I don’t mean to demean those who have been killed or injured in these senseless attacks, but these kinds of news stories are kind of like rubber necking at a car wreck scene.  There is very little to be learned except to see carnage, and when this distracts us from our primary task, in this case driving the car, it leads to us to rear end the car in front of us because we are not paying attention to where we are going.  You get the analogy.  I am sure the press doesn’t.  If it bleeds, it leads.  If it is outrageous, repeat it over and over.

David Brooks in his editorial, What Independents Want, was pushing what I consider the conventional wisdom, albeit, inaccurate.  He accurately noted that there was a swing in independent voters toward conservatives, but he then identified the effects as the cause instead of the real root cause.  His premise was that independents think that President Obama “is moving too fast.”  He cites the economy (the real cause), increasing distrust in government, fear of the deficit, too much government regulation, and probably the accommodation of Wall Street by the Democrats (this one is right on).  Then of course he recommended to his conservative brethren that we should get back to the basics of small government and let businesses do their thing, and fail if they must (read wall street).  He did get one of these things right:  “Independents support the party that seems most likely to establish a frame of stability and order within which they can lead their lives.”  Problem is his conservative prescription for that will only fail as it did last time around.

As always the devil is in the details and one should ask David how he would have handled the bank crisis back in 2007 and what should we do now to make sure the whole economy is not threatened.  Would we do that with less government and fewer regulations?  Same with health care or the climate/energy bill.  If less government is so wonderful, why aren’t these problems already solved after eight years of Republican control?  The real issue here is that the economy is not improving and all the rest, distrust in government, less regulations, etc. are a result of the lack of improvement, not the cause of the problem.   The one thing I always find astounding is that when things are going bad, why do the voters want to bring back the people who got us in this mess and have no ideas for our future?

The other editorial was from Paul Krugman, Obama Faces His Anzio, where Paul identifies what I think is the real problem.  It is not that President Obama has tried to do too much, but he has been too timid with what he has done.  His intrepidation caused him to implement policies that are only minimally effective.  The bank crisis was averted, but then he started accommodating the bankers and real change was not effected.  The stimulus bill by his own staff’s estimation was too small.  He has compromised or watered down what he was going to do and the result is very little progress.  Paul compares this to the Anzio Beach fiasco in World War II:

“The World War II battle of Anzio was a classic example of the perils of being too cautious. Allied forces landed far behind enemy lines, catching their opponents by surprise. Instead of following up on this advantage, however, the American commander hunkered down in his beachhead — and soon found himself penned in by German forces on the surrounding hills, suffering heavy casualties.”

President Obama was elected on a change agenda and then he didn’t.  Mr. Krugman’s final summary is where I think the truth really lies:

“If the Democrats lose badly in the midterms, the talking heads will say that Mr. Obama tried to do too much, this is a center-right nation, and so on. But the truth is that Mr. Obama put his agenda at risk by doing too little. The fateful decision, early this year, to go for economic half-measures may haunt Democrats for years to come.”

Well, as noted, that is what Mr. Brooks is saying already, but I am with Paul on this.  President Obama was too timid and without some real backbone from the Democrats between now and 2010, I believe he may have wasted his chance.  The conventional wisdom summarized by Mr. Brooks is gaining speed, and if the Democrats cannot do something to improve the economy, the conventonial wisdom will prevail and we will have the same failed policies voted back into office in 2010.

Let’s start with Carly.  She had a disastrous run at HP as CEO where she was widely criticized for mismanagement and her bullying leadership of one of Silicon Valley’s legendary companies and then was ousted to return the company (HP) to profitability. (CNN)  Then she became an advisor for economic policy for John McCain, but her ego got out of control when she told two separate interviewers that neither member of the Republican ticket would be capable of running a company.  (Huffington Post)  This would be the woman you want to send to Congress to get things done?  She would be just one more of the dinosaurs up there.

