huffington post or daily kos do. the same thing that cnn or msnbc does when they cherry pick the stories or polls favorable to obama.
Please bash Hillary more. I have not heard enough Hillary bashing in the past year. TV and other blogs do not do it enough! MORE!
Let’s just focus on the one thing she wants to do that you do not agree with!!
Bad astronomer to my surprise followed you lead.
You can easily pick MANY things that Obama has done wrong or stupid things he has said and especially policy that he promotes that you do not agree with and write about that.
This just goes to what I think human nature is all about. It is not based on any logic or the facts. Hillary Clinton clearly has a better resume, she is more qualified, she knows the issues an order of magnitude better. you can trust her to work her heart out for this country. we have no reason to trust obama.
Human nature is based on biases (maybe we are born with them or maybe it is evolution or maybe we learn them at an early age, i don’t really know) and we spend our lives justifying them to each other. In this case the FAR better candidate and more likely to beat McCain is losing.
I’m a little dissappointed McCain is into this idea as well, since it essentially flies in the face of the Pigouvian petroleum tax idea (with say a corresponding tax cut somewhere else).
Krugman is right though, in that it is small potatoes in the scheme of things and ultimately irrelevant… eg Let the politicians run their populist ideas, so long as they aren’t too damaging.
But if you really want to see an economist cringe, simply bring up Obama’s idiotic tirades against free trade alla Nafta or show them all the spending programs he’s promised. Ick! As if W. wasn’t bad enough in that respect.
Mostly off-topic, but not entirely:
Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Acceptance Speech for the Renomination for the Presidency, Philadelphia, Pa.” (June 27, 1936)
Kurt, did Hillary hire you to campaign for her on cyberspace? 🙂
Haelfix,
Ending the Iraq War and the tax cuts on the wealthy will provide significantly more resources to fund health care and education and for that matter even basic science research as well as reduce the budget deficit. Go look at the numbers.
Kurt
“you can trust her to work her heart out for this country. we have no reason to trust obama”
Can you provide some tangible evidence as to why Obama is less trustworthy than Clinton?
e.
Kurt:
We can agree that the gas tax holiday is not a long-term solution. What surprises me is that you seem to think it could work as a short-term solution. The government does not set the gas prices, the gas companies do. Has Senator Clinton proposed *any* method to ensure the gas tax savings find their way down to the consumers, as opposed to just being swallowed up by the gas companies (presumably to help them fund their new windfall profits tax)?
And as for the windfall profits tax, there is no guarantee that it would ever get passed. Even if it does, it’s already spoken for. She (and Obama) proposed a windfall profits tax months ago.
Every way I look at it, the whole idea continues to look ridiculous.
I like Hillary a lot. She was my preferred candidate at the beginning of the race. But this is getting very silly.