Republicans marching lockstep into failure, taking America with them

The Republican Party took control of the House of Representatives in the 2010 election as well as the governorships of a number of states. Generally the winners of these elections took office the first or second week of this year. They've had slightly over a month in office now. So what has happened?

Naturally being patriotic and well-meaning Americans they have quickly settled in and begun to work at the major problems of the country - the of which everyone knows is Great Recession and the resulting broad unemployment. So here is a brief sample of the major actions they have taken so far.

Governor Scott Walker, doing the bidding of his master David Koch, has initiated an all-out battle to kill the state employee unions in Wisconsin. Governor Chris Christie in New Jersey has declared that if the New Jersey legislature does not cut the budget sharply then he will refuse to send out the seniors property tax rebates. Conservatives love to "negotiate" by holding a gun to someones head and saying "Agree or else!"

A big part of the Republican agenda is to go after abortion providers. The House budget bill cuts all funds for planned parenthood since they provide medial services to low-income women including contraception. At the state level we get the true extremists, such as the proposed bill by State Rep. Bobby Franklin of Georgia which would require any woman who had a miscarriage to prove that it was a spontaneous miscarriage or be arrested and tried for a felony.

And of course, anyone who goes out and demonstrates against the extremist Republicans should be shot on sight. Ask Jeffrey Cox who was a deputy attorney general for the state of Indiana until he was fired today for his tweet that told the Wisconsin police if they were to remove the demonstrators from the capital that the police should "Use live ammunition." Allen West, the insane Islamophobic just elected Congressional Representative from Florida told the FOX viewers "I think I’ve done my share to bring the light of freedom into the Islamic world." Yeh, he has fought against Muslims everywhere he could find them - Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan. He was forced to retire from the Army for threatening to kill a prisoner and shooting his pistol off next to the man's head because he thought the prisoner could tell him about some alleged plot to assassinate West. But West says he is not an Islamophobe.

Besides settling old right-wing grudges and acting generally anti-social and even insane, how much is being done to create new jobs and to improve education in this country? Not very much.

Welcome the Republicans into office. They will give us a nation none of us want to live in.

Tuesday's election will not be pretty

This statement by Mike Lux gets at the heart of what has gone wrong with the Obama Presidency.

The biggest problem with the Third Way argument, though, connects to the fascinating back and forth between Obama and progressive interviewers in recent weeks: the palpable frustration expressed by, say, Jon Stewart in his interview is far less about having to make compromises to get things done, and far more with the insider-y ways deals were cut and decisions were made re what to compromise on. This is what Third Way and other pundits who argue for moderation never seem to understand: their version of centrism and the rest of the country's are very different.>

Exactly right. The Washington Insiders have consistently gotten things badly wrong, even when there have been people who told them they were not getting the nature of the problems right and not solving them. That has been especially true with economics, where Krugman was right that the stimulus was too small to work adequately but Obama was neither willing to fight for a larger one nor was he willing to explain to the voters what he was actually doing and enlist their help to get Congress to act!

This is Obama's leadership failure. He has been a backroom deal maker and a manager, but he has utterly failed to lead the country. He makes his deals, then he submits his view to the tender mercies of the Congress and he accepts the results they chew up and spit out. But he has never submitted his judgment directly to the public to convince the public what direction America should take.

The result is that America is getting the inadequate and lobbyist-mangled beltway wisdom out of Washington along with being chastised for not supporting the "superior" wisdom of the Washington insiders.

Obama may have had to go the backroom inside the beltway route to get health care passed. I personally think he did. But even there had he engaged better with the public, the result would have been better. That is what happened with the financial overhaul bill.

Now, a week before the election, Obama is on the hustings trying to get out the base vote so that he can get a Congress back that he can still work with. But the Conservatives and the multimillionaire oligarchs and the foreign-owned fascist FOX TV has gotten to the public before Obama did. Obama is playing defensive politics from a deep hole, and whether much can be done this late date is really questionable. Had Obama offered leadership to America for the last two years it still wouldn't be very good, but since he has not done that it will be worse.

Now America has thrown the structure of Congress in Washington to the tender mercies of a badly misinformed public. It is a dangerous experiment to see whether democracy can be abused and misinformed and still show wisdom on election day.

This is what leadership looks like

Bill Clinton is going out and telling the country why they should keep the Democrats in office.

Bill's right!

Where is the Republican outrage with federal judge's blocking of California's effort to outlaw gay marriage?

The right-wing reaction to the California Supreme Court's decision that blocking a ban on gay marriage caused massive counter reactions and led to the passage of California Proposition 8 making gay marriage unconstitutional under the California constitution. You'd expect the Republican party to have a similar massive and angry reaction to federal Judge Vaughn Walker's decision announced Wednesday that a ban on gay marriage was a violation of the Constitution.

But what do we get? Well, not quite crickets, but the reaction is certainly quite muted. Where is it?

Patrik Jonsson, Staff writer for the Christian Science Monitor offers an explanation for the lack of reaction on the right. Apparently the Republicans are depending on the bad economy to get them reelected and to make gains in Congress.