But let’s look at her standard conservative mantra of cutting taxes and reducing the deficit.  Now unless I am confused, cutting taxes reduces cash flow into the treasury, i.e. increases the deficit. Remember, that is what George did. Oh, I forgot, flow down.  Once taxes are lower, then revenue flows into the Treasury.  Problem with that is it has never happened and our tax rate on the rich is the lowest it has been since 1931 and the recessions continues.  But wait.  She will cut spending by removing waste.  Well name names sweetheart and you will find that one person’s waste is another person’s lifeline.  The biggest wasteful program is military spending and I’ll bet that is not on your chopping block.  And just what are you going to do about all that infrastructure spending that we have put off for years and now needs major investment.  As I like to say the devil is in the details.  So if we fall for this again as another example of conservative free ride-ism, we deserve to slowly fade as a great country. She would be a disastrous for California and the nation.  If this stuff doesn’t sound like the Republicans in 2000, we really do have memory failure.

Now for the bipartisan approach, are we that dumb?  The lesson here is that bipartisan to Republican means the Republican way.  After the Stimulus bill, the health care bill, the climate bill, what we should have learned is that they don’t want to play unless it is their rules.  But even more relevant is that their solutions are what we have been doing and as a result we are in a mess.  So we should bring them into the process and water down real change so that nothing ever changes? The Republican Party is the party of corporations and status quo.  The status quo is destroying us.  So lets bring them back into the process so we can do more failed things harder?

I don’t know, but if these messages that these Republicans are selling catch on, we are truly doomed as a nation who cannot learn from their mistakes.  There are no easy solutions to our problems and they are going to take sacrifice from all of us to build a better tomorrow.  Buying into the conservative shtick is just another attempt at denial of our basic problems and how we got here.  It is really time to put these people and their ideas where they belong, on the junk heap.

But where did those problems come from?  If we are talking about unemployment, the economic down turn, bankrupt state governments, then it came from the last bunch of Republicans they elected before the Democrats were swept in.  So if the Democrats are having a hard time moving things forward, especially with all the obstructionism by the Republicans, and politics looks like business as usual, lets bring back in those guys whose philosophy and policies brought us this nightmare in the first place?  Okay, maybe the issues were more local, but to bring back in people who support demonstrably failed policies is like beating your head against the wall because you have a headache.

In upstate New York, this was a no-brainer.  A Democrat won after 150 some odd years of Republican control because conservative Republicans misunderstood the idea of divide and conquer.  This is supposed to apply to your opponent, not to your own party.  I think that people in that district are still Republican, but when outside forces tried to come in and tell them how to think, the response was predictable.  How does this result impact the radical rights future endeavors?  I don’t think they are rational and they will continue with their attempt to purge the party of moderates or anybody who thinks rationally.  It is the very definition of ideologue.

Finally, one could say that this was a defeat for the Obama Administration in New Jersey.  I have no sympathy for the Democrat in Virginia as he tried to distance himself from Obama.  You know, lets out Republican the Republicans.  He deserved his fate and Virginia deserves their fate in a throw back to a religious nut who thinks women belong in the home.  Good luck with that.  But in all this, there was a real lesson for the Obama Administration, although one I doubt they will learn.

That lesson is simply this.  Speeches don’t get it.  You had better start delivering what you promised.  Right now you have not delivered and you look like politics as usual.  I have to laugh when I get one of those “net roots” email (yes, I sent Obama money during the presidential election) asking me to do something or get out my wallet again.  My thought is, I will when you finally do any of the things you promised.  Using the State’s Secret defense to hide what really happened after 9/11, doing nothing for gays, continuing Bush policies we all hated, expanding our role in Afghanistan, are all things that you don’t need the Republicans to do something about and you have done nothing.  When you do, I might get interested again.  I think many of his independents voters feel the same.  He campaigned with a bang and governed with a whimper.  When he starts fighting for me again, then I will start fighting for him.

The message ought to be loud and clear to Democrats.  Stand tall and fight for real change, not some bipartisan half measure that fizzles.  Don’t try to appeal to independents by trying to go Republican, but stand up and fight for what you believe in.  Compromising with the Republicans will lead to failure.  The Administration could start with health care.  The bill before Congress is a half measure with a small sliver of a public option.  So President Obama could stand up and get engaged or he can watch his Administration fade into the sunset.  If he continues to get co-opted by politics as usual, trying to accommodate failed policies, and not understanding he is leading a fight for the heart and soul of America, he may destroy for a long time to come the real hope he rekindled in 2008.

My biggest concern is that they won’t get the message.  As they all dance around patting themselves on the back for a baby step in health care, the rest of us are thinking, “and you call this real change?”.  As Dennis Kucinich said on the floor of the House the other day, “Is this the best we can do?”

