Category Archives: politics

rope-a-dope

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Or, maybe I’m wrong. Noam Scheiber thinks so, or at least has a different reading of events. Writing for “The Plank” at The New Republic, Scheiber contends it’s all a rope-a-dope and that Obama is in complete control of the discourse and the politics of the stimulus. Here are a couple of salient pragraphs:

Here’s what I’d guess is likely to happen over the next few days: The conference committee tasked with ironing out differences between the House and Senate stimulus bills will undo most of the roughly $65 billion in cuts to state aid, education, and health care spending the Senate centrists negotiated. To pay for it, they’ll junk the $70-billion in Alternative Minimum Tax relief the Senate showered on the upper-middle class.

Republicans will protest that Obama and Congressional Democrats have trampled on the Senate compromise and unilaterally re-imposed their liberal priorities. They’ll sprinkle in a collection of shopworn clichés, like “behind closed doors,” and “dead of night.” But, in the end, it won’t matter. The media, having already proclaimed Obama the Beltway’s only bona fide bipartisan, is hardly going to rewrite the narrative at this late stage. And no senator who voted for the bill in the first time around is going to want to explain why he or she suddenly became “anti-job.”

According to this narrative, Republicans tried to hijack the process of developing the stimulus and Obama stole it back. As Scheiber concludes, “By yesterday evening, you could almost see it dawn on Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell that he’d been played.” If this is so, then John McCain’s appearance on Face the Nation last Sunday should be read as damage control, not gloating.

—I hope so.

senate passes stimulus

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The Washington Post is reporting that the Senate has just passed the economic stimulus bill as revised by moderate Republicans last week. I suppose one has to be grateful that some action is coming from Congress to the President’s desk, but this isn’t the action I would like to see. It can be argued that the new President made a mistake in watering down the stimulus package in the first place, that he had enough public support going in to overcome the threat of a Republican filibuster in the Senate. Paul Krugman has argued as much in a recent op-ed essay, and I agree. Here’s how Krugman describes the administration’s alleged mistake:

. . . [M]any people expected Mr. Obama to come out with a really strong stimulus plan, reflecting both the economy’s dire straits and his own electoral mandate.

Instead, however, he offered a plan that was clearly both too small and too heavily reliant on tax cuts. Why? Because he wanted the plan to have broad bipartisan support, and believed that it would. Not long ago administration strategists were talking about getting 80 or more votes in the Senate.

But that was never going to happen, and here’s how it played out. Rush Limbaugh announced that he hoped President Obama would fail, even as the president was earnestly seeking Republican input and support for the stimulus package (big media event). The President seemed rattled, appeared to strike back. Then, all House Republicans voted against the package and blamed Nancy Pelosi. Subsequently Lindsay Graham and others appeared on the Senate floor and in the media to attack the stimulus package in advance of the Senate’s votes on the bill. “[T]he stimulus legislation was not handled in ‘a true bipartisan fashion,'” Graham bloviated in the best Limbaugh style. And what’s the evidence that countered Obama’s overtures to Republicans over the past weeks? As John McCain explained last Sunday on Face the Nation, All House Republicans voted against the stimulus and “all but three Republicans stayed together” in the Senate. Clearly there had been a Republican decision to oppose the bill and blame the Democrats for their opposition.

I’m grateful to the Los Angeles Times for this photo of the arch-bloviator, It has appeared in a number of places; the Washington Post references it to J. Scott Applewhite of the Associated Press. And I’m grateful to Al Franken for explaining where Rush Limbaugh gets his facts and opinions. Franken has also called Limbaugh a disinfotainer, using a term I first heard from Howard Rheingold. Disinfotainment is more than mere demagoguery, is marked by deeper strains of deceit and cynicism. The drama makes for good TV, satisfies current standards of newsworthiness. We get bloviation and counter bloviation — balanced reporting requires that somebody like Claire McCaskill balance Graham and somebody like Rachel Maddow balance Limbaugh (though I love Rachel Maddow a lot, and my vote for McCaskill is one of the more satisfying votes I have cast in my life). But in the long run we all suffer from the charade, and the public interest isn’t served when the appearance of fairness gives bad arguments and bad faith equal representation with good. It may be that President Obama is making some rookie mistakes as he did during the campaign, when he generally overcame them. I hope he can do some overcoming now and do it fast. The stakes are high, as he often reminds us himself.

