A Dozen Reasons for House Members to Vote for Health-Insurance Reform

[Readers: please feel free to send this list to your representatives, over your own signature if you like.]

[For my predictions for Sunday, click here.]

1. To restore America’s pragmatism and show the world we can solve at least one tough problem, even if it took a century.

2. To keep twenty-first century America from becoming Dickensian England, with our poor and working class literally rotting and festering in every dark corner of every city.

3. To realize a century-long dream of Republican and Democratic presidents, including Teddy Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, FDR, Harry Truman, and Bill Clinton.

4. To help us match our developed trading partners’ far more humane, better performing and far cheaper health-care systems.

5. To take part of the social-cost millstone from around our industries’ and businesses’ necks so that they can better compete with their global rivals.

6. To save yourself and your family from 50 million untreated “vectors” of the next pandemic or a bio-terror plague.

7. To show that our system of government is still capable of governing and achieving important goals.

8. To acknowledge expertise in general, and the CBO’s in particular, when it says that the bill will reduce the deficit.

9. To give our President a fighting chance to govern and arrest our national decline.

10. [For Democrats] To give the lie, for a brief moment, to Will Rogers’ old joke that “I’m not a member of any organized political party. I’m a Democrat.”

11. [For Republicans] To buy some insurance against the people waking up from the spell of your clever propaganda of fear―maybe as early as November―and discovering that for eighteen years your party has done nothing significant (besides a school-improvement project that badly needs repair) but start two wars, emasculate our once-superb government and military in the name of privatization, make money-lenders and paper shufflers obscenely rich, destroy the global economy, explode our deficit (under Dubya), and turn Congress into a mud-wrestling arena―all in the name of fairy-tale ideology.

12. [For both parties, especially new Members] To have something to say on your deathbed, when your grandchildren ask, “Did you do anything important in Congress to improve the lives of ordinary people, or did you just spend campaign contributions and the people’s money, make speeches, and score political points?”

MY PREDICTIONS (7:30 A.M. Sunday): It is now possible to make two predictions with some confidence. First, Obama’s historic push for health-insurance reform will succeed.

Besides momentum, I base this prediction on two things. First, success depends on House Democrats alone. When the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal run simultaneous stories praising Speaker Pelosi’s skill in corraling this herd of cats, you know that she’s done the job. Second, most, if not all, of the anti-abortion Democrats will eventually vote for the bill, but only after holding out as long as they can to get as much press as they can on their agonizing over abortion to appease their constituencies. When push comes to shove, they will come home as Democrats. They won’t risk losing the party’s support.

My second prediction is that this win will solidify the president’s leadership, as well as the Speaker’s. Nothing succeeds like success. John Boehner―undoubtedly the stupidest high-profile politician in America today―doesn’t understand this simple fact: Americans like winners. He also doesn’t understand that repeatedly claiming the sky is falling only works until people begin to notice it hasn’t fallen. As the President wryly noted in his pep talk to Democrats, the sky isn’t going to fall when the bill passes. Once people see things getting much better, not worse, Boehner’s credibility will be down in the single digits, as is appropriate for our national village idiot.

Governing the American people these days is like “breaking” a never-ridden, high-spirited and easily-spooked pony. It takes a firm hand, courage, infinite patience, and perseverance. But after a while, the people get used to a new rider, despite the noise of the crowd, and whatever the rider’s clothing or the color of his skin. By this time tomorrow, the President, with Pelosi’s aid, will have broken the pony and will be taking an historic victory lap around the ring. Anyone who thinks this outcome will impair the Democrats’ prospects for the coming midterm elections has taken leave of his or her senses.

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Let Them Go! The Case for Secession

[For brief comment on how Marco Rubio’s speech confirmed this post, click here.]

Introduction
Recent historical trends
The divorce analogy
Irreconcilable differences?
Should government be able to act?
Live and Let Live
Conditions
Conclusion

Introduction

Mere days after Barack Obama’s re-election, Governor Rick Perry of Texas began talking about secession.

Now Texans are a special breed. Their formative moment came at the Alamo, when a small but brave bunch of them died in a vain, but posthumously successful, attempt to avoid being governed by Spanish-speaking brown-skinned folk.

That was in 1836. Not much in the Mind of Texas seems to have changed since then.

To a non-Texan like me, Governor Perry seems one of the stupidest men ever to enter American politics. He makes Dubya look brilliant. But he seems to understand Texans; otherwise he wouldn’t be their governor. And even a broken clock is right twice a day. So it’s worth some ink to consider Perry’s unoriginal idea dispassionately.

Would it make us all better off? After analysis, I think so. The idea holds up from a whole bunch of perspectives. Before you click out, let me briefly name them: (1) recents trends in global history, (2) trends in divorce law and practice, (3) irreconcilable differences, (4) the quaint notion that government ought to be able to act, and (5) the most basic American value of all: live and let live.

Recent historical trends

The end of World War II coincided roughly with the end of our species’ imperial era. Since then, far more countries have broken up than have formed.

The most impressive example is the old Soviet Union, which spun off (or finally let go) fifteen different nations. But there were lots of other examples: (1) India, which split from the British Empire and spun off Pakistan, (2) Pakistan itself, which spun off Bangladesh, (3) Yugoslavia, which broke up into seven new Balkan nations, which are now (finally!) at peace, (4) Czechoslovakia, which became the Czech Republic and Slovakia, (5) Indonesia, which let East Timor go after a long struggle, and (6) Sudan, which just recently let South Sudan go.

Other examples may be in process. The central part of Africa, which used to be a Belgian colony, has undergone so much boundary change that it’s hard to keep the names of new nations straight. That process shows no signs of abating.

Iraq may be similar. A lot of people, including this writer, thought its three peoples (Sunni, Shiites and Kurds) might be happier apart, or in a loose federation, rather than in a single, centrally governed state. As Chuck Hagel implied in his confirmation hearings, that question still awaits the judgment of history.

I haven’t even mentioned (except for India) all the former colonies that have split from their colonizers. They are almost too numerous to count. (I’ve got a future post coming on them.)

But perhaps they don’t belong in this discussion. Although their colonial masters owned them for all practical purposes, they and their colonizers together did not have enough earmarks of a single state, either geographically or politically, let alone culturally. So we’ll have to count colonies gaining independence as another centrifugal postwar phenomenon, but not quite the same one.

Have there been countertrends? Not many. The chief counterexample is the European Union (1 and 2). It has several would-be copycats, including Mercosur in South America and Asean in East Asia.

But the EU and its follow-ons are not really marriages. They are more like civil unions. Their goals are wholly economic; they don’t affect nationhood or undermine national sovereignty. Even the EU’s members are resisting further integration, especially in immigration and foreign policy. And the Brits seem ready to stalk out, or at least to “renegotiate” the terms of the civil union in their favor.

If you discount these weak civil unions, it looks as if divorce has been far more prevalent among nations since World War II than marriage.

Late Addendum: I’ve been getting some hits from Germany, where readers must be wondering why I didn’t mention the recent reunification of east and west. The reason is that this was not a normal “marriage.” It was the restoration of a nation forcibly divided by war. As I’ve noted myself, the successful reunification was an extraordinary achievement, but it wasn’t the marriage of separate nations with separate cultures. If nothing else, the speed and success of the process showed that. Contrast the fact that North and South here are still fighting the Civil War after a century and a half. That’s a sign of differing cultures.

The Divorce Analogy

That being the case, it’s useful to look more closely at the analogy to divorce. When I was a kid, spouses had to prove infidelity or extreme cruelty to get a divorce. That rule led to lots of spying on bedrooms and lots of fake fights.

Eventually, the law and most of western culture settled on a more sensible rule: couples can divorce if they just can’t get along. As usual, the law expresses that simple rule in polysyllabic terms: “irreconcilable differences” or “incompatibility.”

This new standard has made divorce much easier and therefore much more common. Many bemoan the change and the rising divorce rate worldwide. But the main reason for their distress is children. Many people think, with some justification, that even a bad marriage is better for children than divorce.

There is, however, no close analogy to children in a divorce of whole peoples. They are more like adults who have no children, or whose children have grown up. Most neutral observers conclude that there is no reason for those spouses to maintain a mutually intolerable relationship. (The matter of real interethnic or intercultural children we can solve by giving them or their parents the right to choose a new home.)

