Obama's drinking gourd ain't no Holy Grail

(reposted from 8/10/13)

Was I too dark a prophet when I said
To those who went upon the Holy Quest,
That most of them would follow wandering fires,
Lost in the quagmire? -- lost to me and gone,
And left me gazing at a barren board.

-- King Arthur to his knights, in Tennyson's Idylls of the King, The Holy Grail

Now, I think the really interesting question is why it is that my friends in the other party have made the idea of preventing these people from getting health care their holy grail, their number-one priority. The one unifying principle in the Republican Party at the moment is making sure that 30 million people don't have health care and, presumably, repealing all those benefits I just mentioned -- kids staying on their parents' plan; seniors getting discounts on their prescription drugs; I guess a return to lifetime limits on insurance; people with preexisting conditions continuing to be blocked from being able to get health insurance.

-- President Obama, press conference, 8/9/13

Obama has more than once tagged his Republican opposition with a fundamentalist mindset on economic issues. In his mind, they do indeed follow wandering fires -- mirages of a "holy quest." He has used the metaphor before to denote their worship of false economic gods.

Obama's drinking gourd ain't no holy grail

Was I too dark a prophet when I said
To those who went upon the Holy Quest,
That most of them would follow wandering fires,
Lost in the quagmire? -- lost to me and gone,
And left me gazing at a barren board

-- King Arthur to his knights, in Tennyson's Idylls of the King, The Holy Grail

Now, I think the really interesting question is why it is that my friends in the other party have made the idea of preventing these people from getting health care their holy grail, their number-one priority. The one unifying principle in the Republican Party at the moment is making sure that 30 million people don't have health care and, presumably, repealing all those benefits I just mentioned -- kids staying on their parents' plan; seniors getting discounts on their prescription drugs; I guess a return to lifetime limits on insurance; people with preexisting conditions continuing to be blocked from being able to get health insurance.

-- President Obama, press conference, 8/9/13

Obama has more than once tagged his Republican opposition with a fundamentalist mindset on economic issues. In his mind, they do indeed follow wandering fires -- mirages of a "holy quest." He has used the metaphor before to denote their worship of false economic gods.

The promise of an Obama second term

E.J. Dionne makes a great case today that Obama has a substantive and productive second term agenda, whether or not he makes the case for it as strongly as he might. After reminding us that Obama has in fact laid out a detailed deficit reduction plan -- attacked from left and right, but no less credible for that, he gets to what I consider the core:

Some dismiss what an Obama second term might achieve by claiming that it will be mainly concerned with consolidating his first-term accomplishments. If these had been trivial, that might be a legitimate criticism. But does anyone seriously believe that implementing a massive new health insurance program that will cover an additional 30 million Americans is unimportant? Can anyone argue that translating the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reforms into workable regulations is a minor undertaking?

Here is the case for a term of consolidation that I made informally, in a letter to a friend:

FDR was Hoover, too

We've all heard by now that FDR cut spending in 1937, sending the economy into a sharp recession that reversed much of the rapid economic growth his New Deal policies had helped spur in his first term. 

What's less well known, I think (at least to me), is that when he reversed course after this disastrous bout of balanced budget fever, he did so only fitfully, with ambivalent half measures, and the economy sputtered on with weak growth and unemployment near 20% until 1941, when wartime spending kicked in. Moreover, his assault on big business, via populist denunciations and new corporate taxes -- driven mainly by a need in 1935-36 to cover his left flank and stave off a feared populist third-party challenge -- left a widespread perception that he'd driven away the confidence fairy. David M. Kennedy summarizes in Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945:

Yet so far as the economy was concerned in 19838, Roosevelt's actions looked for the moment to be something considerably less than revolutionary. The president may have planted the seeds of the "Keynesian Revolution" in American fiscal policy, but it would be some time before they would fully flower. In the meantime, Roosevelt seemed to have wrought the worst of all worlds: insufficient government spending to effect recovery, but sufficient government sword-rattling to keep private capital cowed. "The President won't spend any money," an exasperated Jerome Frank exclaimed. "Nobody on the outside will believe the trouble we have with him. Yet they call him a big spender. It makes me laugh." As for private businessmen, they still hesitated to make new investments. Why, the president mused on night at dinner, did they lack confidence in the economy? Eleanor replied tellingly, "They are afraid of you."  Deprived of adequate public or private means of revival, the economy sputtered on, not reaching the output levels of 1937 until the fateful year of 1941, when the threat of war, not enlightened New Deal policies, compelled government expenditures at levels previously unimaginable.

