Explain this

The current Republican message is that the Democrats rammed through a healthcare reform program against the wishes of the American people and they are going to pay dearly in November for this atrocity.

Oh yeah?  Explain this.

Obama is Doomed!

Here are some quotes that Mark Mellman repeats in his column of last week that declare an end to a presidency:

The press purports to explain the problems. “Why The President’s Men Stumble,” a New York Times headline promised to explain.

Another lede concluded that the president’s “once-dazzling political momentum … has stalled.”

A noted columnist captured the pack’s mood: “the Washington press corps is suddenly in hot pursuit of ‘an administration in disarray,’ which is coming apart at the seams under … a ‘detached President.’ ”

The distinguished dean of Washington columnists opined, “it is becoming increasingly clear” that the president’s marvel “was a one-year phenomenon … what has been occurring since is an accelerating retreat … a process in which he is more spectator than leader.”

These quotes are from 1982 and are about the collapsing Reagan Administration.  We all know how that ended, right?

I just hope the Democrats in Congress realize that their only hope is to "PASS. THE. DAMN BILL." with apologies to Andrew Sullivan.

The Economist Gets It Wrong

The Economist issues its diagnosis of what's wrong with America's governing system and declares it is because Obama hasn't given enough ground to the Republicans.

It is not so much that America is ungovernable, as that Mr Obama has done a lousy job of winning over Republicans and independents to the causes he favours. If, instead of handing over health care to his party’s left wing, he had lived up to his promise to be a bipartisan president and courted conservatives by offering, say, reform of the tort system, he might have got health care through; by giving ground on nuclear power, he may now stand a chance of getting a climate bill.

Wrong!  Obama did offer to negotiate over tort reform and was rebuffed by the Republicans.  And what of the three months was given over to Finance Chair Sen. Max Baucus to come up with a bipartisan healthcare reform bill?  The strategy of the Republicans, which Sen. Grassley, minority leader of the committee, explicitly gave away, was to slow the process down and hope that lighten would strike and kill the bill.  Sure enough, lighten struck in Massachusetts, but didn't quite kill it.

But for the Economist to totally absolve the Republicans for any responsibility for the gridlock in Washington is laughable.  They are tacitly portrayed as this poor, ignored collection of principled conservatives.  When, in fact, they are a wrecking crew, bent on the destruction of the Obama presidency.

As Obama has learned, it is very hard to find common ground with people whose fondest wish is your utter failure.

Frank Rich

In today's NY Times, Frank Rich addresses this new prohibition, discussed below, against "blaming Bush" for the problems the country faces currently.  During Obama's State of the Union, John McCain can be seen chuckling and mouthing the words, "blaming Bush."

Rich writes:

Perhaps McCain was sneering at Obama because of the Beltway’s newest unquestioned cliché: one year after a new president takes office he is required to stop blaming his predecessor for the calamities left behind. Who dreamed up that canard — Alito? F.D.R. never followed it. In an October 1936 speech, nearly four years after Hoover, Roosevelt was still railing against the “hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing government” he had inherited. He reminded unemployed and destitute radio listeners that there had been “nine crazy years at the ticker” and “nine mad years of mirage” followed by three long years of bread lines and despair. F.D.R. soon won re-election in the greatest landslide the country had seen.

George Who??

Obama's First State of the Union delivered. It helped stabilize my faith and confidence, which, as per the previous post, was getting wobbly. I appreciated his feistiness. On the two raps from the left, I agree with one and disagree with the other. I agree that he still seems to be holding back on healthcare. I'm hoping that he knows the fix is in for passage of the Senate bill, with tweaks in reconciliation. And his invitation to Republicans into the process was rhetorical, since I am convinced that they have not and will not bargain in good faith. If anything, the Massachusetts result will only increase their determination to block everything.

I reject the critique from the left on the so-called budget freeze. Frankly, I agree with the Republicans that it's too modest to have any economic effect as fiscal policy. But it should have some modest symbolic effect. It is the most controllable part of the budget, so it is appropriate to try to limit overall spending in that category as a first step in reigning in the deficit. As long as it isn't a line by line freeze, it seems like a good, and frankly necessary, step. It's really not a freeze, it's a cap. But I guess freeze polls better.