Irreconcilable Differences?

Are Texas and our other so-called “red” states compatible with our “blue” ones? Or are there irreconcilable differences? Let’s take a look.

The following table lists a number ways in which red and blue views differ. Read through it and see whether: (1) these are important issues for the development and progress of any society or nation and durable sources of discord, and (2) my characterization of the degrees of separation is fair.

Leave aside for a moment who is right and who is wrong. (That’s why I provided no links, although this blog addresses many of these issues elsewhere.) The question before us is not who is right, but whether people so far apart on so many things ought to live together.

Table of Irreconcilable Differences

Issue or Subject	“Red” View	“Blue” View
Domestic Policy
A half-black president	Hate him and whole idea	Don’t mind, as long as he’s good
Labor unions	Don’t mess with markets	Still-important guarantor of social justice and economic equality
Social Security	Unaffordable socialism	Safety net for seniors, the economy and social justice
Medicare	More unaffordable socialism	Same as above
Medicaid	Same, plus burden on states	Needed protection for poor in workforce
Undocumented Immigrants	Keep and move them out, except maybe children	Cut the flow but let law-abiding workers stay
The Crash of 2008	Government caused it, and Obama made it worse	Wall Street and lax regulation caused it, and Obama saved us
Federal debt	An existential threat right now	We can cut it as our economy recovers
Taxes	Always down, never up	Our postwar growth was fine when top rates ranged from 91% to 70%
Government	Drown it in a bathtub	We need it, especially when we’re old or sick, or bankers go rogue
Energy and the Environment
Global warming	A hoax	A grave long-term threat
Wind and solar power	Useless boondoggles	New industries and clean energy
Coal	Burn, baby, burn! It’s cheap	Dirtiest fuel ever; phase out
Oil and gasoline	Drill, baby, drill! They’ll always be there	They’re getting scarcer and pricier; look for substitutes
Natural gas	Drill, baby, drill!	Good transitional fuel, but watch for air and water pollution
Nuclear power	Full speed ahead	Other power sources are cleaner and safer
Foreign Policy
Afghanistan	Stay to defeat Taliban and secure Karzai’s government	Kill terrorists, but get out and shift to civilian aid
Arab Spring	Lock and load! Militant Islam is coming!	Cautious hope for democracy and peace
China	Slave state, cheater, and dangerous rival	Rising economic power and trade partner that bears watching
France	Socialist wimp	Leader in post-colonial engagement and nuclear power
Germany	Old enemy and commercial rival	Hopeful example in manufacturing, energy, and economic equality
Iran	Prepare for air war and oil price spikes	Boycott and bargain, but try to avoid war
Iraq	We should still have combat troops there	We should not have gone in, and it’s good we’re getting out
Israel	Bulwark against militant Islam and (for some) Armageddon trigger	Close friend which can do stupid things
Russia	Slave state like Soviet Union	“Marketizing” European power; can be rival or partner
Military budget	Spend what we must to beat all foes in two world wars at once	Where will those wars come from?
Mitigating global warming	Others should go first	We should lead
Political Personalities
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad	Hitler redux	Failed subordinate on his way out; who’s next?
Rush Limbaugh	Freedom fighter and party leader	Vile and dangerous blowhard
Sarah Palin	Strong female leader	Gold-digging airhead
Vladimir Putin	Lenin and Stalin redux	Modern but authoritarian leader willing to bargain, not even close to Stalin
“Social” Issues and Attitudes
Abortion	The murder of children	A woman’s personal and medical choice
Chirstianity	America’s religion and our highest law	One religion among many
Church attendance	High and important	Much lower and less important
Easily available guns	Guarantors of freedom from crime and government	Makers of mayhem and slaughterers of children
Evolution	Another hoax	The foundation of modern biology
Faith and money	Jesus wants you to be rich	Didn’t Jesus say something about camels and needles?
Fundamentalism	OK if Christian	Dangerous, whether Christian, Jewish or Taliban
Gay marriage	Over our dead bodies!	Yawn, why not? It’s a free country
Public pensioners	Freeloaders	Former fire fighters, garbage collectors, police and teachers
Wall Street	Let ’er rip! Money’s good, isn’t it?	Isn’t something rotten there?

If this list were about spouses, what would the prospects for an harmonious marriage be?

Should government be able to act?

Once in a while, should Congress be able to pass an important law? If you believe that government is best drowned in a bathtub so taxes can go lower, you might “just say no.”

But paradoxically, red voters are just as fed up with Congress as their blue counterparts. No one, red or blue, left or right, seems to like broken government. But all want government to do things their way.

We have broken government for four reasons. First, people with world views as dramatically different as those shown above can’t agree on anything. Their values and outlook are just too far apart.

Second, our voters have self-sorted into tribal camps. They read, watch and believe only news and commentary that supports their pre-existing views. So there’s not much switching between camps. Psychologists, social scientists and pollsters agree. They don’t see much prospect for future agreement or reconciliation.

Third, as red and blue voters become more entrenched in their views and more estranged from each other, “compromise” becomes a dirty word. It already is among the Tea Party. Gerrymandered single-party districts don’t help. Red-meat voters there don’t want compromise; they want champions.

Finally, our Constitution hog-ties us. Every state, even the smallest—has two votes in the Senate. Our Constitution won’t ever let those votes be taken away. So, for the foreseeable future, voters in a state like Wyoming will have about 50 times the voting power in the Senate as voters in California.

But that’s just the beginning. Filibusters give a minority of 41 senators a veto like much like the President’s. The Constitution allows each House to make its own rules, but the rate of filibuster blockage has gone far beyond anything the Founders might have contemplated, and far beyond anything in our golden age as a nation.

Next is the Senate “hold.” Any single Senator, individually (and often anonymously), can delay any piece of legislation or any presidential appointment that requires Senate confirmation, for any reason or for no reason. Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama, a red state, at one time had seventy holds on President Obama’s appointments. While the world “hold” implies only delay, in fact these holds kill legislation and appointments more often than not. (Procedures among 100 senators often can’t wait for one senator, or several, to change their minds.) So not only do we have the 41% “veto” of a minority; we also have an effective senatorial veto, which every single senator can exercise individually.

With these rules and such dramatic ideological splits, is gridlock any surprise?

With the mere act of secession, every one of these reasons for gridlock would disappear. Each spinoff’s people would have similar enough views—a similar culture, if you will—to haggle over details but get things done. The two separate tribes would not have sorted themselves out into different internal camps, at least at first. Their respective media would air different nuances of the two tribes’ views, but not irreconcilable opposites. There would be no jeering. So each spinoff would not have to contend with perpetually warring, jeering, entrenched camps.

Each side also could make considerable progress in avoiding the pitfalls of our Constitution. The seceding states would have carte blanche to design a new government, which they would be well advised to do without filibusters and Senate holds. Anyway, they would not have the incentives for gridlock that our Founders had. They would not be trying to meld two wildly different cultures: an industrial, Puritan, free and communitarian North, with an aristocratic, agrarian plantation South based on slavery.

With world views much closer together, and after a huge sigh of relief, the remaining states could change the Senate rules to eliminate or curb filibusters and avoid single-senator holds. They would be well advised to do so during the initial honeymoon period after secession, perhaps by constitutional amendment. The seceding states could do the same things in designing their government from scratch.

But if things stay as they are, there is no reasonable prospect for any foreseeable solution for either red or blue. The gap in world view and ideology is simply too broad. And as the Senate’s recent failed attempt to curb filibusters proved anew, no politician ever lets power drop out of his or her hands while alive. Hence the chance of abolishing filibusters and Senate holds in the midst of a severe ideological split and gridlock is minimal. The gap in world view, the warring camps, the hatred of compromise, and our Constitution are tying both red and blue states in a death embrace that allows no room for breathing, let alone action.

With secession, the logjam would break quickly for each side. With like-minded compatriots and rules more suited to action, each side could realize its ideological dreams in its own way. The seceding states could reject Roe v. Wade, allow anyone to carry an assault weapon with a huge magazine, make church attendance mandatory, outlaw unions, give tax break to Wall Street banks to lure them down South, use coal for 100% of their power, drill everywhere for oil and gas, and declare their new nation a Christian one.