Republican leaders today are focused intently on the economy – and on blaming Democratic policies for its still-sluggish state – as they try to rally independents, libertarians, and "tea party" adherents around conservative economic ideals in advance of midterm elections.

"Every indicator that I have ... generally speaking, is that economic growth and job creation are the tandem issues that will be the principal drivers of voter decision at polls,” Republican National Committee political director Gentry Collins told reporters Thursday. "What I’m encouraging candidates to do is go out and run on an economic platform, a jobs platform."

That's not to say passions no longer run high on gay marriage. Atlanta on Saturday is host to dueling protests over the Proposition 8 ruling from California, as will be the case for other US communities in coming days. Indeed, the ruling in California, if validated on appeal, could affect some or all of the 45 states with similar gay-marriage bans on their books or embedded in their constitutions.

But Rep. Peter King, a New York Republican and a staunch opponent of gay marriage, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, and a several other top Republicans have offered muted responses so far to Wednesday's ruling from federal Judge Vaughn Walker

What it boils down to is that the leaders of the Republican Party will happily throw anyone - including the American nation and the American Constitution - under the bus as long as it gets them back into power.

A prediction for 2010

Jon Taplin offers an interesting prediction for the election in 2010. It's based on what FDR did in 1934.

Since Obama prides himself on taking the long view I'll bet he has had similar advice. Go read it.

A murkey view of the coming 12 months in politics

When Obama was elected in November 2008 I was thinking that we had been saved from the Bush/Cheney administration. And we had. Just not as dramatically as I had hoped. But now Obama is facing the perennial political question "What have you done for me lately?" 2010 is not going to be a pretty year politically.

It's a year after the 2008 Presidential election. Even Al Franken has finally been sworn in as Senator. Yet we aren't out of Iraq and Afghanistan (unrealistic dream, but not close to being true yet.) Don't Ask Don't Tell is still law in the military. The military budget has gone up, not down. And health care reform which was promised to be on Obama's desk by August is still bouncing around through the Senate and being cut down to something only the conservatives can love.

Recently the London Review of Books published Obama's Delusion by David Bromwich in which David takes Obama to task for having misled the voters in order to get elected, but now has gone back on everything he promised in the campaign. For a number of critics on the left, Obama is already a failed President and those who defend him are as irrational as the defenders of George Bush as he pushed his incompetence onto the American people. Glenn Greenwald provides a somewhat nuanced description of how critics of Obama from the left should be basing their criticism on his failures to enact left wing policies, not on his defenders who simply assume that his personality is so outstanding that nothing he can do is going to be wrong. Glenn is right that the hard left Obama defenders are no better than the Republicans who attack everything Obama does simply because he isn't their man. But for all his nuance, Glenn does not get down to the core of what liberals and progressives need to do to prepare for the 2010 election.

Josh Marshall this morning addressed the threat that 2010 is going to be another 1994 in which the Republicans take back the House and begin another ascent back to power. It's a good article, well worth reading, but in essence it says that 1994 was a direct result of the slow loss of the Solid South to the Republicans beginning with Nixon's Southern Strategy, and delayed only because the incumbent Democrats in the South were able to play off the 12 years of Republican Presidency after 1980 to hold onto their offices, but with the accession of a Democratic President in 1992 they lost that lever. Mostly the incumbent Southern Democrats retired or were defeated in 1994, but the problem was a structural one. It was not a fact that somehow Clinton lost the House to the Republicans in 1994. Those structural weaknesses do not exist in 2010. But Josh does point out that if his theory is correct "2010 is fundamentally different. The key problem for Dems isn't unpopularity. It's a highly apathetic Democratic electorate facing an extremely energized Tea Party GOP" Also, he says "Two factors -- whether Health Care passes and whether there's significant improvement in the economy by next summer -- will decide things, not any amount of strategery and messaging."

I think that is the core of the problem presented by the 2010 election. The core problem that I see is the Democratic apathy. So Steve Benen, riffing off a discussion by Matt Yglesias of the problems of institutional responsibilities faced by Obama explains why the Democrats are currently so apathetic.

Post-election governing tends to feature a familiar pattern. Presidents take office with high hopes, governing proves difficult, the policymaking process gets bogged down, and supporters get discouraged and start to walk away. It can be pretty disheartening.

Invariably, the new president gets blamed for failing to deliver. Matt Yglesias offers a helpful reminder about the nature of institutional responsibilities.

Matt adds to that Democrats thought that when Bush was replaced by Obama, then the Democratic agenda would be pushed through Congress. But all that happened was that the previous roadblock to getting progressive election - the Bush veto - was removed. It was replaced by the new roadblocks of a unified 40 member Republican Party of the Senate able to use the veto to block legislation. This has made the new roadblocks Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman.

...need to correctly identify the obstacles to change. If members of Congress are replaced by less-liberal members in the midterms, then the prospects for changing the status quo will be diminished. By contrast, if members are replaced by more-liberal members (either via primaries or general elections) the prospects for changing the status will be improved. Back before the 2008 election, it would frequently happen that good bills passed Congress and got vetoed by the president. Since Obama got elected, that doesn't happen anymore. Now instead Obama proposes things that get watered down or killed in Congress. That means focus needs to shift.

