Friday, March 5, 2010
A Long Article on Ebooks and Print
http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/the-bookless-future?page=0,4
Once Again: The Difference Between Democrats & Republicans
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: March 4, 2010
So the Bunning blockade is over. For days, Senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky exploited Senate rules to block a one-month extension of unemployment benefits. In the end, he gave in, although not soon enough to prevent an interruption of payments to around 100,000 workers,
But while the blockade is over, its lessons remain. Some of those lessons involve the spectacular dysfunctionality of the Senate. What I want to focus on right now, however, is the incredible gap that has opened up between the parties. Today, Democrats and Republicans live in different universes, both intellectually and morally.
Take the question of helping the unemployed in the middle of a deep slump. What Democrats believe is what textbook economics says: that when the economy is deeply depressed, extending unemployment benefits not only helps those in need, it also reduces unemployment. That’s because the economy’s problem right now is lack of sufficient demand, and cash-strapped unemployed workers are likely to spend their benefits. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office says that aid to the unemployed is one of the most effective forms of economic stimulus, as measured by jobs created per dollar of outlay.
But that’s not how Republicans see it. Here’s what Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate, had to say when defending Mr. Bunning’s position (although not joining his blockade): unemployment relief “doesn’t create new jobs. In fact, if anything, continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work.”
In Mr. Kyl’s view, then, what we really need to worry about right now — with more than five unemployed workers for every job opening, and long-term unemployment at its highest level since the Great Depression — is whether we’re reducing the incentive of the unemployed to find jobs. To me, that’s a bizarre point of view — but then, I don’t live in Mr. Kyl’s universe.
And the difference between the two universes isn’t just intellectual, it’s also moral.
Bill Clinton famously told a suffering constituent, “I feel your pain.” But the thing is, he did and does — while many other politicians clearly don’t. Or perhaps it would be fairer to say that the parties feel the pain of different people.
During the debate over unemployment benefits, Senator Jeff Merkley, a Democrat of Oregon, made a plea for action on behalf of those in need. In response, Mr. Bunning blurted out an expletive. That was undignified — but not that different, in substance, from the position of leading Republicans.
Consider, in particular, the position that Mr. Kyl has taken on a proposed bill that would extend unemployment benefits and health insurance subsidies for the jobless for the rest of the year. Republicans will block that bill, said Mr. Kyl, unless they get a “path forward fairly soon” on the estate tax.
Now, the House has already passed a bill that, by exempting the assets of couples up to $7 million, would leave 99.75 percent of estates tax-free. But that doesn’t seem to be enough for Mr. Kyl; he’s willing to hold up desperately needed aid to the unemployed on behalf of the remaining 0.25 percent. That’s a very clear statement of priorities.
So, as I said, the parties now live in different universes, both intellectually and morally. We can ask how that happened; there, too, the parties live in different worlds. Republicans would say that it’s because Democrats have moved sharply left: a Republican National Committee fund-raising plan acquired by Politico suggests motivating donors by promising to “save the country from trending toward socialism.” I’d say that it’s because Republicans have moved hard to the right, furiously rejecting ideas they used to support. Indeed, the Obama health care plan strongly resembles past G.O.P. plans. But again, I don’t live in their universe.
More important, however, what are the implications of this total divergence in views?
The answer, of course, is that bipartisanship is now a foolish dream. How can the parties agree on policy when they have utterly different visions of how the economy works, when one party feels for the unemployed, while the other weeps over affluent victims of the “death tax”?
Which brings us to the central political issue right now: health care reform. If Congress enacts reform in the next few weeks — and the odds are growing that it will — it will do so without any Republican votes. Some people will decry this, insisting that President Obama should have tried harder to gain bipartisan support. But that isn’t going to happen, on health care or anything else, for years to come.
Someday, somehow, we as a nation will once again find ourselves living on the same planet. But for now, we aren’t. And that’s just the way it is.
Published: March 4, 2010
So the Bunning blockade is over. For days, Senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky exploited Senate rules to block a one-month extension of unemployment benefits. In the end, he gave in, although not soon enough to prevent an interruption of payments to around 100,000 workers,
But while the blockade is over, its lessons remain. Some of those lessons involve the spectacular dysfunctionality of the Senate. What I want to focus on right now, however, is the incredible gap that has opened up between the parties. Today, Democrats and Republicans live in different universes, both intellectually and morally.