The remaining states, by constitutional amendment, could overturn Citizens United, outlaw firearms in crowded cities, and bring back the fairness doctrine for public discourse in the Internet Age. They could also regulate the big banks or break them up into pieces small enough to fail, subsidize wind and solar energy, give labor unions more power, expand Medicare to all ages, and invest heavily in a smart grid, better roads and Internet, electric cars, and education. They could even raise taxes to fund these things.

Each side, of course, would predict the other’s failure. But maybe ideology isn’t so important after all. Maybe if citizens believe in what they are doing, think they are being fairly treated, work hard, and work together—rather than at cross purposes—that’s all that matters. Maybe today’s ideological struggles have no more import than Jonathan Swift’s metaphorical quarrel about which end of a boiled egg to flatten.

The rivalry and competition between the two resulting nations might spur both on to success. And if not, it might settle finally (and for history) whether a mixed economy with strong regulation and a strong safety net is better than a more muscular capitalism with few restraints on money, power and guns.

Isn’t competition the law of nature and our species? Why not settle the endless ideological debate with a real test, an experiment? If one side “won” decisively, the other could always rejoin it.

Live and let live

As I once wrote about gay marriage, the most succinct expression of American values is “live and let live.” That simple phrase states the essence of our common culture better than the lawyers’ language of our Bill of Rights.

But when two groups of people have such starkly different values and world views as our red and blue states, it’s hard to live and let live. With secession, each side would be free, finally, to live according to its ideology and world view. And each side would be obliged to let the other live, albeit in a different nation.

In our present gridlocked society, neither side gets its way, and nothing ever seems to change. That’s not “live and let live”; that’s stasis and ideological combat.

Conditions

A peaceful and orderly secession would of course require some conditions. But they are not many. I think a mere six would do the job.

First, all states wishing to secede would have to declare their intentions within a specified period, maybe two years. Most would want to have a referendum, but the second condition might make that unnecessary.

Second, every citizen or legal resident of every state would have the right, until the very day of secession, to choose to live in any other state, red or blue. The “privileges and immunities” of US citizens and permanent residents, including freedom of travel and residence, would last until the very day of secession. That day should be at least five years after all seceding states have declared their intentions, so as to allow all the dust to settle and every individual to make up his or her mind.

Third, from day of declaration until the day of secession, all military personnel would have the right to be transferred from the remaining states to the seceding states, or vice versa. The military command of each new nation would have the power to choose the particular state, but not the nation. That way, no military person would be forced to serve a nation that he or she did not support. (You might call this the “Robert E. Lee rule.” He agonized over his decision but made the wrong choice. Our Civil War would have been a lot shorter had he chosen right, but you can’t change history.)

Fourth, the seceding states would have to relinquish all nuclear weapons and weapons-related nuclear materials and technology. They didn’t invent them, and they would have marginalized or ignored the people who did—mostly Jewish and Italian immigrants. And given their views on war, the whole rest of the world would sleep easier if they had no nukes. But the remaining US states would pre-sign a treaty guaranteeing a nuclear response to any nuclear attack on any seceding state.

Fifth, each seceding state would have to agree to pay the accumulated arrears of federal money received over federal taxes paid by the state itself, its people, and its private businesses. (The seceding states collectively, if red states now, would most likely have such a collective deficit. But a few, like Texas, might have a surplus.) Each state would be given a lengthy period, such as ten or fifteen years, to make the required payment.

Finally, as part of the declaration of secession, the seceding states would have to establish, before secession, binding rules for immigration, emigration, and international trade. They would also have to agree to abide by all treaties and international agreements binding on the United States, including the WTO, with such exceptions and changes as they could negotiate with foreign parties. (Russia undertook similar obligations as successor to the Soviet Union when it split up.)

Conclusion

Abraham Lincoln presided in a low-divorce era. Couples didn’t split up then, and neither did nations. Both do today.

At first Lincoln wanted only to preserve the Union, not abolish slavery. But he could foresee slavery remaining a source of conflict between the Union and the Confederacy as far as the eye could see.

In other words, Lincoln was prescient enough to understand that secession alone would not significantly reduce the risk of war. Neither the Abolitionists nor the slave owners were going to change. So once the Confederate states seceded, Lincoln had no choice but war. Preserving the Union was a goal that not only Abolitionists, but everyone in the North, could get behind.

Circumstances are quite different today. Slavery is gone forever. Not even Texas is likely to re-institute it. Our blue states and red states have enough of a common culture, and are sufficiently imbued with a common gospel of capitalism and trade, as to enjoy a vibrant and competitive, but not bellicose, relationship as separate countries.

Rather than war, a strong and friendly rivalry might develop after secession. With each able to go its own way, the two sides might eventually develop a certain mutual affection. Their relationship might mimic the affection we now feel for Britain, despite our long-ago Revolutionary War.

Each spinoff country would have the right and necessity to develop its own foreign policy and trade relationships, subject to pre-existing treaties. These tasks would no doubt be a preoccupation of the seceding states for several years after secession, perhaps a decade.

Except for the risk of war between Japan and China over the Senkaku/Daioyu Islands, there is little risk of war between major powers today. Certainly no major power is threatening us. The red states tend to see threats and danger everywhere, not just from Iran and North Korea, but from Russia, China, and even tiny Venezuela. Whether it’s better to face those perceived threats as part of the United States or as a separate country would be something they would have to think about in deciding whether to secede.

Not every red state would necessarily follow Texas. Most would, maybe all. But some might not, particularly the northern ones. Their defection would help make secession easier: the bi-coastal United States remaining after secession would need some sort of ground transportation corridor over the phalanx of seceding states in our center. Maybe strong agreements on trade, transit of people and transportation of goods would suffice.

But the likelihood of any foreign power attacking either the United States or the seceding states solely due to the act of secession seems remote. After all, the Soviet Union dissolved with no such consequence. It had much less friendly neighbors, some of which were much more powerful than ours. Yet no one even thought of attacking it. So the negligible risk of foreign military action—or trade action for that matter—should not preclude secession.

Lincoln couldn’t allow it in his day because: (1) that sort of thing wasn’t done, and (2) war probably would have come anyway. Why postpone it and fight a stronger, better organized foe later?

Today there is no such risk, and there are plenty of precedents for division. We can divorce if we like, under a standard of irreconcilable differences. We certainly are incompatible by any measure of human culture.

As Churchill once said of us and Britain, we red and blue folk are two peoples divided by a common language. But worse yet, we inhabit a common governmental jail cell. Separate and free from each other at last, we might both soar.

Another Case of Immediate Confirmation

I love it when real events confirm my analysis quickly, as they did with my post on coal.

After writing the foregoing post, I had a bout of writer’s insecurity. Had I exaggerated the differences between “red” and “blue” states? Had I been fair to the red ones, whose views I don’t share? Do voters there really believe that government caused the Crash of 2008?

Well, I didn’t have long to wait for confirmation. Last night’s speeches provided plenty.

Marco Rubio, the GOP junior Senator from Florida, gave the “red” reply to the President’s State of the Union address. Very early on, he insisted that government caused the Crash, and that only private initiative could fix it. “A major cause of our recent downturn.” he said, “was a housing crisis created by reckless government policies.”

Do red voters think global warming is a hoax? Well, Rubio didn’t say so exactly, but he did say this: “When we point out that no matter how many job-killing laws we pass, our government can’t control the weather, [the President] accuses us of wanting dirty water and dirty air.”

Rubio, you may recall, is the GOP’s great white hope. He’s the son of Cuban immigrants, and he gave his reply speech in both Spanish and English. He personifies the GOP’s desire to “pivot” on immigration and save itself from Hispanic ostracism.

Rubio hails from Florida, a state once red but now purple. Insofar as his own personal constituency is concerned, he has every electoral incentive to be moderate and bipartisan. Yet as conservative pundit David Brooks noted afterward, he disagreed with almost everything the President had said, point by point, item by item. You don’t even have to know the President’s speech to know this; just read Rubio’s own.

Neither Rubio nor the President covered all the points in my table. But all that they both covered matched my take. Rubio even opened his speech with an oblique reference to life being precious “at every stage”—a hint that abortion is murder.

