On the Contrary

The central question that is running through my mind is should our government provide  what the voters want or should it provide what they need?  Our government is structured as a representative democracy so the voters don’t have a direct say, except at election time.  The rest of the time it is up to our representatives to represent us.   So do they take polls and go with the wind of public opinion or do they try to take a longer view of our welfare?  If history is any indication, when elections get close, it is poll time.

I see some disturbing trends here.  Leadership could be defined as seeing the proper course and then convincing your followers to follow.  Watching the Republicans pander to the Tea Partiers, I think they got this exactly backwards.  See where your followers want to go, then jump out in front of the mob.  But of course Republicans are not the only ones guilty.  Watching the Obama administration try to sweep the eight years of torture and torture memos under the rug is another form of the same thing.  They are making a political calculation (a bad one I think) that the people would be happier to just move on.

Probably the worst of this Democratic pandering is watching Eric Holder, our Attorney General, twist in the political winds.  First was the decision to try the accused 9/11 perpetrators in New York in our civilian courts.  Then “the people” spoke and he has become more sensitive to the politics of the issue and is considering some other form of trial.  Just last Friday, his Justice Department watered down the criticisms of the two lawyers most responsible for the obviously flawed memos authorizing torture (John Yoo and Jay Bybee).  Both of these actions were in response to putting political (read populist) considerations before what our laws and values demand, however inconvenient.

What I see in common with this pandering to populist whims is that in the short term it is good, if you measure good in terms of your political success, and in the long term could do immeasurable damage to our country and who we are as a people.  The Republicans are encouraging anti-intellectualism and violence which eventually will come back to haunt them as they become victims of the fickled masses.  The Democrats, by taking the easy way out now, will see the same Republican policies that should have been thoroughly discredited, rear their ugly heads again.  It does not resolve our problems to just ignore them because it is simpler.

Of course there is another side to this double-edged sword of the people’s will.  Republicans of late have been claiming that the people don’t a public option for health care and therefore they are the true representatives of the people.  However every single poll says they do so in this case the Republicans are just pretending to protect the populist interests as they cleverly try to mask their real masters, the health care insurance industry. Meanwhile we have Harry Reid and many of the Democrats in the Senate also oblivious to the peoples will.  So now am I arguing we should follow the people’s will?

Let’s face it, the people’s will is lower taxes and more government spending and we all know that doesn’t work.  What I am saying, and I know this is against Tea Party wisdom (oxymoron), is that our leaders should be sensitive to the people’s will, but apply the test of rational thought.   Leadership and political courage come from seeing when the people’s will is destructive and to stand up for a different path.  That is why we have a representative democracy and not a pure one.  The Founder’s understood the destructive  gyrations of the popular winds.  In the case of health care, the people are smarter than our politicians because they are forcing a reconsideration of the public option because every analysis tells us it saves money.  In the case of taxes, the people can be their own worst enemy and someone has to be an adult.  In the case of not exposing our past failures, doing the expedient thing instead of the hard thing, our failures will just fester until we repeat them.

What we are looking for is leadership that is ready to lead instead of follow.  We are looking for leadership that instructs and convinces instead of panders.  We are looking for leadership that no longer is tying themselves in knots to play politics, but just looks for what would work best and fights for it.  There are signs of hope in both the White House and the Senate, but I am not holding my breath.

Let’s just face it; most of our political discourse is not rational.  Most of the discourse in Washington is on partisan grounds.  Our media further perpetuates this lunacy as they always interview a “Republican and Democratic strategist” as though this give and take will produce anything useful.  But here is what I want you to think about:  Scientists never have an ideological discussion.  They argue on the merits of the available data and real experimentation and outcomes.  Oh but would our politicians do the same thing.It

So we have this ideological discussion which gets us nowhere.  But what about all the money that flows into these Congressional coffers to support their myopic views?  That one is all about the money.  One would think that in a truly rational world, businesses would do the rational thing to enhance their long-term interests and therefore, all that money would be flowing to Congressional coffers with real ideas.  There was a story in the New York Times that dramatically demonstrates how this is not the case (Energy Firms Split on Bill to Battle Climate Change).  To make a long story short, the energy companies are aligning themselves with the bill/party that will return to them the most monetary benefit.  It is always about the money and short-term gain.  It is never about what is best for the country.  There will always be winners and losers as we move forward.  It’s called progress and the status quo will do anything to prevent it.

So the bottom line is that whether it is health care, energy policy, climate change, education, the economy, or Afghanistan, the arguments line up around partisan ideology fueled by monetary self-interest.  So just where does the long term interests of the United States and the people come into this equation?  It doesn’t.  Oh the combatants will tell you that they are fighting for just that, but note that most of these battles are not about rational discussion and that tells you all you need to know about their true interests.  The facts are out there.  What works is out there.  But since many of these solutions violate either partisan ideology or upset the status quo of wealth, they are rejected.  You would think that the media would be more proactive at identifying these solutions or the failure of the partisan arguments to address these issues, but they are all about the money too.  Shouting and lunacy like Limbaugh and Glen Beck are popular and make money, so the distractions are more lucrative than the reality.  Screw the country.  The media we have today is doing more damage than good (See Tis the Winter of My Discontent).  Did you see more balloon coverage on Monday?  It’s not about what’s important, it’s about what makes money.