Dionne, give the Dems a break

No one in the reality-based community would object to E.J. Dionne's core point below. But I do have a problem with the final sentence (helpfully boldfaced..):

Can a nation remain a superpower if its internal politics are incorrigibly stupid? 

Start with taxes. In every other serious democracy, conservative political parties feel at least some obligation to match their tax policies with their spending plans. David Cameron, the new Conservative prime minister in Britain, is a leading example.

He recently offered a rather brutal budget that includes severe cutbacks. I have doubts about some of them, but at least Cameron cared enough about reducing his country's deficit that alongside the cuts, he also proposed an increase in the value-added tax from 17.5 percent to 20 percent. Imagine: a fiscal conservative who really is a fiscal conservative.

That could never happen here because the fairy tale of supply-side economics insists that taxes are always too high, especially on the rich.

This is why Democrats will be fools if they don’t try to turn the Republicans’ refusal to raise taxes on families earning more than $250,000 a year into an election issue. If Democrats go into a headlong retreat on this, they will have no standing to govern.

That last sentence triggers in me a feeling I have experienced more than once recently: a vicarious weariness on behalf of Democrats in Congress.

The messy evolution of the legislative process, cont.

Bulletin from Pollyannasville:  the health care and financial reform bills disappointed purists of all persuasions.  But both came out stronger than most progressives familiar with the legislative process could have hoped.  In both cases, the widely forecast denuding of key provisions by powerful lobbies was largely forestalled.  In both, the process was more open, more closely tracked by interest and public interest groups and media observers of all stripes, than any prior legislation.

I have more than once referred  to the health care bill  postmortem by Andy Stern, ex of SEIU. His first observation below is tactical. But his second makes an historical argument for what has happened to the legislative process:

First, the longer you wait, the harder it gets and the worse it gets. Time for deliberation is appropriate, but indecision and delay are counterproductive to getting something done. The choices don't get easier over time. They get harder.

Second, people have to decide whether people in the same party will use procedural tricks to trip up their teammates. Or whether parties, particularly the Democratic Party, appreciates that the special deals and earmarks that might traditionally have been part of the process no longer work. Politicians used to bring kickbacks home to their district, but now people think the system is corrupt.

Polyanna alert: my 'trust in government' is high

Wow, am I ever out of step with the electorate.

The latest WSJ/NBC poll finds that lack of trust in government is off the charts. Incumbents are on the execution block.  The Democrats are going to get their clock cleaned. Republicans have a 20-point advantage among likely voters. 

I am aware of the iron law that trust in government varies inversely with the state of the economy, most specifically with the unemployment rate. I've studied Reagan's poll numbers, to which Obama's so far bear a close resemblance.  I accept that Democrats are caught holding the bag of the financial meltdown of 2008-09 -- and that they share responsibility for it, as many of the key deregulatory actions were taken under the Clinton Administration.

But I'm also grateful that the Democratic Congress, in concert with Obama, was there to clean up the mess.


Within the confines of our sclerotic and lobby-laden political system, the Democrats have done everything humanly possible to get this country out of the economic ditch it was in when Obama took office -- and to lay the foundations of needed structural reform.

Data in the chatter: life in the Nate Silver era

The Democrats' loss of the House in 1994, like most high-stakes contests, was treated like a morality play, and widely ascribed to the ignominious dissolution of the party's healthcare reform efforts.

This year, determined not to repeat the past, Democrats screwed their courage to the sticking post and passed a comprehensive HCR bill.

What if this brave and purposeful action is followed by, say, an 80-seat loss, as Sean Trende (that's a stage name, right?) provisionally forecasts and Jonathan Chait acknowledges as a not-unlikely scenario?

Personally, I'm fine with it. I think a Republican takeover of either chamber would be bad for the country.  But the 111th Congress has done what it set out to do, and what it had to do to save the country's short-term (via the stimulus) and long-term (via HCR) economic prospects. My hat is off, and my wallet is open.  If the party loses big-time in November, I will chalk it up to a) natural tidal movement following large gains in the past two elections, b) being caught holding the bag following the financial meltdown, and c) the power of relentless Republican demagoguery, feeding on the anger of a country enduring near-10% unemployment, and amplified in ever-new ways by Fox, Limbaugh etc.