There were only three exceptions. First, Rubio claimed to agree with the President on lowering the corporate tax rate, but without stating conditions. Second, he agreed (without saying so) that the cost of college is too high, but he disagreed on how to lower it. “We must,” he said, “give students more information on the costs and benefits of the student loans they’re taking out.” In other words, no regulation, just disclosure.

Finally, as point man for the GOP’s “pivot” on immigration, he urged “a responsible, permanent solution to the problem of those who are here illegally. But first,” he said, “we must follow through on the broken promises of the past to secure our borders and enforce our laws.”

No doubt David Brooks hopes the GOP survives. Without it, he might be out of a job. But he recognized that there was nothing new in Rubio’s speech. It was straight out of the GOP script of the last twenty years, or GOP scripture if you prefer.

Brooks attributed the speech’s lack of substance and luster to the necessity for Rubio (or any GOP pol) to secure the GOP nomination without being Tea Partied. But isn’t that precisely the point? The Tea Party mentality has captured the GOP and controls its mind.

So my table stands confirmed, and the question remains: can people so far apart in all they feel and think they know get along? And even if they can get along without literally killing each other (except in random gun violence), can they work together well enough to succeed in a very, very competitive world? Or does success require secession?

P.S. Another event today confirmed a different part of the post above. Lindsey Graham, a red-state senator, threatened to use a senate hold to delay or block the appointment of Chuck Hagel (also a Republican) as Secretary of Defense.

Leave aside Graham’s ostensible reason for the threat: to get more information about the tragedy in Benghazi. Certainly Graham doesn’t expect Hagel to have it. Hagel was nowhere near the event or in the chain of command—whether before, during or after the event. So Graham’s ploy is just another example of government by extortion.

Leave aside also the unmitigated gall of a guy whose military service was in a law office, and who never saw combat, challenging the right of a guy who did to serve as Secretary of Defense, based on nothing more than a difference in views, largely motivated by ideology. We’ve seen enough of that recently not to be shocked anymore.

But this farce illustrates precisely how our Senate rules have tied us in knots. In any proper parliamentary democracy, the prime minister would pat Graham on the head and tell him to sit in a corner.

Not here. Like every other individual senator, red or blue, Graham has the power to throw a monkey wrench into the machinery of government any time he chooses. That kind of power approaches Lord Acton’s definition of absolute corruption.

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He Did His Homework

The advent of television a half-century ago changed news forever. Before TV, reporters were anonymous creatures working in obscurity. They had their bylines, but few outside the news business noticed them. No one cared who they were; readers cared only what they wrote.

Radio didn’t change much. You might identify a reporter’s voice, and the quality of the voice mattered. But reporters were not celebrities; the news they provided, not they themselves, were the focus of listeners’ attention. Listeners respected Edward R. Murrow for his news, not his persona.

All that changed with television. Once you could see and hear the reporters, they began to distract attention from the news. A consummate professional like Walter Cronkite could hold the distractions in check for a while, but eventually he retired. Once he did, the trickle of celebrity became a flood.

Today what passes for news in the mainstream media is more entertainment than substance. Newspeople are celebrities and public personalities. Even print reporters, who used to labor in obscurity, appear constantly on radio and television.

Have you ever taken a close look at the composition of TV news panels today? Nearly half the guests interviewed are reporters. Or they are pundits, that is to say, former reporters or political operatives now lacking frequent contact with reality.

So half of our news is reporters talking to other reporters. No wonder the mainstream media seem like a gigantic echo chamber. You have to ask when reporters have time to gather the news, or whether green interns, with no experience or contacts, get it for them.

That’s bad enough, but it’s far from all. Right along with the notion that reporters are news came the notion of universal celebrity. The common person is a fifteen-second pundit. So we have “person-on-the-street” interviews and focus groups. They appear not just as occasional human-interest features, but as a regular, substantial components of mainstream “news.”

The nadir of this phenomenon came on the day Senator Obama announced achieving the presumptive Democratic nomination. There was, as usual, a delay in his reaching the venue for his speech, so CNN had some time to fill. News people call that “treading water.”

In the old days, Walter Cronkite treaded water magnificently. He would give you facts and quotations from history. He would compare the candidate’s voting record to that of other candidates and presidents. He would compare our country to England and others. He would provide legal, scientific, or historical background. In short, he would provide interesting and relevant facts, which took a little digging to discover.

Did CNN do the same? Hell, no. They sent a reporter to Harlem, N.Y., to interview ordinary black residents. The resulting segment was one of the laziest, stupidest and most misleading pieces of reporting I have ever encountered in any medium.

Why lazy? Well, all CNN had to do was get someone from the New York office to grab a camera person and a cab uptown and talk to a few locals. Little effort, little thought, little expense. No imagination. Hitting the library or even the Internet to find some useful factual background would take more time, much more thought, and much, much more imagination. And it wouldn’t be nearly as much fun.

Why stupid? Well, what would you expect black residents of Harlem, N.Y., to say? Even if they don’t support Obama, they are sure to be thrilled with the fact of his path-breaking candidacy. Harlem is well known as a liberal and reliably Democratic community. Are you likely to find there anything surprising or unusual, that is to say, newsworthy? Are people likely to say, for example, “we want more guns in our community to kill off more of our friends and neighbors”? If you want to hear what ordinary people think, go down to your neighborhood bar and have a nice, cold beer.

Why misleading? Let me count the ways. Obama is only half black. Far, far more than half the people who voted for him are white. Many are moderates, Republicans, and even conservatives. Only a minuscule portion of them live, or ever lived, in Harlem. Going to one of the most liberal and most well known (dare I say notorious?) black communities in the country and interviewing people there on the day of his primary triumph completely misrepresents the nature, breadth and depth of his support.

In her primary campaign, Hillary did a great job of confusing undecided voters about Obama and his candidacy. The CNN folks who produced that segment couldn’t have done a better job of continuing her attempt if they had worked for John McCain. If you have a cynical bent, you would conclude that the segment was not just lazy and stupid reporting, but subtle political propaganda.

What is so annoying is that decent producers and reporters could have done so much better with so little effort.

For starters, they might have read Obama’s wonderful first book. It has great stories about Obama, revealing how interesting and admirable his forbears were on both sides, black and white. His African father once confronted a racist who didn’t want to stand next to him at a bar, and got the man to admire him enough to buy him drinks. His father also once charmed his own father—Obama’s grandfather, a local leader of legendary ability and severity—by dancing with his own mother (Obama’s grandmother).

These great stories were there for the reading, and a little effort to locate Obama’s friends and relatives could have found actual people to tell them. But no, CNN went for the lazy, stupid, misleading kill: interviewing the person on the street.

Next to CNN’s producers of drivel, Tim Russert stood out like a beacon of professionalism. His secret was the dirty little secret of everyone who succeeds at a profession: he worked hard.

I didn’t know him personally, and he wasn’t one of my favorite newspeople. But I was acutely conscious of his unusual ability to skewer hypocrisy, duplicity, double-dealing and stupidity. That alone was a tremendous contribution to our credulous, herd-running, echo-chamber media.

How Russert did it was unusual, especially for reporters today. He didn’t just ply the telephone or the upscale bar. He read.

He knew that reading is by far the fastest and most effective method of human communication. You can read a page silently in less than a fifth the time it takes to read it out loud. You can also index it and, if it’s digitized, search it electronically. Try that with speech, let alone a telephone call.

Russert knew the power of reading, so he read. In spare time and on Saturdays, he combed the transcripts, the library, books, and the Internet for background for his interviews. He covered much more ground than his rivals. He was better informed and prepared.

Russert’s epitaph should be, “He did his homework.” After the loss of a candidate who didn’t, and after a drastic decline in competence in America, that is no small thing. If Russert’s death inspires more to do the same, we might yet save the mainstream media and even our Republic.

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“The Messiah’s” Burden

As the life of Jesus showed, it’s not easy being The Messiah. People expect too much from you, and you expect too much of yourself. In Jesus’ case, the result was crucifixion.

The President is no Messiah, but he labors under similar burdens. From the moment of his “miraculous” ascension to the presidency, people have expected too much of him. And though it’s hard to get inside his mind, it seems he has, at times, expected too much of himself.

In many ways, his election was miraculous. Or so it seemed at the time.