It seems to me that the apathy that is currently afflicting the Democratic electorate will be somewhat alleviated by passing health care. Something will have to pass. The future of the Democratic Party rides on it, and the two real threats (Nelson and Lieberman) will not want to be blamed for the total failure of the bill. They cannot now escape blame if it fails. But they are both demanding a very high price for whatever they finally permit. I am concerned that the banker-oriented Obama Treasury Department will do too much to fight the deficit before the 2010 election, though, resulting in a second dip in the economy. The resulting job loss is the real electoral threat. If the administration can actually do something about jobs, that will remove that threat from the election. Naturally, that means that the Republicans will fight hard against every possible job bill.

In any case, though, I do not expect the Republicans to take back the House in 2010. This next 12 months will continue to be very politically interesting.

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Addendum 7:55 pm
Well, well. Steve Benen Reports that this morning Larry Summers said that the White House is shifting its goals from deficit reduction to job creation and economic growth. No surprise, actually. They are bright people and see the same things I do. The difference is that they see more than I do and that they don't have to tell the media what they are planning. So the surprise that this morning's announcement contains is that they decided to let the media in on their planning.

Are our political leaders trapped in the past?

Sen. Ben Nelson is threatening that the "centrists" may kill the health care reform initiative rather than let it go forward.



Nelson is aware that the Democratic "centrists" killed Clinton's effort at health care reform in 1993. He thinks that history is predictive. He'd better be wrong.

If Nelson and the centrists can kill health care reform, then the Democratic Party is as doomed as the conservative Republicans have already proven themselves to be. That means that both major parties will go into the November 2010 election after being completely out of touch with the voters and quite discredited. With both current major parties self-discredited by the 2010 election then what comes out of November 2010 is simply unknowable. But the public is going to latch onto something. This is the kind of event that revolutions are made of. In the extreme such a political event led to the 1917 takeover of what became the Soviet Union, and the 1933 Nazi takeover of Germany. But it is also what Franklin Delano Roosevelt headed off quite effectively during the 1930's.

It might be time right now to start building a true Progressive party outside the two major parties. The media won't figure this out for at least two election cycles. The conservatives, with their backwards view of politics as being a move to what was good in the past, cannot take advantage of such a situation. Progressives, however, are more capable of dealing with such s changing political and social situation.

This is, of course, pure "Blue Sky" thinking, but the problem seems to be that both parties are mired in the experience of the Congressional Leadership with the past, but facing a society and economy that is moving rapidly into the (currently undescribed) future.

Rep Mark Kirk has to transform to become a Senator; Texas Michael Burgess is already just a total "No!" man

This web ad regarding Rep. Mark Kirk (R - IL) in his run for Senator there is quite good. But then, Kirk lives in a state which is not yet dominated by radical right-wingers, and he's trying to run state wide. He's got to appear different to state wide voters than he does in his own (gerrymandered) Congressional District.



Unfortunately, here in Texas the radical right-wing took over state-wide over a decade ago. "My" Congressman, Michael Burgess, has no need to appear anything more than the small-minded conservative pro-status-quo nay-sayer that they all are. Hey, they get well paid to be nay-sayers, and don't give a damn who gets hurt.

Specter's calculations for reelection working - maybe

Arlen Specter switched to the Democratic Party because the conservatives who dominate the Republican Party in PA would never nominate him to run for Senator again. He has made no bones about that. It appears that his calculation was quite accurate according to a new Quinnipiac poll. As a Democrat he would as of right now handily defeat the Republican Pat Toomey who he could not defeat in the Republican Primary.

But all is not rosy for Specter's political future. Moderate former GOP Gov. Tom Ridge might well defeat him, as he trails Specter by only 3 percentage points. The numbers are Specter 46% to Ridge 43%.

What that tells me is that the conservative Republican brand in Pennsylvania does not go over very well, but the Republican Party itself is not nearly so tarnished.

The Conservatives have for years wanted to get a more ideologically pure conservative party. I can remember when Bill Buckley used to rail that the problems for conservatives was that the political parties were not ideologically pure. Well, it looks like movement conservatism achieved Buckley's desire, and the current 25% identification of the voting public with conservative Republicans shows that the old saying "Be careful what you wish for." has really come back to haunt the Republican Party. The result has been a recognition that conservatism is a disaster in government.

Will Specter get reelected in 2010? That's a looong way off. But it will say a lot about the future of conservatism in America.

Specter switched parties to win reelection, not to support Democrats

When Arlene Specter switched from Republican to Democrat last week, it looked like the Democrats might get their 60 vote filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. Apparently not. It looks like Specter switched parties merely to win reelection in 2010, not to be a Democrat.

Here's Steve Benen with the story. The Pennsylvania Democrats need to let a real Democrat run against Specter in the Democratic Primary. If Specter switched just to use Democratic voters to support his run for reelection but won't support Democratic issues, then there is no reason why Democrats should support him. There are better candidates available.

Retired Admiral Joe Sestak, currently the Representative in Pennsylvania district 7, has been sounding a lot like a potential candidate. We need to support his effort.