Take the question of helping the unemployed in the middle of a deep slump. What Democrats believe is what textbook economics says: that when the economy is deeply depressed, extending unemployment benefits not only helps those in need, it also reduces unemployment. That’s because the economy’s problem right now is lack of sufficient demand, and cash-strapped unemployed workers are likely to spend their benefits. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office says that aid to the unemployed is one of the most effective forms of economic stimulus, as measured by jobs created per dollar of outlay.
But that’s not how Republicans see it. Here’s what Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate, had to say when defending Mr. Bunning’s position (although not joining his blockade): unemployment relief “doesn’t create new jobs. In fact, if anything, continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work.”
In Mr. Kyl’s view, then, what we really need to worry about right now — with more than five unemployed workers for every job opening, and long-term unemployment at its highest level since the Great Depression — is whether we’re reducing the incentive of the unemployed to find jobs. To me, that’s a bizarre point of view — but then, I don’t live in Mr. Kyl’s universe.
And the difference between the two universes isn’t just intellectual, it’s also moral.
Bill Clinton famously told a suffering constituent, “I feel your pain.” But the thing is, he did and does — while many other politicians clearly don’t. Or perhaps it would be fairer to say that the parties feel the pain of different people.
During the debate over unemployment benefits, Senator Jeff Merkley, a Democrat of Oregon, made a plea for action on behalf of those in need. In response, Mr. Bunning blurted out an expletive. That was undignified — but not that different, in substance, from the position of leading Republicans.
Consider, in particular, the position that Mr. Kyl has taken on a proposed bill that would extend unemployment benefits and health insurance subsidies for the jobless for the rest of the year. Republicans will block that bill, said Mr. Kyl, unless they get a “path forward fairly soon” on the estate tax.
Now, the House has already passed a bill that, by exempting the assets of couples up to $7 million, would leave 99.75 percent of estates tax-free. But that doesn’t seem to be enough for Mr. Kyl; he’s willing to hold up desperately needed aid to the unemployed on behalf of the remaining 0.25 percent. That’s a very clear statement of priorities.
So, as I said, the parties now live in different universes, both intellectually and morally. We can ask how that happened; there, too, the parties live in different worlds. Republicans would say that it’s because Democrats have moved sharply left: a Republican National Committee fund-raising plan acquired by Politico suggests motivating donors by promising to “save the country from trending toward socialism.” I’d say that it’s because Republicans have moved hard to the right, furiously rejecting ideas they used to support. Indeed, the Obama health care plan strongly resembles past G.O.P. plans. But again, I don’t live in their universe.
More important, however, what are the implications of this total divergence in views?
The answer, of course, is that bipartisanship is now a foolish dream. How can the parties agree on policy when they have utterly different visions of how the economy works, when one party feels for the unemployed, while the other weeps over affluent victims of the “death tax”?
Which brings us to the central political issue right now: health care reform. If Congress enacts reform in the next few weeks — and the odds are growing that it will — it will do so without any Republican votes. Some people will decry this, insisting that President Obama should have tried harder to gain bipartisan support. But that isn’t going to happen, on health care or anything else, for years to come.
Someday, somehow, we as a nation will once again find ourselves living on the same planet. But for now, we aren’t. And that’s just the way it is.
Democrats vs. Republicans on Health Care: The Cultural Divide
Once again Jonathan Chait lays it out clearly. This article lays bare the stark differences between the two parties on healthcare. Read this and you know exactly why I am a Democrat.
Sink or Swim
The GOP’s Dickensian fix for health care.
by Jonathan Chait
Senior Editor of The New Republic
More Utterly Sincere Advice For Democrats From The GOPWhen you consider the differences between Democrats and Republicans on health care, you probably think in terms of scale. Democrats want to enact a big reform, while Republicans favor incremental progress. House Minority Whip Eric Cantor coos, “We want to take a much more commonsense, modest, incremental approach, trying to address the first issue first, which is cost, and then go on to try to deal with some of the things that the president and Speaker Pelosi want to do.” Within a recent six-month span, Republicans on the Senate floor used the phrase “step-by-step” to describe their approach to health care an astonishing 173 times.