When he started his quixotic campaign in 2007, few expected him even to become the Dems’ nominee. Most of the smart money was on Hillary. Under the circumstances, seasoned African-American pols might have been expected to be most realistic of all. Yet most of them backed Hillary initially, not for reasons of deep preference, but because they didn’t think Obama had a chance.

When he won not only the Democratic nomination, but also the presidency, it seemed like a double miracle. I still remember that touching picture of an African-American lady, sitting on the floor, legs akimbo, near a pew of her church, with tears streaming down her face and her child gently touching them. There is no doubt in my mind that part of the reason for her tears—and mine, too!—was the feeling that a miracle had touched us all.

But in truth, Obama’s election was no miracle. It had five practical causes, none of them divine. The first was the President’s immense talent. It amazed anyone with an open mind who knew him or saw him work. The second was the times: we were about to see the back of a president whose stupidity had caused gigantic blunders, who had started two needless wars, run up gigantic deficits, presided over a global economic collapse and couldn’t even speak English. Everyone was looking for change.

The third cause of Obama’s electoral miracles was the poor quality of his opponents. In experience and judgment, Hillary had little going for her. John McCain had even less. A hero in the Vietnam war and a straight shooter, he himself confessed he had little to offer in economics, which the election was all about.

The final two causes related to the campaigns. Having watched Karl Rove’s dirty tricks elect the stupidest president in American history, the Dems were not about to let that happen again. They and Obama assembled the strongest and deepest field of campaign professionals that Dems had ever put together and vowed to beat Rove at his own game. John McCain helped them win by running a slime-ridden, racist campaign that repelled many voters, for which he all but apologized after he lost.

But most Americans knew none of this and cared less. What they saw was an outsider with an improbable background riding in miraculously on a white horse (a seemingly no-longer-racist electorate), promising much-needed hope and change. His unusual background only strengthened the vague impression of something way out of the ordinary. At the Inauguration, the huge crowd of two million happy people heaved a collective sigh of relief when Obama took the oath of office.

Ever sensationalist, our media picked up the meme, magnified it, and rode it to profitability. Ever shrewd, devious and exploitive, GOP strategists picked it up, too. No doubt they remembered the story of Jesus and hoped for a figurative crucifixion in the next presidential election. They still do.

Rush led the way, declaring just days after the President’s inauguration that making the President fail was the GOP’s chief goal. After some initial embarrassment, the rest of the GOP took Rush’s lead, not seeming to notice what a vile oaf he was and always has been. (Thinking of him in the company of our Founders is like imagining a half-decomposed dead rat in a basket of perfect apples.)

And so we have the sad irony of our currrent campaign. The GOP and Mitt have made themselves competitive in this race essentially by playing into the “Messiah” meme. They are blaming the President for failing to cure all the many consequences of Dubya’s catastrophic stupidity. They are blaming him for a natural inability to cure, in a mere four years, the consequences of the GOP’s misguided ideology over the last thirty.

And the GOP has cleverly kept Dubya hidden, silent and out of sight, so that lazy voters forget he even existed. When was the last time you saw a major party convention shun its own living ex-president, let alone the most recent one?

You would expect Dem-haters and overt racists to buy into this ploy. They will grab any convenient meme to beat someone of Obama’s background. You would expect unconscious racists to buy into it, too, because it offers them yet another reason to bury and deny their unconscious racism. They are not, as a rule, the most introspective of people.

But what you wouldn’t expect is once and future Democrats, or independents of open minds, to buy into this simplistic meme.

Yet many of them do. You don’t see that much evidence any more. But just months ago myriad comments in online media complained vociferously of disappointment in Obama’s failure to keep his alleged promises, or his general promise of hope and change. Sarah Palin precisely captured this thinking when she derided that “hopey changey thing.”

Now the GOP campaign has pivoted to more specific charges about specific real and imagined broken promises. But the Messiah’s fall-from-grace meme remains in the background and underlies voter credulity.

What’s the best antidote? I think it’s the President himself—his real character, not the chimeras that political consultants may be trying to create.

One of the many admirable things about the president is his evenness of temper. As he said during the 2008 campaign, he never gets too high or too low. He is calm, steady, realistic and reliable. That’s an important reason why he’s good as both candidate and leader. That’s why he’s also infinitely better than Mitt, whose constant changing, backing and spinning would drive both domestic and foreign leaders crazy and create chaos.

Because the President has no manic-depressive gene, he may have trouble understanding people who do, notwithstanding his off-the-scale general empathy. He may not fully realize that, for hundreds of thousands of persuadable voters, the letdown after expecting a Messiah and getting only a good and diligent president is hurting him.

So as the campaign closes, I think it should do its best to undermine the Messiah meme. It should do so by showing real clips from the President’s calm, steady leadership throughout his first term.

These clips should not be made-up ads. The President is weary from the endless campaign, and the few recent ads I’ve seen don’t show him at his best: his steadiest and most calming.

The new ads should show him as leader, using excerpts from his speeches and acts as president. Maybe one of them should be a clip from his sober announcement of bin Laden’s death.

They would make a wonderful counterpoint to negative adds showing Mitt the Weathervane rotating rapidly with every light breeze. At the same time, they would help relieve the Messiah’s burden by showing how much better is a strong, steady leader than an imaginary worker of illusory miracles, which Mitt now is bidding to become.

Footnote: To see the photo, centered in a beautiful essay explaining the feelings of many that night, click here. Be patient: the essay and photo are archived and may take time to load. But no subscription is required.

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Tax Cuts for the Rich: A Disastrous Blunder

Coda: Is the President a Bleeding Heart?

It’s been nearly a week since “The Deal” now. There will be some low-level haggling. But tax cuts for the rich appear on their way to extension and probable permanence, especially if the President loses in two years.

What’s left of the progressive side of the Democratic party is recovering from shock. But it’s not just the left wingers. People like me had no illusions about the President: we recognized his centrist and domestic “peacemaker” credentials from the start. Compromise and “getting along” here at home were central themes of his 2004 keynote speech that put him on the road to the White House,

People who expected the President to act like the left-wing caricature that Boehner and McConnell painted of him, with the help of Fox Propaganda, just weren’t thinking clearly.

But big things have changed since 2004. In 2004 it was still possible to think of our nation as “Number One” without seeming delusional. The 9/11 attacks had knocked us back on our heels, but we had responded forcefully. We hadn’t captured bin Laden or Zawahiri, but we had routed the Taliban in Afghanistan and seemed to have things under control there. Even in Iraq, where our forces were still searching for WMD, the civil war hadn’t erupted yet. Moammar Kadafi in Libya, having seen what we had done to a similar erratic dictator in Iraq, had voluntarily given up his nuclear weapons program.

At that time, we seemed to bestride the world like a colossus. The division at home remaining from the 2000 election—and just about everything else—didn’t seem to matter much. The nation had no idea of how bad things were just under the surface.

Economics told the same story. The dot-com bubble had been a little one, a minor outburst of irrational exuberance. It had few repercussions outside the stock market and Silicon Valley. By 2004 it was almost forgotten. It seemed like a speed bump on the road to even greater prosperity for a people who proudly proclaimed themselves teachers and leaders of the human race.

But there was rot under the surface. After 2004, it began to emerge like antibiotic-resistant bacteria, eating away at our muscles and skin.

The rot affected our military and financial strength, which of course are interlinked. Our misconceptions of Iraq bogged down our forces. The civil war of 2006-2007 infected our self-confidence. So did our neglect of Afghanistan. What had seemed like a masterstroke of military strategy and clever subversion there turned out to be just one battle in a long civil war, in which we may have taken the losing side.

Economically, the rot was much, much worse. For thirty years we had neglected the critical problem of dependence on foreign oil and the universally predicted advent of “peak oil.” For a shorter time, but at least since Bill Clinton’s tenure, we had gone on a wild bender of deregulation. We had allowed not just ideologues, but the stupidest, most short-sighted, greediest of them, to take over our entire financial system and turn it upside down.

Both of these problems erupted like skin lesions during Dubya’s last term. Gasoline shot to over $4 per gallon and diesel fuel to nearly $5. The Great Economic Collapse of 2008 followed in quick succession.

Ironically, the second disaster mitigated the first. The global economic collapse killed demand for oil and gas, so the price of gasoline dropped to a livable range. But with global economic recovery, it’s already $3 a gallon ($90 a barrel) and headed north. OPEC has just announced that $100 a barrel would be fine, and there is no evidence that even OPEC has the spare capacity to keep it from going beyond that.