So what is the solution to this problem?  It’s called leadership and to this juncture we have had a failure of leadership.  So far, our President has failed us in this most critical function of his Presidency.  This morning on MSNBC, Joe Scarborough was being interviewed and he stated probably the most important and insightful criticism about this President.  He said he is an accommodator and that he was the most accommodating President the nation has ever seen.  Whether it is his generals in Afghanistan, Bank Executives, conservative Democrats, Democrats from coal states, or Republicans, he wastes his leadership accommodating them.  Accommodation is not leadership.  It is a failure of leadership.  It is a failure to understand the root cause of our problems, rationally analyzing them, and picking the best way forward for the United States even when it is not the most popular way forward.  It is his accommodating of old failed ideas that leave us in limbo with the status quo firmly in place.

So are we ever going to get out of this trap of partisan politics and moneyed self-interests, to move this country forward?  Only if this President decides to finally step up to the plate.  The solutions are out there.  They are not going to be found in bipartisanship or in accommodating the status quo of moneyed interests.  They are going to be found and implemented when someone with courage will standup, draw a line in the sand, and make a rational case for them.  He can, if he chooses, restore us to a rational approach to our problems.  But so far he has refused to do this.  Either he knows what is right, but is a coward, or he simply doesn’t understand the problem.  I would prefer to think the latter, but either way, he has become part of the problem.

I spent a news-free two days, so reading the papers this Monday morning got me fairly riled up.  Saturday we did a charity dinner and spent all day in prep and cooking, and Sunday when we got up to go to San Francisco for the Rhone Rangers Grand Wine Tasting, it had snowed and froze my satellite dish, so I was disconnected from the world for wine tasting and general gallivanting in San Francisco. I thought I had left the country in good hands for the weekend, but what a fool I was.   Monday when I got up in SF, got my coffee and sausage muffin at Starbucks, my trusty Kindle had downloaded the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the San Francisco Chronicle and I realized the nation was once again adrift.  So I will do my patriotic duty to get this thing back on course.

Let’s start with the Republicans and their distraction tactics to do nothing about our problems.  Senator Susan Collins, the “moderate” Republican from Maine was “concerned” about the deficit.  She said in regard to deficit spending in the proposed Obama budget, “It brings our debt levels to an unprecedented level that is not sustainable.  It poses a threat to the basic health of our economy.” There are two misplaced ideas here.  First is that this level of debt is not any more than we ran during WWII (as a percent of GDP), which by the way, we borrowed from our own citizens.  And the second one is that our economy is already on life support.  Spending has dried up.  What exactly does Senator Collins propose?  Reduce spending and unemploy millions more?  Ignore our problems and they will get better on their own as businesses fail and our infrastructure collapses?

Monday, E.J. Dionne wrote a column in the Washington Post (Obama versus the Dodgers) pointing out this tactic of ignoring presenting your own solutions and kicking the can down the road by claiming the Obama administration has overreached with too many issues and must focus on the economy.  As he makes clear, this is nothing but a tactic to not discuss or debate the way forward for education, health care, or energy.  Then the Republicans like to criticize everything that is occurring, but offering no coherent alternatives.  That is because there aren’t any.  This editorial encapsulates the complete Republican strategy, and what should concern most Americans is that it is a strategy with no plan other than to have the other side fail.  You have to hand it to Republicans. I never thought a Lose-Lose strategy would ever see the light of day.

But let us not let the Obama administration off the hook.  If the Obama administration has a fatal flaw, it may be that it doesn’t lead in the details and the devil is in the details.  President Obama told us that he wanted the stimulus money spent wisely and for our future.  But it is clear that the money is being spent for business as usual projects such as a toll highway near Houston Texas which could increase rural sprawl and be counter productive to reducing our carbon imprint or vehicle usage.  This is just one of many projects that are going forward which will create jobs, but don’t match up to our long-term goals.  In a related story on Monday, the Obama administration sent out its spokespersons to get out the message that the 90% tax on bonuses that came out of the lynch mob House was flawed, but would wait to see what the Senate will come up with to handle this bonus situation.

Both of these examples demonstrate, in my view, a flaw in the Obama approach.  He is trying to establish wide guidelines and then let the political process play out to arrive at a way forward. The trouble is, the politicos just can’t stop doing business as usual and they need adult supervision.

One of the reasons that George Bush was able to lead so many people down the wrong path was because he was firm about where we were going and gave people confidence in his leadership, however misguided.  President Obama needs to borrow a page from George and start laying the path forward in more specific detail and start fighting for the important things that have to get done, or as Frank Rich pointed out in his column on Sunday (Has a Katrina Moment Arrived?), he has to take charge.

We have this moment in our history when we are at a critical crossroad.  The Republicans are doing everything possible to stymie any progress other than trying maintain the staus quo.  This is no more evident than this morning in the hearings on AIG where the Republicans somehow tried to tie the bonus management to government provided health care.  It is time to stand up and fight for the way forward, not wait for some compromised half-step that won’t get us there.  This is the critical moment whether we either step forward, or always be relegated to an also ran.  We need a leader who will project the way forward, be specific in his plan and then fight for it.

It starts with correcting the abuses of torture and murder we committed, as we became a nation of war criminals by investigating and prosecuting those that committed these atrocities.  We have to get our house in order and this would shut-up Vice President Cheney and his claims of making us safe.  It must continue with a vision for our future and instead of accommodating Republican do-nothingism as bipartisanship, takes it on directly and discredits it.  We need a national plan for energy, education, transportation, and our economy.  Leaving it up to the states or Congress to sort out will not get us there.  The nation is waiting for you President Obama.  Do not let this opportunity get away while you play nice.