Last week, when the president’s tax cut deal with Republicans was all but done, I wrote that the Democrats and progressives risk moral failure if we do not meet the moral obligation the tax cut deal would create. Now the deal is well and truly done — passed by the House and the Senate, and signed by the president. It’s time to look at the nature of that moral obligation and what it will take to truly meet it.
Well, it’s official. The president will sign the tax cut deal into law this afternoon.
The 99ers are getting nothing for Christmas, while the White House and the Tea Party congratulate themselves on extending tax cuts that don’t create jobs or stimulate the economy, because the rich don’t spend tax cuts — but nothing at all that will help those Americans who have exhausted their 99 weeks of unemployment benefits.
It has been said before — recently, even — but it bears saying again and again, as any truth does. Conservatives have finally, and completely, abandoned compassion. Progressives spent much of the previous decade declaring the "compassionate conservatism" of the Bush era a cruel joke. Policy gestures in that vein were seldom backed with the money to make them work. And there there was Bush administration’s cruel habit of praising successful programs only to have his administration recommend devastating cuts to the same programs — often as the president’s praise was still ringing in the air.
In her 2003 column, "The Uncompassionate Conservative," Molly Ivins cited as an example of the above President George W. Bush’s praise of the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program [LIHEAP] — which helps low income families heat their homes in the winter — during a presidential debate in 2000, only to turn around and cut $300 million from the program in his first budget as president — even as people were freezing to death. Ivins attributes this to a kind of pathological cluelessness on the part of Bush and his "compassionate conservatism."
Faced with a foreclosure fiasco of astounding proportions — as duly chronicled by fellow bloggers Zach Carter and Richard Eskow — in which banks literally kick down doors to foreclose on houses even though they can’t prove they own the mortgages, president Obama fretted that a foreclosure moratorium would help people who “don’t deserve it.” He needn’t have worried. Since the housing bubble popped and sent the economy into free-fall, the government has been helping people don’t deserve it.
Of course, I mean the banks and financial institutions bailed out by the very taxpayers they are throwing out of the homes, without being able to prove they have the right to do so. Reading the stories of what has gone on, makes it hard to imagine how this has gone on without so much as a ripple of outraged. It’s simple, the banks — and I believe they know this, and count on it — have their biggest allies in the American people themselves.
It Won’t Work
Not to pick on Kathleen Parker, but the “narrative” she suggested the Democrats take from midterm elections — “You can’t sell people what they don’t want” — is more likely to end up being the narrative the Republicans take from 2012 — if the president and the Democrats do what they need to do. Karl Rove was half-right when he said voters didn’t toss out the Democrats because are “enraptured with the GOP.” People are angry sure, but the numbers tell a different story.
People are angry not at what the Democrats did after 2008, but what they didn’t do. They didn’t “buy” what the GOP was selling. Like a shopper who ordered one thing and got another, American voters ordered transformative change in 2008 but got the same old transactional politics instead. The midterms of 2010 is their letter or complaint.
Here at Campaign for America’s Future, we just released a voter survey that shows voter fears about the economy and anger at government failure to help middle- working-class families even as Wall Street got bailed out.
Findings include:
Why stop at one poll?
The GOP is not popular with Americans, nor is its agenda. Poll after poll leading up to the election bear this out. Their approval/favorability ratings were low going into the election, lower than the Democrats in many cases.
This is in the context of low approval ratings for Congress overall. But, as I said in the previous post, The Democrats’ problem is failing to deliver on the agenda Americans voted for in 2008. The Republicans problem is an agenda that remains toxic to most Americans.
Americans offer tepid support for much of the Republican Party’s domestic agenda, including repealing the new healthcare law and extending tax cuts for the wealthy, according to the latest Society for Human Resource Management/National Journal Congressional Connection Poll, conducted with the Pew Research Center.
The results suggest Republicans could struggle to pass legislation advancing many of the smaller-government themes that have dominated their campaigns in the midterm elections, even if the party wins control of one or both houses of Congress in November.
In particular, the party appears to risk a backlash from senior citizens, a critical voting bloc that harbors deep skepticism about tinkering with entitlement programs.
The survey is the most comprehensive polling look so far at the major elements of the agenda that key Republicans have been discussing in the weeks leading up to the election.
Not all the news was good for Democrats…
…Still, the poll offered little to suggest that the surge in voter support for Republican candidates, whom analysts project to win major gains this fall, carries over to support for policies championed this fall by Republican leaders in Washington and on the campaign trail.