China is already the world’s largest car market, and India is not far behind. If they both keep building gas-driven cars, the sky’s literally the limit for the price of oil and gas. Whatever you may think about peak oil, no one can doubt that oil is getting harder and more expensive to find and extract, even discounting disasters like the Great BP Oil Spill.

So despite decades of awareness, we have still have three monumental problems that are causing our national decline. We have to wean ourselves from the foreign oil tit. We have to wrest our financial system back from the gamblers and swindlers and return to making and building things. And we have to come up with the money to create an alternative energy infrastructure, repair the badly dilapidated infrastructure we already have, and (at the same time) mitigate the hardy consequences of the biggest economic collapse since 1929. We can’t do any of that without money, and we are broke.

That’s why the President’s “base” has gone ballistic over The Deal. It’s not just that tax cuts for the rich are an unwarranted concession to the worst scorched-earth, nation-be-damned politics since our Civil War—although they are. It’s not just that the President promised to end them—although he did. It’s not just that the President could avoid them with a stroke of the pen—which he can. It’s not just that the tax cuts are spectacularly unfair and counterproductive—which they are. It’s that we can’t solve our national problems without money, and we can’t get the money we need without raising taxes. It's that simple.

Unfair and unwise taxation creates a negative feedback loop that hastens our national decline. When I was born in 1945, our top tax rate was 94%, on all incomes over $200,000. (No, that’s not a typo; look it up.) Capital gains were taxed less severely. The clear message to plutocrats was: put your money where your mouth is. You claim to be clever and productive. If so, great. If you invest in private business or infrastructure, we’ll tax you lightly.

But if you want to keep your money for multiple homes, yachts, excessive consumption, the kind of jewelry that royalty wears, supporting idle children, or subverting our political system with corruption and propaganda, no deal. You can put your money back to work, or you can give it to your government, which will put it to work for you. Take your pick. But one way or another, your excess wealth is going to go to work for the common good.

Today, the top tax rate is 35%, where it has been since 2003. The capital gains rate is down to 15%, but it doesn’t seem to matter much. Excessive consumption among the rich is rampant. The nonfinancial corporate world has $1.93 trillion in cash but isn’t investing in industry or employment. Donald Trump is a hero, or at least a celebrity.

The sixteen plutocrats—every one of them outside the fossil-fuels industries—who just agreed to give away billions from their personal fortunes (not coincidentally while The Deal was being negotiated) are only the tip of the iceberg. The Koch brothers and Rupert Murdoch aren’t giving away any of their idle wealth. They’re using it to subvert our democracy further and to enrich themselves while we as a nation decline.

Although seldom articulated, this is the reason why Democrats, including relative centrists like me, are going ballistic. The President is a good and smart man. During his campaign, he saw many ordinary people suffering for lack of health care. So he made fixing our abysmal health-insurance system his first priority after economic stimulus.

He did a reasonable job, against enormous, entrenched opposition. But it’s becoming increasingly apparent that spending so much political capital on health-insurance reform was a mistake. The reform requires lots of money up front, to the incidental benefit of insurance and drug companies, with only a CBO promise of eventual deficit reduction. The fix was far, far more complicated than it need have been. But most of all, it took our eye off the ball.

Besides education and our straitjacket Constitution, we have three major, intractable problems that appear increasingly likely to bring us down: energy dependence, financialization and loss of manufacturing, and the unwillingness to any spend money collectively, as a society, to improve our condition.

The President made a good down payment on solving the second problem with his financial reform bill. But it remains to be seen whether even it is tough enough. Just today, the New York Times reported that derivatives are still largely (and secretly!) in the hands of the same people who caused the Collapse of 2008.

As for the other two problems, there is not even a down payment yet. The so-called stimulus money for energy—even for something as mainstream as nuclear power—is minuscule. There is little federal leadership and guidance of the private sector. And The Deal walks us backwards toward greater insolvency, less fiscal flexibility and responsibility, and more room for Republicans to demagogue debt, “starve the beast,” and continue building excess wealth not just in the private sector, but also in the bank accounts of the individuals who run it.

So what’s going on is far from a temper tantrum among the President’s liberal base. The media ought to be ashamed for portraying it as such. It’s a realistic and sober conclusion that the very President whose wisdom, intelligence and sense of perspective we counted on to right our foundering ship of state has failed us badly this time.

The President’s support in 2008 went far beyond self-identified liberals, who now represent less than one-third of our voters. His education, mind and character won him wide support across the board.

Why? Because we all thought he had the ability to see through churning chaff to grab the wheat. We thought he understands what really matters and what we need to get back on our feet. Now we are beginning to wonder.

We can’t get back on our feet if we’re wasting nearly a billion dollars a day on foreign oil. We can’t get back on our feet unless we transform our entire energy infrastructure, in less than two decades, to something more sustainable. We can’t get back on our feet unless we begin to make things again, instead of shuffling paper.

And we can’t make real progress on any of these things unless we all start paying more taxes and building our government back into a partner with industry, not an emaciated serf capable of being drowned in a bathtub.

To be sure, there’s symbolism in tax cuts for the rich. They stand for our multi-decade deviation from the sound economic policy of the postwar period, which once gave us the brightest future in human history. There is also simplicity: the wrongness (in every sense) of continuing tax cuts for the rich at a time of accelerating national decline is not hard to understand. But most of all, there is substance.

Tax cuts for the rich are bad morally. They are dispiriting and destroy social cohesion. They waste national resources at a time when we have too few of them. And they encourage people who think they are smart because they have money to ignore the common good and use their wealth to throw us further off the path of national salvation.

The President saw clearly the folly of invading Iraq at a time when everyone else was beating the drums for war. Besides the 2008 economic collapse, whose extent was not entirely clear on election day, that single act of wisdom and perspective was probably most responsible for his election. But now, when we need his wisdom and perspective most, he seems to have lost them, in favor of feckless compromise with declared enemies who have made their sole goal his personal defeat.

The disappointment we feel is far, far more than an ideological tantrum. It is a sense that we all—including the President—are playing out a vast tragedy of Shakespearean proportions.

Coda: Is the President a Bleeding Heart?

One of the worst lies about the President is that he doesn’t care about ordinary people. Of course he does. If you couldn’t get that fact from his career as a community organizer in one of the most blighted areas of Chicago, you can just look at his most difficult and controversial decisions as President.

Why did he spend so much political capital on such complex half measures for health-insurance reform, when we had and have so many other serious problems? Because on every stop of his year-long campaign, he heard real stories of unnecessary suffering, pain and death from people with no or bad health insurance. I have rarely seen real passion in the President (except on occasion when his judgment is challenged), but he told those stories with real passion. No one could doubt that his primary goal in health-insurance reform was to alleviate real suffering that has no place in a first-world country.

That same point, I think, is what motivated The Deal. The President just couldn’t stomach the thought of millions of honest Americans, willing to work but without jobs, ending up on the streets, in the middle of winter, when their unemployment insurance expires. And he knew from experience that the soulless GOP would hold them hostage without mercy.

He just couldn’t do that to the “little” people who look to him alone for relief from suffering. So he made The Deal, breaking his promise not to extend tax cuts for the rich and maybe ruining his chances for winning in 2012. It was a noble self-sacrifice for ordinary people at the bottom of the heap.

I have no quarrel whatsoever with that motivation. It is a good one.

But there’s a difference between being an effective champion and a bleeding heart. There’s also a difference between short-term relief and relief that lasts for the medium and long term.

We still don’t know whether the GOP was bluffing because no one called its bluff. The President didn’t bargain hard; he didn’t even threaten a veto. By wearing his heart so conspicuously on his sleeve, he let his vicious enemies run over him and back him into a corner, where he had to agree to counterproductive policies.

More important, problems for the people at the bottom whom he cares about are likely to come thick and fast. Gas prices are already rising. I wouldn’t be surprised if they get back to $4 per gallon within two years. If that happens by 2012, with all the general economic stagnation it implies, the President will almost certainly be a one-term president. Who will protect the weak and helpless then?

We have been facing financialization of our economy for about thirty years, and economic devastation from oil dependence for nearly forty. These always seemed like long-term problems. But the long term doesn’t stay long forever.