My favorite moment was the following:

At the beginning of the last decade, the year 2000, America had a budget surplus of over $200 billion. By the time I took office, we had a one-year deficit of over $1 trillion and projected deficits of $8 trillion over the next decade. Most of this was the result of not paying for two wars, two tax cuts, and an expensive prescription drug program. On top of that, the effects of the recession put a $3 trillion hole in our budget. All this was before I walked in the door.

Now the Republicans and their sympathizers in the media have howled over this. "He's got to stop blaming Bush!" "It was a campaign speech!" Sen. John Kyl (R-AZ) called it "whining" on NPR this morning.

Baloney! We need more of this.

The Republican game is clear. At its most simplistic, they are trying to avoid taking responsibility for mess we're in. But their plan is even more insidious and sometimes seems to be working. Some in the media seem to be buying their scam. Here's how it goes:

Step 1

Make it inappropriate for Democrats or the President to assign any responsibility for the country's problems to Bush or the Republicans. Call it partisan, or whining or unbecoming of the president. Get the conventional wisdom spouters in Washington to flag this and tut tut every time some Democrat mentions Bush. Thereby, they separate Bush and the Republicans from economic mess they created.

Step 2

Hang every problem we have on Obama. Blame the situation on his policies, both those he has enacted, like the Recovery Program, and those they've succeeding in blocking, like healthcare (so far), climate change, banking regulation, etc. Make the Obama agenda into a status quo that has failed. This, despite the fact that every respectable economist has confirmed that the "stimulus plan" actually worked. If anything, it was too small. State that, after a year in office, the fact that Obama has only ended the recession and not brought about full employment is proof that his policies are an utter failure.

Step 3

Propose the same policies that created the economic collapse, tax cuts for business and the wealthy and deregulation of every sector of the economy. Since these proposals are different from the "failed Obama program" and accountability for Bush and the Republicans have been banished from the debate, they are presented as something new. Republicans then become the party of change.

Viola, black is white, up is down. And the Republicans are back in charge accelerating our decline as a country.

Obama at One Year

Count me as a Koolaid drinking supporter of Barack Obama. Whatever I believe about his position on any given issue - and I disagree on some, I fundamentally trust him. I trust his motives, I trust his intelligence and I trust his judgment...I think. Yes, even I am getting a bit wobbly right now. Like everyone else, I was stunned by the slow motion train wreck in Massachusetts. And I'm deeply disappointed with how much it seems to have rattled the Democrats in Congress. If the Republicans were in the same position, they would have rammed the Senate bill through the House by now, if only to make the point that the voters in one state can not scare them. Why the hesitation among the Democrats? They've already voted for the bill in one form or another. How do they think they will diminish their political risk by refusing to vote for essentially the same bill again and at least get credit for the accomplishment? I just don't get it.

Which brings me back to Obama. Why doesn't he just demand the House pass the Senate bill and fix it in the reconciliation process? Since I still trust his motives, intelligence and judgment, I can only assume he knows what he's doing and will bring this to a good place. But my faith is weakening.


It helped me to read an evaluation of Obama by Chris Patten in the European Voice. He's the former governor general of Hong Kong before it was handed back to the Chinese and is an enlightened political observer. Yes, he's European, so his opinion is disregarded as socialist and elitist by red-blooded Americans. But I've always respected his insights. Here's what he said about Obama:

Pragmatic and highly intelligent, sooner or later every issue receives the full attention of his forensic curiosity. Recalling Hillary Clinton's famous Democratic primary television advertisement, Obama, it turns out, is exactly the sort of president that most of us would want to have in the post for that 3am phone call about an international crisis. He would not be afraid to act, but he would be prepared to think first.

And that's what I admire most about Obama. He thinks things through and doesn't claim to have a divinely inspired gut, like his predecessor. Like Patten, I feel like he's been pushed around a bit in his first year in office, by Benjamin Netanyahu, by the Chinese, by the Republicans in Congress. But my hope is that, like John Kennedy being pushed around by the generals on the Bay of Pigs and Khrushchev in Vienna, the experience will toughen him up for when he confronts his own version of the Cuban Missle Crisis (let's hope with somewhat lesser stakes).

Which leads to Patten's larger point in his piece. He identifies to the greatest crisis facing humanity right now and it's not global warming. Rather it's nuclear proliferation.