Kos posted a handy breakdown when the poll came out.
What do Americans want? Here’s a hint, it’s not what the Republicans campaigned on.
And that’s an overview, because a detailed analysis is more than I have space to do here.
Not of the above adds up to what the GOP was “selling” in this election. But it’s what more Americans “bought” in 2008 than voted in the midterm elections and any number of special elections since.
Parker follows the example of other conservatives who, after every election election since November 2008 have rushed to declare that “the people have spoken.” When voters in Massachusetts, Virginia, and New Jersey elected Republicans, they somehow “spoke” louder than those Americans who spoke in 2008. When 45 million fewer vote in 2010 than voted in 2008, “the people have spoken.”
The people spoke in 2008, and have been speaking since then. It’s just that neither party has listened.
The people spoke in 2008, upwards of 130 million of them, compared to 82.5 million in 2010. The numbers above, all from polls taken in the last half of this year, reflect what they voted for then and have wanted since.
From Democrats they got health care reform with no public option; and no fight to defend it; financial reform that left “Too Big To Fail” standing; a stimulus that was too small for the jobs crisis the country faces; a foreclosure prevention program that, in order to avoid helping the “wrong people,” helped almost no one; and no climate/energy legislation, given up without much of a fight.
From the GOP they got an agenda written by and for corporate interests.
The GOP is in an unenviable position. It is constitutionally incapable of delivering what Americans truly want. Meanwhile, the party must content with an extreme right that wants what Republicans cannot deliver without angering a great many Americans.
It won’t work.
The Democrats have a chance to come back if they want it. But they need a plan to finish what the started, and deliver what Americans said they wanted in 2008 and are still waiting for.
Then they have to convince us that they mean it.
First, let’s just face it. For the next couple of years, at least, this is the end of any progress on jobs or the economy. Whatever legitimate gripes progressives had with the outgoing Democratic Congress, the got a lot done. More, in fact, than most others. Ezra Klein called it a “Do-Something Congress.”
That this has been the most “do-something” Congress we’ve seen in 40 years hasn’t made much of an impression on the public. Multiple polls have found that only a minority of voters know that the 111th Congress got more done than most congresses. That’s true even among Democrats. Nor has their productivity made the 111th Congress popular. But if they failed as politicians, they succeeded as legislators. And legislating is, at least in theory, what they came to Washington toz do.
Interestingly enough, the Washington Post dubbed the 110th Congress a “Do-Something Congress”, when the Democrats took over in 2007, in hopes it would get more done than the outgoing Congress.
WHEN DEMOCRATS take over the House next year, the regular workweek will stretch to a backbreaking five days — up from the now-customary Tuesday-through-Thursday arrangement. Members of the House and Senate — no doubt reeling from the two weeks they’ve worked since the election — will have a mere four weeks off after they leave town Friday. Hard to believe, but the new leadership actually expects them to come to work on Jan. 4 rather than enjoy the usual elongated holiday break as they wait around for the president to deliver his State of the Union address in late January. In the Senate, the weeklong March break is being eliminated and the two-week April vacation cut in half.
…It would be quite a change. The 109th Congress will have been in session for a grand total of 103 days this year, which, as Lyndsey Layton pointed out in yesterday’s Post, is seven days fewer than the “Do-Nothing Congress” of 1948. An ordinary full-time worker with a generous four weeks of vacation would have clocked 240 days of work during that same period.
With the GOP taking over the House, the likelihood is that we’re faced with another “Do-Nothing” Congress, at least in term of creating jobs, fixing the economy, etc. As Bill pointed out before election day, the country is about to be saddled with a Congress that not only doesn’t work, but one determined not to let the President work either.
That’s not just because of gridlock, though there will be gridlock. It’s because conservative philosophy basically holds that a “Do-Nothing Congress” is exactly as it should be. And that’s exactly the GOP’s victory may be a Pyrrhic victory. Hemmed in by by a base that wants one thing, major (though anonymous) donors that want another, and an American voters angry that not enough been done to ease their economic pain — and who want more done — Republicans won’t be able to make it work without abandoning their base, their donors, the basic tenets of conservatism, or Americans demanding solutions the GOP just doesn’t have.
It won’t work. That’s what we face for the next two years. The best chance Democrats have for 2012 is to give voters a clear choice that does work, by offering solutions founded in progressive values, making the case for them, and fighting for them.