The reality is quite different. What separates the two parties is not how far to go, but in which direction to go. The divide is simple. Democrats propose to shift resources from the rich and the healthy to the poor and the sick. Republicans want to do just the opposite. Republican health care plans reflect the party’s increasingly widespread belief that good health, like other forms of prosperity, is a matter of personal responsibility. Democratic plans to help the sick at the expense of the healthy therefore amount to socialism.
Health insurance, if you think about it, is a redistribution scheme. It transfers money from the winners (people who don’t need much medical care) to the losers (people who do). It differs from other redistribution schemes because, unlike programs that redistribute from rich to poor, the winners and losers can’t be sure in advance which category they’ll be in. That’s why people enter into it voluntarily--today I might be healthy, tomorrow I may contract some horrible disease.
The problem with this system is that, while you can’t be certain who will win and who will lose in the medical lottery of life, you can make some educated guesses. The health insurance industry is good at making those guesses, and getting better all the time. The business of insurance is to keep expensive customers out and cheap customers in.
Left to their own devices, millions of Americans could not afford to buy health insurance, because their expected medical costs are too high--they’re the losers of the medical lottery--or their incomes are too low. Obviously, many Americans are left to their own devices, with horrifying results. But many more are not, because they’re lucky enough to get insurance through their job. In an office insurance pool, everybody pays the same rate, meaning the healthy subsidize the sick.
The Democrats’ health care plan aims to create pools for people outside of the employer market, joining healthier individuals together with the sick, so that the former effectively subsidize the latter. The common element of all the Republican plans is to do the opposite-to separate the healthy from the sick.
Republicans have long championed Health Savings Accounts, which give individuals who buy insurance a tax deduction for money they set aside for a high-deductible plan. Since tax deductions are worth more to people in higher tax brackets, and since high-deductible plans appeal more to those with lower medical expenses, the plans attract the rich and healthy, leaving the poor and sick behind.
The thrust of the GOP ideas currently on offer is to reduce health insurance regulation. Republicans would create financial incentives that, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), would encourage states to cut regulation; they would also let businesses and individuals buy insurance from other states. (Health insurance is regulated by state governments.) As a result, health insurance regulation would sink to the level of whichever state offered the laxest regulations. If it worked like the credit card industry, governors would be competing to undercut each other’s regulations in order to lure insurers to their states.
Some state regulations are meant to protect all consumers, by requiring licensing of doctors, a fair appeals process for claims, and so on. But many are specifically aimed at helping sick people. Some regulations require that certain procedures must be covered--cancer screenings, diabetes treatment, and so on. Others limit the degree to which insurers can charge higher rates to small businesses or individuals that have higher health risks. Reducing these regulations would reduce costs for the healthy, but raise them for the sick. The GOP’s solution for those with preexisting conditions is to shunt them into state high-risk pools, which (as my colleague Jonathan Cohn has explained) work very poorly and which the Republicans would deny adequate funds.
Republicans boast that the CBO says their plan would reduce insurance premiums. This is true. The CBO predicted this would happen because the GOP plan would reduce premiums for healthy people, bringing more of them into the insurance pool, and raise premiums for sicker people, driving more of them out.
Why would Republicans favor a result like this? The better question might be, why wouldn’t they? The modern Republican domestic agenda is, above all, an attack on redistribution, a crusade to free society’s winners from shouldering the burdens of its losers.
The core of this philosophical divide was on display in last week’s health care summit. Senator Tom Harkin, a traditional liberal, denounced policies that “allow segregation in America on the basis of your health.” Harkin’s point was that the only way to protect the sick is to pool them with the healthy. Conservatives seized upon Harkin’s remark. “Having people pay their own way,” mocked an incredulous Jeffrey Anderson, a former health care speechwriter in the Bush administration, “is apparently an injustice akin to segregating them by race or creed.”
“Pay their own way”--that gets to the heart of the party’s new vision of health as a consequence of personal morality. “I think a national health care act substitutes for a lack of personal responsibility,” complained Republican Representative Steve King last August. Newt Gingrich gloats that Americans have moved “away from the idea of government-run health care and toward more personal responsibility.”
