Corey Booker's bona fides...

Corey Booker, soon-to-be Senator from New Jersey has enormous star-power.  There are things to admire about Booker - he seems to have done a good job as Mayor of Newark against steep odds. He strikes me as slightly ridiculous in the degree of his obsession with ephemeral social media, but that's probably generational.  (Politicians in their mid-40s like Booker tend to be desperate to comport to an older person's notion of what younger potential voters are all about.)

But IMHO Booker is absolutely not the kind of Democrat we need more of on the national

scene - he's way too cozy with the 1%, clearly open to cutting bad deals for the young folks he's eager to impress around their long-term Social Security benefits, babbling right-wing nonsense on the Sunday morning idiot gabfests about deficits as a major problem when we need to be focused on when unemployment has been the burning issue for five years, shamelessly pointing fingers regarding the origins of the financial crisis of 2008 without mentioning the word "banks."

 Noam Sheiber @ TNR has a good break-down of Bookers' deep flaws as an incoming high-profile Democrat addressing issues at the national level:

Exactly what kind of senator will Cory Booker make once he coasts to (a near-certain) victory this fall? On the one hand, Booker—the Newark mayor and reigning viceroy of Twitter—has a habit of lionizing the tech and finance executives who are his biggest campaign donors. Last year on “Meet the Press,” he famously criticized President Obama’s “nauseating” assault on the private-equity industry. Booker’s ease around business moguls is such that he betrayed no sheepishness when The New York Times disclosed that several had funded his personal Internet venture, potentially worth millions to him, while he was ensconced in City Hall.

False "Centrism" on Tax Rates

James Kwak at Baseline Scenario on the skewed notion of "bi-partisan compromise" and "consensus" over cutting tax rates:

Today’s tax rates were set by George W. Bush in 2001 and are considerably lower than the rates that prevailed under Bill Clinton and, for that matter, during most of the history of the income tax. The tax rates on capital gains and dividends, in particular, are at their lowest levels since before World War II. For those of you who care about global competitiveness, total taxes in the United States are lower than in most other advanced industrialized countries. Given the expected growth in the national debt due to demographic shifts and health care inflation, the obvious thing to do would be to simply return to Clinton-era tax rates.

The need to lower rates is not economic, but political. The simple fact is that given the Republican Party of Grover Norquist, you cannot get a single prominent Republican to sign on to a tax plan that does not cut tax rates. Ergo, if you want to call yourself bipartisan, you have to cut rates. But that doesn’t mean it’s right; that just means that the Republicans have successfully eliminated their negotiating room, forcing would-be centrists to cave in to their demands...

Bowles-Simpson, Domenici-Rivlin, and the Gang of Six would all drastically reduce tax revenue from the levels dictated by current law.

Remember, under current law the Bush tax cuts all expire. These “centrist” plans only “increase” tax revenue by first adopting a baseline in which the Bush tax cuts are made permanent.

The Education of a Centrist

Brad DeLong on two decades of GOP "Crazy":

I went to Washington in 1993 to work for what we called Lloyd Bentsen's Treasury as part of the sane technocratic bipartisan center. And it took me only two months--two months!--to conclude that America's best hope for sane technocratic governance required the elimination of the Republican Party from our political system as rapidly as possible. Dole and Gingrich's "We really don't care that these policies are good for the country--are a lot like policies we would enthusiastically support if proposed by a Republican president--but we are going to try to block them because that will weaken Clinton" wad a real eye-opener. Nothing since has led me to question or change that belief--only to strengthen it. We really need a very different opposition party to the Democrats: a less dishonorable one.

David Brooks laments Obama's "mean and intransigent" attacks on the super-rich and feels "used"

The fragile Mr. Brooks at NYTs:

The White House has clearly decided that in a town of intransigent Republicans and mean ideologues, it has to be mean and intransigent too...

(B)y God Obama’s going to raise taxes on rich people who give to charity! We’ve got to do something to reduce the awful philanthropy surplus plaguing this country!

The president believes the press corps imposes a false equivalency on American politics. We assign equal blame to both parties for the dysfunctional politics when in reality the Republicans are more rigid and extreme. There’s a lot of truth to that, but at least Republicans respect Americans enough to tell us what they really think. The White House gives moderates little morsels of hope, and then rips them from our mouths. To be an Obama admirer is to toggle from being uplifted to feeling used. 

Tim Noah comments on Brooks' pain at TNR:

Centrism in extremis: how "serious people" handed the hostage-takers their weapons

A moment of great opportunity?

Jon Chait at New Republic offers some important analysis of how the "serious center" enabled the hostage-takers and outright loonytoons types of the Tea Party - who are driving Republican strategy and threatening to take the country off of an economic cliff in an act of political insanity never before even seriously contemplated in American politics.

His conclusion is clear and simple: "...the deficit hawks who represent the center of Washington establishment thought badly underestimated the danger entailed by tying high stakes negotiations involving the Republican Party to a cataclysmic event." 

Deficit reduction, focused on conjured issues like the future budgets of Medicare or Social Security (which have absolutely nothing to do with our deficits or the debt ceiling), has become the Holy Grail among many Beltway types - when in fact the economic crisis we actually face is about jobs and resultant shortfalls in federal revenues, made worse by a decade of profligate tax cuts.

The hysteria around deficits is not just wrong-headed but dangerous in our current straits - former Council of Economic Advisors chair Laura D'Andrea Tyson warned this week that "the risk grows that large, premature cuts in government spending will reduce aggregate demand, will tip the economy back into recession and drive the unemployment rate back into double digits." The way out of crisis is not through slashing the federal budget but by getting people back to work and, ultimately,  re-balancing our tax code.

The "deficit hawks" dominating "serious" Washington-centric opinion have consistently acted as enablers of a "Tea Partyized" GOP - the runaway vehicle driven by an extremist faction whose agenda ranges from incoherence steeped in cultural resentments to the outright sinister and duplicitous Randian schemes of Norquist & Co.

Chait: