On the Contrary

There have been calls for the President to step up and lead, yes, even by me. But the rabble in the press mean something entirely different than I do. I chronicled in Maureen Dowd versus the President how she and others seem to think that the President, through his magical leadership abilities, can make Congress work with him. That would range from more schmoozing to arm twisting like in the movie Lincoln. As others have pointed out we are in a very different era than Lincoln or even Lyndon Johnson who had both Houses of Congress on his side and even then it was difficult.

This magical ability to use leadership to move Congress has been labeled the Green Lantern theory. The best description of this is from Steve Brenen in The Green Lantern Theory runs rampant. The gist of most of this criticism is two fold, First, they want him to exercise some magical leadership, but fail to say how to make Congress work. The second is to blame the President for the failures of what is a totally obstinate Republican Party. In other words, they fail to appropriately assign blame for the morass we find ourselves in and feed the “both sides do it” bull pucky. They fail to recognize that there is nothing the President can do to get the Republicans to do anything useful in the near term except possibly immigration, and on that one, I doubt it.

Continue reading ‘Leadership and President Obama’ »

Maureen and Barack have entered into a pissing contest and I would say each is half-right. Maureen wrote an op-ed a few weeks ago that lamented Barack’s inability to woo Congress:

Unfortunately, he still has not learned how to govern.

How is it that the president won the argument on gun safety with the public and lost the vote in the Senate? It’s because he doesn’t know how to work the system. And it’s clear now that he doesn’t want to learn, or to even hire some clever people who can tell him how to do it or do it for him…The White House should have created a war room full of charts with the names of pols they had to capture, like they had in “The American President.” Soaring speeches have their place, but this was about blocking and tackling.

Barack responded at the Correspondence Dinner with:

Maureen Dowd said I could solve all my problems if I were just more like Michael Douglas in ‘The American President.’ And I know Michael is here tonight. Michael, what’s your secret, man? Could it be that you were an actor in an Aaron Sorkin liberal fantasy? Might that have something to do with it?…Some folks still don’t think I spend enough time with Congress. ‘Why don’t you get a drink with Mitch McConnell?’ they ask. Really?”

And at his press conference in response to a question about why he is not making Congress heel:

But, Jonathan, you seem to suggest that somehow, these folks over there have no responsibilities and that my job is to somehow get them to behave. That’s their job. They are elected, members of Congress are elected in order to do what’s right for their constituencies and for the American people.”

So Maureen responded this morning with two shots across the bow:

Actually, it is his job to get them to behave. The job of the former community organizer and self-styled uniter is to somehow get this dunderheaded Congress, which is mind-bendingly awful, to do the stuff he wants them to do. It’s called leadership.

He still thinks he’ll do his thing from the balcony and everyone else will follow along below. That’s not how it works.

How can the president star in a White House Correspondents’ Association dinner satirical film pretending to be Daniel Day-Lewis playing Barack Obama in Steven Spielberg’s movie “Obama,” and not have absorbed the lessons of “Lincoln”?

She also raised the issue about Guantanamo:

It’s true that Congress put restrictions on transfers of individuals to other countries with bad security situations. But, since 2012, Congress has granted authority to the secretary of defense to waive those restrictions on a case-by-case basis. The administration hasn’t made use of that power once. So it’s a little stale to blame Congress at this point.

The senior senator from Kentucky has been a leader in Keep-Terrorists-Offshore. Maybe, if the president really wants to close Gitmo, he should have a drink with Mitch McConnell. Really.

Okay now you get the gist of the the argument. I think Maureen is only half right. He needs to lead, but in blaming him, she misses the whole new dynamic that is going on in this country, the marginalization and control of Congress by the Republican base that is unresponsive to rationalization or a pat on the back. Not to mention he has tried the soft “drinks approach” and most declined. The hard approach is twisting arms (which he might be able to do with Democrats) which is totally ineffective with Republicans gerrymandered in by their base. I think she thinks that rational arguments still work and that there is leverage to apply. I don’t. And in hammering the President she feeds the both sides do it. The blame lays most directly on the Republicans.

But the half she is right on is that he needs to lead and his wavering on Guantanamo, is an example. He looks for a textbook solution instead of taking risk. That is why his attempts to compromise have gone on past the point when we all know they are frivolous. Remember the debt ceiling debate and his judgement that he could not use the 14th Amendment and just pay our bills? It was a failure to lead, and taking the safe route. It is the same with Gitmo. Just say no one can guarantee that some won’t join the rebels, but Gitmo is a blemish and send them home.

I guess I am still stuck with Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his famous quote in his 1936 speech. “They are unanimous in their hatred for me, and I welcome their hatred.” In other words understand your enemy, understand they will never help you or the country and quit playing nice. The only way to win is to take chances, take their intransigence to the people, and make it clear if they still control the House in 2014, we are doomed to do nothing. Do not play nice as Maureen suggest, but do lead by pointing out at every step their villainy and do what you can do to offset it by using Presidential power, however risky that is. Oh, and don’t be afraid to start twisting a few Democrats arms. Some of them are as bad as Republicans.

I think most pundits are getting it wrong, but then there is nothing new in that. Everyone is describing the election in terms of racial politics, white men are finally out numbered. Chris Hayes in his show Up with Chris Hayes on Saturday had the usual round of of racial representatives to discuss the outcome of the election and he fell right into this trap. And of course there is some truth to it, but I think they are missing the underlying real crux of the issue, which has nothing really to do with race, but disenfranchisement. The one group that does not represent a fairly homogenous racial profile of similar grievances are Asian Americans. Yet they went in large numbers for Obama.

I think that Republican politics and Republican policies are policies of exclusion. If you believe the poor are poor because they are lazy (47% comment from Mitt captured it), then it follows that you deserve what you have and it is foolhardy to share it, is the underlying philosophy of almost all Republican thinking. Why would you share your hard earned money when they will just waste it? It is a philosophy that justifies selfishness and self aggrandizement. It breeds a sense of entitlement that reduces the worth of others. So its ideology and the resultant policies are exclusionary and they disenfranchise anyone who is not wealthy, white, or their kind. It is really the party of maintaining the status quo, I got mine, screw you. All the rest and the bubble they live in follows from that.

The thing that all the minorities and women have in common is that they have been disenfranchised by our current politics which the Republicans have maintained to keep their status on top of the heap. Democrats offer policies of leveling the playing field (tax fairness, DREAM Act, immigration reform, equal pay for women, voter rights, creating jobs through stimulus, policy based on science, access to health care and contraception for women, gay equality, etc). So what this election was really about was whether the politics of exclusion or inclusion was going to win out, and inclusion won out. This is also why Republicans with their talk of appealing to more minorities is so hollow. You can’t just find token minorities that adhere to your policies and put them out front. You can’t just play nicey nice and connect to them on a personnel level because as long as your policies, economic or social, are the policies of exclusion, you won’t connect. And if you change those policies to be inclusive, well, you are the Democratic Party.

David Frum has written an interesting ebook entitled, Why Romney Lost, but as one reviewer noted, you can’t just abandon your policies of the last 40 years without a major upheaval. And of course David is still stuck in Republican economic nonsense, flow down and blaming Democrats for the deficit that makes his party still the party of exclusion and focusing on the wrong problems. But what is more interesting is the reviewer’s comment that David would be much more comfortable with moderate to conservative Democrats than in the Republican Party. To me this says everything you need to know about how far right the country has really traveled and what the voters were telling the Democratic Party and President Obama. I think Maureen Dowd said it best in her column Sunday:

Last time, Obama lifted up the base with his message of hope and change; this time the base lifted up Obama, with the hope he will change. He has not led the Obama army to leverage power, so now the army is leading Obama…Bill O’Reilly said Obama’s voters wanted “stuff.” He was right. They want Barry to stop bogarting the change.

The message and the election are loud and clear. It was not one of racial politics, but one of inclusion, not exclusion. It said we have moved too far to the right and now if there are any compromises, they must move the country back to the center and maybe to the left, because the left is where the center used to be. Are you listening Barack?

Yes, that is a Navy Blue Angel flying inverted over Alcatraz

Yes Virginia we are all upside down right now, just look at the polls in Iowa.  Newt Gingrich is the favorite of the religious conservative right and that is when you know up is down and down is up.  These are the people that want to restore American values and religion to our government and they think Newt has either?  Maureen Dowd has written an op-ed piece today that kind of hits the nail on the head (Out of Africa and Into Iowa).  She points out his many “contradictions” but I feel a need to point out some she missed.  He has renounced his past behavior and the conservatives believed he is redeemed.  I see the same guy totally in love with himself using redemption as a tool to climb back into power and these people are blind to him.  The cat has not changed his stripes.

I found his comments on putting poor children to work as janitors appalling.  Maureen has adequately described the “Dickensian” element of this, but I think it indicates his total ignorance at the real condition of poor kids.  Worse, think about what that says about separating our society into classes.  The poor work for scrapes in a school while the rich mock them.  If you know anything about kids, that what you would be setting up.

But the worst and what tells you everything you need to know about this creepy little man comes from Maureen’s column:

“He didn’t get whiplash being a serial adulterer while impeaching another serial adulterer, a lobbyist for Freddie Mac while attacking Freddie Mac, a self-professed fiscal conservative with a whopping Tiffany’s credit line, and an anti-Communist Army brat who supported the Vietnam War but dodged it.

‘Part of the question I had to ask myself,’ he said in a 1985 Wall Street Journal piece about war wimps, ‘was what difference I would have made.’”

You see Newt is better than the rest of us.  This is a bit of self-serving narcissism.  I have several friends whose names are engraved into the the Vietnam War memorial.  I wonder what difference they made?  They served their country, but Newt wants to know what is in it for me.  How could my service glorify me.   He is the embodiment of all the greed and self-serving self worship of our leadership in Wall Street and Washington, and he is the moral conservatives favorite?  He is everything the Tea Party says they hate.  If this is what conservatives stand for, they are a sorry lot and we are truly upside down.

Well, I watched all the news shows Sunday and read all the editorials including Paul Krugman this morning and I think we are headed for a big crash.  But then I didn’t think the Giants had a snowball’s chance in hell of getting to the World Series and I was proven wrong by a scrappy team that showed some real spunk winning the big game in the lions den.  Maybe the Democrats will do the same.  But there were some pearls of wisdom out there and I will try to capture them.

Meet the Press proved to provide some insight into our problems and misunderstandings.  A.J. Dionne fairly well summed up the Democrats shortcomings when he pointed out that those that are surging are running not only on what they accomplished, but what they hope to do in the future.  As he put it, it is not enough to point out the other guy is loony, but what is the plan forward.  This approach has a real downside for the Republicans because they have no plan.

One of the things that was truly bothering me was Harold Ford, who mostly agreed with A.J., but said that he thought the Democrats would keep the Senate, but lose the House, and that President Obama and the Democrats should be more “accommodating”.  He exact words were “push the reset button and be more accommodating.”  Well I could agree with pushing the reset button, but accommodating is what they were and is why their policies were too small.  As I have said before in this blog, accommodating with failure is not an option.  Republicans weren’t in the mood to negotiate and the next crop will be worse.  So by all means lets push the reset button, and then let’s go down fighting for what is right and will work, not what might get passed and then fail abysmally (see Paul Krugman below).

I actually agreed with the Republicans on the show, at least in part.  They wanted to see the nation face the sacrifices needed to deal with the deficit by letting the tax cuts expire for everyone which I think is a fine idea.  They also wanted a real discussion about cutting government where the real spending is.  But they saw no role for government in stimulating the economy and I guess all those Americans out of a job and losing their homes is okay with them when the real culprits are the bankers.  At least this crew of Republicans were real conservatives and were not offering tax cuts and balanced budgets understanding that these two together are an oxymoron.

Frank Rich had an enlightening editorial on Sunday (What Happened to Change We can Believe In)  and he put his finger on what I think angers most Americans with the Democrats.  Well there is the obvious fact that economy is not getting better so you could draw the false conclusion, failed policies.  But he identified the real thorn and that was that Wall Street and the Bankers got off scot-free.  To sum up, the average American is suffering and these guys are earning record profits.  Obama certainly prevented a catastrophe, but when it came to righting the ship, all the mutineers walked.  Same can be said for the bankers and the latest mortgage fiasco and once again the Administration appears to be operating as business as usual.  When it comes to finding culprits, the Administration is a coward.  I could extend this to the Iraq war, our treatment of detainees, and the loss of our privacy, but that is for another day.  The point Frank was making was Americans see business as usual and they may just vote for fruit loops if it will bring them change, any change.

But the way forward looks bleak if the Republicans gain power and that was demonstrated in three op-eds.  Paul Krugman this morning in his op-ed in the New York Times, Falling into the Chasm, made the point that the pundits are arriving at the conclusion that the Obama policies failed when in fact what history tells us is that they were the right policies, just way too small.  We are in this mess because we failed to learn from history that tells us that unemployment will take a long time to recover, and the policies put in place by the Obama administration were anemic.  Even sadder is that the Republicans who will gain by this failure of leadership have policies that will only make things worse.