Liberals have reacted with astonishment to conservative accusations of socialism against Obama, whose plan relies mostly on private insurance and closely resembles proposals put forward by Senate Republicans in 1993 and Mitt Romney in 2005. It is, however, socialistic in the broad sense of spreading the risk of medical misfortune. This is a goal that Republicans increasingly abhor.
Sink or Swim
The GOP’s Dickensian fix for health care.
by Jonathan Chait
Senior Editor of The New Republic
More Utterly Sincere Advice For Democrats From The GOPWhen you consider the differences between Democrats and Republicans on health care, you probably think in terms of scale. Democrats want to enact a big reform, while Republicans favor incremental progress. House Minority Whip Eric Cantor coos, “We want to take a much more commonsense, modest, incremental approach, trying to address the first issue first, which is cost, and then go on to try to deal with some of the things that the president and Speaker Pelosi want to do.” Within a recent six-month span, Republicans on the Senate floor used the phrase “step-by-step” to describe their approach to health care an astonishing 173 times.
The reality is quite different. What separates the two parties is not how far to go, but in which direction to go. The divide is simple. Democrats propose to shift resources from the rich and the healthy to the poor and the sick. Republicans want to do just the opposite. Republican health care plans reflect the party’s increasingly widespread belief that good health, like other forms of prosperity, is a matter of personal responsibility. Democratic plans to help the sick at the expense of the healthy therefore amount to socialism.
Health insurance, if you think about it, is a redistribution scheme. It transfers money from the winners (people who don’t need much medical care) to the losers (people who do). It differs from other redistribution schemes because, unlike programs that redistribute from rich to poor, the winners and losers can’t be sure in advance which category they’ll be in. That’s why people enter into it voluntarily--today I might be healthy, tomorrow I may contract some horrible disease.
The problem with this system is that, while you can’t be certain who will win and who will lose in the medical lottery of life, you can make some educated guesses. The health insurance industry is good at making those guesses, and getting better all the time. The business of insurance is to keep expensive customers out and cheap customers in.
Left to their own devices, millions of Americans could not afford to buy health insurance, because their expected medical costs are too high--they’re the losers of the medical lottery--or their incomes are too low. Obviously, many Americans are left to their own devices, with horrifying results. But many more are not, because they’re lucky enough to get insurance through their job. In an office insurance pool, everybody pays the same rate, meaning the healthy subsidize the sick.
The Democrats’ health care plan aims to create pools for people outside of the employer market, joining healthier individuals together with the sick, so that the former effectively subsidize the latter. The common element of all the Republican plans is to do the opposite-to separate the healthy from the sick.
Republicans have long championed Health Savings Accounts, which give individuals who buy insurance a tax deduction for money they set aside for a high-deductible plan. Since tax deductions are worth more to people in higher tax brackets, and since high-deductible plans appeal more to those with lower medical expenses, the plans attract the rich and healthy, leaving the poor and sick behind.
The thrust of the GOP ideas currently on offer is to reduce health insurance regulation. Republicans would create financial incentives that, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), would encourage states to cut regulation; they would also let businesses and individuals buy insurance from other states. (Health insurance is regulated by state governments.) As a result, health insurance regulation would sink to the level of whichever state offered the laxest regulations. If it worked like the credit card industry, governors would be competing to undercut each other’s regulations in order to lure insurers to their states.
Some state regulations are meant to protect all consumers, by requiring licensing of doctors, a fair appeals process for claims, and so on. But many are specifically aimed at helping sick people. Some regulations require that certain procedures must be covered--cancer screenings, diabetes treatment, and so on. Others limit the degree to which insurers can charge higher rates to small businesses or individuals that have higher health risks. Reducing these regulations would reduce costs for the healthy, but raise them for the sick. The GOP’s solution for those with preexisting conditions is to shunt them into state high-risk pools, which (as my colleague Jonathan Cohn has explained) work very poorly and which the Republicans would deny adequate funds.
Republicans boast that the CBO says their plan would reduce insurance premiums. This is true. The CBO predicted this would happen because the GOP plan would reduce premiums for healthy people, bringing more of them into the insurance pool, and raise premiums for sicker people, driving more of them out.