If we don’t soon get about the serious business of converting our transportation infrastructure away from oil, the resulting economic devastation will be far more severe, far more widespread, and far longer lived than any temporary hardship to people denied unemployment insurance while the GOP slowly decides not to commit political suicide. Imagine how life will be for those same people, many of whom live far from any available jobs, when gas hits $8 or $10 a gallon?

We have, at most, twenty years to get energy right. We may have less than ten. (And these numbers are completely independent of any concern about global warming. They’re just a matter of supply and demand.)

We just can’t wait two more years for private industry to decide to act. We have to push it, and that’s better done with subsidies than a gas tax or cap and trade, which seem politically impossible. You can’t subsidize or build without money, which requires raising taxes.

The same is true for manufacturing. Converting our energy infrastructure will produce many domestic jobs that can’t be outsourced. Even if we get the electric cars and solar panels from abroad, someone will have to service the cars and install their charging infrastructure and the solar panels. Infrastructure conversion is the only new industry that promises anywhere near the number of jobs needed to keep us from falling into a depression or (worse yet) protectionism that leads to a global depression and maybe war, just as in the last century.

So when I say my opposition to The Deal is cold and sober, I mean that literally. Like the President, I’m not indifferent to the people who would suffer in the short term from Republican hostage-taking. It’s just that I think they will suffer a lot more—and probably a lot sooner than anyone thinks—if we don’t raise taxes, restore our government to health and effectiveness, and start working soon on the things that are even now reducing us to third-world status. Chief among them is spending a billion dollars a day on a non-renewable resource which the whole globe uses, demand for which could spike, or supply for which could drop, at any time.

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Fear and Age

The monicker “GOP” for the Republican Party is no longer apt.

The party is no longer grand. Instead, it’s small, selfish and mean-spirited. It is old, about which much more later.

But it’s not really a political party. It’s a collection of single-issue extremists. Except for obsessing over the deficit and trying to cut it too quickly, far sooner than the experts recommend, it has no coherent plan or program.

The nearest thing the GOP has to a platform is vague and squishy bumper stickers like “more freedom” and “less government.” Selfishness—cutting spending on infrastructure and social necessities without raising taxes—is not a plan. At least it’s not a rational plan that accounts for cause and effect.

Pundits looking at the recent election’s demographics attribute all this to race and ethnicity, old whites versus rising younger minorities. But skin color is just on the surface. What lies beneath?

Probe deeper, and you find age a much more powerful indicator of the GOP’s present and better predictor of its future without real reform. Despite Mitt’s virtuoso salesmanship, people under 30 preferred Obama by a 23% margin. That’s a slightly greater margin than in Lyndon Johnson’s never-surpassed landslide victory over Barry Goldwater in 1964. [click on year tab “1964”]

Why was that so? Well, there’s always the Occam’s Razor answer: Obama was the best candidate.

But why did older whites prefer the less qualified candidate? Are they all racists? Ask them, and most will tell you “no.” Of course there was and is plenty of unconscious racism, expertly exploited by Fox and Rush.

But it’s hard to believe that skin color is the whole answer. To better approach the truth, you must look at how college dropout Karl Rove managed to assemble a majority for George W. Bush, likely the stupidest man ever to become our president.

Did Rove have a coherent rational plan for our national future? Did he have a blueprint for economic success, what business people call a “business plan”?

Not at all. What he had was a blueprint for success in electoral politics. It had nothing to do with policy.

Rove’s blueprint was based on emotion, not reason. He relied on analysis of cause and effect only in an emotional sense: manipulating people’s votes by pushing their hot buttons. Rove won for Dubya by instilling fear in a large segment of the electorate, precinct by precinct. And the fear he instilled was based almost entirely on isolated single issues.

Rove spooked the religious right with fear of rampant abortions. He raised fanciful specters of religious freedom morphing into suppression of religion. He cowed families into thinking that gays marrying each other and teaching children would subvert children’s sexuality and somehow impair marriage generally. He scared small-town and small-state people with fears that Washington would control their schools and take away their Bibles and guns. And he spooked everyone with the fear that people speaking Spanish on the streets and in supermarkets would conquer our nation peacefully and destroy our culture.

Rove did not act alone. In all this fear mongering, Fox and Rush and other loudmouths were his eager handmaidens.

When President Obama mentioned small-town people “clinging” to guns and religion, he misspoke only in one respect. Their clinging was not a cause, i.e., an intrinsic demographic characteristic. It was an effect. It was a conscious and deliberate aim and the outcome of Karl Rove’s narrow electoral strategy.

In the years since 2000, the GOP has discovered and exploited new sources of fear. The attacks of 9/11 and Dubya’s “war on terror” gave it not only the first real national war on a noun, but Islamophobia as well.

Here Rove was hardly original. In exploiting fear of Islam and Muslims, Rove just copied the blueprint drafted for Communism by Joe McCarthy and perfected by Richard Nixon.

There is no fear so durable or manipulable as the fear that your peaceful neighbors and compatriots are secretly your enemies. It worked for the GOP during the Cold War, and it nearly worked again in 2012.

Other sources of fear came with the decline of American manufacturing and the Crash of 2008. China, Rove told us, was taking away our jobs. So were Mexican immigrants. The poor and hungry masses that our Statue of Liberty once welcomed with open arms were going to destroy our culture and take the food from our tables. It was them or us. All this false fear distracted Americans from the real cause of their discontent: rampant gambling by unregulated bankers .

But the politics of fear has two problems. First, it is irrational; it ignores consequences and fails to consider cause and effect.

During the Cold War, the politics of fear (of Communists) not only wasted enormous sums on world-destroying quantities of nuclear weapons. In October 1962, it nearly extinguished our species.

The fears that Rove incited to win elections have had no such dire consequence, at least so far. But they have made governing harder. They’ve destroyed social cohesion and turned Americans against each other. They’ve produced gridlock in Congress. They’ve conditioned a class of arrogant GOP House freshmen who think they know all the answers and won’t listen to anyone, even senior leaders of their own party.

But worst of all, Rove’s fears have undermined the very values that once made the GOP “grand.” Its greatest leader was its founder, Abraham Lincoln, who fought our bitterest war to keep our country whole. He also fought to realize the ideals of Thomas Jefferson (a Democrat)—that all men are created equal.

But that credo doesn’t jibe with fear and hate. It’s hard to think of others as equal when you are taught to fear and hate them.

Rove-inspired fears of immigrants and foreigners even undermined a key pillar of GOP economic policy, freedom of trade. Progress in WTO talks has nearly stalled, and our rate of ratification of bilateral free-trade agreements has slowed.

If Republicans want to know why, they should look in the mirror. Then they should listen to what members of their very own Frankenstein monster, the Tea Party, actually say. While these worthies are bashing free trade, immigrants and foreigners generally, plus refighting the Cold War, foreign nations are absorbing the values that we and the Brits taught and making deals without us.

The policy of fear is not just bad policy. Any soldier can tell you that fear kills clear thinking and makes any situation worse. In the long run, it’s also bad politics.

Why? Because fear is a facet of age, not youth. What we oldsters fear youth sees as bland fact or opportunity. They don’t fear the Chinese; they study Mandarin. African-Americans don’t scare them. They’ve listened to “black” music all their lives; they follow and emulate brilliant leaders like the President and Cory Booker. They admire Oprah Winfrey’s accepting nature and generosity of spirit. They don’t fear Hispanics in America; they learn Spanish, study the history of our Western Hemisphere and dance and eat salsa.

Since its last reasonable president (the senior Bush), the GOP’s political program has been based on fear. But like a bad flu, fear is self-limiting. The smart wise up, and the inculcated true fearers eventually die off.

Of course the GOP can continue to invent new reasons for overblown fear, just as it “pivoted” from Communism to Islam. But if it does so, it will continue to play best to aging native whites—aging because youth is fearless, and native whites because minorities, foreigners and immigrants are the inevitable targets of manipulated fears.

Out of all the GOP-spawned fears over the years, only fear of immigrants has a semblance of rationality. If we close the doors of immigration, our population will continue to age, and the transition to majority-less demographics will take longer. We will look more like senescent Japan for longer than otherwise.