The nuclear issue is one of the biggest items on the Obama agenda. How it is handled will help to define his presidency....These are going to be some of the major questions for Obama over the next year and more. If he gets them right, he can forget about his short-term critics. Fortunately, he is smart enough to know this.

Coincidentally, there was an NPR story this morning about a new documentary on nuclear proliferation in which Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, William Perry and Sam Nunn, cold warriors all, advance their own grave warnings about this threat. Look for that issue to take center stage in the months ahead. It will be interesting to see how that one gets politicized in the efforts by his opponents to "break" Obama.

In the meantime, we toil in the weeds of domestic legislation. I do believe Obama's got to chalk up some wins on the smaller issues, like healthcare and the economy, in order to give him the political heft to deal with the fate of humanity, a challenge with which Republicans seemed blithely indifferent.

We are at a familiar place. Obama under siege with a big speech coming up. He's nailed it every time before. I'll be watching his State of the Union tonight with my "hope" only slightly diminished.

An Honorable Conservative

Add Judge Richard Posner to the very gradually growing list of intellectually honest conservatives who are will to acknowledge that the actual events of the last year discredited their economic theory.  Alan Greenspan has admitted that he placed to much trust in the free market to rein in financial misbehavior.  Now, Posner, an extremely prolific writer who's considered one of the smartest conservative economic thinkers in the country, has come around, as well.

In the current New Yorker, he is quoted thusly:

We are learning from it [the economic collapse] that we need a more active and intelligent government to keep our model of a capitalist economy from running off the rails.

This is huge.  As noted but the New Yorker writer, John Cassidy,

As acts of betrayals go, this was roughly akin to Johnny Damon's shaving off his beard, forsaking the Red Sox Nation and joining the Yankees.

Now, thanks an analogy I get.

People like Posner prove how utterly out of touch the current Republican leadership is, both party and congressional.  They think they claw their way back into power by bamboozling the public that our current travails are all the fault of Barack Obama, shameless trying to shout there way past the fact that it's their failure and corruption that put us in the mess we're in.

Republican Hypocrisy

I generally take the position that most people consider themselves good and well-motivated.  When people do or say things with which I disagree, I try to understand what they are saying to themselves to justify their misguided ways.  Often, I will conclude that they are either deluding themselves or they believe some higher cause is achieved by maybe shading the truth or ignoring evidence that may contradict their view or action.

So, I mostly attribute Republican lies and deceit with willful ignorance or an "ends justifies the means" approach to politics.  And their end to to obtain power.

But the Republican response to the Detroit underwear bomber blows my theory.  In this instance, they are just evil.  Their relentless attacks on Obama are now completely divorced from any credibility and are shameless, hypocritical efforts to destroy our President without any regard to what it does to our country.  When Democrats criticized Bush, they were said to be unpatriotic.  Republicans, like Dick Cheney, now show no qualms about aggressively politicizing every move Obama makes.  It is truly sickening.

Think Progress has a good account of Cheney's latest outrage.  As does Eugene Robinson in today's Washington Post. 

Sadly, the American public doesn't punish this kind of behavior.  It think the only think that we save our country in the next few years is for the voters to smack the Republicans for the third time in a row.  Right now, they feel politically vindicated because they have succeeded tainting the healthcare reform legislation by making the process of its enactment as ugly as possible.  Eventually, the bill will pass and we will move on to the slow process of implementation.  It is unclear what it's short term political impact will be.  They key in November will be the economy.  If the economy improves and Obama's policies are vindicated, they are dead meat.  And we might see a new Republican party that believes it has some responsibility to govern.  If unemployment remains high and they make political gains, the trench warfare will continue to the detriment of the country.  Our steady decline will continue.

God help us.

Healthcare Reform

Lots of commentary on healthcare reform today. Suffice it to say that opinion is mixed on Obama's accomplishment in this area. Looking back, I predict this legislation will be considered a stunning achievement. Yes, it is much less that most liberals want. It's less than Obama wants. But it is what it is. And what it is is the most significant piece of social welfare legislation since Medicare.

Obama suffers from the size of his original ambition. As we begin to focus on what's in this bill, you realize that, two years ago, anyone who would have predicted legislation of this kind be enacted into law would have been considered delusional. The Patient Bill of Rights, 30 million more people covered by health insurance, free preventive care, thousands of new community health center, etc., etc. While the left criticizes Obama as to timid, as his change incremental, he's changing America.