Why would Republicans favor a result like this? The better question might be, why wouldn’t they? The modern Republican domestic agenda is, above all, an attack on redistribution, a crusade to free society’s winners from shouldering the burdens of its losers.
The core of this philosophical divide was on display in last week’s health care summit. Senator Tom Harkin, a traditional liberal, denounced policies that “allow segregation in America on the basis of your health.” Harkin’s point was that the only way to protect the sick is to pool them with the healthy. Conservatives seized upon Harkin’s remark. “Having people pay their own way,” mocked an incredulous Jeffrey Anderson, a former health care speechwriter in the Bush administration, “is apparently an injustice akin to segregating them by race or creed.”
“Pay their own way”--that gets to the heart of the party’s new vision of health as a consequence of personal morality. “I think a national health care act substitutes for a lack of personal responsibility,” complained Republican Representative Steve King last August. Newt Gingrich gloats that Americans have moved “away from the idea of government-run health care and toward more personal responsibility.”
Liberals have reacted with astonishment to conservative accusations of socialism against Obama, whose plan relies mostly on private insurance and closely resembles proposals put forward by Senate Republicans in 1993 and Mitt Romney in 2005. It is, however, socialistic in the broad sense of spreading the risk of medical misfortune. This is a goal that Republicans increasingly abhor.
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
Absolutely, absolutely among the best books I have ever read.
The prose is lyrical and poetic. I cannot believe that there is an American writer today who writes more majestically. Few American writers heretofore wrote with more splendor. Her prose is as beautiful as Fitzgerald and Faulkner.
The story focuses on a set of characters, the center of which is Milkman Dead. Most of these characters are named from the Bible. Milkman's grandfather was Macon Dead. Macon Dead had two children, Macon Dead and Pilate. Macon Dead had three children, Macon Dead (usually called Milkman Dead), Magdalene (usually called Magdalene called Lena), and First Corinthians. Pilate had one child, Reba, who had one child, Hagar.
This novel is replete with themes. It is about family, identity, and class conflict among others.
I have only two critiques of the story. First, the end is like a movie, with too much action and adventure. Most of the story is a more realistic depiction of humanity. Second, it perpetuates stereotypes of blacks as buffoons and susceptible to believing myths and spirits.
However, I loved this book and plan to read more of Toni Morrison. I do not know that I have ever fallen head over heals for a writer, but I felt smitten with her after finishing this book. I believe that she is among our best writers today.
The prose is lyrical and poetic. I cannot believe that there is an American writer today who writes more majestically. Few American writers heretofore wrote with more splendor. Her prose is as beautiful as Fitzgerald and Faulkner.
The story focuses on a set of characters, the center of which is Milkman Dead. Most of these characters are named from the Bible. Milkman's grandfather was Macon Dead. Macon Dead had two children, Macon Dead and Pilate. Macon Dead had three children, Macon Dead (usually called Milkman Dead), Magdalene (usually called Magdalene called Lena), and First Corinthians. Pilate had one child, Reba, who had one child, Hagar.
This novel is replete with themes. It is about family, identity, and class conflict among others.
I have only two critiques of the story. First, the end is like a movie, with too much action and adventure. Most of the story is a more realistic depiction of humanity. Second, it perpetuates stereotypes of blacks as buffoons and susceptible to believing myths and spirits.
However, I loved this book and plan to read more of Toni Morrison. I do not know that I have ever fallen head over heals for a writer, but I felt smitten with her after finishing this book. I believe that she is among our best writers today.
Monday, March 1, 2010
Huckleberry Finn (5)
At the end of the novel Jim is free, but what about his wife and kids? Nothing is said about them. How on earth would Jim have ever freed them? Twain says nothing about this.
E.J. Dione - The Difference Between Democrats & Republicans
The point is not that Republicans are heartless and Democrats are compassionate. It's that Democrats on the whole believe in using government to correct the inequities and inefficiencies the market creates, while Republicans on the whole think market outcomes are almost always better than anything government can produce.
That's not cheap partisanship. It's a fundamental divide. The paradox is that our understanding of politics would be more realistic if we were less cynical and came to see the battle for what it really is.