That might give the GOP a slightly longer lease on its now pointless life. But it’s hardly the fate that the youngest and once most energetic major power deserves.

Youth or age. Optimism or fear. These are choices that the GOP has made wrongly for a generation. Without fundamental reform it, like an old soldier, may just fade away, in an inescapable demographic landslide.

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Character and Competence

[For a recent analytical post on Brexit in world-historical context, click here. For an analysis of the big lie about “free trade,” click here.]

In this essay, I’d like to propose a new theory of American presidential politics. With Trumpian modesty, I’ll call it the “Dratler Theory of Presidential Electability.” In essence, it holds that character trumps competence (pun intended), every time.

In an earlier essay, I applied this theory to explain the results of the last four presidential elections, which were as follows:

2000	Dubya v. Gore	Dubya wins
2004	Dubya v. Kerry	Dubya wins
2008	Obama v. McCain	Obama wins
2012	Obama v. Romney	Obama wins

In each case, the man whose character was more likely to appeal to the average voter won. Here, stripped to their essence, are the reasons:

2000	Dubya: amiable, plain spoken	Gore: supercilious, arrogant, impatient
2004	[Ditto]	Kerry: aloof, stiff, unapproachable
2008	Obama: calm, warm, unflappable	McCain: irascible, loose cannon
2012	Obama: honest, steady, realistic	Romney: self-inflated super-salesman

In 2000 the case for competence was lopsided. Dubya had held only one public office in his entire life: he had been governor of Texas for all of six years. He was probably one of the stupidest men ever to seek the presidency; he could barely speak English. In contrast, Gore was intelligent and had eight years in the House, eight in the Senate, and eight as Vice President. Yet Dubya won.

In 2004, the experience balance was more even. Dubya had been governor for six years and president for four years, while Kerry had been in the United States Senate for twenty years. As I pointed out in a previous essay, Kerry based his campaign entirely on competence, pointing to (among other things) the two unnecessary wars that Dubya had started, one of which (in Iraq) was then going badly. Yet Dubya won again.

In 2008, Obama was the relative newbie, with no personal military experience, eight years in the Illinois Senate and not yet four years in the U.S. Senate. McCain, in contrast had four years in the House and 22 in the Senate, not to mention six years as a POW and war hero. McCain was the grizzled veteran, in all senses of that word; but Obama won, despite the considerable burden of racism.

In 2012, Obama had the edge in both political experience and competence. He had a four-year term as president to add to his eight years in the Illinois Statehouse and four in the U.S. Senate. Romney had only four years as governor of Massachusetts. But Romney had a plausible claim to greater business experience and economic competence, at a time when job creation was the most important national issue. Obama won.

Character also helps explain what happened to Bill Clinton. A Rhodes Scholar, he was one of our most intelligent presidents in the last century. He gave us a huge surplus and 22 million jobs, and he moved to the center on issues like welfare reform. But he also looked right in the camera and lied, “I did not have sex with that woman!” And he seriously debated “what the meaning of ‘is’ is.”

The monicker “Slick Willie” never quite stuck, but a whole lot of Republicans and independents hated (and still hate) Bill and all he stood for, including the Democratic platform, largely on the basis of his character. Bill’s tendency to rub his rivals’ noses in his self-evidently greater intelligence didn’t help. Among other things, it made Newt his eternal enemy and bipartisan cooperation impossible. That’s a mistake that Obama never made because he has better character.

And so we come to Hillary and The Donald. Hillary has had eight years in the US Senate and four as Secretary of State. Trump has never held public office. Hillary graduated from Yale Law School, arguably our nation’s most exclusive. Trump never went beyond undergraduate school.

Just listen to the two of them speak, and Hillary’s education and experience show. She speaks in complete sentences and paragraphs and offers multi-point plans that address real facts and make good sense. The best Trump can do is offer scatterbrained Twits and insults, which make little sense and alienate large groups of people. (I know, I know. The proper word is “Tweet,” but somehow “Twit” sounds more appropriate for The Donald.)

On a scale of competence, there is no comparison between Hillary and Trump. You would have to be slightly barmy even to compare the two.

But however lopsided that comparison will be, competence will not decide this election. At least it will not decide whether Hillary squeaks by with a still-Republican Congress or sweeps all three branches and gives us Yanks a real shot at national renewal. Character will.

To see this point, you need only look at the Dubya-Kerry contest in 2004. There was absolutely no comparison on experience, intelligence, or competence, as Kerry’s subsequent sterling performance as Obama’s Secretary of State showed. Yet Dubya won.

Could the same thing happen to Hillary? It might. Like her husband, she has an appalling tendency to wiggle around inconvenient facts, rather than acknowledging and facing them honestly. It showed in the Vince Foster affair, Travelgate, her allegedly landing under fire in Bosnia, and her late confession of error in supporting Dubya’s unnecessary and disastrous war in Iraq. Today, it shows in the damning description of her lies—there is no other way to characterize them fairly—regarding her private e-mail servers as Secretary of State.

Among her untruths, as revealed by FBI Director Comey this week, are failure to acknowledge her multiple private servers, not actually getting permission to use them, using them for over one hundred previously classified e-mails, and failing to consult properly with cyber-security experts. And Comey, who made these factual conclusions after exhaustive investigation, has unimpeachable character credentials: he singlehandedly stopped a palace coup in the Attorney General’s office by Dubya and his sycophant Alberto Gonzales, in a famous confrontation at then-AG John Ashcroft’s hospital bedside.

The trouble is that Hillary’s competence actually exacerbates her character defects. You might excuse someone as stupid as Dubya or as self-centered and scatterbrained as Trump for failing to pay attention to factual details. But it’s not so easy to excuse a Yale Law School graduate who seems on top of all the details and nuances of both domestic and foreign policy.

So Houston, Hillary has a character problem, big time.

Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a character transplant. Character will out. And Hillary’s character has been evident not just in this campaign, but in her political career going back at least two decades. No transient campaign-based PR program can wash the stain away.

People of my level of education are willing to make allowances, in a contest with Trump, because of the huge gap in education, experience and well-considered policy. But is the average voter?

Most voters are not well-trained in abstract thinking. That’s why oversimplified issues like abortion, guns, and (formerly) gay marriage have such weight in presidential campaigns. In the big scheme of things, presidents can’t do much about them, except by appointing Supreme Court Justices. They hardly matter on a global scale: they can’t extinguish our species, as global warming or nuclear proliferation might. Yet real people cast real votes on these issues because they can’t be bothered with digesting the complexity and nuances of really important issues that presidents actually can manage.

Character is a cognitive shortcut just like that. If my theory is right, it may be the shortcut that transcends all other shortcuts. If voters like and respect your character, they may trust you to make decisions on issues that they know, deep down, they don’t understand and never will. And if they don’t trust you, it may not matter how smart and competent you are: voters might just fear that you’ll mislead or swindle them.

Donald Trump, of course, has even more execrable character. This week Dem-leaning PBS pundit Mark Shields accurately described him as an “egomaniac with an inferiority complex.”

That makes all the more astounding a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC poll on personal characteristics, reported by GOP-leaning pundit David Brooks on the same program. Asked who they thought was more honest or trustworthy, 41 percent of persons polled chose Trump, while Clinton stuck at 25 percent.

If those numbers don’t give Dems a headache, nothing should. The average voter, apparently, doesn’t clearly see cause and effect, let alone rank issues in order of importance. A lie about landing under fire in Bosnia may rank as high in the average voter’s consciousness as a lie about global warming, which could maim or extinguish our species, or a lie like the ones that led us to invade and occupy Iraq.

So rehabilitating Hillary’s character is most important thing she and her campaign staff can (and must) do for the rest of the campaign season. Nothing else matters as much, certainly not her competent handling of emergent events (like this week’s minority and police killings) that may come up during the campaign.

Without such rehabilitation, I now estimate Trump’s chance of winning the White House as 35%, up five percent from my last estimate. That’s more than a one-in-three chance of seeing an utterly scatterbrained, unqualified and incompetent leader presiding over a thoroughly divided and dispirited country. It’s also over a one-in-three chance of seeing a milder but distinct version of Germany’s Nazi psychotic break happening here. Superdelegates ought to consider all this as they assess their proper roles at the Dems’ upcoming convention in Cleveland.



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