For a more articulate account of Obama's brilliant first year, check out Jacob Weisberg's piece in Slate Magazine. It declares Obama's first year on par with FDR and LBJ. I think he's right.

Quote of the Day

Obama is clearly walking a fine line in his visit to China.  It is in the interests of the whole world that the U.S. and China find ways to cooperate.  Still, the Chinese government can be pretty brutal in terms of human rights.  Obama has to touch both bases.  You can imagine the exchange with President Hu where Obama says, "I'll talk about all the good things we're doing together and how well we're getting along, but I'm going to have to whack you on some human rights issues, OK?"  And Hu says, "Sure, and I'll whack you about your outrageous deficits that are going to kill us in terms of the debt we hold for you.  Deal?"  Obama says, "Deal."  And off they go to the press conference.

Still, I have to say that Obama's response on the Internet did take the obsequiousness a step too far.  No wanting to say that he opposes the Chinese government's censorship of web sites because that would, in effect, accuse them of same, he said:

"I'm a big supporter of non-censorship."

C'mon Barack.  Though I strongly support engagement with China, even I think that was weak.

Don't Have to be Crazy to be Wrong

The New York Times has a story today about an opponent of healthcare reform from Georgia.  He's a very calm man who traveled an hour to attend a town meeting held by Congressman Sanford Bishop, (D-GA), described as a moderate who's undecided on the legislation.

Mr. Collier waited until the end of the 3 hour meeting to pose a comment to the Congressman urging him to oppose the legislation because it would lead to "rationing" and would, essentially, destroy our way of life.  The story depicts Mr. Collier as a sincere and honest man with genuine concerns about the reform proposals before Congress.  Presumably, this was an effort to balance against the loonies and to show there are real people with real concerns.  It, thereby, increases the credibility of the opponents.

However, the story goes on to say that it was Mr. Collier's personal experience with the healthcare system that moved him to attend the town meeting.  His wife contracted breast cancer and was treated apparently successfully.  But here's her story:

When Ms. Collier’s breast cancer was diagnosed three years ago, Mr. Collier’s employer-provided insurance paid for her office visits, a biopsy and three surgeries. But the insurer covered only a small fraction of her radiation treatments, which it considered experimental, leaving the Colliers with a $63,000 bill. To their great relief, the charge was later written off by Emory Healthcare, whose doctors had recommended the regimen.

So, the insurance company rationed her care.  It denied coverage for life saving treatment.  Yet this is the system that Mr. Collier is seeking to preserve.  Why?  How could he be so misguided?

Here's how:

The Colliers are committed conservatives who have voted Republican in presidential elections since 1980. They receive much of their information from Fox News, Rush Limbaugh’s radio program and Matt Drudge’s Web site.

That's the battle Obama faces. Ignorance, pure and simple, fomented by interests who's real agenda is to "break" this president.

Makes me sad.

I had a dream last night

Actually, it was more like a nightmare.  It was likely inspired by the rabid criticism Obama is enduring over the healthcare proposal.  I also wrote an email yesterday to my "teabagger" cousin exposing his hypocrisy in attacking Obama, but remaining silent over the crimes of George Bush.

In any event, I dreamed that there was a presidential election and George Bush beat Barack Obama.  Thinking of the Obama administration, I wailed "It was too short!"  In the dream, I wept bitterly and even woke myself up.

What a relief to realize it was only a dream.

Inauguration

I went down to my office today to pre-position my minivan for our getaway from the Presidential Swearing In ceremony. After dropping off the car, I walked over to the White House, which is only three blocks away. There were lots of people milling around and I could get surprisingly close to the reviewing stand for the parade. I checked my watch. It was 12:30 pm. Less than one day left in the catastrophic Bush Administration.

I have to say that this is the most consequential positive historical event in my lifetime. Words fail me. I find myself suddenly welling up at the strangest times. I ran into a colleague in front of the White House who was there with friends. She exulted, like everyone does, at how amazing it all is. When I began to talk, I choked up and had to cut the conversation short so as not to embarrass myself.

The picture is of the Corcoran Gallery where there is an exhibit entitled