That's not cheap partisanship. It's a fundamental divide. The paradox is that our understanding of politics would be more realistic if we were less cynical and came to see the battle for what it really is.
The Enthusiasm Gap
Robert ReichFormer Secretary of Labor, Professor at Berkeley
Posted: February 28, 2010 02:56 PM BIO Become a Fan Get Email Alerts Bloggers' Index
The Enthusiasm Gap
I had dinner the other night with a Democratic pollster who told me Democrats are heading toward next fall's mid-term elections with a serious enthusiasm gap: The Republican base is fired up. The Democratic base is packing up.
The Democratic base is lethargic because congressional Democrats continue to compromise on everything the base cares about. For a year now it's been nothing but compromises, watered-down ideas, weakened provisions, wider loopholes, softened regulations. Health care went from what the Democratic base wanted -- single payer -- to a public option, to no public option, to a bunch of ideas that the president tried to explain last week, and it now hangs by a string as Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid try to round up conservative Democrats and a 51-vote reconciliation package in the Senate.
The jobs bill went from what the base wanted -- a second stimulus -- to $165 billion of extended unemployment benefits and aid to states and locales, then to $15 billion of tax breaks for businesses that make new hires. Financial regulation went from tough new capital requirements, sharp constraints on derivative trading, a consumer protection agency, and a resurrection of the Glass-Steagall Act -- all popular with the Dem base -- to some limits on derivatives and a consumer-protection agency inside the Treasury Department and a rearrangement of oversight boxes, and it's now looking like even less.
The environment went from the base's desire for a carbon tax to a cap-and-trade carbon auction then to a cap-and-trade with all sorts of exemptions and offsets for the biggest polluters, and now Senate Democrats are talking about trying to do it industry-by-industry.
These waffles and wiggle rooms have drained the Democratic base of all passion. "Why should I care?" are words I hear over and over again from stalwart Democrats who worked their hearts out in the last election.
The Republican base, meanwhile, is on a rampage. It's more and more energized by its mad-as-hell populists. Tea partiers, libertarians, Birchers, birthers, and Dick Armey astro-turfers are channeling the economic anxieties of millions of Americans against "big government."
Technically, the Democrats have the majority in Congress and could still make major reforms. But conservative, "blue-dog" Democrats won't go along. They say the public has grown wary of government. But they must know the public has grown even more wary of big business and Wall Street, on which effective government is the only constraint.
Anyone with an ounce of sanity understands government is the only effective countervailing force against the forces that got us into this mess: Against Goldman Sachs and the rest of the big banks that plunged the economy into crisis, got our bailout money, and are now back at their old games, dispensing huge bonuses to themselves. Against WellPoint and the rest of the giant health insurers who are at this moment robbing us of the care we need by raising their rates by double digits. Against giant corporations that are showing big profits by continuing to lay off millions of Americans and cutting the wages of millions of more, by shifting jobs abroad and substituting software. Against big oil and big utilities that are raising prices and rates, and continue to ravage the atmosphere.
If there was ever a time to connect the dots and make the case for government as the singular means of protecting the public from these forces it is now. Yet the White House and the congressional Democrats' ongoing refusal to blame big business and Wall Street has created the biggest irony in modern political history. A growing portion of the public, fed by the right, blames our problems on "big government."
Much of the reason for the Democrats' astonishing reluctance to place blame where it belongs rests with big business's and Wall Street's generous flows of campaign donations to Democrats, coupled with their implicit promise of high-paying jobs once Democratic officials retire from government. This is the rot at the center of the system. And unless or until it's remedied, it will be difficult for the President to achieve any "change you can believe in."
To his credit, Obama himself has not scaled back his health care ambitions all that much, and he appears, intermittently, to want to push conservative blue-dog Democrats to join him on a bigger jobs bill, tougher financial reform, and a more effective approach to global warming. (His overtures to Republicans seem ever more transparently designed to give blue-dog Democrats cover to vote with him.)
But our president is not comfortable wielding blame. He will not give the public the larger narrative of private-sector greed, its nefarious effect on the American public at this dangerous juncture, and the private sector's corruption of the democratic process. He has so far eschewed any major plan to get corporate and Wall Street money out of politics. He can be indignant -- as when he lashed out at the "fat cats" on Wall Street -- but his indignation is fleeting, and it is no match for the faux indignation of the right that blames government for all that ails us.