A dear departed friend of mine, Alex, was know for saying “We all have choices.” It was usually in the form of advice and/or a warning to a friend who was about to make disastrous choice, with serious implications for his/her future. The not-so-thinly veiled implication was that our choices have consequences, and that we consider our choices carefully to avoid the worst consequences.
Sometimes, if someone particularly daft still wasn’t getting the message, Alex would add a note of severity by saying, “But sometimes those choices get taken away.” I thought about Alex’s warning today at the America’s Fiscal Choices conference. Well into a economic crisis, America still has fiscal choices, but if we don’t make the right choices — and make them soon — those choices will almost certainly be taken away.
When last we left our story, the young guns came galloping into a critical moment. The recession is over, and as the dust settles it reveals that the American economy and middle class lay bleeding: 45 million Americans are living in poverty, last year saw the largest increase in the U.S. poverty rate in 40 years,, 41 million Americans are on food stamps — representing a 20.8% increase in the program 1 in six Americans receive services from anti-poverty programs, 50 million are now on Medicaid,nearly 15 million are unemployed, 1 in every seven mortgages are underwater, 10 million are receiving unemployment benefits,4.7 million are dropping out of the job market after extended unemployment. The “young guns” answer amounts to watching both bleed out. Comparatively, a bullet actually seems more merciful, but the effect on the economy is the same: finishing it off.
In keeping with the western-themed title of Young Guns: A New Generation of Conservative Leaders, allow me to set the scene: It’s well past high noon, and as the dust settles the economy lies bleeding. Looks like it’s all over but the dyin’ and the buryin’. But wait! Here come the "young guns" galloping into the scene. But have they come to save the day, or finish the job.
That depends on what they’re packin’, and it ain’t a first aid kit. It looks like their same old ammo used the first time around.
"It hurts me that they didn’t even try to attempt to see what is happening here, they didn’t care."
Shirley Sherrod – on her forced resignation from the USDA within hours airing of a heavily edited video of Sherrod speaking at an NAACP event by right wing media, in an attempt to portray her and the NAACP as racist. The full video of Sherrod’s speech showed otherwise.
Mr. President,
With all due respect, it’s time to man up. It is time, way past time for you to grow into the job you were elected to do, and promised to do. It is time to stand up and be the man we hope we elected. It is time to justify that hope, and the trust that was placed in you. It is time to pick up the mantle of history that has been entrusted to you and prove yourself worthy of carrying it forward.
Too much is at stake now. Too many people are beginning to think their faith in you was misplaced. What’s worse is you are proving them right.
Strike one was Van Jones.
Strike two was ACORN.
And now Shirley Sherrod had become strike three.
American Conservatives from Joe Barton to Rand Paul and Sarah Palin have expressed outrage that the President Obama would use the the power of his office to hold BP accountable to the residents of the Gulf Coast. They are outraged because they believe this is something the government should not do: help Americans who are out-matched by corporate wealth, power and influence get some measure of justice.
Conservatives haven’t quite reduced government to “the size where we can drown it in the bathtub”. Not yet, but they keep trying because they believe government shouldn’t do what people cannot do themselves. So, if only to see what kind of world they have in mind, it’s worth looking at what happens when government doesn’t act to hold corporations accountable and protect people from the consequences of corporate negligence or malfeasance, and what happens when it can’t.
You hear it all the time, these days. Tea baggers, militia members and various other conservatives all that to "take their country back." My usual response was to ask just how far back they want to go. I used to think I knew. It turns out, I had my time machine set all wrong.
After so long "standing athwart history yelling ‘Stop!’," at what point in our history would conservatives like to have stopped the clock? If they could "turn back time," how far back would conservatives take us? Assuming, of course, that we’d let them.
The big news, since President Obama signed health care reform into law, has been the threats made against Democratic lawmakers. [h/t, Prometheus.]
But there is another threat looming, that isn’t directed at Democratic officials, and isn’t getting nearly as much press.
I don’t know about anyone else, but this was my favorite image from today’s signing of the health care reform legislation.
You can see the rest of the event here, if you missed it this morning.
For those who don’t know, the kid watching Obama sign the bill is 11-year-old Marcelas Owens, who lost her health insurance when she lost her job, and eventually lost her life to pulmonary hypertension. Marcelas became the target of right wing attacks when he took up the cause of health care reform in memory of his mother.
