Poll numbers nudged up for Obama, Pelosi, and Dems generally, while nudging down for Republicans this week. And those numbers were, of course, already incomparably better for Dems than Repugs: Dems control every branch of government but the Supreme Court these days for a reason after all.
It isn't particularly edifying to observe America's ignorant scared white-racist patriarchal id endlessly paraded on the tee vee but it may not be the worst thing in the world to step out of the way and allow the self-marginalizing Republican Rump to immolate itself in this manner.
Repugs have already gone to the "scream about socialism" well and the "scream about skeeery brown people" well several times in this still-young Administration, after all, and Obama has gotten everything he asked for anyway, from Stimulus to ARRA to Sotomayor to the Cash-for-Clunkers re-authorization.
The left (I'm thinking of the fabulous Jane Hamsher in particular right this second) is right to push the mostly millionaires who are representing us mostly not-millionaires in Congress from the left (contra Rahm). But we may be wrong to despair too much about the way this is playing out. Many are feeling despondent, declaring with dread what a tragedy it would be if obviously necessary reform was stymied by a few thousand corporate-organized panic-stricken ignoramuses freaking out in public places despite a popular President elected to accomplish healthcare reform presiding over a governing apparatus his party controls.
Indeed, that would be a tragedy. Given the track record and the actual results we're seeing, I'm not sure we should be eulogizing quite so quick as all that.
Better to channel that energy in organizing efforts to keep the pressure on the Blue Dogs so that when they fall in line, as they assuredly will, they do so before demanding compromises that undermine the capacity of the reform to yield big enough benefits quick enough that Dems can claim credit for them to the benefit of the Party's continued governing majority and continued reforms in the direction of Single Payer.
And Single Payer (no doubt supplemented by plenty of for-profit boutique healthcare enterprises at the margins) is indeed what Dems want, which is indeed what we are seeking to facilitate the emergence of, which is exactly why the Repugs are upset, and which they are right to be upset about because Dem successes here will change society quite as much as our demographic browning is already doing and all in ways that will require the Repugs to become something else if they are to survive and to survive so changed feels to them as threatening as not to survive at all, which isn't exactly not true after all.
So, while it is still upsetting to observe the spectacle of violent, ignorant, mis-informed, terrified people losing all sense and all shame in townhalls and online and so on, I do not agree that the United States confronts the prospect of a fascist takeover (I think that ship sailed in 2006). I do not agree that healthcare reform will replay in the Obama Administration as it did in the Clinton Administration. I do not agree that what we will get will be worse than nothing or even barely worth getting. I do not agree that the present whomping up of the Republican crazytown base will check that party's continuing self-marginalizing in the least so much as defer their necessary reckoning with a changed world. And I do not agree that under these circumstances progressives cannot manage -- especially given emerging p2p-organizing to unseat incumbents out of step with their more progressive constituencies -- to gain more of a hold on the Democratic party, and to the benefit of the party's responsiveness to actual needs and wants of Americans in general, and hence facilitate its holding on to governing majorities long enough to kill Movement Republicanism at long last (the weird libertopian-theocratic-white racist corporate-militarist monster strobing its Nixonian frowny faces and Reaganist smiley faces off and on across forty years of waste and bloodshed and stupidity) and shepherd the US into something more like an actually functioning social democracy upholding sustainable international standards and democratizing international laws to the benefit of a multicultural planet in ecological distress.
Maybe I'm just relieved to be done with teaching for a couple weeks, but re-assessing the scene this morning I'm feeling more optimistic than not at the way things are playing out, given the actual stakes and tensions and constituencies in motion here.
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6 comments:
I understand that Obama supports the Cash for Clunkers program--and I agree with Obama on most things--but not on this. I think it's a sneaky way to give additional subsidy to the undeserving auto industry while also encouraging car culture. I thought you opposed car culture too, so I'm curious why you mention Cash for Clunkers here in a supportive way.
To begin where you end, and on an incidental point, I didn't actually say anything supportive of the Cash for Clunkers program in the post to which you are responding -- I pointed it out as a thing Obama wanted that Republicans opposed with rhetoric and energy analogous to that which they presently expend against healthcare reform, and in which Obama got what he wanted. From such victories we should take heart if we are inclined to despair about the way the healthcare fight is playing out.
As you say, I do oppose car culture. By this opposition I personally mean simply to recognize the complex and catastrophic environmental impacts of a long history of urban planning and suburban sprawl serving the demands of the infernal internal combustion engine.
This opposition moves me to advocate a whole constellation of policies to ameliorate those ill-effects and facilitate a shift into different a different transportation infrastructure, involving bike-lanes, mixed use urbanism, mass transit, cleaner cars, a whole host of things, all of which I fully expect to play out over long time scales through processes involving many compromises and set-backs as politics always does.
I'm not sure "opposition to car culture" encompasses for me exactly what it does for you, which of course if fine. I don't have a car nor have I ever. I use mass transit and always have done, even when I lived in less mass-transit friendly places than the Bay Area. I support environmental organizations and environmental causes.
But I also live in the world. The Cash for Clunkers program does many good things, even if it doesn't do all the good things I would like a program to do. It provides a stimulus that yields economic benefits in a shorter time-frame than many other programs do and in ways that help Obama to keep his approval numbers high enough to do the many unpopular and painful things our circumstances demand. I am quite sure that consequence inspired the program and it is doing exactly what it is meant to do.
However "underserving" the auto industry is -- and I can think of many reasons why you would say so, not least of which its killing of the electric car and idiot worship of SUVs at a time when a shift from the latter to the former would have been as beneficial to the auto industry itself as to the environment -- the fact is that punishing one of America's last remaining actual industries just because it deserves punishment would yield shallow emotional satisfactions while yielding as well deep costs we would surely live to regret far more.