Thomas Friedman, in The Election that Wasn’t, laid out what we need to do.  To wit, “In the short run, we’ll probably need more stimulus to get the economy moving again so people have the confidence to buy and invest. Ultimately, though, good jobs at scale come only when we create more products and services that make people’s lives more healthy, more productive, more secure, more comfortable or more entertained — and then sell them to more people around the world. And in a global economy, we have to create those products and services with a work force that is so well trained and productive that it can leverage modern technology so that one American can do the work of 20 Chinese and, therefore, get paid the same as 20 Chinese. There is no other way.”  He concluded with, “Government’s job is to help inspire, educate, enable and protect that work force. This election should have been about how.”  Once again it would seem that we are about to elect people who believe just the opposite.

Finally I could not leave out Maureen Dowd’s Supremely Bad Judgment.  She describes how the whack job, Ginni Thomas, reopened the whole Clarence Thomas sex addict thing, with corroborating evidence from one of Thomas’s girl friends and had we known this, we would not have this conservative nut job on the Supreme Court.  Remember all the Republicans who lied through their teeth defending him with their moral outrage?  How could Anita Hill stand before them and tarnish their righteous Clarence by having the audacity to tell the truth?  But the bigger conclusion is that we now have a Supreme Court that is populated by very conservative political operatives and the Citizens United decision is just the tip of the iceberg.  This is what conservative ideology will bring you, the final breakdown of the separation of powers and a complete loss of respect for the independence of the Supreme Court.  Remember Gore versus Bush?

So I would say the reality has been laid out for us.  We know what Democrats need to do to recover in the last week.  We know what they need to do if they hold on to power, and we know what we are going to get if they fail.  Does any of that make any difference?  Only if the rest of you get out and vote.  And oh by the way, call your kids and make sure they get their friends out also.  Otherwise we are going to be the United States of Corporations.

If you want to be frustrated, watch the Sunday talk shows as we continue to miss the point and discuss the trivia.  The newspapers weren’t much better.  So for better or worse here are my Sunday thoughts:

• Howard Kurtz of CNN’s Reliable Sources was working hard again at missing the point.  The first thing they discussed was whether the White House criticism of Fox as no longer a news channel was effective, instead of a real examination of how Fox manipulates the news.  Howard criticizes the lack of fact checking and he doesn’t do his own.  See The Fox Propaganda Network.
• On the same program they discussed how the bogus story about the Chamber of Commerce reversing their stand on global warming and climate protection tricked the mainstream media.  I listened to a journalist whine about the pressure to get the news out fast.  Well, sweetheart, it isn’t news if it’s false.  They have yet to examine their role in this problem.  Their job is not to megaphone what other’s say, but to provide us with relevant stories that are fact checked.  The operative words here are relevant and fact checked.
• The New York Times reported that small businesses are facing up to 20% increases in their health insurance costs with no real reason why.  Meanwhile that moron Mitch McConnell says he won’t vote for the health care reform bill because it would raise rates.  Let’s see, rates are going out of sight without reform, and he won’t support reform because it will raise the rates.  Hmmm.  Sadly the public option the glacial Congress is considering will not allow private business to be part of it.  This is such a no-brainer yet we just refuse to face a single payer system.  (Small Business Faces Sharp Rise in Health Care)
• The Huffington Post (Leaderless) reported that our gutless President has decided to go with a Public Option that would only be available with a trigger mechanism.  Talk about failure to lead.  Meanwhile others talk about a public option with a “level playing field”.  What that means is raise the cost of the Public Option so the insurance industries are still able to rake off large profits.  When oh when will we figure out that providing health care is not appropriate to the profit motive, just like police and fire protection?
• Meet the Press today did highlight one important fact and that is the Administration’s focus on executive pay in the banks is just eyewash and is not real reform.  Until they structurally reform the system so that nobody is too big to fail, the government will always be the lender of last resort.  See Regulating Banks.
• In a really scary story, the New York Times (Prosecutors Turn Table on Student Journalists) reported that in Illinois, local prosecutors have subpoenaed the grades, grading criteria, class syllabus, expense reports and e-mail messages of the journalism students from Northwestern’s Medill Innocence Project, which has helped lead to the release of 11 inmates.  You can read the article, but what we have here is shoot the messenger, not examine the message.  To me it is clear they are trying to stifle this kind of embarrassment by trying to sully the program instead of dealing with the factual findings.  If you don’t see the connection to this and the State’s Secret Act and the problems with it, then call yourself a Republican.
• Finally on a positive note, it was nice to see Frank Rich echo my sentiments about the media and the balloon incident (The Fox Propaganda Network), while Maureen Dowd echoed my sentiment that the Catholic Church is trying to recruit the small minded from the Anglican Church (Bashing Organized Religion).  Every now and then I actually hit on something.

Another week where the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, our President fails to lead, and the media and the nation continuing their glide to oblivion shunning critical thought.  All in all not many cheery thoughts.