I hope he reads this because from my seat he is becoming just more of the same without the courage to take really tough positions and push through real change.  I am not alone in these feelings as a recent article in the New York Times about how Iowa voters who voted for Obama back in the primary are losing faith (In Iowa, Second Thoughts on Obama).  I hope this shakes him out of his slumber and realizes this is not about eight years, but about changing the mindset of America.  The eight years is just a byproduct if he can really do this.  Right now he and his team seem to want to take victory laps for baby steps.

Today is an off-year election as if you didn’t know and have not been inundated by the media that seems to have nothing better to cover.  I won’t pretend to know the local politics of these elections, but the kind of statements we are hearing out of the press is to believe this is a predictor of all future elections.  “History tells us….”, “This election will foretell the future for the Democrats in 2010…”, are the common things they are all bloviating.  To me it is all nonsense as Republican pundits tell you it is a referendum on the Obama administration, and Democrats tell you it is meaningless.  Depending on the outcome of these election they will probably switch positions.  They all have their agendas.

What is telling is that Virginia might elect someone who thinks women are second-class citizens, and New Jersey would reject a governor who made some hard decisions about funding government.  Meanwhile Maine will attempt to deny rights to gays and lesbians also as second-class citizens.  I know it is not that simple, but it does demonstrate that the nation still lacks some kind of vision about where we are headed and are reacting to their fears and selfish interests.  Until we get a holistic narrative about what we are about and where we are headed, these elections just reflect the refusal of most voters to make hard decisions about sacrifice for the future or have a shared set of values.  So much can happen between now and 2010 that these elections are meaningless for predicting the future.

One last extraneous thought:  David Kwak, co-founder of the Baseline Scenario, wrote a really interesting piece titled, Do Smart, Hardworking People Deserve to Make More Money? He was responding to a posting about a story of a family that was down on their luck and struggling with high credit card bills, including plenty of fees.  Apparently the story triggered a wave of posts blaming the victim.  What was on display was the same thought process that blames a rape victim for their rape.  What is really going on is that as a defense mechanism, people like to think that they can control their lives.  This control gives them piece of mind and what is really subconsciously going on is “that would never happen to me because I would make better choices.”  If you really want to understand why some people are utterly devastated when something bad happens to them, it is because they feel a total loss of power and control.  The world doesn’t make sense to them anymore because they didn’t deserve it.

But what Mr. Kwak takes on is a fundamental conservative belief that success and prosperity are the result of discipline and hard work, ignoring the impact of chance.  It’s is that being in control thing.  Many people work hard and don’t prosper.  Some aren’t as smart as others through the chance of DNA combinations or opportunities good parenting brings.  So he asks a fundamental question in terms of a philosophy foreign to conservative thought:

“If you are willing to acknowledge that chance determines who you are to begin with, then it becomes obvious (to me at least) that public policy cannot simply seek to level the playing field, because that will just endorse a system that produces good outcomes for the lucky (the smart and hard-working) and bad outcomes for the unlucky. Instead, fairness dictates that policy should attempt to improve outcomes for the unlucky, even if that requires hurting outcomes for the lucky.”

If you understand this reasoning you are a Progressive and if you don’t, you are a conservative.  It is the classic insight into why conservatives lack empathy for their fellow Americans and judge self-worth in terms of wealth.  It is because they do not believe that chance had anything to do with it.  They deserve what they got and do not need to spend any time pondering the fate of others, because they don’t deserve to share in their bounty.

Second, the other important editorial was Tom Friedman who hit on a theme I have poorly described as the “Vision Thing”.  In his editorial, More Poetry, Please, he pointed out that most people are confused about what President Obama really believes.  They see his policies as this and that, as opposed to a cohesive whole toward an end goal.  He calls it the narrative thing and I think he has hit on the critical issue of our times.  Instead of seeing health care reform as a social program, or cap and trade as a tax on all of us, President Obama needs to weave this into a narrative about how these programs are part of the whole fabric of our future, not just separate programs.  Best said from his Op-ed:

“But to deliver on that promise, Sandel added, Obama needs to carry the civic idealism of his campaign into his presidency. He needs a narrative that will get the same voters who elected him to push through his ambitious agenda — against all the forces of inertia and private greed.