Environmental politics needs the Dems, the Dems need the Unions, the Unions need the Auto Industry, and there's an end to it.
As programs like Cash for Clunkers get re-iterated one would like to see the fuel standards and pollution standards skew ever further in the direction of the subsidization of ever Greener practices. But the program isn't the worst thing in the world as it is. Certainly it is nothing like subsidizing solar roofs across the country, investing in intercontinental high-speed rail projects, encouraging local-edible landscaping over suburban lawns, and so on. But nobody ever said or thought otherwise.
Politics is not ethics and it is not moral, both of which thrive on purity in ways politics cannot without losing its way. The best can too easily become enemy of the good, as the saying goes, but this also makes one more susceptible to compromises that risk losing track of the best without which one cannot rightly identify the good at all. One must walk and chew gum at the same time. My partner sympathizes more with your take on this issue than my own -- people of good will draw our lines and make our compromises in different places according to our various calculations of the expedients that will lead us closest to our ideals.
So do you disagree with the arguments made by Earl Ofari Hutchinson in his Huffington Post article Why the Right is Winning Its War Against Obama? If so, why?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/earl-ofari-hutchinson/why-the-right-is-winning_b_260314.html
"Radical Cool Dude" let me begin by saying the form of your question annoys me.
Rather than actually asserting some point that you substantiate on your own terms with the expectation that we are having a conversation together, you simply peremptorily bark a link at me and demand that I agree or disagree with it.
Does Earl Ofari Hutchinson speak for you in every particular? Or have you assigned me the task of processing his piece for you? And, honestly, why that piece in particular? There are dozens of pieces making comparable cases to his every hour on the hour across the blogosphere (as there are making comparable cases to the one I posted, you might add with justice).
Now that I have read his piece I daresay I inhabit it rather as most anybody with a measure of critical intelligence -- there are things with which I agree in greater and lesser degrees, and which I weight differently than he does.
Hutchinson says Obama seems "rattled" by the healthcare debate -- I couldn't disagree more. Indeed, I think that is a surreal misapprehension of Obama's performance in every way.
Hutchinson says Obama was wrong to deride Rush Limbaugh. I couldn't disagree more. Limbaugh has been denominated the de facto leader of the Republican Party, a non-elected and in fact unelectable figure whomping up the most self-marginalizing forces in Movement Conservatism. It shows what disarray Republicans are in that they continue to fall for this.
I'm not happy about the Afghanistan quagmire either -- and so perhaps Hutchinson and I agree here more than we have before -- although it remains to be seen how Obama's policy will play out here.
I expect accountability around civil liberties is coming, including very possibly some accountability for figures higher up the chain of command than I would have dreamed possible this time last year. Obama is allowing legal processes that are slower-moving that the circulation of outrage to unspool in their deliberate ways, all the while seeking to maintain control of inter-sectarian conflicts within agencies that he needs to be functioning all the while. I am very happy that the left is keeping the pressure on Obama here, but I think we are sometimes rather quick to declare superficial twists and turns as signs of betrayal or game-ending gambits. So, I guess Hutchinson and I would disagree at the level of the big picture here, while no doubt equally disdaining the same acts of criminality and equally demanding a real measure of accountability for them.
I think it is frankly idiotic to announce the verdict on Obama's stimulus. Clearly, Obama has taken the advice of "the best and the brightest" here (I hope my irony is palpable) and we must all of us hope that grown-ups and professionals can go a long way toward cleaning up the mess of a generation of Movement Republicans and corporatists of both parties deregulating the financial sector. The process of stimulus, the incentivization of shifts into green production and provision, strengthening unions as a countervailing player to chambers of commerce, and re-regulation of banking and finance is piecemeal, it isn't done, it's ongoing. I'm not thrilled with the way it has been done -- but I can admit I'm not a professional economist and that I respect real professionals and I do think the economy is showing some signs of life I worried it would not. Maybe the professionals really do more than I do about how to generate enough of economic turnaround to yield a space in which regulatory processes can proceed. Stranger things have happened. Call me a skeptic, but less so than Hutchinson apparently.
When Hutchinson imputes to Obama a wish-fulfillment fantasy of misreading 2008 as the arrival of a post-racial America I am almost embarrassed for him that he thinks anybody thinks Obama thinks such a thing. Perfectly absurd. His analysis here is like some sort of cartoon.
I personally do hope Obama continues to make his bipartisanship noises, contrary to Hutchinson. I think Obama is trying to re-invent the Republican Party as a sensible opposition by creating a space in which some Republicans can gain power by playing ball with him while their alternative seems to be willful self-marginalization by identifying with viscerally ugly stupid hatefulness that seems a century outdated. If you point out that he also uses "bipartisanship" as a dodge to kill some left-of-center initiatives with which he does not agree as a center-left figure but which I do as a figure to his left, I think I probably agree with that, but I also expected it given that I actually pay attention to what people say and do before I elect them.
I suppose the shorter answer for me to Hutchinson's question "why the Right is winning" is that I will declare the "Right" to be winning when Obama no longer gets all his measures through more or less intact as he has done, when the Right starts winning elections again which they show little sign of doing, or when the poll numbers suggest they are likely to do as they do not at present. None of that seems much in the offing.Obama was elected as a center-left candidate rather than a progressive as left-of-center as myself, so I daresay those who foolishly imagined him otherwise than he is or ever said he was might imagine the "Right" is winning even as they are losing because they thought Obama's election would mark the unilateral imposition of something like the Swedish government on the US in the first 100 days. I think it would take about sixteen years holding the White House and Congress to turn the US into Sweden, and that Obama's first 200 days have been a better start than I could have dreamed to that end.
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