Posted: February 28, 2010 02:56 PM BIO Become a Fan Get Email Alerts Bloggers' Index
The Enthusiasm Gap
I had dinner the other night with a Democratic pollster who told me Democrats are heading toward next fall's mid-term elections with a serious enthusiasm gap: The Republican base is fired up. The Democratic base is packing up.
The Democratic base is lethargic because congressional Democrats continue to compromise on everything the base cares about. For a year now it's been nothing but compromises, watered-down ideas, weakened provisions, wider loopholes, softened regulations. Health care went from what the Democratic base wanted -- single payer -- to a public option, to no public option, to a bunch of ideas that the president tried to explain last week, and it now hangs by a string as Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid try to round up conservative Democrats and a 51-vote reconciliation package in the Senate.
The jobs bill went from what the base wanted -- a second stimulus -- to $165 billion of extended unemployment benefits and aid to states and locales, then to $15 billion of tax breaks for businesses that make new hires. Financial regulation went from tough new capital requirements, sharp constraints on derivative trading, a consumer protection agency, and a resurrection of the Glass-Steagall Act -- all popular with the Dem base -- to some limits on derivatives and a consumer-protection agency inside the Treasury Department and a rearrangement of oversight boxes, and it's now looking like even less.
The environment went from the base's desire for a carbon tax to a cap-and-trade carbon auction then to a cap-and-trade with all sorts of exemptions and offsets for the biggest polluters, and now Senate Democrats are talking about trying to do it industry-by-industry.
These waffles and wiggle rooms have drained the Democratic base of all passion. "Why should I care?" are words I hear over and over again from stalwart Democrats who worked their hearts out in the last election.
The Republican base, meanwhile, is on a rampage. It's more and more energized by its mad-as-hell populists. Tea partiers, libertarians, Birchers, birthers, and Dick Armey astro-turfers are channeling the economic anxieties of millions of Americans against "big government."
Technically, the Democrats have the majority in Congress and could still make major reforms. But conservative, "blue-dog" Democrats won't go along. They say the public has grown wary of government. But they must know the public has grown even more wary of big business and Wall Street, on which effective government is the only constraint.
Anyone with an ounce of sanity understands government is the only effective countervailing force against the forces that got us into this mess: Against Goldman Sachs and the rest of the big banks that plunged the economy into crisis, got our bailout money, and are now back at their old games, dispensing huge bonuses to themselves. Against WellPoint and the rest of the giant health insurers who are at this moment robbing us of the care we need by raising their rates by double digits. Against giant corporations that are showing big profits by continuing to lay off millions of Americans and cutting the wages of millions of more, by shifting jobs abroad and substituting software. Against big oil and big utilities that are raising prices and rates, and continue to ravage the atmosphere.
If there was ever a time to connect the dots and make the case for government as the singular means of protecting the public from these forces it is now. Yet the White House and the congressional Democrats' ongoing refusal to blame big business and Wall Street has created the biggest irony in modern political history. A growing portion of the public, fed by the right, blames our problems on "big government."
Much of the reason for the Democrats' astonishing reluctance to place blame where it belongs rests with big business's and Wall Street's generous flows of campaign donations to Democrats, coupled with their implicit promise of high-paying jobs once Democratic officials retire from government. This is the rot at the center of the system. And unless or until it's remedied, it will be difficult for the President to achieve any "change you can believe in."
To his credit, Obama himself has not scaled back his health care ambitions all that much, and he appears, intermittently, to want to push conservative blue-dog Democrats to join him on a bigger jobs bill, tougher financial reform, and a more effective approach to global warming. (His overtures to Republicans seem ever more transparently designed to give blue-dog Democrats cover to vote with him.)
But our president is not comfortable wielding blame. He will not give the public the larger narrative of private-sector greed, its nefarious effect on the American public at this dangerous juncture, and the private sector's corruption of the democratic process. He has so far eschewed any major plan to get corporate and Wall Street money out of politics. He can be indignant -- as when he lashed out at the "fat cats" on Wall Street -- but his indignation is fleeting, and it is no match for the faux indignation of the right that blames government for all that ails us.
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