‘You can’t get nation-building without shared sacrifice,” said Sandel, “and you cannot inspire shared sacrifice without a narrative that appeals to the common good — a narrative that challenges us to be citizens engaged in a common endeavor, not just consumers seeking the best deal for ourselves. Obama needs to energize the prose of his presidency by recapturing the poetry of his campaign.’”

Talk about getting to the essence of the issue.

Fareed Zakaria had as his guest Matthew Hoh, who recently resigned from the State Department Staff in Kabul in protest over our policies there.  Matthew was a marine in Iraq and then a State Department staffer in Afghanistan.  So he saw the area, its conflict, and the people from the ground level.  He was a little person dealing with the day-to-day realities of what really is going on over there.  He actually had to carry out and deal the realities of policy.  Apparently he was offered a position on Ambassador Holbroke’s staff, but in the end he realized that he would have little effect on policy and the direction we were headed would result in more deaths, both Afghan and American, with nothing to show for it.  The transcript of the interview is available at CNN.

What Mr. Hoh described was the reality of Afghanistan.  There is no Afghanistan people as such, just a very rural country with local tribal communities that resent all intrusion into their lives, whether that is the Afghan government, foreign fighters, or the United States.  These people don’t want to be protected; they want to be left alone.  The war as he saw it was an ongoing civil war that has been going on for more than 35 years.  We were simply taking a side in that civil war, and more troops would mean more insurgents, and the war will go on forever.  He found no parallels to Iraq where it was a more urban community where control was greatly simplified.  This is a gross summary and if you care about where we are headed, if you care about those brave Americans we send over there to die, you need to read this transcript or watch the interview.  His final observation is that we need to reduce our presence, not increase it:

ZAKARIA: What will happen if we do not go with the McChrystal plan, or we go to a very small troop increase? What will the troops who are there now do? And should we actually draw down some of these troops?

HOH: Oh, I do believe we should draw down. I do believe we should recognize we’re in a civil war. I do believe we should recognize our priorities are the defeat of al Qaeda and the stabilization of Pakistan.

I’m by no means a Pakistan expert. But increasing troops is only going to fuel insurgency. We need to stop our combat operations in areas where we are fighting people only because they’re fighting us.

Otherwise, it’s going to be 2013, we’re going to look back four years, and we’re going to say, what have we accomplished? What did we get? What was this worth? What did we get out of this?

We might be able to stabilize the Afghan government in five to 10 years with a lot of resources. I believe we can militarily defeat the Quetta Shura in two to three years with a lot of resources and a lot of dead.

However, is it worth it? What do we get out of it? What’s the benefit of us doing it? It doesn’t politically defeat the insurgency in the south. And it doesn’t, more importantly, it doesn’t defeat al Qaeda.

Then I watched Meet the Press and the discussion between Pundits David Gregory, Andrea Mitchell (just back from Afghanistan), and Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski about Afghanistan.  The country they were talking about was not the same one that Mathew Hoh was talking about.  Miklaszewski talked as though General McChrystal was a personal friend and that all they needed to do was to provide security for the people.  The construct of what Afghanistan was all about was totally different from the reality that Mathew Hoh presented.  And then I got it.  These people know nothing except the image that has been carefully crafted for them and the narrow confines of their own experience.  They have no on-the-ground, in the dirt, personal experience of the reality there.  They are important people.  You have to get really dirty to really know something.  They are creatures of what they are told, not what they have experienced.  They view Afghanistan through the lens of their own experience instead of the alien reality of the real Afghanistan  and what is possible there.

So Matthew Hoh is one of the little people.  He sees reality as it is because he has had to live it, not through the lens of a need for victory, or military supremacy, or some belief in a quick fix or political ideology.  He spoke truth to power and they tried to co-opt him by stroking his ego with a promotion up the chain.  He saw it for what it was, selling his soul for ego with little chance to effect change.  He is only a little person to those in power.  To the rest of us, he is indeed a very big person.  He did not sell his soul for power and advancement.  Thank you Mr. Hoh.

From my perspective there is one more important lesson here and not just about Afghanistan.  It is about how the little people get co-opted when they speak truth to power and how those in power who can really make a difference are mostly those that sold their soul to get that power.  They are not in power to make major changes, but to carry the flag of those who co-opted them.  How else do you explain our Afghanistan, financial, economic, energy, and climate policy?  The way forward is obvious.  But those in power don’t like those answers.  Those damn little people.