And it could even be the case that this young President believed John McCain and Lindsay Graham when they promised bipartisanship three months ago just after the election and issued a joint statement with him promising to “change the bad habits of Washington.” But McCain and Graham knew they could count on Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to give them plenty of opportunities to cry foul, and this time the President gave them one too, in last week’s apeech to the House Democrats at Williamsburg. Here’s Graham crying crocodile tears on the Senate floor afterwards:

What we’ve done is we’ve lost a young president’s promise to change things. . . . [W]e got a chance to start over. We’re in the first month of the administration, and I have never been more concerned about lost opportunity than I am tonight.

One suspects the good Senator’s concern is entirely for the election of 2010, when the Democrats stand to lose congressional seats if history repeats itself. The political calculation is that Republicans potentially have much to gain from voting against the stimulus, and even more if they can weaken it still further. No one expects the economy to improve quickly. Republicans may be expecting to benefit if the stimulus appears not to be working as political campaigning heats up.

blues man Lowery

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I missed reading some news yesterday because I taught school last night. Today I see that the blogs are full of righteous wingnuttery over Joseph Lowery’s benediction at Tuesday’s inauguration. Here’s a fairly mild little rant from Lewisville, Texas:

That’s not a prayer, that’s a travesty. If a white man had made similarly racial comments, there would have been hell to pay. Racism is truly stronger from black to white, than from white to black. They really need to get over the fact that their skin is black, and join the rest of the human race.

And in case anybody expected that the hate Obama campaign would go away or die for lack of participants, a look at this thread will be sobering.

I loved the Lowery prayer, and I particularly loved its weaving together of material from the history of the civil rights movement. Its peroration was a blues riff, embedded in the history of white privilege to be sure, but also embedded in the humor and toughness of the blues singer’s minstrelsy. It was a human prayer, and its closing call and response, “That all those who do justice and love mercy say Amen” (a quotation from Micah), was exactly appropriate, I thought.

Here’s the apparent source of Rev. Dr. Lowery’s blues riff. Katie Sherrod has some background for the song, for which she depends partly on Louie Crew, in a reference I’ve not been able to track down. But here’s the song, “Black, Brown and White,” as recorded by Bill Broonzy in the nineteen fifties.

a new era of responsibility

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I thought it was a magnificent speech, not so much somber as sober — but radical all the same. The pundits are gradually parsing it–I’m listening to MSNBC as I write–and commenting on its challenge to a new assumption of responsibility for our public affairs by all Americans. Even Pat Buchanan seems to have been inspired. Of course Fox News has already panned the speech, so it must have been even better than I thought. Too bad about Michael Gerson–somebody should ask him to dance.

Then after all the flap about who was going to pray, Joseph Lowery stole the show, quoting James Weldon Johnson in the beginning and concluding with a riff that closed with a call and response. I watched in a room full of students and faculty at SLU who had gathered in the headquarters of the African American Studies Program. There were maybe a hundred of us, people drifting in and out listening to a panel at the beginning that included my beloved and some other faculty, eating snacks and lunch, some of them weeping, some laughing. Nobody was unhappy.

So — there it is. My guy is now the 44th President of the United States of America. I’m recalling the bicentennial celebration in the nineteen seventies when, for a while, it felt good to be a patriot. One thing that happens in such times is that the great clichés return from banishment and sometimes even comfort us. President Obama today evoked words of George Washington before the Delaware crossing: “Let it be told to the future world…that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive…that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet [it].” For my ear the following passage was the heart of the speech:

Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends – hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism – these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility – a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.

The event started for me when Aretha Franklin sang “America,” channeling Mahalia Jackson. I thought Professor Alexander’s poem was surprisingly good and loved the piano quartet (Itzhak Perlman, Yo-Yo Ma, Gabriela Montero, and Anthony McGill) that played an arrangement of a couple of hymn tunes by John Williams. It was a fine morning, and it made me think again that not the least accomplishment of the former junior Senator from Illinois is that he has begun to rehabilitate love of country for many of us who have felt that we were abandoned as Americans by the reactionary politics of the past almost forty years since the beginning of the Reagan era. He is telling us again and again that love of country is at one with our better angels, not the corporate egotism and jingoism of the recent past.

Perhaps patriotism doesn’t have to be the last refuge of a scoundrel. Perhaps it can again become a call to practice those habits of the heart that Tocqueville found among our ancestors almost two centuries ago: a self-interest understood to require concern for others and for the common good. “[H]ard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism,” as President Obama said today:

— these things are old. These things are true.