Naturally, his story resonated with president Obama, who said during his remarks: “Today, I’m signing this reform bill into law on behalf of my mother, who argued with insurance companies even as she battled cancer in her final days.”
Oh, and why is it a big deal that the VP was heard to say “This is a big fucking deal”? After all, he’s right. It is a big fucking deal.
Not as big as it might have been or should have been, but big nonetheless.
President Barack Obama doesn’t begrudge Wall Street’s banksters their bonuses.
The president, speaking in an interview, said in response to a question that while $17 million is “an extraordinary amount of money” for Main Street, “there are some baseball players who are making more than that and don’t get to the World Series either, so I’m shocked by that as well.”
“I know both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen,” Obama said in the interview yesterday in the Oval Office with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, which will appear on newsstands Friday. “I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free- market system.”
Obama sought to combat perceptions that his administration is anti-business and trumpeted the influence corporate leaders have had on his economic policies. He plans to reiterate that message when he speaks to the Business Roundtable, which represents the heads of many of the biggest U.S. companies, on Feb. 24 in Washington.
Well, maybe the president is a bigger person than I am. Where I come from, we don’t just hold grudges. We nurse them and watch them grow.
And, like a lot of Americans, I do begrudge the likes of Dimon and Blankfein their multi-billion dollar bonuses. Not because I “begrudge people success or wealth,” but because I begrudge anyone their ill gotten gains — especially as others are made to support them and suffer the consequences of their actions.
Besides, if I can hold bear a grudge against a person, why can’t bear a grudge against corporations? After all, aren’t they people too?
Listening to conservatives squawk about deficits is a bit like taking parenting and/or relationship advice from Medea, the Gosselins or “Octomom.” At best, they serve as an example of what not to do.
As it is with children, so it is with conservatives and deficits. People who are very good at making them aren’t necessarily all that skilled in dealing with them.
And we know, during the previous decade, conservatives proved themselves quite adept at creating a deficit from a surplus.
*Sigh*
Stuff like this gives me a headache Excedrin can’t begin to cure.
Oh no you didn’t, Chris. You didn’t forget he was black. Not for a second.
Tea bags are meant to be tossed out. They are useful, at most, once or twice in their lifetimes. Beyond that, they lose flavor and strength, eventually becoming weak as water itself. If kept around beyond their usefulness, they become unpleasant and even unhealthy, as they start to smell and begin to mold. Or they dry up and eventually crumble. Either way, they become useless.
What’s true of tea bags is also true of teabaggers. However, tea bags are tossed out when they outlive their usefulness. The same can be true of teabaggers, but only if Democrats have the political will to make it so.
The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.
W.E.B. DuBois — “The Souls of Black Folks”
The outcome of the Massachusetts special election makes one thing clear: It is time for President Obama to embrace his inner angry black man.
These words will no doubt as offensive to some as were Harry Reid’s words about then candidate Obama. They are also just as true concerning President Obama as Reid’s were of candidate Obama. They must be heeded if the president hopes to accomplish his agenda.
…It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
– W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folks
The quote above, from W.E.B. DuBois’ The Souls of Black Folks, came to mind in the wake of the by now over-reported remarks Senate majority leader Harry Reid made about then Senator Obama.
I would just like to say that as a southerner it is both against my nature and my religion to leave my house under the current weather conditions. Nonetheless, despite a cracked rail on the Metro, I made it to the office this morning.
Dancing With The Stars is neither about dancing nor stars. Discuss.
Parker recently learned the word “overprotective” and now sometimes jokingly says I’m, well, overprotective. Whatever, but if I can keep my kids from getting hurt I’m gonna do it. Case in point: the shredder. I read a while back about the dangers paper shredders pose to kids and pets. Since then, I’ve kept ours unplugged. We plug it in, use it, and then unplug it again. Stories like this one about a 4-year-old who turns on paper shredder and sticks his fingers inside remind me why that’s a good idea. I’d like my kids to keep all their fingers.
Great. The plugin I rely upon to create digest posts when I don’t have time to write anything seems to be on the fritz. And like most things that break in my life, I have no time to try and fix it. If it doesn’t fix itself, expect a lost more blog silence here.
We’re on a bit of a family vacation this week. So posting may be sparse, though I do have one in the works.
Archive for Asides »
del.icio.usPowered by WordPress. Theme: TheBuckmaker. Bank
Posts
